Unlike Bernard Lewis, who argues that Muslim "rage" for having lost cultural primacy that was once theirs to the West is the root cause of their current conditions, Chaney has a more grounded historical explanation. In the ninth century, according to Chaney, rulers across this region began to use slave armies as opposed to their native population to staff armies. These slave armies allowed rulers to achieve independence from local military and civilian groups and helped remove constraints on the sovereign in pre-modern Islamic societies. In this autocratic environment, religious leaders emerged as the only check on the rulers' power. Religious leaders cooperated with the army to design a system that proved hostile to alternative centers of power. This historical institutional configuration which divided the power between the sovereign backed by his slave army and religious elites was not conducive to producing democratic institutions. Instead, religious and military elites worked together to perpetuate what Chaney calls "classical" institutional equilibrium - which is often referred to as Islamic law - designed to promote and protect their interests.
Regions incorporated into the Islamic world after they were conquered by non-Arab Muslim armies, such as India and the Balkans, and where Islam spread by conversion, for example, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sub-Saharan Africa, did not adopt the classical framework. Their institutions continued to be shaped by local elite which preserved political and cultural continuity. Consequently democratic deficit has remained an enduring legacy in the Arab world and in lands conquered by the Arab armies and remained under Islamic rule from 1100 AD onwards. But Islamic countries such as Turkey incorporated into the Islamic world by non-Arab Muslim armies or by conversions the democratic developments have followed a more progressive trajectory.
For the Arab Spring, history does not have to be destiny. Some optimistic signs suggest that it may be possible for the Arab world to escape its autocratic past.
The region has undergone structural changes such as increasing levels of education, urbanization and industrialization over the past 60 years which have made it more receptive to democratic change than any time in the past. The widespread uprisings of the Arab Spring since 2011, while an expression of this change, would not automatically lead to democracy. The events unfolding in Egypt and actions of the Supreme Council Armed Forces to grab power in the face of Muslim Brotherhood's electoral victories sharpen the possibility of further violent confrontation. Failure of the UN monitors to stop the Syrian state from murdering and suppressing its people will only accentuate sectarian violence and bloodshed. It will take time to dismantle authoritarian institutions and mindsets of their minders.
But there is one clear sign that Muslim countries will follow different trajectories. Countries like Turkey, Albania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia are more likely to defy history than the Arab countries, but poverty and weak civil institutions remain obstacles to democratic change.
