Rachid al-Ghannouchi leads Tunisia’s Islamist party, which gave up control of the transitional government. Credit Samuel Aranda for The New York Times
.
* “If moderates hope to counter the jihadists and build democracies, their parties must be much more inclusive and conciliatory toward non-Islamist rivals… Tunisia’s Rachid al-Ghannouchi said the solution for the Islamist movement was not to fight back with weapons, but to further embrace pluralism, tolerance and compromise. ‘The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.’” *
.
The New York Times, A1, by David D. Kirkpatrick (Tunis, Tunisia, June 18, 2014) — Islamist politicians swept elections across the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, stepping close to power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco and undermining the thesis of Qaeda-style militants that violence offered the only hope for change. Today, those politicians are in frantic retreat from Riyadh to Rabat, stymied by their political opponents, stalked by generals and plotted against by oil-rich monarchs. Instead, it is the jihadists who are on the march, roving unchecked across broad sections of North Africa and the Middle East. Now they have seized control of territory straddling the borders of Iraq and Syria where they hope to establish an Islamic caliphate. And they are reveling in their vindication.
“Rights cannot be restored except by force,” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the surging Qaeda breakaway group, declared last year after the Egyptian military removed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood from office. Islamists must choose “the ammunition boxes over the ballot boxes” and negotiate “in the trenches rather than in hotels,” the group proclaimed, calling the more election-minded Muslim Brotherhood “a secular party in Islamic clothes” and “more evil and cunning than the secularists.” Thwarted by the old guard and eclipsed by the jihadists, moderate Islamists in Egypt, Libya and Yemen and among the Syrian opposition are finding themselves shoved to the margins. And they are debating what went wrong, how to salvage their movement and how to revive the dream of synthesizing Islam and democracy. In Syria, too, moderate and secular rebels have been eclipsed by extremists in their battle against President Bashar al-Assad.
One camp of moderate Islamists maintains their defeats are temporary setbacks that will only make them stronger. The struggles will “increase the Islamist movement’s strength, experience, coherence and understanding of the reality’s inner workings,” Roushdy Bouibry, a Moroccan Islamist, argued in an essay posted on his party’s web site.
Many are lashing out furiously at the fundamentalists whom many moderate politicians hoped to tutor as political allies. Instead Egypt’s ultraconservative Salafis supported the military takeover, saying that it would limit social strife. And in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Tunisia, the violence of ultraconservative militants is hobbling efforts to build inclusive democratic states. Some moderates play down their own mistakes, and insist that the main lessons to be learned are about the strength of their enemies, not their own shortcomings. Or they portray the reversal of their fortunes — even the killing of more than 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters by Egyptian security forces — as a kind of divinely ordained test to be endured. But others, led by the moderate Islamists here in Tunisia, argue that the movement is partly to blame. They say that if moderates hope to counter the jihadists and build democracies, their parties must be much more inclusive and conciliatory toward non-Islamist rivals and even those who participated in the old authoritarian governments.
[Continue Reading at The New York Times…]
The post As Moderate Islamists Retreat, Extremists Surge Unchecked – The New York Times appeared first on Morocco On The Move.