The “what” in this question refers to a great idea to serve as the matrix of new political thought, to mobilize our energies, to take us out of our historic impasse, and to turn our societies into makers, rather than objects of history.

Before we speculate about what this great new idea might be, let us review some of its predecessors. We have to start from the late 19th and early 20th centuries if only because there were no truly independent Arab countries before that while Turkey and Iran were moribund empires with little control over their destiny.

The first great idea to come to us from the West was that of creating a powerful state, with a standing army, a modern bureaucracy, and, in the cases of Turkey and Iran, adopting European-style clothes, at least for the elite. All that was accompanied by some symbols of Western industrialization such as railways, the telegraph, and, in the case of Tehran, Istanbul and Cairo, opera houses.

The man most responsible for bringing that great idea to our neck of the wood was Jamaluddin (who disguised himself as Al-Afghani).

What he did not realize was that the Western model was the fruit of centuries of development in which Europeans had first defined their national identity and, then, created modern states to express it. In our case, in the Middle East, we were putting the cart before the horse: Creating the state first and then looking for a nation.

Soon, we realised that the “powerful” states we had created, often at the expense of what was left of our liberties, were not strong enough to resist the onslaught of Western powers. Some of our leaders acknowledged that a state not based on a nation was little more than a piece of décor.

Their analysis led to another import from the West: Nationalism. Arabi Pasha in Egypt, Ataturk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran, and Rashid Ali Gilani in Iraq were some of the representatives of the new trend. They, too, were doomed to fail if only because there were no European-style nations in the Middle East. (Our countries were multiethnic remnants of broken empires.)

Those who realised that no Middle Eastern nation could alone face the challenges of a world dominated by the West, began to espouse another import from Europe: Pan-ism. Zaki Arsuzi, Ali Nassereddin and Fatih Al-Husri developed the idea of pan-Arabism. The Young Turks advanced the cause of pan-Turkism. Kazemzadeh Iranshahr and Ahmad Kasrvai advocated pan-Iranism.

When the various “pan-isms” also ended in disaster, both at intellectual and practical levels, another idea was imported from the West: Socialism. By the mid-1960s all brands of Western leftism, from Marxist-Leninism to Castroism and Maoism, were present in our region alongside hybrid variations like Arab Socialism and Baathism.

The hybrid left won power in a number of Arab countries, notably Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The Communists seized control of South Yemen. In other countries the left, though not in power, exerted tremendous intellectual influence, often using it to impose Stalinist terror against non-left writers. (In Iran, for example, some of the greatest contemporary poets were so vilified by the Stalinists that few people were able to read them until the death of the left in the 1990s.)

From the 1960s another idea was imported from the West into our region: Islamism.

Since Islam originated in Arabia, the suggestion that Islamism came from the West may appear paradoxical. It is not. The transformation of religion into a political ideology is a purely Western idea.

The Islamists believe that the majority of Muslims have ceased to be “ true Muslims” and have to be “remolded” in the crucible of revolution. This is a typically fascist idea and, like other fascist ideas, turns the individual into a cipher while putting “the Ummah”, the equivalent of the German “Volk”, a mere abstraction, at the center of things.

The best-known advocates of Islamism, such as Khomeini, Qutb, and Maudoodi are, in some cases directly and in others indirectly, more influenced by Western totalitarian ideologies than by classical Islamic thought. They are closer to Hobbes, de Maistre and Hegel than to Farabi, Nizam Al-Mulk and Ibn Khaldun.

All our ideological imports in the past 150 years failed.

The myth of the “powerful state” exploded when, in 1921, the Shah of Iran was put on British payroll for an annual salary of 5000 pounds while the Ottoman caliph, branded “the sick man of Europe” decades earlier, was packing for exile after losing his empire.

Nationalism failed when Gilani’s suicidal plan collapsed. Reza Shah was forced into exile, and Mussadeq escaped over a ladder into a neighbour’s garden, still in pyjamas. Nasser died, presumably of a broken heart, after having led the Egyptians into their greatest defeat in the name of Arab honor. Saddam Hussein fled, allegedly taking part of the contents of the Iraqi Central Bank with him. The leftists did no better.

In Iran they became spies and torturers for the Khomeinist regime and in Iraq played second fiddle to Saddam. In South Yemen they fled to Oman by hijacking taxis in Hadhramaut at gunpoint.

Need one recall the disastrous record of Islamism: From Zia ul-Haq to Khomeini, and passing by the Sudanese tragedy? And what about the Taleban whose contribution to the history of infamy may well be the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas?

Statism, nationalism, pan-ism, leftism, Islamism: All were ideas imported from the West and twisted beyond recognition. Each wrecked our lives, in its own way, before we realized it was dangerous for our well-being. So, what will be our next big import from the West? It is democracy. And there are attempts already at twisting it beyond recognition by reducing it to mere electoralism. There can be no democracy without elections. But there can be elections without democracy.

Suddenly, Iran, where all candidates are approved by non-elected mullas, who also ignore the decisions of the elected Parliament, is labelled a “democracy” in Washington. Some of the smaller Gulf states, where doctored elections are used to increase the powers of the ruling elite, are hailed in as “new Arab democracies”.

Because of our mimetic tradition, electoralism of one form or another is likely to spread to most of the region within the decade. We will all become “democrats” just as, at different points, we had all become statists, nationalists, pan-ists, leftists and Islamists of one kind or another. Our democracy could prove to be as fake as our other imports.

Unless we learn the lessons of the past, the next great imported idea could also fail.

The reason? Once again we may be putting the cart before the horse. Democracy does not start with elections. It starts with freedom of thought and expression. It starts with grass-root movements, clubs, associations, unions, and, eventually, political parties.

For 150 years we have acted like actors, learning a part and playing it in our fashion, but in the end, reverting to our true self.

Is this not too pessimistic?

Well, one might say that a pessimist is an informed optimist.