The Arab Spring has placed the relationship between Islam, democracy and Muslim societies back on the academic agenda. Theorizing, however, about democratic transitions and democratic consolidation in the Arab-Islamic world remains weak. The rise of Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt after the fall of dictators and their relationship toward democracy poses a particular challenge in this regard. This paper argues that Muslim societies are exceptional and qualitatively different when it comes to the question of democracy but not in way that Orientalist scholars have argued. The difference is not in the ability of Muslim societies to democratize, uphold human rights and to indigenize political secularism but rather it is the political trajectory and pathway that they will traverse to become democratic which is different (from the Western experience). One of key requirements in developing a new democracy theory for Muslim societies is incorporating the role that religion will play in the process of democratization. Given the deep secular bias in democratization theory this has caused considerable analytical distortion among Western social scientists and intellectuals leading to a grim prognosis about the prospects for democracy in the Arab-Islamic world. Constructing a new democratic theory for Muslim societies also demands a rethinking of several key assumptions in Western democratic theory (liberal theory, modernization theory and dependency theory in particularly). This paper develops an argument for what this alternative democratic theory might look like based on developments in the Arab Spring but also including democratic developments in Turkey and Indonesia. The work of Alfred Stepan (“The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations’” and “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes”), Vali Nasr (“The Rise of ‘Muslim Democracy’”) and Asef Bayat (“The Post-Islamist Revolutions”) will be utilized to write this paper.