Liberal democracy repeatedly failed to take root in Muslim societies for a century

Evidence

In the 1980s and 1990s Islamist movements dominated and often monopolized the opposition to governments in Muslim countries. Their strength was in part a function of the weakness of alternative sources of opposition. Leftist and communist movements had been discredited and then seriously undermined by the collapse of the Soviet Union and international communism. Liberal, democratic opposition groups had existed in most Muslim societies but were usually confined to limited numbers of intellectuals and others with Western roots or connections. With only occasional exceptions, liberal democrats were unable to achieve sustained popular support in Muslim societies, and even Islamic liberalism failed to establish roots. “In one Muslim society after another,” Fouad Ajami observes, “to write of liberalism and of a national bourgeois tradition is to write obituaries of men who took on impossible odds and then failed.” The general failure of liberal democracy to take hold in Muslim societies is a continuing and repeated phenomenon for an entire century beginning in the late 1800s. This failure has its source at least in part in the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to Western liberal concepts. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 312

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates on the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis and to the author’s larger argument about civilizational incompatibility; also touches the modesty/immodesty moral-panic theme about how the same cultural repertoire gets reinterpreted politically across contexts.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 312