Does power moderate Islamists? That was the question of the moment just a few months ago, following Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections. And on the lips of those who were inclined toward optimism, you heard one word over and over again: garbage. The idea was that once Islamists were responsible for taking out the trash--and providing other mundane social services--they would have to think more like pragmatists and less like jihadists. "[T]he fact is Hamas is now responsible for the school system, the collecting the garbage, the electricity. ... I do believe that the burden of that responsibility is going to inevitably have to moderate their behavior," Tom Friedman told NPR. "My hope is that as a consequence of now being responsible for electricity and picking up garbage and basic services to the Palestinian people, that they recognize it's time to moderate their stance," said Barack Obama. Surveying all this, George Will came up with a name for such wishful thinking: the "Garbage Collection Theory of History." He also dryly noted that the God worshipped by Hamas had "not authorized moderation in the name of sanitation."

In Amman recently, I met a man whose story illustrates--albeit it in a very small way--why such skepticism may be warranted. Ibrahim Gharaybeh is a 44-year-old writer on Arab politics and former stalwart of the Muslim Brotherhood who has sought to distance himself from the organization. Gharaybeh is no secularist, but he isn't exactly your stereotypical Islamist either: He believes in an Islamism that tends to the social and ethical needs of its people, has no structural objection to Israel's right to exist, and yes, takes seriously the practical issues of governance--that is, issues like garbage collection. For espousing these views, he has earned a cold shoulder from his former Brotherhood peers. Which is why Tom Friedman, Barack Obama, and anyone else who believes that Muslim radicals will happily shift their focus from holy war to waste disposal might want to first consider the career of Ibrahim Gharaybeh.

Gharaybeh joined the Brotherhood as a teenager in the 1970s. But he recalls that within a few years he was already troubled by the easy inclination toward political violence within the movement. Jordan's branch of the Brotherhood was unlike Egypt's, which at the time was busy expunging factions that called for an armed campaign against the state. (Among the firebrands cast off in Egypt was a young Ayman Al Zawahiri, now Al Qaeda's second in command.) Urban society in Jordan was overwhelmingly secular, and most mosque worshippers were "either very old or young Brotherhood members like myself," he says. As a result, political Islam was a tightly knit "society within a society." The utopian Islamism teenage Gharaybeh dreamed about would have broken through these cliquey tendencies and remedied Jordan's ills--not by force of arms, but through the irresistible merits of Islamic tradition and values.

Since there was little possibility of all this coming about in Jordan, Gharaybeh moved on to Saudi Arabia, where religion has always been more broadly embraced and political parties have always been banned. There he studied at King Abdelaziz University in Jeddah. Among his professors was a stalwart of the Brotherhood from back home: the late Abdullah Azzam, one of Hamas's founding fathers and, by virtue of having mentored Osama Bin Laden, one of Al Qaeda's founding grandfathers. Azzam was renowned for his stemwinding sermons about Palestine, Afghanistan, and global jihad (and to this day, videos of those addresses are considered must-viewing for Islamist militants everywhere). But according to Gharaybeh, there was another side to Azzam that he saved for intellectuals--and for when the camera was turned off. "He was an entirely different person during the time we spent together," Gharaybeh recalls. "He knew his movement needed thinkers and builders, not just fighters."

Such was the context in which Gharaybeh resolved to move on to Afghanistan in 1986, where he spent four years. "I wanted to work in the world of the Mujahadeen and the Brotherhood," he says. He became a field researcher for the Saudi-funded Institute for Policy Studies, a Brotherhood think tank run by Egyptian-born Kamal Hilbawy. Gharaybeh describes his daily work back then as follows: "We would prepare studies on the development of general education, schools in villages and rural areas, hospitals, and we would hope that these studies would benefit the government and the institutions that served the Afghan cause. ... It was a lot like your book on rebuilding Iraq, but from an Islamic perspective rather than an American perspective." (Gharaybeh was referring to my book The New Iraq, which laid out ideas for reconstructing the country. He had previously written charitably about the book on Al Jazeera's website, and told me that it reminded him of "the kind of thinking I used to do about a new Afghanistan during the jihad against the Soviets.") He adds that throughout his years in Afghanistan, his colleagues and mentors at the institute were primarily concerned with building a viable Islamic economy and state in Afghanistan--that is, the practical matters of governing a country--and had little interest in the Palestinian problem.

At this point in the conversation, my own recollection conflicts with his narration. Hilbawy had visited the United States during those years and given speeches to the now-defunct Muslim Arab Youth Association. The talks were largely concerned with promoting jihad and anti-Semitism; and when he spoke of Afghanistan, as I remember, there was a lot of blood and glory, and little about nation building.

Gharaybeh nods his head sadly. "I wrote an article at that time," he recalls, "'Truths and Imaginations in the Afghan Cause.' It was bitterly opposed. I wrote that there were many differences between the Mujahadeen, and the problems were political and social and weren't really much about Islam." Palestine, he says, "represented a global and Islamic fancy. ... Nobody could talk about something mistaken in the Afghan cause. Not Kamal Hilbawy, not anybody. ... You couldn't tell people your opinion and convictions. You might be killed. The movement was like a wall."

In 1991, Gharaybeh came back to Jordan and tried out his ideas on a new audience: the Brotherhood in Amman, by now a broad-based political and social movement. "My experiences in Afghanistan gave me a new idea of public works," he recalls, "the role [of the Brotherhood] being to transform the broader society, and not be isolated from it." He says he made the case for a far-reaching agenda "based on tax issues, confronting government corruption, social inclusion, and overall policies of the society and state." On the Palestinian question, he wrote critically of Hamas during the '90s, arguing in several opinion pieces that armed confrontation with Israel was a mistake. "I felt that military operations only lead to destruction and prison, and resorting to [foreign] intelligence agencies and states, and the need for money and training from abroad. And that's what has happened, with Syria and Iran." By 1998, he had earned himself so much resentment within the movement that he felt it best to leave.

Today, Gharaybeh writes 50,000 words of freelance prose per month to make a modest living for his family. After distancing himself from the movement ("You do it by simply not participating; you just distance yourself in practice") he faced boycotts from the myriad Brotherhood-controlled civil society institutions and publications. Meanwhile, it took six years before a pro-government newspaper in Jordan, the semi-independent daily Al-Ghad, would publish his work. He competes for space with younger and less knowledgeable reporters in Amman, he says, who win the tacit approval he cannot from Jordan's intelligence services to join a local newspaper's staff. Gharaybeh's plight is the predicament of the independent thinker in polarized societies: After leaving the comfort and safety of a political movement, he finds that its enemies are still his enemies, but its friends are no longer his friends.

Eight years later, it ought to be springtime for Gharaybeh. The Muslim Brotherhood now controls a government in Palestine and a sizable parliamentary bloc in Egypt. On the east bank of the Jordan River, the movement has a shot at sweeping municipal elections nationwide this year and gaining considerably in Jordan's parliamentary elections next year. At least in theory, these wins and potential wins present an opportunity for principles of pragmatic Islamist governance to be put into practice. But Gharaybeh remains critical of the movement: "[The Brotherhood] is unable to acknowledge to itself that it won," he says. And his pessimism is understandable. Recent history is riddled with examples of power emboldening, not moderating, Islamists. Small examples include Hezbollah's failure to moderate after taking control of the energy ministry in Lebanon. Large examples include the failure of Islamists to moderate after seizing whole countries, like Afghanistan and Iran. Yet, for some reason, the idea that the mundanities of daily governance will inevitably and necessarily pacify Islamists continues to hold appeal in the West. As the career of Ibrahim Gharaybeh suggests, that view is garbage.

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.

Copyright 2006, The New Republic