Hamid on the MB's "Arab Calvinism"
Shadi Hamid of Brookings-Doha does some great research, but I tend to disagree with what he has written over the past year about the Muslim Brothers — I think they are much more conservative and less democratic than he gives them credit for, and strongly oppose any special relationship or particular "engagement" between the US and the MB, which he seemed to advocate in this piece last May. And I don't think they're interested in the Turkish model in any meaningful manner. But Shadi has a very nice turn of phrase in his latest Foreign Affairs piece:
In years past, the Brotherhood distanced itself from the Turkish Islamists under Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan, whom they saw as unfaithful to the Islamist program, morphing into little more than European-style conservative democrats. But having emerged from Mubarak's repression with a real chance of ruling, the Brotherhood is increasingly looking toward the Turkish model. What the Brotherhood has absorbed from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party is that strong economic growth makes everything else easier. If you raise people's living standards, they are more likely to listen to you on noneconomic matters. Perhaps more important, the Brotherhood believes Egyptians will associate any such economic success with the "Islamic project" -- a sort of Arab Calvinist dream.
He goes on about the potential for the MB to use parliament as a counter-weight to SCAF and, eventually, the presidency as well as their institutional culture. But I find what's interesting about the economic ideas of the Brothers is actually taking place away from parliament (although they did try to introduce a business court reform bill in 2006 I believe) and in their discreet reaching out to the business community since Mubarak's overthrow. As a group of mostly economic liberals that has many entrepreneurs in its higher echelons, the MB has been experimenting with business incubators and sending reassuring messages to the business community. But it also has some odd economic ideas with roots in an Egyptian tradition of populism that cuts across the political spectrum and makes little sense today, such as, in the FJP's program, "Achieving self-sufficiency in strategic commodities, particularly of wheat and cotton."
But in many other respects they favor free entreprise, economic rule of law, help to boost SMEs and other very reasonable ideas, interwoven with some religious concepts such as makign zakat more effective, reforming the awqaf charitable foundation system and more. Do check out their program, which we've made available in English and Arabic in our documents section.
Issandr El Amrani
Faithful reader SP send this article on "Islamic Calvinism" in Turkey, showing the term has a long pedigree. Thanks!
Islamic Calvinists [PDF, 1MB]
Reader Comments (5)
seeing the MB as people as real as you or i, with deeply held beliefs as real as yours or mind, begins the process on un-demonizing them, and allows the beginning of communication .. because we have to do that on this world, communicate. can't stomp, block, manipulate, legislate, blockade everybody, that's a waste of life.
enjoy,
gregorylent
Check out where your link to Sandmonkey on the Blogroll takes you.
Is that deliberate?
Not deliberate! Now corrected.
You're right, and the professional vs entrepreneurial social base of the Bros vs turkish Islamists makes a lot of difference. Bjorn Utvik has written about the MB's economic populism as a kind of utopian ideal of social and economic harmony that replaced Nasser's but was still statist and populist in the same way and I tend to agree, though the rise of the Islamic business and banking sector's importance for MB funding was not something he accounted for I think. The Turkish Islamists had strong free market networks though and the Bros are more about providing state-like services and charity rather than financial cooperatives. Of course the Turkish Islamists also talked a more populist talk about homegrown education and popular values before coming to power and made deals with the EU and started to send their kids to the West for education when they moved up in the world so who knows what power will do to the Bros.
And the reverse is true as well: economic catastrophe makes everything harder. And that's probably the more likely scenerio; the central bank is going to run out of foreign currency to defend the pound pretty soon, right? That's when the ~20% devaluation that the markets have already priced in hits the real economy in the form of inflation, smacking the poor hardest. That's a difference between Egypt and Turkey, no? — inflation was terrible when Erdogan took power and he "owned" the recovery, while Egypt's incoming parliament is going to "own" the shock that's going to happen.
In the medium term the economy will adjust and get growing again; whether it does so in time for all classes to see the benefits may well determine who wins the next election.
(I guess there's still the chance that Egypt manages to kick the can down the road far enough with stopgap loans that currency flows stabilize somehow; I have no idea whether this is at all probable.)