With the unfolding transitions in Egypt and Tunisia, citizens have emerged from stifling authoritarian regimes and expressed their strong preference for democracy. We are witnessing on one hand, the acceptation of free and fair elections and of political rights for citizens and on the other hand, the recognition of the moral role of religion in politics. The latter translates into multiple initiatives to preserve the status of Islam as the religion of the nation through a discriminatory use of law, detrimental not simply to religious minorities but also to Muslim citizens who exert freedom of speech. Such a combination of political rights (one man, one vote) and moralization of the political community presents a challenge for the dominant theories of democracy, that emphasize the decline of religion in democratic transitions. This paper will demonstrate that this importance of religion in the current political transitions is not simply the consequence of the political influence of Islamist parties but is also related to long standing State policies since the foundation of the Nation-States. In other words, it introduces State’s actions and policies as a factor in the politicization of Islam as well as a key factor in the current political transitions in the Middle East. It will shed light on the neglected role of the secular nationalist rulers from Bourguiba to Nasser in reshaping and controlling Islamic institutions and religious establishment to make them fit into the national framework. Consequently, it argues that political Islam is not only the monopoly of Islamic parties but the common denominator from “liberals” to salafis. It identifies this common denominator as the preservation of the national community over the protection of individual rights. It will discuss the influence of these specific political cultures on the current political transitions in particular and the democratization process in general. The cases of Tunisia and Egypt will be presented, based on broader research of three years, on constitution, role of Islam in the legal system, in the education system and political parties concerning several other Muslim-majority countries.

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.

What is the role of Islamism and Islamist movements in post-2003 Iraqi politics? Does Islamism provide an impediment to Iraq’s efforts at a democratic transition or can Islam act to promote democratization? I analyze several political trends that fall under the rubric of Islamism. First, the government of Nuri al-Maliki, who heads the Islamic Call Party (Hizb al-Dacwa al-Islamiya), functions as a Shiite “political mafia” which intimidates Sunni Arabs and Kurds who are viewed as elements which oppose the regime’s goals. Second, the powerful Sadrist Trend (al-Tayyar al-Sadri) – formerly the Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi) - seeks to curtail Maliki’s power by promoting a cross-confessional and cross-ethnic nationalism, under the banner of Islam. Finally, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leader of global Shiism, Ahmad cAbd al-Ghaffur al-Samara’i, the Sunni Mufti of Iraq, and a large number of moderate Shiite and Sunni clerics, seek to offset the sectarianism, corruption and neo-authoritarian polices of the Maliki government. They also work to promote democratization, tolerance and national reconciliation (al-musaliha al-wataniya). This paper ends with an assessment of the influence competing Islamist trends will have on the future trajectory of Iraqi politics. It also assess the extent to which exogenous forces, such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, are influencing the Islamist movement in Iraq and encouraging sectarianism at the expense of democratization.

Much recent research has focused on the extent to which Islamic political movements and parties have moderated and secularized their political goals over time in semi-competitive electoral arenas (Schwedler 2006, 2011; Wickham 2004; Tezcur 2009; Naqvi and Kurzman 2010). Scholars have pointed out, however, that this moderation has often occurred in electoral contexts in which Islamist goals have remained constrained by authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, as in Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and Pakistan (Lust-Okar 2004). The democratic evolution of Islamism, therefore, has remained suspect, often understood as a strategic rather than a genuine change towards democracy. Only in situations where the electoral arena is really flung open is it possible to measure the true intentions of Islamist political parties, these critics might argue, as in Algeria 1991, or, perhaps, in Egypt today. While this criticism oversimplifies the various ways in which religious political movements may evolve towards democracy, it points out the neglected question of power within much contemporary scholarship on Islamism. Do Islamists position themselves differently with respect to democracy when they are in power as opposed to out of power? Even as they democratize, do Islamists take on different democratizing roles when they enjoy an electoral majority? Or remain under the heavy hand of authoritarian elites? This paper attempts to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of Islamist political evolution under three different power realities: the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, who have governed in a democratic environment since 2002; the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in Indonesia, who have run as an opposition party since 2004 in a democratic environment; and the Movement for Society and Peace (MSP) in Algeria, who have worked in a ruling political coalition between 1999 and 2011 within a semi-authoritarian regime. Through this comparison, the paper argues that it is possible to trace out a more complex global evolution of Islamic political movements towards democracy over the last fifteen years. Across a wide range of power realities and institutional settings, Islamist political parties have begun to articulate a distinctive religious vision of democracy and given evidence of a qualitative shift, as opposed to (simply) an instrumental one, in their religious and political goals.