just to make a general statement: i'm not going to forgive ahmadinejad's idiotic holocaust denial, expressed in the most vivid and repetitive way. or a variety of the other slop that comes out of his mouth. on the other hand i think we underappreciate the real popular power of fundamentalist islam in the islamic world generally (we also misread the taliban the same way). people are sincerely and devoutly religious: that constituency alone can bring out 25% of the vote here, much less there. there is a class conflict between what we would call a working-class population, which is also traditional and religious, and cosmopolitan, uptown, secularized, westernized privileged people. the religious politicians give off an air of poverty and incorruptibility, a quality profoundly to be desired in leaders anywhere. they have a populist, palinesque appeal, including the rattletrap: a common touch.
and the religious parties speak across tribal lines, and the artificially-drawn nation-state borders of the region. they speak to an identity that people actually do share from morocco to indonesia: they speak for the caliphate that will be. we want to believe that conflicts really have to be about nations or economics, but that's not true: the religious dimension is perfectly real. our own leaders and media don't really want to recognize that the religious motivation/identity is central.
these folks are going to have a somewhat different read on obama than we might expect. they will be provisionally more sympathetic to him than to bush. but they will quickly come to associate him with the elites in their own countries. karzai is a good example of this, and that election will also be interesting. that is, obama is a profoundly "neo-liberal" figure: technocratic, all about education, universal values and the expansion of the american economy on a worldwide basis. so there is still likely to be a pointed place for religious politics throughout the muslim world.