Abstract
In the introduction to his volume Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean (2008), the late historian Christoph Schumann stated presciently: “Looking at the political realities in the Eastern Mediterranean today, the project of publishing a volume on liberal thought seems to be daring, to say the least.”1 The political realities that Schumann referred to then were American military rule in Iraq, Islamist inroads in Egypt in 2005 and Palestine in 2006, and the war between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006. These events, in his estimation, turned hopes for political liberalization and democratization in the Near East into “a grand delusion.”
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Notes
Christoph Schumann, “Introduction,” in Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19th Century until the 1960s, ed. Christoph Schumann (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 1.
For literature on the 2011 events, see for example, Jean-Pierre Filiu, The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons from the Democratic Uprising (London: Hurst, 2011);
Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013);
Adeed Dawisha, The Second Arab Awakening: Revolution, Democracy, and the Islamist Challenge from Tunis to Damascus (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013);
Dan Tschirgi, Walid Kazziha, and Sean F. McMahon (eds.), Egypt’s Tahrir Revolution (Boulder, CA: Lynne Rienner, 2013);
Michael J. Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring (London: Hurst, 2012);
George Joffe (ed.), North Africa’s Arab Spring (London: Routledge, 2013);
Fawaz A. Gerges (ed.), The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014);
David Govrin, The Journey to the Arab Spring: The Ideological Roots of the Middle East Upheaval in Arab Liberal Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2014);
Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust (eds.), Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Notably, Egypt was a focal point of this paradigm. Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), esp. chapter 6;
P. J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt (London: Weidenfeld &; Nicolson, 1969);
Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York: Norton, 1986);
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (London: Phoenix, 2002);
Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey (New York: Pantheon, 1998). Another scholar, Abdeslam Maghraoui, went a step further and refuted the liberal essence of the Egyptian discourse in the interwar period because of the contempt it showed toward the Egyptian people as unworthy and its appeal to establish an authoritative state to lead Egypt toward modernity. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. chapters 3–4.
Elie Kedourie, Democracy and the Arab Political Culture (London: Frank Cass, 1994).
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon &; Schuster, 1996), esp. pp. 209–218, 248–265.
Schumann (ed.), Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean; Peter Sluglett, “The Mandate System: High Ideals, Illiberal Practices,” ibid, pp. 29–50; Peter Wein, Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations 1932–1941 (London: Routledge, 2006);
Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009);
Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012);
Meir Hatina, Identity Politics in the Middle East: Liberal Thought and Islamic Challenge in Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), chapter 1;
Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Gershoni and Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt; Israel Gershoni (ed.), Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).
Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice after 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 30–31.
For a critical review of the attitude of Western historiography toward liberalism in the Arab milieu see Meir Hatina, “Arab Liberal Discourse: Old Dilemmas, New Visions,” Middle East Critique 20 (Spring 2011), esp. pp. 5–8.
Stephane Lacroix, “Islamo-Liberal Politics in Saudi Arabia,” in Saudi Arabia in the Balance: Political Economy, Society, Foreign Affairs, ed. Paul Aarts and Gerd Nonnemam (London: Hurst, 2005), pp. 35–56; Roel Meijer, “The Emergence of Political Liberalism in Saudi Arabia” (unpublished paper).
See also Henri Lauzière, “Post-Islamism and the Religious Discourse of ’Abd al-Salam Yasin,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005), pp. 241–261;
Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2008).
Dale Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (eds.), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999);
Naomi Sakr (ed.), Arab Media and Political Renewal (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
Jill Crystal, “The Human Rights Movement in the Arab World,” Human Rights Quarterly 16 (1994), pp. 435–454;
Emile Sahliyeh, “The Status of Human Rights in the Middle East: Prospect and Challenge,” in Human Rights and Diversity: Area Studies Revisited, ed. David P. Forsythe and Patricia C. McMahon (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska, 2003), pp. 252–275;
Adel M. Abdellatif, “Human Rights in the Arab Mediterranean Countries: Intellectual Discourses, Socio-Economic Backgrounds and Legal Instruments,” Mediterranean Politics 9/3 (Autumn 2004), pp. 319–343;
Bosmat Yefet-Avshalom and Luis Roniger, “A Discourse on Trial: The Promotion of Human Rights and the Prosecution of Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim in Egypt,” Journal of Human Rights 5/2 (2006), pp. 185–205;
Bosmat Yefet, The Politics of Human Rights in Egypt and Jordan (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015);
Joe Stork, “Three Decades of Human Rights Activism in the Middle East and North Africa: An Ambiguous Balance Sheet,” in Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 83–124.
Wael Abu-’Uksa, Arab Liberal Discourse in the Modern Era: Theory and Practice (PhD dissertation; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 2012) (in Hebrew).
Charles Kurzman, “Introduction: Liberal Islam and Its Context,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 3–5;
Charles Kurzman, “Introduction: The Modernist Islamic Movement,” in Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–27.
Schumann, “Introduction”; Christoph Schumann, “The Failure of Radical Nationalism and the Silence of Liberal Thought in the Arab World,” in Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice, ed. Christoph Schumann (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 173–189.
Christoph Schumann, “Freiheit und Staat im islamistischen Diskurs,” in Islam und moderner Nationalstaat (forthcoming). See also Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988);
Raymond Baker, Islam without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Michaelle Browers and Charles Kurzman, “Introduction,” in An Islamic Reformation? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004);
Mona El-Ghobashy, “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005), pp. 373–395;
Michaelle Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 8–11, 48–76;
Chris Harnisch and Quinn Mecham, “Democratic Ideology in Islamist Opposition? The Muslim Brotherhood’s Civil State,” Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009), pp. 189–205.
See also Michaelle Browers’s stance, which tends to adopt the heuristic approach regarding Arab liberalism, but is still cautious about disqualifying the existence of ideological camps, and points to the existence of boundaries between them. In her view, liberals can be described as a separate camp that is influenced by the Western model and is bound to the democratic/tolerant ethos. Regarding the Islamists, she points out that issues of religion and gender are still contentious, hindering a more meaningful embrace of liberal and democratic values among them and limiting the formation of a more progressive political opposition. Michaelle Browers, “Arab Liberalism: Translating Civil Society, Prioritizing Democracy,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 7/1 (2004), pp. 52–53; Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World, pp. 11–16.
See, forexample, Hakan Yavuz’s books: Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Parti (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2006); Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Albert Hourani, Arab Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1962]).
Hatina, Identity Politics in the Middle East, chapters 4, 7; also Elizabeth S. Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
On popular culture see, for example, Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Walter Armbrust (ed.), Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago, IL: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002).
On this debate see John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Julian Schwedler, Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Schumann, “Freiheit und Staat”; El-Ghobashy, “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Brothers”;
Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik (eds.), Modernization, Democracy, and Islam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005);
Yoram Meital, “The Struggle over Political Order in Egypt: The 2005 Elections,” Middle East Journal 60/2 (Spring 2006), pp. 257–279;
Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 7–8, 182–189;
Emmanuel Sivan, “The Islamic Resurgence: Civil Society Strikes Back,” Journal of Contemporary History 25/2–3 (May–June 1990), pp. 353–364, esp. 361–364;
Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (New York: Basic Books, 1983);
Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
Martin Kramer, “Islam vs. Democracy,” Commentary 95/1 (January 1993), pp. 35–42;
also Martin Kramer (ed.), The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 1997); Krämer, “Islamist Notions of Democracy.”
Halil Yenigun, “The Political Ontology of Liberal Islam: A Critique of Contemporary Islamic Democracy Theories,” lecture delivered in the 2014 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington DC, November 22–25, 2014.
See also Katerina Dalacoura, Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), mainly chapters 3–5; Duncan Pickard, “Challenges to Legitimate Governance in Post-Revolution Tunisia,” in Joffe (ed.), North Africa’s Arab Spring, pp. 133–148.
Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Freedom,” in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–172.
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Hatina, M. (2015). Introduction. In: Hatina, M., Schumann, C. (eds) Arab Liberal Thought after 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551412_1
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