On-Line Islamic Activists Are A Whole New Political Animal
On-line Islamic youth activists have very different approaches to politics than the traditional Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
The “Shabab al-Facebook” network—and network seems the only way to describe this intercommunicating and interactive web of individuals, cells and organizations–includes many who see Islam as a source of inspiration, and many members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But these are not your father’s Muslim Brothers:
“Very soon, and it’s happening already, there will be no such thing as the Muslim Brotherhood anymore. The organization will be there, but it will have been transcended,” said Ibrahim el Houdaiby, 27, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were supreme leaders of the Brotherhood.
This quotation is drawn from an illuminating article by Hannah Allam entitled “Tolerant, tech-savvy young Islamists may reshape Egyptian politics.” Allam points out that the educated, interconnected children of Muslim Brotherhood leaders are turning away from the traditional styles of leadership, organization and action toward forms of political action that allow tolerance toward and cooperation with other groups in pursuit of shared goals.
As Allam puts it:
The youths who fought alongside secular, Christian and other non-Islamist peers not only helped to unseat one of the world’s longest-serving autocrats, they’re also rewriting the rhetoric of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and other established Islamist blocs. The voice they found during the anti-Mubarak protests could just as easily be raised against the traditional Islamist leadership if the old guard doesn’t conform to their demands for a more democratic Egypt, several activists said.
The strength their success has given their critical voices is new, as Allam indicates, but the critical youth movement itself has been growing in strength and numbers for many years.
I was first exposed to it in 2000 through the work of Mohamed Mosaad Abdel Aziz, who wrote about the struggles over blogging within the Muslim Brotherhood in early drafts of a thesis ultimately approved in 2004 as “Islam and Postmodernity: The New Islamic Discourse in Egypt” (supervised by AbdAllah Talib Donald Cole).
Mohammed was particularly interested in how the blogs shifted from what was supposed to be a top-down, centrally driven publicity vehicle to a distributed network of commentary and communication over which the central leadership had little control.
One of the most important changes is that rather than a leadership style marked by secretive debates culminating in a unified front, the blogs tended to put the debates “out there” in a transparent manner that made many uncomfortable and others excited.
Marc Lynch also wrote about the new “young brothers in cyberspace” in 2007 in the Middle East Report, pointing out the scathing response by the Muslim Brotherhood’s more than 150 bloggers (up from a handful just the year before) to the organization’s newly announced political platform (“Is this the platform of a political party or a religious organization?” asked one).
Lynch wrote, presciently:
In some ways, the rise of the young bloggers is another round of a recurrent pattern of generational challenges to the Brotherhood’s hierarchy. But it also responds to wider trends in the environment in which the Brotherhood operates. The transformative impact of new media technologies, the enthusiasm unleashed by a year of political protests in 2004–2005 and the growing repressiveness of a sclerotic regime on the brink of a leadership transition have affected the youth of the Muslim Brotherhood just as they have the rest of Egyptian political society.
The politically pragmatic but idealistic stance of these new brothers seems like a contradiction to standard explanations of the rise of political Islam in the Middle East, which, in good Enlightenment fashion, tends to cast Islamism as a move backward rather than forward.
The revival of Islam as a social and political force in the world is usually explained by Western scholars as a simple reaction to the economic and political dislocation created by autocratic regimes like that of Hosni Mubarak, and the rest, and reactions to the West provoked by its support for those regimes, and its military activities in that part of the world.
In this argument, the poor, the unemployed, and the politically excluded turn away from the desire for prosperity, the promise of democracy, and the unreachable world of modern goods to something else, something that makes them feel better about themselves and that exposes material satisfaction as illusory. There is a great deal of truth to this; Unni Wikan has done a fine job demonstrating how such an approach might explain some members of al-Qaida.
But how can we then explain the increasing attraction of an active Islamic renewal to cosmopolitan Egyptians who are well-off, and well-educated with good job prospects, who have opportunities to enter the corridors of power through kinship relations, social networks, and cultural capital, and whose dress and lifestyles are marked by consumption of imported goods?
The attraction of this kind of Islamic renewal to this affluent population can better be explained by an emerging literature that describes resurgent Islam as a kind of action that many people see as a relevant and powerful tool for bettering their situation rather than turning from it (Wiktorowicz 2003; Sparre and Petersen 2007). In this understanding, mass literacy spread by national educational reforms took Islam out of the hands of the small class of scholars, preachers, and jurors (Eickelman and Anderson 1997; Eickelman 2002) and made it possible for individual Muslims to “put Islam to work” (Starrett 1998), especially in new (often commodified) public spaces not yet dominated by the older religious authorities, such as television (Abu-Lughod 2005), cassette recordings (Hirschkind 2001, 2006a, 2006b), and the internet (Anderson 2003a, 2003b).
Connected in Cairo p. 125
But Lynch warns us that the tech-savvy, urban pragmatic Islamists of Cairo and Alexandria who make up only an estimated 15 percent of the organization, are not the only future of the Muslim Brothers:
Outside of Cairo and Alexandria, however, the vast majority of Brotherhood youth seem to be traveling in a different direction, toward a more conservative, religious orientation unconcerned with politics. When the Brothers sent the party platform out to the cadres in the provinces, “salafi” youth reportedly had few opinions to offer—and when they did, they chided the leadership for its more progressive positions, calling for a more “Islamic” document. The showdown between these two trends among Muslim Brotherhood youth will have long-lasting repercussions for the future of the organization and for Islamist politics around the world.
Whether the resounding political successes of the shabab in ousting the regime and paving the way for the Muslim Brotherhood to emerge as a political party will be a game-changer, or will lead to a schism in its ranks as the daily newspaper al-Masri al-Yawm has long predicted, is yet to be seen.
Further Information:
Allam, Hannah. 2011. “Tolerant, tech-savvy young Islamists may reshape Egyptian politics” McCatchy Newspapers http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/02/18/109037/tolerant-tech-savvy-young-islamists.html#ixzz1Eal76anV
Eickelman, Dale. 2002. Inside the Islamic Reformation. In Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, 2nd ed., ed. Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early. Pp. 246–256. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Eickelman, Dale, and Jon W. Anderson. 1997. Publishing in Muslim Countries: Less Censorship, New Audiences and the Rise of the Islamic Book. Logos 8(4): 192–198.
Sparre, Sara Lei, and Marie Juul Petersen. 2007. Youth and Social Change in Jordan and Egypt. ISIM Review 20: 14–15.
Starrett, Gregory. 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Unni Wikan. “”My Son—A Terrorist?” (He was such a gentle boy).” Anthropological Quarterly 75.1 (2002): 117-128.
Wiktorowicz, Quintan. 2003. Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
CONNECTED in CAIRO 