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.

Modern Middle Eastern history is littered with secular authoritarian rulers, artifacts of the colonial Middle East, all despised and most violently deposed. Religious political movements developed as the grassroots alternative to secular military rulers. In Iran, whole swathes of the population--including many liberal reformers who were later sidelined in the process--came together to replace the Shah with the Islamic Republic. In Iraq, many of secular despot Saddam Hussein's greatest internal opponents were religious Shia groups. And now in Turkey, the population appears to support the Islamic party's push against the military's long-held influence.

Typically, we have sought to marginalize Islamist movements by supporting secular rulers. Clearly, those efforts haven't really worked. They saw us allied us with unpopular and abusively rules such as the Shah of Iran. They also strengthened the militant fringes of political Islam, as with the violent backlashes against top-down secularization attempts in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Now the secular rulers are mostly gone and the Islamic movements, whether fringe or not, see us as an enemy, making them less likely to adopt American-style government. However, in Turkey we have a chance to encourage bottom-up liberalization by focusing on what we have in common, which it turns out is a lot, rather than our differences.