Third generation political Islam

"Centrist" Islamist parties have yet to receive anywhere near the same share of attention that has been devoted to militant Islamist trends, such as radical fundamentalist and jihadist movements. The scant attention Islamist centrism has received since the mid- 1970s has rarely gone beyond discussion of religious/doctrinal aspects and individual exponents. Assessment of its general socio- political impact is missing.

Yet over the past two decades, Islamist centrism has tangibly grown across the Arab world. We have, for example, the Tunisian Nahda (Revival) Party, founded in 1981; the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Morocco whose membership consists largely of a blend of members of the Popular Constitutional and Democratic Movement, founded in 1967, and of the Moroccan Reform and Renovation Movement; Jordan's Islamic Centre Party, founded in 2001; and, in Egypt, the New Centre Party whose members have been struggling for 10 years now to obtain official approval for their party, though without success.

Moreover, this trend has introduced changes of such a magnitude into the contemporary Islamist ideological map that it is possible to identify it as the "third postulate" in the nearly century-long life of political Islam (the first two being represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, and the breakaway radical and militant Islamist trends that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s).

Several concrete factors compel us to devote study time to this phenomenon, in the hope that this will contribute to legitimising its experience, promoting its political presence and producing a possible resolution to the church and state problematic that has long occupied a large and influential space in the realm of Arab epistemological debate.

First, the Islamist centrist parties can boast a subtle and sophisticated "Islamic" political awareness, which has been sorely lacking in the Arab political arena since the emergence of the modern state a century and a half ago. Or, if it existed, it was grossly distorted in the course of the vicious confrontation between the state and radical fundamentalist movements that raged for nearly three decades towards the end of the last century and that raised considerable scepticism over the possibility of a civil Islamist experience ever being able to evolve.

Second, these parties defy being placed on that customary spectrum of "moderate" to "extreme", normally used to categorise Islamist groups. They offer new criteria for categorisation -- notably political competence, or the ability to grasp the concepts of democracy and civil action and to interact with them in a way that keeps "religion" at arm's length from political practice. The centrist Islamist parties, like moderate ones such as the Muslim Brotherhood, have a religious frame of reference that governs their outlook towards themselves and others, but rather than dominating their practice of politics to the extent that politics becomes a springboard for proselytising, religion is a "civilisational incubator" that can accommodate political, ideological and religious differences within a single nation.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/824/op3.htm