European opinion interprets the popular uprisings in North Africa and Egypt through a gate dating back more than thirty years: the Islamic revolution of Iran. She expects to see Islamist movements, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and their local counterparts, to be either the lead or in ambush, ready to take power.
But discretion and pragmatism of the Muslim Brotherhood astonish and disturb where are the Islamists? But if you look at those who launched the movement, it is clear that this is a generation of post-Islamist. The great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s, for them it's ancient history, those of their parents.
This new generation is not interested in ideology: the slogans are pragmatic and practical ("releases", "erhal"), it does not appeal to Islam as their predecessors did in Algeria in the late 1980s. They express above all a rejection of corrupt dictatorships and a demand for democracy. This obviously does not mean that protesters are secular, but they just do not see in Islam a political ideology can create a better order: they are in a secular political space.
And same goes for other ideologies: they are nationalists (see waved) but does not advocate nationalism. More original is the muting of conspiracy theories: the United States and Israel (and France in Tunisia, which has yet backed Ben Ali to end) are not designated as the cause of unhappiness in the Arab world.
Even pan-Arabism has disappeared as a slogan, even though the effect of mimicry that lays the Egyptians and Yemenis in the street following the events in Tunis shows that there is a political reality in the Arab world. This generation is pluralistic, probably because it is too individualistic.
Sociological studies show that this generation is more educated than the previous, longer lives in nuclear families, have fewer children, but at the same time, she is unemployed or lives in the social downgrading. She is more informed, and often has access to modern communications which allow to connect a network from person to person without going through the mediation of political parties (banned anyway).
Young people know that Islamist regimes have become dictatorships: they are not fascinated by Iran nor Saudi Arabia. Those who display in Egypt are precisely those who were demonstrating against Ahmadinejad in Iran (for reasons of propaganda the Tehran regime pretends to support the movement in Egypt, but it is a reckoning with Mubarak).
They may be believers, but that separate their political demands: in this sense the movement is "secular" because it separates religion and politics. Religious practice was individualized. It manifests primarily to dignity, to "respect": this slogan is from Algeria in the late 1990s. The values which we claim are universal.
But democracy is being asked today is not an imported product: it's all the difference with the promotion of democracy made by the Bush administration in 2003, which was not admissible because it did 'had no political legitimacy and was associated with a military intervention. Paradoxically weakening of the United States in the Middle East, and the pragmatism of the Obama administration, is now offering a native application of democracy to speak legitimately.
Having said that a revolt is not a revolution. The movement has no leaders, no political party and no supervision, which is consistent with its nature but the problem of institutionalization of democracy. It is unlikely that the disappearance of a dictatorship automatically establishing a liberal democracy, as Washington had hoped for Iraq.
There are in every Arab country, as elsewhere, a political landscape even more complicated than it has been overshadowed by the dictatorship. But in fact, apart from the Islamists and, very often, unions (even weak), there is not much. We call those Islamists who see in Islam a political ideology to solve all the problems of society.
The most radical left the scene to the international jihad and are no longer there: they are in the desert with Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Pakistan or in the suburbs of London. They have no social or political basis. The global jihad is completely disconnected from social movements and national struggles.
Of course the propaganda of Al-Qaeda tries to present the movement as the vanguard of the entire Muslim community against Western oppression, but that does not work. Al-Qaida is recruiting young jihadists de-territorialization without social base, which have all cut their neighborhood and their families.
Al-Qaida remains locked in his logic of "propaganda by deed" and never bothered to build a political structure within Muslim societies. Like most action of Al-Qaida takes place mainly in the West or is defined as Western targets, its impact in real societies is zero. Another optical illusion is to link the massive re-Islamization What seemed to know what companies in the Arab world over the last thirty years with a political radicalization.
If Arab societies are more visibly Islamic it was thirty or forty years, why the absence of Islamic slogans in current events? This is the paradox of Islam: it was largely depoliticized Islam. The re-Islamization social and cultural (the veil, the number of mosques, the multiplication of preachers, religious television) took place outside of Islamic militants, it has also opened a "religious market" that nobody n has a monopoly and is also in line with the new quest of the religious youth, which is individualistic but also changing.
In short the Islamists have lost the monopoly on religious speech in public space, they had in the 1980s. On the one hand, dictatorships have often (but not in Tunisia) favored a conservative Islam, but little visible political obsessed with control of customs. The headscarf has become commonplace.
This conservatism of the state found itself in step with the movement called "Salafi" which focuses on the re-Islamization of individuals and not on social movements. In short, as paradoxical as it may seem, the Islamic revival has led to a trivialization and politicization of religious marker: when everything is religious, nothing is religious.
Which, in view of the West, was seen as a big green wave of Islamic revival that finally does a trivialization: everything becomes Islamic fast-food to women's fashion. But the forms of piety were also individualized: it builds faith, we seek the preacher who speaks of self-realization, as the Egyptian Amr Khaled, and no longer interested in the utopian state Islamic.
The "Salafis" are focused on the defense of religious symbols and values but have no political agenda: they are absent from the protest where you do not see women in burqas (although there are many women among demonstrators, even in Egypt). And other religious currents that belief back, such as Sufism, bloom again.
This diversification also released the religious framework of Islam, as seen in Algeria or Iran, with a wave of conversions to Christianity. Another mistake is to design dictatorships as defending secularism against religious fanaticism. Authoritarian regimes do not secularized societies, on the contrary, except in Tunisia, they are accommodated in a re-Islamization of fundamentalist neo, which speaks to implement sharia without asking the question of the nature state.
Everywhere the ulama and religious institutions have been domesticated by official state while falling back on a chilly theological conservatism. So the traditional clerics, trained at Al-Azhar, are no longer in the loop or on the political issue, nor even on the big issues of society. They have nothing to offer the new generations who are seeking new models to live their faith in a more open world.
But as a religious conservatives are no longer on the side of popular protest. This change also affects the political Islamist movements, which are embodied in the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood and their followers, as the party Nahda in Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood has changed. The first point is of course the experience of failure, both in the apparent success (the Islamic Revolution of Iran), in defeat (repression waged against them everywhere).
The new generation of militants has learned, as well as former Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia. They understand that taking the power after a revolution is led to civil war or the dictatorship in their struggle against the repression they are closer to other political forces. Good connoisseurs of their own society, they know as little weight to ideology.
They also learned from the Turkish model: Erdogan and the AKP have been able to reconcile democracy, electoral victory, economic development, national independence and promote Islamic values, if not, at least "authenticity". But especially the Muslim Brotherhood are not holders of another economic or social model.
They have become conservative about morals, and liberals on the economy. And this is probably the most notable developments: in the 1980s, Islamists (but especially the Shiites) claimed the interests of the oppressed classes and advocated a nationalization of the economy, and redistribution of wealth .
Today the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood endorsed the cons-agrarian reform conducted by Mubarak, which is to give landowners the right to increase the leases and return their farmers. So that the Islamists are no longer present in the social movements that agitate the Nile Delta, where there is now a return of the "left" is that of union activists.
But the gentrification of the Islamists is also a plus for democracy: lack of play on the map of the Islamic revolution, he pushes them to conciliation, compromise and alliance with other political forces. The question today is not whether dictatorships are the best bulwark against Islamism or not.
The Islamists have become agents of the democratic game. They will of course weigh in the direction of greater control of morals, but without relying on a system of repression as in Iran, or a religious police in Saudi Arabia as they will have to cope with demand freedom does not stop the right to elect a parliament.
Short or the Islamists will identify with the traditional and conservative Salafi stream, losing their claim to believe in Islam, modernity, or they will have to make an effort to rethink their conception of the relations between religion and politics. The Muslim Brotherhood will be even more a key to change the generation in revolt little effort to organize itself politically.
We remain in the revolt of protest, not in the announcement of a new type of regime. In addition, Arab societies are rather conservative, middle class that developed in the wake of economic liberalization want political stability: they are protesting primarily against the predatory nature of dictatorships, which borders on kleptomania in the regime Tunisia.
The comparison between Tunisia and Egypt is instructive. Tunisia Ben Ali clan had weakened all his potential allies by refusing to share not only power but also wealth: the class of business was literally cheated by standing in the family, and the army was left not only offside on the political level, but especially outside of the distribution of wealth: the Tunisian army was poor and it even has a corporatist interest to have a democratic system which will without doubt a higher budget.
Cons by the regime in Egypt had a broader social base, the military is associated not only power but also to manage the economy and profits. Demand Democratic Butera then throughout the Arab world on the social roots of patronage networks of each plan. There is an interesting anthropological dimension: the demand for democracy is it able to overcome the complex network of allegiances and loyalties to intermediate social bodies (whether military, tribes, customers policies, etc..).
What is the capacity of systems to play on traditional allegiances (the Bedouin in Jordan, the tribes in Yemen)? How these groups can or not to tap into this demand for democracy and become actors? How the religious reference is to diversify and adapt to new situations? The process will be long and chaotic, but one thing is certain: we are no longer in the Arab-Muslim exceptionalism.
Current events reflect a profound change in the Arab societies. These changes are long gone, but they were overshadowed by the deep-rooted stereotypes that the West hung on the Middle East. Twenty years ago, I published The Failure of Political Islam. It has been read or not does not matter, but what is happening today shows that local actors have taken their own lessons from their own history.
We have not finished with Islam, yes, and liberal democracy is not the "end of history", but we now think of Islam as part of its empowerment from a culture called "Arab-Muslim" that no more today than yesterday was closed on itself. Olivier Roy, professor and director of the Mediterranean European University Institute in Florence (Italy) 
But discretion and pragmatism of the Muslim Brotherhood astonish and disturb where are the Islamists? But if you look at those who launched the movement, it is clear that this is a generation of post-Islamist. The great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s, for them it's ancient history, those of their parents.
This new generation is not interested in ideology: the slogans are pragmatic and practical ("releases", "erhal"), it does not appeal to Islam as their predecessors did in Algeria in the late 1980s. They express above all a rejection of corrupt dictatorships and a demand for democracy. This obviously does not mean that protesters are secular, but they just do not see in Islam a political ideology can create a better order: they are in a secular political space.
And same goes for other ideologies: they are nationalists (see waved) but does not advocate nationalism. More original is the muting of conspiracy theories: the United States and Israel (and France in Tunisia, which has yet backed Ben Ali to end) are not designated as the cause of unhappiness in the Arab world.
Even pan-Arabism has disappeared as a slogan, even though the effect of mimicry that lays the Egyptians and Yemenis in the street following the events in Tunis shows that there is a political reality in the Arab world. This generation is pluralistic, probably because it is too individualistic.
Sociological studies show that this generation is more educated than the previous, longer lives in nuclear families, have fewer children, but at the same time, she is unemployed or lives in the social downgrading. She is more informed, and often has access to modern communications which allow to connect a network from person to person without going through the mediation of political parties (banned anyway).
Young people know that Islamist regimes have become dictatorships: they are not fascinated by Iran nor Saudi Arabia. Those who display in Egypt are precisely those who were demonstrating against Ahmadinejad in Iran (for reasons of propaganda the Tehran regime pretends to support the movement in Egypt, but it is a reckoning with Mubarak).
They may be believers, but that separate their political demands: in this sense the movement is "secular" because it separates religion and politics. Religious practice was individualized. It manifests primarily to dignity, to "respect": this slogan is from Algeria in the late 1990s. The values which we claim are universal.
But democracy is being asked today is not an imported product: it's all the difference with the promotion of democracy made by the Bush administration in 2003, which was not admissible because it did 'had no political legitimacy and was associated with a military intervention. Paradoxically weakening of the United States in the Middle East, and the pragmatism of the Obama administration, is now offering a native application of democracy to speak legitimately.
Having said that a revolt is not a revolution. The movement has no leaders, no political party and no supervision, which is consistent with its nature but the problem of institutionalization of democracy. It is unlikely that the disappearance of a dictatorship automatically establishing a liberal democracy, as Washington had hoped for Iraq.
There are in every Arab country, as elsewhere, a political landscape even more complicated than it has been overshadowed by the dictatorship. But in fact, apart from the Islamists and, very often, unions (even weak), there is not much. We call those Islamists who see in Islam a political ideology to solve all the problems of society.
The most radical left the scene to the international jihad and are no longer there: they are in the desert with Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Pakistan or in the suburbs of London. They have no social or political basis. The global jihad is completely disconnected from social movements and national struggles.
Of course the propaganda of Al-Qaeda tries to present the movement as the vanguard of the entire Muslim community against Western oppression, but that does not work. Al-Qaida is recruiting young jihadists de-territorialization without social base, which have all cut their neighborhood and their families.
Al-Qaida remains locked in his logic of "propaganda by deed" and never bothered to build a political structure within Muslim societies. Like most action of Al-Qaida takes place mainly in the West or is defined as Western targets, its impact in real societies is zero. Another optical illusion is to link the massive re-Islamization What seemed to know what companies in the Arab world over the last thirty years with a political radicalization.
If Arab societies are more visibly Islamic it was thirty or forty years, why the absence of Islamic slogans in current events? This is the paradox of Islam: it was largely depoliticized Islam. The re-Islamization social and cultural (the veil, the number of mosques, the multiplication of preachers, religious television) took place outside of Islamic militants, it has also opened a "religious market" that nobody n has a monopoly and is also in line with the new quest of the religious youth, which is individualistic but also changing.
In short the Islamists have lost the monopoly on religious speech in public space, they had in the 1980s. On the one hand, dictatorships have often (but not in Tunisia) favored a conservative Islam, but little visible political obsessed with control of customs. The headscarf has become commonplace.
This conservatism of the state found itself in step with the movement called "Salafi" which focuses on the re-Islamization of individuals and not on social movements. In short, as paradoxical as it may seem, the Islamic revival has led to a trivialization and politicization of religious marker: when everything is religious, nothing is religious.
Which, in view of the West, was seen as a big green wave of Islamic revival that finally does a trivialization: everything becomes Islamic fast-food to women's fashion. But the forms of piety were also individualized: it builds faith, we seek the preacher who speaks of self-realization, as the Egyptian Amr Khaled, and no longer interested in the utopian state Islamic.
The "Salafis" are focused on the defense of religious symbols and values but have no political agenda: they are absent from the protest where you do not see women in burqas (although there are many women among demonstrators, even in Egypt). And other religious currents that belief back, such as Sufism, bloom again.
This diversification also released the religious framework of Islam, as seen in Algeria or Iran, with a wave of conversions to Christianity. Another mistake is to design dictatorships as defending secularism against religious fanaticism. Authoritarian regimes do not secularized societies, on the contrary, except in Tunisia, they are accommodated in a re-Islamization of fundamentalist neo, which speaks to implement sharia without asking the question of the nature state.
Everywhere the ulama and religious institutions have been domesticated by official state while falling back on a chilly theological conservatism. So the traditional clerics, trained at Al-Azhar, are no longer in the loop or on the political issue, nor even on the big issues of society. They have nothing to offer the new generations who are seeking new models to live their faith in a more open world.
But as a religious conservatives are no longer on the side of popular protest. This change also affects the political Islamist movements, which are embodied in the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood and their followers, as the party Nahda in Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood has changed. The first point is of course the experience of failure, both in the apparent success (the Islamic Revolution of Iran), in defeat (repression waged against them everywhere).
The new generation of militants has learned, as well as former Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia. They understand that taking the power after a revolution is led to civil war or the dictatorship in their struggle against the repression they are closer to other political forces. Good connoisseurs of their own society, they know as little weight to ideology.
They also learned from the Turkish model: Erdogan and the AKP have been able to reconcile democracy, electoral victory, economic development, national independence and promote Islamic values, if not, at least "authenticity". But especially the Muslim Brotherhood are not holders of another economic or social model.
They have become conservative about morals, and liberals on the economy. And this is probably the most notable developments: in the 1980s, Islamists (but especially the Shiites) claimed the interests of the oppressed classes and advocated a nationalization of the economy, and redistribution of wealth .
Today the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood endorsed the cons-agrarian reform conducted by Mubarak, which is to give landowners the right to increase the leases and return their farmers. So that the Islamists are no longer present in the social movements that agitate the Nile Delta, where there is now a return of the "left" is that of union activists.
But the gentrification of the Islamists is also a plus for democracy: lack of play on the map of the Islamic revolution, he pushes them to conciliation, compromise and alliance with other political forces. The question today is not whether dictatorships are the best bulwark against Islamism or not.
The Islamists have become agents of the democratic game. They will of course weigh in the direction of greater control of morals, but without relying on a system of repression as in Iran, or a religious police in Saudi Arabia as they will have to cope with demand freedom does not stop the right to elect a parliament.
Short or the Islamists will identify with the traditional and conservative Salafi stream, losing their claim to believe in Islam, modernity, or they will have to make an effort to rethink their conception of the relations between religion and politics. The Muslim Brotherhood will be even more a key to change the generation in revolt little effort to organize itself politically.
We remain in the revolt of protest, not in the announcement of a new type of regime. In addition, Arab societies are rather conservative, middle class that developed in the wake of economic liberalization want political stability: they are protesting primarily against the predatory nature of dictatorships, which borders on kleptomania in the regime Tunisia.
The comparison between Tunisia and Egypt is instructive. Tunisia Ben Ali clan had weakened all his potential allies by refusing to share not only power but also wealth: the class of business was literally cheated by standing in the family, and the army was left not only offside on the political level, but especially outside of the distribution of wealth: the Tunisian army was poor and it even has a corporatist interest to have a democratic system which will without doubt a higher budget.
Cons by the regime in Egypt had a broader social base, the military is associated not only power but also to manage the economy and profits. Demand Democratic Butera then throughout the Arab world on the social roots of patronage networks of each plan. There is an interesting anthropological dimension: the demand for democracy is it able to overcome the complex network of allegiances and loyalties to intermediate social bodies (whether military, tribes, customers policies, etc..).
What is the capacity of systems to play on traditional allegiances (the Bedouin in Jordan, the tribes in Yemen)? How these groups can or not to tap into this demand for democracy and become actors? How the religious reference is to diversify and adapt to new situations? The process will be long and chaotic, but one thing is certain: we are no longer in the Arab-Muslim exceptionalism.
Current events reflect a profound change in the Arab societies. These changes are long gone, but they were overshadowed by the deep-rooted stereotypes that the West hung on the Middle East. Twenty years ago, I published The Failure of Political Islam. It has been read or not does not matter, but what is happening today shows that local actors have taken their own lessons from their own history.
We have not finished with Islam, yes, and liberal democracy is not the "end of history", but we now think of Islam as part of its empowerment from a culture called "Arab-Muslim" that no more today than yesterday was closed on itself. Olivier Roy, professor and director of the Mediterranean European University Institute in Florence (Italy)
- The Islamist-Free Revolution (17/01/2011)
- How are you embracing the technological revolution in your classroom? (12/02/2011)
- "Turkish Regime Sees Egypt Revolution As Opportunity for Repression, Islamism" and related posts (13/02/2011)
- Worldwide Islamist revolution explodes (31/01/2011)
- Muslim Brotherhood: Egypt revolution not Islamist (08/02/2011)
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