The end of Islamism or political Islam was worded by attracting attentions to the lack of an Islamist discourse, grassroots, leadership and content in the revolutions begun in Tunisia, continued with Egypt and spread to other countries in the Middle East. Particularly while the movements in Egypt were going on an article of a famous French Islamolog Oliver Roy was published in which he once again declared the end of Islamism moving from the respective observation.

 

We say "once again" because this is not the first time that Roy declared the end of Islamism. We know that he declared it in 90s and also recited it a few times after the 9/11. His book The Failure of Islamism was also published in Turkey which was passing through “the 28 February Process” in late 90s and was discussed to a great extent. I also participated to the discussion then with a few papers and an article in Tezkire journal titled “The End of Political Islam Narrative.”     

 

What I wanted to tell at that time was that the thing coming to an end was not the political Islam but the concept of “political Islam” itself. What is more the political Islam became a new and climbing movement at that time but it would need conceptual instruments in order to be understood and identified. The analyses giving the impression of armed Islamist guerrillas when the phrase Islamist was uttered were fallacious. There was no political side of the respective Islamism representing that impression. It was the image of the Muslims fighting at a level beyond-politics or pre-politics. There was not any politicality there, instead there was a war. However, politicality is realized during the negotiations with others at a ground where you accept the existence of others. 

 

The political Islam that Roy understands, being the discourse trying to put Islam into the center of the political order, was a way of actuality extending to bloody initiatives concerning the restructuring of the society on Islamic principles. In different parts of the world Oliver Roy would show the examples of the failures of these initiatives which were in the endeavor of occupying political centers and their inability of applying the political programs that they promised. While reckoning on the end of the Islamism in the New Middle East revolutions that he couldn’t see, Roy was consistent in the route he was following. However, as Salman Sayyid, the author of an epochal book A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentricism and Emergence of Islamism, puts it, he would be right only twice a day, like a broken clock, but this rightness is neither beneficial to anybody nor would help us to analyze the events going on. However, the validity of the failure of Islamism thesis depends on what we understand from “Islamism” and “success.”

 

The last article of Roy was discussed in Turkey as well. I may have missed some of other contributions but Kürşat Bumin and Hayrettin Karaman whose writings I am interested in by all eyes, wrote about the respective article. The reason behind my handling the issue so late is the article of Prof Ümit Cizre that I read in the attachment “Open View” of Star Newspaper. At a conference held in Jerusalem on the recent developments in the Middle East, the critical evaluation that Cizre did after quoting another French Islamolog Gilles Kepel’s more or less similar statement, puts quite a unique and comprehensive approach forward.

 

Cizre states, “according to Keppel who stated that the radical Islam entered into a crisis in 90s in terms of militarization of the masses and the 9/11 was committed as a result of this crisis, these new movements deposing regimes declare the end of radical Islam and take the Turkish type AK Party raising on the shoulders of an entrepreneur middle class and ‘converting the political participation from instrument pace by pace to an aim’ as model.”  

 

While Keppel stated that the screams of the masses rising in squares for the demands of modernist and universal rights were perceived as the collapse of the “fundamentalist, radical and violent” Islamist trends and gave way to the rise of AK Party model, he would keep on portraying the new era coming out as a result of tsunamis in the Middle East with the simple and commonly used categorization- as Islamologs do for the issues that they have difficulty to explain- such as radical and moderate political Islam in a monotone and passionless manner. While it was obvious that approaching the issue as the failure of the standpoint against the Islamist movements was truer than failure of the Islamist movements themselves, explaining the political transformation in the Middle East centering Islamism was perhaps an unveiling the helplessness that academicians fall into in understanding-explaining activities. The point that this approach outcasts is that the momentum maintaining the idea of rethinking and discussing the modernity, giving way to the emergence of new alternatives within the frame of the demands regarding human rights, identities, living quarters and democracy in this geography was again created by the Islamist activism.

 

The expectation that precipitates the political project that the Islamist movements present as alternatives to the dictatorship would be similar to that of the dictate regimes; that it would have a radical discourse, a strong authoritarian state and military structure and a despotic leadership didn’t come true. This expectation about the Islamists was not of the Islamists but it belonged to the Orientalist approaches which categorize Islamism. They entail the success to the realization of this condition, however, there is not such an expectation of those whom they call Islamist and they haven’t entailed their success to such a condition.