Islamists from Egypt to Morocco are reaping the rewards of new democratic freedoms brought by the Arab Spring, with the more moderate citing the Turkey as their template for the future. “They look at Turkey as a model. They look at Turkish success because it improved the life of Turks,” Shadi Hamid, director of the research at the Brookings Doha center, told AFP. “So they look at AKP (the ruling Justice and Development Party) and they want their success,” he added. The moderate Islamist Ennahda party that won in the first post-revolution elections in Tunisia openly expressed its admiration for the “Turkish model” represented by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a pious Muslim.
Erdogan did a tour of Arab Spring countries in October, visiting Cairo where the formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood is set for electoral success and Tunisia where he met the head of Ennahda, Rached Ghannouchi. In the Tunisian capital, he declared to great acclaim that “Islam and democracy are not contradictory” and that “a Muslim can run a state very successfully.” The appeal of his party is partly its Islamist roots and partly the way in which it has managed to wrest control from the army, the traditional power centre in the country which has toppled several elected governments.
A fast-growing economy has raised standards of living and given the country bigger diplomatic clout that it is beginning to flex. “The AKP has become a sort of guide for the Islamist parties,” says Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily based in London. “They want to imitate it after seeing how it has transformed Turkey into the 17th biggest economic power in the world with growth rates that would make Europe green with envy,” he said. But while the AKP party has Islamist roots, Turkey is officially secular — a concept the Islamists emerging in Arab Spring countries seem unwilling to embrace.
