HUSSEIN IBISH: Tunisia's litmus test for Arab politics

• Published date: 28 July 2021
• Author: Hussein Ibish
• Publication title: Business Day: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

This is a battle that has played out repeatedly across the Arab world. When the old authoritarian order is toppled by a prodemocracy mass movement, it is usually the Islamist groups — better organised and less tainted by the former regime than most secular rivals — that rise to power. But they quickly alienate the population by ideological overreach and administrative incompetence, which creates an opening for the return of the secular authoritarians.

The quintessential example of this is Egypt, where popular protest in 2011 brought down the dictator Hosni Mubarak (just days after Tunisians had overthrown their own tyrant), leading to elections won by the Muslim Brotherhood. But the undemocratic policies of President Mohammed Morsi led to even larger protests two years later, which brought General AbdelFattah ElSisi to power.

Mainstream Arab attitudes towards Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood are bookended by two rival small and wealthy Gulf states: Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE champions a strict separation between religion and politics, and holds that relatively moderate groups like the Brotherhood are the thin end of the wedge; give them space in the public square and it will soon be overrun by more radical and violent Islamist groups. (This argument draws power from the fact that extremists such as AlQaeda and the Islamic State do indeed derive much of their worldview from Brotherhood sources.) Better to eliminate the somewhat milder forms of political Islam before the more dangerous strains take hold.

Qatar, backed by its more powerful partner Turkey, argues to the contrary: the Islamism of the Brotherhood is the only plausible corrective to more violent extremism — and is, moreover, broadly representative of popular sociopolitical sensibilities in Muslim communities.

The UAE, with its deep pockets and often backed by Saudi Arabia, has tended to back secular authoritarians such as Egypt's Sisi against Islamists. The Qataris, hardly lacking in resources, have been generous towards the Brotherhood and its offshoots and use their considerable media clout to implausibly conflate Islamists and Arab democracy.

But...