In the Western political science literature of the late 20th and early 21st century, the Middle East has often been described, not only as authoritarian, but also as impervious to democracy. Institutional, structural, and cultural explanations were advanced to explain this democracy deficit. Among the most notorious of the cultural explanations is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. Two American scholars, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, have built on Huntington’s theory to argue that the permissive sexual mores and gender equality seen as indicative of the contemporary West have not taken root in Islamic societies. This piece debunks the notion that democratization in the Middle East is limited by entrenched Muslim and/or Islamist views on social and sexual mores, and on women’s political and social rights. Indeed, the events of the so-called Arab Spring have shown that the desire for democracy is the reason for the overthrow of several regimes in the Arab world. These popular led regime changes were triggered by a desire for political and social reform. The main actors behind the Arab Spring have been Arab youths and women, with women actively participating in anti-regime demonstrations and sometimes paying the price for that participation with their bodies. The presentation will show four trends (the discourse of male religious scholars, changes in the law proposed by grassroots secular activists, and the work of Muslim feminists and Islamist female activists) in the transformation of women’s roles in the Middle East that counter the claim that Islamic views on gender equality limit the emergence of democracy. The presentation will also demonstrate a correlation between grassroots activism among secular, Muslim and Islamist women in the past couple of decades, and the events of the Arab spring.