Islamists make impressive electoral gains in four countries

CAIRO, Egypt -- Islamist candidates have pulled off a string of election successes in recent weeks, running on appeals to the faithful as well as challenges to entrenched politicians viewed as more corrupt than caring by exasperated voters.

The successes -- in four countries across a wide swath of the Islamic world from Morocco to Pakistan -- represent a new pragmatism by political Islam that is increasingly turning to the ballot box to bring about change.

It's difficult to chart a single trend from countries with different histories and conditions, but authorities on the Muslim world say the victories are all the more significant because they come as the West increasingly tends to equate Islam with violence and repression.

The experts warn, however, that while moderate Islamic groups are gaining ground, radical forces also have new appeal to many Muslims who feel under siege, who distrust America's assurances that the war on terrorism is not a crusade against their faith.

Mainstream Islam

"What we are seeing is a diverse mainstream expression of Islam," said John Esposito, an expert on Islam at Georgetown University in Washington. "At the same time, we are still dealing with the extremist groups, and I think it's important to make the distinction between the two -- one is constructive and one needs to be crushed."

The first of the Islamists' success came in September elections in Morocco, thought to be the cleanest ever. The Islamists won 42 seats, tripling their representation to become the third biggest party in the 325-seat parliament.

In Pakistan, one of Washington's main allies in the war on terror, a coalition of religious groups won 59 out of 342 parliamentary seats in Oct. 10 polls.

In Bahrain, Islamists won 19 of the 40 seats in the first legislative elections since the ruler dissolved parliament nearly 30 years ago. In secular Turkey, a party with Islamic roots won 363 of parliament's 550 seats in elections Nov. 3, swept to power.

The philosophy of most Islamist parties is based on the conviction that Islam provides a complete sociopolitical system as suitable today as it was in Arabia in the Prophet Muhammad's time 1,400 years ago.

Most of the recently successful candidates and parties also appealed to a wider audience by smoothing the rough edges of their ideology.

Turkey's victorious Justice and Development Party took pains to distance itself from its more Islamist forerunners and even begged journalists not to call it Islamic.

Islamist candidates elsewhere were also careful, for example, to separate themselves from movements like Afghanistan's Taliban, which forced women to leave their jobs, denied girls an education and insisted all men wear long beards.

In Bahrain, Islamic-oriented parliamentary candidates focused their campaign on creating jobs, not on calls for an Islamic state.

"We might look like the Taliban, but we certainly do not share their ideals," said newly elected lawmaker Sheik Adel al-Moawdah, a Muslim cleric who has a lengthy beard and wears a turban.

In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party made clear that it cared less about religion than about with fixing the economy and steering the nation to European Union membership.

"It's obvious now that Islamic movements have over the past 20 or 30 years become better equipped to accumulate and use expertise," said Dia'a Rashwan, an expert on Muslim groups at Cairo's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Many secular Muslims remain suspicious that despite the Islamist parties' new image, they still want to establish strict Muslim law. But similar parties in other countries have found Islamic ideology can get lost in rough-and-tumble politics.

In Jordan, Islamists gained a share of power in elections in 1989, but they quit their posts less than a year later over the lack of popular support for some of their radical ideas, which included separating boys and girls in schools.

In Kuwait, Muslim fundamentalists hold 20 of parliament's 50 seats and have succeeded in denying women the right to vote or run for office. But their attempts to restrict public entertainment and tighten censorship of books and movies have been fought by the country's Westernized liberals.

"Islamists have in the past found out that it's easy to criticize from the outside, but very difficult to change things when you are formulating policies," said Egyptian analyst Waheed Abdel-Maguid.

Despite the recent successes of Islamic-oriented candidates, Islamist parties remain excluded from politics in some Muslim nations, notably in Egypt, the most populated Arab country.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest fundamentalist group, remains outlawed nearly 30 years after it renounced violence, and parliament is dominated by the ruling National Democratic Party.

Egypt has faced a series of violent Muslim revolts, and no one believes the cycle has reached its end.

"The role of mainstream political Islam in Egypt is something that the government and society will at some point have to come to grips and deal with," said Georgetown's Esposito. "The real question is how Egypt as a country develops in terms of the space it yields to any opposition, not just Islamists."