Olivier Roy and post-islamism

les matins - Olivier Roy by franceculture

The above video, from the morning talk show on France Culture (a radio channel where the intellectual level is so high it is tantamount to being completely alien to typical US talk radio), features the "Islamologue" Olivier Roy, one of the best of the French school of academic specialists on Islamism. Roy is known for having coined, some 20 years ago, the failure of political Islam. In this show he discusses the post-uprising Arab world, making the following points:

• Islamist movements like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt can no longer even be called Islamists, they are conservatives analogous to the religious right in the US. This is what he calls "post-Islamism" — much like socialist parties in Europe abandoned Marxism at some point in the 1970-80s, Islamist movements have abandoned a pure Islamist framework by combining "a religious reference" with democracy in a plural political space. They cannot impose themselves, and they do not necessarily deal with issues such as women's rights in terms of Sharia, but in terms of "family values."
• He makes a difference between the above, which he calls "a product of the Arab Spring" and its democratic underpinnings, with the call for Sharia in Libya for instance not being a product of the Arab spring in that is is not in a democratic context, since Libya is now the product of foreign intervention in a civil war, with one side having taken power. He predicts the question of who wields power in Libya will be settled by the Kalashnikov rather than the ballot box.
• He said Rachid Ghannouchi does not have a dual discourse, he has been quite coherent for 20 years and reminds listeners that when Ghannouchi was a political refugee, he was refused a visa by France.
• The debate between Muslims Brothers and Salafis in Egypt will be key. The MB must now choose to align itself with Salafis or make its own beliefs distinct, much like the right in Europe must distinguish itself from the far right which accuses it of having abandoned core values. MB has not campaigned as an Islamist party as much as the party of order and stability.

Comments

[Jayson Casper]

On his first point that the MB is post-Islamist: Perhaps this is a tendency but it seems premature to call it a fact. The telling sign will be what they do post-elections, as he hints at in his last point about the challenge of the Salafis. That such a scholar believes their discourse is weighty to take into consideration, but the possibility is still there that they maintain their long term pure Islamism, no matter how much they moderate strategically to get there.

[Amr]

I believe he has a fair reading of the situation, one of important things in my point of view is that MB will be forced sooner rather than latter to have a clear retoric about their views on a secular state and whether they will side with or against Salafis, it will very hard for them in this and in many other points to be clear and to leave their ambiguous ways. Ambiguity has been for ever their habit.

[Messi_fan]

I think that many intellectuals are 'wishfully thinking' in such situations. They are hoping that Islamists are not really 'strict' ; they are hoping that they are just 'conservative democrats'.

I disagree. There is actually very little difference between the MB and the Salafists. They just disagree on the extent of Sharia law to be applied in the future. Also, they are both hard-core anti-Israelis, to the extent of being anti-Jewish. I fear that the likelihood of a war between Israel and Egypt is high under the rule of either of these 2 Islamist groups.

I also fear that many secularist Egyptians and many non-Muslim Egyptians will flee Egypt when they see that the MB are not so keen on full human rights for all Egyptians.

I hope time will prove me wrong.