Almost concurrently, three among the states of the Arab spring witnessed events which are quasi identical in terms of the influential powers in them. In Egypt, where the ballot boxes produced a president from the Muslim Brotherhood and a government controlled by Islamists, a group of extremists carried out a bloody attack against an Egyptian army post in Sinai, which revealed that the main security challenge facing the new authority will come from these radicals. In Tunisia, where elections produced a ruling coalition controlled by the Islamists and a government headed by the secretary general of the Islamist Ennahda movement, extremist groups in various areas of the country are forcibly imposing specific behavior on the citizens under the pretext of fighting blasphemy. Clashes thus broke out between the Tunisian police and these groups on more than one occasion, in a way that rendered these groups the main security concern in the country. In Libya, where the electoral process ended with someone close to the Islamists assuming the presidency of the National Congress, armed groups are targeting state positions and officials and destroying places of worship, shrines and heritage sites under fundamentalist pretexts. This forced the authorities to adopt exceptional measures to confront this security challenge. The current governments in the three countries were supposed to be transitional, i.e. to have as their main task the temporary management of the state's affairs and the drafting of a permanent constitution. This mission should have been neutral between the parties and should have allowed all the powers with their various views to participate in drafting of the permanent constitution, thus launching a major political workshop over the constitution and drawing the lessons from the mistakes and gaps in the previous constitution that had led to dictatorship. Nonetheless, it seems that the temptation of power has prompted the Muslim Brotherhood group, with its Egyptian and Tunisian branches, to turn toward the Islamization of the rule and the administration. This was done by President Muhammad Morsi, whether during the formation of the government or the presidential team, from which he excluded the other powers that participated in the revolution and before that in the opposition movement against the former regime. It is also being currently done by Ennahda in Tunisia, with the recognition of President Al-Moncef Marzouki. In the meantime, the nature of the upcoming Libyan government has not yet become clear, in light of an electoral system relying on individual nomination and opening the door before wide alliances. But based on the election of the head of the National Congress, Mohamed el-Magariaf, it is likely that it will feature an Islamic majority or will be a coalition government with significant Islamic representation. The victory of the Islamists in the elections is not a problem in and of itself. Rather, the problem lies in the fact that these Islamists believe they are the only side to have political-religious legitimacy, which – as shown on the ground – pushes toward the gradual exclusion of other forces from political life and government. In addition to the fact that this approach sets the foundation for the monopolization of power and for a new dictatorship, with all that this entails in terms of nepotism, corruption and obstruction of the state's neutral role, it allows the spread – rather like fungus – of the extremist and fundamentalist movements which deem themselves the only ones capable of outbidding the new authority in the name of religion. It is likely that the further Islamization of power will increase the fundamentalist tendency which – by relying on simplified and conclusive principles – is attracting a marginalized and frustrated audience. At the level of the Pakistani experience that witnessed the successive rise of Islamic parties to power, the latter – such as the People's Party – confronted the defiance of extremist and fundamentalist groups, including the Pakistani Taliban that now constitutes the greatest security challenge in the country.
