Reply #37: 20% is pretty impressive for a banned political organization

[BOG PERSON]

Today, if you look around certainly the Arabic-speaking world, and in many places in the Muslim world more broadly, you see this phenomenon of executive dominance. That's what the political scientists like to call it. It's a situation where a king or a president has enormous power and is not effectively checked by any voice in the society.

On the one hand, it's important to notice that many less developed or Third World countries have similar problems. You can go to Africa and see the same phenomenon in countries that are not Muslim. You can go to Latin America and see the same phenomenon in some countries that are not Muslim. So the point is, this isn't unique to the Muslim world.

But what I think is distinctive for the Muslim world is that the voice that traditionally would have served as a counterbalance to the executive—namely, the scholars—is largely muted. What has come in place of the scholars is the movement which calls itself the Islamist movement.

It's in this that the Muslim world today is very different from Africa or Latin America, where what you get are various liberation movements or pro-democratization movements. You might even include the former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe in this model. In those countries, the criticism of the executive that has emerged is of a certain type that is particular to those environments. But in the Muslim world, the most powerful voice opposing the autocratic governments has been that of the Islamists.

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/transcripts/0039.html