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The Arab Inheritance

Fouad Ajami
September/October 1997
Summary -- 

The Arab world has squandered its political inheritance of secular nationalism. In the 1980s, autocracy and young theocratic brigades overtook and exiled the older generation of liberals. The rise of political Islam was accompanied by severe economic decline in the region. But the Middle East is ripe for a post-Islamist era. A modernist Arab alternative requires large-scale economic and political reform and a coming to terms with the two bogeymen -- America and Israel.

Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

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It is time that Saturns ceased dining off their children; time, too, that children stopped devouring their parents . . .

by Alexander Herzen

It was a generation ago, in the mid-1980s, that a whole world slipped through the fingers of the Arab elite, formed on the secular ideals of nationalism and modernity. A city that had been their collective cultural home-Beirut-was lost to them. A political culture of nationalism that had nurtured them had led to a blind alley, and been turned into a cover for despotism, a plaything of dictators. A theocratic temptation blew into the political world like a ferocious wind, and the secular Arabs were left thrashing about. Nothing today, no ship of sorrow can take these men and women of the secular tradition back to the verities of their world. A political inheritance has been lost.

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