Between Religion and Politics
تاريخ النشر: 31/12/2010
الناشر: مؤسسة كارنيغي للشرق الأوسط
نبذة نيل وفرات:Over the past decade, Islamists have been thrust by events and by their own efforts into the center of the political stage in a number of Arab countries.
The parties and movements that Nathan J. Brown and Amr Hamzawy consider in this volume are not ones that form small ...cells for violent actions. Rather, they are large, diverse organizations that seek (among other things) to participate in the established political process.
The various parties and movements considered here- in Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, and Kuwait- are hardly new. Must go back decades. But in recent years, all have taken a much stronger interest in electoral competition and parliamentary politics. It is the initial success of these efforts that has earned them so much attention in the Arab World and abroad.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won one-fifth of seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections. In Morocco, the party for justice and Development earned more votes than any other party in the 2007 parliamentary elections (though because of the electoral system it finished second).
The Palestinian Hamas movement won the first parliamentary elections it entered in 2006. In Yemen, Jordan, and Kuwait, Islamist parties and movements have been slower but steadier players, in each country they have also experimented with sitting in the government and trying to form opposition coalitions.
In Between Religion and Politics, Brown and Hamzawy delve into the parliamentary experience of Islamists: What made them decide to step up their involvement in parliamentary politics? What did they do with the seats they won? How has the Islamists’ embrace of parliamentary elections affected their relations with the regime? Have they managed to build coalitions with other political actors, especially liberal and leftist parties? And how are they likely to react to the ebbing tide of dogmatization in the region?.
The essays in this book explore a kind of “in between polities regimes playing with democratic procedures without being fully committed to them and Islamists investing in political participation without sacrificing their broad focus on religions and social activism. And although the long- term impacts of this political “gray zone” remain to be seen, it has already injected elements of dynamism and competition into what was otherwise a persistently stagnant polity in the Arab World. إقرأ المزيد