Accepting Political Islam
With protests against regimes in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, the West fears a new era of Islamic political power in the Middle East. There are four reasons it shouldn't.
When Egyptian youths battled draconian police tactics in recent demonstrations, they made a point of showing journalists the inscription on the tear-gas canisters that had been hurled at them: Made in the U.S.A. It symbolized an important point: U.S. support of autocratic governments for the sake of stable, pro-Western regimes in the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East has long been an inconvenient truth. The bottom line is that political Islam, in some form, will be a significant factor in much of the Arab world and beyond. U.S. foreign policy must come to grips with this emerging reality.
