The Arab world confronts the different non-Arab political projects surrounding it, the dilution within it, and the weaknesses it experiences at its peripherals, without having any common conception of its recent past.

The major socio-political projects that had emerged in the Arab world in the past century have not only all collapsed, but perhaps equally important, have left opposing interpretations of their causes, objectives, and legacies.

Arab liberalism was the product of Egypt’s and the Levant’s experience in the nineteenth century of opening up to western modernity, not only in terms of importing from Europe, at the time, the tools to initiate modern industry and education, but also, at its core, Arab liberalism was a subtle realisation that the western experience in the period from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was far superior to that in the Arab and Ottoman world. By extension, this meant that the Arab world came to a realisation that, for it to advance, to move beyond medieval ages and to step into modernity, it had to import also ways of life, social norms, and modes of thinking that the West had pioneered.

Arab liberalism gave rise to immense advances in Egypt and the Levant and parts of North Africa in various areas of social sciences and humanities. Arab literature, philosophy, theatre, and cinema, in the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, pored deep into the Arab psyche, and attempted to find ways of incorporating the new, what had been imported from the West, with what had been inherited over centuries. The outcomes were often impressive, not just in their intellectual rigour, but also in the honesty with which they looked at the past and interpreted its meanings.

Perhaps Arab liberalism’s most wonderful achievement was that it inspired a way of undertaking Arab politics that was vastly different from anything Arab or Ottoman societies had ever known throughout their history. That was the beginning of having, in parts of the Arab world, and primarily in Egypt, in the early twentieth century, features of serious political representation and rule of law, free press and expression, powerful and independent civil society, and the early contours of a serious framework for recognising and respecting human rights.

Whereas the breakthroughs in philosophy, literature, and the arts had a long life, the political advances proved momentary. The very few experiments of liberalism in the Arab world collapsed under the weight of skewed development, vast social inequalities, and advances in thought that proved with tiny constituencies in Arab societies. By the end of the Second World War, the Arab world was waiting for tornados of change.

The failure of Arab liberalism remains a story not properly studied. This is why, Arab liberalism continues to stir different responses amongst major segments of Arabs. For many, there is nostalgia for what they consider the golden age of modern arab history. For others, the experiments of Arab liberalism were nothing but the rule of westernised elites whose cultural allegiances were detached from the major trends in Arab history, and importantly whose political allegiances were to masters on the northern shores of the Mediterranean, rather than to the majorities of their people in Arab lands.

This gave rise to Arab nationalism, whose story began in the late nineteenth century amongst Arab Christian intellectuals in the Levant who had rejected Ottoman domination, but whose apex materialised in the Nile valley during the reign of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser.

Arab nationalism had a longer life than Arab liberalism. But perhaps that was due to the two phases that Arab nationalism had undergone, in the Levant, and then during the Nasserite period. Also Arab nationalism’s two facets - the intellectual in the Levant, and the revolutionary that came with Nasser (and was later repeated, in much paler versions, by lesser figures than Nasser in different parts of the Arab world) - gave the idea malleability that few political ideologies in Arab history enjoyed. Yet, despite the longevity and the malleability, Arab nationalism collapsed under a colossal, and often shocking levels of ignorance and incompetence.

And yet like Arab liberalism’s, the legacy of Arab nationalism remains divisive and dividing in the Arab world. For many, the idea, at its core, is the essence of having an Arab world, as well as it remains, in the minds of its adherents and sympathisers, one of few moments in modern Arab history, that a set of collective Arab objectives were solidified into a serious political project, under leaderships that truly represented the will of the largest segments of Arabs. For others, Arab nationalism was a little more than vacuous rhetoric that benefited from the global weakening of colonialism and that, despite its initial lofty intentions, quickly descended into a fatal mix of political oppression, economic incompetence, and social insularity

Islamism shares the fortunes of both Arab liberalism and nationalism. The founding ideas that its modern incarnation was built upon, for example those of Gamal al-Din al-Afghani, had very little to do with the later incarnations that political Islam took in the mid and late twentieth century. Salafism, the Islamist ideological current that sought to inspire modern Muslim-majority societies by its own understandings of the ideas and concepts that had shaped Islam in its earlier phases, also underwent acute divisions, between the illuminating ideas of courageous thinkers such as Mohammad Abdou and much less inspiring, and inspired, minds that followed him. And then there was the fundamental problem that Islamism, in its various facets, has repeatedly fallen into. That is, Islamism has consistently been unable to reconcile its views about the role of religion in society with the ideas of secular nationalism, particularly in societies with strong national identities, and crucially with different social components, Muslim or not, that would not accept the Islamists’ understandings as a basis for their societies’ socio-politics. Some strands of Islamism fell into the disastrous sin of fighting their own societies. But even the ones that side stepped that sin were unable to form, let along articulate, serious roadmaps for their societies to follow.

The result was that Islamism became, in the minds of many, either a project in need of reinvention, or, for others, a project to be opposed. In both cases, like Arab liberalism and nationalism, it is far from having a cohesive legacy in the Arab world, let alone from being an inspiring socio-political framework for the future.

Lacking credible narratives about the past deprives societies from psychological anchoring. This affects how they confront the present, especially if that present entails serious challenges, and especially if the imminent future seems fraught with acute threats. This is why the Arab world today stands in the face of strong winds of change without the grounding that accepted, convincing, and serious conceptions of the past provide.