Temptations of power : Islamists and illiberal democracy in a new Middle East /
by Shadi Hamid.
- New York : Oxford University Press, USA, (c)2014.
- 1 online resource.
Includes bibliographies and index.
Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Islamists in Transition -- 2. Democrats Before Democracy -- 3. The Promise of Politics -- 4. The Turn to Repression -- 5. Learning to Lose -- 6. Temptations of Power -- 7. Illiberal Democracy -- 8. A Tunisian Exception? -- 9. The Past and Future of Political Islam.
"In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously declared that we had reached "the end of history," and that liberal democracy would be the reigning ideology from now on. But Fukuyama failed to reckon with the idea of illiberal democracy. What if majorities, working through the democratic process, decide they would rather not accept gender equality and other human rights norms that Western democracies take for granted? Nowhere have such considerations become more relevant than in the Middle East, where the Arab uprisings of 2011 swept the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties into power. Since then, one question has been on everyone's mind: what do Islamists really want? In Temptations of Power, noted Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid draws on hundreds of interviews with Islamist leaders and rank-and-file activists to offer an in-depth look at the past, present, and future of Islamist parties across the Arab world. The oldest and most influential of these groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, initially dismissed democracy as a foreign import, but eventually chose to participate in Egyptian and Jordanian party politics in the 1980s. These political openings proved short-lived. As repression intensified, though, Islamist parties did not -- "Shadi Hamid draws from years of research to offer an in-depth look at the past, present, and future of Islamist political parties across the Arab world"--
9780199314065
Islam and politics. Islamic fundamentalism. Democracy--History--Middle East--21st century. Revolutions--History--Middle East--21st century.