A Response to Chibli Mallat

The Arab Spring is, as its subtitle indicates, an “essay” on ideas about revolution and constitutionalism.1 We chose the term “essay” deliberately, to signal that the book offers reflections and speculations on ideas important to thinking about constitutional law. The essay was occasioned by the form that constitutional transformation took—or failed to take—during the Arab Spring. Although several chapters present rather detailed accounts of how constitutional provisions evolved during the process, we did not purport to offer a “deep dive” into each of the jurisdictions. We thought that we offered, in Professor Mallat’s words, “a more abstract, less grainy perspective,”2 but apparently we failed adequately to convey that intention.
So, for example, we explored the possibility that the constitutions drafted in the aftermath of the Arab Spring might have embodied something like a distinctive Islamic constitutionalism. This required us to present in some detail the evolution of constitutional language. In the end, the details, sometimes admittedly a bit tedious (“dull,” in Professor Mallat’s words3), suggest that rather little truly distinctive of the Arab Spring transformations can be found in those constitutional details. They also suggest that rather little was resolved about the distinctive Islamic component, if any, of the new constitutions. Rather, our presentation confirms the general observation that the best predictor of a nation’s new constitution is its prior constitution. That is something of a deflationary finding, cautioning against a kind of constitutional triumphalism that sometimes affects discussions of seemingly large-scale political transformations.