Word: islamist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Middle East grapples with how to democratize while also including the Islamist movements that have become increasingly popular in the last three decades, Sept. 7's parliamentary elections in Morocco offer some useful insights. A poll two years ago indicated that 47% of Moroccans would vote for Morocco's Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD). That 47% turns out to be a curiously recurrent statistic. In 1991, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front won the first round of elections with 47%, an outcome that plunged the military into panic and the country into a bloody civil war. This July, Turkey...
...monarchy has permitted the PJD to engage in political activity since 1997. It is an Islamist group that, like the Palestinian Hamas organization, has historical and ideological links to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood movement. Long ago, the PJD leadership decided that the Algerian Islamists got it all wrong when they chose an outright confrontation with the army. Instead, they admire the wise persistence and incrementalism of Turkey's Islamists, and they have demonstrated as much by their own integration into mainstream Moroccan politics. In the 2002 and 2003 parliamentary and municipal elections, for example, they accepted, albeit grudgingly, the regime...
...should the Islamists put up with electoral manipulation? Because the founders of the Islamist movements that combined to form the PJD made the strategic decision that participating in politics, with the prospect of reaching power one day, was better than remaining oppositionists on the sidelines...
...example, in May 2006 Saad Eddine el-Othmani, the PJD secretary general, toured think tanks and met congressmen in Washington in a visit coordinated with the State Department. According to an American official, the trip was intended to show that the U.S. could do business with this kind of Islamist...
...Turkey's secularists remain deeply suspicious. Pointing to Gul and Erdogan's background as formerly hard-line Islamists, they argue that the AKP harbors a secret Islamist agenda. As President, Gul has the power to approve or veto legislation, and secularists fear that he will sign into law any bill passed by Erdogan's government without concern for the separation of religion and politics. They are also infuriated by the fact that his wife Hayrunnisa dons a headscarf - Islamic attire is restricted in government offices under laws that date back to Ataturk?s reforms...