184. Karen Armstronguncomfortably aware that if there were truly democratic elec-
tions, an Islamic government might well come to power. In
Egypt, for example, Islam is as popular as Nasserism was in the
1950s. Islamic dress is ubiquitous and, since Mubarak's gov-
ernment is secularist, is clearly voluntarily assumed. Even in
secularist Turkey, recent polls showed that some 70 percent of
the population claimed to be devout, and that 20 percent
prayed five times a day. People are turning to the Muslim
Brotherhood in Jordan, and Palestinians are looking to Mu-
jamah, while the PLO, which in the 1960s carried all before it,
is now looking cumbersome, corrupt and out of date. In the
republics of Central Asia, Muslims are rediscovering their re-
ligion after decades of Soviet oppression. People have tried
the secularist ideologies, which have worked so successfully in
Western countries where they are on home ground. Increas-
ingly, Muslims want their governments to conform more
closely to the Islamic norm.
The precise form that this will take is not yet clear. In
Egypt it seems that a majority of Muslims would like to see
the Shariah as the law of the land, whereas in Turkey only 3
percent want this. Even in Egypt, however, some of the ulama
are aware that the problems of transforming the Shariah, an
agrarian law code, to the very different conditions of moder-
nity will be extreme. Rashid Rida had been aware of this as
early as the 1930s. But that is not to say that it cannot be
done.
It is not true that Muslims are now uniformly filled with
hatred of the West. In the early stages of modernization,
many leading thinkers were infatuated with European cul-
ture, and by the end of the twentieth century some of the
most eminent and influential Muslim thinkers were now
reaching out to the West again. President Khatami of Iran is
only one example of this trend. So is the Iranian intellectual
Abdolkarim Sorush, who held important posts in Khomeini's