Within the context of the Arab Spring, as you all know, Syria is going through a popular revolution against military dictatorship. Now it has become an armed revolution. This armed revolution is pitted against brutal and ruthless military repression. I hope that my lecture this afternoon will shed some light on the background and actualities of the revolutionary processes that are unfolding now in the Arab world and of course the most dramatic of it being Syria, Syria itself.

I go back a little bit in history to say that the Arab discussions and debates over the question of civil society and civil government heated up and asserted themselves asserted their immediacy and relevance in the mid seventies of the last century. Especially after the October war between on the one hand Israel and Syria and Egypt on the other. These debates and discussions were the focus, or the centers for them were Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in particular. Contributions came from North Africa, North African thinkers, and the most interesting instance of that is the exchange of letters and debate between Mohamad Abed Eljabiri and Hassan Hanafi in Egypt. Both are very important and highly influential Arab public intellectuals. The first Mohamed Abed Eljabir in Morocco and Hassan Hanifi in Cairo. And the topic of the debate then was the question of almaniya which means secularism, our secularism in the Arab world. Now since the term secularism in Arabic almaniya has been associated with things like atheism anti-clericalism the term civil gained dominance as a euphemism for secularism. And for a secular form of government and for a mild separation of state power politics on one side and Islam as a faith and religion on the other. In the middle of the seventies of the last century as I said particularly after the October war it became evident that the earlier Arab political cultural consensus of nationalism populism and Arab nationalism that was put together and presided over by president Nasser of Egypt had broken down catastrophically and completely and totally dissipated. Naturally various forms of Islam and Islamism and Jihadism rushed in to fill the resulting political and cultural vacuum.