More than a century before it was showered by outsiders with mantras about “freedom agendas” and “good governance,” the Arab world had a figure for whom these concepts represented imperatives for stanching the decline of the Arab-Muslim realm and restoring its position in the world. Arabs seeking a homegrown blueprint for human, political, social, and civil rights need not search very far. Al-Kawākibī offered a strategy for reform that rested on a penetrating analysis of tyranny and its ramifications for polity and society. A lifelong advocate of freedom of expression and freedom of association, al-Kawākibī’s commitment to the principles of liberty and justice was as unflinching as it was unequivocal.

So argues Ryuichi Funatsu in “Al-Kawākibī’s Thesis and its Echoes in the Arab World Today.” To read this article, which appears in the latest issue of the Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, click here.

Ryuichi Funatsu is a career diplomat at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, currently posted in the Middle Eastern Bureau. An AM graduate in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, his research interests include the history of Syrian-Lebanese relations and Arab reformist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.