The Arab world’s experience with modernity is slightly over 200 years old.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, which ended in failure at the very beginning of the 19th century, had shocked the country and with it most of the urban parts of the Arab world. The peoples of the region came to see the colossal gap in the sources of power, namely science and technology, that separated them from Europe.
Those who had followed events carefully understood that the failure of the French campaign was not the result of Egyptian resistance, but largely because of Britain’s insistence that Egypt, with its immense strategic importance, should not become a French colony. Egyptians, and behind them the rest of the peoples of the region, were largely the observers of this conflict with hardly any serious capabilities to shape their own future.
The realisation of this weakness give rise to Mohamed Ali’s project, arguably the most ambitious development project Egypt and the entire Arab world have witnessed in the past two centuries. For three decades between 1810 and 1840, Mohamed Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha and a large group of engineers, scientists, doctors, military strategists, and administrators, largely European, but with time also including a large number of Egyptians, overhauled Egypt’s economy along with life in the country.
Mohamed Ali’s project took Egypt out from mediaeval darkness and ushered it into the modern age. By the mid-19th century, living conditions in Cairo and Alexandria and in the rich parts of the Nile Delta were comparable to those in similar places in southern Europe. Mohamed Ali and Ibrahim’s ambitions went further than this, however. For a decade in the 1830s, Egypt was the base of a budding empire that encompassed the whole of the Levant and that came close to overtaking the seat of the Ottoman Empire itself.
However, geopolitics put an end to this Egyptian expansionism. Britain with the key European countries at the time decided to check Mohamed Ali’s power. Egypt’s Eastern Mediterranean empire fell, and with the passage of time many of the generators of power that had been established in Egypt were lost amidst weak leadership and mismanagement.
Yet, it was again in Egypt that the Arab world witnessed its second major development project in the second half of the 19th century. Ismail Pasha, a grandson of Mohamed Ali and a son of Ibrahim Pasha, sought to create through urban and industrial development what his grandfather and father had attempted through military might.
Over a decade, Ismail transformed Cairo and Alexandria, making them resemble parts of Paris and Vienna. He aimed to develop the Egyptian economy from being one of the world’s most important cotton exporters into an integral node in the world’s key industrial and trading value chains at the time.
The wind was in his sails for several years. But ambition gave rise to hubris, and confidence descended into arrogance, at the exact time that world economic conditions were creating headwinds facing his project. Egyptian debt ballooned, and the burdens mounted on the Egyptian treasury. Ruin followed, and in its wake came humiliation and Egypt’s loss of economic and then political independence. Less than a decade later in the early 1880s, Egypt and the rest of North Africa and the Levant were falling under direct British and French control.
About half a century later, the Hashemites in the Hijaz believed that Britain, at the time the world’s primary imperial power, would reward them for rebelling against the Ottomans and siding with it against Turkey in World War I by granting them an independent Arab kingdom. They aspired to create a united Arab state that would encompass the entire Levant.
The ambition behind this was not merely political, as echoes of what Ismail had earlier created in Egypt fuelled the imagination of several Hashemite princes, and parts of the Levant, especially those that had never witnessed any significant modernisation before, saw serious advancements in infrastructure and transportation and the provision of basic services.
However, once again most of these ambitions ended up as bitter memories. Naïveté and lack of real preparation blurred them. A united Arab state did not materialise, and real independence was not achieved.
The Arab liberal experiment, anchored in Egypt in the period between the two world wars, was a moment of true potential. Political freedom, real representation, serious checks and balances on the executive, and genuine advancements in human rights, together with an impressive cultural effervescence in Egypt that was closely followed by the entire Arab world, stimulated ambitions for effecting a real developmental breakthrough in the region.
But the liberal experiment proved fleeting, and its foundations were quickly eroded by the demands and realities of World War II. By the late 1940s, little was left of that experiment. Importantly, its values and meanings did not have enough time to become an established part of Arab societies and politics.
Former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser championed the Arabs’ most popular political project in modern times in the 1950s and 1960s. A strong will, the determination to achieve independence, global conditions after World War II, and the changes that had taken place in Egypt after the fall of the monarchy at the hands of Nasser and his movement all put an end to European colonialism in the Arab world.
The 1956 Suez War, in which Nasser’s Egypt politically defeated colonialism, became a turning point across the entire Arab world, as well as globally. It made it seem possible that the Arab world (and the entire Global South) could summon up its will, defeat its former masters, and emerge as a sizeable power determining its own future.
The Nasserite project gave rise to a new Arab collective consciousness that absorbed and in turn gave momentum to a tantalising mix of development advancements along with an assertive geopolitical positioning. There were real achievements in the decade after Suez. But as the project came to be tested, whether militarily in the 1967 War or in several developmental aspects, its shortcomings and acute weaknesses became more glaring.
In the final reckoning, the will and discipline and talents that had led the project proved to be far from commensurate with the grand ambitions that were entailed in it.
The decades from the mid-1970s to the Arab uprisings in 2011 were largely vacuous. There were notable developments in infrastructure, some economic reforms, and in the Arabian Peninsula, where oil and gas revenues were fuelling development, there were major, and often impressive, advancements that had to do not just with the look and feel of some cities, but also with mindsets and ways of managing the countries of the region.
However, the vast majority of the Arab world in these decades lacked any real socio-political project that could inspire its peoples. This vacuum of the imagination was also taking place as the Arab world was almost doubling its population. Economics exacerbated the situation. Economic reform programmes in the period from the 1980s to the first decade of the 21st century often resulted in fiscal improvements and monetary stabilisation. But the cost was poverty and inequality that rose to often shocking levels and that were reminiscent of conditions in the Arab world during the feudal times of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As argued earlier in this series, the Arab uprisings at the beginning of the second decade of this century saw the flowering of major ambitions and the eruption of immense anger. The experience of most parts of the Arab world over the past 15 years has shattered the ambitions of these uprisings and for many have turned anger into resignation.
The story of the Arab world’s key developmental projects and moments of rising potential over the past 200 years seems devoid of major or sustained successes. There were many significant achievements. There were moments that continue, decades later, to inspire and imbue the soul with joy and pride. And there is an accumulated history, a lot of it replete with learning, that has enriched the Arab psyche.
But there is also the painful realisation that the trajectory of Arab development over the past 200 years has achieved far less than what seemed possible, or even expected, during the different development periods the region has undergone. It is not a surprise that the collective Arab psyche, particularly among young people, has become disengaged from its environment and history.
As the next article in this series will show, today the development trajectories of the region are diverging, posing serious questions concerning the very notion of a single Arab world.
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 20 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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