However, announcing the death of Islamism may also be premature. Decades of surviving under repressive regimes have taught the Arab Islamists the art of kitman or dissimulation. They know how to hide their true colours and bide their time. If it is foolish to overestimate their strength when they are part of a broader picture, it is deadly to underestimate their capacity for doing harm when they seize all levers of power.

In Iran, too, once the Shah had fallen, Ayatollah Khomeini went to Qom ostensibly to resume teaching theology. The future Prime Minister was a French-educated engineer and author of a book on thermodynamics. His government was backed by a coalition of secular parties and groups. Iran boasted a rich spectrum of political parties, from ultra-liberal to Trotskyite, taking in conservative, Communist and social democrat. The post-Shah regime was supposed to be dedicated to eliminating corruption, speeding up economic development and giving the masses a better deal.

All the time, however, the mullahs and their minions were infiltrating the apparatus of the state, placing their people in strategic positions within the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the media, and creating paramilitary squads. They accepted elections on the basis of one man, one vote, once. After the first free elections in January 1980 there were no more elections in any real sense of the term.

Something tremendous has happened in the Arab Spring countries, something that merits being supported and protected. For the first time, almost everyone agrees that political power should come from the people with free pluralist elections as the method of ascertaining the popular will. Claims that power has divine origin and/or dynastic roots have been abandoned. What matters now is to make sure that the elections we have just witnessed in several Arab states do not turn out to be the last of their kind.