Al Qaeda's Challenge

Osama bin Laden’s long-sought revolutions in the Arab world are finally happening, and the upheaval would seem to give Al Qaeda a rare opportunity to start building the Islamic states it has long sought.

Ideally, these states would not have parliaments (human lawmaking usurps God’s role as lawgiver) and would be hostile to U.S. interests. But so far at least, the revolutions have defied bin Laden’s expectations by empowering not jihadists but Islamist parliamentarians — Muslims who engage in parliamentary politics to increase the influence of Islamic law but who refuse to violently oppose U.S. hegemony in the region.

In Tunisia, the Islamist Renaissance Party leads in the polls ahead of legislative elections in October. In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party, the new faction created by the Muslim Brotherhood, is likely to gain a large number of seats in parliament this fall. Should countries that have experienced more violent revolutions also hold elections, such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Islamist parliamentarians are well positioned to compete in those nations as well.

Although bin Laden’s death was a major setback for Al Qaeda’s organization, in some ways its new chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is better suited to the revolutionary climate of the Arab world than his predecessor. Unlike bin Laden, Zawahiri sees violence as but one tool among many for overthrowing Arab regimes. Nevertheless, Zawahiri’s hostility toward parliamentary politics leaves the levers of political power to those Islamists who know how to pull them once the revolutions end.

The outcome in Egypt is particularly personal for Zawahiri, who began his fight to depose the Egyptian government as a teenager. Zawahiri understands that Egypt is the grand prize in the contest between Al Qaeda and America given its geostrategic importance and its status as the leading Arab nation. In his recent six-part message to the Egyptian people and in his eulogy for bin Laden, Zawahiri suggested that absent outside interference, the Egyptians and the Tunisians would establish Islamic states without parliaments that would be hostile to Western interests.

Zawahiri is too optimistic. Having suffered under one-party rule for decades and wary of rival Islamist parties, the Arab world’s Islamist parliamentarians (like their secular counterparts) will be unwilling to support such a system in the future. And although they will certainly seek to implement more conservative social laws, the Islamist parliamentarians will come to accept that their countries require the economic and military aid of the United States or its allies in the region.

Although some Islamists rhetorically support Al Qaeda, many, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, are now organizing for their countries’ coming elections — that is, they are becoming Islamist parliamentarians. Even Egyptian Salafists, who share Zawahiri’s distaste for parliamentary politics, are forming their own political parties. Most ominous for Al Qaeda’s agenda, Gama’a Islamiyya — parts of which once allied with Al Qaeda — forswore violence and recently announced it was creating a political party to compete in parliamentary elections. That these groups are now willing to enter parliamentary politics shows that Al Qaeda is losing sway even among its natural allies.

This dynamic limits Zawahiri’s options. For fear of alienating the Egyptian people, he is not likely to end his efforts to reach out to Egypt’s Islamist parliamentarians or to break with them by calling for attacks in the country before the elections. Instead, he will continue urging the Islamists to advocate for Shariah and to try to limit U.S. influence.

In the meantime, Zawahiri will press for attacks on the United States and seek to exploit less stable post-revolutionary countries, such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which may prove more susceptible to Al Qaeda’s influence.

Still, the continued predominance of the United States in the region and the growing appeal of Islamist parliamentarians mean Al Qaeda is unlikely to get the states it desires. Even supporters of Al Qaeda now doubt that it will be able to replace existing regimes with Islamic states anytime soon. In a recent joint statement, several jihadist online forums expressed concern that if Muammar el-Qaddafi is defeated in Libya, the Islamists there will participate in U.S.-backed elections, ending any chance of establishing a true Islamic state.

As a result of all these forces, Al Qaeda is no longer the vanguard of the Islamist movement in the Arab world. Having defined the terms of Islamist politics for the last decade by raising fears about Islamic political parties and giving Arab rulers a pretext to limit their activity or shut them down, Al Qaeda’s goal of removing those rulers is now being fulfilled by others who are unlikely to share its political vision. Should these revolutions fail and Al Qaeda survives, it will be ready to reclaim the mantle of Islamist resistance. But for now, the forces best positioned to capitalize on the Arab Spring are the Islamist parliamentarians, who, unlike Al Qaeda, are willing and able to engage in the messy business of politics.

William McCants, an analyst at CNA’s Center for Strategic Studies and author of the forthcoming book Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths From Antiquity to Islam. This article is adapted from a longer version in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs.

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