The “failure” of radical nationalism and the “silence” of liberal thought in the Arab world

This particular silence has a number of obvious reasons. In the political sphere, censorship can enforce silence on critical minds. However, this kind of silence has a limited reach. Intellectual techniques of circumventing censorship are as old as censorship itself: irony, allusions, ambiguous language, and, most importantly, the shift of focus to other eras and places. In the era of the Enlightenment, readers of Voltaire understood very well that his assaults on Muhammad and Islam were, in fact, directed at the Catholic Church. In the Arab world today, political humor and cartoons are certainly as widespread as censorship.