Islamic, Arab exception: no democracies?

Arabic states have largely been authoritarian since the revolutions after WWII.  

The noted Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim from the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies, explains some reasons in an interview in Resetdoc:

"Many people have been talking for the last 10-15 years about an “Arab exceptionalism” while 25 years ago it used to be called the “Islamic exceptionalism” because Muslims were somehow different from the rest of the world and this was the reason why they did not have a democracy. This so-called Islamic exceptionalism is a false proposition because 75% of the Muslim population is actually ruled by democratically elected governments (Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Albania.... without forgetting India with its 165 million Muslims). Let us take Egypt as an example. Egypt created its first Parliament in 1866, that means 4 years before the Italian Unity with capital city in Rome. Egypt has been a democracy for almost 100 years, until Nasser Revolution in 1952 which brought to an end the Egyptian and Arab liberal age. I argue that the cause for its end was the establishment of the State of Israel."

"Because the Arab defeated armies went back home looking for a scapegoat to explain why they lost the first Arab-Israeli war. In spite of realising that there were many reasons for that defeat, they put the blame on the liberally elected governments. Then, only three months after the signing of the armistice treaty with Israel there was the first coup d’état in Syria, followed by Egypt and then Iraq.!

For the Moroccan prince and political scientist, Moulay Hisham, giving a widely circulated interview in French, the thesis of an Arabic exceptionalism is refuted. The protest are non-ideological and anti-authoritarian in nature, free of the old antiimperialist, antiisionist dichotomies.

"Ceux-ci proposent une nouvelle version de la société civile où le refus de l'autoritarisme va de pair avec le rejet de la corruption. Ces mouvements sont nationalistes et non-autoritaires à la fois, ils sont pan-arabistes selon un nouveau modèle, en rupture avec la version anti-démocratique qui a sévi par le passé."