How to Deal with Islamist Movements in Post-Revolutionary Regimes?
By Matthew Levitt
Initially slow to react to the string of Jasmine revolutions rocking the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama administration is now proactively engaged in policy and analytical reassessments to determine how to respond to various contingencies arising from the new political horizon rising across the region. One such internal assessment, completed in mid-February, focused on differences between various types of Islamist movements that promote Islamic law in government. Such a review is timely, commendable, and appears to be asking some of the right questions. That, however, is no guarantee it will reach the right conclusions.
To be sure, significant ideological differences separate al-Qaeda from the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood, not the least of which is the sharp contrast between al-Qaeda's distaste for national boundaries in it quest for an Islamic Caliphate and the Muslim Brotherhood's ability to mold its Islamist ideology to the specific nationalist contexts of each country in which it is present. And yet, the Brotherhood's Islamist, illiberal ideology includes tenets that raise significant questions about its qualifications as a partner in the democratic process. The threshold for partnership cannot simply be that a group is not quite as extreme or violent as al-Qaeda.
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