Word: islamists
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...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...
...demands good governance, not banning alcohol or imposing a particular dress code on women. No liquor shop has been closed, no woman has been forced to wear the veil. This suggests that if the party eventually gains power, Morocco and Western critics would not necessarily have to fear an Islamist party...
...That is not to say that the way forward is simple. The PJD has to struggle for Islamic support against its Islamist competition, the Sufist-grounded Justice and Charity movement, whose leader, Abdessalam Yassine, refuses to recognize the monarchy's legitimacy and believes that the PJD props it up by participating in elections...