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"By making concession after concession in the moral and cultural domains", the French sociologistGilles Kepel has observed, governments in Muslim countries "gradually created a reactionary climate of "re-Islamisation". They sacrificed lay intellectuals, writers, and other "westernised elites" to the tender mercies of bigoted clerics, in the hope that the latter, in return, would endorse their own stranglehold on the organs of state.......Western politicians have talked incessantly over the past week about the need for "stability". It's time they recognised that it's the desire for stability above everything else, including democracy, that leads to the very instability they fear. The effervescence of popular democracy may be unsettling but it is something to be cherished far more than the stability of authoritarian rule, whether secular or religious.