After the Arab Spring:

Democratic Aspirations and State Failure

Ebrahim Afsah *

v. 0.17

1. Introduction: Instability and Institutional Failure ................................................... 2

a. Broken Societies and an Aborted Awakening .................................................................................. 2
b. The Arab Exception ....................................................................................................................... 5
c. Relativism and Reality: The Price of Inadaptation ........................................................................... 8
d. Physical Elections and Necessary Comparisons .............................................................................. 13
2. Governance: Rents and Repression................................................................... 15
a. Missing the ‘Third Wave’ of Democratisation ................................................................................ 15
b. The Authoritarian Social Contract ................................................................................................ 18
c. Now is the Winter of Our Discontent ............................................................................................ 22
d. The Absence of Politics .................................................................................................................. 25
3. Institutions: Interests and Efficiency ................................................................... 28
a. The Necessity of Politics: Power and Authority .............................................................................. 28
b. The Miracle of Politics: Accountability and Effectiveness ................................................................ 31
c. ‘Good Governance’: A Western or an Islamic Ideal?...................................................................... 34
d. Contingency, Trajectories and Performance Standards ..................................................................... 37
4. Economics: Bread, Dignity and Freedom ........................................................... 41
a. Material Base of Discontent........................................................................................................... 41
b. Labor Market: Insiders and Outsiders .......................................................................................... 44
c. Law, Institutions and Economic Performance................................................................................. 46
d. Trade, Productivity and Rent Seeking ............................................................................................ 50
5. Human Development: Growth and Frustration ................................................... 54
a. Structural Changes and Normative Resistance ............................................................................... 54
b. Family Values: Conformity and Critical Thinking ........................................................................ 56
c. Demographics and Youth Bulge ..................................................................................................... 59
d. Science and Education: Producing and Using Knowledge ................................................................ 64
6. Outlook: Elusive Stability ................................................................................. 68
a. The Persistence of Foolish Ideas ..................................................................................................... 68
b. Taking Responsibility .................................................................................................................... 71
c. Addressing Structural Failures ...................................................................................................... 74
d. Bracing for Trouble........................................................................................................................ 75

*
Associate Professor of Public International Law, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, ebrahim.afsah@jur.ku.dk,
http://jura.ku.dk/ebrahimafsah.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3002518

1. Introduction: Instability and Institutional Failure

a. Broken Societies and an Aborted Democratic Awakening

The Arab world is in deep crisis. Of the 22 member states of the Arab League,1 at least five have
essentially collapsed, their governments being unable to control their territory, uphold basic order,
let alone provide essential services: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria exist only in name today,
as their territories have fallen to competing, murderous armed groups. The life of the inhabitants
of these states is “nasty, brutish and short,” as coined by the English enlightenment philosopher
Thomas Hobbes in an influential description of life before the foundational social contract to
create the state.2

The Roman statesman Cicero wrote some two thousand years ago in his treatise On the Republic the
following about the indispensable characteristics that a political community must possess if it
wishes to survive: “unless a state maintains a balance of rights, duties and functions, so that state
officials possess enough power, deliberations of the leading citizenry and enough authority, and
the people enough freedom, it is not possible for it to remain stable.”3 This, unfortunately, is not a
description that many would apply to any contemporary Arab state. And this is in essence what
this course is all about: Arab exceptionalism.

In this short course, I invite you to join me on a journey of discovery into the contemporary Arab
state system, trying to understand why that “balance of rights, duties and functions” has proven so
elusive, why meaningful “deliberations with the citizenry” remain absent, why administratively
weak states mistake coercive power for authority, and why a minimum level of individual social,
economic and political freedom is necessary for communal stability.

Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain have experienced massive popular unrest, leading to the violent
overthrow of the government and/or massive repression. Only Tunisia holds any promise,
however tenuous, that these democratic aspirations for greater public participation and a better life

1
You can find more information about the League of Arab States on their official website: www.lasportal.org
2
The quote is taken from his most famous work, Leviathan. The term refers to the personification of the sovereign power of
the state grounded in the need to replace that terrible, chaotic ‘state of nature’ with order imposed by force from above. Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1651]). He remains a vastly influential political
thinker, for an account of his enduring influence, see Kinji Akashi, “Hobbes’s Relevance to the Modern Law of Nations,” Journal
of the History of International Law, Vol. 2 (2000) pp. 199-216; Christopher W. Morris, The Social Contract Theorists: Critical Essays on
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
3
Cicero, On the Republic, 2.30, quoted in Antony Kamm and Abigail Graham, The Romans. An Introduction, 3rd ed. (London:
Routledge, 2015), p. 31.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3002518

might one day lead to anything else than yet another autocracy. Political life in Lebanon and Algeria
remains fragile and suspended after their traumatic civil wars, Sudan saw its southern part secede
after a long, brutal and still unresolved civil war. The Comoros, Djibouti and Mauritania have all
experienced high rates of violent regime changes. Palestinians remain under Israeli occupation,
while their aspiration for equality or statehood remains as elusive as ever.

The oil-funded autocracies of the Gulf – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar–
appear stable for now, but considerable doubt remains about the resilience of a socio-economic
model built on religious extremism, rents, imported indentured labour and foreign military
protection. This was most dramatically shown by the invasion and subsequent ‘liberation’ of
Kuwait by Western troops. Only Jordan, Morocco and Oman show, for now, any semblance of
normal, but not particularly well-functioning governance.

The Arab journalist Hisham Melhem opens a piercing critique of the current state of his people in
the following troubling words, uttered in response to the massacres, mass rapes and proudly
claimed sexual enslavement of women, deliberate destruction of priceless cultural artefacts and
mass civilian casualties:

“Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent,
unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the extremism of the rulers and those in
opposition — than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago.”4

These are all phenomena that have largely gone unprotested in an Arab and Muslim world
otherwise all too willing to enact violent operettas of choreographed rage at the slimmest of slights
to the perceived dignity of a religion, in whose name these very atrocities continue to be committed.
Melhem continues:

“Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment,
the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in
their early heydays — all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions
and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious
exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf — which for the moment
are holding out against the tide of chaos — and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable
legitimacy left in the Arab world.”5

It is actually a remarkable phenomenon that a few Danish cartoons led to concerted, bloody, global
protests by large number of Muslims, including many so-called ‘moderates,’ while the abduction
and sexual enslavement of young Jazidi and Nigerian girls was and continues to be met by a

4
Hisham Melhem, “The Barbarians Within Our Gates. Arab Civilization Has Collapsed. It Won’t Recover in My Lifetime,”
Politico, (18 September 2014)., no pagination.
5
Ibid.

3
deafening silence. The serious and sustained loss of moral compass in the treatment of its own
culture and religion has had momentous practical implications, as Melhem concludes:

“Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-
destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no
one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the
Americans and Western countries?”6

Melhem’s words are tragic and powerful, yet hardly hyperbolic and difficult to dismiss. In the
following, I will investigate one of Melhem’s particular observations more thoroughly, namely that
“the promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the
season of Arab uprisings” has not been fulfilled.

Rather than announcing a democratic awakening, the so-called Arab spring that began in 2010 has
failed and instead “has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the
reassertion of absolutism.” This raises the obvious question whether there is something inherent
in the Arab, and by analogy Muslim, condition that makes them special.7 Does this condition make
them impervious to generally observable trends towards greater accountability, popular
participation in political decision-making, greater generation and fairer division of economic
wealth?

Some argue that this so-called Arab, or Islamic, ‘exceptionalism,’ stems from the existence of
specific anti-democratic cultural or religious forces, which not only make this civilization peculiarly
resistant to the norms and ideals of democracy, but of modernity more generally. The exception
refers to the curious absence of politics – the meaningful struggle over competing interests within
structured, accepted channels –, the surprising lack of solidarity, social cohesion, as well as legal
certainty and respect for human dignity in ossified, unproductive, unimaginative societies.

As Cicero’s quotation earlier showed, certain ingredients of statehood cannot be ignored if a

political community wishes to survive. They concern ultimately the creation of political institutions
in which competing interests can be articulated and agglomerated; as well as the creation of
governance institutions in which decisions can be carried out through a mixture of administrative
capability, coercive power and social legitimacy. This investigation into the institutional

6
Ibid.
7
The classic – and controversial – restatement of that position surely is Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between
Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002). Don’t trust secondary accounts of this book, but
read it for yourself. It’s message is uncomfortable but necessary.

4
preconditions for stable communal life thus points us to a second, more conventional set of
explanations for the ‘Arab exception.’8

Rather than relying on notoriously imprecise concepts such as culture or religion, I propose here
to use general social science tools to investigate the nature of the political, legal, social and
economic institutions that have developed, or failed to develop, in the Arab world. We will
investigate whether these popular manifestations were indeed a ‘democratic awakening,’ why they
occurred where they did and not elsewhere, and why they largely failed.

b. The Arab Exception: Critical Reason and Responsibility

Talking about the Arab exception requires us to address the problematic nature of ‘essentialism.’9
This term describes the belief that there is a set of attributes that are necessary for an individual or
group’s identity and function.10 This ‘essence’ is the one and only necessary attribute that defines
(and sets the person or group apart) in all areas of human existence. Likewise, there is a tendency
to treat Islam as a ‘total’ civilisation, not just a religion but as a political and social system with
divinely revealed, and thus immutable, law at its core. Insisting on the totality and indivisibility of
Islam, it is held that it constitutes the ‘essence’ of every Muslim’s being, ultimately determining
every facet of a Muslim’s actions, and thoughts.11

The aim of this exposition is not an apologia of the religion of Islam nor the denial of rather
obvious cultural problems.12 The Palestinian writer Faisal Darraj recognises cultural predispositions
as a major source of the problem. Writing in 2007 in his foreword to the first English translation
of Sadiq al-Azm’s seminal book Self-Criticism after the Defeat, Darraj sees the failure of the Arab
nations to live up to their self-chosen ‘duty’ towards the Palestinians as grounded in their inability
to come to grips with the demands of modernity, in particular critical thinking, rationality and
responsibility.13 This contrasts with the still-prevailing view in popular and official Arab discourse

8
Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 131.
9
We discussed this problem at some length in the very first lectures of my other online course, Constitutional Struggles in the
Muslim World, www.coursera.org/learn/muslim-world. You might want to head over and review these videos there.
10
You can find an in-depth philosophical discussion of the term in Richard L. Cartwright, “Some Remarks on Essentialism,”
The Journal of Philosophy (1968) pp. 615-26.
11
The literature on the application of the term to the debate about the immutability of Islamic law and its place in
contemporary Muslim societies is vast. As a point of departure, you can begin with Heiner Bielefeldt, “‘Western’ versus ‘Islamic’
Human Rights Conceptions?: A Critique of Cultural Essentialism in the Discussion on Human Rights,” Political Theory (2000) pp.
90-121.
12
An interesting and highly critical exposition of these cultural and linguistic traits can be found in Dan Diner, Lost in the
Sacred: Why the Muslim World Stood Still, trans. by Steven Rendall (2009).
13
Faisal Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” in: Self-Criticism after the Defeat, ed. by
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (London: Saqi Books, 2012 [1969]) pp. 21-28.

5
that the defeat in the 1967 Six-Day-War between Israel and several Arab nations14 – and by
implication all subsequent military beatings like the 2003 invasion and destruction of Iraq15 – were
somehow external events, as characterised by Sadiq al-Azm:

“Indeed, our use of the term ‘nakbah’ [disaster] to indicate the June War and its aftermath
contains much of the logic of exoneration and the evasion of responsibility and
accountability, since whomever is struck by a disaster is not considered responsible for it, or
its occurrence, and even if we were to consider him so, in some sense, his responsibility
remains minimal in comparison with the terror and enormity of the disaster. This is why we
ascribe disasters to fate, destiny, and nature, that is, to factors outside our control and for
which we cannot be held accountable.”16

Al-Azm cites the then contemporary Egyptian journalist, Mohammad Heikal, who described the
1967 war as follows: “We face a modern and learned foe, and there is no other solution available
to the Arab side at the line of total confrontation but to be modern and learned.”17 While this
sounds like an honest analysis of the relative superiority of Israeli over Arab forces, al-Azm isn’t
satisfied with it:

“Just as one of you will not meet an Arab who does not consider himself of the party of
charity, motherhood, and ‘commanding the good and forbidding the bad’ [the Quranic
instruction to all Muslims], so you will not find an Arab who does not consider himself a
friend of science, modernity, and progress. At this level of generality and abstraction we all
agree and assent remains compulsory.”18

Al-Azm points out that at such an abstract level the hard choices that need to be made are
deliberately downplayed. Embracing science, rationality and progress requires giving up many
things and mental states that are prized and constitute crucial elements of identity. The radical
changes in one’s personal attitude, in social organisation, in the very fabric of our lives that
embracing – not merely submitting to – modernity requires, is a painful process necessitating many
bitter political struggles, as he continues:

“Are we prepared to accept these changes and transformations, and to renounce all the
things that we prized previously, if it is demonstrated that they exert a clear resistance to
science and modernity? For science and modernity mean, for example, secularism and the
separation of church and state. Who among our responsible leaders dares openly to state

14
There are innumerable works on virtually all aspects of that conflict and, especially, that decisive war. Two recent ones are
Guy Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Gershon Shafir, A Half
Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 2017).
Both are reviewed in an openly accessible article by David Shulman, “Israel’s Irrational Rationality,” New York Review of Book (22
June 2017).
15
Again, there is a vast amount of literature. But this early article sums it all up quite nicely, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen
M. Walt, “An Unnecessary War,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 134 (2003) pp. 50-59.
16
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Self-Criticism after the Defeat (London: Saqi Books, 2012 [1969]), p. 40.
17
Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, in al-Ahram, 20 October 1967, quoted in Ibid., p. 43.
18
Ibid.

6
 this, instead of wrapping the truth inside fine-sounding generalities about science and
modernity?”19

Today, half a century later, al-Azm’s rhetorical questions have been answered: Arab societies have
by and large not been willing to embrace these changes. Faisal Darraj acknowledges, in his recent
foreword, that the 1967 defeat followed an unbroken chain of earlier defeats since the nineteenth
century, and in turn was followed by defeat after defeat into the present age, perhaps most starkly
symbolised by the Western invasions of Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.20 Darraj is clear to place
responsibility where it belongs: “like many others, [1967] was a homegrown defeat, that it did not
have its source in ‘external conspiracies’ but in persistent Arab impotence, distributed equally
among the people and the authorities.”21

Speaking of the ‘Arab exception’ implies that there is a general pattern to which Arab states and
societies do not conform. Before addressing that question, we should briefly consider what is
meant by Arab (or any other developing nation’s) “state failure” or “administrative and/or social
dysfunction” and why it matters.

Such terminology implies a yardstick against which the performance of Arab states and societies
can be measured. In line with authors such Hamilton,22 Kaufmann23 and others working at the
World Bank,24 Fukuyama,25 Radelet26 and others working elsewhere,27 I argue that such a standard

19
Ibid., p. 44.
20
Regarding the latter, see Stephen M. Walt, “What Intervention in Libya tells us about the Neocon-Liberal Alliance,” Foreign
Policy, (21 March 2011). It is available here:
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/21/what_intervention_in_libya_tells_us_about_the_neocon_liberal_
alliance\
21
Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” p. 21.
22
Kirk Hamilton, Katharine Bolt, and Giovanni Ruta, Where is the Wealth of Nations? Measuring Capital for the 21st Century
(Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006).
23
Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi, Governance Matters IV, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper
3630, World Bank, Washington, D.C. (June 2005), available at: http://www-
wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2005/06/15/000016406_20050615140310/Rendered/PDF
/wps3630.pdf, accessed on: 22 June 2015.
24
Glenn-Marie Lange et al., The Changing Wealth of Nations: Measuring Sustainable Development in the New Millennium (Washington,
D.C.: World Bank, 2011); Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury, Is Good Governance Good for Development?, United Nations
Series on Development (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
25
Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2004); Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order. From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2012);
Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay. From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2014).
26
Steven Radelet, Emerging Africa. How 17 Countries are Leading the Way (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global
Development/Brookings, 2011).
27
Thomas Risse, Governance without a State? Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013); Merilee S. Grindle, “Good Governance: The Inflation of an Idea,” in: Planning Ideas that Matter (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press Cambridge, 2012) pp. 259-82; Francesco Cavatorta, “The Convergence of Governance: Upgrading
Authoritarianism in the Arab World and Downgrading Democracy Elsewhere?,” Middle East Critique, Vol. 19(3), No. 3 (2010) pp.
217-32; Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “Developing Capacity in Fragile States,” Public Administration and Development, Vol. 30(1), No. 1
(2010) pp. 66-78.

7
for effective governance can be found in states that perform better with respect to a number of
quantifiable and important output indicators.28 As most of these better performing states have
historically developed in Western Europe and its cultural outposts – what is summarily described
as the ‘West’ –, there is an implicit assumption that studying their peculiar historical experience can
teach us something about the creation of statehood and administrative capacity in general.

I will return to the question of the suitability of the Western experience as a model for comparison
in the next section, but at this point let’s briefly return to Darraj’s affirmative restatement of al-
Azm’s central thesis of the necessity for critical rational thinking and the acceptance of
responsibility:

“For he realizes that the Arab world, like it or not, lives in a universal time, and that this
universal time compares the achievements of one people and another, without regard to
‘ancient glories,’ real or imagined. The critical comparison … depends on a demonstrative
reason relying on a comparative approach, an approach that affirms that the value of a given
society is measured against the value of another, because human societies are not found in
isolation.”29

Now, this seems like a fairly straight-forward statement in a globalised world where ideas, diseases,
capital, goods and services travel with ever greater ease. Still, these views remain highly
controversial.

c. Relativism and Reality: The Price of Inadaptation

More than four-hundred years ago, the English poet John Donne declared the essential
brotherhood of man and interconnectedness of life when he declaimed that “no man is an island,
entire of itself.” Societies do not live in isolation, just as they are linked by ties of friendship,
solidarity and affected by ideas that travel, they are also subject to economic and military pressures
in their competition with one another. Failing to compete effectively, societies risk occupation,
defeat or destruction. Through these competitive pressures, states and societies will gradually be
forced to emulate innovations from each other and gradually become more alike, or suffer the
consequences of inadaptation. The American political scientist Kenneth Waltz has called this the
‘sameness effect’ brought about by a competitive anarchical system which forcefully socialises its
members.30 Failing to adapt is costly.

28
Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock, “Solutions When the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in
Development,” World Development, Vol. 32(2), No. 2 (2004) pp. 191-212.
29
Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” p. 22.
30
Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 129.

8
These pressures are structurally determined and have thus always existed. Indeed, for many years
Muslim and Arab states and societies were powerful actors and competed successfully in that global
system. But since the advent of modernity in the late 18th century, they have found it hard to adapt.
Ever since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the decisive end of Arab and Islamic
grandeur, most important decisions affecting Arab and Muslim lives have been taken by outsiders.
The invasion and the brief occupation that followed “destroyed the structure of government in
Egypt, shook up Ottoman ayans, and reverberated to Ottoman neighbors in the Caucasus and
Arabia.”31 Thus, even if the French were unable to impose a particular social vision of their own
onto the subjugated peoples of Egypt (and later elsewhere in North Africa),32 their military
expedition was momentous for what it symbolised: the drastic shift in relative power between the
Arab and European worlds. Henceforth, Arabs were the objects of a history they no longer actively
controlled or wrote,33 reacting to rather than shaping decisions made by outsiders whose effects
were imposed on them.34

This inability to adapt to externally imposed change is the primary reason for the Arab world’s
current paroxysm of instability and violence. The eighteenth century Irish conservative political
commentator, Edmund Burke, saw the origin of the French revolution in the inability of the ancien
regime to adapt to changing social and economic realities and legitimate popular demands, dooming
the monarchic state: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its
conservation.”35

31
Douglas A. Howard, A History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 233.
32
See the opening chapter “The French in Egypt, 1798–1801” in J.C.B. Richmond, Egypt, 1798-1952: Her Advance Towards a
Modern Identity (London: Routledge, 2013 [1977]), pp. 15–30.
33
On that not insignificant point, see Nina Burleigh, Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007). Edward Saïd made a big show and dance about the imposition of such a Western ‘gaze’ upon the Oriental
persona in his vastly influential book Orientalism. Despite its importance and broad reception, I consider Saïd’s argument deeply
flawed. For an account of the cultural encounter broadly in line with that sketched by Saïd, see Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi,
Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (London: Palgrave in association with St. Antony’s College Oxford,
2001). For a stringent critique, see Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Islamism: Keynote Address to
“Orientalism and Fundamentalism in Islamic and Judaic Critique: A Conference Honoring Sadik Al-Azm”,” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 30(1), No. 1 (2010) pp. 6-13. Al-Azm’s original critique of Saïd’s argument has recently
been re-published, Idem, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” in: Collected Essays on Islam and Politics. Vol. 3: Is Islam
Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2014) pp. 27-56.
34
Regarding the impact of the invasion, see the review essay by Jackson Sigler, “Engaging the Middle East: Napoleon’s
Invasion of Egypt,” History: Reviews of New Books, Vol. 38(2), No. 2 (2010) pp. 40-44. The books reviewed are Burleigh’s book
above and Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Paul Strathern, Napoleon in
Egypt (New York: Bantam Dell, 2009).
Regarding the reaction of Muslim peoples to this shift in relative power, see Chapter 45 “Imperialism, Modernity, and the
Transformation of Islamic Societies” in Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), pp. 511–23.
35
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. by F. G. Selby (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 37; quoted in Samuel
P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 [1968]), p. 19.

9
It is their inability to adapt that has rendered Arab states often passive objects and accounts, in the
words of the Egyptian economist Fawzy Mansour, for “the exit of the Arabs from history.”36 Faisal
Darraj, the Palestinian intellectual, refers to the “tyranny of inherited habits,” which leads to “the
renewal of the defeats under different social-authoritarian conditions, and the reproduction of the
relations of backwardness in a renewed form, which allows for serial defeats that ‘expel the Arabs
from history.’”37 Referring to the book by Halim Barakat, Alienation in Arab Culture, Darraj then
goes on to draw a remarkably depressing juxtaposition of Western and Arab life:

“there is no Arab authority capable of renewing itself after it has settled into a state of
‘scandalous exceptionalism,’ and the ‘absolute fatalism’ that has triumphed at the populist
level is not concerned with earthly matters [but seeks deliverance in religion]. The final
remainder, in both cases, is an ‘Oriental particularism,’ which gives to one human side
tyranny, corruption, weakness, and immiseration, and the other side, democracy, science,
technical knowledge, the rule of law, and the rights of citizenship.”38

Darraj, like al-Azm and myself, sees modernity despite its evident costs and its inevitability, as
ultimately a positive phenomenon, due to its unbelievable dynamism, its promise of liberation and
simultaneous destruction of old certainties but also restrictions. Still, there are two critiques to our
approach towards modernity, to its evocative promise just outlined by Darraj, that I should briefly
touch upon, namely the possibility of objectively measuring governance, and the related but distinct
question of cultural relativism.

Darraj and al-Azm are explicitly asking their Arab readers to accept and take responsibility for a
state of affairs that is unflattering to the Arab psyche. Negative information that contradicts the
often-idealised way we see ourselves creates painful emotions and inner conflict. The term
psychologists use to describe this phenomenon is ‘cognitive dissonance.’ It refers to the mental
discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs,
ideas or values. It is stressful having to act in contradiction of these pre-existing beliefs, ideas or
values, or being confronted with information that contradicts these. Learning by definition
challenges pre-existing knowledge, which explains why it is often felt to be so hard for adults and
much less so for children, who are unencumbered by preconceived notions.

Because criticism is painful, it often evokes resistance. Still, I see no alternative to insisting on
universal analytical tools, common performance standards and the ascription of responsibility

36
Quoted in Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” p. 21.
37
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
38
Ibid., p. 27.

10
where it belongs. Resistance to such criticism is not limited to members of underperforming
societies, but equally unpopular in some parts of Western polite, post-colonial discourse.

Much of that discourse denies the progressive narrative of modernity as really only a cover for the
“total institutions” of modern life with its prisons, mental hospitals, intelligence services and
whatnot. According to these critics, the ambivalent nature of the modern state “denies the
possibility of any sort of freedom, either outside these institutions or within their interstices [the
cracks left between them].”39 Post-modernism’s more provocative challenges to liberalism and the
constitutional state, ultimately to the idea of democracy and the rule of law, stem from its rejection
of the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment.

Post-modernists argue that the constitutional orders that were built on enlightened premises are
by no means more liberal, more ‘civilised,’ inclusive or caring, but simply produce more subtle,
more effective and productive ‘technologies of subjection.’ In other words, because the modern
state is at best a highly ambiguous achievement and because it is inherently impossibly to compare,
let alone rank different cultures, it would be ‘chauvinistic’ and intellectually dishonest to describe
the Arab state as ‘failing’ vis-à-vis its Western equivalent. This, it is argued, would be futile because
no common normative standard of comparison can exist, because culture is always contingent and
political communities therefore only understandable in their own context. The great American
literary critic Marshal Berman dissects the position of Michel Foucault, perhaps the most
prominent post-modernist, to arrive at a damning conclusion:

“After being subjected to this for a while, we realize that there is no freedom in Foucault’s
world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything
Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break. The mystery is why so many of today’s
intellectuals seem to want to choke in there with him.”40

Berman ventures a guess about the enduring attractiveness of post-modern fatalism and passivity.
Their supposedly ‘critical’, ‘ironic’ stance make it appear pointless to resist the oppressions and
injustices of modern life and dream of liberation. But, “once we grasp the total futility of it all, at
least we can relax.”41

This sentiment is explored at length in a painful, difficult to read but fantastic book by Guido
Preparata appropriately titled The Ideology of Tyranny, in which he has the following to say about the
implications of this nihilistic school of thought:

39
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 34.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., p. 35.

11
 “The proximate enemy of postmodernism appears to be technocratic oppression and
surveillance – symbolized by the clean-shaven, monitoring engineer in a white robe – but
the ultimate target is unmistakably the belief in ‘the good.’ Foucault’s is a testimony to
reasoned despair, which strives to oppose compassionate sentiment, and which takes no
pains to reform the world’s iniquities for the sake of peace.42

Preparata stresses that post-modernism proudly celebrates the absence of a political agenda or plan
for reform. The idea of resistance to the alleged oppression of modern life that its adherents
advocate is celebrate the forces of resentment that fester “at the margins” of society and to join
forces with them in undermining the constituted authorities. The celebration of “transgressing”
established norms of decency appear to have been an end in itself, namely to keep social tension
simmering.

Not surprisingly, this school of thought has shown a remarkable affinity for political Islam in its
most atavistic manifestations. From Foucault’s enthusiastic visit to Iran at the height of the 1978
revolution, to Jean Baudrillard’s characterisation of the attacks of 11 September 2001 as “both the
high point of the spectacle and the purest type of defiance” which therefore “could be forgiven,”43
to contemporary apologetics of vile Islamist violence as somehow ‘justified’ by the unfairness of
an international system skewed towards Western interests. What is surprising is the intellectual
affinity and cross-referencing between post-modern and Islamist thought, manifested not least in
their mutual insistence on cultural relativism.44 These links are explored in the great book by Janet
Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, in which they examine the

perplexing affinity between this post-structuralist philosopher, this European critic of

modernity, and the antimodernist Islamist radicals on the streets of Iran. Both were
searching for a new form of political spirituality as a counterdiscourse to a thoroughly
materialistic world; both clung to idealized notions of premodern social orders; both were
disdainful of modern liberal judicial systems; and both admired individuals who risked death
in attempts to reach a more authentic existence.”45

If the post-modern “invitation to transgress appeared to have been an end in itself” because that
movement rejects the very notion of a universal “good,” try to imagine what its exponents would
have to say about the orgies of sexualised violence unleashed by Islamist armed groups. Foucault’s
earlier pronouncements about child abuse and about the executions during the Iranian revolution

42
Guido Giacomo Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny. The Use of Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), p. 7.
43
Jean Baudrillard, “L’esprit du terrorisme,” Le Monde, (3 November 2001); quoted in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 170.
44
Rukmini Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape,” New York Times, (13 August 2015); Kamel Daoud, “Saudi
Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It,” New York Times, (20 November 2015).
45
Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, p. 13.

12
give us a fairly good indication what he would have said about Nigerian or Jazidi girls abducted as
‘spoils of war.’46 Such a ‘philosophy of despair’ and deliberate moral debasement can be contrasted
with one of normative solidarity, insistence on epistemological equality and the liberating potential
of rational critique. In short, the non-cynical embrace of universal values and common standards
of analysis.

d. Physical Elections and Necessary Comparisons

Unlike the verbose insistence on cultural relativism and the supposedly salutary effects of the
‘spectacle’ of irrational violence, I personally embrace the beneficial effects of a stable public order
and therefore consider the state prima facie as a civilizational good. Anyone cursorily familiar with
modern Arab history – one need only to look at the two Ba’athist regimes of Iraq under Saddam
Hussain and Syria under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad – will know about the totalitarian potential of
modern state institutions, which imported coercive institutions from the West – modern armies,
intelligence services, surveillance techniques, propaganda tools, etc. – but not those corresponding
institutions enabling accountability or participation – parliaments, a free press, critical research,
freedom of expression.

But the potential of the coercive institutions of the state being taken hostage by authoritarian rulers
must not blind us to their quintessential necessity. Recalling Cicero’s statement about maintaining
a balance of rights, duties and functions for a state to remain stable, we are reminded of some of
the essential characteristics for stable governance that any state, whether modern or pre-modern,
democratic or undemocratic, rich or poor, must possess if the political community wishes to endure.

The Arab state system has been ravaged in recent years by an incredible array of external and
internal upheavals. These have destroyed many certainties in a part of the world that for much of
the twentieth century appeared like an outlier, an exception to general trends observable in the rest
of the world. One of these macro-trends since the middle of the twentieth century has been a
gradual increase in public participation in decision-making about “public things”, res publica as the
Romans called it, which gave us our modern word “republic.”

The Arab world has somehow not participated in that global movement towards greater political
and economic participation and, as a result, it has now reached a situation of unprecedented
instability. State collapse, war, economic mismanagement and social stagnation have led to a
dramatic migration of large sections of the Arab populace no longer content with being stuck on

46
Discussed in Preparata, The Ideology of Tyranny. The Use of Neo-Gnostic Myth in American Politics, pp. 49–59, 77–79, 192–198.

13
the wrong side of ‘Oriental particularism.’ As Darraj has pointed out, it only offered them “tyranny,
corruption, weakness, and immiseration,” presumably on account of some inherent cultural or
genetic predisposition, while the other human side, those in the ‘depraved’ West and amidst the
emerging economies of the Southeast, could enjoy “democracy, science, technical knowledge, the
rule of law, and the rights of citizenship.”47 This is the hidden underbelly of the supposedly tolerant,
supposedly inclusive insistence on cultural relativism that its proponents don’t want to address:
large sections of populations supposedly entitled to their ‘authenticity’ are risking their life, limb
and treasure to physically move to those parts of the world where decent, if culturally ‘inauthentic,’
governance exists.

Irrespective of the momentous implications these refugee flows have on the Western societies
faced with accommodating them, two observations can be made: first, just as in the case of
Palestinian refugees decades earlier, there has basically been no attempt made by Arab societies to
meaningfully integrate their displaced fellow Arabs, especially among the prosperous Gulf nations
fearful of their demographic balance and unwilling to share their wealth. Second, migratory flows
are not caused by war and violence alone, but are likewise strongly evident from nominally peaceful
places like Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan or Egypt.

People are fleeing the general malaise, the quiet despair of missing political, economic and social
opportunities. It is this hopelessness that constitutes, in the words of Faisal Darraj, “the apparent
proof for what … exists to a scandalous degree in a debilitated Arab reality, reproducing its misery
and achieving what is called today ‘the Arab exception,’ that is, the singularity of Arab society in
rejecting the bases of democratic life.”48

This malaise cannot be reduced to religious or cultural, let alone genetic factors. Still, the instinctive
refusal to acknowledge that some of the more odious manifestations of its religion and culture
somehow miraculously do not represent ‘true Islam’ or otherwise can be externalised is equally
misleading. The Arab journalist Hisham Melhem insists on the collective ‘ownership’ of the
malaise, urging us to see these most extreme manifestations as symptoms of something deeper and
more general:

“Yes, it is misleading to lump – as some do – all Islamist groups together, even though all
are conservative in varying degrees. As terrorist organizations, al Qaeda and Islamic State
are different from the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative movement that renounced
violence years ago, although it did dabble with violence in the past. Nonetheless, most of
these groups do belong to the same family tree – and all of them stem from the Arabs’

47
Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” p. 27.
48
Ibid., p. 23.

14
 civilizational ills. The Islamic State, like al Qaeda, is the tumorous creation of an ailing Arab
body politic. Its roots run deep in the badlands of a tormented Arab world that seems to be
slouching aimlessly through the darkness.”49

In the following modules, we will take an institutional approach to identify some of the factors that
have colluded to bring about this ‘civilizational low-point.’ We will investigate how the failure to
create and maintain reasonably inclusive, effective and legitimate institutions has produced
enduring shortcomings in governance, the economy, the arts and sciences, and human
development more generally. At the end, you will be better equipped to understand the source of
the contemporary instability and assess prospects for positive change in the future.

2. Governance

a. Missing the Boat to the ‘Third Wave’ of Democratisation

What do we mean with the term ‘Arab exceptionalism’ that you have come across in the previous
section? To understand that term, it is necessary to briefly examine what the general condition is
from which the Arab experience is said to deviate. That general experience can be described as the
spread of the basic idea that the population should somehow be involved in decisions affecting its
livelihood. This is by no means a modern idea, nor does it necessarily include all the nice things
often associated with the notion of democracy in modern discourse, such as the rule of law,
constitutionalism, etc.

Looking at the past two hundred years, we can observe that this idea has spread consistently and
globally, but not evenly. The late American political scientist Samuel Huntington describes this
phenomenon in his influential book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, as
three consecutive ‘waves.’ Each ‘wave’ is defined as “a group of transitions from nondemocratic
to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time, and that significantly outnumber
transitions in the opposite direction during that period.”50 For the purposes of this course we do
not need to concern ourselves with the inherent problems of classifying complex social processes
into the somewhat simplistic binary of “democratic vs. non-democratic.” Just be aware that the
issue is complex.

49
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
50
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1991), p. 15.

15
Huntington proposes a purely procedural evaluation, namely the existence of free, universal,
competitive elections. Accordingly, he “defines a twentieth-century political system as democratic to
the extent that its most powerful collective decision makers are selected through, fair, honest, and
periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult
population is eligible to vote.”51 You have probably already noticed, this is hardly a description
anyone would apply to any Arab state.

Huntington observed three periods in which large numbers of countries made that transition, each
followed by a ‘reverse wave’ in which some democratic gains were lost again:

First, long wave of democratization 1828 – 1926

First reverse wave 1922 – 42

Second, short wave of democratization 1943 – 62

Second reverse wave 1958 – 75

Third wave of democratization 1974 – present52

Third reverse wave of “illiberal democracies” 1995 – present53

What drives a nation towards democratic governance? The ‘first wave’ was caused by the long-
term demonstration effect of the French and American revolutions and the manner in which
republican ideas were received into a restive European body politic. If interested, you can find
more on this topic, for instance, in Albert Hourani’s classic book, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,
1798–1939,54 which discusses how these same ideas came to influence an important, growing, but
ultimately still-born, Arab democratic movement. Looking at the long-term institutional and
ideational origins and effects of the European revolutionary precedent, I also refer you to an
interesting recent comparison by two American academics, Steven Philip Kramer and Judith
Yaphe, “The European Spring of 1848 and the Arab Spring of 2011: Lessons to Be Learned?”
They conclude:

51
Ibid., p. 7.
52
Ibid., p. 16.
53
Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76(1), No. 1 (1997) pp. 22-43.
54
Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

16
 “If 1848 proves anything, it is that the significance of great revolutionary upheavals emerges
only slowly and long after the barricades have been torn down. It is clear that 1848 was not
so much an end as a beginning; it is too early to tell how the Arab Spring will end.”55

According to Huntington’s reading of the historical record, the ‘second wave’ of democratisation
was caused by the demonstration effect of Allied success in World War II, which led to a “pervasive
and lasting change in the intellectual environment of politics. People in most countries came to
accept – if not to implement – the rhetoric and ideas of democracy,” that is open, competitive
participation in decision-making.56 Importantly, the simultaneous ideological competition with
communism reinforced the basic idea that it is the population that holds power and that
government should be for the benefit and with the participation of the common person.

But the Arab world remained by and large under colonial domination well into the 1950s and post-
independence politics generally have been turbulent and violent. We can summarise the period
immediately following colonial domination as “the politics of family rule,” as twenty-one “Arab
states or statelets had as their head of state a king, amir, shaikh, sultan, bey or imam drawn from a
family that had either established or been given hereditary right to rule.”57 Five of these – Egypt,
Tunisia, Iraq, Libya and North Yemen – were deposed by military coup d’états in the 1950s and
1960s, leaving fourteen monarchies in the Gulf – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and
the seven members of the UAE – plus Jordan and Morocco to survive to the present day.

Lebanon achieved independence from a much weakened and itself occupied France in 1943 and
Syria followed suit in 1946. In both countries, post-independence politics led to much turmoil and
instability until a civil war and a military coup d’état, respectively, ended electoral politics.
Mauritania achieved independence from France in 1960 and immediately established a one-party
dictatorship. The Comoros achieved independence in 1975 from France and entered at least thirty
years of political turmoil and violence. Djibouti achieved independence from France in 1977 and
followed the same pattern. Somalia achieved independence from Britain in 1960 and by 1969,
following a coup d’état, established a one-party dictatorship, which in 1991 collapsed into a bloody
and ongoing civil war, making the country the “quintessential failed state.”

These patterns are emblematic of the experience of much of the developing world, where
democracy has been slow to take root, primarily because the social and economic mobilisation
caused by rapid modernisation created expectations, dislocations and polarisations that immature

55
Steven Philip Kramer and Judith S. Yaphe, “The European Spring of 1848 and the Arab Spring of 2011: Lessons to Be
Learned?,” Mediterranean Quarterly, Vol. 25(4), No. 4 (2014) pp. 45-63, p. 46.
56
Huntington, The Third Wave, p. 47.
57
Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 40.

17
political institutions proved unable to contain or channel constructively. The fragility of the state
machinery and the instability of political life created ample opportunities for determined “men with
a moustache,” often with a military background, to take over fragile political and administrative
systems and turn them into seemingly strong, repressive autocracies. We will return to the logic of
the authoritarian bargain.

The still ongoing period of the ‘third wave’ of democratisation began replacing autocracies with
more inclusive, rule-bound polities, beginning with the revolt by progressive Portuguese officers
against one-man rule in 1974. Huntington offers a particular causal explanation for the ‘third wave,’
which has particular relevance for the Arab world. He argues that the primary driver towards
electoral democracy is the inevitable decline in the legitimacy and governmental performance of authoritarian
regimes. The inability of authoritarian regimes to respond effectively to the economic and debt
crises in the aftermath of the oil price shock of 1974 began, in this reading, an enduring crisis of
legitimacy due to the outlined performance dilemma, that is the inability of any government over time
to meet the expectations of the populations with respect to its ability to deliver output.

This very logic is well epitomised in the problems faced by fascist Portugal, Spain and Greece
during the 1970s or Communist Poland during the 1980s in keeping the lights on amidst crushing
debt payments, unsustainable expenditure for military coercion and economic stagnation. These
fiscal problems led eventually to the spread of more inclusive politics and more sensible economic
policies throughout the ‘third wave’ and dramatically gathering momentum after the fall of
communism in 1989.

Ironically, it is these very factors that account for the relative resilience of the Arab authoritarian
exception. The fiscal and trade hardships caused by the oil price shock of 1974 pushed many
authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world over the edge economically, but simultaneously
these factors sheltered Arab regimes from popular pressure. As the rest of the world faced the
‘reality check’ imposed on unpopular and unproductive regimes aching under much higher energy
bills, this very money was flowing to the Arab world and permitted a very peculiar social contract
to take hold.

b. The Authoritarian Social Contract and the Absence of Politics

Second only to the 1967 defeat, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War had momentous implications. Militarily,
it restored a certain sense of self-worth to the badly bruised Arab collective psyche, it reduced
Israeli resistance to a negotiated peace, and it prepared Egypt’s eventual desertion of “the great
cause” of the liberation of Palestine in favour of an opportune separate deal. That war and its

18
aftermath effectively ended the charade of both Arab unity and hope for a military solution. The
‘essence of Arabism’ became successively reduced to an ever more narrowly defined localised
conflict from which the rest of the Arab world essentially disengaged. In Darraj’s words:

arriving finally at the Oslo Agreement that reduced ‘historical Palestine’ to a collection of
contiguous prisons. Two things are clear in all of this: the renewal of the defeats under
different social-authoritarian conditions, and the reproduction of the relations of
backwardness in a renewed form.58

These two consequences of the catastrophic 1967 military defeat – the renewal of political and
social authoritarianism, and the renewal and perpetuation of backwardness in new forms –really
become entrenched after the 1973 war. Much more than the military and geostrategic realignments
that ensued – Egypt’s defection from a unified Arab front and shift into a de facto alliance with
Israel under American auspices – it is the economic consequences of that war that matter.

Led by Saudi Arabia, which despite its military insignificance and extreme reliance on American
protection sought to compete for leadership within the Arab world, the major Arab oil producers
instigated an oil embargo against the United States and certain Western nations to punish them for
their support of Israel. By the time it ended five months later in March 1974, the embargo had led
to a quadrupling of oil prices. Prices remained thereafter structurally much higher, fuelled by the
next oil price shock in 1979, as a result of the Iranian revolution and subsequent war with Iraq,
which affected production in both countries. The rise in oil prices had a massive negative impact
on the global economy, including pressures for greater political accountability in many autocratic
energy-importing countries.

In the Arab world, it had the opposite effect, because all this money was flowing there. The
embargo thus led to an unprecedented fiscal windfall in exponentially grown oil revenues, either
directly for the oil producers or indirectly through inter-Arab aid payments, remittances, etc. This
essentially free and now dramatically larger income, that is revenue for which very little local
productive effort was needed, permitted Arab regimes to dispense with the most central function
of any state: to collect revenue in order to pay for essential services, primarily the provision of
internal and external security.

Most of the enduring pathologies of Arab governance had been well-established prior to 1973, but
they now came to full bloom. Following independence, all Arab nations looked to the state and
the public sector as the central actor in a political-economic system aimed at redistribution and
equity. Following then fashionable intellectual models, Arab states pursued agrarian reforms and

58
Darraj, “The Persistence of the Defeat / The Persistence of the Critical Book,” p. 23.

19
heavy nationalisation of banking, industry, insurance and trade; they relied on import-substitution
rather than export-driven models, and the protection of non-competitive local industries shielded
behind tariff walls. In a paternalistic vision, the state was given a central role in the provision of
welfare and social services; and the political arena was envisaged as essentially non-competitive and
‘organic.’ Irrespective of the particular ideological flavour of the day, whether pan-Arab, Arab-
socialist, Ba’athist, etc., this latter corporatist vision of political life entailed considerable
centralisation and governmental control of all avenues for collective political action, that is the
pursuit of competing interests through political parties, trade unions, professional and civic
associations, etc.59

These arrangements were not peculiar to the Arab world. This classic ‘authoritarian bargain’ could
be found in many places, and refers to citizens’ willingness to accept political exclusion in return
for state provision of services, employment, subsidies, health care, housing, education and other
benefits. Central elements of this bargain became entrenched in post-independence constitutional
charters, statutes, policy declarations, etc. in which material entitlements of workers and citizens
and the responsibility of the state to provide work and welfare were laid down.60

Under the banner of various ideologies, normal social and political life in Arab societies was
perverted to the demands of an authoritarian state. These attitudes, that laid the foundation for the
enduring pathologies of Arab political thought, began after independence but gathered strength
through the influx of easy money after 1973. Melhem expresses it as follows:

“It took the Arabs decades and generations to reach this nadir. It will take us a long time to
recover – it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime. My generation of Arabs was told by both
the Arab nationalists and the Islamists that we should man the proverbial ramparts to defend
the “Arab World” against the numerous barbarians (imperialists, Zionists, Soviets) massing
at the gates. Little did we know that the barbarians were already inside the gates, that they
spoke our language and were already very well entrenched in the city.”61

The massively increased income after 1973 permitted Arab governments to take this existing vision
and dramatically expand the role of the public sector as a conduit for patronage and pliancy. The
availability of very large revenues for which very little if any political accountability was owed,
encouraged extremely ambitious, often hugely wasteful state-driven development policies. And it
cemented popular attitudes towards the state as the chief dispenser of jobs, welfare, benefits, social
status, etc. In this paternalistic vision, the state was giving not taking. If the slogan of the American

59
Magdi Amin et al., After the Spring. Economic Transformations in the Arab World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.
32.
60
See the overview of constitutional provisisons in Ibid., pp. 34-36.
61
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”

20
war of independence had been “no taxation without representation,” the bargain in the Arab world
was the opposite: “no taxation, therefore no representation.”

The rentier nature of the Arab state effectively isolated it from the kind of pressures that operated
elsewhere. The Arab state, consequently, seemed stable and strong, with demands for popular
participation either absent or easily supressed by over-staffed bureaucracies and coercive organs.
This has been described as the curious phenomenon of the “absence of politics” within Arab
societies, where people’s lives remained determined by tribal, family, and informal factors, while
formal institutional channels for social action remained curiously underdeveloped and under state
control.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama notes correctly and eerily prescient in his 2006
foreword to the re-edition of Samuel Huntington’s classic 1968 account, Political Order in Changing
Societies:

But the degree of overall stability is surprising. The Arab Middle East, for example, has seen
relatively little political violence since the end of the Lebanese civil war, with the exception
of Iraq and the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the post-1968 period, long-serving
leaders in Morocco, Libya, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt either have turned over or are preparing
to turn over leadership to their sons. Indeed, many observers argue that the region is too
stable; the political stasis that has overtaken most regimes there has blocked political
participation and bred resentment.62

As we now know, that apparent stability did not last, and was largely swept away by the so-called
Arab spring. What caused these rebellions? Essentially two, interrelated reform failures: political
and economic. In other words: the failure to adapt to a changing material world.

Politically, Arab societies failed to create open and pluralistic systems in which competing interests
could be articulated and ideas debated. This left citizens with few avenues to participate in civic or
political discourse, let alone governmental decision-making. This absence of political democracy
occurred despite rapid advances in human development funded by external rents, that is rising
standards of living, health care, education, etc., the combination of which made the Arab world
highly exceptional.

Economically, growth was almost exclusively rent-financed and driven by consumption and
sheltered unproductive industries. The distribution of benefits was highly unequal, extremely
inefficient, and totally unconnected to local rates of productivity. With exploding demographics,
highly volatile and secularly falling oil revenues, and extremely uncompetitive domestic economies,

62
Foreword in Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. xv.

21
state welfare could not keep up. The benefits disbursed by the state – public sector employment
and welfare transfers – that the populations had grown accustomed to and on which the stability
of the authoritarian social contract relied, became fiscally unsustainable. States could simply no
longer afford to increase the size of the civil service to give jobs to large sections of a rapidly
growing population. The result is that

Arab economies became highly dualistic, with insiders who received benefits from the state
and outsiders who did not. … Monopolized, top-down corruption was an instrument for
the capture of the polity and economy.63

It is this dual failure, namely the failure to create political institutions capable of channelling
meaningful articulation of grievances and search for equitable solutions, and the failure to create
the preconditions for a labour market able to absorb growing numbers of job-seekers, that account
for the structural instability of the Arab body politic entering the twenty-first century. This dual
failure put the underlying social contract under unprecedented stress, which violently unravelled
after 2010.

c. Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

The performance dilemma postulates that all governments lose popular legitimacy over time, as
they fail to meet performance expectations, which leads to louder calls for change and thus popular
participation in decision-making. Authoritarian regimes responded to the normative expectations of
their populace – not least stemming from the rising prestige of the idea of democracy described in
the previous video – by stressing their ability to provide superior governance outcomes, such as social
stability, economic prosperity, social justice, etc. compared to the often-chaotic popular regimes
they had replaced. In these claims, authoritarian governments benefitted from what Huntington
terms ‘negative legitimacy’, that is the support they initially enjoyed by being distinct from the
turmoil and/or colonial domination that they had replaced when they came to power. Pointing at
the turmoil of formalistic, unruly democratic politics, the autocrat proudly proclaims: “I alone can
fix it!” And because the turmoil had been real, people are willing to believe him.

This positive popular disposition is often maintained and reinforced by an ‘authoritarian social
contract’, that is welfare transfers in return for political docility,64 likewise described in the previous
video. But as the memory of the problematic aspects of the ancien régime wanes, the strength of that
‘negative legitimacy’ declines and the authoritarian government will be measured by its actual ability

63
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 31.
64
Ibid., pp. 34-38.

22
to produce desirable governance output, primarily stability and prosperity. Eventually, like any
other government, it will fail to meet rising expectations, but the authoritarian nature of the political
system will make it impossible for the population to distinguish between the government and the
political system as such, leading ultimately to the gradual de-legitimation of both.

This ‘performance dilemma’ is one of the strongest, yet underappreciated strengths of reasonably
participatory regimes. Yes, democratic decision-making procedures are often slow and
burdensome, and participation often hinders efficient implementation. The most impressive
performance of the Chinese government over the past forty years is often touted as indicative of
these inherent flaws of democratic politics.65 Yet, while there may be many reasons to be sceptical
of the supposed normative superiority of democratic politics, and despite its unavoidable
inefficiencies in both decision-making and implementation, there is one pragmatic, long-term
strength that often goes unnoticed. It is this very aspect that came crushing down on the Arab
body politic. As Huntington writes in his explanatory account of the spread of democracy during
the ‘third wave,’ it is precisely the separation between procedures and rulers, so emblematic of
democratic politics but unknown to autocracies, that allows the political system to weather difficult
times:

“The effort to base legitimacy on performance, however, gave rise to what can be termed
the performance dilemma. In democracies the legitimacy of rulers usually depends on the extent
to which they meet the expectations of key groups of voters, that is, on their performance. The
legitimacy of the system, however, depends on procedures, on the ability of voters to choose their
rulers through elections.”66

Clearly, elections are a minimal definition and many have argued that a more inclusive definition
of ‘true democracy’ is needed, some version of the liberté, egalité, fraternité emblematic of the French
Revolution is needed to allow a political culture that permits effective citizen control over policy,
responsible government, honesty and openness in politics, informed and rational deliberation,
equal participation and power, and a host of other civic virtues.67 Such a culture is largely absent in
the Arab world.

Surely, Islam has something to do with the failure to develop such an open, inclusive, constructive
political culture. Islam as a social and political idea, as a legal system based on ‘sacred law’, as a
reactionary theology, and especially as an intellectual refuge for those yearning for ‘authenticity’
amidst the turbulence of a modernity forced upon ancient societies from outside. Fouad Ajami

65
Eric X. Li, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” New York Times, (18 February 2012).
66
Huntington, The Third Wave, p. 50, emphasis added.
67
Ibid., p. 9.

23
described Islam in this vein in his important book The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and
Practice since 1967,68 as “a language of refusal.” Islam permitted the colonised Arab to differentiate
his identity from that of the, in virtually every other respect superior, identity of the coloniser.
Ajami relies here on the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who had described the colonial encounter
as a “clash of selves,” in which religion became a refuge, an escape from a hostile, incomprehensible
world, a means to defend one’s authentic identity amidst the all too evident, overwhelming
experience of failure and inferiority. Because, as Geertz noted, “the only thing the colonial elite
was not and, a few ambiguous cases aside, could not become was Muslim.”69

There is a tendency – by both Western critics and Islamists themselves – to treat Islam as a ‘total’
civilisation, not just a religion but a political and social system with divinely revealed law at its core.
Insisting on the totality and indivisibility of Islam, it is held that it constitutes the ‘essence’ of every
Muslim’s being, ultimately determining every facet of a Muslim’s actions, and thoughts. So, yes,
Islam is certainly part of the problem, primarily because it has prevented an honest, critically
rational examination of social ills and a pragmatic, solution-oriented approach to resolve them.
These issues are discussed at length and with much persuasive force by Sadiq al-Azm in his already
presented Self-Criticism after the Defeat, and his piercing Critique of Religious Thought.70

But much more prevalent than theological impediments have been deliberately destructive policies
pursued by authoritarian rulers trying to prevent the emergence of alternative power centres
undermining their rule. We recall that the ‘authoritarian social contract’ has been based on a
peculiar paternalistic vision of the state, personified in the ruler, centrally dispensing welfare, jobs,
social services, with normal political divisions over competing interests denounced as unnatural
and divisive.71 These strategies created societies largely devoid of public life, without any of the
institutions necessary for the formulation, contestation and implementation of political ideas. The
resulting states looked stable and strong, but were ill-equipped to deal effectively with recurring
problems, let alone external shocks.

Fouad Ajami sees this as the key weakness and catastrophic legacy of Arab autocrats. In a
perceptive article from 2005, The Autumn of the Autocrats, written after the forceful removal of
Saddam Hussain and discussing Syria’s worsening internal and regional situation, he writes:

68
Foad Ajami, The Arab Predicament. Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967, 17th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press/Canto, 2007), p. 68.
69
Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 64.
70
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Critique of Religious Thought (English Translation of Naqd al-Fikr ad-Dini), trans. by George Stergios and
Mansour Ajami (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2015).
71
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 32.

24
 “Hafiz al-Assad, who established the regime, may have lacked Saddam’s megalomania, but
at the heart of his government was the cult of the ruler and his iron fist. In Syria as in Iraq, a
generation of peasant soldiers and merciless ideologues took the society apart and trumpeted
their pursuit of a new social order, only to create a system of political sterility and economic
plunder. … It has the strengths and weaknesses of sectarian control: the secretiveness, the
devotion to the clan, the subordination to the leader, and the brittleness at the center of it
all.”72

Whatever therefore the peculiarities of Islamic theology and Islamist ideology, we can identify the
difficulties the Arab world has had with the establishment of democratic politics as primarily a
result of the toxic institutional structure created by successive autocratic regimes. This lack of
functioning institutions largely explains why the “promise of political empowerment, the return of
politics, and the restoration of human dignity”73 that had been associated with the Arab Spring
remained unfulfilled.

d. The Absence of Politics: Fear, Stability, Institutional Decay, and Polarising Elections

All Arab states, without exceptions, relied on terror and intimidation to impose order. As Roger
Owen summarises it: “The bottom line as far as state control was concerned was the presence of
the army and the police, backed up by the many intelligence services, the secret courts, the torture
chambers and the prisons.”74 This is not to say that some regimes did not start out with genuine
popular support, the Front de la Libération Nationale in Algeria or Nasser in Egypt stand out in this
respect. Furthermore, the enforced retreat of foreign businessmen and traders, coupled with
import-substitution policies fuelled by large oil incomes, the massive expansion of education and
the public sector, as well as land reform offered great opportunities to large sections of the
population. Nevertheless, as Owen makes clear: “no regime was prepared to share power with
more than a limited number of chosen collaborators; organized opposition was ferociously
crushed; and all rulers were careful to cultivate an atmosphere of arbitrariness and fear.”75

As noted by the Hungarian writer Georg Konrad in the context of Communist authoritarianism,
violence, caprice and persecution were not accidental, but the system itself required political
prisoners. Some regimes, like those in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan or Algeria, managed to “create great
order with little terror,”76 as Konrad would have it, but others, especially the Ba’ath regimes in Syria

72
Foad Ajami, “The Autumn of the Autocrats,” Foreign Affairs (2005 May/June) pp. 21-35.
73
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
74
Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 30.
75
Ibid.
76
Georg Konrad, The Loser (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 205.

25
and Iraq, relied on fear as a fundamental basis of their power. As an example, take a look at this
live sequence from Iraqi TV, showing the moment Saddam Hussain established dominion over
party, state and society.77

Christopher Hitchens, who narrates this video, argues that Saddam’s character justified the Western
invasion of the country he ruled, a position I emphatically reject. Still, the video illustrates the kind
of regime he built. The Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya’s influential book Republic of Fear: The Politics of
Modern Iraq describes the peculiar pathologies that arise when a state relies almost exclusively on
brute force and terror to carry out its orders.78 Because fear is most pervasive and effective when
terror can strike unpredictably at any moment, arbitrariness is a deliberate element characteristic of
the state’s exercise of its power.

Imagine this legacy of authoritarian rule, the deliberate destruction of any semblance of legal
certainty, procedural stability, let alone toleration or civility, the ruthless suppression of any
rudiment of alternative organised public life in civic or professional associations, trade unions,
sports clubs, educational institutions, etc. The excellent film by Leyla Bouzid, As I Open My Eyes
(À peine je ouvre les yeux), shows the pervasively suffocating atmosphere of social and patriarchal
convention, political repression and pervasive, often sexual, violence by the state.79 The film gives
you a decent impression of life under even the relatively benevolent Tunisian dictatorship prior to
the uprising.

It is this suspension of public and political life, the almost complete absence of any channels for
organised communal or artistic expression of dissatisfaction, that made the aftermath of the Arab
Spring so predictably disappointing. Hisham Melhem gives here a piercing analysis of Egypt that
likewise applies to all other Arab states:

“In a region shorn of real political life it was difficult for the admittedly divided and not very
experienced liberals and secularists to form viable political parties.

So no one should be surprised that the Islamists and the remnants of the national security
state have dominated Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. In the end, the uprising
removed the tip of the political pyramid — Mubarak and some of his cronies — but the rest

77
Taken from the documentary ‘The Hitch’ A Christopher Hitchens Documentary, by Kristoffer Seland Hellesmark, 2014. It can be
found here https://vimeo.com/94776807.
A different narration of the event can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUktJbp2Ug.
78
Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998
(1989)).
79
For a brief description, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_peine_j%27ouvre_les_yeux. You can find the video in
full length here: https://youtu.be/YOtdwRhBeO4.

26
 of the repressive structure, what the Egyptians refer to as the “deep state” (the army, security
apparatus, the judiciary, state media and vested economic interests), remained intact.

There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political
movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite
forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious
monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies.”80

Now try to think what this pervasive absence of functioning political institutions amidst a distorted,
paranoid political culture means for the likelihood that elections can yield stable, constructive
polities.

Given the global normative consensus around the democratic principle, virtually all international
efforts today stress the importance of elections as a means of establishing legitimate governance.
But elections rarely ensure the necessary stabilization of a fractioned society. In fact, elections can
easily contribute to further polarization if they are held in an environment of intense competition
over power and resources, and amidst an immature institutional framework. The reason elections
have become the instrument of choice of many international efforts is the relative ease with which
they can be implemented, as well as the high normative premium attached to the idea of popular
sovereignty. This sentiment has somewhat flippantly if accurately been summarised by an American
academic:

“you must hold elections. It does not matter a great deal who wins. Hold elections and
proclaim it a democracy, even if it is flawed. We must call it a democracy because that is
what we stand for and that is what will enable the administration in power to claim success.
It may be only an electoral or limited democracy, not liberal or pluralist democracy, but
some democracy is better than none. Then what you do is you hope.”

Unfortunately, that hope has largely not been borne out in the Arab world, with the notable
exception of Tunisia. Elections in the absence of the necessary institutional and cultural framework
have from Algeria in the 1990s to Iraq after 2003 to Egypt after 2011 led to highly polarised
outcomes and considerably contributed to societies fracturing along ethnic, religious and political
lines. It is thus obvious that elections in themselves cannot deliver a society that, at a minimum, is
committed to establish what the German-American political scientist Karl Deutsch half a century
ago in a different context called a ‘security community,’ “in which there is real assurance that the
members of that community will not fight each other physically but will settle their disputes in
some other way.”81

80
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
81
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical
Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 5.

27
I have encountered this willingness when speaking to Tunisian Islamist politicians, whose own
experience of torture under the ancien regime has inoculated them against absolute truths, absolute
means and the desire for revenge. Elsewhere in the Arab world, however, this willingness to
construct a ‘security community’ remains largely absent.

3. Institutions

a. The Necessity of Politics: Power and Authority

In previous sections, we encountered some of the inherent difficulties with democracy in immature
political settings, especially those with an aggressive authoritarian past. Still, the insistence on a
purely procedural definition – competitive, regular, universal, and free elections – remains useful.
This obviously begs the question why elections, that is the belief that the governed should have a
say in governance, are considered important. Ultimately this goes back to the basic distinction
between “power” and “authority,” again a distinction that is not new and that we already
encountered with Cicero. Remember, he deemed it necessary that “state officials possess enough
power, [conduct sufficient] deliberations of the leading citizenry and [thereby acquire] enough
authority.”

My students, online and in person, know that no course that I teach would be complete, if I
wouldn’t somehow relay back to one of my intellectual heroes, Max Weber. (Here you can see a
poster in my office that my students made for me after a summer course on Muslim governance,
in which I presumably overstated my debt to him.) Now, this German sociologist and lawyer
formally distinguished between power and authority. Power is the, eminently necessary, ability to
coerce compliance with orders, generally through physical force or the threat thereof. The video
you saw earlier showing Saddam Hussain publically executing those among the Ba’ath leadership
who had dared to second-guess him is an excellent manifestation of “power”: because non-
obedience is severely punished, subjects and lower agents of the state will obey the commands of
the ruler, in Weber’s deliberately dry definition, “without regard to the actor’s own attitude to the
value or lack of value of the content of the command as such.”82 If you want to survive in Saddam’s

82
Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2005), p. 159;
Idem, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), p. 215.

28
Iraq, Assad’s Syria, the Sa’ud’s Arabia, and many other places, open defiance to the ruler is not an
option and disobedience on principled grounds literally suicidal.

So, something else is necessary, as both Cicero and Weber acknowledge. Weber thus distinguishes
between ‘power’ (Macht) and ‘domination/authority’ (Herrschaft). Power is defined as the
“probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will
despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.”83 Brute force deployed by a
warlord, criminal or thug meets this minimum criterion. Authority, by contrast, requires the
recipient of the order to accept the order, it is therefore “the probability that a command with a
given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons; ‘discipline’ is the probability that
by virtue of habituation a command will receive prompt and automatic obedience in stereotyped forms,
on the part of a given group of persons.”84

‘Power’ is therefore a necessary but insufficient quality, any organised system of control will require
some minimum degree of ‘authority,’ because orders must be carried out promptly, automatically
and reliably, without the need for physical control and coercion in every instance. Such a habit can
be induced by fear, as we have seen. But that is costly in terms of the means directly necessary to
induce fear, but also in terms of the indirect cost to society and economy resulting from the
distorting and ‘chilling’ effects of a system of pervasive repression. Culture, science, education, they
all require a reasonable degree of freedom to flourish, just as the economy requires a decent degree
of regulatory predictability and fairness.

In Weber’s formulation, again going back to much earlier insights as already expressed by Cicero,
‘authority’ requires therefore something more than brute force or fear. He characterises it as the
acceptance by the governed of the existing order as legitimate, because “every genuine form of
domination implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an interest (based on ulterior motives
or genuine acceptance) in obedience.”85 That interest in obedience therefore derives from the belief
that the existing order meets the needs of the person following orders. Again, fear can be a substitute
for such a genuine interest. But because there is no positive association with the existing order
beyond the desire to avoid punishment, the order will be inherently unstable, irrespective of the
appearance of strength so ostensibly displayed by authoritarian regimes.

83
We can for these purposes ignore his more granular distinction of ‘power’ into Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 38;
Weber, Economy and Society, p. 53.
84
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 38; Weber, Economy and Society, p. 53.
85
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 157; Weber, Economy and Society, p. 212.

29
Weber distinguishes three ‘ideal types’ of how a genuine interest in the continuation of the order,
that is the voluntary acceptance of authority can be established:

(a) rational/legal authority, “resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right
of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands;

(b) traditional authority, “resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial

traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them; and finally

(c) charismatic authority, “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or

exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed
or ordained by him.”86

Arab states have mostly relied on a mixture of traditional and charismatic authority, with the former
being by far the most dominant, as exemplified in the many kings, emirs and dynastic presidential
regimes. Even those regimes that began on charismatic grounds, most notably perhaps Gamal Abd
el-Nasser in Egypt, eventually reverted to some variation of traditional authority, perhaps best
symbolised in the attempted or successful dynastic transitions from father to son in nominally
presidential, often ‘revolutionary’ regimes. This pattern of legitimacy generation explains also the
continued importance of Islamic law and tradition.

Rational/legal authority, in contrast, has not enjoyed a great deal of political traction throughout
the Arab world. The notion of a ‘constitutional patriotism,’ as described by Jürgen Habermas for
the American and the post-war German republic, namely the pride in the strength of state
institutions deriving their legitimacy primarily from legal procedure, remains anathema throughout
the Arab world.87 The best exponent of that principle would be Abd el-Razzak el-Sanhuri, the great
Egyptian jurist, constitutionalist and codifier, who lived from 1895-1971, although his commitment
to rational law versus sacred and natural law can be questioned. His conflictual relationship with
the Egyptian state under various regimes, and his important but ambiguous constitutional drafting
legacy throughout the Arab world are testimony to the difficulty the principle of the superiority of
rationally designed rules as the basis of authority has had in the Arab world.

An Egyptian journalist commenting on the severe dispute between the Egyptian judiciary and then-
president Morsi recalled the episode in 1954 when Sanhouri as the then Head of the Egyptian State
Council was attacked and physically assaulted in his office by supporters of the revolutionary
officers. Sanhouri had been an early supporter of the republic but then publically disagreed with

86
Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 159; Weber, Economy and Society, p. 215.
87
See on this his musings about the imposed regime change in Iraq, Jürgen Habermas, “Was bedeutet der Denkmalsturz?,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, (Frankfurt, Main, 17 April 2003), p. 33.

30
its laws, for which he was physical assaulted by revolutionary vigilantes, and later placed under
house arrest and exile. Because these conflicts remain very much alive throughout the Arab world,
that Egyptian journalist writing in 2012 was not referring to Sanhouri’s legacy as a scholar, but his
importance as a symbol of the superiority of law rather than physical force, that he explains “why
everybody still remembers El-Sanhouri.”88

Today, the democratic principle – which with its reliance on procedure firmly belongs into the
category of rational/legal authority – has achieved enormous universal appeal. The idea is so
powerful that even polities that formally base the authority of the existing social order on a
competing source of legitimacy – in the Arab world that is primarily some variation of divinely
inspired tradition – have felt the need to pay lip service to democracy. Saudi Arabia for instance
felt the need to permit local elections, or Kuwait after the ‘liberation’ by Western forces had to
introduce reasonably competitive parliamentary elections, etc. But political accountability requires
more than mere elections, as we will shortly see.

b. The Miracle of Politics: Accountability and Effectiveness

Until the onset of the so-called Arab Spring, momentous political changes saw “democracies and
market-oriented economies spreading in virtually every part of the world except for the Arab
Middle East.”89 The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama observes this in the opening
sentences to his book The Origins of Political Order, published just as the Arab uprisings were
gathering steam in 2011. As we discussed earlier in the context of the ‘third wave,’ liberal democracy
became increasingly to be seen as the default form of government. As we laid out in the previous
section, these changes in the form of the political system were driven by a massive social
transformation: “The shift to democracy was a result of millions of formerly passive individuals
around the world organizing themselves and participating in the political life of their societies.”90

The factors that drive this transformation are manifold and include, in no particular order, much
expanded access to education and dramatically better access to information through electronic
channels. This make people vastly more aware of their own relative station in the political world
around them. Cheap and ubiquitous communication technology also created a formerly non-
existing public space for deliberation and social organisation (Egyptians post-2011 sold T-Shirts

88
Ali Ibrahim, “Why everyone still remembers El-Sanhouri,” al-Sharq al-Awsat, Cairo, 16 October 2012, available at:
http://english.aawsat.com/ali-ibrahim/opinion/why-everyone-still-remembers-el-sanhouri.
89
Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, p. 3.
90
Ibid.

31
on Tahrir Square that proudly displayed the Facebook logo as one of the emblems of the
‘revolution.’) When local organisation failed, these more accessible communication avenues
allowed people to ‘vote with their feet’ and migrate to greener pastures up North. All this happens
against a changing economic landscape in which the state had less to offer in terms of benefits,
employment etc., while simultaneously greater prosperity meant people had more to lose and thus
began to demand better legal protection of their property rights.

These factors are indeed prevalent in the Arab world and they largely explain why suddenly in 2010
this previously politically dormant part of the world appeared to renounce its exceptionalism and
join the democratic mainstream. While these factors certainly are real, the focus on democracy and
market-economy obscures a much more basic observation: the failure of the state as such, whether
democratic or non-democratic, to deliver basic services.

As outlined earlier, the repressive default of Arab statehood throughout the twentieth century
constituted an absence of politics. Any organised articulation of interests, let alone grievances, was
made impossible by the repressive machinery of the state. If one accepts that societies, composed
of living beings, are in a constant state of development and social movement, such a deliberate
discouragement of political discourse portends trouble. What this amounts to is the deliberate
refusal of the status quo to adjust to changing external conditions. Refusing to acknowledge and
adapt to these new conditions will eventually tip the dysfunctional institutional balance.91

And it is here, at the institutional basis of governance where we can observe very serious
shortcomings in the Arab world; shortcomings that are much more fundamental than the higher-
order question of how decision-makers are chosen. Writing in 1968, Huntington, whom we have
already encountered in the context of the ‘third wave’, addressed this more fundamental question
by opening his seminal book Political Order in Changing Societies, by rejecting the dominant ideological
struggle of his day as relatively peripheral:

“The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of
government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and
dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies
consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries
whose politics is deficient in these qualities.”92

It is these basic qualities that Cicero alluded to in the opening statement to this course; qualities
that are largely absent in the Arab world, quite irrespective of the question whether these societies

91
Ibid., p. 10.
92
Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 1.

32
are democratic or not. The single-minded focus on elections, and therefore the question of the
formal existence of democracy, which has dominated international discourse after the fall of
Communism in 1989, has tended to obscure this deeper institutional reality. Perhaps
understandable in light of the character of Communist dictatorships, which by and large were
powerful and able administrators, the chief challenge was seen as opening the political space for
democratic participation to take place and control the awesome power of the state. In a sense, the
existence and strength of the state was a given, all that needed to be done was to ‘civilise’ the state
machinery by imposing legal limits and democratic control. Hence the focus on human rights and
electoral democracy.

The problem is that the Arab world, despite or because of its history of authoritarianism, has not
developed effective state machineries, beyond those necessary for oppressive domestic social
control. Because in the developed world, including the hitherto so-called ‘second world’ of
Communist dictatorships, the existence of effective government is taken for granted, much of the
focus has been on the form such government takes. This has tended to obscure how difficult it has
historically been to create functioning political, social, legal and economic institutions. This exclusive
focus on taming the power of the state by insisting of individual rights has also tended to obscure
how unattractive a world without basic institutions, with minimal or no governance looks like.93

To understand why the Arab rebellions of the past years failed to yield stable, inclusive governance,
it is therefore necessary to acknowledge the extreme difficulty – and indispensable importance! –
of creating and maintaining effective institutions able to sustain meaningful communal life. This
means governance that is simultaneously powerful, rule-bound and accountable.94 Combining all three
attributes is very difficult. It amounts to a “miracle of politics” if that elusive but attractive combination
emerges. So attractive is this combination that many millions of migrants are “voting with their
feet,” often at great risk and expense, to move to such a community. As the literature on
governance indicates, a state that possesses these attributes will not only be attractive to migrants,
more importantly it will be politically stable and, in all likelihood, economically prosperous.

This latter aspect is not coincidental, because the very institutions on which the edifice is built
come into being in response and as vehicles for the realisation of the perceived self-interest of
people. How individuals and groups define their self-interest and how they collaborate with others
to realize them is, of course, culturally and historically contingent and develops in a mutually

93
Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, pp. 12–13.
94
Ibid., p. 10.

33
reinforcing complex relationship with institutions. But it is evident that self-interest and legitimacy
– that is, we recall Weber’s definition, the voluntary submission to a given order as beneficial to one’s
interests – are the corner-stones of the stability of a given political order. What makes such an
attractive set-up a true “miracle of politics” is the sheer difficulty of creating effective and inclusive
governance.95 These inherent challenges are compounded by the normative contestation about
questions of ‘authenticity’ and the absence of an easy, unambiguous plan of action.

c. Contestation of Models: Is ‘Good Governance’ a Western or an Islamic Idea?

The famous nineteenth century Egyptian Islamic theologian Muhammad Abduh, an Islamic
modernist and one of the key figures relied upon by the contemporary Salafi movement, is said to
have commented on his return from a lengthy and intensive study trip to Europe: “I went to the
West and saw Islam, but no Muslims; I got back to the East and saw Muslims, but not Islam.”96

A similar sentiment is expressed by two contemporary American Muslim economists,

Scheherazade Rehman and Hossein Askari, who set out to measure “the adherence of Islamic
countries to Islamic economic teachings and develop an Economic Islamicity Index (EI2) to assess
the extent that self-declared Islamic countries adhere to Islamic doctrines and teachings. We do
this by measuring 208 countries’ adherence to Islamic Economic principles using as proxies 113
measurable variables.”97 Their investigation surprisingly, and depressingly, agrees with Abduh’s
observation 120 years earlier: the top “most Islamic” countries according to their metric are:
Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The best placed Muslim-
majority countries are: Malaysia (Rank 33), Kuwait (42), Kazakhstan (54), Brunei (55) and Bahrain
(61).98 In other words: they also, like Muhammad Abduh, see “Islam but no Muslims in the West,
and Muslims but no Islam in the East.99

Most Danes would be surprised to hear that their country is the second-most “Islamic” country in
the world. Rehman and Askari’s description of Denmark as being so highly placed in her supposed
“adherence to Islamic doctrines and teachings” is also not meant as a commentary on rising Muslim
immigration into Western Europe. What their somewhat controversial argument is meant to

95
Amin et al., After the Spring, pp. 26–27.
96
This is merely an approximation of his verdict after his return, not an exact quote of what he said or wrote.
97
Scheherazade S. Rehman and Hossein Askari, “An Economic IslamicityIndex (EI2),” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 10(3), No.
3 (2010) pp. 1-37, p. 1.
98
Ibid., pp. 17–19. Note that they provide a somewhat different list in Scheherazade S. Rehman and Hossein Askari, “How
Islamic are Islamic Countries?,” Global Economy Journal, Vol. 10(2), No. 2 (2010) pp. 1-40, pp. 31–37.
99
For a fairly sympathetic account of their approach, see Sarah Albrecht, “How Islamic Is the West? Recent Approaches to
Determining the “Islamicity” and “šarī ʿa Compliance” of Modern States,” Zeitschrift für Recht & Islam, Vol. 8 (2017) pp. 197-224.

34
convey is that Denmark adheres to basic principles of good governance and sound economic
policies – qualities which they associate with being “Islamic.” Pointing to the large
historiographical, philosophical, sociological and, not least, economic literature, which starting with
our friend Max Weber has asserted a link between the professed religion of the majority and a
nation’s socio-economic prospects, they propose a more basic question:

“We ask what we believe to be the precursor question to the linkage between Islam and
economics -- “to what extent do self-declared countries actually behave like Islamic
countries i.e. following Islamic economic teachings as laid out in the Quran and practiced
by the Prophet?” In other words, are these countries truly Islamic or are they Islamic in label
only?”100

I consider their basic assumption a deeply flawed one. Their explicit aim is to circumvent the
incontrovertible evidence of dysfunction and underperformance of Muslim-majority nations, by
claiming that “true Islam”, whatever that is supposed to be, is not practiced there but only a
bastardised, autocratic, false version of it, as one of the authors, Hossein Askari, clarifies in a recent
publication:

“Islam is not the problem, but is instead the solution for a better future for Muslim countries.
The fact is that Islam has been undermined and hijacked by corrupt hereditary rulers, clerics
and strongmen to “legitimize” their illegitimate rule. And their illegitimate rule – with its
absence of the rule of law and representative government – has been supported by the Great
Powers, from the East and especially from the West.”101

In their self-consciously apologetic endeavour, Rehman and Askari seek to prove that the essence
of ‘true Islam’ is “equity and justice” and that, in fact Islamic teaching is not only compatible but
actually conducive to social and economic progress. In rejection of influential accounts like Bernard
Lewis’ What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East,102 they argue instead
that self-declared Islamic countries do not in fact follow basic Islamic economic and governance
principles. They therefore allege a ‘misconception’ in Western media and scholarly accounts “that
any shortcomings by these self-declared Islamic countries and their governments can be directly,
or at least indirectly, attributed to Islam and that such shortcomings are a sign of some deficiency
in Islam.”103 In some variation of the ‘false consciousness’ thesis of orthodox Communism, they

100
Rehman and Askari, “An Economic IslamicityIndex (EI2),” p. 2.
101
Hossein Askari, “Islamicity Indices — The Best Instrument for Changing the Muslim World,” Huffington Post, 10 January
2016, available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hossein-askari/islamicity-indices--the-b_b_8950332.html, accessed on: 19
August 2016.
102
Lewis, What went wrong?
103
Rehman and Askari, “An Economic IslamicityIndex (EI2),” p. 4.

35
allege that what one finds in Muslim-majority societies is, in fact, not true to the original meaning
of the faith. Rather, citing approvingly, they claim that:

“Islam not only does not rule out economic progress, but that it clearly endorses several of
the basic factors cited frequently by Western commentators as essential in historic economic
transformation – private property, recognition of the profit incentive, a tradition of hard
work, a link between economic success and eternal reward. Thus Islam seems unlikely to
rule out rapid economic growth or even the construction of a strong system more or less
capitalist in essence.”104

Assessing the veracity of this claim requires an investigation into both Islamic dogma and historical
practice, something which we cannot undertake in the limited space available here. So, I leave it to
yourself to begin your own investigations into the sources of underdevelopment, whether it is ‘false
consciousness’ as claimed by Rehman and Askari, or whether Islamic theology indeed inhibits
social, political and economic development due to factors including “fatalism, personalism,
laziness, lack of curiosity, mistrust of science, superstition, conservatism, and traditionalism,”105
that is, whether The Muslim World Stood Still because it got Lost in the Sacred, as both Lewis and Dan
Diner have convincingly argued.

For our purposes the answer to this truly philosophical question is less important than the
somewhat self-evident acknowledgment of economic and governance failure inherent in Rehman
and Askari’s apologetic research venture. The details of their stipulated characteristics of a ‘truly
Islamic’ socio-economic system are less important here106 than their realisation that such an
idealized society “very much resembles the modern view of development,”107 108
leading them to
the superficially surprising outcome of their research, making Denmark the second-most ‘Islamic’
country in the world. Denmark achieves this status not by virtue of the compliance of its famous
frikadeller (meat balls) with Islamic dietary requirements, but its characteristic as a well-run, fair,
prosperous, law-abiding political economy delivering very high rates of security, basic services and
opportunities for individual social, intellectual and spiritual development.

In short, Denmark is so ‘Islamic’ because Rehman and Askari associate ‘Islamic’ with ‘good
governance,’ applying a standard that is not markedly different from the one Cicero applied at the
beginning of our course, namely a state which: “maintains a balance of rights, duties and functions,

104
Abbas Mirakhor, “The General Characteristics Of An Islamic Economic System,” (2003), pp. 45–46.
105
Timur Kuran, Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East: The Historical Role of Culture, Institutions, and Religion, (Department
of Economics, Duke University, September 2007), p. 1.
106
Rehman and Askari, “An Economic IslamicityIndex (EI2),” pp. 12–13.
107
Ibid., p. 12.
108

36
so that state officials possess enough power, deliberations of the leading citizenry and enough
authority, and the people enough freedom.”109 The claim that ‘good governance’ is actually
consistent with or even required by Islamic dogma is quite controversial and, in my opinion,
ahistorical. But it nevertheless helps us to contextualise our investigation into the rather evident
dysfunction of contemporary Arab states and societies.

This is important because a structured investigation requires a common standard, agreed units of
measurement that allow an objective and replicable comparison between different phenomena.
The all-too-common insistence that apples and oranges are different must not be confused with
the impossibility of comparing the nutritional value and relative contribution different food stuffs
can make to a balanced diet. In this spirit, the next video will briefly explore the criticism of
‘Eurocentrism’ that is often levelled at those who impose common performance criteria on
governance institutions across cultural boundaries.

d. Contingency, Trajectories and Performance Standards

Those schooled in the language of political correctness will reject the characterisation Melhem has
given earlier, namely that: “Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone,” destroyed by
inner forces of radicalisation, anti-rationalism and a surprising, communally suicidal propensity for
violence: “there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.”110 He comes to this
assessment today when the Arab state system is in open dissolution, large parts of its population
are internally displaced, international refugees, driven out by violence and economic despair, or
staying put in ‘inner exile’ amidst the drudgery of political repression and social stagnation. Melhem
makes clear that we won’t easily find answers, but that the need for analysis and honest reckoning
is evident by the wrecked societies left behind:

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last
century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and
political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and
Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious
monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies.111

Melhem writes this today when the evidence of failure of all competing ideologies, all of which had
justified massive repression and intellectual contortion, has become incontrovertible. Kanan
Makiya, writing more than twenty years earlier in his Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq,

109
Cicero, On the Republic, 2.30, quoted in Kamm and Graham, The Romans. An Introduction, p. 31.
110
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
111
Ibid.

37
discusses the Stalinist use of terror and massive repression during the period of enforced
industrialisation of the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. In common narratives, the
economic and social backwardness of the Soviet Union justified violence and terror in the eyes of
“half-baked Marxists and ‘progressive’ nationalists like the Ba’ath who have raised high the banner
of parochialism, cultural relativism, and Third Worldism. If Stalinist violence were ‘compensated
for’ by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, then Ba’thism could find its
justification by way of precedent.”112

Both Ba’thist states have now completely collapsed; Iraq under the strain of external attack by the
USA, while Syria was destroyed by internal rebellion, although supported by external actors. It is
quite clear that the reign of terror unleashed on their populations, just as the somewhat less severe
but equally suffocating repression in virtually all other Arab states has not yielded the developmental
benefits promised. Both socialist and capitalist theories of state-led development have failed to
deliver results. It has become apparent that the key claim of ‘modernisation theory’ in its various
guises has been false, namely that economic development could be kick-started by the state and
would quasi-automatically lead to corresponding political development. Social mobilisation coming
in the wake of state-driven modernization has tended to outpace relatively immature political
institutions. When traditional social structures had been displaced by new modes of living and
greater expectations, highly unstable social situations ensued, which could often only be controlled
with very high rates of repression. This reliance on repression, fear, conspiracy thinking and
impossibility of rational critique led to a marked “degradation of thought” that Makiya describes
vividly:

How do barrages of myths coming from every direction – newspapers, the media,
workplace, street, and family – affect people after twenty years, especially those once
illiterate? What does the administration of lies from the cradle to the grave do to a people’s
judgement, especially when they are afraid? No one knows. From the outside one can reach
in and scratch at the surface. From within the world is black, and having the courage to want
to understand is about groping around trying to get a sense of what cannot be seen. This is
the cold world of analysis in which all stories are forbidden.113

Those who denounce as ‘Eurocentric’ such “cold analysis,” with its application of universal
standards and common tools of inquiry, make a two-pronged argument, one normative and one
epistemological. The normative, relativist argument is utterly bogus, false, and must be rejected on

112
Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, p. 98.
113
Ibid., p. 99.

38
principle. The second, epistemological is correct and must be treated seriously. Differentiating
between the two is not difficult but necessary, as you will see now.

The relativist critique argues that European values, as expressed in the peculiar form of government
that developed here are somehow inapplicable to non-Europeans. They argue that therefore
democracy, constitutional limitation of governmental power, the protection of rights, and the
predictability of economic and social life that comes from the existence of effective, enforceable
legal rules are somehow inappropriate for non-Europeans/non-Whites/non-Christians, because
these people somehow prefer a more ‘authentic’ existence subject to the stipulations of their own
culture or religion. This position claims, in other words, that the benefits of ‘good governance’ are
somehow culturally contingent. I reject this position on principle, because the benefits of decent
governance mean longer, healthier, happier lives. Denying that governance matters, or claiming
that some cultures somehow don’t care for decent governance, is tantamount to saying that some
cultures like to die sooner, live sicker and unhappier lives. However much one dresses up that
argument in romanticised notions about ‘exotic’ peoples, it is untenable.114

The other ‘Eurocentric’ critique, by contrast, has substance. The classic theoreticians of
modernisation, like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Henry Maine, Ferdinand Tönnies and my hero
Max Weber, studied for obvious reasons the experience of those nations in which modernity and
industrialisation had manifested itself first, trying to derive abstract theories about that process with
a view to identify the driving factors that account for the transformation of traditional societies
into modern, socially, normatively and intellectually mobile ones. They have tended to see the
particular experience of that process in England, Germany, France and the United States as
paradigmatic for the process as such. While that focus is understandable in light of the earliest
manifestation of modernisation in the West, the criticism of modernisation theories derived from
that particular cultural and evidential basis as reductionist is accurate.

Development is a highly complex, and contextually contingent phenomenon strongly influenced

by path-dependencies, idiosyncrasies and local particularities. Seeking to abstract a single, or very
few, causal factors is therefore fraught with danger and the experience of any one locality will only
rarely transfer to a different one. The peculiar trajectory of European political, economic and social
development therefore cannot offer ready-made blueprints for other parts of the world, as had for

114
For reasons of space, I will refrain from a more principled refutation of that argument, which I made at some length
elsewhere, see Ebrahim Afsah, “Contested Universalities of International Law. Islam’s Struggle with Modernity,” Journal of the
History of International Law, Vol. 10 (2008) pp. 259-307.

39
instance erroneously been claimed by so-called ‘modernisation theory’ and its Communist
equivalent in the 1950s and 1960s.

This critique, while accurate in the context of the self-righteous certainty of development theory
during the period of decolonization, addresses a caricature of the argument presented here. My
argument is not about form, the historically and culturally contingent solution to a particular social
problem, but about performance, that is whether the problem got solved effectively, efficiently and
durably.

Many such solutions were found in Western Europe, but no one is arguing that its peculiar
experience with rational, bureaucratic, legally structured administration can be simply transposed
into different cultural contexts. Still, the manner in which these government machineries produce
output in terms of public services is a useful and, in a world marked by migratory and information
flows, necessary standard of comparison. This insistence on performance output is stressed in a
widely-cited paper by two World Bank economists that in its original title – “Getting to Denmark”
– ruffled precisely such relativist feathers:

“most agree that the (perhaps very) long-run goal is to ensure that the provision of key
services such as clean water, education, sanitation, policing, safety/sanitary regulation, roads,
and public health is assured by effective, rules-based, meritocratic, and politically
accountable public agencies ––that is, something resembling Weberian bureaucracies. We
call such a world ‘‘Denmark.’’

By ‘‘Denmark’’ we do not, of course, mean Denmark [the actual country]. Rather, we mean
the common core of the structure of the workings of the public sector in countries usually
called ‘‘developed’’ (including new arrivals like Singapore). To be sure, there are numerous
variations on the core ‘‘Denmark’’ ideal; indeed, remarkably similar performance outcomes can be
and are delivered by different, and culturally distinctive, institutional forms – e.g., Denmark, New
Zealand, Germany, and Japan. The historical evidence is surely that while development is
likely to entail a convergence in terms of institutional performance outcomes, the precise form those
institutional arrangements actually come to take in each country will continue to be as varied as
the countries themselves.”115

Now, ‘getting to Denmark’ is a curiously accurate title for the problem at hand. For it is precisely
the inability of all Arab states to deliver the kind of institutional performance outcomes necessary
for reasonably stable, reasonably prosperous, reasonably free, reasonably predictable and
reasonably fair societies that has motivated increasing numbers of people to ‘vote with their feet’
and quite literally try to ‘get to Denmark.’ (or more accurately, Germany and Sweden.) The first
relativist argument, namely that non-Europeans somehow don’t covet the kind of good governance
generally associated with Western constitutional democracies is both normatively and quite

115
Pritchett and Woolcock, “Solutions When the Solution is the Problem,” p. 192.

40
evidently empirically false. It is contradicted by every single refugee boat crossing the
Mediterranean; testimony to the culture-transcending attractiveness of that institutional package.

4. Economics: Bread, Dignity and Freedom

a. Material Base of Discontent

The uprisings that transformed the Arab state system from 2010 onwards have been primarily
economically motivated. The slogan used by restive populations was: “Bread, Dignity, Social Justice
and Freedom!” While clearly no hunger riots, the uprisings – and their demand for economic
redistribution came as a surprise to many at that particular point. Macroeconomic indicators for
most of the Arab world had actually been moving into the right direction for some time,116 as Amin
et al. state in the introduction to their highly illuminating analysis After the Spring: Economic Transitions
in the Arab World. They write:

“It is tempting to ascribe the Arab Spring to high levels of unemployment, especially among
youth, and the suppression of political options, but that seems to be too narrow an
explanation because in countries such as Egypt the available evidence showed gradual improvement
in these indicators. By the end of 2010, unemployment in the region had modestly declined,
though from high levels. Democratic reforms were taking place, albeit in a slow and
incremental fashion, and young people had a more optimistic outlook on their economic
prospects than the elderly. Along with sound economic growth and increasing foreign direct
investment, these trends created a false sense of complacency among policy makers over the pace
and impact of progress.”117

The so-called Arab Spring has been compared to the one other truly transformational social event
in the modern Muslim world, the Islamic Revolution in Iran. While such comparisons must be
taken with some caution – Iranians and Arabs have different cultures, speak different languages,
adhere to different sects of Islam, experienced their respective social uprisings in dramatically
different global environments and achieved strikingly different results – there is some truth to the
analogy. One similarity that is particularly pertinent is the inability to derive from the economic
record a straight-forward explanation for what happened. Offering an original explanation of the
Iranian revolution to which I will return shortly, the American sociologist Charles Kurzman makes
an interesting observation in his book The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. He notes:

116
See for instance the impressive rates of GDP growth reported just prior to the uprisings in Margareta Drzeniek Hanouz
and Sofiane Khatib, The Arab World Competitiveness Review 2010, World Economic Forum, Geneva (2010), available at:
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GCR_ArabWorldReview_2010_EN.pdf, p. 5.
117
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 1.

41
 “If we were observing Iran in early 1978, economic data would probably not have led us to
predict that a revolution would soon occur. Iran was faring no worse than many other
Islamic countries, than other populous oil exporters, or than its own previous recession of
1975. The social groups suffering the most economically were politically quiescent. Indeed,
the economy looked ready for a rebound in early 1978.”118

We can find similarly positive accounts about the state of the major Arab economies in the run-up
to the uprisings that erupted in 2011. Looking how outside economists had dramatically shifted
their assessment of the health of the Iranian economy within two months in early 1978, Kurzman
correctly observes a phenomenon that we see replayed thirty years later in the Arab context. While
in hindsight economic indicators did portent trouble, it is their psychological, not material, impact
that changed dramatically and unpredictably within a short period of time:

“But this drastic loss of confidence was not accompanied by statistics or other information
that would suggest a shift in economic conditions since the previous, promising forecast.
What had changed was the emergence of an unexpected protest movement, which cast a
new light on economic issues that observers had previously downplayed, leading economic
causes to be identified retroactively.”119

This concerns ultimately the fundamental problem of prediction in the social sciences generally. A
hypothesis might in hindsight explain the causal chain leading to a certain event. Still, it might not
be able to predict ahead of time whether the causal factors it identifies will in fact bring about that
event. The American historian John Lewis Gaddis discusses this problem of the predictive power
of theoretical models in his 1992 essay “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold
War.” He grappled with the failure of virtually all scientific models to predict that the Soviet Union
would collapse, and do so without major war. He acknowledges that all scientific models are
incomplete and unreliable guides to the future, still he exhorts us not to “jettison the scientific
approach to the study of international relations.” We should remain mindful of the inherent
limitation of science and therefore accept also all the other tools at our disposal, namely “not just
theory, observation, and rigorous calculation, but also narrative, analogy, paradox, irony, intuition,
imagination, and – not least in importance – style.”120

In a remarkable book published five years later, and written with the benefit of access to Soviet
archives, he returns to his earlier exhortation to methodological flexibility to assert confidently: We

118
Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 104.
119
Ibid. See also his take on the more recent Arab events, Charles Kurzman, “The Arab Spring Uncoiled,” Mobilization, Vol.
17(4), No. 4 (2012) pp. 377-90.
120
John Lewis Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 17(3), No. 3
(1992-1993) pp. 5-58, pp. 57–58.

42
Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.121 Revising decades of mainstream thinking, including most
of his own earlier realist writing, he concludes that material factors in hindsight overdetermined the
outcome of the Cold War. At the time, however, they were not perceived by either scholars nor by
the people concerned to be determinative. The Cold War ended not because of any discernible
change in people’s livelihood or strategic environment, but in what they saw and felt. Like in Hans-
Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, people suddenly realized that the emperor was naked and once that
realization spread, the social reality changed, even if there was no change at all in the material
reality.

In the same vein, Kurzman offers an analysis of the Iranian revolution that does not rely on
economic or military factors, but on their perception by a hitherto docile, fearful population, who
suddenly became aware that the Shah was, metaphorically speaking, naked:

“People evaluate the ‘legitimacy’ of a regime on a relative scale, not an absolute scale. To
take the example of economic performance; it’s not that a regime delivers or fails to deliver
a particular level of growth, but that a different regime would have done ‘better’ – a
counterfactual whose attractiveness rises and falls independent of the current regime’s actual
economic performance. ‘Better’ could mean any number of things, including more growth,
or a different distribution of economic gains, or non-economic factors that people come to
consider more important than growth. … [What determines the actual realization of
rebellion] is the perception of a viable alternative to the existing regime. … A viable
alternative is a movement that seems to have a realistic chance of success.”122

The Iranian revolutionaries found that viable alternative in Khomeini’s Islamist movement. For
the would-be Arab revolutionaries in 2011 a coherent alternative to the ancien regimes did materialise
and was never formulated even in theory. But what suddenly did emerge was the realistic possibility
of displacing the old order, even if it remained – and remains – unclear what would come to take
its place. The ‘viability’ of resistance is ultimately a hard to measure, and impossible to predict,
group psychological phenomenon, namely the belief that the old order is not invulnerable and that
its apparent permanence could be challenged through social action. Kurzman ends his books by
stressing this psychological element:

“This appearance of stability was self-fulfilling: if people expected protest to fail, only the
courageous or foolhardy would participate. With such small numbers, protests could not fail
to fail. So long as revolution remained ‘unthinkable,’ it remained undoable. It could come to
pass only when large numbers of people began to ‘think the unthinkable.’”123

121
Idem, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
122
Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, p. 136.
123
Ibid., p. 172.

43
As we will see in the following videos, the realisation that the old order was indeed vulnerable and
could be displaced through social action suddenly became ‘thinkable.’ What remained
underdeveloped, highly contested and, apart from the Islamist project, quite literally ‘unthinkable’
is which vision of the state should come to replace the authoritarian bargain.

b. Labour Market: Insiders and Outsiders

Previously, we looked at the psychological element suddenly emerging around 2010 that social
action against the old order was viable, even imperative. As I stressed, we need to be sceptical of
all too easy, mono-causal, ex-post explanations of large, complex phenomena like popular
insurrections against firmly entrenched, well-armed and determined autocracies. We therefore need
to be careful not to attribute to our theoretical analysis explanatory powers they do not have,
remembering Prof. Gaddis’ earlier admonition to take all the tools in our possession to make sense
of the complexity in the world around us.

In fact, it is evident that the false sense of complacency in the stability of the Arab state system
prior to 2010 betrayed a mistaken belief in the ability of certain macro-economic indicators to
adequately represent the entirety of the lived experience of actual people on the ground. As Amin
et al. make clear:

“What was missed were other catalysts of growing discontent: the popular perception of
entrenched and rising corruption, severely restricted options for participation and
representation in policymaking, and failing public services – what might be called a growing
governance deficit.”124

It is this lack of effective and accountable governance that is responsible for the social and
economic grievances that exploded in the years after 2010. People in the Arab world were not
starving and in fact most were leading longer, healthier lives than at any previous point in history.
Still, their economic and social situation had been desperate and had been so for a long time. What
changed suddenly in 2010 was the psychological cognition that changing this unbearable situation
had all of a sudden become possible. What were the grievances? Why was the situation so
intolerable?

We have in previous sections described at some length the ‘authoritarian social contract’ that
defined the Arab state and accounted for its peculiar stability.125 But that arrangement depends on
ample state revenue and eventually became fiscally unsustainable for three interrelated reasons.

124
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 2.
125
See in this respect Fukuyama’s concern that this stability could not last, above fn. 62.

44
First, very strong population growth had increased the numbers among whom benefits needed to
spread. Second, state revenue derived from resource rents was becoming smaller due falling oil
prices. Third, and for our present purposes most important, the nature of the rentier state itself
created the conditions for discontent and the implosion of the old order. What were these
conditions?

As we discussed, one of the key features of the rent-based authoritarian social contract is the
availability of free income to the ruler, who will use some of it to bribe the population with welfare,
but spend the bulk on ensuring the survival of his rule. This leads to highly unequal, often violent
and by definition unaccountable state institutions, whose main aim is not the delivery of services
but the perpetuation of the existing social order.

As resources for welfare distribution, not least through public sector jobs, dwindled in the face of
massive population growth, society became ever more differentiated into insiders benefitting from
the system, and outsiders, especially the young. These were not only left out of the distribution of
benefits, but were at the mercy of an oppressive, arbitrary state apparatus that foiled their social
and economic aspirations. The proximate cause of popular discontent was economic injustice and
dissatisfaction with the arbitrariness and inefficiency of unaccountable bureaucracies.

Under the strain of population growth, declining productivity rates and shrinking revenue streams,
the old elites found the old arrangement, of buying political pliability through welfare largesse,
fiscally unaffordable. Deep structural change was – and remains! – inevitable, but virtually all Arab
states, even those still nominally stable, have found it impossible to peacefully enact that change.
And you now remember the pertinence of Edmund Burke’s admonition I presented you in an
earlier section: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its
conservation.”126

The problem was that these material constraints wouldn’t simply go away but forced painful
adjustments onto state and society. The problem was only that this was not done in an equitable,
managed process but that its costs fell disproportionately on the young, who had been failed by a
backward education sector, by a rigid labour market, legal system and state apparatus whose
primary purpose was to serve the needs of the insiders the governments cultivated as its support
base.127

126
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 37; quoted in Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 19.
127
See the chapter “The Origins of the Arab Spring” in Ibid, pp. 31-53.

45
Much of Arab economic activity is generated and the majority of its labour force is employed in
the informal sector. The Tunisian street vendor who sparked off the rebellions in 2010 is a case in
point and indicative of the strong chord his desperate act of defiance struck with millions of other
in a similarly desperate socio-economic situation:

“Bouazizi wanted two things: to earn a living for his family and to accumulate capital (ras el
mel). He was a young man, only 26, of no other discernible interests. His life was consumed
by his role as the primary breadwinner for his family of seven … As those who knew
Bouazizi tell it, he was the very opposite of an activist. … Above all, he was a repressed
entrepreneur – which is why Bouazizi’s death resonated so strongly and became a unifying
force across the culturally, politically, and religiously diverse Arab world, from Morocco to
Syria. For decades, market economies have been growing in the Middle East and North
Africa, albeit in the shadows of the law. [It is] estimated that 50 percent of the region’s
entrepreneurs operate outside the law. They share Bouazizi’s desire to prosper – and his
despair in the face of the insurmountable obstacles in their way.”128

The implications for a self-interested ruler of whatever ideological persuasion should be straight-
forward and reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s winning election slogan many years ago: “it’s the
economy, stupid!” What needs to be done is reasonably clear and not particularly controversial and
will be shortly discussed. It is evident that without sustained economic growth, much broader
participation in the generation and fairer distribution of wealth, Arab societies will remain
endemically unstable. It is furthermore evident, that this economic potential cannot be unleashed
without drastic changes in the existing regulatory framework, institutional structure and
distribution of decision-making power to ensure a sufficient degree of accountability

The reason why governments around the world have not rushed to create independent judiciaries,
enact robust and enforceable property rights, and accountable, rule-abiding administrations is, of
course, is because doing so is both hard and can take many forms. Even if one accepts the necessity
of change towards the rule of law, the particular local implementation of that policy prescription
will be difficult to design, and more difficult still to carry out.

c. Law, Institutions and Economic Performance

When the uprisings began, the chief driving force was popular discontent with the miserable
economic prospects of most people outside the inner circle. While the language of democracy and
participation was audible, one of the defining characteristics of the revolt was its emphasis on
demanding better governance and fairer distribution of economic opportunities. Here, it is worth

128
Hernando de Soto, “The Real Mohamed Bouazizi. One Year on, a Team of Researchers Uncovers the Man Behind the
Martyr and the Economic Roots of the Arab Spring,” Foreign Policy, (16 December 2011).

46
taking a longer historical perspective. Those of you who have taken my previous online course will
remember the extremely acrimonious disputes that have existed throughout the Islamic world
when faced with the idea of popular sovereignty from the 19th century onwards. You can read
about some of these debates in Albert Hourani’s, Arab Thought in the Liberal Age,129 which I had
already mentioned in an earlier video.

These arguments were – and remain – highly aggressive, with many voices arguing that Islam as a
religion and as a culture somehow was incompatible with democracy. Too strong appeared the lure
of ‘authenticity,’ too strong the odium of being a fifth-columnist of the Western imperialist, and
too strong appeared the stigma of association with previous failed imported governance models.
These factors combined to comprehensively and lastingly discredit explicitly democratic, let alone
secular political positions. The Iraqi-born British sociologist Sami Zubaida notes in his book Law
and Power in the Islamic World, that in the Egyptian context prior to the uprisings, major political
disputes were fought over only between competing Islamist visions about the proper role of
religious law:

“On the one side are the political elites and social managers, pointing to the exigencies and
sensibilities of a modern society and economy, where the old legal provisions lead to
considerable hardship and dysfunction; on the other are the social conservatives appealing
to religion to arrest or reverse any measures of social liberalization. What is interesting,
however, is that both sides appeal to religious sources and authorities; there seem to be no secularists.”130

One of the surprising things about the uprisings after 2010 is the relative absence of any distinctly
ideological motivation. Contrary to the essentialist claims made by decades of Islamists and
Western essentialist, the young men and women, who were stirred into action by the self-
immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor, shared his same, quite universal
longing: a desire to prosper economically and a deep sense of frustration and “despair in the face
of the insurmountable obstacles in their way.”131 But there was no clear vision about how such a
more equitable society would have to look like.

Contrary to what the Islamists and the Essentialists have been claiming, there is little to suggest
that Muslim populations somehow miraculously are motivated by entirely different factors than
people in the rest of the world. As opinion surveys have consistently shown, political participation
was and continues to be seen as necessary and compatible with cultural and religious preferences.132

129
Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939.
130
Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 173.
131
de Soto, “The Real Mohamed Bouazizi.”
132
See the results of the 2015 Arab Opinion Index on Arab Public Attitudes towards Democracy,
http://arabcenterdc.org/survey/arab-public-attitudes-towards-democracy/

47
But equally consistent with attitudes elsewhere in the world, a strong economy is seen as even more
important than democratic participation.133 If we accept that economic grievances were among the
chief driving forces behind the Arab uprisings, four rather uncomfortable implications need to be
addressed.

First, the situation that led to the uprisings in 2010 was neither cyclical, nor resulted from a sudden
external shock, nor limited to any one particular locality. As I have tried to show in this section,
these grievances built over a long period of regulatory and institutional stagnation. They were
surprising only to the extent that, as Kurzman noted earlier, people suddenly dared to “think the
unthinkable” of resisting an order whose dysfunction and thus instability was over-determined in
all other respects.134 The grievances that motivated people to suddenly take to the streets in 2010
had been in place for a long time, were real and were not easy to fix.

Second, take to the streets to topple a corrupt and dysfunctional socio-political structure that had
failed them economically. But paradoxically, by doing so they drastically worsen the overall economic
situation, at least in the short term. Amin et al. report that since 1960 there have been 103 cases of
a strong shift toward democracy, and in about half of these cases the country experienced an
economic contraction in the first year, which in 40% of the cases lasted at least five years.135 The
Arab states since 2010 have confirmed this pattern. Where prior to the uprisings macroeconomic
indicators had generally been positive but distribution extremely unequal,136 the past five years have
shown very serious and lasting economic decline. Dramatically worsening economic conditions
make the inherently difficult transition towards democracy exponentially more difficult.137

To be abundantly clear: even in the best of circumstances will a transition to democracy entail
significant change and uncertainty. This directly translates to reduced economic prospects, which
lamentably reduces the likelihood that the transition will be successful.138 In the Arab world, this
already difficult situation is made worse by the legacy of economic mismanagement. Structural
deformities could arise and remain due to substantial oil revenue in past decades.139 The heavy

133
See the chart of the result of the 2011 opinion poll asking “Which is more important? Strong Economy versus Good
Democracy” in Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 3.
134
Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, p. 172.
135
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 4.
136
Drzeniek Hanouz and Khatib, The Arab World Competitiveness Review 2010, p. 5; IMF, Arab Republic of Egypt: 2010 Article IV
Consultation—Staff Report, IMF Country Report No 10/94, International Monetary Fund, Washington D.C. (April 2010).
137
See generally, Samuel Issacharoff, “Can There be a Behavioral Law and Economics? Symposium: The Legal Implications
of Psychology: Human Behavior, Behavioral Economics, and the Law,” Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 51(6), No. 6 (1998).
138
See generally, Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South
America, and Post-Communist Europe, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
139
Onn Winckler, “The “Arab Spring”: Socioeconomic Aspects,” MIddle East Policy (2014).

48
authoritarian legacy in the institutional landscape and political culture, compounded by massive,
yet avoidable policy mistakes further reduced chances for a successful transition in the Arab
states.140

Third, the popular uprisings were nationally organized and led to a re-assertion of nationalism,
born of the common experience of resistance and struggle, a resulting sense of self-determination
and feelings of solidarity. The uprisings were also fuelled by a belief that legitimate popular
entitlements had been usurped by the authoritarian rulers. Ever since independence, and especially
since the advent of easy oil money, these entitlements had formed a central element of the
definition of citizenship. Combined with the disastrous experience of crony capitalism, especially
in the extremely corrupt and mishandled privatizations of the 1990s, this led to highly unrealistic
economic expectations regarding social justice. The result is a highly unrealistic image of the
economic role of the state, that does not sufficiently distinguish between the regulatory,
redistributive and actually productive role of the state.141

The oil bonanza had permitted Arab states to avoid most painful structural adjustments. Easy
money had notably shielded unproductive public sector employment in preference to export-
driven production. And crucially, it had prevented sensible family planning to reduce extremely
high fertility rates. This left a legacy of very high youth unemployment, very low labour
productivity, very low labour force participation rates, especially for women, and very high reliance
on the informal sector. Structural under- or misplaced investment left infrastructure not capable
of keeping up with the demands of explosive population growth. The extreme gap between the
superrich and the rest of society and the fiscally unsustainable and price-distorting reliance on
subsidies, led to highly polarised societies. Insiders benefited from an increasingly unfair economic
deal, and outsiders were permanently excluded. The private sector remained largely informal and
offered few channels to those without connections.

Forth, as a result of the relative luxury of oil rents, Arab economies are not very productive. The
are focussed on redistribution through patronage networks, often in the form of ineffective public
sector employment, rather than wealth production. Consequently, Arab economies are much less
integrated into global or regional trade than any other region in the world. Non-oil trade is less
than 1% of global trade and inter-regional trade among the lowest in the world.

140
Nathan J. Brown, “Egypt’s Failed Transition,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 24(4), No. 4 (2013) pp. 45-58; Alfred C. Stepan,
“Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 23(2), No. 2 (2012) pp. 89-103.
141
Amin et al., After the Spring, p. 4.

49
Redressing these structural shortcomings left by decades of rentier authoritarianism would now,
somewhat miraculously, have to happen under the heightened conditions of political turmoil after
the popular rebellions, and happen quickly enough to meet unrealistic popular expectations. That
doesn’t bode well, as we will shortly see.

d. Trade, Productivity and Rent Seeking: Living on Borrowed Time

It should have become apparent by now that the economic situation in all Arab nations, both oil
and non-oil producing, displays a number of remarkable characteristics, which set them apart from
other parts of the world. These characteristics largely account for the ‘Arab exception’ that we
discussed in the beginning of this course. The social arrangement that took hold rested on four
pillars:

First, establishing a large bureaucracy to provide both employment and social services, especially
in health care and education;

Second, expanding the security and intelligence services, to maintain social control and, to a lesser
extent, sustain external conflicts, especially with Israel;

Third, creating large numbers of public sector companies and production facilities, following both
the import-substitution, socialist economic model of the day, and as a deliberate tool to create
employment opportunities for loyal supporters; and

Forth, subsidizing basic foodstuffs, housing, energy and transport.

As stated before, these policies were not limited to the Arab world and, moreover, they were
initially largely successful. Given the relatively small size of the population, the opportunities
offered by the departure of colonial businessmen, and resource transfers in the context of the Cold
War competition, unemployment declined sharply and living standards, health and life expectancy
rose equally sharply.

The oil bonanza of the 1970s did not lead to the kind of structural adjustment rising energy bills
forced upon the rest of the world, because the Arab nations were directly or indirectly beneficiaries
of that price rise. Their economies sharply grew, largely due to four factors:

First, drastically increased revenue to the oil producers, which was especially pronounced in relative
terms for the smaller producers with large populations, such as Egypt, Sudan and Syria;

Second, a surge in financial aid from the larger oil producers, especially those in the Gulf, to the
other Arab nations, especially after Egypt’s defection of a separate peace deal with Israel in 1979.
Egypt herself was compensated with lavish Western aid.
50
Third, labour migration from the populous Arab non-oil producers to the Gulf and to Libya
dramatically increased, leading to very substantial remittance payments, which from the 1980s
constituted the largest source of foreign currency in all Arab non-oil producers.

Fourth, and often over-looked, tourism from Arab oil-producers to the other Arab nations,
especially Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt increased dramatically and became an
important source of revenue there.

In short, unlike the rest of the world, Arab nations – producers and non-producers alike – reaped
substantial benefits from the oil price shock. Growing rapidly, they could dispense with instigating
painful political, social and economic adjustment policies. Democratisation, sensible family-
planning policies, and a shift towards efficient, market-based production did not occur.

By the mid 1980s this windfall came to an end with drastically fallen oil prices, leading to sharply
rising unemployment in the non-oil producing Arab states and IMF-imposed structural adjustment.
The more dependent the country was on the oil-producers – through remittances, aid or tourism
– the sharper the economic contraction. By the early 1990s, in the words of the Israeli economist
Onn Winckler, “all the non-oil countries have been living on borrowed time, as their economies
could no longer support their expenses.”142

Paradoxically, it was security crises which provided a temporary ‘lifeline’ to many governments in
the region. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 and the ensuing decades of American military
engagement first to ‘liberate’ Kuwait and then in 2003 to invade Iraq itself, dramatically increased
the value of quiescence from Syria, Egypt and Jordan and released aid transfers from both the West
and the Gulf. Simultaneously, the infamous ‘oil-for-food’ programme imposed by the UN on Iraq
offered its neighbours very large economic transfers, as did the actual invasion in 2003 and its
aftermath.

It is now that the economic interests and prospects of Arab oil producers and non-producers begin
to diverge sharply. Previously inter-Arab solidarity, not least with respect to Israel, had ensured
that through remittances, aid transfers and tourism, the wealth that reached oil producers directly
was also spread to the non-producers. Faced with their own explosive demographic growth, the
oil producers now begin to face their own budget shortfalls. Moreover, the Kuwait invasion, the
behaviour of Palestinians during that invasion, and the effective abandonment of their hostility

142
Winckler, “The “Arab Spring”: Socioeconomic Aspects.”

51
towards Israel for a de facto, if unacknowledged alliance with it against Iran, convinced the Gulf
oil producers to alter their behaviour.

They reasoned that their own domestic and security interests could only be met when oil prices
were very high. This created a certain sense of fiscal prudence when oil prices were depressed,
leading to the realisation that their oil wealth should henceforth only in exceptional cases be shared
with other Arabs. Most importantly, the Gulf states came to treat Arab migrant labour a potential
demographic threat and began to shift to migrants from South and South East Asia. This deprived
the non-oil producers of one of their key economic and social safety valves.143

Most of the Arab non-oil producers managed to survive the lean years of the 1990s and 2000s
reasonably intact. But they failed to find a structurally sound response to the dual problem
underlying their social bargain:

Frist, how to create sufficient jobs for their enormously growing populations, especially how to
reduce very high rates of youth unemployment; and

Second, how to address the rising cost of living, both for individuals and for the state having to
subsidise basic amenities. As commodity prices on the world market are directly tied to energy
prices, and they now had to bear themselves drastically higher oil prices, the cost of living, not least
the subsidy bill, became unsustainable.

The non-oil producing Arab economies are thus trapped in an impossible position. They need to
instigate fundamental and painful structural economic reforms in at least five areas:

First and most importantly, in order to avoid immediate fiscal meltdown, they must drastically
reduce subsidies.

Second, the large inter-generational inequity that has been created by the inability of absorbing the
masses of young entrants into the labour market, needs to be addressed. This requires job
opportunities in the private sector and better, more relevant training for young people. This will
have to come at the expense of public sector employees, old elites, and other rent seekers who
constitute the ‘insiders’ of the existing economic bargain.

Third, the Arab economies need to modernise their public sectors, both in the regulatory and the
productive sectors. Efficiency, accountability and the prevention of elite capture are made much
more difficult, however, by the absence of a unifying developmental and constitutional vision or

143
Barry Mirkin, Arab Spring: Demographics in a Region in Transition, Arab Human Development Report Research Paper Series,
United Nations Development Programme, New York (2013), available at:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9647/5cb5a26d490a9ff1ce112705839d4e5507d3.pdf, p. 8.

52
model as existed for Central and Eastern Europe in the form of the thriving economies of Western
Europe.144

Forth, the Arab private sector is currently largely synonymous with corruption, cronyism, and elite
capture. It is also highly inefficient and utterly non-competitive on a global scale. The regulatory
system on which effective markets rely, especially accessible, reliable and predictable courts, is
totally underdeveloped. The Arab failure to industrialise, characterised by exceedingly low
manufacturing output per capita is largely responsible for the current unemployment crisis. To
address it, private sector employment must provide the brunt of jobs, which requires dramatically
better legal systems, not least to attract foreign direct investment.

Fifth, and related to the latter, Arab economies must end their isolation and integrate into the
global economy through meaningful trade. This is difficult in the best of circumstances and fraught
with dislocations. But the Arab experience with earlier economic reform often yielded crony
capitalism supported by the Washington Consensus. The very idea of economic reform is therefore
discredited. Coupled with the new nationalism that gained strength after the uprising, popular
embrace of sensible economic policies does not appear likely.145

While these are eminently reasonable and patently necessary reform suggestions, Arab
governments have predictably found it exceedingly hard to implement them, not least after the
popular uprisings. Whenever in the past benefits and transfer payments to the population were
curtailed, violent protests quickly erupted, which forced the governments to backtrack. People
reacted violently to the withdrawal of entitlements. Unlike those in previous generations, neither
public sector employment, nor migration to the Gulf or to the EU remained as avenues for social
advancement. The majority of the population, especially the young, was trapped in an impossible
situation.

As the governments were no longer able to keep up their end of the authoritarian bargain of pliancy
against benefits – what we described in the beginning of this course as ‘no taxation, therefore no
representation’ – many in the middle classes were no longer willing to accept their docile end of
the bargain. In a nutshell, this is the socioeconomic story of the Arab Spring: by no longer offering
public sector employment, welfare transfers and subsidies to artificially increase the quality of life,

144
Ebrahim Afsah, “Guides and Guardians: Judiciaries in Times of Transition,” in: Judges as Guardians of Constitutionalism and
Human Rights, ed. by Martin Scheinin, Helle Krunke, and Marina Aksenova (London: Edward Elgar, 2016) pp. 251-77, pp. 254,
263–67.
145
This largely follows the suggestions made by Amin et al., After the Spring, pp. 6–9.

53
the government seemingly introduced a form of “taxation” by imposing costs on ordinary people.
And as political theory would predict, these people reacted by demanding representation.

Among the oil-producing countries in the Gulf, the old bargain has so far survived, due to the
much larger revenue-to-population ratio there. Here, generous welfare continues to flow in
exchange for the absence of political participation. But even here the fiscal situation has become
tenuous and for the first time, these oil producers need high oil prices to survive fiscally. This puts
them in direct opposition not only to the non-oil producing Arab countries, but also to their
Western clients. Still and irrespective of their fiscal health, the oil-producing countries suffer from
exactly the same structural deficiencies in the manner their societies, economies and state
bureaucracies are organised. These deficiencies are particularly apparent with respect to human
development and the normative contradictions inherent in their social model, not least its reliance
on the propagation of the violent extremism of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

5. Human Development: How the Arab World Missed the Boat

a. Structural Changes and Normative Resistance

The Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji argued in an article for the American news-channel
CNN that “the West gets Iran wrong.”146 Much of what he wrote is directly applicable also to Arab
societies. Ganji begins by stating that much contemporary academic, popular and official analysis
about the state of liberalism, economics and feminism in Iran – and by implication also in the Arab
world – has been mistaken.

He notes the principled ideological objection by the founder of the Islamic Republic and his
successors to Western concepts of liberal democracy, to Marxism, to Capitalism, and to feminism.
As Ganji notes, it is apparent from both Khomeini’s writings and his actions in government, that
he “was not really familiar with liberalism and Marxism, yet he was opposed to both.” In their
stead, he and his successors postulated “religious democracy,” as both superior to liberal
democracy in producing governance outcomes, and, crucially, as more respectful of ‘family values’
than liberal democracy.

Velayat-e faqih, the official ideology that gives a prominent and institutionalised role to the clergy in
governing the state is peculiar to the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the claim that democracy needs

146
Akbar Ganji, “How the West gets Iran wrong,” CNN World, New York, 9 May 2014, available at:
http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/09/how-the-west-gets-iran-wrong/, accessed on: 21 December 2014.

54
somehow to be tempered by religious precepts respectful of Muslim identity and interests is not
peculiar to Iran. The claim that the clergy, as interpreters of god’s law, should be given some role
in the formulation and implementation of law and public policy enjoys considerable appeal. The
enormous electoral success of Islamists throughout the Arab world after the uprisings indicates
popular support for the idea that religion must play a strong, if not controlling role in public affairs
to ensure ‘authenticity’ and Muslim identity.147 The constitutional debates in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya
that have seen regime changes as the result of the uprisings, or in Jordan, Morocco or Algeria that
did not, all devoted considerable time to questions of the appropriate role of Islam in the machinery
of the state.

What Ganji then goes on to state has important repercussions on the way we perceive both the
source and the likely trajectory of the Arab uprisings. While the commitment to competitive
elections and popular participation in social and economic decisions certainly is much larger in Iran
than in any Arab nation, the Iranian leadership shares with all Arab regimes the belief that key
decisions simply cannot be entrusted to the electorate. At best, they subscribe to a ‘guided,’
religiously-tempered version of democracy, which allows the leadership to retain ultimate control.
So far so depressingly familiar.

But Ganji then goes on to say something counter-intuitive: “Yet anyone believing that Khamenei's
views have in turn resulted in a top-down squashing of political discussion – even of imported
ideas – would be mistaken.” He explains this by restating the well-known opposition of all
Islamists, including the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to Western notions of feminism,
because they “consider their own views on women and their rights to be fair and just, and claim
that unlike the West, Islam is opposed to using women as an object for advancing one’s own
agenda.”148 Irrespective of our assessment of the veracity of this position, we can acknowledge that
there exists an important difference in opinion about social values between the idealised Islamic
vision of the good life and that observed in modern Western societies.

The reason, Ganji surmises, that the Islamist leadership has been unable – despite trying very, very
hard – to impose its social vision on society is due to the existence of structural changes beyond
anyone’s control. These have brought about realignments in society, which cannot be turned back
and which, in turn, lead to normative changes that no-one decreed and that no-one can steer. The

147
For a classic exposition of this position, see Abul A’la Mawdudi and Khurram Murad, Let us be Muslims (Leicester: Islamic
Foundation, 1985). For a critical engagement and refutation of that position, see Philip Carl Salzman, “When They Proclaim
“Islam is the Answer,” What is the Question? The Return to Political Islam,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa, Vol. 2(2), No. 2
(2011) pp. 129-52.
148
Akbar Ganji, “How the West gets Iran wrong.”

55
dramatic rise in literacy, in urbanisation, in female university attendance, the availability of foreign
ideas in translated books and through the internet, economic pressures of urban life which force
both spouses to earn a living, the opening of professional careers to women required by
macroeconomic needs, and many similar structural changes inevitably and irrevocably lead to
normative changes that cannot be controlled.

Ganji points to the dodged and often violent determination of the Iranian supreme leader to stop
these changes, but observes the futility of these efforts: “And yet, despite this, certain social
developments are beyond his control, in part because his power is not absolute, and also because
of the strides that Iranian civil society has made in recent years.”149

The point to note here is the dualism between an immutable ideological, often religious dogma
controlled and defended by an identifiable group of persons – often the clergy or political leaders
– on the one hand, and structural, impersonal forces on the other. These forces lead to often drastic
changes in what is perceived ‘appropriate behaviour.’ As people’s practice changes in response to
material changes in their livelihood, ideational change ensues: people begin to look differently onto
the world and eventually their normative worldview changes. A public order that is unable to
accommodate these inevitable changes in the way people perceive the world and what they consider
to be legitimate will be inherently unstable.

b. Family Values: Conformity and Critical Thinking

One of the ways the Arab uprisings have exposed – but not resolved – existing tensions between
social reality and governing norms is with respect to what we can broadly refer to as ‘family values.’
One of the major justifications for existing authoritarian regimes throughout the region is their
purported defence of traditional, generally religiously based, family values against the supposedly
corrosive influence of modern, read Western, habits.

To use a relatively innocent example that is dear to my heart, take the treatment of animals. I
personally believe that the treatment of animals is a relatively good proxy for a society’s overall
level of civility towards its vulnerable members. Be this as it may, attitudes throughout the region
have traditionally been vastly different, yet are generally deemed to be in conformity with religious
norms of ethical and liturgical behaviour.150 We are here not so much concerned with the manner

149
Ibid.
150
See further, Seyyed Hassan Eslami Ardakani, “Animals in Islam: a Brief Review,” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft
Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen, Sonderausgabe: Tiere, Vol. 38 (2014) pp. 24-26; Reza Gharebaghi et al., “Animal Rights in Islam,”
AATEX Proc 6th World Congress on Alternatives to Animal Use in the Life Sciences, Vol. 14 (2007) pp. 61-63; Zulfikar Khayum, “The
Slaughter of Animals and Islam,” UCL Jurisprudence Reviev, Vol. 12 (2005) pp. 46-62; Khadijah Nakyinsige et al., “Stunning and

56
in which the topic has historically been treated in religious law and ethics. Instead let’s look at the
issue as an illustration of the process that Ganji described in the earlier video, namely how changed
living conditions and encounters with new concepts lead to different notions of ‘appropriate
behaviour.’

As urbanisation and more comfortable middle class life styles have taken hold, traditional agrarian
conceptions of animals as purely instrumental ‘things’ have receded. The luxury of adopting certain
species as ‘pets’ accompanies increasing wealth. These are exclusively companion animals, which
have no utilitarian value but are treated as family members of sorts. This in turn has led, generally
in explicit emulation of Western practices and often in close collaboration with expatriate
Westerners, to demands for the legal recognition of animal rights and the need for state protection
of their welfare. The American law professor Kirsten Stilt has described this phenomenon in an
interesting, still unpublished, paper about the strange alliance between Westernized middle class
animal rights advocates and Salafi Islamists that led to the adoption of the remarkable Article 45
in the 2014 Egyptian Constitution. The article recognised for the first time in an Islamic context
an explicit state obligation towards animal welfare:

“The state will provide for the protection and development of [the environment] and the
kind treatment of animals (al-rifq bil-hayawan)”.151

I invite you to read her article because the story is interesting both substantially, but especially
procedurally with respect to the necessary alliance-building and the, at times tortuous, manner in
which the globally novel phenomenon of animal rights was justified in terms of prophetic
precedent, theological argument and a doctrinal exegesis of Islamic law. But I mention the issue
here as an illustration of Ganji’s point about the impersonal evolution of social norms to which
public laws will ultimately have to adapt, even if these are strenuously opposed by a seemingly
powerful, autocratic leadership bent on maintaining a particular social status quo.

Seemingly paradoxical, pets, and in particular dogs, have become a potent symbol in the Kulturkampf
waged by Islamists against modernisation and what they perceive as lamentable Westernisation.
Keeping dogs merely for companionship in an urban setting has been deemed ‘un-Islamic’ due to

Animal Welfare from Islamic and Scientific Perspectives,” Meat Science, Vol. 95(2), No. 2 (2013) pp. 352-61; Cüneyt Simsek, “The
Problem of Animal Pain: An Introduction to Nursi’s Approach,” in: Theodicy and Justice in Modern Islamic Thought: The Case of Said
Nursi, ed. by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi (London: Ashgate, 2013) pp. 111-34; Monika Zbidi, “Tierschutz und Vegetarismus im
Rahmen des „Öko-Islams“,” Bulletin der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft Mittlerer Osten und Islamische Kulturen, Sonderausgabe: Tiere, Vol. 38
(2014) pp. 27-30.
151
Kristen Stilt, “Constitutional Animal Protection in Egypt and the Making of a Social Movement,” unpublished manuscript,
Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. (21 January 2016). A summary of her argument is provided by Mara Alioto, “Animal
Rights in the Egyptian Constitution,” Northwestern University Constitutional Design Team, Chicago, Il., Northwestern University Law
School, 15 May 2014, available at: https://constitutionaldesign.law.northwestern.edu/2014/05/15/animal-rights-in-the-egyptian-
constitution/.

57
their designation as ritually impure by many mainstream interpretations of Islamic law.
Consequently, until about ten years ago the practice was virtually unknown and it used to be literally
unthinkable to allow a dog inside a house. But changing lifestyles and growing familiarity with
global practices have led to the practice now becoming mainstream.

Remember what Ganji had said about the likelihood of the government preventing such normative
changes from taking place. The government, seeing the practice as undermining its anti-Western,
Islamist vision of society, has imposed severe penalties for keeping dogs.152 But as Ganji observed,
“despite this, certain social developments are beyond [its] control, in part because [its] power is not
absolute.”153 My family is conservative, has impeccable religious credentials, is not particularly
fashionable, anything but rebellious and lives in one of the most traditional parts of the country far
away from the capital. In this photo, taken recently by my brother during my aunt’s funeral, yu can
see that keeping dogs is no longer a fringe phenomenon in Iran.

The distance between actual social attitudes and the norms imposed by the government stirs social
resistance. This has been the case of the veterinarian Dr. Payam Mohebi who ran for office in the
recent Iranian elections in order to bring the law in line with social practice. As reported by the
New York Times:

“Tehran has changed over the past 15 years, Dr. Mohebi said. There is more money, more
freedom and more attention to social rights, he said. But that did not stop Parliament three
years ago, when it was still dominated by hard-liners, from passing a law that increased the
fines for dog owners to the equivalent of $2,500, as well as killing the animal and 60 lashes
for the owner. “We have one million pets in this city — what are they thinking?” Dr. Mohebi
said. “There is a massive gap between our politicians and us.”154

To be sure, the issue of animal welfare is perhaps of marginal importance when compared to many
other, perhaps more pressing social tensions, the most obvious and by far the most important of
which is certainly the social role expected and legally imposed on women and youth. As Ganji
noted, here social habits have evolved and in the process become increasingly divorced from the
vision imposed by authoritarian governments resisting popular pressure for change. Here, the
authoritarian legacy has severely compromised the ability to voice such popular demands in a
peaceful and constructive manner. The uprisings of 2011 were themselves the most dramatic
manifestation of the risks for a political order that refuses to respond to changed social conditions.

152
Thomas Erdbrink, “Risking 60 Lashes, Iranian Runs for Office So He Can Walk a Dog,” New York Times, (16 May 2017).
153
Akbar Ganji, “How the West gets Iran wrong.”
154
Erdbrink, “Risking 60 Lashes, Iranian Runs for Office So He Can Walk a Dog.”

58
Remember here Edmund Burke’s earlier warning: “A state without the means of some change is
without the means of its conservation.”155

The problem is that the uprisings after 2010 exposed these tensions but did little to resolve them,
even in the countries that saw regime change. The rebellions were caused by severe reform failures
that denied large sections of the population any realistic hope of living a decent life. Addressing
these economic, political and institutional reforms is crucial, but very difficult. Depressingly, most
needed reform has not even begun.

But perhaps even more important and even more difficult to address, the authoritarian legacy has
left societies whose value system is ossified and dominated by unchallengeable religious and cultural
prescriptions. This makes it almost impossible to accommodate even something as innocent as
keeping a dog, let alone something as revolutionary as women’s liberation.

The combination of a conformist traditional culture, an authoritarian political order, unappealing

economic prospects and extreme inequality destroys artistic and entrepreneurial creativity and has
yielded a lost generation whose only hope for the future lies in violence or emigration – a route
that is increasingly fraught with dangers and social exclusion even were it to succeed. This cartoon,
published in a major Tunisian newspaper as the country celebrated its 60 years independence
anniversary, mockingly shows a Tunisian under a jubilee banner who prays to the Lord to just help
him to get to France.

c. Demographics and the Youth Bulge

We have in previous sections encountered the legacy of immature political, legal and administrative
structures of Arab states, but let’s focus in this video on human capital. The economist Onn
Winckler, whom we already encountered earlier, sums up the situation as follows:

“These high growth rates enabled them to avoid two things: adopting structural reforms
that would re-orient their economies away from services and rents toward export-oriented
industries –as did many developing economies during the 1970s– and carrying out a family-
planning policy to reduce their extremely high fertility rates. Therefore, not only did natural-
increase rates not decline, they increased, as death rates dropped sharply due to the rise in
per capita incomes, while the extremely high fertility rates were sustained. Thus, despite
rapid economic growth, from a macroeconomic structural point of view, the bonanza
decade was wasted.”156

155
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 37; quoted in Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p. 19.
156
Winckler, “The “Arab Spring”: Socioeconomic Aspects.”

59
What we find today are extremely young populations with ongoing very high fertility rates.157
Coupled with otherwise desirable advances in public health and life expectancy, these have
translated into exploding population growth across the region. One logical aspect of this growth is
the so-called ‘youth bulge,’ that is the disproportionate share of young people in the overall
population.158 Such inter-generational imbalances are challenging under any circumstances, but the
peculiar dysfunctions of modern Arab history exacerbate the situation, as pointed out by the
anthropologist Suad Joseph:

“Arab children and youth constitute two-thirds of the population of almost all Arab
countries. In an area of the world that produces critical sources of world wealth, the rates
of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and underemployment, and health problems among
children and youth is staggering. Since World War II, when most of the States of that region
gained independence, the story of state-making and of nation-building has been a story of
stunning failure.”159

The extreme demographic growth of Arab societies has long been known to pose a major security
risk.160 In itself a youthful population obviously does not have to be a problem. In well-functioning
societies, young people are often a source of economic growth and social dynamism. But in
societies that lack the necessary social, educational, regulatory infrastructure to integrate them
productively into the labour market and create constructive outlets for their aspirations, the
potential demographic advantage of a youthful population is squandered. Instead they become a
drain on public resources and a source of instability. This, unfortunately, has precisely been the
situation throughout the Arab world, as the former CIA analyst Graham Fuller pointed out already
in 2004:

“The reality is that in nearly all of the Middle East, the social infrastructure is poorly
developed, ill-equipped to cope with the increase in a youthful population and lacks policies
that are responsive to new social requirements.”161

157
World Bank, “Fertility Rate, total (Births per Woman),” Washington, D.C., World Bank, 2016, available at:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN, accessed on: 9 June 2017. For a slightly differently computed data-set,
see CIA, “Country Comparison: Total Fertility Rate,” The World Fact Book, Washington, D.C., Central Intelligence Agency, 2017,
available at: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html, accessed on: 9 June 2017.
158
See on this generally, United Nations Development Programme and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development,
Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality (New York: UNDP, 2017).
159
Suad Joseph, “Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State,” in: Anthropology of the Middle East and
North Africa: Into the New Millennium, ed. by Sherine Hafez and Susan Slyomovics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press,
2013) pp. 105-24, p. 106.
160
For a good and concise summary, see Mara Hvistendahl, “Young and Restless Can Be a Volatile Mix,” Science, Vol.
333(6042), No. 6042 (29 Jul 2011) pp. 552-54.
161
Graham E. Fuller, The Youth Crisis in Middle Eastern Society, (Michigan: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, April
2004), available at: http://www.youthmetro.org/uploads/4/7/6/5/47654969/youth_crisis_in_middle_east.pdf, p. 5.

60
The imbalance in the age cohorts had three important, well-understood and long-known
implications:162

First, it put extreme strain on resources, infrastructure and government services, in particular
education, which we will cover later in the course.

Second, the arrival of a large number of new arrivals into an already strained and highly inefficient
labour market left very few opportunities for social advancement and extremely high rates of youth
unemployment.

Third, a young, inexperienced and legitimately frustrated generation found the old promises of
Arab politics increasingly unattractive, not surprising given the abysmal track-record of secular
Arab governance of whatever ideological persuasion. Combining youthful exuberance and risk-
taking, with the unavailability of legitimate channels for political expression, drove an ongoing
spiral of radicalisation.

The causal connection between a generation of frustrated, unemployable youth and violent protest
is evident, as highlighted in a report by Chloe Mulderig, published recently by Boston University,
entitled An Uncertain Future: Youth Frustration and the Arab Spring:

“The resulting cadre of youth are living longer, healthier lives and are seeking a higher quality
of living, including accountability from their governments, more consumer options, and
respect for human rights. The Arab Spring could not have occurred without the ideological
and numerical push of a huge mass of angry youth.”163

These factors are further exacerbated by an extremely low overall labour force participation rate,
which for the region as a whole is only 45%. That means that less than half of the population who
could be working, actually is working or looking for a job, while even of those who do work, many
are perennially under-employed. This is particularly severe for women, only 30% of whom chose
to pursue gainful employment.164 This in turn increases the Total Fertility Rate, as women who do
not work outside tend to have more children.165 The lack of opportunities, the ample time, the

162
These were acknowledged by Arab leaders long before the uprisings, but the difficulty of addressing them surpassed their
abilities, even should they have mustered sufficient political will. See also Emma C. Murphy, “Problematizing Arab Youth:
Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure,” Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 17(1), No. 1 (2012) pp. 5-22, p. 6.
163
M. Chloe Mulderig, An Uncertain Future: Youth Frustration and the Arab Spring, The Pardee Papers, No 16 (Boston: Boston
University - The Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, April 2013), available at:
http://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2013/04/Pardee-Paper-16.pdf, p. 5. In a similar vein, Dan LaGraffe, “The Youth Bulge in
Egypt: An Intersection of Demographics, Security, and the Arab Spring,” Journal of Strategic Security, Vol. 5(2), No. 2 (2012) pp. 65-
80.
164
Mulderig, An Uncertain Future, p. 7; , referring to ILO, Global Employment Trends 2011: The Challenge of a Jobs Recovery,
International Labour Organization, Geneva (2011), available at: http://tinyurl.com/global-employment, p. 52.
165
See for instance the interesting data analysis which identifies lack of public sector employment opportunities as a major
driving force, as well as pointing out that as the ‘youth bulge’ now itself enters childbearing age further increase in the rate of
growth can be expected. Ragui Assaad, “Beware of the Echo: The Youth Bulge and Fertility in Selected Arab Countries,” New

61
boredom, the hopelessness, the anger has created a “youth army” fuelling violent unrest, as
described here in a journalistic account in the journal Foreign Policy of the starting point of the Arab
spring in Tunisia:

“It’s no coincidence, the young people of Sidi Bouzid say, that the public uprisings surging
across the Middle East and North Africa this month started here. “Every day, my mother
tells me go look for a job, why don’t you get a job, get a job,” Sofiene Dhouibi, 24, told me
this week in Sidi Bouzid. “But I know there is no job,” Dhouibi said. “I look. Really, I look.
But there is no job,” Dhouibi continued, doing something so common among North
Africa’s unemployed that it has earned its own trade name –the hittistes, meaning, in Arabic
slang, those who lean up against the wall. 166

The term has followed young Arab migrants to Europe, where their often miserable education
translates into non-existing employment prospects. In German, this lost generation is referred to
as Eckensteher, having moved from the wall to the corner of streets. The lack of formal economic
opportunities means that young people have to rely on family networks for survival, seek uncertain
prospects in the informal sector and thus remain trapped and unable to have their hopes fulfilled.
The anthropologist Suad Joseph describes the situation as follows:

“For in the Arab world, the state has offered no future, no national future. Some citizens
cleave to possibilities available to them, often routed through kin and family systems – dually
sites of security and/or sources of oppression. Many try to leave their natal countries. Many
migrate internally, willingly or unwillingly. Many are unemployed or underemployed. Some
are mobilized into militias, nationalist movements, resistance movements, or
sectarian/religious movements. Islamist movements, which have swept through the region
since the 1980s, are among a variety of attractive alternatives for youth who try to claim a
vision for their future.”167

In this context, it is also proper to mention the usually unaddressed sexual politics of
radicalisation:168 in a society in which relations between the sexes are highly regulated and generally
only permissible in the context of marriage, the lack of economic prospects often means
postponing or even foregoing the prospect of marriage.169 One of the few media that openly
addresses this issue is the German-Arab online magazine Qantara.de, which is also available in
English. The attendant sexual frustration of young angry Arab men is a major contributing cause

York, United Nations, 2016, available at: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf/expert/25/2016-

EGM_Ragui%20Assaad.pdf, accessed on: 9 June 2017.
166
Ellen Knickmeyer, “The Arab World’s Youth Army. Meet the chronically unemployed twenty-somethings fueling social and
political upheaval across the Middle East,” Foreign Policy, (27 January 2011).
167
Joseph, “Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State,” p. 107.
168
Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
169
“Mr Fawzy feels the outlook is bleak. He worries that no job he finds after graduation will pay enough to cover his costs,
let alone allow him to support his widowed mother. Without a good salary, Mr Fawzy cannot buy a flat; without his own home he
cannot marry; and without marriage, he cannot have sex.” “Arab Youth: Look Forward in Anger. By Treating the Young as a
Threat, Arab Rulers Are Stoking the Next Revolt,” The Economist (6 August 2016).

62
to the radicalisation and barbarity on ready display,170 as well as complicating their integration into
European liberal societies.171 This uncomfortable story is well explored in Deeyah Khan’s film Jihad
– A British Story, which features interviews with young Muslims who had joined jihadi groups such
as ISIS.172 A former follower of one of the recruiters presented in the film describes it in a
newspaper interview as follows:

“It’s not about ideals – 90% of them never subscribe to the ideals – it’s other factors that
are a draw. This is the new rock and roll; jihad is sexy. The kid who was not very good-
looking now looks good holding a gun. He can get a bride now, he’s powerful. The Isis gun
is as much a penis extension as the stockbroker with his Ferrari.”173

Without denigrating the obvious differences between the experience of Muslim immigrant
communities and those in their homelands, the problem of a restive and frustrated reservoir of
people is essentially the same. The French professor Oliver Roy, an expert on Islamic radicalisation,
describes those attracted to jihadi violence quite aptly as “lost losers.”174 With respect to Tunisians
both at home and in the diaspora, the issue has correctly been described by the local political scientist
Hamza Meddeb as a “ticking time bomb.”175 As the filmmaker Deeyah Khan herself puts it: “I
learned from them that terror thrives on discontent and pain.”176 The unwillingness and/or inability
of Arab government (or Western governments for that matter) to address it, does not bode well
for the future. As one recent article in Newsweek wisely advised policy-makers: “Forget ISIS, Egypt’s
Population Boom Is its Biggest Threat.”177 And ours here in Europe, one could hasten to add.

170
Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015, available at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/, accessed on: 8 June 2015; Rukmini
Callimachi, “The Horror Before the Beheadings,” New York Times, (25 October 2014); Martin Chulov, “Isis: The Inside Story,” The
Guardian, (London, 11 December 2014); Charles Lister, Profiling the Islamic State, Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper, Brookings
Institution Press, Washington, D.C. (1 December 2014), available at:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/12/profiling-islamic-state-lister, accessed on: 15 June 2015.
171
See generally on the phenomenon, Martin Walker, “The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 153
(Mar/Apr 2006) pp. 60-61; Gilbert Caluya, “Sexual Geopolitics: The ‘Blue Balls’ Theory of Terrorism,” Continuum: Journal of
Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 27(1), No. 1 (2013) pp. 54-66. See also Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
172
The film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_usgevtEppg
173
Alyas Karmani, quoted in Tracy McVeigh, “‘Recruiter’ of UK jihadis: I regret opening the way to Isis,” The Guardian,
(London, 13 June 2015).
174
Olivier Roy, “« Pour passer à l’action djihadiste, il ne reste plus que les “losers” »,” Le Monde (28 March 2017); Idem, “« Le
djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste »,” Le Monde (24 November 2015).
175
Hamza Meddeb, “Tunisia’s Ticking Time Bomb,” Qantara, 23 January 2017, available at:
https://en.qantara.de/content/hamza-meddeb-on-the-no-future-generation-tunisias-ticking-time-bomb, accessed on: 9 June
2017.
176
Deeyah Khan, “‘Jihad’: My Journey Into the Roots of Islamic Radicalism in Britain,” Huffington Post (15 June 2015).
177
Peter Schwartzstein, “Forget ISIS, Egypt’s Population Boom Is its Biggest Threat,” Newsweek, (20 March 2017).

63
d. Science and Education: Producing, Disseminating and Using knowledge

Demographic trends move slowly and with a great deal of inertia, like oil tankers who likewise are
slow to change course or stop once in motion. The youth bulge described previously was therefore
well-known and, at least in the abstract, its implications for the stability of Arab states and societies
had been well understood. When today two thirds of all Arabs are under 30 years old, decision-
makers decades ago when these cohorts began to be born did understand the magnitude of the
challenge that these newcomers would eventually come to pose for labour markets, societal
prosperity and stability. Governments throughout the region responded with large investments in
education, which – at least on paper – drastically improved access, extending it to the rural poor,
to women and other vulnerable segments.178 Enrolment and graduation rates rose sharply, the
gender gap became much smaller, and from an almost complete blank slate an impressively-looking
array of educational, vocational and research institutions on all levels were created. So, where is the
problem?

Why could the advent of large numbers of young citizens not be seen as an opportunity to generate
growth and create knowledge-intensive, globally integrated political economies, rather than merely
posing a demographic and political challenge? Navtej Dhillon, a fellow of the American Brookings
Institution and Director of its Middle East Youth Initiative, expressed this dual potentiality in 2008,
at a time when the regimes still looked stable, the uprisings were not yet on the horizon and most
Arab states were in decent fiscal situations and receiving global accolades for their seemingly
impressive progress in attaining human development. Perhaps speaking more as an activist than a
scholar, he claimed that the Middle East was then at a crossroad if its governments wanted to lay
the foundation for lasting prosperity:

“The region faces a scenario of double dividend or double jeopardy: for the first time in its modern
history, the Middle East is simultaneously experiencing an economic boom and a
demographic boon. The region is experiencing its best economic performance in three
decades – oil and non oil producing countries alike are showing record growth. Second, the
region has a large youth bulge, presenting a large pool of human capital which if used
productively can usher growth and prosperity. If countries can take advantage of the
confluence of these two historic gifts, they can create a virtuous cycle of higher growth, higher incomes
and savings. Failure to do so will result in a double jeopardy: the economic and social exclusion of youth
drains growth and creates social strife.”179

178
United Nations Development Programme and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, The Arab Human
Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations (New York: UNDP - Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 52.
179
Navtej Dhillon, “Middle East Youth Bulge: Challenge or Opportunity?,” Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution, 2008,
available at: https://www.brookings.edu/on-the-record/middle-east-youth-bulge-challenge-or-opportunity/.

64
It is, of course, the second scenario that has come to pass, but those of you who have paid attention
in the previous sections will be posing a different type of question now. If demographic movements
are inherently slow and thus well-known for decades, and if Arab states had indeed invested sizable
portions of their sizable income in research and education since the 1970s, then the situation in
2008, when Dhillon spoke, could not have been so dire as to warrant his alarmist descriptions. You
are, obviously, entirely correct, because Dhillon’s call to action was necessary precisely because so
much was rotten in Arab basic and higher education.180

On the one hand, it is true that the baseline from whence Arab nations began at the time of
independence was exceedingly low in terms of basic education, especially for women.
Consequently, government efforts in the ensuing decades produced marked improvements, if only
because they improved upon such an abysmal starting point. Likewise, modern universities and
research facilities were almost completely absent at the time of independence. Subsequent
investments into creating new facilities thus appeared in principle impressive. But even if some
Arab states before the uprisings had been spending more than 15% of their budgets on
education,181 the kind of education these investments bought was sub-standard. Chloe Mulderig, in
her report on the state of Arab youth that we encountered earlier, gives it simply “A Failing Mark
for Arab Education.”182 She maintains that the habitual praise from the international community
and its development finance institutions for these efforts had been misdirected. Such praise was
based on purely nominal factors, such as macroeconomic indicators indicating substantial
spending, high enrolment and graduation rates, reduction of gender differentials, and reductions
in admittedly high illiteracy rates, but it largely ignored the abysmal quality of education and research
happening in the Arab world. She recounts an exchange with a young Arab university student:

“Tears of frustration streaming down her face, one young Moroccan I spoke with provided
a clear analysis of her educational experience: “Education in Morocco is worth zero. I know
that, all my classmates know that. Even our parents know. But what are we to do?” While
nearly all Arab youth have access to at least the beginnings of a full education, the actual
value of what they are receiving has not yet reached international expectations.

180
And he was, of course, very much aware of this, as is clear from his writings, see Navtej Dhillon and Djavad Salehi-
Isfahani, Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform, Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper Series
No 8 (Washington, D.C.: Wolfensohn Center for Development/Dubai School of Government, 2008), available at:
http://shababinclusion.org/content/document/detail/1166/; Dhillon, Navtej and Tarik Yousef (eds.), Generation in Waiting: The
Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East (Brookings Instition: 2010).
181
World Bank, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, World Bank, Washington, D.C.
(2008), available at: http://tinyurl.com/edu-reform-mena.
182
Mulderig, An Uncertain Future, p. 8.

65
 When Arab youth are tested on skills and knowledge gained during their education, the
progress of education in the Arab world is revealed to be a mirage.”183

Students in the Arab world, at primary, secondary and tertiary level, score significantly worse than
their peers in virtually any other region in the world on international standardized educational
testing, which means that the average Arab students does not benefit as much as students in other
parts of the world from the same time spent in the classroom.184 Arab high school students remain
several years behind their peers in countries with better school systems. A Syrian high-school
student before the onset of the civil war, after eight years of schooling would, for instance, lag fully five
(!) years behind a German student.185 The official 2005 Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey found
that less than half of the girls graduating from the state-required minimum years of schooling (aged
15 or older) could pass a basic literacy test.186

According to standardised tests for 2011, – that is before the onset of the civil war, which made
everything much worse – 65% of Syrian students did not obtain the minimum level of competence
defined by the OECD. Corresponding figures for Albania, a terribly poor and troubled part of
Europe, are 59% and for Germany 16%. This leads some educational economists to conclude that
up to two thirds of Syrian high school students can be considered functionally illiterate,187 and that
was before the civil war destroyed what was widely regarded as one the best performing Arab
educational system. This startling gap between considerable advances in the quantity of education
in the Arab world but not in its quality has hampered economic growth in the region, as observed
by the World Bank.188

These shortcomings are mirrored at the level of vocational and university training, where the
knowledge imparted quite simply does not prepare students for productive careers in the labour
market. The emphasis on rote learning, corrupt examination processes, curricula geared exclusively
toward admission into the coveted but ever more unobtainable public sector, as well as socio-

183
Ibid., p. 9.
184
Navtej Dhillon, Paul Dyer, and Tarik Yousef, “Generation in Waiting: An Overview of the School to Work and Family
Formation Transitions,” in: Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, ed. by Navtej Dhillon and
Tarik Yousef (Brookings Instition: 2010) pp. 11-38, p. 19.
185
Jan-Martin Wiarda, “”Zwei Drittel können kaum lesen und schreiben.” Interview mit dem Bildungsökonom Ludger
Wößmann,” Die Zeit, (Hamburg, 3 December 2015).
186
Mulderig, An Uncertain Future, p. 9. See also Aziz El Massassi, “En Égypte, les professeurs déplorent le déclin de la langue
arabe,” Le Monde, (Paris, 3 August 2016).
187
Wiarda, “”Zwei Drittel können kaum lesen und schreiben.” Interview mit dem Bildungsökonom Ludger Wößmann.” Note
that Syria participated only in the first of the two major tests, that is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)
and not the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
188
World Bank, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa.

66
economic access restrictions dramatically limit the ability of graduates to find jobs in a tight local
labour market, let alone prepare them for global opportunities.189

This malaise had already been exposed in a series of uncharacteristically frank Arab Human
Development Reports published by the United Nations Development Programe (UNDP). The 2002 report,
entitled Creating Opportunities for Future Generations looked at the issue of youth unemployment and
educational failure;190 the 2003 report, entitled Building a Knowledge Society, addressed the failure of
the Arab world to produce meaningful research, as attested by scientific research, publications,
patents, etc.;191 the 2004 report looked at the reasons for the stunted creativity in producing relevant
knowledge, entitled Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World,192 while the 2005 report concluded with
one of the most crucial social shortcoming affecting all the cultural ills outlined before, entitled
Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World.193 The 2009 report deals with The Challenges to Human
Security,194 while the so far final 2016 report deals with Youth and the Prospects for Human Development
in a Changing Reality after the momentous upheavals since 2010.195

Written primarily by a team of Arab scholars, these reports held an uncomfortable mirror to Arab
societies and governments that wasn’t as easily dismissed as external critique often is. The deep
structural failure to produce, disseminate and productively use knowledge has been laid out in an
exceptionally clear and piercing manner in these reports. I strongly urge you to read them, they are
freely available on the UNDP website. The fact that their urgent lessons and recommendations
have not been heeded is a strong contributing factor to the unravelling of the old order that began
in 2010.

189
Dhillon, Dyer, and Yousef, “Generation in Waiting: An Overview of the School to Work and Family Formation
Transitions”; Amin et al., After the Spring.
190
United Nations Development Programme and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, The Arab Human
Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations.
191
Idem, The Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society (New York: UNDP - Stanford University Press,
2003).
192
Idem, The Arab Human Development Report 2004: Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World (New York: UNDP - Stanford
University Press, 2004).
193
Idem, The Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: UNDP - Stanford
University Press, 2006).
194
Idem, Arab Human Development Report 2009: Challenges to Human Security in the Arab Countries (New York: UNDP, 2009).
195
Idem, Arab Human Development Report 2016: Youth and the Prospects for Human Development in a Changing Reality.

67
6. Outlook: Likelihood of Stable Governance

a. The Persistence of Foolish Ideas

At the beginning of this short course, I presented you an important book written by the Syrian
philosopher Sadiq al-Azm shortly after the devastating defeat the Arabs suffered in their 1967 war
against Israel. In that book, Self-Criticism after the Defeat, al-Azm observed three major shortcomings
in Arab intellectual and cultural life that directly contributed to that defeat:

First, the primary cause of the military defeat had not been any insufficiency in materiel, because
the Arabs had been supplied with advanced weaponry and mostly free of charge by the Soviet
Union, matching Israeli material capabilities, which had been supplied, equally free of charge, by
the United States. The chief difference lay in the very different usage made by Arabs and Israelis
of these advanced material capabilities. Arab strategic thinking, tactical prowess, organisational
routines and personnel training were far inferior to that possessed by Israel.

Second, the chief reason for this discrepancy was that Israeli society had embraced the functional
logic of modernity, while the Arabs remained attached to pre-modern, anti-rational notions, which
were defended on traditional and religious grounds even if manifestly dysfunctional in their
outcome. While the Israelis had embraced science, rationality and critical thinking, the Arabs had
not and would not, relying instead on irrational, often magical beliefs in their superiority and
eventual vindication, irrespective of countervailing evidence.

Third, rather than accepting responsibility for this state of affairs, Arabs had chosen – and have
continued ever since – to rely on exonerating narratives that always place the blame for one’s
misfortune on some external, insurmountable force, reflected in the region’s penchant for
conspirational thinking.196

In an essay entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” the English novelist George Orwell wrote, just after
World War II, that people obviously can talk, and even believe, nonsense for a very long time
without paying an obvious price. Eventually, however reality will impose a reckoning:

“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and
then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we
were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only
check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a

196
al-Azm, Self-Criticism after the Defeat; Idem, “Orientalism and Conspiracy,” in: Orientalism & Conspiracy: Politics and Conspiracy
Theory in the Islamic World. Essays in Honour of Sadik J. Al-Azm, ed. by Arndt Graf, Schirin Fathi, and Ludwig Paul (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2011) pp. 3-28; Idem, Critique of Religious Thought (English Translation of Naqd al-Fikr ad-Dini).

68
 battlefield. … The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers
were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.”197

One of my teachers, the American professor of political science Stephen Van Evera once wrote a
short but very insightful article about a deceptively simple but vexed question: “why do states and
societies believe foolish ideas?”198 An astute student of German strategy before and during both
world wars, he was startled by the same paradox Orwell observed: how could otherwise
accomplished nations and their leaders pursue policies so evidently contradicted by reality? He
accepts that bad decisions or perceptions sometimes occur, whether for self-interested, ideological
or entirely innocent reasons. Those placed to perform a given job invariably make mistakes. It is
the critical evaluation of their performance, which promotes innovation, necessary change, and
holds incumbents accountable. Evaluation thus threatens their jobs and status, which explains why
those in positions of influence often seek to hamper and to punish evaluators.

Internal self-evaluation is therefore often timid and ineffective. This is true even without
accounting for the paranoia and persecution so prevalent in states whose governments rely
predominantly on fear to uphold their rule. If you remember Kanan Makiya’s account of Iraq under
Saddam, you will realise why a Republic of Fear isn’t a very good place to critically challenge the
wisdom of state decisions. But even without such pervasive fear, critical self-evaluation is hard
work, as George Orwell acknowledged: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant
struggle.”199 And because it is hard, psychologically unpleasant and professionally dangerous,
individuals and groups resist criticism with obvious negative repercussions for the community as a
whole. Van Evera puts it as follows:

“In essence the organization suffers an auto-immune disease of the brain. It attacks its own
thinking-learning apparatus if that apparatus does its job. As a result, the organization thinks
poorly and learns slowly.”200

The devastating lack of intellectual honesty and critical thinking in the Arab world that had been
lamented by al-Azm in his seminal book half a century ago and put into glaring statistics in the
UNDP Arab Human Development Reports from 2002-2006 is the result of precisely the kind of
communal “auto-immune disease of the brain” that Van Evera described. Because critical voices
face persecution, as the institutions that contain the necessary expertise to hold the powerful

197
George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. In Front of Your Nose, 1946–50 (London: D.R. Godine, 2000).
198
Stephen Van Evera, Why States believe Foolish Ideas: Non-Self-Evaluation by States and Societies, Version 35, Cambridge, Mass. (10
January 2002), available at: http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/vanevera/why_states_believe_foolish_ideas.pdf, accessed on: 25
July 2006.
199
Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. In Front of Your Nose, 1946–50.
200
Van Evera, Why States believe Foolish Ideas.

69
accountable and challenge the wisdom of their decisions are unavailable – especially independent
research centres and universities of high quality – the communities end up “thinking poorly and
learning slowly.”

Because the powerful never have to defend their positions rationally and to endure critical
questioning, a fertile ground for eminently idiotic policies is created. And while psychologically and
intellectually it might be possible to explain their obvious failures away, as George Orwell observed,
sooner or later these false beliefs will face the countervailing evidence of solid reality. This happens
most devastingly on the military battlefield against foes who do not subscribe to such illusions.
According to Orwell, the very complexity and indeterminate nature of political life often permits
delusional thinking to persist well after its costs have become unbearable:

“In private life, most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget,
two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or
non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for
two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities
I have chronicled above, are all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions,
unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”201

And as the pressures of this solid reality make themselves painfully felt in the form of lost wars,
economic decline, unemployment, political instability, social insecurity, etc., yet the painful but
necessary analysis necessary to adapt to it remains absent, communal pathologies of perception
develop. This is ultimately due to the absence of critical thinking and institutionalised sources for
self-evaluation, as Van Evera points out:

“Non-self-evaluation explains national misperception in two ways. First, government

bureaucracies non-self-evaluate. … Second, the whole society can also suffer the non-self-
evaluation syndrome: the national process of evaluating public policy is damaged by a scaled-
up version of the same dynamics that afflict organizations. Academe, the press, and other
non-governmental evaluative institutions often fail to evaluate because evaluation makes
enemies that often have the power to defeat or deter it.”202

In the volatile post-Arab spring situation, such evaluative institutions remain as weak or absent as
ever, which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the enormous challenge of sustained structural
reform will be tackled in a serious and realistic manner.

201
Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. In Front of Your Nose, 1946–50.
202
Van Evera, Why States believe Foolish Ideas. (no pagination)

70
b. Taking Responsibility

One of the chief reasons for the poor thinking and slow learning, which we have identified earlier,
has been the absence of effective self-evaluation as a precondition for social and political
accountability, especially when it is most painful to do so. The army museum in Cairo still claims
that the Egyptian army won the 1973 war. Only because these falsehoods are never openly
challenged, can the reconstituted military regime survive today, when it is relying on handouts from
the Gulf to avoid economic meltdown and unable to impose security even domestically, as Melhem
observes:

“The vaunted Egyptian military is even incapable of imposing its total sovereignty over the
Sinai Peninsula. It finds itself reliant on the might of the Israeli Air Force — the same air
force that decimated Egyptian air power on June 5, 1967 — in the fight against the so-called
Islamic State and other extremists.”203

It is the critical voices of evaluation that force the community and its decision-makers to assume
responsibility for mistakes in deed or in calculation. The Arab penchant for conspiracy thinking is
but one of the manifestations of a deep-seated unease with accepting responsibility for self-inflicted
damage. The chief attraction of conspirational thinking is precisely that it absolves one from painful
self-inspection and relieves the pang of cognitive dissonance.

One of its other manifestations is what the Arab social scientist Hammed ‘Ammar more than half
a century ago termed the “clever personality” (al-shaksiat al-fahlawiyya). Al-Azm’s saw this
widespread attitude as one of the chief impediments to learning, critical thinking and social progress
because it eschews serious engagement with an issue in favour of

“the constant search for the shortest and fastest route to realize particular goals and aims
while avoiding the toil and the effort usually required in overcoming impediments to reach
this goal, and avoiding using the natural means to attain it, because the concern of the clever
personality is not the accomplishment of the work in the most complete way, but mere
success in achieving the goal lest he be called incapable or incompetent. For what matters
to him most is that he performs the task in a way that maintains his personal façade.”

Al-Azm, himself a lifelong university professor, stressed how entrenched this attitude is in Arab
educational institutions, where the ‘clever’ student is celebrated, someone who manages to achieve
apparent success without ever seriously studying. Relying on cheating, flattery, even outright
bribery, does not carry an obvious social stigma. Students are exclusively concerned with the
“external appearance that comes with this success” in passing their exams, while the serious pursuit
of knowledge is disparaged. He continues:

203
Hisham Melhem, “The Arab World Has Never Recovered From the Loss of 1967,” Foreign Policy, (5 June 2017).

71
 “What is painful in this matter is that most of us approach this type of behaviour as if it
were a natural matter and without a pang of conscience, self-examination, or internal
resistance saying to ourselves, ‘your success is false, hollow, and empty, without validity or
authority.’ What scares us is not the failure in itself, but the shame and disgrace that we
believe descends on us when the news of our failure spreads and becomes known.”204

The infamous ‘science cities’ and imported cultural institutions in the Gulf and elsewhere, the
Louvre, Guggenheim, NYU and other brand-name institutions that are parachuted into a barren
cultural landscape precisely meet this desire for the “external appearance of success.” While looking
nice, they do little to redress the underlying structural lack of critical and creative thinking. As one
Western scholar concludes in her survey of the sector: “We might presume that expensive, private
American-style universities’ primary role in Gulf states is not to educate Gulf states’ students for a
knowledge economy, but rather, to bring prestige and international acclaim to the Gulf States.”205

Not only do such institutions do little to train the next generation of creative, productive citizens,
they also fail to serve as centres for independent, critical research, while creating the appearance of a
rigorous academic landscape.206 We have outlined earlier that the education sector has failed to
equip young Arabs with the necessary skills to find gainful employment in labour markets that at
any rate are highly skewed toward a shrinking and inefficient public sector. Perhaps more
worrisome still, the education and cultural sector, irrespective of the appearance of academic freedom
and critical thinking symbolised in Western offshoots, is increasingly parochial, marked by religious
and sectarian bigotry and a high penchant for violence. Relying on the Harvard scholar Ishac Diwan
the British magazine The Economist offers the following bleak assessment of contemporary Arab
political culture:

“young Arabs are markedly more patriarchal and less tolerant towards people of different
cultures or religion than young people in other middle-income countries. Worryingly, better
education does not breed greater openness, as it usually does elsewhere. Mr Diwan thinks it
is because schooling is used by governments and religious authorities as a form of

204
al-Azm, Self-Criticism after the Defeat, pp. 73–74.
205
Elizabeth Buckner, “The Role of Higher Education in the Arab State and Society: Historical Legacies and Recent Reform
Patterns,” Comparative & International Higher Education, Vol. 3 (2011) pp. 21-26, p. 25.
206
The issue has been debated intensely in the specialised media. The discourse has centred on the financial opportunities to
Western institutions on the one hand, and the obvious reputational risks arising from infringements of academic freedom, low
student quality, and political interference on the other. See for instance, Kristina Bogos, “American Universities in a Gulf of
Hypocrisy,” New York Times, (15 December 2016); Philip G. Altbach, “The Branch Campus Bubble?,” Inside Higher Ed (15 July
2011); Nick Anderson, “In Qatar’s Education City, U.S. colleges are building an academic oasis,” Washington Post, (6 December
2015); Daniel Epstein, “Transforming the University. The Curious Politics of US Satellite Campuses,” Harvard International Review,
14 January 2016, available at: http://hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=12429; Warren Fahmy, “Branching Out: Why Are US Campuses
in the Gulf Struggling?,” The Middle Easterner, Los Angeles, Cal., UCLA Center for Middle East Development, 17 July 2014,
available at: http://www.middleeasterner.net/blog/ibcs; John Morgan, “Branching Out,” Times Higher Education, London, 3
February 2011, available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/branching-out/415018.article; Andrew Ross,
“Human Rights, Academic Freedom, and Offshore Academics,” Academe, Washington, D.C., American Association of University
Professors, January-February 2011, available at: https://www.aaup.org/article/human-rights-academic-freedom-and-offshore-
academics#.WWtiqBiw0SM.

72
 indoctrination. Rather than teach critical thinking, textbooks perpetuate ideas of obedience
(the region’s repressive governments like it that way) and, often, misunderstanding or even
hatred of other faiths and sects.”207

It is apparent that the current instability in the Arab world has been largely the result of an
unsustainable rent-financed political economy that produced extreme demographic growth but did
little to harness the potential of its human capital towards productive purposes. The uprisings of
2010 proved the bankruptcy of the old ways but, with the possible exception of Tunisia, they did
not provide a decisive end to old patterns. Everywhere but in Tunisia, the uprisings have either
been beaten down, aborted and coopted, or have descended into civil war and state collapse. The
structural indicators for virtually all Arab nations have been worrisome for decades. But in the
years since the uprisings they have degenerated further, strongly exacerbated by self-defeating
policies by regimes trying to maintain their hold on power at any price, perhaps best symbolised
by Egypt’s military rulers.208

Arab governments, without exception, were and continue to be led by aging dictators supported
by a class of socio-economic ‘insiders.’ They seek to perpetuate the privileges they got used to
during the fat years, while ignoring the plight of the wave of new arrivals. What turns the
demographic imbalance between age cohorts from a mere challenge, or even an opportunity, into
a catastrophic security risk,209 is the same problem we discovered at the very opening of this course:
the absence of functioning institutions. The American political scientist Richard Cincotta studied the
impact of the youth bulge on political stability. Whether revolutionary ideas take hold depends,
according to him, not only on the material conditions and the availability and attractiveness of
certain ideas over others, but on “how easy it is to get this ideologically naïve, experimental, risk-
taking, perhaps creative group of people into politics.”210

But getting these frustrated young people into peaceful politics will prove to be difficult, if not
impossible, for as The Economist correctly observes:

207
“Arab Youth: Look Forward in Anger. By Treating the Young as a Threat, Arab Rulers Are Stoking the Next Revolt.”
208
Ruth Michaelson, “Egypt’s Economy is in Crisis. So Why is the Government Spending Millions on a Fancy New Space
Agency?,” Newsweek, (28 February 2017); Peter Hessler, “Egypt’s Failed Revolution,” The New Yorker (2 January 2017); “The
Ruining of Egypt. Repression and the Incompetence of Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi Are Stoking the Next Uprising,” The Economist,
(London, 6 August 2016); The Editorial Board, “Egypt Averts Economic Collapse, for Now,” New York Times (5 November 2016).
209
LaGraffe, “The Youth Bulge in Egypt: An Intersection of Demographics, Security, and the Arab Spring”; Murphy,
“Problematizing Arab Youth: Generational Narratives of Systemic Failure.”
210
Quoted in Hvistendahl, “Young and Restless Can Be a Volatile Mix,” p. 552.

73
 “These days, life for young Arabs is often a miserable choice between a struggle against
poverty at home, emigration or, in extreme cases, jihad. Indeed, in places such as Syria, the
best-paid jobs involve picking up a gun.”211

In the previous sections on the economy, on political institutions, on human development we have
identified a host of very serious structural shortcomings. Unfortunately, we have also identified
either reform failures or a blanket refusal to even acknowledge that reform is necessary. Remember
the bleak assessment offered by Hisham Melhem in the opening of this course when he asked
“who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world?”212 Note that Melhelm, unlike
many of his compatriots, uses the First-Person-Plural, “we,” to describe who is to blame.

c. Addressing Structural Failures

As has become apparent in this course, the challenges facing Arab states are enormous: they need
to simultaneously reform their political institutions to create viable channels for constructive
political participation, they need to create economic growth to generate an unprecedented number
of jobs to accommodate their youth, they need to instigate social engineering towards an
ambitiously restrictive family planning policy, which in turn will require uncomfortable normative
discussions about sexual ethics, public morals and the role of women in society, and they need to
do this very, very quickly while massive economic and security dislocations are happening. If they
do not manage to do all this – and do it quickly – the implications will be grim, as a recent UNDP
report concludes:

“Without noticeable improvements in their economies or employment prospects, especially

for much of the frustrated youth, rising demonstrations, unrest and violence appear
unavoidable for the nearly half a billion people in the Arab world by 2025.”213

The problem is, of course, that the uprisings themselves had a major negative impact on the
economic prospects of the countries concerned.214 In those countries were the regimes fell, the
ensuing reorientation led to major political, social and economic insecurity. This, in turn, led to a
reduction in the economic outlook of the country. Where regimes did not fall, or where, like in
Egypt, the old powers managed to reassert themselves, there has been an understandable but

211
“Arab Youth: Look Forward in Anger. By Treating the Young as a Threat, Arab Rulers Are Stoking the Next Revolt.”
212
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
213
Mirkin, Arab Spring: Demographics in a Region in Transition, p. 8.
214
For data, see for instance Kari Paasonen and Henrik Urdal, Youth Bulges, Exclusion and Instability: The Role of Youth in the Arab
Spring, Conflict Trends No3 (Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), 2016), available at:
http://files.prio.org/Publication_files/prio/Paasonen,%20Urdal%20-
%20Youth%20Bulges,%20Exclusion%20and%20Instability,%20Conflict%20Trends%203-2016.pdf, accessed on: 9 June 2017, p.
3.

74
ultimately catastrophic reluctance to engage in the kind of hard and painful adjustment process
necessary to redress decades of mismanagement.215 A recent insightful summary by two economists
from the International Monetary Fund draws a catastrophic picture, despite the diplomatic language
used:

“The Arab Spring made it clear that the economic framework and institutions… needed to
change. Since then, there has been some progress, but the core structural weaknesses in
these countries’ economic frameworks have yet to be addressed. … Consequently, economic
outcomes at the household level have not improved, and in some cases have worsened since
2011. … These outcomes point to persistent, if not growing, challenges. These sources of
distress will likely continue to fuel social discontent and could significantly undermine public
sector reforms and the private sector’s response to them.”216

Behind the carefully-worded diplomatic language, you can detect a distressing reality: the Arab
countries have not yet addressed the structural shortcomings that exposed them to so much
instability, bloodshed and economic distress. More importantly, there is very little serious
intellectual engagement with these institutional and societal shortcomings, and they are therefore
very likely to persist. We can thus expect in the foreseeable future continued violence, state fragility,
radicalisation and uncontrolled mass emigration to Europe.

d. Bracing for Trouble

In the previous sections, we have become familiar with the peculiar political economy of rent-
financed, state-led, consumption-driven development in the Arab nations during the past fifty
years. This peculiar arrangement, as we learned, has had three important consequences:

First, it permitted the creation of an authoritarian social contract in which the rulers offered state-
provided welfare and the population accepted to stay out of politics.

Second, it dispensed with the need to build administrative capacity, which is normally necessary to
collect the necessary revenue to pay for essential services. As revenue was essentially free, these
services were often purchased externally, not provided locally. This created a culture of entitlement.
The state was responsible for providing welfare and services. In short, the expectation of the
lifestyle one was entitled to was artificially inflated. This has had tremendously negative implications

215
Again, Egypt is the most glaring case of mismanagement born out of fear that reform will undermine the fragile basis on
which the reconstituted authoritarian regime rests. See inter alia The Editorial Board, “Egypt Averts Economic Collapse, for
Now”; “The Ruining of Egypt. Repression and the Incompetence of Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi Are Stoking the Next Uprising.”
216
Adnan Mazarei and Tokhir Mirzoev, “Four Years after the Spring,” Finance & Development, Vol. 52(2), No. 2 (June 2015) pp.
55-57, pp. 56–57.

75
for the labour market, as many prefer unemployment and relying on family networks rather than
accept jobs thought to be ‘beneath’ them.

Third, the ability to simply purchase developmental achievements on the global market led to
seemingly impressive increases in human development indicators, specially in public health217 and
education. But these were achieved without the painful cost-benefit calculations and adjustments
that usually accompany them. Much of the purchased achievements remained nominal, especially
in education, culture and research, and neither respond to local needs nor international standards.

This created an enduring complacency and unsustainable public expectations about the standard
of life Arabs were ‘entitled’ to. Most crucially, it left a structural legacy that is extremely hard to
reform, let alone reverse. The uprisings and ensuing ongoing social turmoil have made clear that
the status quo is unsustainable. But beyond the dissatisfaction with present conditions and the call
for the “people” to become involved in decision-making, the Arab uprisings have lacked a clear
vision for change.218

In Huntington’s explanatory narrative of the ‘third wave,’ with which we became acquainted in the
beginning of this course, governments lose popular legitimacy because they fail to meet performance
expectations. This leads to ever more vociferous calls for popular participation in decision-making.
While true, this underestimates the clamour for legal protection through effective and independent
institutions, irrespective of the question of how decision-makers are to be chosen. The demands
for “dignity” throughout the Arab uprisings are indicative of this desire to be protected by legal,
administrative and social institutions that function rationally, impersonally and thus in a non-
arbitrary fashion.

Although no journalist or political scientist would cast it in these boring words, in a sense the Arab
populations went on a rampage against the old order because they wanted proper administrative law
and a state bureaucracy that wasn’t terrible. Perhaps deserving its reputation for being boring, but
administrative law embodies that “most lawyerly virtue, procedure, in assuring a kind of objectivity
to what would otherwise degenerate into an unconstrained act of judicial fiat”219 or just plain old
administrative malfeasance, arbitrary abuse and extortion, as so vividly happened in the instance

217
For an account of the causal relationship between increased wealth and longer life expectancy, see generally Moshe
Semyonov, Noah Lewin-Epstein, and Dina Maskileyson, “Where Wealth Matters More for Health: The Wealth–Health Gradient
in 16 Countries,” Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 81 (2013) pp. 10-17.
218
Lynch thinks that this in itself is a sufficient and hopeful insight. Marc Lynch, “The Big Think Behind the Arab Spring: Do
the Middle East’s Revolutions Have a Unifying Ideology?,” Foreign Policy (December 2011).
219
Paul F. Campos, “The Color of Money: O.J. Simpson and the Criminal Justice System - Perceptions and Decisionmaking,”
University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 67(4), No. 4 (1996) pp. 921-30, p. 924.

76
that triggered Mohammed Bouazizi’s desperate act of revolt. You remember, a policewoman tried
to extort a bribe from him, which he couldn’t pay, so she confiscated his entire capital investment
– an electronic scale he needed for his fruit-selling business – and humiliated him in public by
slapping him in the face. What a wonderful administrative law case of a disciplinary complaint that
would have made in a country with a proper justice system.220

Tired of the unfilled promises of charismatic snake-oil-peddlers of various ideologies, these

leaderless revolutions wanted a somewhat less ambitious version of what already existed elsewhere.
In a sense, we have been there before. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas had described
the startling, and for the European liberal left spiritually so disappointing, demands of the anti-
Communist uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe as revolutions in pursuit of an existing reality,
not an moral utopia.221

Habermas described the situation in the Communist periphery on the eve of the cataclysm of 1989
as one of ‘delayed modernity,’ where a powerful ideology had erected barriers against the full
realization of the promise of the Western institutional package.222 Consequently, he described the
political upheaval as eine nachholende Revolution, which unlike earlier revolutionary movements did not
seek to erect a new social order in opposition to those already existing,223 but instead tried to ‘catch
up’, that is to recreate as faithfully as possible the exact institutional, legal, social, and economic
structure already existing across the border.224

While remaining sceptical of the self-congratulatory sentiment so prevalent in the West at the time,
Habermas acknowledged that the revolutions that swept aside Communism required a
readjustment of often romanticized notions of popular movements. In particular, he recognized
that these revolutions were fought not in the pursuit of some lofty utopia, but sought to obtain
something that already had a physical reality. They wanted the constitutional acquis that already

220
de Soto, “The Real Mohamed Bouazizi”; Knickmeyer, “The Arab World’s Youth Army. Meet the chronically unemployed
twenty-somethings fueling social and political upheaval across the Middle East.”
221
Note that the following paragraph has been taken from an earlier chapter, Afsah, “Guides and Guardians: Judiciaries in
Times of Transition,” pp. 263–64.
222
He elaborates his vision of the characteristics and continuing appeal of modernity in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. by Fredrick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995 [1985]).
223
The quintessentially anti-establishment nature of social revolutions is well described in Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of
Revolution: Europe, 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995). The continuing appeal of this thinking is examined in
Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also, Idem, “Rentier State
and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society, Vol. 11 (1982) pp. 265-83.
224
Jürgen Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).

77
existed in the West, which ‘progressive’ Westerns often criticized as bourgeois, restorative, and
socially regressive.225

To be sure, it appears slightly sophistic to disentangle in hindsight precisely which portion of the
undeniable popular demand for radical socio-political change concerned participation/democracy,
and protection/constitutionalism, respectively. During the political upheavals that led to the
collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, as during the ongoing rebellions in Arab
nations, the demand for democracy, that is for participation in decision-making, was strong. But
arguably more important, than the demand to be able to vote and have one’s vote counted, was
the dissatisfaction with the social and economic implications of being unable to find legal redress
against an overbearing, often corrupt and ineffective state.226

The problem, both intellectually and practically, is that the Arab world, unlike Central and Eastern
Europe, does not want to benefit from the stabilising and guiding impact of an existing role
model.227 Because the Western rational, constitutional model has been so thoroughly discredited
by decades of experience with illegitimate, formally secular autocracies and the sustained normative
assault of Islamists insisting on the need for an ‘authentic’ model of governance, the rebellions
after 2010 were not only leaderless but clueless.

Merely insisting that the people should have a voice, without ever articulating what this voice would
actually demand concretely,228 is at best a recipe for ineffectiveness and stagnation, at worst an
invitation for more ruthless, better organised reactionary forces.229 The uprisings were the long-
overdue answer to the provocative question posed by an al-Jazeera talk-show host in 2003: “Why
does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always
submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign
saviors?”230 Yes, the people responded, but because the xenophobic resistance against “foreign
saviours” had become so deeply entrenched in Arab thinking, it did not lead to a constructive
engagement with practical solutions to common governance problem developed elsewhere.231

225
See the chapter ‘Nachholende Revolution und linker Revisionsbedarf ’ ibid.
226
See for instance Chapter 2 “The Origins of the Arab Spring” in Amin et al., After the Spring, pp. 31-53; de Soto, “The Real
Mohamed Bouazizi.”
227
Afsah, “Guides and Guardians: Judiciaries in Times of Transition,” p. 263.
228
Salzman, “The Return to Political Islam.”
229
Here, I would thus strongly disagree with the optimism expressed by Lynch, “The Big Think Behind the Arab Spring: Do
the Middle East’s Revolutions Have a Unifying Ideology?”
230
This is how the controversial talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem began his program in December 2003 on the al-Jazeera
channel, quoted in Ibid.
231
See generally, Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Derick W. Brinkerhoff, Governance in Post-Conflict Societies: Rebuilding Fragile States (London: Routledge, 2007);

78
It may be fitting to end by referring you to a recent article by Hisham Melhem with whom we also
opened this course. It is a remarkable piece, a eulogy to his friend, the great Sadiq al-Azm, whose
writings we have encountered repeatedly in this course and who died on 11 December 2016 in
exile in Berlin. But it is simultaneously also a eulogy to Arab intellectualism, if not a eulogy to Arab
civilisation as such. He draws an arch from the devastating loss against Israel in 1967,232 to the
seeming vindication of the autocracies in 1973, to note that the harsh encounter with reality did
not yield the kind of sustained critical re-examination that could have put the Arabs onto a
sustainable trajectory to modernity.

The brief moment of cultural, intellectual and political renewal that took place mainly in Beirut
after 1967 dissipated after 1973 as the forces of reaction reasserted themselves and began the
ongoing process of accommodation with the victor, Israel and its backers, rather than question the
basis of their own rule in examining the reasons for the defeat. The three cataclysmic events of
1979 cemented the ascendancy of atavistic religious thinking in Arab politics – the Iranian Islamic
revolution; the Soviet invasion and the Islamist resistance in Afghanistan; and the violent
occupation of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by Saudi Islamists who challenged the religious
credentials of the monarchy. The Saudi reaction to all three could not have been worse and has
dragged the entire region and the Muslim community globally into an ongoing spiral of ever more
radical, ever more violent interpretations of their narrow puritan Wahhabi creed.233

The irrational insistence on the relevance of religious prescriptions and governmental models from
an altogether different age for the solution of contemporary governance problems had been largely
dismissed until that cataclysmic defeat. It is that defeat and the refusal to learn its lessons that
prepared the ground for the current malaise, which first and foremost is an intellectual disease:

“Fifty years after Azm and other Arab intellectuals started to mercilessly deconstruct their
ossified political orders, reactionary and primitive religious structures, and stagnant societies,
the Arab world has descended further into darkness. … Initially, most Arabs sought refuge
in denial, refusing to admit that their military rout was emblematic of deeper rotten cultural
maladies and social defects and instead calling the disastrous defeat a temporary “setback.”
… it was only after the 1967 defeat that the Arab Islamists, who were mocked and dismissed
by the left in previous decades, began to regroup and reassert themselves intellectually and
politically as the only “authentic” alternative to Arab nationalism. None of us who were
politically active in those years would have believed that the exclusivist and reactionary
Islamists … would dominate Arab life and politics in subsequent decades.

Ebrahim Afsah, “The Challenge of Civil Service Reform: The Elusive Goal of Governance,” in: Das internationale Engagement in
Afghanistan in der Sackgasse? Eine friedensethische Auseinandersetzung, ed. by Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven and Ebrahim Afsah (Baden-
Baden: Nomos, 2011) pp. 144-72.
232
See also Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East.
233
Daoud, “Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It”; Ibid.

79
It is difficult to end this course on an optimistic note. The best that can be said about the current
near total collapse of Arab and Muslim civilisation is a vindication of sorts of the relevance of
rational, critical thinking. Irrespective of fashionable but false post-modern ruminations about the
indeterminacy of social science, the past fifty years have shown that material reality has a way of
extracting a cost for ignoring and adjusting to it. As Orwell put it, “sooner or later a false belief
bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”234 The prevalence of myth, magical,
conspirational or otherwise delusional thinking, and the perpetuation of the structural conditions
for repression and backwardness that periodically erupted in violence, have led today to the near
total collapse of Arab states and societies.

In Melhelm’s words, “the Arab World has never recovered from the loss of 1967,” because it didn’t
want to learn its lessons. Looking at the aftermath and prospects of the Arab uprisings it is thus
necessary to take this earlier history of missed opportunities into account. As we discussed at the
beginning of this course, and again in Melhem’s words, we need to realise that “it took the Arabs
decades and generations to reach this nadir. [And that i]t will take us a long time to recover.”235 I
agree with Melhem that it certainly won’t happen in my lifetime, and I am somewhat younger than
him.

The current situation is the culmination of the worst fears of the critical intellectuals like al-Azm,
who after 1967 tried to set out onto a better trajectory by embracing rationality, scientific inquiry
and the liberating promise of modernity.236 What the current mess proves, however, is that these
critical intellectuals and their project of critical self-examination is more necessary than ever.

234
Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. In Front of Your Nose, 1946–50.
235
Melhem, “Barbarians Within Our Gates.”
236
Idem, “The Arab World Has Never Recovered From the Loss of 1967.” See also the introduction in Berman, All That is
Solid Melts into Air.

80
Bibliography

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of
Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Ebrahim Afsah, “Contested Universalities of International Law. Islam’s Struggle with
Modernity,” Journal of the History of International Law, Vol. 10 (2008) pp. 259-307.
———, “The Challenge of Civil Service Reform: The Elusive Goal of Governance,” in: Das
internationale Engagement in Afghanistan in der Sackgasse? Eine friedensethische Auseinandersetzung,
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