After sitting out a three-month long wave of protests, Jordan’s Islamists have finally taken to the streets. On Friday, the Islamic Action Front , Jordan’s main opposition party and a branch o the Muslim Brotherhood, virtually took over the protest movement by rallying supporters in the capital Amman, turning out more than 1,000 marchers in the city. Though sometimes seen as a loyal opposition, the movement had been mostly dormant since boycotting the country’s 2007 elections, claiming the polls had been rigged to subvert the Islamists’ power. “It’s a surprise that they suddenly came out today,” says Chris Phillips, Jordan country specialist at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Until Friday, anti-regime sentiment had been marshalled by an inexperienced group of young Jordanians who dubbed themselves the March 24 movement and modeled their actions on Egypt’s activists. They had been stymied after police hit their protests with rocks, sticks and water hoses on March 25. Fewer than 400 demonstrators came out in Amman the week after that incident. Most civilians believed the movement was dead in the water. Getting young people involved in politics “is like pulling teeth,” says Naseem Tarawnah, the CEO of 7iber, an Amman platform for citizen-generated media. “It’s unrealistic to think that it’s going to become the vanguard of the anti-government movement,” adds Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Institute. “No one should expect them to play that role. It’s going to take a longer time for them to develop a larger constituency.”
