"4 Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Not Islamic."

By Haroon Moghul:

1) The political Islamism that ended up triumphing in Iran was a much more authoritarian interpretation of Islam....

2) Iran’s Islamist opposition to the Shah was shaped by the peculiarities of Shi’a Islam and Iranian history....

3) People who study Iran know how vexed the relationship is, and has been, between Persian cultural identity and Islam. While many Iranians before the revolution were religious in a non-political way, the country’s elite tended to see Islam and Persianness as mutually incompatible. On the other hand, Egypt is a proudly Arab society... which has never seen Islam as incompatible with their specific ethnic and national project....

4) Egypt’s revolution doesn’t have to be Islamic because Islam isn’t at the heart of the problem on the ground.... Egypt’s society is a deeply Muslim one, and the very success of this non-political religious project has negated the need for a confrontational Islam. Egyptians know their religious identity is not under threat....

As an aside, I might also add that Muslim societies often have flourishing religious institutions and practices, organic and varied. But in the case of Iran, the regime paradoxically undermined that popular and organic religiosity when they sought to enforce faith through the state. This is an argument for keeping religion and politics separate in the Muslim world: in the interest of defending both from the negative effects of the other....

Interesting. I hope it's true. That last insight — valuing the separation of religion and politics  to defend each from the negative effects of the other — has been fundamental to the separation of religion and government in American history. (Read James Madison, Roger Williams, and all the rest.)