The concept of revolution is a Western import to the Middle East

Evidence

But the notion of revolution, as developed in sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century America and France, was alien and new. The first self-styled revolutions in the Middle East were those of the constitutionalists in Iran in 1905 and the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Since then there have been many others, and by the last decade of the twentieth century, a clear majority of states in the region were governed by regimes installed by means of the violent removal of their predecessors. In early days, this was sometimes accomplished by a nationalist struggle against foreign overlords. Later it was usually achieved by military officers deposing the rulers in whose armies they served. All of these, with equal fervor, laid claim to the title “revolutionary,” which in time became the most widely accepted claim to legitimacy in government in the Middle East. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1116

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful conceptual distinction: rebellion/conspiracy/tradition of challenging tyranny existed pre-Western influence, but the specific notion of ‘revolution’ as modeled on Holland, England, America, France was genuinely new & foreign.