The Arab Spring makes for headline, not understanding and the linked article provides a review. We have a number of threads on the theme in the Middle East forum, each set in a national context, but none for a general discussion.

I've heard the author Olivier Roy speak @ Oxford University and was impressed, so thanks to Twitter a pointer to this long academic article:http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/si...s/Roy-23-3.pdf

It opens with:
The “Arab Spring” at first had nothing about it that was specifically “Arab” or “Muslim.” The demonstrators were calling for dignity, elections, democracy, good governance, and human rights. Unlike any Arab revolutionary movements of the past sixty years, they were concerned with individual citizenship and not with some holistic entity such as “the people,” the Muslim umma, or the Arab nation. The demonstrators referred to no Middle Eastern geopolitical conflicts, burned no U.S. or Israeli flags, offered no chants in favor of the main (that is to say, Islamist) opposition parties, and expressed no wish for the establishment of an Islamic state or the implementation of shari‘a
He is rather optimistic and some would disagree that AQ in Iraq has been defeated. On AQ:
Al-Qaeda, in short, is yesterday’s news, part and parcel of the old anti-imperialist political culture that the Arab Middle East is now leaving behind.
Lots of examples are given of how the 'Arab Spring' has twisted to adjust to local conditions and popular, sometimes democratic demands upon Islamism.

He ends with:
Instead of the secularization of society, we might do better to speak of the “autonomization” of politics from religion and of religion from politics, due to the diversification of the religious field and the inability to reconstruct religion as a political ideology. When religion is everywhere, it is nowhere. That was the underlying meaning that I took away from what Egyptian parliament speaker and Muslim Brother Saad al-Katatni said to a Salafist deputy who wanted to perform the Muslim prayer call while the house was in session: “We are all Muslims; if you want to pray there is a mosque in parliament, but parliament is not a mosque.”

The paradox of re-Islamization is that it leads to political secularization and opens the door to debate about what Islam means. This could lead to the reopening of theological debate, but that would be a consequence and not a cause of the democratization of Muslim societies.