The Arab world is confronting the different non-Arab political projects surrounding it, the dilution within it, and the weaknesses it experiences at its periphery without having any common conception of its recent past.
The major socio-political projects that have emerged in the Arab world over the past century have not only all collapsed but perhaps equally importantly have also left opposing interpretations of their causes, objectives, and legacies.
Arab liberalism was the product of Egypt’s and the Levant’s experience in the 19th century of opening up to Western modernity, not only in terms of importing from Europe the tools to initiate modern industry and education in the region, but also at its core the subtle realisation that the Western experience in the period from the 17th to the 19th centuries was far superior to that in the Arab and Ottoman world.
By extension, this meant that the Arab world came to a realisation that in order for it to advance and to move beyond the mediaeval ages and to step into modernity, it had to import ways of life, social norms, and modes of thinking that the West had pioneered.
Arab liberalism gave rise to immense advances in Egypt and the Levant and parts of North Africa in various areas of the social sciences and humanities. Arab literature, philosophy, theatre, and cinema in the period from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries penetrated deep into the Arab psyche and attempted to find ways of incorporating the new, what had been imported from the West, with what had been inherited over centuries.
The outcomes were often impressive, not just in their intellectual rigour, but also in the honesty with which they looked at the past and interpreted its meanings.
Perhaps Arab liberalism’s most striking achievement was that it inspired a way of undertaking Arab politics that was vastly different from anything that Arab or Ottoman societies had known previously. It was the beginning of seeing in parts of the Arab world, primarily in Egypt in the early 20th century, features such as serious political representation and the rule of law, a free press and free expression, a powerful and independent civil society, and the early contours of a serious framework for recognising and respecting human rights.
Whereas the breakthroughs in philosophy, literature, and the arts had a long life ahead of them, the political advances proved momentary, however. The few experiments in liberalism in the Arab world at the time collapsed under the weight of skewed development, vast social inequalities, and advances in thought that proved to have tiny constituencies in Arab societies. By the end of World War II, the Arab world was waiting for the tornados of change.
The failure of Arab liberalism remains a story that has not yet been properly studied. This is why it continues to stir different responses amongst major segments of the Arabs. For many, there is nostalgia for what they consider to be the golden age of modern Arab history. For others, the experiments of Arab liberalism were nothing but the rule of Westernised elites whose cultural allegiances were detached from the major trends in Arab history and whose political allegiances were to masters on the northern shores of the Mediterranean rather than to the majorities of their own people in the Arab lands.
This gave rise to Arab nationalism, whose story began in the late 19th century amongst Arab Christian intellectuals in the Levant who had rejected Ottoman domination, but whose apex materialised in the Nile Valley during the rule of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
Arab nationalism had a longer life than Arab liberalism. But perhaps that was due to the two phases that Arab nationalism underwent, once in the Levant and then again during the Nasserite period in Egypt.
Arab nationalism’s two facets, the intellectual one in the Levant, and the revolutionary one that came with Nasser and was later repeated in much paler versions by lesser figures in different parts of the Arab world, gave the idea a malleability that few political ideologies in Arab history have enjoyed. Yet, despite its longevity, Arab nationalism collapsed under colossal, and often shocking, levels of ignorance and incompetence.
Like Arab liberalism, the legacy of Arab nationalism remains divisive in the Arab world. For many, the idea at its core captures the essence of the Arab world, and it remains in the minds of its adherents and sympathisers one of few moments in modern Arab history when a set of collective Arab objectives solidified into a serious political project under leaderships that truly represented the will of the largest segments of the Arabs.
For others, however, Arab nationalism was little more than vacuous rhetoric that benefited from the global weakening of colonialism and that, despite its initial lofty intentions, quickly descended into a fatal mix of political oppression, economic incompetence, and social insularity
Islamism shares the fortunes of both Arab liberalism and nationalism. The founding ideas that its modern incarnation was built upon, for example those of the 19th-century thinker Gamaleddin Al-Afghani, have very little to do with the later incarnations that Political Islam took in the mid and late 20th century.
Salafism, the Islamist ideological current that sought to inspire modern Muslim-majority societies by its understandings of the ideas and concepts that shaped Islam in its earlier phases, also underwent acute divisions between the illuminating ideas of courageous thinkers such as Mohamed Abdou and the much less inspiring, and inspired, minds that followed him.
Then there was the fundamental problem that Islamism in its various facets has repeatedly fallen into. It has been consistently unable to reconcile its views about the role of religion in society with the ideas of secular nationalism, particularly in societies with strong national identities and different social components, Muslim or not, that have not accepted the Islamists’ understandings as a basis for their societies’ politics.
Some strands of Islamism have fallen into the disastrous error of fighting their own societies. But even the ones that have side stepped this have been unable to form, let alone articulate, serious roadmaps for their societies to follow.
The result has been that Islamism has become in the minds of many either a project in need of reinvention, or, for others, a project to be opposed. In both cases, like Arab liberalism and nationalism, it is far from having left a cohesive legacy in the Arab world, let alone an inspiring socio-political framework for the future.
The lack of credible narratives about the past deprives societies of their psychological anchoring. This affects how they confront the present, especially if this entails serious challenges and if the future seems fraught with threats. This is why the Arab world today faces strong winds of change without the grounding that only accepted, convincing, and serious conceptions of the past can provide.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 27 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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