Alfred Stepan was one of the most accomplished scholars of political science and one of the pioneers of democratization studies. This latest edited volume deals with the issue of transition to democracy in the Muslim world and examines in detail what explains the Tunisian success and the Egyptian failure to democratize. Furthermore the volume offers a broader perspective on the conditions that lead democratization to succeed by taking into account cases outside the Arab world. As Stepan recognizes in the introduction to the book, Muslim countries were notably absent in the founding studies of democratization, largely because it was believed that Islam and democracy were inherently incompatible. While Stepan cannot be accused of essentializing religion and linking it to political and institutional outcomes, other transitologists were not as subtle in their arguments and blamed Islam for the persistence of authoritarian rule across the Muslim world.

This book is therefore a welcome addition to the literature on democratization because it examines political developments in the Arab world without assuming that there is some kind of cultural exceptionalism to the difficulties that democracy has encountered in the region. Leading scholars of Arab studies contribute their analyses of the Tunisia and Egyptian transition, emphasizing that the factors that led the two countries towards radically different trajectories are also shared by a host of non-Muslim countries. From this it follows that structural constraints such as the size of the middle class, actors’ beliefs and choices, the role of militaries, or the quality of the leadership of political and social groups are also what decided the success or failure of processes of regime change. In short, these factors and their different combinations are central in understanding the Muslim world, as they are in the non-Muslim one. The book is at its best in providing readers with the necessary information to move away from received wisdoms about Islam and about religiously-oriented political parties as inevitable obstacles to democratization. In so doing, the book contributes to strengthening what Stepan and other comparativists of democratization had already discovered. The examinations of cases of Muslim-majority countries and India, which has a substantial Muslim population, further strengthen the main arguments.

The book is a tremendously useful contribution for those interested in the broader issue of democratization, both theoretically and empirically. From a theoretical perspective, many of the key lessons of transitology are confirmed with the addition of a crucial one, namely the necessity of moving away from militantly secular interpretations of the democratic order built following the demise of an authoritarian regime. Stepan suggests correctly that religiously oriented political parties in the Arab world can potentially play the same democratizing role that other religious parties elsewhere have played. Taking into account some of their demands and “values” when designing new post-authoritarian institutions should not therefore be seen as giving in to obscurantism. From an empirical perspective, the extensive analyses of Tunisia and Egypt allow readers to make cross-regional and cross-cultural comparisons that speak to widely shared challenges when it comes to constructing a democratic political system.

Where comparativists of democratization will find plenty of insights, however, area-studies scholars might be somewhat disappointed as the findings presented in the book are not particularly novel to them. Students of the Arab world will find no surprises in the analyses of the Tunisian and Egyptian transitions, nor will they be intrigued by some of the debates about ideological moderation and cross-ideological coalition-building. When it comes to the role of Islamist parties, the real bone of contention both academically and in practice, Alaya Allani, Azzam Tamimi, and Rikke Haugbølle among others had already emphasized well before the Tunisian revolution that the Islamist party al-Nahda had moved away from the ideological framework of the Muslim Brothers to embrace a more local version of Islamism imbued with the values of moderation, compromise, and respect for pluralism. Conversely, Khalil al-Anani, Hazem Kandil, and Tewfik Aclimandos had already suggested, albeit to different degrees, that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was ideologically more rigid and, crucially, much more internally divided. The post-revolutionary period simply exposed the diverging trajectories of the two movements and while the outcome might have indeed been different due to the volatility of transitional times, it was not as surprising for area-studies experts to see that institutional compromise would be much more difficult to achieve in Egypt than Tunisia.

A similar point could be made about cross-ideological cooperation, which Stepan and other contributors to the volume rightly perceive as fundamental in ensuring that regime change leads to the instauration of democracy. Janine Clark, Michaelle Browers, Eva Wegner, Miquel Pellicer, and Hendrik Kraetzschmar among others have worked on cross-ideological cooperation in the Arab world for well over a decade before the uprisings, reaching similar conclusions to the ones that are found in this book, namely that cooperation is indeed possible under specific circumstances and that even temporary cross-ideological alliances can lead to considerable gains vis à vis authoritarian regimes. When authoritarian regimes are then removed, cross-ideological cooperation, where successful, can overcome mutual suspicions, as the case of Tunisia demonstrates, particularly if there is a history of it. While cross-ideological coalitions had existed in Egypt as well before Mubarak’s dismissal, they were not as deep as in the Tunisian case.

Another unsurprising element that emerges from the book is the unreliability of categories such as “Islamist” and “secular” as if they were un-problematic and mutually exclusive, particularly when associated to the supposed values they carry: Islamists are authoritarian by definition and seculars are democratic by definition. Monica Marks’ excellent chapter illustrates this fallacy in the Tunisian case, but, again, this is not a novelty for scholars of the Arab world. Steve Cook and Lahouari Addi made this point over a decade ago and Anne Wolf did so more recently by also looking at the Tunisian case. Finally, the role militaries play in transition to democracy has come again under scrutiny in the Egyptian and Tunisian transitions because of the widely diverging role that men in uniform had during and after the uprisings. Contrary to Egypt, where the army has traditionally played a central role in politics, the limited political role of the Tunisian military stems from the way in which the post-colonial state was constructed under Bourguiba. It is not unsurprising that the two institutions acted differently when faced with similar choices, as Mourad Chabbi has also explored when looking at the path-dependent behavior of Arab militaries.

Stepan’s edited volume is necessary reading for those who are interested in the dynamics of democratization, the challenges it faces, and the opportunities it provides. It is a solid contribution to transitology more generally and it has the merit of putting to rest conventional wisdoms about the role of religion in the Muslim world. It might have been interesting, though, to have a chapter looking at the achievements of the only Arab country that, according to the criteria that Stepan set, has successfully democratized. While Tunisia can legitimately claim to be a political-institutional democracy, it is far from achieving what one might expect when adopting a substantive definition of democracy. As established democracies across the world are beginning to learn, without its socio-economic element, procedural and institutional democracy might not be considered as such by a significant portion of the population.