Spring Storms
19 Apr 2013- Details
- Written by Super User
Many outcomes are possible across the ‘Arab Spring'
Noel Weeks, Professor of history at Sydney University is chairman of MERF Australia.
[Insightful analysis of events in the Middle East by Christian historian, Dr. Noel Weeks is reprinted, with permission from Australian Christian periodical AP]
Anybody who thinks history is irrelevant should follow closely the events consuming many Arab countries at the moment and the attitudes of Western governments and commentators to those events. It can be argued that the West is seeing the events in terms of its own dominant theory of history and ignoring the alternate possibilities.
The Western hailing of the turmoil as a "Spring" flows from reading the movements as democratic with all that connotes in the Western mind: free, progressive, secular. In turn that flows from a theory that sees democracy as the inevitable direction of history. The Arab world is following us in demanding freedom and rights.