Editing Islamism (section)

===Anti-communist stances===
{{Further|Anti-communism}}
By the late 1960s, non-Soviet Muslim-majority countries had won their independence and they tended to fall into one of the two cold-war blocs – with "Nasser's Egypt, Baathist Syria and Iraq, Muammar el-Qaddafi's Libya, Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne, [[South Yemen|Southern Yemen]], and Sukarno's Indonesia" aligned with Moscow.<ref>Kepel, ''Jihad'', 2002, p.46</ref> Aware of the close attachment of the population with Islam, "school books of the 1960s in these countries "went out of their way to impress upon children that socialism was simply Islam properly understood."<ref>Kepel, ''Jihad'', 2002, p. 47</ref>
[[Olivier Roy (political scientist)|Olivier Roy]] writes that the "failure of the 'Arab socialist' model ... left room for new protest ideologies to emerge in deconstructed societies ..."<ref name=ORFPI1994:52>[[#ORFPI1994|Roy, ''Failure of Political Islam'', 1994]]: p. 52</ref> Gilles Kepel notes that when a collapse in oil prices led to widespread violent and destructive rioting by the urban poor in Algeria in 1988, what might have appeared to be a natural opening for the left, was instead the beginning of major victories for the Islamist [[Islamic Salvation Front]] (FIS) party. The reason being the corruption and economic malfunction of the policies of the [[Third World socialism|Third World socialist]] ruling party (FNL) had "largely discredited" the "vocabulary of socialism".<ref>Kepel, ''Jihad'', 2002, pp. 160–1</ref>
In the [[Postcolonialism|post-colonial]] era, many Muslim-majority states such as Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, were ruled by authoritarian regimes which were often continuously dominated by the same individuals or their cadres for decades. Simultaneously, the military played a significant part in the government decisions in many of these states ([[Deep state in Turkey|the outsized role played by the military]] could be seen also in democratic Turkey).<ref name="Wi">''The History of the Modern Middle East'' by William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton, 2008, p. 371.</ref>

The authoritarian regimes, backed by military support, took extra measures to silence leftist opposition forces, often with the help of foreign powers. Silencing of leftist opposition deprived the masses a channel to express their economic grievances and frustration toward the lack of democratic processes.<ref name="Wi"/> As a result, in the [[Post–Cold War era|post-Cold War era]], civil society-based Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood were the only organizations capable to provide avenues of protest.<ref name="Wi"/>

The dynamic was repeated after the states had gone through a [[democratization|democratic transition]]. In Indonesia, some secular political parties have contributed to the enactment of religious bylaws to counter the popularity of Islamist oppositions.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/11/19/political-parties-clash-over-sharia-based-bylaws.html |title=Political parties clash over sharia-based bylaws |work=The Jakarta Post |access-date=6 March 2021 |archive-date=11 April 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210411130737/https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/11/19/political-parties-clash-over-sharia-based-bylaws.html |url-status=live }}</ref> In Egypt, during the short period of the [[2012 Egyptian presidential election|democratic experiment]], Muslim Brotherhood seized the momentum by being the most cohesive political movement among the opposition.<ref>The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood: Grim Prospects for a Liberal Egypt. by Eric Trager, ''Foreign Affairs'', 2011.</ref>