Sixteen years ago, as the Berlin Wall was crumbling and Eastern and Western Europe began the now well-worn (if as yet incomplete) process of reintegration, Western and especially American scholars began to celebrate the end of the Cold War as signifying what Francis Fukayama would famously call the "end of history." The idea of history having an end, or "telos," has a long provenance in Western thinking, going back to the development of the great "Axial Age" monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One of the crucial areas in which they differed from many other religions, whether major world religions such as Hinduism or local tribal beliefs, was precisely in the idea that the world—indeed, the cosmos as a whole—had a definite beginning and end, and that it was humanity's, and each individual person's, responsibility to work with God to ensure that the desired end came about.

As we all know, each person would be judged by God on their performance of this duty; yet as early as the Old Testament entire peoples could be judged so irredeemably out of sync with the desired "telos" as to warrant their erasure from human history. For Ancient Israelites, the Amalek was the symbol of what would happen to a people that deviated too far from the divinely ordained path. 2,500 years later, the great German philosopher GWF Hegel consigned the entire continent of Africa to a similar fate as a "people without history."

Indeed, one of the great epistemological accomplishments of modernity, without which it could never have competed with existing religious belief systems, precisely because it couldn't appeal to the same emotional, spiritual (actually, religious) needs, was that it took the notion of human history being linear and teleological, stripped it of its divine sanction (i.e., secularized it), and made humanity and human—or more precisely, Western/Northern European—social systems, the primary barometer of progress by which all other societies would be judged. That is, the new goal or telos was not eternal spiritual salvation but rather the salvation of becoming fully "modern," a concept whose definition has always remained (usefully) hazy except for the clear fact that modernity was what "we"—Europe, the West, later apotheosized by the US—had achieved, what "they"—the people's of the colonized world—lacked, and which could only be brought to them by the good offices of said West.

Not surprisingly, Hegel was the primary philosophical source for Fukayama's notion of the end of history, which for the philosopher signaled the final unfolding of Spirit through a fully mature humanity. As in any teleological system, the logic of Hegel/Fukayama's linear progression of history was somewhat tautological: whoever was ostensibly at the forefront of history at the moment of consideration—that is, whoever's society was most economically, politically and culturally dominant—was deemed to be closest to the end/ends of history. Naturally, their economic, political and cultural system would be considered the model for all other civilizations to follow; since there was only one end to history and only one road to it, whoever was in front surely must be most closely following history's pre-ordained path.

The teleological ideology of modernity (which in many ways reshaped and redirected rather than tried to subdue the older religious teleologies, especially their prosletyzing sprit) became one of the primary justifications for European colonialism and imperialism, as evidenced by such notions as the mission civilasitrice and the White Man's Burden. But for many non-Western peoples, the idea of a pre-ordained, Eurocentered notion of historical progress was deeply problematic. Especially for an Axial age civilization like Islam, which until recently could be said to have had history on its side vis-à-vis Europe, the idea that Muslim societies were literally behind the times, and that only by following Europe's example could they hope to catch up to their neighbors to the north and west, proved as difficult to swallow as it was seemingly self-evident.

And so the early Muslim reformers of the modern period saw as among their primary tasks the "modernization" of Islam, although soon this would change to a focus on the Islamicization of modernity. Either way, leading 19th and early 20th century Muslim thinkers accepted the notion that the Muslim world was backwards and needed to modernize; the main debates were about how much of the West's culture and political-economic systems could be adopted without challenging core Islamic tenets and social systems. But by the 1920s, with the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a new trend could be observed whereby religious Muslims would become much more circumspect and limited in what they were willing to adopt from the West, and as the twentieth century wore on Muslim thinkers like Mawlana Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb and the Ayatollah Khomeini increasingly saw everything apart from Western scientific advances (which as far back as the great 19th century reformer Jama al-Din Asad-Abadi (al-Afghani) was seen to be at the heart of Europe's power rather than some inherent cultural superiority) as a threat to Islam that must be combated at all costs.

As the Berlin Wall crumbled and neoliberal globalization quickly became accepted as the new self-evident teleology for world history, most Arab/Muslim scholars felt they were forced to choose between an "inhuman globalism" and a "human nationalism" that their societies had yet to achieve. Because of this, most Muslim activists had strong reservations about the neoliberal global paradigm; and in the writings on globalization thinkers like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukayama (who in many ways held diametrically opposed views as to how history would unfold from this point forward if at all) were singled out as the proponents of a world-view that was a direct threat to the Muslim world precisely because it defined the end of history as lying outside it and unavailable to Muslims except by adopting core elements of the dominant political, cultural and economic systems of the "West."

Indeed, the rise of militant/extremist Islamic "fundamentalism" in the late 1960s has been directly tied—temporally and causally—to the slow transition out of the era of post-war high modernity and to the era of neoliberal globalization. So it's not surprising that groups like al-Qa'eda define themselves as anti-modern even as their methods of operation and in many ways their goals are fully modern, if modern of a very particular, Jacobin (post-French Revolution), type.

But if the majority of Muslim scholars have been loathe to accept Fukayama's notion of an end to history that signaled the achievement of liberal market democracy as the final standard for human historical and societal progress, something has happened in the last few years—something certainly tied to the post-9/11 world environment, although not only in response to it—that has led many scholars to adopt a position similar to those of their counterparts a century ago and therefore both to judge their societies by Fukayama's yardstick and begin debating how the Muslim world could achieve the democracy and development that has long eluded it.

This trend became most noticeable with the release of the first Arab Human Development Report, which I have critiqued at length precisely for adopting Fukayama's teleology and the view (most recently celebrated by Bernard Lewis, among others) that the reasons for the Arab/Muslim world's problems are almost exclusively internal. But now, with the spread of democratic processes to places such as Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Lebanon (or so the story goes) and seeming retreat of the "axis of tyranny" in the face of American-sponsored democracy and market economies (or so the story goes), we can observe some Arab commentators daring to question whether we have arrived at the "end of Arab history."

In future posts I'll explore this idea in more detail; here let me just summarize one recent article in the Arab press that symbolizes the emerging discourse. The article, titled "The end of Arab History" (Nihayat ta'rikh 'arabi)—and notice the lack of a question mark at the end—was written by al-Hayat commentator Abdel-Rahman al-Rahseed in March of this year. Taking its cue from the evolving situation in Lebanon sparked by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, al-Rasheed argues that what is occurring in Lebanon signifies a process whose impact extends far beyond Lebanon's borders, and in fact heralds the "end of the era of Arab fascism in every place." While we can't generalize, he warns us, the evidence is quickly mounting that the Arab world has entered a new era with the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, as expressed primarily in political reforms and elections across the region.

For al-Rasheed, picking up on recent remarks by Lebanese Druse politician/warlord/emerging philosopher of history Walid Jumblat, while Eastern Europe has been hurrying to arrive at the destination of a fully neoliberalized global society and even countries like China have been moving "slowly but surely" towards the same goal (never mind whether this characterization of China's versus Eastern Europe's development is accurate), the Arab world has been stuck in time. One of the main reasons for this has been the "nationalist excesses"—which he compares to those of the Serbs, until recently perhaps the most "stuck in time" culture in Europe—that have plagued the countries of the region and have led to a "narrow-minded and closed Arab thinking" that is only now ending."

What is important for al-Rasheed is that the "historical illusions" of the region cannot exonerate the "crimes of the present in the name of Arabism or Islam or defending [our] rights." And so base nationalism can no longer suffice as a ruling ideology; nor can Arabism allow Syria to remain in Lebanon. What al-Rasheed doesn't say however, is where the weakening of such ideologies is supposed to lead: If for him, like George Bush or Thomas Friedman, Arab history is over and all Arab countries will naturally, if at varying speeds and with varying levels of difficulty, follow the peoples of China, Poland or Romania toward the promised land of neoliberal democracy, for Osama bin Laden and millions of like-minded people, the final chapter of Arab/Muslim history is just beginning, and their pre-ordained end is radically different than al-Rasheed, Bush or Friedman's.

On the other hand, for many younger Muslims, not tied to any particular ideology and just at the beginning of a long process of defining themselves and their futures, perhaps a more accurate representation of the situation would be to say that history itself (rather than its last chapter) is just beginning anew after being held in check for generations by foreign control and local authoritarianism and corruption, and that their political, cultural and economic horizons are still wide open. Indeed, this is the basis of the the slogan of the global peace and justice movement: that "another world is possible," one in which each society is free to chart its own course to a future or futures that best suits its needs and historical traditions. For the young protesters in Beirut, like the counterparts this week in Baghdad and across the region, the more open they are to the surprises that history inevitably will throw at them, the better the chance they'll be able to arrive at their still-to-be-decided destination without falling prey to the nationalist and religious excesses that frustrated their elders' attempts to achieve modernity, development and democracy.