When the news circulated that Morocco’s leading political group, the Development and Justice Party (PJD), has been trounced in the latest elections, held in September, official media mouthpieces in Egypt celebrated the news as if the PJD’s defeat was, in itself, a blow to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. Regionally, political commentators who dedicated much of their time to discredit various Islamic political parties – often on behalf of one Arab government or another – found in the news another supposed proof that political Islam is a failure in both theory and practice.

“Regionally, the news of the (PJD) failure was greeted with jubilation,” Magdi Abdelhadi wrote on the BBC English website. “Commentators regarded the fall of PJD as the final nail in the coffin of political Islam,” he added.

Missing from such sweeping declarations is that those who greeted the defeat of the PJD with ‘jubilation’ are mostly the very crowd that dismissed political Islam even during its unprecedented surge following the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011; and the same intellectual mercenaries who unashamedly continue to sing the praises of such dictators as General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt and the various Arab monarchs in the Gulf.

The PJD was not only defeated but almost completely demolished as a result of the vote, saving only 12 seats from the 125 seats it had obtained after the 2016 elections. The reasons behind such failure, however, are being misconstrued by various entities, governments and individuals with the aim of settling old scores and tarnishing political rivals. The ultimate objective here is to cement the status quo where the fate of Arab nations remains in the grip of brutal, corrupt and self-aggrandizing rulers, with no tolerance for genuine political plurality and democracy.

Those who insist on viewing Arab and Middle Eastern politics through generalized, academic notions have also found in the outcome of the Moroccan elections a perfect opportunity to delve further into sweeping statements. These knee-jerk, cliched reactions were boosted by the ongoing political crisis in Tunisia, the main victim of which, aside from Tunisian democracy, is the Ennahda Islamic party.

Democracy Crisis in Tunisia

On July 25, Tunisian President Kais Saied began a series of measures that effectively dismantled the country’s entire democratic infrastructure, while concentrating all powers into his hands.

Taking advantage of the poor performances and endemic dysfunction of the country’s major political parties, including Ennahda, as well as the festering economic crisis and the growing dissatisfaction among ordinary Tunisians, Saied justified his actions as a way “to save the state and society.”

Deterministic vs Dynamic Politics 

When the Arab Spring first began, starting in Tunisia in early 2011, it seemed that the fall of dictators and the rise of democracy was inevitable; also certain seemed the rise of Islamic parties, which has, indeed, registered substantial victories in various democratic elections throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) – which was founded by the country’s Muslim Brotherhood Movement – won 37 percent of the votes in the parliamentary election in 2011; Morocco’s PJD secured over 25 percent of available seats in the parliament, while Ennahda obtained 89 of 217 seats.

Then, it was common to discuss Islamic parties as if they are all branches of the same ideological – in fact, in the view of some – even political movement. ‘Political Islam’ became synonymous with the ‘Arab Spring’. Some saw this as an opportunity for ‘moderate’ Muslims – marginalized, exiled and often tortured and killed – to finally claim what is rightfully theirs; others, namely Israeli and right-wing western intellectuals and politicians, decried what they saw as an ‘Islamic Winter’, claiming that democracy and Islam would espouse an even greater anti-western and anti-Israeli sentiment.

Often missing from most of these discussions is the national context, under which all Arab politics, whether Islamic-leaning or otherwise, operate. In Morocco, for example, King Mohammed VI played his own political game to ensure the survival of the monarchy in the age of democratization. He quickly drew the Islamists nearer to him, offered a veneer of democracy, while practically holding on to all aspects of power.

Though it will take time to reach a conclusive analysis, it is possible that the PJD’s downfall was a result of its willingness to compromise on its declared principles in exchange for a very limited share of power. Indeed, at times, it seemed as if the Islamic party, elected to steer the country away from the rule of a single individual, was serving the role of the King’s official political party. This was manifested in the PJD’s acceptance and eventual endorsement of Morocco’s normalization of ties with the State of Israel in December 2020.

The Islamists’ recent defeat in Morocco, however, must not be viewed as a crisis in political Islam, for the latter is a theoretical concept that is in constant flux and is open to various, often radically opposing interpretations by different scholars and under different historical contexts.

While the PJD, for example, signed off to the King’s normalization with Israel, Ennahda vehemently rejected it. Indeed, each Islamic party seems to behave according to different sets of priorities that are unique to that party, to its socio-economic setting, political objective and, ultimately, to its own unique interests.