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199 Elena Labrado Calera An analysis of the plurality of political Islam. The cases… underground. During the 1980s, the movement attempted to rejoin the political mainstream and eventually became the main opposition force in Egypt. Seeing this as a major threat, President Hosni Mubarak launched a second wave of repression against the organisation. Following the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and the fall of President Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood made it into government in 2012, only to be overthrown in 2013 following another coup, after which it was again banned and persecuted by a new military regime, that of General el-Sisi. Political Islam is not the only thing uniting the Muslim Brotherhood with the JDP, Ennahda and the AKP. The leaders of the latter three had also been banned, persecuted and exiled for decades by secular nationalist regimes and dictatorships that were thoroughly corrupt and ineffective on various issues. The case of Morocco is different in that it is a constitutional monarchy and the JDP was pragmatically accepted before its counterparts in the other countries. In some countries, protracted repression coupled with poor governance led to a wave of discontent that washed through the region and erupted with the Arab Spring; a movement that advocated the return of religion to politics, given that religion had by then become the refuge of all those who felt completely powerless at not being able to attain the level of economic, political and military development of other nations14. At this point, it is worth highlighting the exception of Turkey, where the «democratisation» process (or «reform» process, if you prefer) that began in the late 1990s has been more or less peaceful. And we say «more or less» because it has not been entirely smooth; there was a coup in 1997 and apparently two other attempts in 2007 and 2010, known as Ergenekon and Sledgehammer. The case of Morocco is also exceptional. The monarchy was able to curb a minor outbreak of the Arab Spring with a few timid and limited reforms spearheaded by the Royal Family. Indeed, it is only now, with the protests in the Rif that Morocco is facing a movement akin to an Arab Spring. In some countries, expression of popular discontent in different places led to the door being opened to a type of opening-up process, «democratisation» being perhaps too optimistic a word (and using strictly Western terminology). A door through which religious freedom would enter, thus allowing the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequent political Islam movements in other countries to breathe. And, after breathing, to strive for political power, which is their ultimate goal. This is more the case of Morocco, as explained in the previous paragraph, although it has not reached the point of evolution of its neighbour Tunisia. Without leaving the Maghreb, the path followed by Ennahda is not unlike the one taken by Morocco’s JDP years earlier. Accordingly, within a decade and a half, sentiment in the region shifted from disillusionment with Pan-Arabism to the rise of Pan-Islamism (including jihadist groups 14  http://www.pensamientocritico.org/charfi0209.pdf Accessed on 02-08-2016. http://revista.ieee.es

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