When the “Arab Spring” erupted in December 2010, its aspirations were ambitious: liberty, dignity, and social justice. But the democratic backlash in Tunisia, the coup d’état in Egypt, and civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and more recently Sudan, have left little doubt that the Spring devolved into a nightmare, a failure of what began as pacifist demonstrations for change. The Arab monarchies and emirates, meanwhile, absorbed the protests quickly through a mix of measures, from modest constitutional reforms to expanded subsidies for the unemployed and the poor.
The rise and militancy of what I prefer to call the terrorist “Impossible Islamic State” (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2018 gave many in the region—and beyond—an even more pessimistic view of the Middle East’s socio-cultural and political life. Additional waves of the Arab Spring later emerged in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Algeria, but their momentum was soon overtaken as the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine reshaped global politics. Then came the catastrophe of this new century and decade—what future historians may well regard as another watershed in both regional and global politics: the genocide in Gaza, which has so far left 70,000 dead, nearly 200,000 injured, and brought about the total destruction of the Gaza Strip.
In this context, what do Arab thinkers, scholars, writers, and intellectuals across disciplines make of these changes and challenges? Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, the distinguished Lebanese scholar of contemporary Arab philosophy, captures these intellectual responses and makes a forceful case for the emergence of a “new contemporary” thinking in the Arab world (understood here in a cultural, not ethnic, sense).
In her book Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution: The Egyptian and Syrian Debates and the newly released second edition of her classic Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective, Kassab argues that the “new contemporary” intellectuals of the post-Arab Spring Arab world are done with the two longstanding elephants in the room: first, the endless debate over how to engage with Tradition (al-Turath), and second, the equally exhausted debate over how to engage with the “West” as a modern intellectual episteme. In her Reset DOC essay, “From 2011 to Gaza: The Transformation of the Arab Intellectual Scene”, she pointedly buries the “Western hegemon” beneath the ruins of Gaza. As she writes, “The whole claim of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization to universal categories and values collapsed irremediably in the genocide in Gaza. This time, it was no longer the well-known problem of ‘double-standards’ but the total loss of intellectual and moral credibility.” Any fair-minded intellectual, anywhere in the world, would agree.
I seize this occasion to express similar thoughts in slightly different terms, and to suggest that the “new contemporary” Kassab identifies in Arab thought after post-2011 and after the Gaza genocide is a harbinger of a new era—either one of mutual intellectual recognition and future solidarity, or one of deeper ruptures. I certainly hope for the former: a shared new world shaped by intertwining histories and stories that link Europe and America to the Arab world, and vice versa. The post-2011 and post-Gaza moments have tested Arab and Euro-American intellectual and political choices alike, and the ground now seems leveled to begin anew– hopefully.
The Arab quests for change
Reform in the Arab world has been ongoing since the early 1800s, beginning with the first Nahda—the“awakening” or “renaissance”— and the region’s initial opening to a modern, secularizing, and liberalizing Europe. That trajectory then moved through the era of European colonialism, into the post-colonial period of the 1950s, and finally into the post-1967 landscape shaped by the political defeat of Arab nationalism. The 1967 defeat, in particular, gave rise to major philosophical and cultural projects by a new generation of intellectuals who have shaped contemporary Arab thought ever since.
The Arab Spring of 2010-11 revived hopes for meaningful change. The Lebanese philosopher Nassif Nassar called for a new Arab Nahda—civically and liberally oriented—in his influential 2004 text al-Tafkir wa al-Hijra: Min al-Turath ila al-Nahda al-‘Arabiyya al-Thaniyya (“Thinking and Departure: From Tradition to the Second Arab Awakening”).
And running through all these periods is the central, unresolved question of Palestine—a major factor that has blocked the region politically, economically, and intellectually. It is a stone in the shoe, and unless it is resolved, it will continue to drain energies across the region and far beyond it.
When the Arab Spring kindled in late 2010, aspirations for political change and economic prosperity were very high. Yet, from within, it confronted—and still confronts—two entrenched sovereignties blocking its path. the first is the authoritarian regimes and the economic elites that sustain them. The second is the traditional elite of religious scholars and the political Islamist movements that uphold a traditional worldview on politics and socio-cultural norms—though, ironically, at the scientific and economic levels, they are often perfectly rational and liberal.
It is worth noting here that the secular and republican authoritarian regimes in the Arab world have failed terribly to deliver promises to their states. By contrast, monarchies and emirates—however authoritarian or semi-authoritarian they may be—have not failed in the same way. Monarchies enjoy a certain legitimacy, and they know when to loosen the iron fist just enough to allow the tempests of social protest to pass with modest reforms. That, too, is a reasonable way of doing politics. Some monarchies have also benefited from oil reserves that allow them—rentier-state style—to ease social tensions and contain protests more easily.
Among the republics, Tunisia was the region’s only democratic hope, and it has so far faltered; it could still return to a democratic path if supported by democratic partners. Among the monarchies, Morocco—and so Jordan to a lesser extent—has experimented with multiparty politics and a democratization process since the 1960s, even if the limitations remain numerous before anything resembling full democracy can emerge. In non-oil countries, citizens work and pay taxes, and their sense of citizenship and their demands for rights have grown over time. However, this is not the case in the Gulf oil states.
(Democratization took different paths in Europe and elsewhere as well, and economic factors are fundamental for its success. There is no poor democracy, unless it is a few thousand people of inhabitants; and there is no democracy that is not also economically either rich, or is becoming rich.)
It is precisely because the major alternatives in Arab politics have all been tested that Arab thought can now breathe a new air: neither the liberals, nor the socialists, nor the Islamists have delivered enough. What Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab captures with her term, the “new contemporary” in Arab thought, is the recognition that the Arab Spring gave Islamists their chance, and the region has now learned that no single actor can succeed alone in managing the complexities of politics and its socio-economic problems. Most importantly, the Arab Spring seems to have taught the region that “big narratives” and single political blocs cannot carry the day; only the division of powers and rotation of power can save the region, especially its most ethnically and religiously plural societies. These lessons are, in fact, the very heart of the culture of democracy. Elections alone do not make a democracy—just as knowing individual words does not make one fluent in a language.
While Arabs demonstrated across major countries and capitals for these aspirations, the democratic “West” offered no help. At first, it simply stood still—perplexed that Arabs were indeed capable of mass, peaceful demonstrations for social and political change. Later, when democratically elected presidents or parliamentary leaders in Egypt and Tunisia were sentenced unjustly by coup regimes and their compliant judiciaries (Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, Moncef al-Marzouki and Rached al-Ghannouchi in Tunisia, among others), the “democratic West” again remained silent, declining even to issue strong statements of condemnation. And when Tunisia faced severe economic pressures during its democratic decade (2011-2019), little was done to support this fragile democratic embryo, which eventually collapsed back into authoritarianism. Democracy grows with friends, just as friendship grows in the company of good fellows. And consolidated democracies solidify their friendships, and apparently, they can also often support each other in hegemonic endeavors when their interests meet.
Overcoming ignorance, ignoration, and arrogance
History punishes two kinds of people: the ignorant and the arrogant. The West is both. This, of course, applies to every cultural and political community, state, or empire. The West remains ignorant of the region despite the vast scholarship produced in universities. The gap between scholarship and politics is immense. This ignorance breeds arrogance—hegemony and colonialism. The West forgets the “historical spirit of liberation” that this ancient part of the world carries, despite all its socio-economic and political crises.
Gaza’s genocide is yet another sign of the “West’s” decline as we have known it since at least the 1950s: liberal, rational, and democratic. But the West’s potential saviours also come from within it. The critical voices that have protested against the genocide for two years are its hope and future—if the West wishes to heal its ignorance and arrogance. Sometimes ignorance is cultivated deliberately in order to preserve arrogance; this might be called a policy of “ignoration” (al-tajahul, not al-tajhil, in Arabic).
Arab thought is geopolitically in jail—a punishment for having freed itself from the European colonialism of the 20th century, only to be forced into the neocolonial grip led by the US and its ally, Israel. Yet despite this geopolitical imprisonment, Arab thinkers, philosophers, scholars, writers, and artists across disciplines denounce this confinement, work around it, and strive daily to overcome it.
Abdelilha Belkeziz, the prominent and widely Moroccan thinker, argues that it is now the Arabs and the thinkers of the Global South who must save the Enlightenment ideals of reason—and everything that came with them: secularism, democracy, human rights—because the West has failed these ideals and must do its own homework to correct itself. Hassan Hanafi, the Egyptian philosopher, theorized “Occidentalism” in 1991 as a science for critiquing and understanding the Occident before engaging it as an equal for the benefit of all. He insisted that fair-minded Western thinkers and intellectuals are the true allies of their peers in the Arab world and the Global South. And fair-mindedness begins with calling things what they are.
Europeans are doing their utmost to contain Russian aggression in Ukraine, yet they fail to see that Palestine is, for Arabs, an analogous case. An Arab proverb says: “He who lets go of his land lets go of his honor.” Palestine is the last outpost of classical colonialism, and this colonialism must end. Without resolving Palestine, there can be no liberty and natural integration among the states and peoples of the region; there will only be hegemony—and more arrogance, more ignorance, and more ignoration.
And because arrogance is what crushes human dignity, the whole world (outside a few influential Western capitals) protests against it—not out of hatred, but out of humanity, solidarity, and a desire for peace. The entire world is exhausted from watching the horrors of this unresolved cause for at least seven decades. If it is not resolved, it will remain a mark of humiliation for all and a permanent reminder that might is right. Humiliations do not produce normal relations among peoples and states. Humiliations breed resistance of every kind.
The costs only grow as the case remains unresolved, despite UN resolutions since 1967 and the Arab Initiative since 2002. Yet the Oslo Accords, the Abraham Accords, and recent peace summit all shy away from a real, enforceable resolution—one that could be enforced within ten years of serious commitment, if a local Mandela were to emerge and bring people together for a sustainable peace, and if the West, led by the US, reclaimed its role as a defender of human rights rather than of apartheid and aggression in international relations.
Towards an Overlapping Civilization?
There is a profound drift in today’s democratic societies—one that worries thinkers and ordinary people across the non-democratic world as well. It is far better to have democratic spaces on this planet than to live under a landscape made up solely of authoritarian regimes or hegemonic major democracies. We, scholars of the North and South, East and West alike, must work to save democracy from its colonialist and purely economy-driven elites and plutocracies.
Critical Arab intellectuals have been doing their part, despite immense internal and external pressures.
After the Gaza genocide, the West has been cut down to size—its real size in the world. The critical and fair-minded Euro-Americans who have demonstrated tirelessly over the past two years are the true allies of Palestinians and Israelis who genuinely seek coexistence and an end to a century of massacres and turmoil. Global solidarity with Palestine has reached its peak, and this is the right moment to invest in it collectively for a sustainable solution. The Arab world—and the world beyond it—will all benefit from peace in this central part of the globe.
There is ample space to build what I like to call an “overlapping civilization”, borrowing and slightly modifying a term from the French historian Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), who used it to describe medieval Arab-Islamic Spain and its extraordinary scientific, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious pluralism. The Mediterranean can revive this experience in even better forms, once reciprocal critique is applied–both to one’s own tradition and to that of the neighboring other.
We are living in a moment of mutual suspicion and exhaustion. Sooner or later, the north and south of the Mediterranean (Europeans and Arabs), their Atlantic allies (Americans), and partners near and far will realize that it is high time to be just. Justice is the key, the door, and the window: it allows one to befriend an enemy, understand a friend, and defend a victim. And embracing justice requires radical change from all stakeholders.
Cover photo: Palestinians walk around their tents in Gaza City on November 3, 2025, during a ceasefire in the two-year-long Israel-Hamas war. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)
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