1. Contesting democracy: discourses and counter-discourses -- The democratic problematique: absence not presence -- Focus and purpose -- The democratic debate -- Discursive context -- Words and worlds -- About this book -- 2. Defoundationalising democracy and the Arabo-Islamic setting -- Foundationalism -- The ethos of democracy and contestation in the Arabo-Islamic setting -- 3. Democracy as an occidentalist discourse -- Definitions and concepts -- Rediscovering the West: from al-Afghānī to al-Tahṭāwī -- Islamist counter-discourses and the politics of identity -- Imaginings of the "West" and "democracy" in Islamic discourses -- 4. Democracy as an Orientalist discourse -- Background -- Orientalism in modernist discourses -- Said and istishrāq -- 5. Contemporary Arab conceptions of democracy -- Democracy and freedom: a background -- Al-Farābī's virtuous city -- Nahḍawiyyūn: iṣlāh without dīmuqrāṭiyyaḥ -- Dimuqrāṭiyyah, ḥurriyah: a contemporary kaleidoscope -- 6. Arab women and democracy: breaking out -- Theoretical background -- "Male feminism" -- Arab women's conceptions of democracy -- Feminisation, Islamisation and democratisation -- Women and politics in the AME -- 7. The West and the sponsoring of Arab authoritarianism: Islamist narratives -- Islamists against Eurocentricism and Orientalism -- Foreign powers in the AME and democracy -- Exporting democracy: the Islamist dimension -- 8. Discoursing Islam and democracy: tests and contests, texts and contexts -- From test to contest -- From text to context.