Islamists not behind Arab uprisings, says Tariq Ramadan

04 April 2011

BEIRUT: Prominent Swiss Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan said over the weekend Islamist Muslims did not stand behind popular uprisings in the Arab world but reminded that the majority of protesters are Muslim after all.

“The big majority [of protesters] in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, don’t forget, are still Muslim,” said the professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University during a lecture titled “Which role for Islam in the Era of Arab revolutions,” as part of a larger symposium taking place at the American University of Beirut.

The grandson of the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Bana argued that even if Islamists did not start the protests, they were yet part of the popular movements in the Arab world and did not try to usurp or organize those uprisings.

He stressed the recent protests were directed at corrupt regimes and called for equality and freedom, adding that these demands did not go against the principles of Islam.

He warned against the idea of political Islam being a “monolithic reality,” saying that even the Muslim Brotherhood included different trends.

But to Ramadan, the West’s understanding of the region is quite limited. He said the West thinks that only two trends existed in the region: radical Islam and dictatorships.

He added that the region’s dictators marketed the idea that the only alternative to them was Islamist movements

“This led Western leaders to support dictatorships in fear and rejection of Islamists,” said Ramadan.

He added Ben Ali failed to convince that the protests in Tunisia were fueled by Islamists; the West went from fearing a potential Islamic state to being optimistic about the popular movement.

“The Western world thought: they’re like us, they have Western values in Tunisia,” said Ramadan, arguing that the premise of ideas and values being “Western or Islamic” was “unfounded.”

Ramadan also raised doubts about the kind of democracy the Western world would like to see in the Arab world, giving the result of the 2005 parliamentary polls when Hamas won the majority of votes as the example of a purely democratic process that did not yield results to the liking of the West.

He wondered if the West was now ready to “accept complete democracy” in the aftermath of what he called “unachieved revolutions” in the region.