Both the West and the Arab rulers need to realize that the tense equation between the incumbent regimes and political Islam is not necessarily a zero-sum game. This has been learned the hard way by Algerian President Bouteflika who, through his Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation of February 2006, brought an end to a long and bloody civil war, the origins of which lay in the violent cancellation by the military of the Islamist Front’s (FIS) electoral victory in 1991.