.... the new regimes are remarkably uninterested in each other. Many North African government include what might loosely be termed Islamist groups: the PJD in Morocco, Ennahda in Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and so on.
Yet the idea, sometimes promulgated by Western writers, that these parties are branches of a single Islamist movement, is quite misleading. Despite facing similar challenges, and sharing a language, they are almost wholly focused on their domestic affairs, and have little to do with one another.
They vary enormously in their approaches to politics. Indeed, the more you discover about them, the more you realise that Islamist is a wholly inadequate label. To posit a continuum between salafist radicals, who want a sharia-based theocracy, and pluralist Muslim parties that see themselves as local equivalents of Europe’s Christian Democrats, is preposterous. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more
