Across the Arab world, Islamists’ brief stints in power have failed

BEFORE 2011 many Arabs believed that, given a fair chance, Islamists would be an unstoppable force in democratic politics. This view was shared by supporters and opponents alike. The former saw Islamists as clean, unsullied by power, adept at providing social services and well-placed to run campaigns. The latter thought they would use democracy to swoop to power and then abolish it: “one man, one vote, once”, as the saying goes.

For decades, few could test this hypothesis. Islamism was the main ideological challenger to Arab nationalism, but it was repressed throughout the region. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, was officially “banned but tolerated”, allowed to perform charitable work but mostly kept out of politics. Algeria endured a brutal civil war in the 1990s after the government negated an Islamist victory at the polls. Hafez al-Assad flattened much of Hama in 1982, killing thousands, to quash an Islamist revolt.