Ennahda

That also means it's not a monolith.

The spectrum runs from the relatively moderate electoral politics of Tunisia's Ennahda Party, which helped write a democratic constitution after the Arab Spring, to the violent extremism of ISIS, which declared a caliphate and murdered tens of thousands of people.

In between, you have the Muslim Brotherhood, the AKP in Turkey, Hamas in Gaza, and dozens of other movements with very different methods and goals.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is worth lingering on because its story tells us something important about both the promise and the peril of political Islam.

This is not a small or marginal phenomenon.

It is evidence that Islam and democracy are compatible when the political culture supports that compatibility.

Tunisia, which briefly produced a democratic constitution after the Arab Spring with significant contributions from the Islamist Ennahda Party, is another hopeful but now tragic case.

Tunisia's democracy began unraveling when President Kais Saied consolidated power in twenty twenty-one, effectively ending the democratic experiment.