Why Arab Liberals Had No Chance

Reviewing David Govrin’s The Journey to the Arab Spring: The Ideological Roots of the Middle East Upheaval in Arab Liberal Thought (2014), Tzvi Mazel notes that already in the late 19th century there were Islamic scholars who sought “an appropriate internal religious response to the cultural and technological challenge posed by the West,” some of whom tried to find a theological basis for constitutional government. Their ideas gained little traction, and the recent “Arab Spring” has seen yet another failure of liberalism:

The history of the first Islamic reformists is important to understanding the problems inherent in realizing democracy and individual freedom in Islam. . . . Already at this early date, and even more so afterward, one could see "the tension between Arab culture, which stresses the collective, the tribe, and ties of blood, and Western liberalism," Govrin writes, quoting an Arab liberal from our own time, Khaled al-Dakhil, who does not hesitate to state that in Arab society liberalism is still a set of foreign ideas discussed among a narrow elite. . . .

The concept of individual freedom has clear meaning in the West, but it has a more legalistic connotation in the Islamic world, referring to things such as exemption from taxes or from social limitations. According to Islam, the concept of individual freedom contradicts the concept of the sultan, who is unlimited and whose powers are based on sharia, the divine law. . . .

Today, it's clear to [reformers] that religion will need to be separated from the state to implement democracy and its values, but only a few will say this out loud, as it is an attack on the foundations of Islam. We saw what happened, for instance, to Faraj Fawda, a liberal journalist and writer who was murdered, and to the philosophy professor Nasr Abu Zayd, who called for a new interpretation of Islam, was tried for heresy, was forced to divorce his wife, and fled to Holland. The work of the Arab liberals is a tragic, ongoing example of a Sisyphean effort with little hope of actually reaching the top of the mountain.

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