Reason for hope on the Arab Spring

A year after the Tunisian uprising, opinion is divided over the revolts it inspired across the Middle East.

Many in the West wonder whether the “Arab Spring” is heading for an “Islamist winter.” In Arab countries, too, pessimism is on the rise with some early leaders of the revolt regretting the regime changes they helped bring about.

As it happens, pessimism about the Arabs’ ability to build free societies has been a feature of global political thinking for over two centuries.

The Arabs’ first significant encounter with the modern world built by the West came in 1798 with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. The invaders claimed they were bringing the ideals of the French revolution such as ending tyranny and transforming “subjects” into citizens.

After that, in every encounter with the West, Arabs and Muslims in general were defeated and humiliated. How to face the modern Western world — one that Arabs and Muslims had played no role in forming — became the central issue of politics in the Islamic sphere.

In the 19^th century, it inspired a pan-Islamic movement known as tajaddud (“renovation”), which campaigned for Western-style institutions, modern state structures and professional armies — as well as for a reform of sharia. Tajaddud advocates called for better treatment of women and the right of girls to education.

The movement’s failure to quickly achieve these high goals prompted the same kind of pessimism we witness today. Nevertheless, over decades, many of those goals were achieved.

In most Muslim lands, the Napoleonic Code effectively replaced sharia, while the few Muslim nations that retained their independence set up Western-style bureaucracies and armed forces.

In the Ottoman Empire, accounting for half the world’s Muslims, tajaddud inspired the “re-organization” reforms in 1839. In Iran, the movement fostered the Constitutional Revolution of 1906.

As tajaddud faded, a new movement, Islah (Reform), took up some of its ideals, preaching an Islam freed of superstitions and myths accumulated over centuries. It, too, eventually faded away — after pushing religious reform into the mainstream of Islamic debate, and paving the way for a new movement: an-Nahda (Revival), which sought to build Western-style nation-states permeated with Islamic values.

By the mid-20^th century, whatever was left of an-Nahda had been buried under an avalanche of Western ideologies that came to dominate the politics of Muslim lands: Nationalism, Communism, Fascism (Ba’athism for Arabs, Khomeinism in Iran).

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