Max Fisher has a good take on the constitutional reforms Turkish citizens voted for on Sunday, which make the country more democratic by weakening the power of Turkey's military, which has historically acted as a secularizing force, while at the same time strengthening the political position of the Islamist party in charge:
We assume in the U.S. that any Islamic political movement, because it is chiefly rooted in and motivated by a pursuit of the ideals of Islam, must be counter to liberal democratic values. That's not a crazy belief; any religious government is inherently exclusionary, and certainly tend to be hostile towards minorities. There's also the reasonable concern that the closer a Muslim-majority state comes to a theocracy, the more closely it will resemble the world's most Islamic government of all, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The "Islamification of Turkey," as some call it, has troubling ramifications for the region's tenuous political balance. After all, AK's Turkey has not been a great friend to Israel, and its growing stature in Europe and in the Middle East will further marginalize America's most important ally. That we would prefer the governments of Muslim-majority states to be as secular as possible, then, is entirely rational.
However, as Turkey proved this week, Islamic governments are not always a bad thing. They tend to be popular, which gives them wider support and the greater ability to reform. The more people they honestly represent, the less they will have to force their will and the more they can work with local institutions for a well-functioning society. And the alternative--a Middle Eastern government that forces secular rule on a largely religious population--often does the U.S., typically its greatest benefactor, more harm than good.
Basically it's a trade-off between Turkey being more secular and more authoritarian, or more democratic and more religious. But this is exactly the problem with conservatives eager to portray "Islamism" as the enemy -- not all forms of Islamism are sinister, and framing the issue in this manner essentially discredits all forms of religiously based political advocacy on the part of Muslims, even in their own countries, as proto-extremism. You can't have a completely secular democracy in a country with a large number of observant Muslims anymore than you can have democracy in the United States without the Christian right. Enforcing secularism through authoritarianism can have the opposite of the intended effect, both strengthening the popular support of Islamists while potentially pushing them toward radicalism.
