ABSTRACT
This bloc of countries representing the republican model is made up of the oldest countries in the Islamic world, which have been experimenting for about a century with modernization and democratization, at time advancing valiantly toward becoming a model of it, at other times being held back by Islamic reaction which called for a halt of that process in order to permit their societies to rethink their way. Except for Tunisia, which is a small previous French Mandate, as one of the three Arab countries in North Africa under French tutelage for most of the time spanning the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, these countries are among the largest in the Islamic world, hence their large impact on the world Islamic population. All of these countries had experienced a traumatic event of some sort that forced them into the modern era but did not permit them to overcome the basic problems of population, standard of living, poverty, and alienation. They sought to enter the modern, Western world, but they remained locked in their local issues, regional conflicts, and questions of legitimacy of power and of world conspiracies against them. But a common trait unites them—that is Islam, a brand of Islam that had been trying to strike a balance between modernity and moderate religion, development and faith, Western liberalism and Islamic puritanism, trying to relegate religion to the domain of the individual while adopting for the state as secular a system as possible.
