Islam, Democracy, Diversity

Some Reflections on the Arab Popular Uprisings

Resumo

The so called “Arab Spring” came as a huge surprise to most observers and scholars and, though its final outcomes are still unknown, things will never be the same again in the “Arab world”. These Arab popular uprisings were not predicted but were they really unpredictable? Whatever the answer may be, the changes that took place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, not to talk of Bahrain, Morocco or Syria, clearly show that authoritarian regimes were not, as the Western democracies which long supported them believed, the best and only alternative to Islamism. Moreover, these uprisings underline the deep social changes resulting into the emergence of new actors, and mainly women and youth who were at the waterfront of these uprisings. Yet, though the latter have wiped out the idea of an Arab exception to democracy, the democratic regulation of cultural pluralism appears to be one of the most crucial challenges for the future of the “Arab world”.