a-conservative ulemas by allowing them to control the social model of Muslim society. They became the censors of society and caretakers of tradition, and thus prevented any change or social reform as well as any modernist interpretation of Islam. This is how the Arab States closed the door on new interpretations or readings of Muslim tradition aimed at adapting it to the modern world, for the greatest satisfaction of the Western world, convinced that the world od Islam is incapable of producing modernity.
This concept shared both by the West and the westernized elites of the Arab and Muslim world came to a crisis in the seventies when the value system put in place by the first post-colonial generation revealed all of its failures. The value system was based on the socio-economic model of the all protecting state, on pan-arabism. socialism and anti-imperialism, focused on the fight against Israel. The overall failure of such principles (acute socio-economic crisis, corruption, authoritarian political system, loss of political influence as a regional group within the international community and striking defeat in the fight against Israel with the loss of the 1967 war as a symbolic date) created a growing gap from the seventies onward between government and society. And within society, the gap was even wider with the most relevant sector, (in demographic terms) that is to say the young people, the following generation who make up for the vast majority: over 60% of the total population in the Arab world to-day are under 20 years of age. Confronted with the overall failure of the political and ideological models derived from the West, this new generation will feel attracted by a new model, that contrary to what the first nationalist generation had done, was inspired by their own cultural heritage and would build an up-dated model based on their own cultural, historical and legal universe. This explains why, from the eighties, this part of the world has gone through a process of Islamic cultural affirmation, that politically identifies with the reformist islamist parties.
Or, to say things differently, after the experience of failure, in terms of political and economic independance, there is in the Arab and Muslim world to-day a strong feeling rising from the sphere that was long most neglected by the nationalist elites who built the State, that is to say the sphere of cultural identity and independance, which in the Arab world is closely linked to the Islamic framework. This is where reformist islamism anwers, in sociological terms, the need felt by a vast proportion of Muslim populations to build a new, modern, democratic order based on their own culture and identity. What is expected from the West is respect and acknowledgement, however this revitilazation of Islam is not aimed against the West. What is questioned is the way the specificity of the Western cultural universe has been arbitrarily raised to the status of abs...
