Periode pasca-Arab Spring telah menjadi sebuah arena politik dimana partai-partai Islamis memainkan peran yang relatif signifikan dalam transisi politik demokratis di Timur Tengah. Meski banyak pihak menafsirkan adopsi kalangan Islamis atas nilai-nilai demokrasi sebagai sekedar upaya pragmatis, taktis, dan minim ketulusan, persoalan Islam dan demokrasi telah menjadi perhatian beberapa pemikir Islamis berpengaruh bahkan beberapa dekade sebelum pecahnya Arab Spring. Mengkaji Islamisme lebih sebagai sebuah tradisi pemikiran, penelitian ini berupaya menelusuri genealogi pemikiran kalangan Islamis mengenai demokrasi pada tradisi pemikiran Islam modernis hingga munculnya kelompok yang dikenal sebagai “neo-Islamis”. Berbarengan dengan analisis terhadap aspek-aspek doktrinal dari pemikiran kalangan Islamis, penelitian ini akan mendemonstrasikan bagaimana perdebatan intra-Islamis mengenai teologi politik tertentu dapat menimbulkan perbedaan-perbedaan penting, baik secara ideologis maupun politis. Hal ini dilakukan dengan melihat pada praktik politik partai-partai Islamis di Mesir, Tunisia, dan Maroko. Studi ini mendapati adanya kontinuitas sekaligus perubahan pada pemikiran kalangan Islamis mengenai demokrasi dari tradisi pemikiran Islam modernis dan menganalisis bagaimana hal ini memengaruhi trayek politik partai-partai Islamis di tiga negara tersebut setelah Arab Spring. Meski terdapat ambivalensi terhadap gagasan demokrasi, bahkan kecenderungan anti-demokrasi, di kalangan Islamis awal; periode pasca-Arab Spring menegaskan mungkinannya upaya rekonsiliasi antara pemikiran Islamisme dan aspek-aspek demokrasi tertentu.

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The post-Arab Spring period had been a political arena where Islamist parties played relatively significant roles in the democratic political transition in the Middle East. Despite the fact that many have interpreted the adoption of democratic values by Islamist parties as merely pragmatic, tactical effort and lacking sincerity, the question of Islam and democracy had been discussed by some prominent Islamist thinkers, even decades before the break of the Arab Spring. Approaching Islamism more as an intellectual tradition, the present study seeks to trace the genealogy of Islamist thought on the issue of democracy in the discourses of some Islamic modernist thinkers until the emergence of the so called “new-Islamist”, in the years prior to the Arab Spring. Along with an analysis on the doctrinal aspects of Islamist thought, this study will then demonstrate how intra-Islamist debates on certain political theology can cast light on important differences among Islamists themselves, both ideologically and politically. This will be done by looking at the politics of Islamist parties in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. The study notices the existence of both continuity and change in the Islamist thought on democracy from the Islamic modernist tradition and analyzes how they affect the different political trajectories of Islamist parties in those three countries in the aftermarth of the Arab Spring. Eventhough there had been an ambivalence attitude, or even a hostile tendency, toward democracy among the early Islamists; the post-Arab Spring has confirmed the possibility of reconciliation between Islamist political thought and certain aspects of democracy