As Islamists Gain Influence, Washington Reassesses Who Its Friends Are
New York Times:
WASHINGTON — In his first major speech last month, Mohamed Morsi, the new Egyptian president, pledged to seek the release of a notorious Egyptian terrorist from a North Carolina prison. Not long before that, a member of a designated terrorist organization, Gamaa al-Islamiyya — who also happens to be a recently elected member of the Egyptian Parliament — was welcomed to Washington as part of an official delegation sponsored by the State Department.
Obama administration officials made no public comment on Mr. Morsi’s promise and struggled to explain why the Egyptian Parliament member, Hani Nour Eldin, got a visa, citing privacy rules and declining to say whether he had been granted a waiver from the ban on such visitors or whether his affiliation simply escaped notice.
Pressed by reporters after the visa quickly became a Congressional controversy, a State Department spokeswoman, Victoria J. Nuland, said Mr. Eldin had been judged to pose no threat to the United States.
“It’s a new day in Egypt,” she added. “It’s a new day in a lot of countries across the Middle East and North Africa.”
For the Obama administration, as it navigates the tumultuous effects of the Arab Spring, it’s a complicated day, as well. Long-held assumptions about who is a friend of the United States and who is not have been upset, leaving many Americans confused.
“Right now, the United States is kind of in a trance when it looks at the Middle East,” said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University. “Everything has changed.”
The overthrow of dictators across the Arab world and the rise of Islamists to new influence or power is forcing Washington to reassess decades-old judgments. The most important is in Egypt, where Mr. Morsi, representing the region’s most powerful Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, won a close election. His move on Sunday to revive the dissolved Parliament had Western experts scrambling to understand his strategy.
In Tunisia, a once-banned Islamist party, Ennahda, won a plurality of seats in elections last year, and Islamists have won new support in Yemen as well. In Saturday’s voting, Libya appeared to buck the trend, when a coalition led by a moderate political scientist seemed to edge out two Islamist parties.
But in a sign of the political potency of religion, the leader of the winning coalition, Mahmoud Jibril, went out of his way to reject the “secular” label for his National Forces Alliance and reached out to the Islamists. “There are no extremists,” he said.
In the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans largely viewed the Middle East and Islam through the lens of the terrorism threat. The United States exercised stark judgments, encapsulated by President George W. Bush’s warning to the world nine days after the attacks: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Foreign Muslim scholars were denied visas because of outspoken views at odds with American policy. American officials did not always carefully distinguish between Islamists, who advocate a leading role for Islam in government, and violent jihadists, who espouse the same goal but advocate terrorism to achieve it.
American hostility to Islamist movements, in fact, long predated Sept. 11, in part because of the United States’ support for secular autocrats in Arab countries. During the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was officially banned, so American diplomats in Cairo kept contacts quiet and informal.
“We have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood,” Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, declared in a 2005 speech in Cairo, “and we won’t.”
Experts on the Middle East suggest that the recent controversies over Mr. Morsi’s statement and Mr. Eldin’s visa are only the beginning of a long, contentious process of adjustment for the United States, with implications for American aid and Arab countries’ relations with Israel.
But they suggest that Americans should not assume that the rise of Islamists puts the United States in greater danger from terrorists. The opposite may well be the case, they say.
“I would say people should not be too alarmed by the anti-American rhetoric,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, based in Washington. The end last year of the Mubarak rule in Egypt, he said, “is an important step in combating terrorism in the region and undermining its appeal.”
“People can freely vent their frustrations and go to the polls to vote,” he added.
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David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.
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