Istanbul vote result marks watershed in political history
The Istanbul electoral board offices' decision to declare the Turkish opposition party candidate the winner of the mayoral race may seem like an event of relatively minor importance for a region that generates a disproportionately large amount of international news. But for those who monitor broad political trends of the Middle East and North Africa region, the April 17 scenes of cheering supporters of the secularist CHP's Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul's Caglayan district receiving the mandate hold the symbolic significance of a political earthquake.
Maybe, just maybe, the high noon of political Islam, or Islamism, has passed.
To be sure, the Islamist AK Party (Justice and Development Party, AKP) still has a tight grip on most levers of power in Turkey and is not exactly preparing to go gentle into that good night. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who assumed sweeping powers in 2017 under a new constitution, could stand for a third term when his second term finishes in 2023, meaning he could potentially hold power until 2028.
Despite losing the prize three cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir – plus a number of coastal provinces, AKP and its hard-right nationalist allies polled more than 53 percent of the national vote in the March 31 local elections and maintained their popularity.
Nevertheless, the ground seems to have shifted beneath the AKP, which perhaps explains its many appeals for recounting, including an "extraordinary objection" and a request for a rerun of elections across Istanbul – the country's biggest city and economic capital – that Turkey's top electoral body is yet to consider.
As several experts have pointed out, the ruling alliance has lost control of cities where half of Turkey's 82 million people reside, depriving Erdogan of control of crucial municipal resources on which he has relied to retain the support of conservative voters.
Beyond Turkey, Islamists have been on the defensive for quite some time now, the proverbial anti-incumbency vote being just one of the many challenges confronting them. From the western edge of North Africa all the way to the Persian Gulf, disparate individuals, groups, political parties and military-backed regimes that interpret Islam as a source of political identity and action are struggling to get back the footing they lost in the chaotic aftermath of the post-2011 Arab Spring uprisings or due to their unending authoritarian rule.
Sudan, where Islamists backed by the military have ruled for the past 30 years, is witnessing attempts by a largely apolitical umbrella group to bring about a civilian transition. Although the "intellectual architect" of the military coup of 1989, Hassan al-Turabi, later fell out of favor with the generals and was repeatedly jailed until his death in 2016, the policy of "top-down" Islamization he oversaw alienated the regime from almost the entire population. From the US "state sponsor of terrorism" label to UN sanctions and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court, the Sudanese regime's actions have attracted nothing but widespread opprobrium.
Algeria, the second country in North Africa currently in the throes of a people-power revolt, was on the verge of choosing an Islamist-led government in the country's first free and fair elections when the army stepped in to annul the election results in January 1992, declared a state of emergency and launched a crackdown that foreshadowed 10 years of a brutal war with shadowy Islamist groups in which an estimated 200,000 people died.
In retrospect, long before political Islam captured the public imagination in predominantly Muslim North Africa and the Middle East, Algerians were sold on the slogans of a political party that vowed to eliminate the last vestiges of French language and culture, establish an Islamic state ruled by sharia law and introduce sexual segregation.
Today, Algeria's military-backed political elite is once again facing the fury of a population fed up with perceived corruption, favoritism and a stuttering economy despite the oil and gas wealth. But the protests this time around are in sharp contrast to those of the late-1980s and early 1990s. As a recent Reuters news agency report from Algiers noted, the "demonstrations have been peaceful, with people singing, laughing and taking selfies as they wave banners calling for peaceful political change. Some even bring lunch to the demonstrations."
The biggest setback that Islamists have suffered in recent years is, of course, in the cradle of Islam, Saudi Arabia. The religio-political movement known as Sahwa, which arose in the 1990s from a merger of Muslim Brotherhood ideas and Wahhabism, has been in decline for a number of reasons. Chief among is probably the abhorrence of a new generation of Arab Gulf princes and elites to an ideology that spawned al-Qaeda and its offshoots, including the Islamic State (ISIS) group.
In November 2004, 26 Saudi religious scholars signed an open statement to the Iraqi people conferring legitimacy on the Sunni insurgency (which later morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq) and forbidding any cooperation or dealing with the then occupying American forces. At around the same time, the sermons and public petitions of dissident Saudi preachers such as Salman al-Ouda and Safar al-Hawali resonated with many young people who listened to their interviews and lectures via satellite TV channels and audio cassettes.
Today, both are in detention in Saudi Arabia, unable to propagate their controversial ideas freely via social media. Their demands for a bigger role for the clergy in governing, conservative views about the place of women in society and fulminations against a Western plot to dominate the whole Arab and Muslim world seem strikingly out of sync with the zeitgeist of the smartphone age, mirrored in the music-filled, mixed-gender demonstrations occurring in Sudan and Algeria.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, women have gained the right to drive and female Uber drivers are not uncommon in the major cities of Riyadh and Jeddah. The lifting of a 35-year ban on cinemas has inaugurated a new era of family entertainment. Concerts and music events are drawing huge crowds, entertainment venues are proliferating, people's social lives are improving with every passing year, and gender segregation in public places is falling by the wayside.
Just because life is changing for Saudis and women are taking part in the protests in Algeria does not, of course, mean the writing is on the wall for political Islam. In Turkey, for instance, despite the gains made by the CHP in the local elections, Erdogan, as head of government and the head of state, holds the power to issue executive decrees, and appoint judges, heads of state institutions and mayors.
Despite the many changes to voting laws that have given the ruling alliance an unfair advantage, even some critics of AKP say the municipal election results demonstrate that the rule of law has not disappeared under the Islamists. On the other hand, as Mustafa Akyol, the Turkish scholar and a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, told Al Jazeera, the numerous objections and appeals for recounting point to AKP’s reluctance to cede power. "People wonder," he said, "if they resisted so much just not to give Istanbul, what will happen if they lose a general election?"
Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.