OF ISLAMISTS AND BALLOT BOXES: RETHINKING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ISLAMISMS AND ELECTORAL POLITICS

Extract

As Islamist movements have gained strength across the Muslim world, their commitment to democratic means of achieving and exercising power has been repeatedly analyzed. The question of whether resort to violence to achieve its goals is inherent in the Islamist project (that what some Islamists understand as a divine mandate to implement shariעa ultimately sanctions the use of force against dissenters) or contingent (that the violent exclusion of Islamists from the political arena has driven them to arms, best expressed by François Burgat's contention that any Western political party could be turned into the Armed Islamic Group in weeks if it were subjected to the same repression Islamists had endured¹) looms large in this debate. Where Islamist movements have not had the opportunity to participate in elections for political office, analysts willing to give these movements the benefit of the democratic doubt argue that their peaceful participation in the student body and syndicate elections that they have been allowed to contest proves their intention to respect the results of national-level elections.² They also point to these groups' repeated public commitment to play by the rules of the electoral game.³ The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and members of the Islah Party in Yemen have successfully competed in not one but a series of parliamentary elections and evinced a tendency to wage their battles through parliament and the courts rather than by force suggests to many that the question of whether Islamists can ever be democrats has already been settled in the affirmative.