Quotes of the Day
The headquarters of the Islamist party that heads Morocco's newly elected government is in a quiet Rabat neighborhood. The building, a repurposed residence, would be indistinguishable from the other houses on the narrow, leafy street if it weren't for the noisy demonstrations in front of its gates. When I visit the Justice and Development Party on a recent weekday, two groups of unemployed Moroccans have taken up positions on opposite sides of the street. They hold up banners demanding government jobs and chant singsong slogans about their right to work.
The loudest voice belongs to Khadija el-Hachimi, a cheerful woman in a headscarf, who leads the group representing the jobless aged 40 or more. She tells me many in her group voted for the PJD (the Islamist party's French acronym), but that didn't stop them from picketing the HQ. "We have to keep pressure on them, or they will turn into fat thieves, like the other politicians," she says. "We have to [remind] them about why we elected them."
The group across the street is made up of people from small towns and villages. Many are waving documents bearing the seal of Mohammed VI, Morocco's supreme ruler, who bowed to street protests and allowed the free elections late last year. The documents are letters from the King to various government departments, encouraging them to find the bearer a job. For years, the monarch has given these, with as little thought as a movie star handing out signed photographs, to subjects he encounters on visits across his kingdom. Now the people on the street are demanding that the PJD honor the royal promissory notes. "The King said they should be given jobs," el-Hachimi says. "The government has to obey."
As we talk, I'm conscious that we're being watched very closely by a vanload of policemen armed with truncheons. Later in the day, a large force of cops is called in to head off a protest march by several hundred young unemployed who are plainly much angrier than el-Hachimi's group.
It was not so long ago that the PJD cadres were the ones protesting government corruption and ineptitude — and at the receiving end of the truncheons. Now in power, they're the ones under pressure to deliver quick results. "People want all their problems solved, right now," sighs Lahcen Daoudi, the new Minister of Higher Education and one of the PJD's senior leaders. "They have waited for a very long time, so the challenge for us is to get them to be a little patient." Having formed the government in January, the party has barely had time to pursue its modest election promise to bring down unemployment from 9.1% to 8% by 2016, but Moroccans seem in no mood to wait.
The PJD's predicament is familiar to the Islamist parties that suddenly find themselves in power across the Middle East and North Africa. But the Islamists have not had much time to bask in their triumph, or indeed use their power to pursue any radical agendas. Make no mistake: it's springtime for political Islam. Arabs liberated from old secular dictatorships have voted into power political parties that espouse a conservative worldview deeply informed by their faith. In Tunisia, the Ennahda party won a plurality in the late-October elections to the constituent assembly. Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, won 235 of 508 seats in parliament in elections held from November to January. A coalition led by the PJD easily trounced secular and leftist parties in Morocco. Islamists parties in Yemen and Libya are expected to do well when those countries eventually hold elections.
This is all very alarming, not only for liberal-minded Arabs who worry their new rulers may take away some cherished freedoms, but also for Westerners long used to the image of Islamists as wild-eyed, bushy-bearded reactionaries who hate modernity and embrace violent ideologies, like that of al-Qaeda. The prospect of Islamists ruling large swaths of the Arab world can seem frightening if you believe they are "a mortal enemy of our civilization," as Newt Gingrich described the Muslim Brotherhood.
But such fearmongering has proved to be misplaced. Since the collapse of dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, Islamist parties have shown themselves to be conciliatory toward skeptics, at home and abroad. They won votes not by appealing to faith but by building political alliances with nonreligious groups and embracing secular causes like fighting corruption and reforming the economy. Their hopes of succeeding in government as they did in elections may rest on their ability to steer clear of radical agendas.
If political expediency is pulling Islamists away from the extremist fringe, then the exigencies of governing are pushing them to the political center. They find themselves having to cater — and answer — to a much wider, more unpredictable constituency than their traditional base. Deepening economic crises and worsening unemployment mean there's little time to dwell on potentially divisive religious and social issues. The urgent need for foreign investment doesn't allow for the holding of grudges against Western countries that long backed their oppressors. And always, there's the fear that failure to meet their people's expectations can lead to the same explosion of street anger that blew away the old dictatorships and brought the Islamists to power.
The Shades of Green
While they are all moving away from the conservative fringe, some Islamist groups have farther to travel than others. Political Islam comes in varying shades of green, with Hamas and Hizballah at the darkest end of the spectrum and Turkey's Justice and Development Party (which took its name from the Moroccan original, but is better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) at the lightest. "Just because they all 'speak Muslim' doesn't mean they're saying the same thing," says François Burgat, of the French Institute of the Near East and one of the world's pre-eminent scholars on Islamist politics.
The differences are deep: Shi'ite and Sunni Islamists are far apart on religious interpretation. Hamas and Hizballah are enthusiastic proponents of political violence; the Muslim Brotherhood renounced it in the 1970s. Turkey's Islamists want to be part of the European Union, whereas their Yemeni counterparts are suspicious of the West. They may all pray in the direction of Mecca, but Morocco's PJD acknowledges Mohammed VI as Commander of the Faithful, while no other group accords such reverence to a living leader.
This diversity means there's no single way to communicate with Islamists, a fact that has only recently dawned on policymakers in Washington. The Obama Administration is still struggling to build relations with the Brotherhood, for instance. In Iraq, the only Middle Eastern country where Islamists owe their elevation to Western intervention rather than homegrown revolutions, relations with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, are at best testy.
A Leap of Faith
But unlike in Russia, where Vladimir Putin used anti-West messages to drum up votes in the March 4 election, the Islamist parties for the most part avoided that kind of rhetoric. Their main pitch to voters was based on their reputation for honesty, a novelty in a political culture riven with graft and patronage. During the election campaigns in Egypt and Tunisia, Islamists broadened their appeal by talking up nonreligious issues like corruption and unemployment. It helped that their Islamist credentials needed no burnishing, but candidates either avoided or underplayed social wedge issues like women's rights.
Having got to power by getting votes from beyond their traditional base, Islamists must now work to keep the big tent from collapsing, and that means they can't press too hard on religious and social hot buttons.
Karim Tazi, a Casablanca businessman who describes himself as "left-wing democracy-oriented," was among the leading lights of the Feb. 20 campaign, Morocco's equivalent of the mostly peaceful Arab Spring movements that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. Although some left-leaning parties chose to boycott the elections, Tazi announced he would vote for the Islamists. "I don't share their values, but they were a clear alternative, and they are genuinely democratic," he tells me. He's clear-eyed about what the PJD can achieve. "They may not move us forward on social issues, but at least none of the leaders wants to take us backward," he says. "There's no Santorum there."
There's another reason why liberal-minded Arabs (and Westerners) can be more sanguine about the Islamists' intentions: their hold on power is far from secure. They've won pluralities, not majorities, and have to rely on alliances with secular and leftist parties. In Tunisia, for instance, Ennahda has appointed the human-rights activist Moncef Marzouki as interim President. There are other powerful, if undemocratic, checks on political Islam. In Egypt, a clique of generals continues to rule the country, at least until a new President is elected in May; the Brotherhood has vowed not to field a candidate, leaving the secular Amr Moussa the favorite to win. The Egyptian and Tunisian militaries have strong secular traditions. In Morocco, King Mohammed was pressured by street protests to allow free elections, but the monarch continues to wield great authority, including the power to dismiss the government.
The Burden of Expectations
Like the PJD, newly empowered Islamists everywhere find themselves suddenly burdened with the massive weight of their nations' expectations. The Arab youth who toppled the tyrants now look to their elected governments to give them what the dictators didn't — clean government, social justice and, above all, jobs. And if they don't get what they want, they know exactly what they'll do. "We'll go back to Tahrir," is the phrase I heard again and again in Egypt, and it's as much a threat as an expression of confidence from young people who have tasted power in the street, if not in parliament. However much they may alarm Westerners, Islamist governments hold no dread for Tunisians and Yemenis who now have a successful blueprint for regime change.
In the end, as Daoudi acknowledges, the success or failure of political Islam will depend, as much as anything, on the patience of the revolutionaries. To earn that patience, the PJD reckons it needs to give the public some red meat in the form of anticorruption campaigns. It has published lists of people who got transportation and construction-materials licenses from previous governments, exposing widespread fraud and favoritism. Moroccans have long suspected that lucrative licenses — to run intercity bus services, say, or collect sand from the coast to make concrete — were handed to friends and cronies of politicians. But to actually see the lists in print is a level of transparency until recently unthinkable, and it has earned the PJD some credit. "It's a populist step, and it's smart policy because it widens the circle of accountability [in government]," says Driss Ksikes, former editor of TelQuel, a Moroccan magazine known for its opposition to ultraconservative Islamist ideology. "If the PJD can keep widening the circle, they will win goodwill."
Other election promises may be harder to fulfill: the government has not yet explained how it will accelerate economic growth or create employment. Daoudi says the party will not follow previous practice and fatten civil service rolls by absorbing large numbers of unemployed into government service. Where, then, will they find jobs? Businessmen who have met with PJD leaders report they are candid in admitting their lack of experience in economic matters and keen to listen to ideas. But if such candor is refreshing, it is not reassuring to Moroccans like those protesting outside the party headquarters.
Who's Extremist Now?
The PJD leadership has also worked to allay fears, at home and abroad, that Islamists will use power to pursue an ultraconservative social agenda. While the election victory has emboldened some party members to call for, among other things, a ban on alcohol consumption and making the headscarf compulsory for women, party leaders wave off these off as voices from the fringe, analogous to some of the more extreme views aired in the U.S. presidential-election cycle.
Ignoring extremist voices can be dangerous, however. In Egypt, politicians representing the ultraconservative Salafi movement have denounced all manner of modern practices. Salafis won 25% of the vote in the parliamentary elections, which makes them more than a mere fringe. The success of the Salafi al-Nour Party has led inevitably to concerns that the Brotherhood's FJP may feel compelled to tack right to shore up its conservative base. But the opposite is just as likely. When the Salafis won a surprisingly large number of seats in the first phase (there would be three in all) of parliamentary elections, Egyptian analyst Hisham Kassem told me this would pressure the Brotherhood to move more to the center. "The Salafis have basically claimed the 'A vote for us is a vote for Allah' space; the Brotherhood can only grow in the opposition direction, if they can persuade nonreligious people to come to into their fold." Sure enough, the FJP has shown little inclination to move right since the elections.
Now Open for Business
In truth, the Islamists in power would prefer not to be distracted by issues of faith just now: there's too much governing to do. The economies of the Arab Spring countries have all deteriorated since their dictators were toppled. Morocco, like Egypt and Tunisia, depends heavily on tourism, but visitors are reluctant to travel to a region in political upheaval. Foreign investors are leery too. Morocco's traditional sources of investment are mostly in Europe, a continent with a crisis of its own. More hardship is on the horizon: a drought has wrought havoc on the agriculture sector, which may lead to a double whammy of higher food prices and a spike in unemployment. If the PJD government has plans to head off these crises, it has not adequately articulated them.
At the Higher Education Ministry, Daoudi is trying to balance priorities: Should he weed out corrupt officials or concentrate on dragging the country's outmoded universities into the 21st century? He knows what the schools need: "Technology! Technology! Technology!" When I ask him if he's planning to introduce more courses in Koran studies — a fear expressed by several Moroccans I had met — he's momentarily nonplussed. "More Koran studies?" he asks, with heavy irony. "And what, my friend, are we going to eat?"
Whereas once they were suspicious of foreign money, most Islamist leaders now say they'd be glad for some investment as well as for loans to tide over their governments a couple of hard years. They are aware this is an especially bad time to be looking for money: lenders expect extortionate interest rates from countries with poor records of economic management and untested new leadership. Investors will need convincing that the risks are worthwhile. And, of course, the Islamist-ruled countries must compete with one another for every dollar. Daoudi hopes Chinese businesses can be persuaded to use Morocco as a production base from which to supply Europe, but he knows the Tunisians are making the same pitch. Egypt and Yemen both hope to send more workers to oil-rich Persian Gulf countries. (Libya, with its own oil and a small population, is better placed.)
As they learn to deal with economic crises, the Islamists also confront what is, for them, a new political challenge: how to modernize their countries without losing their religious moorings altogether. Mustapha Khalfi, Morocco's new Communications Minister, has a surprising solution: "We must learn how to defend our family values and faith values while embracing globalization ... from the Republican Party."
Taken aback by his answer, I stop writing in my notepad and wait for a punch line. But Khalfi is dead serious. "You can learn a lot from the Republicans about how to develop policy ideas that reflect your values," he says, citing President George W. Bush's faith-based initiatives like the promotion of healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood. (The Bush Administration allocated large funds to these programs; their actual impact is a matter of debate along the partisan lines of American politics.) Khalfi is hoping Islamist parties across the Arab world can adopt some of the Republicans' best practices. "The [GOP] knows how to reflect its ideas in a legislative framework," he says. "It's something we need to do, now that we're in government ourselves."
Khalfi has observed the Republicans from close quarters. In 2006, as a Fulbright scholar, he spent a year in Washington, D.C., as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and, for eight months, as a legislative aide in Congress. Although he worked mainly with a Democrat, Representative Jim McDermott of Seattle, it was the folks on the other side of the aisle who made the strongest impression on the soft-spoken Moroccan with the somber demeanor. "I paid attention," he says of his time in the U.S. He was especially intrigued by the close links between the party and conservative think tanks, "and how that helps in policy formation." On returning to Rabat, he set up the Center for Contemporary Research and Studies, which he hopes one day will become "a Moroccan Heritage Foundation."
McDermott had lost touch with his former aide and was surprised to learn he's now a minister, but he remembers Khalfi fondly. "He was an open-minded learner," the Congressman recalls. "I knew he was deeply into his faith, but that never got in the way [of] his ability to listen or to learn." Now that Islamists like Khalfi are rising to top jobs in Arab governments, it's time to return the compliment. "We've demonized [them] so much that we've put ourselves at a disadvantage," says McDermott.
There's time yet to change that. Khalfi will arrive in the U.S. in early April to attend some conferences. Washington would be wise to pay attention.
- Bobby Ghosh / Rabat
- Islamists, long suppressed by Middle Eastern dictators and feared by the West, now lead governments in the Arab Spring states. But instead of unleashing their radical urges, power has tamed them