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December 16, 2008

Resolving the 'Islamist Dilemma'
Posted by Shadi Hamid

I've written a new report for The Century Foundation on "Resolving America's Islamist Dilemma: Lessons from South and Southeast Asia." Check it out here. I make several main points, a few of which I'll highlight here:

1) In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, democracy, while flawed, is more institutionalized, and Islamist parties have already been accepted as legitimate players on the political scene. The Islamist dilemma has, in a sense, been resolved. These also happen to be three countries where Islamists have held positions of executive power at the local and regional level. (The world has not ended, as a result).

2) The trajectory of Islamist parties in South and Southeast Asia has been shaped by four main factors: a low ceiling of Islamist support, strong establishment parties, intra-Islamist competition, and normalization of islamist political participation. In understanding how and why mainstream Islamists behave the way they do, these four factors have much more explanatory power than looking at, say, what these groups supposedly "believe" from a normative standpoint.

3) The academic consensus is that inclusion of Islamist parties leads to moderation and exclusion/repression leads to radicalization. The experience of South and Southeast Asia, however, seems to belie such a characterization. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan, while retaining some authoritarian features, are considerably more democratic than their Arab counterparts. Yet, in those three countries, Islamist parties tend to be more conservative (or less moderate) than most mainstream Arab Islamist groups, including Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), and Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD). This is reflected in the disproportionate attention paid to divisive cultural-moral issues on the part of Malaysia’s PAS, Pakistan’s MMA (and to a lesser extent Indonesia’s main Islamist parties), and, more tellingly, on their efforts to apply restrictive shariah laws forcing women to cover up and allowing for controversial hudud legislation.

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I would share The editor suggests a solution to the dilemma with which all the contributors would largely concur: integrating the Islamists "in a truly pluralistic context which defines the rules and limits of political competition.

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