RUTHFULLY YOURS

Egypt left a couple of enduring images to finish the year of Arab tumult. There were the long lines of patient faces, each waiting to cast the first meaningful ballot of a lifetime. There was also the young woman at a Cairo protest, beaten to the ground, her black abaya pulled back over her head to reveal a blue bra. A conscript’s boot stomps down on her exposed torso. Arab brute or Arab voter? It’s an easy choice, no matter what the Middle East’s experiment with democracy brings. And in Egypt, peaceful elections are throwing up distressing results. In the first two of three stages of parliamentary elections, Islamists have won around 70%; more than a quarter of the vote went to Salafists who practice Osama bin Laden’s creed of Islam. Liberals trail behind.

Yet any sort of civilian rule looks better with each day under the hard-knuckled generals, who took over in February from Hosni Mubarak, a general himself. On Thursday, supposedly interim military rulers raided the offices of 17 pro-democracy nonprofit groups, including three funded by the United States. A week before, security forces killed more than a dozen demonstrators.

So, no, elections and new rulers aren’t the primary threat to Egypt’s stability or future. But certainly the election rout by Islamists frames the challenge ahead. Democracy’s success depends in large measure on how Islam (and its self-styled political avatars) adapts to and coexists with pluralistic, free politics. This may require a Muslim reformation, which is no small matter. But then democracy may be the surest route to one.

Islamists have done well before in elections in Turkey and Indonesia, the closest that the Muslim world gets to mature democracies. Hardline parties in Indonesia reached a high mark in 2004, at 21% of the vote, but have fallen off since. After a few turns at the polls, says Anies Baswedan, president of Paramadina University in Jakarta, “people don’t vote for you because you’re Muslim. People ask, what are you going to deliver for us?”

This is what explains the electoral dominance of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), not its roots in political Islam. In the past decade under the AKP, Turkey escaped an IMF-run intensive-care ward and became the world’s fastest-growing economy. The rigid Kemalist secularism enforced by a dominant military was partly dismantled. In its place has emerged a more dynamic society, more tolerant of differences. The AKP does have a mild-to-festering authoritarian streak, depending on whom you believe, but that’s rooted in Turkish as much as Islamist political culture.

In any case the appeal of political Islam, which grows when religiosity is repressed by nominally secular regimes, tends to diminish over time in Muslim countries with freer politics. Why?

When the state isn’t hostile to religion, ideological Islam isn’t a bankable political issue. Elections usually turn on more pedestrian matters. The AKP re-election campaign last June was all about the thriving economy.

By supporting Islamist candidates, Egyptians aren’t voting for theocracy. Conservative lower- and middle-classes make up majorities that, for decades, were shut out of the establishment. To them, the Islamist brand suggests opposition to corruption and a common touch. For many, a vote for Islam was the most obvious rebuke to the ancien regime in a first free election.

Egypt begins this journey with serious handicaps, and comparisons with Turkey, Indonesia or Tunisia, which launched the Arab Spring early last year, can only stretch so far. Tunisia has a large, educated middle class. Most significantly, perhaps, it also has empowered women who tend to work. October elections were a good mirror to this society and the vote split evenly between moderate Islamists and secular liberal parties. Salafists there are a fringe—unlike in Egypt, where what is now the second-largest party threatens Egypt’s large Coptic Christian minority and demands the imposition of Shariah religious law.

Islam can make for an ill fit with modern civil society. You might read almost anything into the Quran and Hadiths, a million or so sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Some find inspiration for a free market; others for stoning. Muhammad warned against ghuluw (extremism) and pleaded for qist (balance) in religion, yet in recent decades the loudest voices within Islam ignored that advice.

Iranian mullahs, Saudi virtue squads and bin Ladens have drawn on Islam’s stricter precepts to justify their totalitarianism. Shariah imposes many religious duties and punishments that are outdated. It doesn’t set out rights that deserve protection. It makes few allowances for minorities or dissenters, the sine qua non of liberal democracy.

Political Islam, a good case can be made, is itself a perversion—the reformation in reverse. Calls for Shariah to become state law emerged only in the 20th century, as a result of Islam’s encounter with the West. The Quran is politically agnostic and says nothing about the preferable form of government.

After the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, political Islam grew out of the Arab world’s experiments with Western-style nationalism and socialism. In his recent book “Islam Without Extremes,” Turkish author Mustafa Akyol calls Islamists the “illegitimate sons” of the Muslim world’s hardcore secularists. Like Marxists or Fascists, Islamists want to relegate “Islam to a collectivist ‘system,’ devoid of personal religiosity.” From Mr. Akyol’s religious perspective, for mere mortals to claim to establish rule by God is sacrilege.

The Muslim Brotherhood probably won’t be easily dissuaded. If a future Egyptian or Libyan state is to be built in part on Quranic laws, however, it depends on which aspects of the Quran are chosen. Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian religious philosopher, proposes to selectively apply the Quran and Hadiths. This way, he says, Islam can be “humanized.”

Mr. Soroush’s prescriptions make him a notable Muslim Luther in waiting. After the Iranian revolution, he was Ayatollah Khomeini’s leading propagandist and adviser. He broke with Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s current supreme leader, and now lives in suburban Washington, D.C., exile. His experience of the Islamic Republic inspired one of the most thorough critiques of what happens when Islam intrudes into political life. He says the clerics became the worst kind of rulers, feeling “a right and a duty” to impose tyranny. “Islamic democracy” isn’t the goal, and it makes no more sense than “Islamic technology.” What Muslim countries need, he says, is a “just and democratic Islam.”

Imagine a society that respects religious invocations to dress or eat a certain way without imposing them. America is one; not France, whose state-dominated secularism was the model for so many Muslim leaders of the last century. The U.S. is the more religiously vibrant country. Mr. Soroush, who has a wide following in Iran, says that a mosque-state separation serves Islam best. “A religious society becomes more religious as it grows more free and freedom loving, as it trades diehard dogma with examined faith,” he writes in his collection of essays, “Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam” (2000). “This is the spirit that breaks the tyrannical arm of religious despotism and breathes the soul of free faith in the body of power.”

New Arab leaders will have enough headaches of government to occupy them for years. Islam will be just part, hopefully small, of the story of those who undertake democratic reform. Yet this may also be the best chance for another overdue experiment to reconcile Islam with modern politics. No faith that makes strong demands on its practitioners necessarily dooms itself to tyranny. As the former Polish dissident and writer Adam Michnik rather impishly says, “If Judaism can co-exist with democracy, any religion can.”

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.