The Economist (UK)

It may be four decades since Saudis last voted, and only in a limited local way, but elections for town councils across the country, the final round of which concluded last week, were well timed in one respect. They gave Saudi Arabia’s acting leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, some nice-sounding messages to carry to Crawford, Texas, for his potentially awkward meeting with President George Bush, where the pair talked about oil, as well as global politics.

For one thing, he could point to the polls as evidence that the kingdom is getting less autocratic. Not only does that help mollify the many Americans who blame the oppressiveness of Arab regimes for spawning youthful anger and dangerous radicalism. It also gives Mr Bush’s administration some cover for its efforts to rebuild ties with America’s oldest and most strategically important Middle Eastern ally.

Those ties, severely strained since the attacks of September 11th 2001, are now slowly healing. Saudi Arabia’s belated but determined and apparently quite successful campaign to crush Islamist militancy has certainly pleased America. Promises to raise Saudi oil output to bring down petrol prices should also help clear the air. For his part, Mr Bush appeased the Saudis not only by giving the crown prince a warm welcome but also by pledging to back early Saudi entry into the World Trade Organisation and to work harder to secure Palestinian statehood, a cause particularly dear to the de facto Saudi ruler’s heart.

The Saudi polls also helped the crown prince argue that it is the Saudi people themselves, and not just their rulers, who wish to keep the place conservative. True, the elections were hardly exemplary. Women were barred. Most eligible men stayed away out of apathetic habit or in silent protest against the 178 councils’ limited mandate and the fact that half their members will be appointed anyway. Yet the voting still brought convincingly sweeping victories to Islamist candidates, not just in the conservative interior but in the relatively liberal coastal cities of Dammam and Jeddah. In many cases, winning slates had been specifically endorsed by popular preachers, via such tools as internet websites and telephone messaging.

In other words, the Saudi leader could warn Mr Bush that if America truly wants Arabs to democratise as a foil to extremism, it must expect results that may not be entirely to its liking. This message is not new. Arab governments have long excused the curbs they impose on political freedom by raising the spectre of Islamism.

But the political strength of Islamism has grown increasingly plain, not only in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, religious parties are the strongest to have emerged among both Sunnis and Shias. When Palestinians vote in a new legislature this summer, the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are both expected to make gains against secular parties. The Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest of Islamist parties, remains the most credible opposition group in Egypt and Jordan. It is even making a slow comeback in Syria, where it was nearly hounded to extinction during the 1980s. In faraway Morocco, two Islamist parties, one “loyalist” regarding the monarchy, the other dissident, have made headway against the once dominant socialists and liberals.

What unites these groups is not simply a commitment to defend Islamist values. Compared with other movements in the very broad Muslim political spectrum, many of the emerging forces are relatively progressive. They have gained from the Arab public’s frustration with their own governments’ failure to deliver better living standards as well as from anger at perceived western belligerence against Islam. But they have also largely adopted “western” values, such as democracy and constitutional limits to executive power.

For example, many of the Saudi clerics who endorsed what came to be known as “golden lists” did not come from the state-sanctioned Wahhabi religious hierarchy. Unlike such officials, who have tended to preach blind loyalty to the monarchy, more popular preachers talk instead of the rulers’ responsibilities towards their people. And many of the winning Islamist candidates were not bearded fundamentalists but technocrats with records of charitable public service. While conservative on such prickly issues as women’s rights, their emphasis is more on keeping an Islamist framework than on the rigid enforcement of traditional values. Reforms that have vexed Wahhabi traditionalists, such as purging school books of anti-infidel venom, may meet less resistance.

Modernising currents in Islamism have evolved far more slowly in Saudi Arabia than elsewhere. Moroccan Islamists, for example, have broadly endorsed recent government initiatives to expand women’s rights. The published platform of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood calls for parliamentary rule, separation of powers, and protection of minorities. Although charged by America with terrorism, Lebanon’s Hizbullah has often adopted more progressive stands on social and religious issues than its rival and supposedly more moderate Shia party, Amal. Iraq’s top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, preaches against both sectarianism and the notion of Iranian-style clerical rule.

Even in Saudi Arabia, the emergence of newer forms of Islamism suggests a growing public discomfort both with state-imposed orthodoxy and more radical, romantic and violent trends. Saudi voters reflected wider Arab attitudes not only by rejecting candidates tarred as liberals and secularists. They did so by shunning the most extreme conservatives. And as some Saudi analysts note, this is just a small beginning. Next time Saudis vote, the age limit may drop from 21 to 18, more men may choose to register, and maybe even women will get a chance to be heard, too.

But there is another factor that may prompt Saudis, and other Arabs, to express newfound freedoms in more moderate ways. Islamist parties have long blamed western powers for blocking their progress, charging that they have actively colluded with oppressive Arab governments out of fear of political Islam. Algeria, whose thwarted choice of Islamism in 1990 elections sparked civil war, is often cited as an example. Increasingly, in Washington and other western capitals, the opinion gaining ground is that any solid, popularly elected government is better than a shaky autocratic client.