After Arab Spring,search for a definition

As they emerge from the shadows of a long,sometimes bloody struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments,they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs. In Turkey and Tunisia,culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles,are rejecting the name Islamist to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt,a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey,where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists,but rather among the Islamists themselves,pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.

Thats the struggle of the future, said Azzam Tamimi,the author of a biography of a Tunisian Islamist,Rachid Ghannouchi,whose party,Ennahda,is expected to dominate elections to choose an assembly to draft a constitution. The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout public. Its going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist,rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.

The moment is as dramatic as any in recent decades,as autocracies crumble and suddenly vibrant parties begin building a new order,starting with elections in Tunisia in October,then Egypt in November. Though the region has witnessed ventures by Islamists into politics,elections in Egypt and Tunisia,attempts in Libya to build a state almost from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syrias dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the regions still embryonic body politic.

It is a turning point, said Emad Shahin,a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame.

At the centre of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state,a post Islamist state. Its foremost exemplars are Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogans Justice and Development Party in Turkey,whose intellectuals speak of a shared experience and a common heritage with some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Ennahda Party in Tunisia.

They feel at home with each other, said Cengiz Candar,an Arabic-speaking Turkish columnist. Ghannouchi,the Tunisian Islamist,has suggested a common ambition,proposing what some say Erdogans party has managed to achieve: a prosperous,democratic Muslim state,led by a party that is deeply religious but operates within a system that is supposed to protect liberties.

If the Islamic spectrum goes from bin Laden to Erdogan,which of them is Islam? Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate. Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought,like the Taliban or the Saudi model,while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us,like the Turkish,the Malaysian and the Indonesian models,models that combine Islam and modernity?

In Libya,Ali Sallabi,the most important Islamist political leader,cites Ghannouchi as a major influence.

Egypts Center Party,a group that struggled for 16 years to win a license from the ousted government,may go furthest here in elaborating the notion of post-Islamism. Its founder,Abul-Ela Madi,has long sought to mediate between religious and liberal forces. Like the Ennahda Party in Tunisia,he disavows the term Islamist, and like other progressive Islamic activists,he describes his group as Egypts closest equivalent of Erdogans party.

Were neither secular nor Islamist, he said. Were in between.

The emergence in Egypt,Tunisia and Syria of Salafists,the most inflexible currents in political Islam,is one of the most striking political developments in those societies. The Koran is our constitution, goes one of their sayings.

And the most powerful current in Egypt,still represented by the Muslim Brotherhood,has stubbornly resisted some of the changes in discourse. Tamimi,the scholar,argued that some mainstream groups like the Brotherhood,were feeling the tug of their increasingly assertive conservative constituencies,which still relentlessly call for censorship and interest-free banking.

Is democracy the voice of the majority? asked Mohammed Nadi,a 26-year-old student at a recent Salafist protest in Cairo. We as Islamists are the majority. Why do they want to impose on us the views of the minoritiesthe liberals and the secularists? Thats all I want to know.