Islamic Movements Must Not Be
Distracted By Hecklers
01 September 2012By Khalid Amayreh
The recent ascendancy of Islamic forces, especially
the Muslim Brotherhood, to the political forefront in
parts of the Arab world has generated many enemies.
Secularists, pseudo-liberals, anti-Islam Arab
nationalists as well as heretical sectarians have all
suddenly emerged from their protracted dormancy to
fight the Islamic movements' efforts to re-Islamize
societies, end political tyranny and despotism, stem
the tide of corruption and achieve economic
development and prosperity.
Such a phenomenon would be perfectly normal were not
for the fact that these generally marginal forces
conceal a real rejection of democracy and popular will
in their hysterical endeavor to tarnish the Islamic
movement. They easily forget that the Islamists
earned, not arrogated, their achievements.
In Egypt this week, some secularist intellectuals
called for a million-man strong demonstration to
vilify the Muslim Brotherhood and President Muhammed
Mursi. However, to the secularists' chagrin, only a
few hundred protesters showed up, a majority of whom
were followers of the Coptic Church.
The protesters sounded so frustrated, so irate and so
disillusioned that they called the Brotherhood
"murderers" and "traitors."
Needless to say, the highly-charged and manifestly
mendacious epithets used in reference to Egyptian
Islamists underscore the desperation and bankruptcy of
the anti-Islamic forces.
It also illustrates the fact that these people are
unable to come to terms with the fact that the people
of Egypt have elected an Islamic president and an
Islamic parliament, although the latter was dissolved
by the so-called Constitutional Court, which we all
know would never ever have adopted that infamous
decision had the liberals or secularists or Mubarak's
men won the elections.
With big mouths and little minds, the anti-Islamists
have been making the illogical accusation that the
Islamists are monopolizing power. This is a despicable
canard since each and every winning Islamic candidate
was duly elected by the masses in fair and free
elections monitored by the whole world and supervised
by relevant state institutions.
In fact, if we add the malicious intent inherent
behind the canard, the big lie becomes a real crime
since the ultimate goal of this unrelenting cycle of
incitement and vilification is to foil the democratic
process and carry out a coup against the will of the
people.
This is certainly not freedom of speech. Freedom of
speech, as far as we know, doesn't include calls for
murdering a democratically elected president.
In Libya, the remnants of Muammar Gaddafi's supporters
have blown up one or two car-bombs during the
Eidul-Fitr holiday. Their sinister goal is to murder
and maim as many innocent Libyans as possible in order
to destabilize the fledgling democracy. These
treacherous terrorists want to sow terror, violence
and chaos in order to make the Libyan masses regret
having revolted against and toppled the criminal
autocratic Gaddafi regime.
In Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Spring, the "France
Party", which includes Tunisians who are Arab in name
but French in everything else, including culture,
enmity to Islam, and lifestyle, have been revolting
vociferously against the new democratically-elected
Quasi-Islamic rulers of the North African country.
The brazenness of some these people's demands would
give one the impression that the right thing to do was
to maintain and consolidate the colonialist French
culture, including excessive secularism, hostility to
Islam, nudity, atheism and promiscuity while combating
everything and anything remotely related to morality
and Islam, the religion and way of life of the vast
majority of the Tunisian people.
And in Morocco, the enemies of Islam seem hell-bent on
thwarting the first Islamic government by holding it
responsible for all the troubles in the failed
monarchy ever since independence in 1956.
Even in some relatively innocuous entities in the
Mashreq (eastern or Asiatic part of the Arab world),
we are beginning to hear terms such as the
Ikhwanization of the state. The term is not innocent
or neutral. It is meant as a euphemistic rejection of
Islam.
The disseminators of this poisoned propaganda know too
well in their heart that the use of terms such as the
"Islamization of the state" wouldn't achieve the
required goal, namely to incite the often unsuspecting
public against the Islamists. (It might actually
produce a boomerang effect.) This is why they employ
the more tendentious term "the Ikhwanization of the
state" in order to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood's
Islamic platform.
In one oil-rich Gulf Sheikhdom, we have been affronted
with one prominent security official who seems to have
particular difficulties shutting his mouth up. The
visibly ignorant official, whose tongue functions much
more swiftly than his mind ever does, has been vowing
to arrest and imprison Islamist elements, comparing
them with dangers posed by Iran.
The utter absurdity of that official's remarks
prevents this writer from further commenting on him
and his ludicrous ranting lest I inadvertently accord
him a dignity he doesn't deserve.
Needless, to say, the Islamic movements in the Arab
world must not preoccupy themselves with such
distractions. The shipyard dogs are too many and it
would be futile and counter-productive to waste
attention and energy that should be utilized
elsewhere. The dogs bark but the caravans must go on.
Indeed, instead of keeping reacting to bankrupt and
malicious detractors, the Islamic movements should get
busy implementing serious social and economic
programs, including fighting poverty and other social
ills and helping college students who don't afford to
pay tuitions.
More to the point, the Islamic movements should see to
it that alternative and effective media outlets be
founded in order to help shape an Islamic public
opinion which can be mobilized when necessary. This is
a paramount matter since the existing public-sector
media in countries such as Egypt and Jordan is
decidedly anti-Islamist if not anti-Islamic.
Hence, the Islamic movements are urged to create as
many new satellite TV stations as possible along with
a large number of attractive and versatile internet
sites in various languages in order to communicate the
Islamic message and accurate information to the
largest possible audience.
This is not to say, of course, that the Islamic
movements should scale down its devotion to the
Palestinian cause and confrontation with Zionism and
Israel.
In the final analysis, the Islamic movement's
commitment to the Palestinian cause is the single most
important factor contributing to Islamists' popularity
among the masses.
Khalid Amayreh is an American-educated
journalist living in the southern West Bank town of
Dura near Hebron. He graduated from the University of
Oklahoma in Norman in 1981. He also, received a Master
degree in Journalism from the University of Southern
Illinois at Carbondale in 1983.
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