Islam in Middle East

Even the word "peace" - which meaning, in its use by Israel's new Prime Minister, reneging on all his country's commitments over the past five years, can ring as hollow a term as liberation, security or terrorism. There is no miracle word to save the turbulent Middle East, less so to define easy parameters to analyze the region and affect its future positively.

More contrasted binary set-ups, such as "Islam and democracy", "Western and Arab" (there are so very many variations: Asian, Muslim on one side, European, American or French on the other), serve equally little purpose if wording is not carefully chosen: such contrasts easily reinforce theories of latent "clashes of civilization", now adumbrated in a famous 1993 article in Foreign Affairs by Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. These parameters can never offer an adequate prism, that is, unless one is intent to see the alleged clash result in a new Crusade.

At the same time - notwithstanding the warnings of serious authors like Edward Said against such essentialism - one can hardly deny that there is an identifiable trend in the region, which comes under the rubric of "Islamic fundamentalism". Islamic fundamentalism exists and is effective, even if one needs to look into all the different set-ups across the Middle East and the Muslim world at large to appreciate the phenomenon's many variations. How then can one shun clash-of-civilization types of essentialism analyses and yet account for an identifiable and real trend of fundamentalists - Islamic primarily but also Jewish, Christian and Hindu? Granted binary parameters, let alone one-word panaceas, will not do, it may be safe to deploy those trustworthy indices, which have served their purpose well to guide humanity...

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... they had known for centuries in favor of alien French civil and English common laws - is addressed in the right manner. Instead of reducing law to a few provocative acid 'Islamic' tests, one can question the uprooting of a whole tradition and the people who have supported and carried it through thirteen centuries in the local languages (Arabic primarily).

The process has already started, and several courts, most remarkably in Egypt, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates, have initiated a slow but effective reversal of the colonial onslaught on the legal tradition of Islam. How it can be reinforced and developed could represent the third major cultural challenge for reform.

Since good governance is premised on the rule of law, the most difficult task ahead for the Arab and Muslim world may be precisely this: expropriating its own rich and distinct traditions.