This is why the Islamists are winning

[RedEarth]

Many people in the Middle East, Asia and the West work overtime these days trying to understand the expanding wave of Islamist political groups that are winning elections and sharing power. Mainstream Islamist parties winning democratic elections are often perceived in many Western lands and Israel as a dire threat. Not all Arabs and Asians are happy with the victorious Islamists, either. It is important to interpret correctly why the Islamists are winning, and what they really represent.

I have had many opportunities in the past few years to participate in conferences, seminars, lectures and friendly dinner conversations with Arab, Asian, European and North America colleagues. With only a few exceptions, what I have heard largely reflects the distorted analysis pervading much of the Western media. Analysts from outside the Middle East quickly become confused by the synthesis of phenomena that manifest themselves simultaneously in Islamist politics, in a way that they do not in Western culture. These include religion, national identity, good governance, and resistance to foreign occupation or subjugation

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Now we are witnessing the third wave of Islamism in our time, with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Justice and Development in Turkey, as well as others, winning power through democratic elections. They learned the hard lessons of the first Islamist waves, notably that neither brute terror nor clandestine social activism would help them achieve their goals.

The significant new element in this wave of "electoral Islamists" is that they have combined into a single force those separate elements that had fragmented their citizen activists and the mass movements over which they presided there. Islamists should be called religio-nationalists, or theo-nationalists, because they now tend to combine the twin forces of religion and nationalism. "My God and my people" may be the two most powerful mass mobilization forces ever invented by human civilization. Islamists are using them politically in a most efficient way, having crafted a message of hope, defiance and self-assertive confidence that responds firmly to the multiple complaints of their fellow citizens.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=22947