Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 11

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Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are
By: Robin Wright
The Islamists Are Coming: Who They Really Are. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and United States
Institute of Peace Press, 2012. 169pp. [price not stated]. ISBN: 978-1601271341.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Jennifer Bremer, PhD
American University in Cairo
Egypt
By all rights, this book should be excellent. It addresses a topic that policymakers and analysts urgently need to understand: the Middle East's
Islamist parties, their origins, policy positions, and likely future directions. The book is a collaborative effort uniting two prestigious think tanks.
The editor and contributing authors are highly recognized experts in Middle Eastern studies based in leading research centers. In short, all the
ingredients have been assembled to produce an excellent analysis of an important topic.
The recipe for combining these ingredients has also received professional consideration. The book begins with an excellent introductory chapter by
the editor, followed by a regional overview and 12 country profiles covering 11 countries from Morocco to Yemen (Egypt gets two, one to
introduce the Muslim Brotherhood and another for the Salafis). A final chapter offers capsule profiles of 50 Islamist parties across 14 countries. To
make the material accessible and to facilitate comparison, authors have been enjoined to follow a standard outline, beginning with the origins of the
movement in their assigned geography, tracing its progression institutionally and ideologically to the present time, looking ahead to likely
developments in the near term, and reviewing positions on selected key issues.
Despite these assets, the whole falls short of the sum of its very promising parts. Before considering why this is so, the book’s strong points deserve
recognition. Three stand out. First, this work offers a comprehensive, if abbreviated overview of the Islamist parties that are now the largest parties
in many countries. One can imagine a harried Congressional aide turning to this book repeatedly to make some sense of Islamist movements in
countries her boss is about to visit.
Second, the treatment is uniformly fair, even-handed, and thoughtful. Within the strictures of the format, the authors have striven not only to
distinguish radicals from reformers and to do so over time, among countries, and across the current political spectrum, but to provide some
explanation for this diversity and how it has evolved. Facile, broad-brush generalizations have been avoided, although at times, this results in the
opposite effect, an analytic pointillism that resists resolution into a coherent picture.
Third, the book is well-written in clear prose that is accessible if rarely compelling, sharply focused on the main storyline, and devoid of jargon.
The authors’ evident expertise enables them to assemble the key events and their leaders into a straightforward narrative covering the past eight
decades.
What, then, are the shortcomings causing the work’s reach to exceed its grasp? They fall into two categories: the analysis itself and how it is
presented. While the first category holds much more significance in the broader scheme of things, some quick fixes to the latter would have made
the book more useful to the reader. First, and most important, the analysis does not put the emergence of the Islamist political movement into its
socioeconomic or religious context. The narrative tells us that the Islamists are coming, how many groups there are, and how fast they are moving,
but it does not make clear why they are coming. What are the social and economic forces that have attracted people to these movements? What
types of people have supported them? We are given a sense of the movement’s leaders but much less of their followers, rich or poor, urban or rural,
young or old, educated or otherwise. What are they looking for and why do they believe that the Islamist parties offer the best chance of finding it?
The defining feature of Islamism is the leading role it assigns to Islamic doctrine in the political sphere. By choosing to leave this central and
essential aspect of Islamism largely off the table, the authors have undercut their ability to explain who the Islamists are and what they hope to
achieve. The religious and doctrinal issues uniting or separating Islamists are admittedly very difficult to summarize, particularly for readers lacking
much if any familiarity with Islam—precisely those readers presumably targeted by this work. Nonetheless, the result is a denatured discussion that
is oddly distant from its topic. As it describes the long struggles between the old regimes and the Islamists, no real sense emerges of what the latter
are fighting for or how they will govern now that power is within their grasp. Where they have come from is important, but it tells us only so much
about where they are headed.
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