Rami G Khouri writes: Hold on to your seats, for the four most powerful and influential Arab countries – Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – are all experiencing significant, sometimes violent, internal changes that touch on the most basic elements of identity, power and national authority. What happens in those countries in the years ahead will shape the Middle East for generations perhaps, creating new patterns of stable statehood on the way. Saudi Arabia is not experiencing the upheavals of Iraq, Syria and Egypt, but its new internal dynamics portend historic changes underway in that country and throughout the Gulf – because some citizens no longer accept blindly to follow the rules of the foundational tenets of Saudi-Wahhabi doctrine.

The worsening carnage in Syria, the sharp increase in bombings and ethnic cleansing in Iraq in the past few months, and the confrontation between the armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are stark reminders of where the modern Arab world stands today on its road to modern statehood. Syria, Iraq and Egypt embody the leading political challenges the Arab world faces: how to shape a stable and equitable pluralistic society; how to achieve an acceptable balance of authority among military and civilian forces; and how to assert religious values in daily and public life without falling into the trap of theocratic autocracy or artificially imposed secularism from above.

That these three historical Arab powerhouses all are experiencing deep conflict or uncertainty is the inevitable consequence of our recent history since the 1950s. We are today dealing with the national wreckages, social carcasses and political diseases of several generations of security-based state-building that provided a thin veneer of stability, but never buttressed this with the durable substance of genuine citizen-anchored nationhood. [Continue reading…]

Rami G. Khouri writes: Egypt continues to mesmerize, and it seems for many people around the world, to mystify as well, at least to judge by the wild and definitive assertions we hear daily about the consequences of developments in Egypt: Islamism is dead in the Arab world. Pluralism is dead. Democracy has failed in Egypt. Qatar is fading. Saudi Arabia rules the region. The Turkish and Iranian leaderships have lost. Egypt will suffer either civil war or a democratic resurgence. Arab Christians have no future in the region. And many other such statements that are asserted with the illusory confidence of absolute fact. This is comical for revealing the ignorance of most analysts who make such statements, and insulting for revealing a subtle new form of Orientalist thinking that manifests itself in two ways: One assumes that Arabs and their political cultures can only be black or white – democracy or military rule, and nothing in between; and another assumes that the future of 350 million Arabs will be definitively set for decades by developments this week, or the next month at most, disregarding both the force of human agency and the powerful corrective measures that come with time.

The most offensive aspect of so much of the international, especially American, commentary on Egypt is its absolutist nature that assumes three things that I believe are wrong assumptions: That current events in a short span of time will define Egypt for many years; that the people of Egypt essentially only face two choices, namely the Muslim Brotherhood or the armed forces; and that loyalists of both parties will clash and one of them will win, with no space in between for subtleties or nuances or groups of citizens engaging each other to craft a new political culture that is neither absolutist nor autocratic.

Much of the analysis about Egypt these days misses how life, ideology, identity and politics actually operate across the Middle East, which is basically through a process of constant negotiations of identities and authorities by a wide range of citizens who often are not formalized in clear organizations, and for the most part do not have websites, or Twitter and Facebook accounts. If Egypt teaches us anything for now it is that dozens of different groups of citizens will continue to engage each other in political battle until they agree on the outlines of a national governance system that they can all accept as legitimate and appropriate for their country. [Continue reading…]

Rami G. Khouri writes: Every once in a while the Middle East region experiences a series of major and simultaneous developments in several different arenas, indicating that something important is taking place. We are passing through just such a moment this week, with quite dramatic developments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and several Arabian Peninsula states, without any sign of what is truly historic and new and what is a passing phenomenon.

Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that nobody is in charge, as they had long imagined, or is pulling strings to achieve predetermined objectives, like the break-up of large Arab countries into a series of ethnic principalities, or the control of Arab countries by Islamist groups beholden to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States. Local dynamics primarily drive each set of major changes across the region, with cross-border linkages following as a corollary in most cases.

Iraq is pursuing its own post-war domestic conflicts and stresses and trying to figure out the balance among its Arab and Kurdish components, its Iraqi and Iranian interests, and the frail communalism among Iraqi Arab Shiites and Sunnis. The United States is pushing hard to revive a Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiation by focusing on three tactics that have repeatedly failed and probably will fail again: tripartite meetings with Jordan; talks between Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, who would not recognize a credible peace process if they found it in their soup; and, a proposed $4 billion development initiative for occupied Palestinian territories that focuses on economic development rather than liberation as the antidote to the depressed condition in Arab Palestine. [Continue reading…]

The National: The battle of Al Qusair, which has been raging for weeks in Syria between Hizbollah militants and Syrian opposition forces, evokes images of Mohamed Bouazizi’s torched body in Tunisia, which was the first spark of the Arab revolutions, observed columnist Mamoun Fandi in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat.

“Al Qusair mirrors the town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, in that it signals the start of a new conflict in the Arab region in light of the new strategic direction that Hassan Nasrallah has dictated clearly in his last speech,” the columnist said.

The chief of Hizbollah, the Shiite militant group in Lebanon, gave a televised address on Saturday vowing to fight alongside Syrian president Bashar Al Assad until the bitter end, and promising victory over the rebels.

The strategic implications of his attitude may be the most substantial in the last two years in the changing Arab world, according to the writer.

“Despite his persistent denials of allegations of sectarian alignment, Mr Nasrallah’s speech outlines the nature of the next conflict in the region: a Sunni-Shiite conflict par excellence, and its first combat skirmishes on the ground have begun in Al Qusair,” the writer said.

It is a new manifestation of the Arab Spring where the usual protagonists – autocratic regimes versus pro-democracy oppositions – have taken on a sectarian aspect with the Sunni-Shiite conflicts.

“The Arab region would fall hostage to a religious ideological clash that pits the Shiite camp sponsored by Iran against a Sunni axis of power that is taking shape between Turkey and influential Gulf states,” the writer suggested.

But Hizbollah’s deep involvement in the Syrian war isn’t rooted in ideology alone. It is a real involvement with serious military and operational aspects.

The two-year fight has revealed some real gaps in the Syrian army’s capabilities. It isn’t the fine-tuned combat machine that Iran and Hizbollah thought they could depend on for support.

Hizbollah and Iran’s direct interference in the war is aimed at bridging the gaps of the regular army and reorganising it while also testing the compatibility and the potential for interoperability in their alliance.

Such an advanced level of coordination between the three military forces – Syria, Iran and Hizbollah – creates the exemplary Shiite army that would be tasked with implementing and protecting the new strategic map for the region, the columnist remarked. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The sudden escalation of fighting in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli is troubling on two fronts and noteworthy on a third. The troubling dimensions are the chronic nature of urban warfare in Lebanon’s streets and the direct linkages between the Tripoli battles and the fighting in the Syrian town of Qusair. The noteworthy element is the growing role of Salafists in the Tripoli fighting, which is part of a remarkable expansion of Salafist groups’ public action in political and military spheres across the Middle East in recent years. Credible reports from Tripoli repeatedly chronicle the increased military role of Salafists in the city, directly reflecting the heightened clashes mirroring the fighting between pro- and anti-Syrian government forces in Syria. Tripoli has long had its own localized confrontation between the Sunni-dominated Bab al-Tabbaneh quarter and the majority Alawite and mostly pro-Bashar Assad quarter of Jabal Mohsen.

Several new elements have transformed this chronic local tension spot into something much more ominous: the direct linkages between the clashes in Syria and in Tripoli, the movement of growing numbers of Salafist fighters into north Lebanon and other parts of the country in recent years, the movement of fighters from north Lebanon into Syria to support anti-Assad rebels, and the Lebanese Salafists’ self-imposed role of countering the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and in the fighting in Syria – especially in Qusair this month.

This is not a sudden or unexpected development. Salafists have operated in small numbers in isolated parts of urban or rural Lebanon for some years, often expanding in direct proportion to adjacent conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Pockets of militants battled the Lebanese Army and security forces in the north a few years ago, mainly in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp. More recently, Lebanese security officials have been quoted in the press as expressing concern about the growing numbers of Salafists moving into Lebanon, anchoring themselves in Salafist-dominated urban neighborhoods such as Bab al-Tabbaneh or in some Palestinian refugee camps outside the control of the Lebanese state, such as Ain al-Hilweh in the south.

The militant nature of the Salafists adds a significant dimension to the nonviolent ways of the majority of Arab Salafists who tend to focus on recreating the “pure” Islamic lifestyles and societies from the earliest decades of the Islamic era, during and immediately after the days of the Prophet Mohammad. Most Salafists across the Arab world in recent years have operated quietly at the neighborhood level, seeking primarily to promote basic Islamic values (faith, modesty, charity, mercy) in the personal and communal behavior of individual men and women. Active political participation in public life was left to the Muslim Brotherhood or its various derivatives, who sought power at a national level, or to jihadists who waged their own battles across their imagined global battlefield.

So today we can witness two important developments occurring simultaneously across parts of the Arab region. Some Salafists have emerged from the shadows to participate in public politics and contest parliamentary and executive power, such as in Egypt and Tunisia most dramatically; and, a few Salafist groups have turned to military means to defend their local, regional or global causes, as we see in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq most clearly.

This means that we now have at least three distinct and identifiable kinds of Islamist movements in the Arab world that are engaged in public political, social or military action: Hezbollah- and Hamas-like resistance groups that are heavily anchored in individual nationalisms; parties like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan that operate within the available channels of political participation and contestation; and, Salafist militants that use violence and intimidation to impose their strict ways on society. [Continue reading…]

Marc Lynch writes: A video of a rebel commander eating the lung of an enemy fighter and the horrific scenes of children massacred by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are only a few of Syria’s ever-growing catalog of atrocities. This stuff of nightmares has raised fears that Syria’s civil war is spreading Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict across the Middle East — fears galvanized by the escalating body count in Iraq, the dismal standoff in Bahrain, and the seemingly uncontainable tensions in Lebanon.

Many now see this sectarianism as the new master narrative rewriting regional politics, with Syria the frontline of a sectarian cold war permeating every corner of public life. The Sunni-Shiite divide, argues Brookings Institution fellow Geneive Abdo in a report released last month, “is well on its way to displacing the broader conflict between Muslims and the West … and likely to supplant the Palestinian occupation as the central mobilizing factor for Arab political life.”

Perhaps. But think about how little deep Arab sympathy for the Palestinian cause has actually produced effective or unified Arab official action in its support. Will Sunni solidarity be any more effective?

The sectarian master narrative obscures rather than reveals the most important lines of conflict in the emerging Middle East. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: An important but unclear aspect of the ongoing Arab uprisings has been how more democratic and legitimate Arab governments would impact on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Several incidents in Egypt indicate how government and popular street sentiment are likely to behave differently on Israel-Palestine than did the previous Mubarak regime. Now Jordan vividly captures the complexities and nuances of the consequences of more representative Arab governance systems.

The newly elected lower house of the Jordanian parliament last week asked the government to expel Israeli Ambassador Daniel Nevo, and to recall Jordan’s ambassador to Israel, Walid Obeidat. Neither of those things is going to happen, but the political dynamics of the process are intriguing, and highlight an issue that other Arabs must also address in due course: What do Arab governments do when they prefer to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and satisfy American government dictates, but their citizens are angry with Israeli policies and want to take political-diplomatic action to express their discontent?

The Jordanian parliament’s vote was non-binding, and will not result in any changes because its decisions must be ratified by a majority of the upper house of parliament, which is appointed by the king. This vote was especially intriguing because the lower house that was elected last November, in a vote boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, was thought to be dominated by pro-government tribal interests, and thus would be little more than a rubber stamp body.

Well, that may be true for most issues, but I guess we are learning now the important political science principle that rubber stamps and human hearts do not always coincide – for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and especially the Islamic holy places in occupied East Jerusalem, clearly touches the hearts of all Jordanians, Arabs and Muslims. [Continue reading…]

Issandr El Amrani writes: Free Arabs, a new Web site run by a group of Arabs — some in the Middle East, others in the West — is causing a stir. Gathered under the slogan “Democracy, Secularism, Fun,” it laments the fact that “millions of Arabs have internalized the notion that secularism is tantamount to faithlessness, and is all about demonizing Islam and promoting a dissolute way of life.

Not only can secularism coexist with religion, Free Arabs argues, but it protects the free exercise of religion and can help promote other civil liberties, like gay rights.

The group is defending a no-compromise version of secularism — one that may be too much to ask of many Arab politicians, particularly those in the fledging new liberal parties that have emerged since the Arab uprisings.

Some don’t want to be dragged into culture wars, a favorite ground for Islamists who bank on the fact that many Arab societies are still socially conservative. Others are just plain conservative themselves, even on issues far more basic than gay rights — like whether gender equality should be applied to inheritance and other questions traditionally governed by Islamic law.

Still, the controversy triggered by Free Arabs is just the kind of debate Islamists and secularists in the Arab world should be having, if only because they couldn’t have had it under the old regimes. Also, there’s plenty of room for debate: In this part of the world, the term “secular” means very different things to different people. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: We will find out in coming months whether the second term of the Obama administration will herald any significant changes in United States policies in the Middle East. Four main issues should be monitored for any signs of change: the Palestine-Israel and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; tensions with Iran; the Arab uprisings, revolutions, and constitutional transformations; and socio-economic conditions across the region.

Each of these issues is important in itself. However, viewed from Washington they often get conflated and confused, so American government responses to the various Arab uprisings, for example, often are shaped by officials’ concerns about Iran and Israel.

On a short visit to Washington this week where I had discussions with specialists on the Middle East, my sense is that little has changed in the U.S. capital in the past two years. While the ordinary men and women of the Arab world have launched the most dramatic and consequential change ever in the political configuration of their region, officials and experts in Washington appear to be living in the past, intellectually and politically immobilized, pursuing more or less the same policies of the past several decades. [Continue reading…]

Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui writes: The Arab Spring is not an outcome, it is a process. For those countries at the forefront of regional transformation, the fundamental question is can democracy become institutionalised? Though progress has been uneven and the outcomes of many state-society struggles have yet to be resolved, the answer is a cautious yes. In at least a few countries, we are witnessing the onset of democratic institutionalisation: whether the process of reform and transformation spreads to other parts of the Middle East depends on many factors — religious tensions, political mobilisation, regime adaptations, geopolitics. Meanwhile North Africa provides the most promising preview of the future.

Democratic institutionalisation means the healthy convergence of politics around three arenas of competition: elections, parliaments and constitutions. When these institutions are robust and durable, then the democratic governments they engender are relatively safe from radical groups, reactionary forces and authoritarian backsliding (due to alternation: democracies that uphold the rule of law and hold regular elections require that power alternates between competing parties).

In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this process is unfolding, if at an unsteady pace. All three have had founding legislative elections that were far more competitive and pluralistic than those held in their authoritarian past. In Tunisia, the project to re-craft the national constitution nears completion by the Constituent Assembly, which itself was the product of electoral competition. The crisis there has two dimensions: the new government’s passivity in response to Salafist violence (which came to an end after the attack on the US embassy in Tunis) and the delay in getting economic reform under way, especially in the poorest regions. In spite of often acute tensions and conflicts between different political interest groups, all but the tiniest minority have accepted that democracy is now the name of the game. [Continue reading…]

Sheri Berman writes: Two years after the outbreak of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring, the bloom is off the rose. Fledgling democracies in North Africa are struggling to move forward or even maintain control, government crackdowns in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere have kept liberalization at bay, and Syria is slipping ever deeper into a vicious civil war that threatens to ignite the Middle East. Instead of widespread elation about democracy finally coming to the region, one now hears pessimism about the many obstacles in the way, fear about what will happen next, and even open nostalgia for the old authoritarian order. Last June, when the Egyptian military dismissed parliament and tried to turn back the clock by gutting the civilian presidency, The Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign policy columnist cracked, “Let’s hope it works.” (It didn’t.) And Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s attempted power grab in November made such nostalgia commonplace.

The skepticism is as predictable as it is misguided. Every surge of democratization over the last century — after World War I, after World War II, during the so called third wave in recent decades — has been followed by an undertow, accompanied by widespread questioning of the viability and even desirability of democratic governance in the areas in question. As soon as political progress stalls, a conservative reaction sets in as critics lament the turbulence of the new era and look back wistfully to the supposed stability and security of its authoritarian predecessor. One would have hoped that by now people would know better — that they would understand that this is what political development actually looks like, what it has always looked like, in the West just as much as in the Middle East, and that the only way ahead is to plunge forward rather than turn back.

The first error critics make is treating new democracies as blank slates, ignoring how much of their dynamics and fate are inherited rather than chosen. Turmoil, violence, and corruption are taken as evidence of the inherent dysfunctionality of democracy itself, or of the immaturity or irrationality of a particular population, rather than as a sign of the previous dictatorship’s pathologies. Because authoritarian regimes lack popular legitimacy, they often manipulate and deepen communal cleavages in order to divide potential opponents and generate support among favored groups. So when democratization occurs, the pent-up distrust and animosity often explode. And because authoritarian regimes rule by command rather than consensus, they suppress dissent and block the creation of political and social institutions that allow for the regular, peaceful articulation and organization of popular demands. So citizens in new democracies often express their grievances in a volatile and disorganized way, through a dizzying array of parties, extremist rhetoric and behavior, and street protests and even battles. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The year 2012 will be remembered as an important milestone in the development of the modern Arab world, because it has started to reveal the underlying but long-hidden strengths and weaknesses of Arab societies and states. Here is my list of the 10 most significant things we learned from events in the Arab World and the wider Middle East in 2012. First, it is now clearer than ever that there is no such thing as a cohesive, single “Arab World,” as every Arab country follows a different path in pursuing its own political reconfiguration. For the first time ever in their history, ordinary Arab men and women are driving the political changes under way, revealing the variety of identities, sentiments, legitimacies and conditions in different Arab countries, with their own character, nuance and agency.

Second, simultaneously, those 350 million ordinary Arab men and women across the region are expressing some common grievances, attitudes and aspirations. The most significant sentiment they expressed in 2012 is the desire to live a life of integrity and dignity – not to be treated like a serf by one’s own government, but rather to enjoy a basic set of human and citizen rights. Shaping national systems that guarantee those citizen rights via credible constitutions is the hallmark trend of 2012 that is rippling across the Arab region in different forms and at different speeds.

Third, as part of that process, 2012 has taught us not to exaggerate the power, wisdom or political efficacy of Arab Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, who have generally fared poorly in translating their slogans into policies. Thus they are being increasingly challenged by fellow citizens – including some of their own supporters – who are disappointed by the Islamists’ erratic performance in office. [Continue reading…]

Peter Beaumont writes: Recent reports from inside Syria paint a grim picture on both sides. In Aleppo, as my Guardian colleague Ghaith Abdul-Ahad described in a vivid report last week, the armed opposition to President Bashar al-Assad remains as split as ever, looting is commonplace and rivalries are multiplying. In Damascus, the situation for Assad and his inner circle continues to deteriorate. The president himself, suggest some accounts, is “isolated and fearful”, almost invisible and unwilling to venture outside. The operational capacity of the forces closest to him to mount operations is also declining even as Russia seems to be moving to distance itself from Assad, if not from Syria itself.

In all likelihood, some end to the regime appears inevitable, if not immediately, then in the not very distant future. The question now being posed is: what happens next? And while the desire to predict and second-guess is hard-wired into our natures, not least the nature of journalists and analysts, it’s probable that we will get it badly wrong.

The tools most commonly used to try to explain complex situations such as conflict, including the predilection for historical analogy to explain current events, are often deeply misleading, as the impressive Kings of War blog of the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London cautioned before Christmas. The reality is that the Middle East is not the Balkans of the 1990s, nor is Egypt revolutionary Iran. “The truth,” the Kings of War concluded, “is we should probably not be surprised by the things that surprise us.”

Indeed, a whole cadre of Soviet studies specialists failed to spot the USSR’s coming collapse. The same could be said of those specialising in the Middle East, who not only failed to predict the Arab Spring, but once it had begun hoped to use the models of Tunisia and Egypt to suggest how other revolutions might turn out.

We cannot say whether Syria after Assad, with its specific social and sectarian tensions, will resemble Libya post-Gaddafi or Iraq post-Saddam. All conflicts and all post-conflict situations are unhappy, or unstable, in their own particular way. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: If there is one fundamental relationship that is central to stable statehood and the wellbeing of entire populations in modern states, it is the relationship between the citizen and the state. These highest and the lowest, and biggest and smallest, levels of statehood need to be reasonably in sync with one another for relatively normal life to go on in any country, leading to social calm, economic progress, security for all and opportunities for individual men and women to develop to their full human potential. Not surprisingly, the citizen-state relationship has been widely distorted – in fact never fully established – across much of the modern Arab world, which is one reason why millions of citizens have been in revolt against their governments and ruling elites during the past two years. A good example of the unnatural state of citizen-state relations is the recent string of incidents in which some Arab governments have revoked the citizenships of some of their nationals, usually as punishment for political acts or even just for their political rhetoric.

For example, last month Bahrain revoked the nationality of 31 activists, citing them as a threat to “national security.” This included political leaders, such as Saeed Shehabi who lives in exile in London, and Jalal and Jawad Fairooz, two former MPs from the opposition Al-Wefaq party. As happens in all such cases, the government said its move was perfectly legal, as its citizenship law allows it to reconsider nationality if a Bahraini “damages national security” – a phrase that can be interpreted any way the government wishes.

A year ago, the United Arab Emirates revoked the citizenship of seven citizens who also happened to be members of Al-Islah, an Islamist group that is critical is government human rights policies. Some of them had signed a petition for an elected Parliament with executive powers.

Kuwait took similar measures two years ago when it revoked the citizenship of politician Yasser al-Habeeb, accusing him of abusing religious symbols and attempting to trigger sectarian tensions (he is a Shiite). The Cabinet made the decision at the recommendation of the Interior Minister, using available legal means.

These and other such cases across the region are extreme examples of dysfunctional citizen-state relations, which often reflect mutual contempt for the other by both sides, because they have never negotiated a sensible and equitable relationship that defines the use of state power for the wellbeing of all in society. [Continue reading…]

Excerpt from Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All? by Amaney A. Jamal:

They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. . . . They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble.

— President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001, quoted in The Stakes: America in the Middle East by Shibley Telhami.

Perhaps nothing is more insulting to Arab societies than U.S. claims that America values freedoms in ways that ordinary Muslim and Arab citizens don’t—or even worse, can’t. It is one thing to claim that the United States has strong geostrategic interests in the region that render democracy inconsequential; it is another altogether to sell such interest, which has resulted in authoritarian durability, as the result of something inherently undemocratic among the people of the region. Not only has the United States continued to invest in the myth of a civilizational divide but it now designs policies to remedy this clash that miss the root cause of the problem and, indeed, perpetuate it.

Because democratic inferiority is the policy theory du jour, we are now confronted with a new set of policies aimed at addressing it. The United States is currently engaged in bolstering liberal and secular elements of Arab societies as a means to counter the influence of Islamists. This strategy does little to address the sources of anti-Americanism in the region. But describing the problem as an ideological one exonerates the United States from culpability because this strategy implies that Islamists are problematic because of their Islamic belief systems and not their anti-Americanism.

In fact, commentators often assume that Islamists are anti-American by default, failing to recognize the significant variation that exists among Islamists in their anti-American sentiments. While Islamists have shown significant levels of moderation on domestic political issues relating to Islam, whether it is human rights, women’s rights, or democracy, they have been less compromising on the issues that they are most passionate about, like foreign policy. Islamist groups have shown a remarkable willingness to play within the rules of democratic elections—in part because they can be confident about the level of their support among the voters. According to Muriel Asseburg, “The democratic openings that have been achieved, albeit limited, have encouraged many Islamists to pursue their agendas through the ballot box rather than violence; when and where Islamists have been allowed to do so, they have started to work for change within the political systems.” [Continue reading…]