And then you have a third party saying, Vote for us we'll establish a theocracy.

Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising.

Will Egypt gravitate toward Islamic theocracy or adopt a secular government that respects minority rights? Which economic policies statist, liberal, or some combination of the two will best ensure social justice and broad distribution of prosperity?

What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy.

In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who, you can be sure, have no compunctions about using education to further their values the absolutes of a theocracy.

After more than a decade of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, its status as a threshold nuclear state has been internationally legitimized. Moreover, it has managed to compel the US to abandon its dream of regime change, and to coexist and even engage with an Islamic theocracy that it finds repugnant.

North Korea is essentially a theocracy. Some elements are borrowed from Stalinism and Maoism, but much of the Kim cult owes more to indigenous forms of shamanism human gods who promise salvation (it is no accident that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church came from Korea, too).

With this single error, he has undermined what had appeared to be a robust post revolutionary course for the first and only theocracy in modern history. The cries of God is Great! have now been overtaken by chants of Death to the Dictator! in recent demonstrations in Tehran, Tabriz, Shiraz, and other Iranian cities.

He was an indispensable ally of the West in the fight against Islamist terrorism, culminating in Ethiopia s military operation in neighboring Somalia in 2006. More recently, Meles coordinated efforts with Kenya to stage limited strikes against the al Shabaab militia, which has waged an unrelenting war to turn Somalia into a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.

What Pakistan s military strategists failed to realize was that groups like LET and JuD had local agendas as well converting Pakistan into a theocracy. Hafiz Saeed, the founder of LET and currently the head of JuD, once proudly argued that We believe in the Clash of Civilizations, and our Jihad will continue until Islam becomes the dominant religion.

A second lesson of recent events in Iran and Turkey is that the spectrum of government in the Middle East and North Africa runs from autocracy and theocracy to varieties of managed democracy. No country qualifies as a full liberal democracy that is, as a political system that combines free and fair elections with constitutional protections of individual rights for all its citizens.

It may well be female students very success and the role of educated women in opposing Iran s theocracy that led the government to seek to reverse the trend. Now, women like Noushin, a student from Esfahan who told the BBC that she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, are unable to achieve their ambitions, despite getting high scores on their entrance exams.

Khamenei s backing of the June 2009 putsch now appears to be a costly mistake. With this single error, he has undermined what had appeared to be a robust post revolutionary course for the first and only theocracy in modern history. The cries of God is Great! have now been overtaken by chants of Death to the Dictator! in recent demonstrations in Tehran, Tabriz, Shiraz, and other Iranian cities.

The question is this are Muslims ready to accept that Khomeini s dictum that Islam is politics or it is nothing is wrong, that Islam is a religion and not a form of government, and that, as in the Christian world, there is a sphere for Caesar and a sphere for God? Those in the Muslim world who want to embrace reform must be driven by the conviction that theocracy has never served as a vehicle for human progress.