Middle East revolutions: the end or the evolution of Islamism?

In the revolutions that began in Tunisia, continued in Egypt, and are announcing that they will come to other Middle Eastern countries as well, attention was drawn to the absence of an Islamist language, base, leadership and content, and the end of political Islam or Islamism was spoken of. Particularly while the revolutionary process in Egypt was still continuing, an article was published by the famous French Islamologist Olivier Roy, in which, proceeding from precisely this finding, he once again declared "the end of political Islam."

We say "once again" because this is not Roy's first declaration of the end of political Islam. We know that he made this declaration several times in the nineties and after 11 September. His book titled The Failure of Political Islam was also published in Turkey in the nineties, while Turkey was going through the 28 February process, and was widely discussed. I too took part in that discussion, in addition to many articles, with a piece titled "The End of the Political Islam Narrative" in the journal Tezkire at the time.

What I wanted to say then too was that what had ended was not political Islam but, on the contrary, the conceptualization of "political Islam" itself. Indeed, political Islam was a movement that was just beginning and had entered an ascent, but new conceptual tools would be needed for it to be identified and understood. Analyses that brought to mind, at the words political Islam, images of Islamist guerrillas with Kalashnikovs were misleading; the Islamism represented by those images had no political side. It was the image of Muslims fighting at a post-political or pre-political level; there was no politicality there, there was war. Yet politicality is precisely something that takes place on a ground where you recognize the existence and legitimacy of others as well, on the basis of negotiation with others.

The political Islam that Roy understood was a discourse that sought to place Islam at the center of the political order, and a form of activism that extended to bloody attempts to restructure society on Islamic principles. Roy showed, with examples, the failure of all these attempts, in different parts of the world, to seize the political center, and, where they were able to seize the center, their inability to implement the political programs they promised. In ruling that these forms of Islamism, which he could not see in the new Middle Eastern revolutions, have completely ended, he is of course following a line consistent with himself. But as Salman Sayyid, the author of the groundbreaking book Fear of Fundamentalism, put it, like a stopped clock he is merely telling the truth twice a day, yet this truth is of no benefit to anyone nor does it help us understand what is going on. Yet the validity of the thesis that Islamism has failed depends on what we understand by both "Islamism" and "success."

Roy's latest article was discussed in Turkey too. I may have missed other contributions, but the pieces I followed with interest were written by Kürşat Bumin and Hayrettin Karaman. The reason I am entering that debate now, after such a delay, is Prof. Dr. Ümit Cizre's article, simply exquisite, which I read yesterday in the Açık Görüş supplement of the newspaper Star. The critical assessments she made after relaying remarks similar to what Roy said by another French Islamologist, Gilles Kepel, at a conference she attended in Jerusalem on the latest developments in the Middle East, present the most original and comprehensive approach I have read on the subject.

Cizre begins her quite long article by noting Keppel's view of the absence of an Islamist language, base, leadership and content in the Middle East revolutions as a sign of the death throes of Islamism. Let me relay a few paragraphs from her article, which is hard to summarize (emphases are mine):

"According to Kepel, who states that Radical Islam entered a crisis in the 1990s in the sense of militarizing the masses and that 11 September was carried out as a result of this crisis, these new movements overthrowing regimes announce the end of Radical Islam and were taking as a model the Turkish-type AK Party, which rose on the shoulders of entrepreneurial middle classes and which makes participation in the political system "first a tool, then step by step, the goal."

Keppel, who openly declared that he perceived the Middle East tsunami, as the masses' shouting in the squares with their modernist and universal demands for rights rose, as the collapse of the "Sharia-minded, harsh, violent" Islamist vein and the rise of the AK Party model, while trying to depict this new situation in an unexcited, monotonous voice and with simple propositions, continued to explain everything that was going on, as Islamologists resort to categorization in every matter they have difficulty solving, by reference to the radical and moderate veins of political Islam. While it is obvious that it would be more correct to view the matter as the inability of the perspective on Islamist movements, not of Islamist movements themselves, to transform, and its collapse, explaining the political transformation in the Middle East with 'Islamism' at its center was perhaps in fact an expression of the helplessness into which academics have fallen in their activity of understanding and explaining. What this approach forgot was that the Islamist mobilization had created the momentum that made possible the rethinking and debating of modernity in this geography and its emergence with new alternatives within the framework of demands for new rights, identities, living spaces and democracy."

"The expectation that the political project the Islamist movements would offer as an alternative to dictatorships would resemble exactly the dictatorial regimes they were trying to overthrow, that it would have a radical discourse like them, a strong central state and army structure, a despotic leadership, was not realized."

This expectation regarding Islamist movements, let it not be misunderstood, did not belong to the Islamists; it was an expectation of the Orientalist approaches that categorize Islamists. They tied success to the condition of the realization of these expectations, whereas those they call Islamists no longer have such an expectation and have not tied their own success to it.

I may not have relayed Cizre's article sufficiently; I recommend that you reach and read in full her piece, in which she did the summary, titled "Middle East Revolutions: Evolution of Islamism?"