Through this discussion of the Arab civil society question and the Arab Spring, I hope to be able to shed some light on the nature of the upheavals that have suddenly hit a number of key Arab countries – after a long period of stagnation and decay – and shed light also on the recent historical background and social context of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring.

The commotion over “civil society” and “civil government” heated up and asserted its immediacy and relevance in the mid-seventies of the last century – particularly in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, with important contributions coming from North African thinkers and intellectuals; the most famous instance being the “debate” and exchange of letters between two very prominent Arab thinkers and public intellectuals, one in Morocco and the other one in Egypt on the topic of secularism in the Arab World.

Since the term “secularism” in Arabic got associated with atheism and anti-clericalism, the term “civil” gained dominance as a euphemism for secularism, for a secular form of government, for a mild kind of separation of state, power politics and law, on the one hand, from Islam as a faith and religion, on the other.

In the middle of the seventies of the last century, particularly after the October War of 1973, between Israel on one side and Egypt and Syria on the other, it became evident that the earlier Arab politico-cultural consensus of nationalism, populism and Arab Socialism put together and presided over by President Nasser of Egypt had broken down catastrophically and dissipated.

Naturally, various forms of Islam, Islamism and Jihadism rushed in to fill the resulting political and cultural vacuum. At the time, it seemed that the only acting agents in key Arab societies, particularly in Egypt and Syria, were the military regimes with their martial law and state of siege condition, on the one side, and armed insurrectionary Islam with its demands for the immediate application of Shari’a law (the martial law of the Islamists) and their powerful slogan, then, “Islam is the solution”, on the other. It was at this critical juncture that the concepts and practices of “civil society” and “civil government” imposed themselves as the only practical way out of that destructive dead lock. This is the occasion on which the Arab concerns and discourses on “civil society” and “civil government” intensified and were felt to be a most urgent and pressing matter for avoiding worst case scenarios.

The working definition of “civil society”, then, took the form of two negatives: a society of equal citizens run and managed neither by martial law authorities nor by Shari’a law Islamists à la Iran.