If the popular revolts that have rocked Tunisia and Egypt gain momentum and spread across the Middle East, they could strike a catastrophic blow to Al-Qaeda’s violent ideology, experts say.
While some in the West fear pro-democracy protests in the Arab world could see authoritarian secular regimes overthrown by equally hardline Islamists, other observers say the movements pose a far greater threat to jihadi militants.
Groups like Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda have long preached that peaceful protest is useless in the face of autocracy. They condemn electoral politics and urge Muslims to use violence to combat injustice and oppression.
But if street protests in Tunisia can force a dictator into exile and in Cairo can force a regime to promise free elections and sit down with its opponents, why should angry young Arabs turn to bombs and guns?
“Ultimately, it works against the idea of the resort to violence,” Maha Azzam, who studies the Middle East for the London-based think tank Chatham House, said.
The revolt so far has not been without violence, a police crack-down and clashes between pro and anti-regime groups have left an estimated 300 people dead, but the focus of the movement has been a peaceful demand for change.
Some in the West and in neighbouring Israel have expressed concern that a free vote in Egypt could lead to victory for the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, and that this would be a boost for violent factions in the region. But observers in Cairo say the Brother-hood’s power is exag-gerated and that in any case it is not a violent movement like Al-Qaeda. It could play a role in multi-party politics, representing a political Islamist constituency.
“All people and all groups in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood, demand a demo-cratic transition to power. They all condemn political violence,” said Dr Azzam. “If it succeeds and if the transition is peaceful and successful, if it leads to a political system that includes all groups, it will be detrimental for the radical groups.”
Al-Qaeda, whose intellectual head and number two figure is the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, has long condemned any participation in elections, indeed any participation in secular political life.
The Muslim Brotherhood, in contrast, has battled for rep-resentation. In Egypt, where it is banned, the group fields can-didates under the “independent” banner and it is now pushing to be involved in political reform.
“The jihadi groups are at a crossroads,” said Dominique Thomas, an expert in radical Islam at the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris. “If these events snowball, and raise demo-cratic expectations in the region and people are able to overthrow dictatorships with pressure from the street, that would be a stunning blow to their theories.”
“If it’s the will of the people that topples regimes, Al-Qaeda and jihadi groups will find it hard to bounce back and modify their narrative,” he said. “And, amid all this excitement, they’ve been strangely quiet. They’re probably confounded. Bin Laden or Dr Zawahiri will have to speak out soon, or their whole discourse will lose credibility.”
Another leading expert, Jean-Pierre Filiu of New York’s Colombia University and Paris’ Sciences-Po, agreed.
“Al-Qaeda was caught completely unawares by the popular uprisings in the Arab world,” he remarked. “They’ve gone completely silent on the subject, incapable of com-menting on the news, so far is it beyond their understanding.”