Perhaps the events of the so-called Arab Spring will put paid to the common misperception that Islamic societies are resistant to or incapable of reform and that, by extension, Muslims in general are unwilling to embrace 'modernity'. At the heart of the uprisings that have spread across North Africa and the Middle East is a popular desire for change. These are examples of Muslim peoples railing against the status quo, using peaceful protest as a means to demand a better future.
Various quarters have attempted to claim credit for catalysing these popular uprisings. The Iranian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, heralded the protests across the Middle East as an 'Islamic awakening' inspired by Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Closer to home, former prime minister John Howard remarked that the Arab Spring 'might' have been encouraged by the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Neither claim is convincing: why has it taken so long for any 'awakening' to ripple outwards from Tehran, and how do the travails that Iraq has endured since 2003 amount to an inspiring model?
An alternative explanation can be found within the Middle East. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Arab Spring followed closely on the heels of widespread popular protests in Iran in 2009, following a presidential election widely regarded to have been manipulated to ensure the Islamic regime's then-preferred candidate won.
The popular imagination holds that Islamic societies are gripped by a 'seventh-century mindset' that smothers innovation and reviles change, so that if change is to come to the Muslim world it must be imposed or catalysed from outside. Yet as even conservative commentator Daniel Pipes recently remarked, Islam is not static. Widely overlooked in Islamic history are repeated instances of home-grown attempts at reform, political and religious.
From the mid-19th century, intellectuals across the Islamic world, stung by comparisons with a rapidly modernising Europe, sought to address the shortcomings that beset their societies. Later known as the Islamic Modernists, these intellectuals advocated political, economic and cultural change.
Here the example of Europe was a guiding light, but not one to be slavishly imitated. The Islamic Modernists warned against a propensity for taqlid (imitation), whether of Muslim tradition or European example; rather they highlighted ijtihad (reasoned interpretation), a principle applicable equally