Free Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright Page B

votes than any candidate in the entire West Bank. His older brother Jibril did not even make a decent showing. He lost. Hamas won all nine seats in Hebron.
    Defying every exit poll, Hamas won an outright majority. It did not mop up, however. It won fifty-six percent of the seats in the legislature—and the right to form a government—but only forty-four percent of the vote. Fatah’s fatal mistake was running too many candidates, dividing its own vote. Pollsters later said Fatah could have won—with the same vote—by fielding fewer candidates.
    Nevertheless, Palestinian voters had sent a decisive message. “This was the only way to stop Fatah,” said Samir Abdullah, director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, a delegate to peace negotiations in the 1990s, and an early deputy minister of economy. “Fatah leaders showed no willingness to change.”
    Added Nader Said, “If it had rained, Fatah would have lost out even more. You have to be motivated to vote.”
    After a half century of dominating Palestinian politics, Fatah’s monopoly had ended. It was the first time an Arab electorate ousted autocratic leadership in free and fair elections—a message that resonated throughout the region.
    Jibril Rajoub, jobless, decided to go back to school.
    Sheikh Nayef became minister of religious affairs in the new government.
     
    The coming conundrum in the Middle East is that free and fair elections may not initially produce a respectable democracy. After decades of autocratic rule, the political spectrum has become so skewed that the choices, and winners, may not all be peace-loving or tolerant moderates. The transition to stable democracy worldwide—in Russia, South Africa, and Venezuela, to name but a few still struggling in disparate ways—is a rocky process that requires time. But in the Middle East, transitions may be the messiest.
    The Palestinians were the test case.
    After winning several city-council elections in 2005, Hamas politicians sent mixed signals about their intentions. They often streamlined budgets, eliminated waste, and went after pervasive corruption. They also allied with Christian politicians in Ramallah and Bethlehem and did not try to change the tradition of councils appointing Christian mayors ruling over Muslim majorities. And they did not propose adopting Islamic law—yet.
    “The implementation of Sharia is not a priority at this juncture,” Sheikh Nayef Rajoub told al Jazeera. “This doesn’t mean, however, that we will not seek to amend some of the existing laws to make them more even-handed.” 25
    But the atmospherics clearly changed. Islam may not have become the law, but its rules were increasingly becoming the practice. In the West Bank town of Qalqilya, the city council cancelled a popular music festival because the music was too Westernized. The local sheikh said the festival violated Sharia. “There are times when the municipality acts as a brake on the Palestinian Authority decisions that are against Islam,” the mayor explained. 26 In Gaza, a clampdown by Islamist vigilantes targeted shops selling liquor and pharmacies carrying birth-control pills. Traditionally more religious than the West Bank, more men in Gaza also grew beards, and more women wore head scarves, some even donning face veils, a practice virtually unknown a generation earlier.
    So Hamas’s decision to run for national office in 2006 deepened the debate about whether Islamists would honor democratic principles once elected. Views differed sharply.
    “I have not seen any group as willing to be co-opted and integrated into a system that is not of their own making,” reflected Nader Said, the U.S.-educated pollster in Ramallah. “The Palestinian Authority is still the umbrella of power, the Americans are still the interlocutors, and Israel is still the neighbor. So whatever they say, Hamas has to give up a great deal to participate.
    “Things will never be the same for Hamas. And they have