Dans l´édition d´aujourd’hui du prestigieux magazine Anglais "The Economist", il y a un dossier tres interessant sur l´Islam et l´occident.
Je vous ai choisis l´article suivant sur le "case study" du Maroc et d´Egypte. (Désolé pas le temps pour traduire en francais!).
Bonne Lecture! ________________________________
SURVEY: ISLAM AND THE WEST
Two countries: Who is using whom in Egypt and Morocco?
Sep 11th 2003 From The Economist print edition
THEY are not “failed states”. Both are “pro-American”. But they are a mess. At opposite corners of North Africa, Egypt and Morocco are swamped by social problems. Both have parliaments and elections, but neither is remotely democratic. In Morocco ultimate power rests with a king, Muhammad VI, with the power to appoint the prime minister and cabinet. Egypt is run by a president, Hosni Mubarak, who has sat on his perch since 1981 with little check on his authority. Both have secular opposition parties, but in both places the only serious challenge to the regime comes from the Islamists. What do the Islamists want?
Abdul Moneim Abul Fotouh is a doctor, the head of the Egyptian Medical Association and a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation to which Sayyid Qutb belonged, and which is now tolerated, within limits, by Mr Mubarak's government. It has not dabbled in violence since the 1960s, but the Brotherhood is banned as a political party—though 17 of its members sit as “independents” in the toothless People's Assembly.
Dr Abul Fotouh will never be the toast of Washington's neo-conservatives. He argues that the West has turned against Islam mainly because “the Zionist colonial-settler project” (Israel) needs western protection and so has poisoned western attitudes to Islam. On the other hand, he does not subscribe to Qutb's notion that the West is in a state of jahiliyya. “In general, I don't find the western way of life at odds with Islam,” says the doctor. “At the end of the day, we have a set of common humanist values: justice, freedom, human rights and democracy.”
Saeddine al-Othmani is vice-president of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), which everybody will tell you is the only legal Islamist party in Morocco. Everybody, that is, except the party's members. On meeting The Economist, Mr al-Othmani and his colleagues disavow the Islamist label. Yes, the party puts somewhat more emphasis than others do on Morocco's Islamic identity. But it is dedicated to democracy, not Islam. “For us”, they say, “the problem is that 50 years after independence Morocco is way behind on justice and economic development. So our two priorities are to fight corruption and put ethics back into public life, and then to diminish flagrant social inequality by investing in human capital.”
From Cairo, Dr Abul Fotouh sends the same message; the people demonised in the West as wild-eyed Islamists are just democrats in search of justice. He swats aside questions about the role the Brotherhood would want for sharia in a perfect Egypt. Of course sharia should be honoured. However, Egypt's crisis is not the absence of sharia but the lack of freedom. The Brothers have faced torture and prison; he himself was jailed for five years. “The West has to understand that these regimes are crooks and thieves who just want to sit on their thrones. They worsen the image of Islam in the West and create Islamophobia.”
Along with the PJD, Morocco also has a bigger Islamist movement, Adl wal Ihsane (Justice and Charity). This one is banned from operating as a political party and its charismatic leader, Sheikh Yassine, is under house arrest. Its explicit aim is to turn Morocco into an Islamic state. But this, says its spokesman, Fathallah Arsalan, is for the long term. In the meantime, it concentrates on education and welfare. “The present social crisis is not the time for political competition,” says Mr Arsalan. “What we need now is a transitory period when Islamists, leftists and rightists should all be involved in making conditions better.”
Lumping them all together
Such encounters show that political Islam is no monolith. The mild spokesmen of the PJD,Adl wal Ihsane and the present-day Muslim Brotherhood seem a world away from the violent men of al-Qaeda. So why do people bundle such movements together under the label of “political Islam”? Because they are linked, even if in no other way, in the minds of the regimes.
Take Morocco. Last May, suicide bombers in Casablanca killed 45 people. The perpetrators were said to belong to a group called the Jihad Salafists. No evidence links the attacks to the PJD, which was quick to condemn them. And yet the attacks prompted a clampdown on the PJD. Some palace officials said the bombings showed that the king's cautious political reforms were moving too fast. At one point, the government was said to be thinking of banning the PJD from this month's local elections.
This reaction is no surprise. In Morocco, Egypt and many other Muslim countries the regimes tend to arrange Islamists along a spectrum in which they are all in the end connected. At one end are imams whose only sin is to stir too much politics into their Friday sermons (which the regimes carefully monitor). At the other end are proper terrorists such as the Jihad Salafists in Morocco or the Gamaa Islamiya (currently observing a ceasefire) in Egypt. In the middle are movements such as the PJD, the Adl wal Ihsane and the Muslim Brothers, which claim to be non-violent but which the regimes accuse of “creating an atmosphere” of militancy in which the men of violence flourish.
The oddity of all this is that the regimes do not just fear the Islamists; they also manipulate them. Morocco's government once saw Adl wal Ihsane as a useful conservative bulwark against the left. Then it encouraged the PJD to become a moderate counter to Adl wal Ihsane. Then—when the PJD started to do well in elections—the palace began to worry that the PJD was growing too big for its boots. In Egypt, likewise, the regime has often seen the Muslim Brotherhood as a tool. Dr Abul Fotouh, now in his 50s, belongs to a generation of Brothers that was encouraged by then-President Sadat to act as a counterweight to the radical left on university campuses.
It seems grossly unfair to associate parties such as the PJD, which will not even call themselves Islamists, with the wilder jihadis. But such parties are not above a bit of dissembling of their own. The PJD's leaders may disavow the “Islamist” label, yet they harp on about Morocco's Islamic “tradition”. Its spokesmen are evasive when asked how extensive sharia would have to be in their ideal Morocco. And the party is built on top of an underlying network of associations, called Unity and Reform, which is much more outspoken about its goal of Islamising society.
Given this, it is not only the government that worries about the growing influence of the Islamists. Driss Ksikes, a playwright and editor-in-chief of Morocco's TelQuel, a current-affairs magazine, says he deplores the way the state used the Casablanca bombings to demonise all Islamists and slither back into authoritarianism. But he has his own reservations about the Islamists. In the end, he says, the moderate PJD and the more radical Adl wal Ihsane both want to create an Islamist state based on sharia. They have just chosen different methods. While Adl wal Ihsane prepares the people patiently for the coming of the caliphate, the PJD works the political system and promotes a softer image. But both are heading for the same destination.
In the absence of a credible secular opposition, all this has a paradoxical result. Mr Ksikes notes that secular Moroccans are forced to hope that the king, of all people, will become the champion of modernity. The king may not actually believe in liberal democracy—what king would?—but has to pretend to believe in it a bit if he is to keep Morocco's relations with its western allies sweet.
In Egypt, too, it suits Hosni Mubarak to have an Islamist opposition at hand. This helps him to persuade the United States that if he falls, Egypt will collapse into fundamentalism. The same argument is made right across the Muslim world, from the kingdoms of Arabia to the dictatorships of Bashar Assad of Syria and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
Kings and dictators point to the Islamists and say that they would be worse than their own regimes. Meanwhile the non-violent Islamists say that they will be replaced by violent ones if the state persists in repressing them. “If we have no democratic process, we will see the resurgence of the extremist groups,” says Mustapha Khalfi, political editor of Morocco's Attajdid newspaper.
In Egypt, argues Bahgat Korany of the American University of Cairo, the staid Brotherhood has become less alluring than the jihadis since September 11th. The younger generation, he says, is less likely to focus on domestic issues alone: they identify beyond Egypt with the position of Muslims at large.
Are Egypt and Morocco typical? They could hardly be more different even from each other. One was the birthplace of Arab nationalism; the other is a monarchy. One is at the centre of the passions that sweep the Arab world; the other is a conservative backwater. But the politics of Islam in these very different countries repeats itself throughout the Muslim world. By throttling the secular opposition, authoritarian regimes have left the Islamists as the only groups with a following. It seems obvious that unless the moderate Islamists are given a fair hearing, disaffected citizens will turn to the violent organisations on their fringes which, since Iraq and Afghanistan, have a potent message of global Muslim beleaguerment to recruit more followers. So why does nothing change?
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