Sevinç Alkan Özcan

As far as the discussions on the Muslim world have been concerned with the process of secularization, a major focus has been the question of whether Islam and democracy are compatible. The religious-oppositional-civil movements that have been revived since the 1980s, has prompted a reformulation of the question as follows: “are secularization/laicism and democracy compatible?” or, put differently, “are the enemies of democracy in the Middle East, not the Islamic parties, but the secular regimes” From this perspective, there has been a shift from the dominance of the French type of authoritarian, exclusivist and monopolistic laicism to a pluralistic understanding of secularization, influenced by the resurgence of political Islam in Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution.