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Journal of Islamic Law and Culture

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The Islamic roots of the Egyptian Revolution

Laith Saud
a a

DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

Available online: 25 Nov 2011

To cite this article: Laith Saud (2010): The Islamic roots of the Egyptian Revolution, Journal of Islamic Law and Culture, 12:3, 187-196 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1528817X.2010.618024

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Journal of Islamic Law and Culture Vol. 12, No. 3, October 2010, 187 196

The Islamic roots of the Egyptian Revolution

Laith Saud
DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

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Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. (Miguel de Unamuno)

The rst decade of the 21st century has been characterized by the ubiquity of Islam. Since 2001, an elaborate industry has developed, made up of analysts, scholars, and journalists, producing all sorts of knowledge on all things Islamic; especially things political, social, and cultural. The accuracy of the Islam Industry is less relevant than its range. On the whole, Islamicists and Orientalists still maintain a very restricted view of what Islam is and what Muslims do. The severity of those restrictions can be measured according to the success of US policy in the Muslim world, which has been, according to any objective assessment, an abysmal failure. At the close of the decade, the short sightedness of the industry has been brought into sharp relief. The Arabs are overthrowing their regimes, and in so doing, are reminding the rest of the world just how dynamic the Islamic tradition remains. The Arab Spring has its roots in many things, but of all them the most central is Islam. I base this observation on three factors. First and foremost, the historical context within which the revolutions are transpiring is inundated with Islam. As I said before, the 21st century has thus far been dominated by talk about Islam and political movement within the Muslim world. This talk has not been merely talk, but a political discourse according to which military and economic policies have been articulated. It is difcult to believe though that Islam is everywhere, yet nowhere to be found when Arab Muslims peacefully pursue democracy; but this is exactly what some experts want you to believe. The second factor involves our vocabulary and the tendency to understand Islam in very narrow terms. Islam is more than a religion, it is a broad culture. More to the point, Islam as tradition incorporates a variety of experiences, including that of Near Eastern Christianity, secularism and modernization. Even if these concepts are typically described in opposition to Islam, the reality of the Islamic experience is one that includes such diverse elements within the larger tradition/culture. Of these, the secular aspects of Islamic political thought have been the most grossly overlooked and misunderstood by scholars. The last factor is this basic problematic why

Email: laith.saud@gmail.com

ISSN 1528-817X print/ISSN 1753-4534 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1528817X.2010.618024 http://www.tandfonline.com

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havent these types of revolutions spread to other non-Muslim societies that suffer similar conditions? All of these factors can be addressed according to one over all thesis the social imagination, to employ a term by Charles Taylor, of the Muslim world still evolves and a modern Islamic vision for a Muslim society is developing before our eyes. So let us touch upon these factors one by one. For the last ten years, Islam has been a menace. It is in the airport, waiting to board the airplane with you. It is down the street, waiting to subjugate you. It is in your coffee, waiting to convert you. Yet when the peoples of Cairo or Damascus, two of the three most important cities in Arab-Islamic history, demonstrate their collective efforts, no one discusses Islam. Let us think about this in relation to the other great city of Arab Islam Baghdad. In 2003, George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, claiming to bring democracy to a region decient in it. But this policy was not isolated, it was part and parcel of the larger War on Terror. Bush famously juxtaposed us and them and for all intents and purposes Islam has been the fundamental problematic of Western-Islamic relations. In order to manage this problem, western experts have conceptually broken down the Muslim world into a series of issues revolving around Islam; such as the relationship between religion and politics, the status of minorities, religiously driven violence, reconciliation with modernity, so on and so forth, in an effort to create a frame within which policy can be organized. This approach reduces the Islamic world to a heap of rubble, composed of supposedly disparate and even mutually exclusive parts, which are then again explained away as the failure of Islam. The term Islam, presented in all its simplicity, is then held responsible for this rubble and all its discontents. Now of course not all academics have invested in this false frame; Marshall Hodgson, William Cleveland, or Hugh Kennedy, to name only a few, have written eloquently on the complexity and, more importantly, coherency of Islam and its civilization. But it is the Emersons, Gellers, Spencers and Pipes that dominate the popular and more political potent narrative and who form an industry by which they demonize Islam and Muslims (and also enrich themselves considerably). It has also remained unclear how policy makers are counter-balancing the largely ideological (and false) projection of Islam with a more realistic and nuanced approach. But, again, according to the Islam Industry Islam is responsible for violence, gender discrimination, authoritarianism and underdevelopment in a way that is wholly unique. And the self-understanding generated by this industry culminated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 2003 marked the beginning of several converging trends; it was the beginning of post-Islamism and post-liberalism in the Arab world. As Arabs and Muslims watched in horror and yes anger, the bombardment of their Baghdad, a collective consciousness began to form throughout the Arab world. The Arabs were neither with us or them; and thus, the Arabs began to nd themselves again situating themselves in a complicated world. This is an important point. Complexity, nuance, grey-ness, are the basic constituents of a humanistic, that is, intellectual outlook. And for the rst time in modern Arab history, at least that I can think of, this intellectualism sprang from the ground up. It was not based on the formulations of a few major Arab intellectuals, although those intellectuals do now have a responsibility to capture it. It is least of all due to the grandstanding of Western politicians for whom freedom only followed bombs. This was the great achievement of the Arab Street (a term that I do not nd pejorative, as others have). The Arabs seriously and collectively shattered the hegemonic narrative that facilitated the repressive environment of their world and this was with Islam, not without it. Allow me to explain.

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The hegemonic narrative between 2001 and 2003 was basically this: The civilized West was under threat by a backward and dangerous contingency of Islamist terrorists. In order for the West to defend itself, the invasion of Muslim lands was necessary to combat terrorism. Combating terrorism required civilizing Muslims by establishing certain institutions that are seen as universal in their applicability but, in fact, represent social, economic, and historical developments peculiar to the West. So two major components coalesce to form this narrative: A civilized West (and all of the concomitant characteristics that being civilized in the West presupposes) and an Islamist or potentially Islamist East (and all of the characteristics that designation presupposes in the West as well). Without expounding upon the evolution of Islamist activity against the backdrop of the failure of Arab nationalists (note: not Arab nationalism), let us get to the heart of the matter. Islamism was about resistance. It was the Islamists in Palestine/Israel resisting occupation. It was the Islamists doing the same in Lebanon. The Islamists had pride; they were independent and thus free. They were not corrupt, unlike their so-called secular colleagues, who from Baghdad to Casablanca, Sanaa to Damascus, undermined the peoples prosperity through patrimony and nepotism. These so-called secularists were also aligned with the West and lined their pockets (if not palaces) with Western money. Islamist activity was/is rooted in one primary philosophical notion: The Absolute Sovereignty of God. Now, Islamophobes have often misrepresented this notion as an entire apparatus, that is, the Sharia, but the notion of Absolute Sovereignty of God is a notion, nothing more or less. Let me demonstrate by way of anecdote. When watching World War II lms, I nd myself curious as to why someone would hail Hitler or applaud Mussolini, let alone commit acts of political murder or genocide in the name of the state. The enthusiasm behind such fascist demonstrations or actions is of course alarming. It proves just how easily men can submit themselves to committing atrocities against their fellow men. Such commitments can be explained simply by fear. Human beings fear reprisal from the state, therefore they submit to authoritarianism and even carry out violent acts against their own people or others out of such fear. Or submission can be explained, perhaps even more appropriately, by way of examining modernity itself, as Zygmunt Bauman has in Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman observes how crucial bureaucratic rationalities and resoluteness were to the Holocaust, above and beyond simple anti-Semitism, for rage and fury are pitiably primitive and inefcient tools of mass annihilation.1 It is easier for a German soldier to kill a Jewish child, if that child is conceived of as a number on a production line. Murder, when meeting a quota, becomes merely extermination. Hannah Arendt described this sensibility as the banality of murder. And Marx, as well as Nietzsche, also warned us of the inherent dangers of modernity. Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist ideologue par excellence addressed both types of submission that predicated on fear and that found in modernity itself. Living in an authoritarian society himself, Qutb was a victim of the brutal Egyptian secret police. In Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, a great man in many respects, still found logic in turning the police on his own people if it seemed such

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See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press 2000). In pages 98 110, the author expands on the relationship between bureaucracy and mass killing.

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people were opposed to the revolution or the natural progress of Egypt. After many years of torture and imprisonment, Qutb was eventually executed. But he was not executed before articulating a lucid, if not systematic, critique of modernity.2 Qutbs critique is predicated on two complimentary notions. First, the various impersonal institutions, cultural and political, that make up a modern society form a facade that masks the accumulation of wealth and power according to personal interests. We may hear echoes of Marx here and there is no doubt in my mind that Qutb was inuenced by Marx, but Qutbs critique was different, more trenchant and general, less systematic and impersonal. Second, for Qutb, the pervasiveness of these institutions sustained the overall complacency and Ignorance of society. Society itself was enamored by the idols of nationality, statehood, abstract concepts like freedom or even the ction of their own sovereignty. Without afrming or rejecting either Qutb or Marx, the appeal of such critical social theorists increases when humans sense incongruity between the latent and manifest purposes of their social institutions. Here in America we can recall similar disturbances in our public consciousness when our freedoms seemed more paradoxically repressive than liberating. For example, freedom of the press during the invasion of Iraq was turned against itself. Journalists were offered such open access they were actually embedded with the military; such proximity of course endowed them with legitimacy since to the public they seemed right there, but these reporters became little more than correspondents for the units they were in. Inversely, the tactic of embedding journalists undermined un-embedded journalists like Dahr Jamal or Patrick Cockburn who were reporting from all sides and thus providing a more complete picture of the war. In the public mind, these journalists lacked the requisite clearance, which was intimately bound up with notions of nationalism. For Qutb, the only way to liberate yourself from these institutions is to transcend them, it is to embrace the Eternal Oneness of the Absolute. Therein one nds Truth. And Truth is Liberation by denition. And there could have been no greater way to honor Qutbs thought then by having executed the man. Qutb showed his willingness to submit to nothing, not even the fear of death. Having submitted to Truth, he was not free to submit to anything else. And I believe Qutb articulation of this notion, this fundamental philosophical premise, has made it part and parcel of the social imaginary of the courageous people of Egypt. As they faced tear gas and even bullets, they demonstrated their ultimate conviction. We see the people of Damascus doing the same. This courage to march against the most brutal state, with full knowledge that death awaits, and full knowledge that the world will only watch, but that the march must be done is Islam.3 Evidence of this connection was all over the streets of Cairo, where signs
2 Qutbs legacy is of course ambiguous; his prescription for jihad could very well be considered out of control, but it is not altogether clear what exactly Qutb meant by jihad, as he never articulated any explicit means or methods. More directly, I nd it difcult to believe that Qutb would have endorsed terrorism (i.e. the targeting of innocent civilians), as for his espousal for armed resistance, however, I consider it within the milieu of the militant radicalism of Malcolm X or Che Guevara in the 1950s and 1960s. 3 In addition, this articulation was not nebulous but clear and precise; the people embraced the Islamist notion of sacrice while rejecting the often concomitant appeal to violence. I would hold back from saying that this means Muslims have developed a denitive non-violent philosophy- or ahisa; it remains to be seen how things play out in Libya, for example, where the West is arming rebels against the regime. Nonetheless, even HAMAS has recently began to renounce political violence as, at the very least, ineffective.

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celebrated the sacrice of those protestors killed by the regime and reminded us all that each individual (whether Muslim or Christian) was a shahid or martyr. Couple this with the emphasis on selmiyaa or peaceful protests and we see the counter-narrative achieve full maturation. The Arabs embraced Islams emphasis on sacrice for social justice but rejected the Islamist call to kill for the same end, in so doing they not only rejected the Islamists but also the Bush narrative. Yes, Islam is courage.4 But the Egyptians also consciously demonstrated Islamism is not. And this is not only a distinction, but a major intellectual achievement, by a people. As you can recall, we began this discussion with us versus them. When Bush raised the stakes and articulated his vision of a world of binaries, in opposition to each other, we were compelled to investigate those binaries. And the Arabs were compelled more than anyone else precisely because of what was at stake for them. Which side would they choose? Islam, as many would have you believe, had demonstrated itself as the eternal menace to the West it always ways. And look at the West: It is free, stylish, fun, lled with all kinds of cool products and doing well. Meanwhile, look at the Islamists: murderous, villainous and, most importantly, failures. At least this was the hegemonic narrative and not an easy one to counterbalance for a whole host of reasons. Augmenting this narrative was the implicit but pervasive association of Islam with Islamism. Even though in public many politicians claimed to disassociate the two, we were constantly being reminded that it was the Islamists, after all, who supposedly took Islam the most literally. So the Muslims, including the Arabs, were left with a choice us versus them. Yet what the Arab Revolution make clear is that the Arabs have resisted the binary itself and have contributed to articulating a counter narrative that is more complex, nuanced and benecial to pursuing a sane world. According to Jacques Ranciere the assertion of political agency cannot be the ` simple assertion of an identity; it is always, at the same time, the denial of an identity given by another, given by the ruling order of policy . . .5 It was realized, amongst the Arabs, that this is exactly what the Islamists failed to do. In their zeal to resist, very much in the Qutbian sense, resistance to state expanded to resistance to culture, products, and various lifestyles associated with the West. The Islamists embraced their beards and foreswore suits and ties. And they did so, this is important to note, precisely to become the them of Bushs world. In order to show their fearlessness and resistance against the West, the most powerful region on Earth, they embraced an identity described as the enemy to the West; so even the Islamist who would never employ violence, still participated in resistance by rejecting Western clothes and culture. Perhaps that is ne, it is certainly a more peaceful means of resistance. But such an identity was little more than a mirror image of long-standing Orientalist stereotypes that facilitated an Orientalist agenda, which is amongst others things an attempt to understand the backward East in order to dominate it through superior technology and thus training in various elds. The Islamists, in an effort to resist the West, had submitted to it.
4

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I say this without exaggeration, to understand Islam as simply a host of rituals revolving around absolute monotheism is to misidentify Islam as dogma rather than Islam as praxis. The notion of speaking truth to power and actively pursuing social justice is steeped in the prophetic tradition or sunna. The language in the streets of Cairo, on signs, shirts and in songs, often expressed a reacquaintance with this tradition. 5 Jacques Ranciere, Politics, Identication, and Subjectivization, (Summer, 1992) 61 The Iden` tity in Question 58 64, 62.

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Islamism did provide an alternative outlook for a region ensnared in political corruption, elitist global politics and devoid of institutions that facilitate agency. But Islamism was also a historical anomaly; it is predicated on a certain uniformity that is inconsistent with the diversity of the Arab world, let alone the whole Muslim world. Though anchored in the absolute oneness of God, Islam has always been a spectrum of ideas, beliefs, reecting a diversity of peoples, which in part explains Islam as a phenomenon. As Marshall Hodgson observes, what has been felt as Islam, however, considered historically, in all its ramications and even in its most central implications, has of course varied enormously.6 Hodgsons observation belies the fact that Islam is unique among the religious traditions for the diversity of peoples that embraced it.7 Islamism, in its emphasis on a shallow uniformity, rejects Islamic history, making most Muslims terribly uncomfortable with it. Yet, it was precisely this uniformity that so suited the us versus them narrative. Islamists were not only practicing Islam poorly, but they were also conrming the status quo based on us versus them, not resisting it. The Arabs understood this, for after all, they are Muslims. For people in the West, save a few specialists exposed to the diversity of Islamic thought and history, the correspondence between Islamism and Orientalist stereotypes simply conrmed beyond a doubt that Islam is what it always was understood to be. Whereas over the last ten years, Islamism had remained a formidable military and ideological foe to the West, in the Arab world it had become little more than a two-dimensional g leaf. Add to this the destruction attributed to the Islamists in Iraq and one could faithfully say that Islamism remains relevant only in the West. Of course, this rising intellectual awareness vis-a-vis Islam was not the only thing ` happening. The Arabs had also been confronting an aspiring new world order over the last ten years, dominated by neo-liberal economic trends that characterized the Bush administrations vision of us. It should be mentioned that the framing of Islam in certain terms was essential to the formation of this world-view. The frame purported neo-liberalism to be a counter-balance to Islamism, an inevitable by-product of impoverished Muslim societies. We can recall Tony Blairs Strategy Unity producing plans for more proactive intervention in failing states that claimed neo-liberal principals but resonated with imperial tones.8 I would like to suggest two things here: First, the Arab Revolutions are a formidable rejection of the neo-liberalism stated above. Second, although neo-liberalism, i.e. Globalization, facilitated an environment ripe for revolution, this environment was not the cause of revolt. Globalization and its neo-liberal doctrine is an interesting phenomenon that poses challenges to contemporary political theorists not yet fully recognized, but we can tentatively outline some inherent contradictions within the doctrine. The ideas of liberty and equality, the ying and yang nexus of Western political theory, has historically been dependent on citizenship as an institution by which to distribute such privileges. The emergence of the global corporation has squeezed the privilege out of citizenship however; the citizen is now taxed to bail out corporations who over extend themselves in an effort to become even more global. These trends are vital to understanding what happened in both Egypt and Tunisia to a large extent. Privatization, the reduction of trade tariffs and other conditions facilitated a cozy
6

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Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1977), 72. 7 Ibid., 75. 8 http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/11/15/2003211156

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relationship between banks and Mubarak family cronies, meanwhile Ben Alis family expenditures have now become proverbial, coming at the expense of the average Tunisian fruit seller. Now, I am acknowledging that economic conditions are often in place when revolutions transpire. In fact, it is difcult to imagine a society in which so many members are well off having a revolution. For example, Marxist leaning professors in the West testify to this, they do not lead revolutions. They write Marxist leaning book reviews in the London Review of Books instead. They are too well off, too much appropriated by the larger hegemonic culture. But just because economic injustice often accompanies revolution, does not mean revolution often accompanies economic injustice. If so, much, much more of the world would be in revolt. Economics also cannot explain why the Arab Revolution has hit every Arab country in some way with the exception of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in spite of how diverse these countries are economically. Economic conditions are just that conditions and conditions do not possess agency. Human beings do. But it is not an easy thing to believe that you can change the unjust world, that is something that can only be done if you have tradition in so doing. And the Islamic tradition is that tradition. Let us explore what tradition means and, in this context, the Islamic tradition in particular. When I went to Egypt this past February to document events and participate, I had the opportunity to perform Friday prayers at Tahrir Square with hundreds of thousands of other Muslims. Upon completing salat, Copts performed Mass in the square. This complimentary role is what I mean when I refer to the second aspect of this discussion Islam as culture. What is culture exactly? Culture is the meta-institution according to which we more or less organize our behavior as a society. We draw social conventions, norms, mores and laws from culture and by so-doing re-enforce that culture. Islam is such a meta-institution, forming an Islamic civilization and culture. To once again quote Hodgson,
Muslims succeeded in building a new form of society, which in time carried with it its own distinctive institutions, its art and literature, its science and scholarship, its political and social forms, as well as its cult and creed, all bearing an unmistakable Islamic impress.9

In other words, even secular literature (adab) or the empirical sciences or, for our purposes here, relations between Muslims and Christians, very much elaborated on in both Muslim and Christian literature in the Near East, constitutes a general culture of which Islam has formed a core. Culture, Islamic or otherwise, possesses its authority by being rooted in a historical memory. I am being specic here and do not mean rooted in history: History is the things that happened. Historiography is an attempt to understand the things that happened. Historical memory is the way we choose to remember how things happened. How we choose to remember things says a lot about who are and hope to become. Such memories can be collated in a certain manner to invent a national narrative, as Shlomo Sand and others have pointed out. Or they can be used to reinforce the status quo. But I am more interested in such memory for philosophical purposes, as the existentialists have explored it; we recall our past in an effort to know the possibilities of our future.
9

Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 71.

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The act of having Muslim prayers, side by side with Christian ones was an act of recollection, a celebration of Egypts Islamic past where Muslims and Christians have lived side by side for centuries. This act only makes sense in the Islamic context and reveals the embedded-ness of the Egyptian Revolution in historical memory. Since the beginning of Islam, Muslim Christian relations have persisted along a continuum that stresses the centrality of the Abrahamic tradition in that region. Rather than marginalize their different religious identities in order to facilitate a common but abstract political identity, they displayed their religious differences in order to commemorate a concrete Egyptian identity. I am willing to insist that this was an Islamic act because it is almost impossible to imagine Muslims being invited to pray alongside Christians at a political rally in the West, if those Westerners wanted to achieve anything more that agitating the establishment. Secondly, it is doubtful that Muslims would have much success in the West if they merged an act of faith with an act of politics. Believe me; they have tried with pathetic results. Lastly and most tellingly, I do not think we would nd many instances of Mass being held at a political rally in the West, where Catholic and Orthodox Christianity is much more apolitical. These acts only make sense in the Islamic context and demonstrated a deliberate attempt to re-connect with historical memory. This is no minor symbol, having achieved three things. First, it openly undermined the authoritarian claim that the only thing keeping these different religious groups from tearing each other apart was the regime. We in fact now have evidence suggesting that the regime was itself behind sectarian violence, in an effort to validate itself in exactly this matter. Second, and more importantly, it addressed a more complex issue and once again conrms the intellectual achievements of the revolutionaries. It is generally assumed in the West that any politics deeply seated in religion, any religion, is inherently problematic. I will elaborate on this in a moment. Thirdly, the act of having ecumenical prayers in Tahrir Square rejected the us/ them dichotomy. Let me to return to the second point. The West has developed a certain tradition over the span of two thousand years and it has often been argued that this tradition embodies certain universal norms. In the early modern age, about 1500, this tradition involved the Protestant Reformation and later the Enlightenment, leading to what are generally considered secular states in the West. Since the West has also been the most successful civilization both militarily and nancially in the last ve hundred years, it has been assumed that their tradition is a model for all societies. But modeling oneself after another is neither easily done nor particularly desirable. Tradition facilitates our social imaginary, it allows us to understand how we behave together but in order to be effective, tradition must be authentic and by that I mean organic. A true tradition must be a spectrum, constituted of fundamentally contradictory parts. Otherwise the ideas have not been challenged and the range of the tradition is limited and unviable. Only by challenging ideas does their full potential emerge. Such a tradition can only be developed over time, as the people of any given society engage and disagree over time and space for innumerable reasons. Thus in Islam you nd theocracy and secularism, textualism and rationalism. In the West you nd a similar dialectic in play, giving rise to such opposing masters as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. If you attempt to subvert a peoples organic tradition and replace it with one from the outside, that importation can never carry along with it all of the depth, texture and even scars required for tradition. A tradition imposed from above, or even

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worse from beyond, is at, vacuous and lacks rigor. In other words, it is simply ideology. A sudden rupture in tradition (and here I mean the whole spectrum of tradition, not merely the more conservative aspects of it) can have disastrous consequences, many of which have manifested themselves in the Muslim world over the last 100 years. A sudden rupture in tradition is like a sudden rupture in memory and as Unamuno so elegantly points out, the cessation of your memory is, quite simply, the end of you. Who am I without the congruity of my memories? And the end of a tradition is the end of a people, to quote Unamuno:
Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and destroy himself as part of that people.10

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When Westerners or Western educated Arabs/Muslim blindly ape Western thought and insist on their universal application they stand outside of tradition and ask others to cease to be themselves. Allow me to put it another way, Charles Taylor employs an illuminating thought experiment: Imagine you were born of other parents. If you take the experiment seriously, you soon realize you must immediately discard everything about yourself; in fact you would not be you and thus simply cease to be. Bushs ostensible attempt to bring Western style democracy to the region required dismantling all of Iraqs institutions and Iraq has, for the time being at least, ceased to be (although Iraq will return, it always does). But in Tahrir Square, where real Arab freedom persisted, the Arabs did not feel compelled to sideline their religious beliefs or even identities. We Muslims performed salat while Christians stood and in many instances protected Muslims as they prayed (in turn, Muslims did likewise for Christians). These acts were reafrmations that in a Muslim majority society, religious minorities have always enjoyed religious liberty as a fundamental Islamic principal and, in turn, native Christians extend their hands to their fellow natives, constituting an organic tradition. Islamic yet, Islam as meta-institution and more importantly, as naturally belonging to the people, all of them. As I said before, revolutions do not happen unless there is some sort of tradition that elaborates on the possibility of social action and positive change. To claim, as some silly analysts have, that Facebook or Twitter were the cause of these revolutions is preposterous. The easy question is, if they were, why do we not see similar revolutions in Latin America or parts of Africa (where it is assumed there is a common developmental status)? Or I could ask why have these technologies not facilitated a revolution in the American mid-West or urban America where the economic inequity of the United States is most apparent? In fact, one could argue that such technologies have in fact been used as counter-revolutionary measures, inoculating the masses with the freedom of social-networking. Why have the Arabs been able to transcend that dynamic? It is because the Islamic tradition empowered them to. These revolutions, at times bloody and difcult, still bare a tremendous amount of hope and courage; perhaps the Islamic nahda (Renaissance), often times limited to the late 19th century, is still happening. The larger cultural body that is Islam has been in
10

Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (New York, Cosimo 2007), 11.

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debate with itself for a long time, without any need for Bush and bombs (or Obama and bombs either). We must also observe that the complex way in which these young revolutionaries have distinguished Islam from Islamism is just as admirable as their ability to distinguish the greatness of freedom from the crusade that certain groups in the West associated it with. The Arab Spring is an opportunity to reassess our entire discourse on Islam. And if we are serious about what we do, then we will look forward to this reassessment with hope, ambition, and excitement. But allow me to start the discussion off by saying one thing: We have entered the post-Islamist age, but post-Islam? God forbid.

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