Abstract
The Muslim world has a reputation for being the final frontier of both democracy and women’s emancipation. But recent studies suggest that it may actually be the Arab region, not the Muslim world in general, that is especially resistant to the global movements toward democracy and gender equality. This paper explores various factors that might explain these twin ‘Arab gaps’--factors such as oil-dependent economies, robust tribal-patriarchal norms, the special cultural centrality of Islam, the anti-imperialist drive for cultural authenticity, and even the impact of one gap upon the other. While these explanations may each carry some weight, this paper argues that none of them is adequate to account for the Arab region’s democracy and gender-equality deficits. It concludes, rather, that these regional deficits are ultimately rooted--to an extent that is difficult to overestimate--in what Fouad Ajami calls ‘the Arab predicament,’ the political and intellectual crisis that engulfed the Arab world after its defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Indeed, the culminating claim of this paper is that the searing Israeli defeat cemented in the social and political culture of Arab populations a keen ambition if not to reverse that humiliation, at least to resist the Western dominance it represents--a priority that has precipitated the region’s search for strong, charismatic leaders and high tolerance for muscular autocracy but also its rejection of gender equality in favor of indigenous gender norms.