Egypt’s final round of parliamentary elections won’t end
until next week (January 11) but the outcome is becoming clear. The
Muslim Brotherhood will most likely win half the lower house of
Parliament and more extreme Islamists will occupy a quarter. Secular
parties will be left with just 25 per cent of the seats.
Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. The region’s
authoritarian governments had simply failed to deliver on their
promises. Though Arab authoritarianism had a good run from the 1950s
until the 1980s, economies eventually stagnated, debts mounted and
growing, well-educated populations saw the prosperous egalitarian
societies they had been promised receding over the horizon, aggrieving
virtually everyone, secularists and Islamists alike.
The last few weeks however have confirmed that a
revolution’s consequences need not follow from its causes. Rather than
bringing secular revolutionaries to power, the Arab Spring is producing
flowers of a decidedly Islamist hue. More unsettling to many, Islamists
are winning fairly: religious parties are placing first in free, open
elections in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. So why are so many Arabs voting
for parties that seem politically regressive to westerners?
The West’s own history furnishes an answer. From 1820 to
1850 Europe resembled today’s Arab world in two ways. Both regions
experienced historic and seemingly contagious rebellions that swept from
country to country. And in both cases, frustrated people in many nations
with relatively little in common rallied around a single ideology – one
not of their own making but inherited from previous generations of
radicals.
In 19th century Europe, that ideology was liberalism. It
emerged in the late 18th century from the American, Dutch, Polish and
especially French revolutions. Whereas the chief political divide in
society had long been between monarchs and aristocrats, the revolutions
drew a new line between the “old regime” of monarchy, nobility and
church, and the new commercial classes and small landholders. For the
latter group, it was the old regime that produced the predatory taxes,
bankrupt treasuries, corruption, perpetual wars and other pathologies
that dragged down their societies. The liberal solution was to extend
rights and liberties beyond the aristocracy which had inherited them
from the middle ages.
Suppressing liberalism became the chief aim of
absolutist regimes in Austria, Russia and Prussia after they helped
defeat France in 1815. Prince Klemens von Metternich, Austria’s powerful
chancellor, claimed that “English principles” of liberty were foreign to
the continent. But networks of liberals – Italian Carbonari, Freemasons,
English Radicals – continued to operate underground, communicating
across societies and providing a common language for dissent.
This helped lay the ideological groundwork for Spain’s
liberal revolution in 1820. From there, revolts spread to Portugal, the
Italian states of Naples and Piedmont, and Greece. News of the Spanish
revolution even spurred the adoption of liberal Constitutions in the
nascent states of Gran Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Mexico.
Despite their varied grievances, in each case, liberalism served as a
rallying point and political programme on which the malcontents could
agree.
A decade later, in July 1830, a revolution toppled
France’s conservative Bourbon monarchy. Insurrection spread to Belgium,
Switzerland, a number of German and Italian states and Poland. Once
again a variety of complaints were distilled into the rejection of the
old regime and the acceptance of liberalism.
The revolutions of 1848 were more numerous and
consequential but remarkably similar to the earlier ones. Rebels with
little in common – factory workers in Paris, peasants in Ireland,
artisans in Vienna – followed a script written in the 1790s that was
rehearsed continuously in the ensuing years across the continent.
Today rural and urban Arabs with widely varying cultures
and histories are showing that they share more than a deep frustration
with despots and a demand for dignity. Most, whether moderate or
radical, or living in a monarchy or a republic, share a common inherited
language of dissent: Islamism.
Political Islam, especially the strict version practised
by Salafists in Egypt, is thriving largely because it is tapping into
ideological roots that were laid down long before the revolts began.
Invented in the 1920s by the Muslim Brotherhood, kept alive by their
many affiliates and offshoots, boosted by the failures of Nasserism and
Baathism, allegedly bankrolled by Saudi and Qatari money and inspired by
the defiant example of revolutionary Iran, Islamism has for years
provided a coherent narrative about what ails Muslim societies and where
the cure lies. Far from rendering Islamism unnecessary, as some experts
forecast, the Arab Spring has increased its credibility; Islamists,
after all, have long condemned these corrupt regimes as destined to
fail.
Liberalism in 19th century Europe and Islamism in the
Arab world today are like channels dug by one generation of activists
and kept open, sometimes quietly, by future ones. When the storms of
revolution arrive, whether in Europe or the Middle East, the waters will
find those channels. Islamism is winning out because it is the deepest
and widest channel into which today’s Arab discontent can flow.