The rise of Islamism, a highly politicized interpretation of Islam, since the 1970s only seemed to confirm the same view: that “Islam is resistant to secularization,” as Shadi Hamid, a prominent thinker on religion and politics, observed in his 2016 book, Islamic Exceptionalism.
Yet nothing in human history is set in stone. And there are now signs of a new secular wave breeding in the Muslim world.
Some of those signs are captured by Arab Barometer, a research network based at Princeton and the University of Michigan whose opinion surveys map a drift away from Islamism — and even Islam itself. The network’s pollsters recently found that in the last five years, in six pivotal Arab countries, “trust in Islamist parties” and “trust in religious leaders” have declined, as well as attendance in mosques.
Not that the trend is huge, but it is real. I never lost hope that the Arab Spring was not a failure but a step on a long road to reform.
The polling data is a sign that the holding action that our war on terror is will not be in vain as we hope the Islamic world resolves its civil war in favor of the normal people who'd rather just get along with other people.
So Happy New Year. Eventually.
