The appearance of an extreme form of radical Islamic fundamentalism as an international phenomenon has drawn attention to Islam as a religion and a civilization. Much less attention has been paid to social and political conditions in the Arab world, and this neglect has not been overcome by the plethora of analyses that followed the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC.

Any simplistic explanation of the kind of terrorism now carried out by al-Qaeda (and previously by other Islamic organizations) purely in terms of Islam misses the point. Like every religion, Islam can be interpreted in numerous ways, and just as in Christianity the Sermon on the Mount could dwell side by side with the Spanish Inquisition, similar tensions are obviously present in Islam. But Islam as such cannot serve as an adequate explanation.
Instead, one has to look at Islamic and mainly Arab societies from a different perspective. And one of them is how Arab societies have confronted the challenge of modernization.

In the Arab historical narrative, attempts at Western-style modernization are traced back to Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt, which is remembered mainly in Europe for the Rosetta Stone and the eventual deciphering of the hieroglyphic script. In Egypt, and in the Arab world generally, it is usually seen as the beginning of the Arab encounter with the West and of the European incursion into Arab lands. That this incursion was accompanied by French and British imperial expansion obviously tainted it in the eyes of many Arabs. Yet the European values of the Enlightenment-tolerance, political liberty, secularization, and liberalism-were genuinely embraced by generations of Arab intellectuals who wanted to modernize their societies while preserving their own distinct, historical identity.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) is perhaps one of the best examples of the ambivalent legacy left by the West’s impact on Arab societies. Originally established in the mid-nineteenth century by Boston-based Presbyterian missionaries, its avowed aim was to spread Christianity. Yet in the process of doing so, it also became the source for the introduction of many Western ideas, thus contributing to the emergence of modern, secular Arab nationalism. AUB was until now one of the main sources for the dissemination of Western secular ideas-nationalism as well as Marxism-in the Arab world. It may even be said that the idea of secular Arab nationalism originated at AUB.

In the wake of this opening to the West, practically all the various ideologies and institutional arrangements prevalent in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been tried in the Arab world: liberal constitutionalism, monarchical or republican, was tried in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq-and failed; in the l930s and l940s, Iraqi, Syrian, and Palestinian intellectuals toyed with fascism-and came to no good; later, various strands of secular nationalism, Marxism, and Third World ideologies were tried-Nasserism was perhaps the most sophisticated amalgam of them-and failed. As some Arab writers like Fouad Ajami or Sadiq Jelal al-Azm have written-all the Western ideologies have been tried in the Arab world-and all have failed.

Hence the recourse to Islam should not come as a surprise. It is, in a way, a return to the region’s roots, as well as a return from the exile, as it were, among alien, Western ideas, which are considered by some Islamic radical thinkers as quasi-pagan, similar to the immorality of pre-Islamic days, the era of the Jehaliya, the time of barbarism, ignorance, and Godlessness.

Another political aspect, quite visible in the Arab world, is the weakness or virtual nonexistence of attempts at democratization and liberal reform. The last decades have seen a worldwide trend toward attempts to democratize: in Central and Eastern Europe, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, even in Africa. These attempts are far from universally successful, and the results are rather mixed: local conditions, historical traditions, and the socioeconomic perquisites vary from region to region and from country to country. But the attempts have been made, sometimes against extreme odds.

The only region where no serious attempt at democratization has been made is in the Arab world. And where a half-hearted attempt was made-in Algeria-it backfired cruelly because the outcome was a resumption of the military dictatorship attempting to preempt the coming to power of Islamic extremist fundamentalists through the ballot box.

This is in itself a phenomenon that has to be studied more carefully. Some Arab countries are rich, some are poor; some are large, some are small; some are more or less homogeneous, some are extremely heterogeneous; some have been under Western imperial rule, some have maintained their independence; some are conservative monarchies, others are secular autocracies. They run the gamut of almost every possible political system, but in none of them has there been an attempt to democratize-neither from below, nor from above. No meaningful movement for democratization, stemming from civil society-an Arab Solidarnosc-has appeared in any Arab countries. And intellectuals do not, with very few exceptions, play the critical role that intellectuals have played in Eastern Europe or Latin America: in most cases, they are-to use the Gramscian term-organic intellectuals, not critical intellectuals.

There may not be a simple answer to this, yet the absence of a movement toward democratization in Arab countries should raise some methodological and comparative questions. As said earlier, the answer does not lie in Islam as a religion. Does it, however, have something to do with Islam as a religion of conquest and the consequent traditional and legitimate role of the army in Islam’s historical societies? One tends to answer in the negative (after all, Christianity was equally spread by the sword). Yet the question lingers.

Last and not least: poverty. Much has been written recently about poverty as a motivating force for anti-Western, and especially anti-US, radical Islamist protest. Yet the issue is more complex. Not all Arab countries are poor-on the contrary, some are among the richest countries in the world. Yet poverty is part of the problem: it is the internal distribution of wealth within and among Arab countries that is the major cause of poverty in the region, not the gap between the Western “haves” and the Arab “have nots.”

The enormous oil riches of Arab peninsula countries-Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates-has not been spent for development purposes in the Arab world. Some of it was spent locally, within the oil-producing countries themselves; some was rather grandly spent in building mosques and madrasas in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Chechnya; some for conspicuous consumption by the ruling elites on the Riviera or in Cairo; most of it, however, was invested in the Western economy.

Nothing like an Arab Common Market, or a meaningful Arab solidarity fund, has ever been established. Enormously rich and sparsely populated Saudi Arabia is the next-door neighbor of poor and overpopulated Egypt, and very little of the fabulous wealth of the Saudi Guardians of the Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina is shared with their fellow Arabs and fellow Muslims in Egypt. No surprise that to many young, educated Egyptians and Saudis, the House of Saud looks very much as the fifteenth-century papacy looked to Luther. This is also why so many Arab intellectuals who detested Saddam’s regime nonetheless applauded his conquest of Kuwait, whose wealth symbolized so much of what to them was wrong-socially and morally-in the Arab world.

That this lack of solidarity and willingness to share is coupled with a very high level of rhetorical commitment to the cause of Arabism only exacerbates the gap between the lofty language of pan-Arab unity and religious piety, on the one hand, and the apparent callousness for the suffering of fellow Arabs, on the other. As Egyptian commentators occasionally observe-always in guarded language-if Saudi Arabia had shared some of its wealth for development projects with 70-million-strong Egypt, the combined energy could have made the two countries into a veritable Middle Eastern powerhouse-an Arab Japan or South Korea.

But this is not the reality experienced daily in Egypt or Saudi Arabia-and hence the anger, the frustration, the bitterness that local governments, for their own protection, channel toward the West, Israel, and globalization. But the real problem is internal.

All these elements combine to present something like an Arab Sonderweg. Like claims for a German or Russian Sonderweg, the term itself does not explain much, and in a way it begs the question. Yet the fact remains that the combination of so many diverse phenomena unique to the Arab world raises questions that have to be addressed-without recourse to simplistic universalist paradigms but also without equally simplistic accusations of Orientalism or Eurocentrism. The political failures of the Arab world are too serious in their implications to be overlooked.