So much for religion, what about culture? One could argue, as the
late British historian Elie Kedourie did in 1992, that there is “nothing
in the political traditions of the Arab world—which are the political
traditions of Islam—which might make familiar, or indeed intelligible,
the organizing ideas of constitutional and representative government.”6
But outside the Arab world a number of countries with Muslim political
traditions have had some significant experiences with democracy. And
even if one were to omit Kedourie’s equation of Arab and Islamic political
traditions, one would still need to explain why the alien “organizing
ideas” of modern democracy have taken hold in a number of countries in
Africa and Asia for which there really were no precedents, but not in the
Arab world. If the problem, as Kedourie went on, is that Arab countries
“had been accustomed to . . . autocracy and passive obedience,” why has
this remained an insurmountable obstacle in the Arab world while it has
not prevented democratization in large swaths of the rest of the world
that had once also known only authoritarian domination?