ABSTRACT
Although characteristics of every model can be found in each of the five others, there is nevertheless one brand of Islamic countries and entities that does not accord with all others. It is the revolutionary kind, which is always restless and unsettled and does not seem to find any satisfactory base to found a permanent arrangement for a stable future. It is in constant search, in which it finds its real interest, for it yearns not for a set goal but for the way to get there. Mali, that remote, isolated, and scorched land at the edge of the Sahara, which had known glorious days when Timbuktu was a famous commercial and study center on the fringes of the world of Islam, is once again shaken by the Islamic Spring in rather odd ways. In previous years it was the Algerians, the Sudanese, the Palestinians, and the Somalis who provided the paradigms for this model, but this keeps shifting, since none of those has finally settled down in contentment to enjoy the fruit of its revolution. Mali, this vast desert country, following a few decades of independence and cultivation of modern nationalism has reverted to a civil war about its identity, very reminiscent of the one between the national movement of the Palestinians and Hamas, which challenges it from the very heart of the Palestinian people; between the FLN governments since the days of Ben Bella and Boumedienne, until the days when the Islamic armed groups attempted via military action and bullets to obtain power once their victory in the ballots was denied them; in Sudan, it was the breakdown in the alliance between Umar Bashir, the military arm, and Hassan Turabi, the spiritual head, that caused the unrest, in contrast with the seeming harmony between those branches of power that has been exhibited in the Saudi monarchy; and finally in Somalia, where a working government seemed to function after the emancipation of 244the country from colonial rule, but fell to the gangs of robbers, pirates, and fundamentalist Muslims who have thrown the country into chaos.
