A cleric who was very popular among the 9/11 hijackers and jihadis in North Africa, Muhammad al-Fazazi, is now causing a stir with an article he published in Hespress. The following passage addressed to a secular critic is particularly aggravating his former fan club:
I am now in the same trench with the king [of Morocco] fighting the enemies of God and the nation on all sides, including associates like yours who are homosexuals, eat during Ramadan, and advocate apostasy. You pick a fight with the government and still do not understand that I accept the establishment of an Islamic party if it offers assurances. I may join the Justice and Development Party–the party you hate for no other reason than it is Islamic.
Shmukh forum member abuhamza rightly observes that Fazazi previously considered parliamentary politics to be heresy. “His words now resemble the words of the secularists and the Brotherhood.”
Fazazi’s sentiments may be off putting to some but they are the words of a religious conservative getting involved in parliamentary politics. A sign of the times.
now in Morocco there are many like him , we don’t know about the future
Maybe not.
Zawahiri’s opposition to the democratic political process was based purely on rationality and feasibility of attaining power IMHO.
In Algeria, the FIS was clearly having success playing its hand in the democratic process. The government eventually declared election results null and void, disbanded the FIS, and ensured that the FIS was denied political power which it was on the verge of achieving through democratic means.
Under Sadat and Mubarak, did the Muslim Brotherhood really stand any chance of truly seizing political power and implementing Sharia law via the democratic process? Definitely not.
In Iraq, given the Shia majority and the general secularism of the Kurds, I would argue that a Sunni Islamist party stood no real chance of seizing political power and implementing Sharia law throughout the whole of Iraq via the democratic process.
Maybe the Islamists are endorsing the democratic process now because they see it as a legitimate means to gain power and implement Sharia law. As undemocratic as the Communists and Nazis were, they had no qualms about using the democratic process as a vehicle for destroying democracy.