Arab Spring, A Clash of Civilizational Paradigms:  Arabism, Capitalism, and an Islamic Just Third Way

                                                    by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

I.  Challenge and Response

      The future of what optimistically has been dubbed “The Arab Spring” becomes increasingly problematic as the populist originators fail to address, much less agree upon, their ultimate goals.  The framework or paradigm of “Freedom from” requires a corresponding paradigm of “freedom for”.  A focus on secular power as an ultimate goal can start a revolution, but it inevitably will result in a replication of itself, perhaps even worse than what originally triggered it, unless the highest goal of transcendent justice provides both a rationale and motivation for revolutionary transformation both within persons and within societal institutions.

    The response of the establishment Muslim organizations in America to the Arab Spring is just as disconcerting as are the apparently impending failures of the Arab Spring in the Muslim world.  In an email of August 16, 2011, Sheila Musaji, founding editor of the ezine, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, pointed to the catastrophy highlighted by a recent Gallop poll of Muslims in America.  This poll, she writes, “showed two HUGE problems that we also need to address:

1)  Muslims are least likely of religious groups in America to be registered to vote, and

2)  None of our existing national organizations are seen by American Muslims as representing them (12% was the highest approval rating any of them received”.

    For more than thirty years, I have been addressing the underlying problems among Muslims that have led to the Islamophobic political campaign now reaching a crescendo after two decades of professional preparation.  The response is increasingly receptive, though still rare, to my critique that most professional Muslim organizers have always focused on gaining power for Muslims as an independent force in America, rather than on understanding and developing the fundamental identity of classical Islam and classical American thought.  Although they insist that almost all Muslims in America are loyal Americans, which clearly is true, their understanding of what it means to be an American is superficial. 

    Perhaps this is understandable because both the heritage of classical Islam in the transcendent justice embodied in the maqasid al shari’ah and the profoundly spiritual American heritage in the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave rise to the American Revolution, have been lost in the black hole of shirk al khafi or hidden polytheism. This consists in worship of the four fals