The Egyptian Coup Is a Failure for Political Islam
What’s the Latest Development?
The coup that ousted Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood suggests that Islam still has no stable footing on which to shoulder the responsibilities of modern governance, according to Olivier Roy, French analyst of the Muslim world and professor at the European University Institute. “The Brotherhood regime in Egypt fell, of course, under the weight of its own incompetence (and in particular its failure to recruit technocrats) and its perceived nepotism. These sins fell short of big-time corruption, because the government did not last long enough to refine that art; but it still looked pretty bad.”
What’s the Big Idea?
Insofar as Islam has become a modern religion, branching into many different sects which are then signed onto by individuals rather than groups, building a national coalition has become a more than arduous task. “Egypt’s Islamised social world was not centrally co-ordinated, as the Brotherhood would like it to be, but highly diverse, with sub-cultures growing around particular charismatic preachers and theological trends. Egypt’s Muslim majority might be devout, but it was also ‘modern’ in the sense that more than one Islamic style was available and individuals could make their choice.”
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