Islamism, Democracy and Democratization and the 2011 Arab Uprisings

Will the 2011 uprisings lead to democratization in the Arab world and what role will Islamist movements play in that process?This important question exercises analysts of the Middle East, policy makers and, more importantly, the citizens of the region.It also provides a unifying theme for the three works reviewed here.The question is one of many that can be asked about the impact of the 2011 uprisings on the Middle East region.In dealing with it, we must steer between the Scylla of Western-centrism and the Charybdis of Middle Eastern exceptionalism.On the one hand, we cannot fall victim to the Western obsession with democracy that Anderson identified in her seminal and still prescient article (2006) as bedevilling US Middle Eastern studies and skewing scholarly analysis of the region's politics.On the other hand, we cannot presume that in the Middle East democracy 'does not matter' or that it matters less than in other parts of the world.The Arab uprisings of 2011 showed that democracy does matter in the Middle East region.Although the popular demand for it was not expressed under the 'democracy' label as such, the substance of it lay behind the calls for 'dignity' which, alongside 'social justice', constituted the main demands of the demonstrators.In 2011, the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, and in other parts of the Arab world, erupted in fury against the lack of accountability, arbitrariness, tyrannical practices and arrogance of the authoritarian