The debate: "Better elected Islamists than dictators"

That was the proposition recently debated at Intelligence Squared. Generally these eventually wind up on both NPR and PBS in some (typically abbreviated) form, but the video of the full debate has already made it to YouTube:

You can find the results of the debate's voting at the link above or just watch the thing.

So far the situation in Egypt has turned out slightly better than I expected, but I'm still fairly cynical about the "Arab Spring."

At the moment Bangladesh is about 90% Islamic, and seems to exhibit a fairly high degree of social hostility towards non-Islamic religions but the country operates as a secular democracy. On the other hand, Turkey (~98% Islamic) seems to be getting less secular.