While I have concentrated primarily on the situation in Egypt (for reasons I have explained often), the onslaught of corporate imperialism is by no means exclusive to Egypt.
Across the region, implementation of neoliberalism is progressing rapidly and multinational corporations and foreign investors are imposing their control, undermining national sovereignty, and setting up the mechanisms of enslavement in country after country.
The Islamists, by and large, are absent from the real independence struggle, losing credibility, and marginalizing themselves because they either do not understand the dynamics of economic domination, or because they are from that strata of society which can reap benefits from collaborating with the process.
This represents a grave danger to the Islamic movement.
In Morocco, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood has more or less signed-off on privatization and the whole raft of International Monetary Fund reforms; as An-Nahda did in Tunisia, and, indeed, as Mursi did in Egypt.
While this position may ingratiate the Ikhwan to the global owners of capital (with varying degrees of success), allying with the global 1% inevitably alienates the disempowered, disenfranchised, dispossessed 99%.
When your rhetoric is that “Islam is the solution”, but in practice you advocate the “solution” of market liberalization, privatization, and the subordination of government to foreign investors; when you advocate, essentially, neoliberal Islamism; you will ultimately estrange the population from the concept of political Islam itself.
The majority of our people are poor. They are hungry. Massive percentages of our youth are unemployed. We lack access to education, healthcare, and essential services. We live in shacks, huts, cramped apartments; we do not own land or businesses or shares of companies. We are struggling and our futures are bleak. And our numbers are growing every day, as is our desperation.
Rich, well-fed Islamists in their suits and ties, do not represent us, do not understand us, and their Islamism is not our Islamism.
When they talk about rapprochement with the West, we talk about liberation from it. They talk about prosperity, but we are talking about survival.
I’m afraid that many leaders of the Islamic movement have become the Muslim equivalent of the Catholic clergy in Latin America who aligned themselves with the powerful while disregarding the poor.
This led to the emergence of “Liberation Theology” when renegade priests took up the cause of anti-colonialism and preached revolution because they lived amongst the impoverished masses.
This is what needs to develop in Islamist thinking. A bottom-up, grassroots, reconfiguration of political Islam to respond to the real existing miserable conditions our Ummah is enduring.