In Europe, the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been interpreted using a model that is more than 30 years old: the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Commentators have been expecting to see Islamist groups – the Muslim Brotherhood and their local equivalents – either at the head of the movement or lying in wait, ready to seize power. But the discretion of the Muslim Brotherhood has surprised and disconcerted them: where have the Islamists gone?
Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear that we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation. For them, the great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history, their parents’ affair. The members of this young generation aren’t interested in ideology: their slogans are pragmatic and concrete – “Erhal!” or “Go now!”. Unlike their predecessors in Algeria in the 1980s, they make no appeal to Islam; rather, they are rejecting corrupt dictatorships and calling for democracy. This is not to say that the demonstrators are secular; but they are operating in a secular political space, and they do not see in Islam an ideology capable of creating a better world.
Only time will tell…
“The process of change will undoubtedly be long and chaotic, but one thing is certain: the age of Arab-Muslim exceptionalism is over.”
I’m not buying this from a French writer. European liberals have forever look past reality to what they want to see. As #1 says, “only time will tell,” but I fear the Iran revolution was only the beginning, and we are not through with radical Islam’s taking hold in the Middle East (and elsewhere) by a long shot. U.S. needs to use its intelligence community and money to support political parties in Egypt and all over the Middle East that are opposed to theocracies and support secular representative republics. We are good at that and have the money to do it, if we just will have the courage of our convictions.
But we also need to think about the manner in which Catholic confessional parties gradually integrated themselves into the European political process.
Most of the Christian Democratic parties of today derive from confessional Catholic parties of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that – in France particularly – gravitated to the anti-democratic Right in protest at their marginalization by secular liberals (think Action Francaise). Only after World War II, did a younger generation of Catholic leaders commit to a broader political coalition (the CDU in Germany and the MRP in France).
If there is a [url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704629004576135882819143872.html]generational divide[/url] within the Muslim Brotherhood, that too should be encouraged.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]