Are democracy and political Islam simply incompatible? Is it critical to ban religious parties from Middle Eastern elections?
I don’t think you can ban any sort of political party. I’m not for banning political parties, as long as they compete fairly in elections. I suppose you can point to Turkey as an example of a country that has a government basically run by an Islamist political party, and which is still maintaining both a democracy and sort of a universal approach toward people who don’t agree. It’s a very complicated question because passions are so high. People flock to these parties because they’re desperate or angry or riled up by imams in mosques and it’s so easy under current circumstances for this to spin out of control. It’s a very delicate question — I think the answer is to go slowly. I think what happened in Iraq shows that most clearly. Here was a secular dictatorship. We destroyed it, and what emerged in its place is largely a Shiite theocracy on one side, and a Sunni movement that because of civil war conditions is itself pulled very strongly into a Sunni Islamic formation. Neither one of
