Against the backdrop of a probable military intervention of some sort in Syria by the United States and some other Western powers, Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are still searching for an answer to an all-important question.
The failure of the first elected Islamist — or any other — President. Mohamed Morsi, in Egypt’s history leaves a great void. The Turkish example, the repeated triumph of the Islamist Justice and Development Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which buried the traditional military state of Kemal Ataturk, started with much promise to prove another disappointment. The Taksim Square symbolised a revolt of many Turks to protest against the type of country they did not want.
There is of course the Algerian example of Islamists’ probable victory being denied them by the military leading to more than a decade of guerrilla war. But the common thread of the temporary success of Islamists in Egypt and the more enduring rule of their co-religionists in Turkey points to the dilemma of reconciling Islam to the 21st century. In essence, the problem is: how to be a good Muslim in the modern age?
Efforts have been made in banking, for instance, in reconcile Quranic injunctions with handling money, and in many Muslim countries the Sharia has been made a reference point in jurisprudence, with patchy results thus far. The world was hoping that Mr Erdogan would show the way because Ataturk had been a great modernising influence in a deeply religious Islamic society.
Turkey’s initial modernising plans were partly influenced by its desire to join the European Union in the face of opposition from Germany and others in absorbing some 80 million Muslims in what is predominantly a Christian club. Mr Erdogan’s government did take a number of steps to bring his country closer to European norms. Negotiations are still on but are going nowhere.
As far as Egypt is concerned, Mr Morsi seemed an inept administrator in his one-year presidency. He was not his own master, with more influential figures in the Muslim Brotherhood calling the shots. The end result was that he was more interested in buttressing the hold of his organisation in the country’s power structure than in running an inclusive government.
One must also take into account the fact that Mr Morsi’s narrow victory was partly the result of the choice offered. His opponent was an old-time Mubarak loyalist, and many liberals and secularists voted for Mr Morsi to signify their disgust with the old order they had overthrown in a revolution.
Given the scale of the new revolt against Mr Morsi’s rule, the armed forces quickly snapped up the opportunity to overthrow him. It is ironical that some two years after the end of the Mubarak era, he has been transferred from jail to house arrest while Mr Morsi remains in prison.
As the Arab Spring spread from one country to another in areas long ruled by military men or men who donned uniforms, the world cheered. The winds of change were blowing in countries that had seemed immune from international trends. The common factor among them was that they were Muslim-majority countries and those seeking to overthrow them, apart from liberals and secularists, were religious extremists. The last category, indeed, helped the autocratic leaders to receive Western help because they said they were primarily fighting terrorists.
There were, of course, other factors involved: oil and Western, particularly US, interests aligned with protecting Israel. In the historic deal during the Jimmy Carter presidency, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel and has been receiving an annual military subvention of $1.3 billion, notching up a bumper $60 billion thus far, comprising the latest American military equipment.
The United States was also factoring in Egypt’s traditional importance in the Arab world as the most populous country and the trend setter. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, was an inspiration to other Arabs who formed their own Islamist parties. It would have been foolhardy to expect that as the Arab Spring hopped from one country to another, it would lead to an instant happy ending In societies fossilised by decades and generations of arbitrary rule. Change had to come with setbacks.
Beyond the immediate problems and the change resisted by a variety of vested interests remains the central dilemma. How do Muslim societies cope with the modern age? Christians had their reformation to adapt their faith and beliefs to a new era. Muslims have not experienced such a transformation, partly because autocratic rulers had appropriated Islam to buttress their power. Take Zia-ul-Haq’s case in running Pakistan.
What made modernising attempts even more difficult were the variety of extremist factions using Islam to achieve their violent aims. The tragedy is greater because the one country that could give the answer, Turkey, has shown that in worsting the military power structure, its new rulers have chosen to emphasise their religiosity, rather than build on modern Turkey’s secular credentials.
It is not merely a question of Mr Erdogan’s wife wearing a head scarf in public, but one of pandering to the ruling party’s conservative and religious-minded constituency in the Anatolian heartland, people who have made good in business. In fact, Mr Erdogan’s objective seems to be to borrow Ataturk’s resonance to take his country to a totally different direction. Imagine building a replica of Ottoman barracks in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, the idea that lit the unprecedented anti-government protests.
As Muslim societies in the midst of change take their twists and turns to achieve a new dawn, there is no leader of great stature on the horizon to guide his co-religionists to make peace with the modern age. The head of the traditional seat of Sunni learning, Cairo’s Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed Mohammad Al Tayeb, took a seat with the coup leaders after Mr Morsi’s downfall. He has proved unequal even to the task of giving Egypt spiritual guidance in the continuing turmoil.
Nor can an answer be found in the kind of theocracy Iran has set up — a hybrid system in which the state is answerable to an unelected spiritual head.