The European Union, the NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the USA are all criticizing "a government assault on press freedom" by Erdogan's ruling Islamist party. The latest move was detention of ten journalists and copying hard disks from their computers and seizing notes and books. Parliamentary elections are due in June and the harassment is aimed at secularists who oppose Erdogan's religious agenda.

How ironic that at the same time some of the least democratic Muslim-majority states are seeing shifts toward freedom, the oldest "working democracy" is moving in the other direction. In some ways this parallels the situation in Lebanon - give the Islamists an inch and they take a mile. Ditto in Gaza. The West Bank is under threat of a Hamas takeover. Pakistan has been a quasi-democracy and it too is facing Islamist pressure. Afghanistan has been a quasi-democracy for only a few years and is such an oddball case that I hesitate to even hint that its lessons may be relevant, but we see there that democracy has great difficulties capturing the hearts and minds of the people and Islamists present the major alternative/opposition. And the situation in Indonesia is far from 100% stable in this regard.

It could be that we're seeing a really strange combination of two historical trends that are to a large degree incompatible: people-power with a desire for government of/by/for -- the quintessential liberal ideal -- versus the thoroughly illiberal ideology of Islamism taking advantage of democracy's weaknesses and the peoples' least liberal instincts (submission to Allah) to replace liberal democracy with a form of governance compatible with strict Koranic teaching.

Can the experiences of Europe's conflicts between Christianity, monarchy, nationalism and feudalism provide any insights here or are we looking at a dynamic without analog or precedent? Has Islam (not Islamism but just the practice of Islam as it's been) created peculiar cultural conditions that make it extremely difficult to draw lessons from the rest of world history? Or, because people are people and "happiness" is the same everywhere, can we rely on a general, if inconsistent, shift toward more representative/responsive governance?

Islamism, by which I mean a system of beliefs that holds that all Muslims ought to be subject to a religious-political authority based on traditional Koranic teachings in lieu of any other form of organization or governance, isn't something new or innovative. Quite the opposite. But it's seeing a resurgence. I say "it's seeing..." but in truth what we're witnessing is a mushrooming of many varieties of Islamism. With every day that passes the world becomes more modern and Islamism is not compatible with modernity as we understand it. This friction might explain why Islamist-terrorists violently lash out at manifestations of the modern. Can Islamism possibly prevail over the rising tide of international social networking, globalism, travel, ubiquitous popular culture, et cetera? If not, what will its death throes look like? Will the current people-power movement make things easier or more difficult for Islamism?