Rise of political Islam

Successive electoral victories of Islamic movements in a number of Arab countries seem to have triggered a kind of debate in the West about this "problem", malevolently described as the 'rise of political Islam'. Of course, this is the rise of political Islam but it's not necessarily the rise of militant Islam with which it is being confused, sometimes out of malice but more often out of sheer ignorance. Except for the Salafists who surprisingly won 20 percent vote in the first phase of the Egyptian election, no other winning Islamic party has promised the so-called militant Islam.
And that the Muslim Brotherhood would ask them to become their coalition partner is not a certainty given that the Brotherhood has made no such promise, now during the run-up to the election or ever before. The Tunisian major winner, Ennahda, and the Islamic Justice and Development Party, which took the biggest share of vote, too espouse moderation and political coexistence like the Muslim Brotherhood. And when Yemen goes to polls, as expected in not too distant a future, the like-minded parties, including the frontrunner Yemeni Congregation of Reforms party, are likely to win. For all of these Islamic parties, present-day Turkey is a model and they have said so in so many words.
That the so-called secular-liberals have been defeated by the Islamic movements is not an accident but actualisation of the Muslim majorities' long-lasting struggle to rediscover their true self. Not that the liberal-seculars, who no doubt were in vanguard that spearheaded the struggle to get rid of dictators, have been rejected; the fact is that at the hustings, they turned out to be a minority against those who had perceived the dictators not only undemocratic and brutal but also un-Islamic. The ousted dictators had been the darlings of the West and instruments of oppression and misrule for too long to be forgotten and forgiven by the majority in the Arab world. Who supported Saddam Hussain; not the religious parties of Iraq but the United States to use him against Iran.
No one would like to deny the support the West has of late rendered to the forces fighting political absolutism in the Arab world, but the fact remains that it was mainly the West which helped the dictators grab power - be it in Iraq or Egypt or Tunis. Now that the majorities in these countries have voted for Islamic movements, this should be accepted as a flowering of democracy and should not be viewed as a damaging development to world peace. What we have today in Afghanistan is essentially a consequence of such a misperception. The Taliban came to power in Afghan not by force, but by the support of the people, who welcomed their arrival on the political scene and in return got a drug-free, peaceful Afghanistan which one could travel from one end to the other, day in day out, without paying protection tax to the warlords. Now that they are the victims of a war, which is not of their making, they are fighting back with whatever they have in their hands and are branded as militants.
Islam is a religion of peace. None of the Islamic parties who have won a majority vote in the recent elections espouse militancy and extremism. What they stand for is moderation and co-existence in an ambience of a pressure-free society. Unfortunately, quite a few in the West tend to see the mosque as the centre for breeding militancy and extremism. That is absolutely wrong; the mosque remains a very important institution in many respects, for it is not only a place of worship, but also a source of succour for the needy, to whom help from the state is not available. Muslims, by faith, are philanthropic and there is no dearth of generosity in a Muslim society. Therefore, before propaganda overtakes reality, the fact of the electoral victory of the Islamic parties in the liberated Muslim countries should be accepted with an open heart and they should be helped to form their governments. The alternative to it is a militant Islam.