En plural, enfatiza Vali Nasr. Los capítulos más interesantes de Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World
A continuación destaco varios pasajes del primero de esos dos capítulos.
Fundamentalismo militante y fundamentalismo pacífico (pág. 146, 168):
The conservative, devout Islam that has been gaining so much popularity in Turkey, as well as in Egypt, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf, is not sympathetic to the violent extremism preached by Osama Bin Laden and his followers. Even within fundamentalism, there is a crucial - and growing - divide between extremists who support terrorism and a fundamentalism that wants a seat at the table and is focused on providing care and social services for the poor. The truth about fundamentalism that has not been appreciated fully enough in the West is that ever since the Iranian Revolution, the militant breed of Islam that draws its strength from attacking America and Western values and launching terrorist attacks has been forced to find footholds in countries, or regions of countries, where the government is weak if not in chaos. In countries with relatively strong governments, it has either been suppressed or it has been evolving into a less militant strain that has abandoned the call for violent revolution and opted to participate in electoral systems. Militant extremism definitely has footholds, and it is currently wreaking havoc in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories, but is not on the rise around the region, and it is not the brand of Islam that appeals to the rising class of Muslims who are interested in being free to do vigorous business even while staying true to their Islamic faith. (p. 146) (...)
In Algeria, key to turning the tide against the revolution was that shopkeepers who supported the fundamentalist cause grew tired of the chaos. A similar trend can be seen in Iraq today, where Shia shopkeepers, traders, and merchants - all men with vested interests in security and an orderly climate for business - have thrown their support behind Primer Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawaa Party or the Supreme Iraqi Council in their power struggle with the more radical Sadrist movement, whose origins lie in the slums of Baghdad and Basra. Where there is an interest in business, there is an impulse toward moderation and order over extremism and chaos. Here is an important lesson for American policy: the current battle line in many Muslim societies is not between Islam and secularism but rather between types of Islam.
Fundamentalismo minoritario en las urnas (pág. 173-175):
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood won 22 percent of the seats in Parliament in 2005 and in 2006 Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, won in the Palestinian Authority elections.
That rare victory stands out as an exception. The shock of that outcome and the instability - including gang warfare - that wracked Gaza and the West Bank in its wake have amplified fears of what elections might bring if fundamentalists gather a heard of steam. But the Palestinian Territories are hardly typical of the Arab world, and even less so of the larger Muslim world. In 2006, Palestine was not (and still is not) a state; it lacked (and still lacks) proper political institutions, not to mention previous experience with democracy, and wars of liberation hardly make for normal politics.
Even so, fundamentalism was far from a clear favorite with Palestinian voters that year. Hamas won only a plurality of the vote (44.5 percent against Fatah's 41.5%). (...)
The ballot box has not, in general, been favorable to fundamentalist parties. Fundamentalists in Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait, and Jordan found niches in parliaments dominated by monarchs (or in Yemen's case, a strongman president). Democracy confirmed that fundamentalism had clout, but also showed that is was hardly as popular as followers and critics alike often claimed. Competing in elections has turned out to be tougher - and voters harder to woo - that fundamentalists had anticipated. It seems that many voters may like shariah law as a concept, but are not so sure about actually living under it.
Generally, where Islamic parties have done well, as with Turkey's AKP or its namesake the Justice and Development Party of Morocco (known by its French acronym, PJD), success came only after telltale fundamentalist goals were forgone. (...)
The AKP has won successive elections, in 2002 and 2007, on the back of economic and governance issues. The PJD very publicly embraced moderation after terror bombings in Casablanca in 2003 shocked and horrified Moroccans and threatened the crucial tourism sector of their economy. Refusing the fundamentalist label - the PJD prefers to call itself only "a party with an Islamic point of reference" - in 2007 it ran on economic and legal issues in te latest iteration of Morocco's orchestrated and controlled electoral process.
In Pakistan, a country synonymous in Western minds with everything fearsome about fundamentalism, the coalition of Islamic parties in 2002 managed to turn in fundamentalism's best performance in eight national elections dating back to 1970. But it was still good for just 11 percent of the vote. (...) With Musharraf on his way out, fundamentalists won over 2 percent of the vote. (...)
If fundamentalism and the shariah are not in fact big vote getters, the what is? The answer is a list familiar from electoral politics the world over: jobs, public services, economic growth, good government and muscular foreign policy, specially when it comes to America and Israel; in short, secular political concerns. The leaders of Malaysia's largest fundamentalist party reflected on their defeat in 2004 elections saying, "We lost because we emphasized Islam too much instead of social services and governance".
The story of Indonesia's recent set of elections is instructive. In 2004, the fundamentalist Prosperous Justice Party(PKS) surged to tie President Yudhoyono's secular Democrat Party. But PKS's fortunes plummeted five years later in the 2009 elections after the president's party adopted PKS's call for clean and effective government. The Democrat Party won three times as many votes as its fundamentalist rival.
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