East versus West, Native versus Universal, Religious versus Secular: Debates over Secularism in the Middle East and the Arab Spring

This article examines the debates about the relationship between the secular/ism and religion in the Middle East in terms of the binaries of local versus universal or Orient versus Occident, and how these sets of concept are revisited or revised in the analyses of Arab Spring. The first part of the work offers a comprehensive and critical review of the culturalist and essentialist fundamentals of these binaries and challenges against them in the academic literature. What follows is an evaluation of the Arab Spring in light of the main arguments about Middle Eastern secularism. It questions particularly the arguments that the sociocultural characteristics of the large segment of the protesting masses and their primary demands and slogans resemble those in the recent uprisings in the Western societies and therefore, indicate the death of essentialist East-West dichotomy. On the other hand, it problematizes the way secularity and religiosity is stripped off any political content, by transforming especially the former into a merely “cultural gesture”