Abstrakt
For a long time, attitudes towards politics in the Arab world were covered up by a lack of freedom of expression, distorted by post-colonial authoritarianisms and held captive by the struggle between authoritarianism and Islamist grass- root opposition. It was hard to avoid the preliminary conclusion of Islamic ex- ceptionalism, that is, a different conception of political authority in Islam.
It is commonly accepted that the political outlook of Islamists has limita- tions concerning the universality of citizen and human rights. Until the upris- ings of the Arab Spring, the debates on the political particularism of Muslim societies were largely based on limited empirical material from authoritarian contexts and thus remained of limited interest.
The recent political processes that unfold in the wake of the popular Arab uprisings help those debates to evolve. The political change in Northern Africa made the question whether Islam is compatible with democracy obsolete and posed a more pertinent question: whether Islamism is.
It also made Islamism more palpable as a subject of inquiry