It’s no secret that democratic elections sometimes bring out odd bedfellows, and the Islamists are undesirable bedfellows to many. It is, however, in the best interest of America and the West -- and indeed for the good of the peace in the Islamic world -- to accept Islamists when they come to power through the ballot box. The secret should be to tame them, not to shun them.

The West committed the original sin in Algeria when the Algerian military denied election victory to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which had won an overwhelming majority of 231 seats out of the 430. Instead of condemning the military’s obstruction of the democratic process, the West applauded it. It was this miscalculated step that reinforced the Islamists’ claim that the West is against Islam. It was here that the clash of civilizations started long before Samuel P. Huntington wrote his ominous article of the same title in Foreign Affairs in 1993.

The only way to deflate Al Qaeda’s hate-loaded jihadist message is to accept the outcome of free elections in the Muslim world. It is true that Islamist groups with terrorist agendas may use democracy as a Trojan horse to grab power and then impose their reactionary ideologies, but they could be kept on a leash by engaging them instead of shunning them and giving them the freedom to recruit more unsuspecting Muslims to swell their jihadist brigades.

The West’s message to the Hamas government should be: “We accept that you have been elected democratically, we accept that you represent the wishes of a majority of the Palestinian people, but we don’t agree with your political values and your rejection of international laws.” It should be made clear that they are not rejected due to their Islamic orientation but because they flout the UN charter by denying the existence of the state Israel, that they reject internationally sponsored peace agreements between the Palestinian authority and Israel, and that the civilized world loathes their veneration of suicide bombings as a legitimate means of resistance.

South Africa’s overture to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh should, therefore, be welcomed if the intention is to convey to him these international concerns clearly and strongly and to teach him a lesson or two about the ANC’s history, which never resorted to Hamas-style terrorism as a means of liberation.

One may also be confused by the irrationality of the American policy that encourages the Maliki government in Iraq and the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government in Somalia to engage the Islamist insurgents while rejecting the same treatment to Hamas, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon. As these groups share the same goals and ideals, one wonders why the Orwellian doublethink. It may also be questioned how Ismail Haniyeh is different from Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, a man with a checkered past and an autocrat, who has been given a clean bill by the West -- or is it “the oil, stupid,” that is more powerful than the pull of democracy and human rights?

Another brewing issue that the Muslim world is watching carefully is the wrangle taking place in Turkey between the Muslim-oriented ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AK), and military-backed secularists over the candidacy of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul for the country’s presidency. Until now the EU and the U.S. have shown sagacity in giving full backing to the democratic process and warning the military against any interference.

Although the Turkish AK is neither Hamas nor Algerian FIS, the EU-U.S support for it shows the Muslim world that the West sees things not only in black and white but in shades of gray as well. Incidentally, stretching the gray area a little wider may be all that is needed to win many hearts and minds in the region, and South Africa may have just become cognizant of this fact.