“Following the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, a debate is resurfacing as to why dictatorships emerged throughout the Arab world in the first place. Mohanad Mustafa recently claimed on these pages that “Arab modernization … was led by young middle-class people and was interrupted externally by Western colonial powers and domestically by Arab forces. This was followed by the rise of authoritarian regimes, most of them pro-Western” (“The Orientalist blindness,” February 13 ). In other words, Western colonialism and its agents are at fault. But is that really so? “

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