Are Islam and democracy incompatible? Can the fact that countries with an Islamic majority lag behind other world regions in democratization be put down to cultural exceptionalism and a kind of Islamic ‘special way’? In any event, variations on this assumption have been repeated for decades. On closer inspection, this turns out to be an Orientalist prejudice (Bayat 2007, 3). Despite the fact that most governments in the Islamic world are still authoritarian (see Chapter 5), we can already discern many democracy-like processes in the contemporary political practice of most Islamic countries that give the lie to such sweeping statements. Crucially, we must bear in mind that as recently as the twentieth century many observers considered the Catholicism of Europe's Latin states incompatible with democracy – and were spectacularly wrong.

However, in analyzing the relations between Islam and democracy we must come to terms with a number of key paradoxes. In the contemporary Middle East, there are Islamic fundamentalist groupings in many states which pay a certain amount of lip service to the idea of democracy but by no means argue straightforwardly for its establishment, and these constitute the strongest opposition to existing authoritarian relations of power. What is the logical outcome of this situation? Could ‘democracies without democrats’ arise, as political scientist and former Lebanese minister of culture Ghassan Salamé speculated as long ago as the early 1990s (Salamé 1994b)?