Davis 387promote understandings of the development or lack of development of
democratization in the Arab world is laudable, the issue of cross-cultural
knowledge and the problem of a “private language” need to be addressed
if we are to make sense of how the concept of the public sphere might
enhance our understanding of ways to promote greater political freedom
and tolerance in the Arab world. If the concept of the “public sphere” as
applied to the Arab world lacks a praxis dimension, because a wide range
of intellectual and political actors are unable to incorporate it in their
political discourse, can the concept have a significant political and social
impact?^5
n addressing these epistemological concerns, a counterargument I
can be made that the problems associated with applying Western concepts
in non-Western contexts are often exaggerated. In this view, inserting
Western concepts into non-Western analytic and political discourse does
not necessarily result in ethnocentrism. For example, a concept closely
related to the public sphere, that of “civil society”[al-mujtama‘^ al-madanῑ],
faced similar problems when it began to be used by Arab scholars such as
Dr. Sa‘d al-Din Ibrahim, founder and former director of the Cairo-based
Ibn Khaldun Center, who emphasized projects built around this concept.^6
Initially, the concept was not well known or widely used in Arab political
discourse and had a distinctive Western stamp. Nevertheless, the concept
of civil society has achieved widespread currency in Arab political and
academic circles and is now an integral part of the region’s intellectual
discourse.^7 A number of Iraqi newspapers that appeared after the Ba‘thist
regime’s collapse in 2003, such as al-Sabah and al-Mada, contain specific
sections devoted to civil society in their daily editions.^8
rom a different perspective, the literature on democratic transi-F
tions provides another example of the danger of overemphasizing the
problems associated with applying Western concepts in non-Western
contexts. The notion of the “prerequisites of democracy” that preoccupied
much of the modernization literature of the late 1950s and early 1960s
ultimately proved to be a poor predictor of the development of democ-
racies in non-Western societies.^9 The spread of democratic governance
to many areas of the non-Western world during the 1990s, following the
fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, points to the
problematic character of much of the prior theorizing on “democratic