ABSTRACT
For the last five or six decades, the Arab world has been dominated by two ideologies struggling over cultural hegemony and political power: nationalism and Islamism. For many observers, both seem to be opposed to liberal values. This perception gives credibility to Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis that the Islamic “civilization,” i.e. the world region where Islam is the dominant religion, is resistant to the adoption of liberal Western values. Huntington criticized the earlier modernization theory, which assumes that modernization leads to the spread of Western values. Instead, Huntington argues in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order that the Islamic world experienced a process of modernization without Westernization.1 Our volume questions the underlying suppositions of this interpretation. It argues that universalistic values do not stop at geographical boundaries, if they are truly universalistic. In this sense, liberalism is not only hotly debated in the Arab world today but also has historical roots that go back to the nineteenth century. Of course, this tradition of liberal thought was disrupted by the authoritarian regimes that came into existence during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, in light of the remarkable reemergence of liberal ideas in the region now, it is interesting to see if and how Arab intellectuals will connect their ideas to a critical assessment of the past.
