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| Egyptian hieroglyphs |
Brotherhood’s fiasco in Egypt will change future of Islamism
By Hussein Ibish
With
the removal of the Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, the future of
the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamism in general, is undoubtedly at a
turning point. The question is typically being cast as a binary: is this
“the beginning of the end” or “the end of the beginning” for the
Islamist movement? Even if, in the final analysis, this proves a
misleading question, it nonetheless articulates a precise and
instructive framework for what is at stake.
Many observers have no doubt that this is the beginning of the end of
the Islamist movement, at least as it has been traditionally structured
and as a dominant ideology in the Arab states. According to these
observers, if the oldest Muslim Brotherhood party cannot maintain
popular legitimacy in Egypt after only one year in office, then the
ideology itself simply isn’t a practicable model for governance
anywhere.
Sunni Islamists will invariably fail in power because Islam is a
religion and not an actual political ideology. Islamism doesn’t have the
intellectual heft, breadth or depth to suggest any answers to most
policy questions. It essentially boils down to a set of religiously
conservative social attitudes. It only takes a short while in office to
reveal that.
Moreover, the very qualities that made the Brotherhood so effective as
an opposition group – secrecy, discipline, streamlined hierarchy and a
paranoid suspicion of all outsiders – proved crippling in office... READ MORE
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