After decades of apparent resignation, millions of women and men have taken to the streets at the call of youth, The "Arab awakening" has broken a lock and opened up the field of possibilities, Even if, from Syria to the petromonarchies, the "springs" are slow to become "revolutions"...

Were these events unexpected? From Tunis to Cairo, non-violent mobilization movements were known to Western states, even encouraged. Will they be confiscated by the very people who have accommodated themselves to dictatorships for so long? Will the Arab world be able to reclaim its memory to reinvent popular education, women's rights, social justice, artistic creativity, control of the economy, the fight against corruption and real democratization? Finally, can this emancipation be envisaged with Islam, experienced not as a straitjacket, but as an ethical and cultural richness?

A historic opportunity is offered to predominantly Muslim societies to seize their destiny to combine Islam, pluralism and democracy without betraying their identity, At a time when the West/Islam divide is fading, Tariq Ramadan lists the challenges awaiting Arab societies , but also Western: will they be able to free themselves from the binary conceptions that the new situation calls into question?

Excerpt from the Introduction to the book:

It is never easy to analyze situations on the fly, when events are unfolding, when so much uncertainty remains about understanding the causes, the facts themselves and the future. This book does not claim to reveal secrets, reveal more or less well-intentioned strategies or even predict the future. It would be madness, it would be pretentious, it would be vain and useless. At a time when we are talking about the "Arab Spring", "revolutions" and "upheavals" in North Africa and the Middle East (Anmo), we wanted to go back to the facts, study the realities and try to highlight some lessons for the Arab world and predominantly Muslim societies themselves, but also for observers of these surprising and unexpected developments.

So what happened in Tunisia and Egypt, what is happening more broadly in the two regions that make up Anmo, why now? These are the first questions that come to mind and that must be addressed by re-examining the recent past, the actors present, as well as the political, geostrategic and economic data. Only a holistic reading, including these three dimensions, will be able to give us some keys to understanding. Faced with the magnitude of the earthquake that is shaking the Arab countries, such a study is imperative, if we want to assess the issues and accompany these societies towards freedom, democratization and economic autonomy.

It seemed necessary to us to name, or rather to refuse to name too quickly the Arab uprisings. We do not know what it is exactly or what the concrete results of these nonviolent and transnational mass movements will be. Together with the world, we rejoiced and celebrated the end of dictators and their regimes, but following the analysis of the facts and a number of objective data, we express a cautious and lucid optimism. Recent history has not yet finished revealing its secrets to us: our analyzes have not finished being reviewed, refined and perhaps challenged.

These uprisings do not come out of nowhere. Since 2003, with more and more force, we heard about the necessary democratization of the Anmo countries. President George W. Bush did not otherwise justify the intervention in Iraq, announcing a larger program for the entire region. From 2004, training seminars in non-violent mobilization (in line with the one that brought down Milošević in 2000) were offered to young cyberdissidents from Anmo. In Serbia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe or the United States, institutions financed by the American administration and/or by large private companies (such as Google), conferences, seminars and networks are created to provide young executives with training relating, in particular, to mastering various Internet tools and social networks (such as Facebook or Twitter).

These facts are known and have been reported by the training institutions or the actors themselves, as well as by the press. They confirm a reality: Western governments were aware of – and funded – these training sessions, while the governments of Tunisia, Egypt or elsewhere were also aware of them, since some of the cyberdissidents were arrested and arrested on their return from training, as was the case in Egypt in 2008. These facts are tenacious; they must be studied and put into perspective if we want to have a better understanding of the dynamics and the issues.

Does this mean, as some think, that these movements are manipulated and that everything, basically, is in the hands of “the West”, the United States and Europe? We do not think so. There is a long way between determining what was known, controlled and sometimes planned, and concluding that the potentialities of History are limited to attempts to control events. It is certainly clear that the United States and Europe had decided to change their policy in the two regions. Unconditionally supporting dictators (now at the end of their reign) and corrupt regimes could no longer be viable or effective in the perspective, in addition, of the emergence of new political and economic actors of weight such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, even Turkey and Venezuela. Reform was needed. Impossible to control, however, was the extent that the phenomenon would take and the amount of sacrifices that the peoples were willing to assume to regain their freedom.

The mobilizations in Tunisia, then in Egypt – this effervescence that flourished in Liberation Square ( midan at-Tahrir ) – released unsuspected forces and energies. In Yemen, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Bahrain, women and men have shown that, if instrumentalization is sometimes possible, absolute control of mass movements is not. A lock is broken in the Arab world, which we must take note of lucidly, without naivety. This implies avoiding both the blissful idealism and optimism of those who are blind to political maneuvers and the conspiratorial paranoia of those who no longer trust the ability of humans to remain subjects of their history. Peoples have shown that it is possible to dislodge unarmed dictators, by force of numbers, in a pacifist and positive attitude: there is something irreversible in these events.

The moment is historic, as are the prospects for emerging from the era of dictatorships. Nothing is settled, these uprisings are not yet revolutions. From Tunisia to Yemen, via Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, nothing is certain: the democratic processes are embryonic, the security fragile and the armies still powerful and on the lookout. No one can predict the future, and the tensions that followed the uprisings, in Tunisia as in Egypt, prove that it will still take time to turn our backs on the past and give birth to open, pluralistic and democratic societies. Still, the actors of these societies will have to look the real challenges in the face and not fall, for example, into the trap of polarization around sterile debates between “secularists” and “Islamists”. Of course, there are fundamental questions to be clarified: nature of the State, role of religious reference, founding principles of equal rights between citizens, especially between women and men, etc. They should not reduce the discussion to the confrontation of two approaches respectively in crisis, as this book tries to show.

Determining the real issues, setting resources and priorities relating to social and political reforms, supporting the emergence of a real civil society, these are the projects awaiting intellectuals and politicians, far from truncated and paralyzing debates. It is this fundamental, radical renewal that we are calling for, at a time when Anmo is becoming the object of innumerable desires, for both economic and geostrategic reasons.

The time has come to stop blaming the West for the colonization and imperialism of the past, or even for the manipulation and domination of the present. Arab-Muslim civil societies must free themselves from this victimizing posture and reconcile with the course of history, which millions of women and men have accelerated by massively taking to the streets. It is a historic responsibility: it is important to be clear-sighted about what is at stake, aware of manipulations and always determined to carry out the necessary reforms with the participation of citizens of all social classes and from all religious backgrounds and cultural.

These uprisings have opened up multiple perspectives: nothing is decided yet. Choices now have to be made. The former couple “Islam and the West” is now giving way to multipolar relations where the South, the East and Asia play an original role. This is interesting, even if it is not a guarantee of more justice and more democracy (...)