Twenty-two authors met in 1985 at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University to peer ten years into the future. Dull as this sounds, the mixture of disappointment and hope make many of the articles surprisingly interesting. Taking just the book's first section, which deals with issues touching on democracy and human rights, one finds that the authors are not happy with recent trends. We learn from Ibrahim Ibrahim that "the authoritarian, bureaucratic state has exhausted itself'; from Michael C. Hudson that "the trend since the beginning of the 1970s has been toward more authoritarian rule"; from Saad Eddin Ibrahim that "the last ten years witnessed an unprecedented scale of atrocities committed by several Arab governments against their own citizens"; and from Sharabi that the Arab world is in crisis.
In light of these comments, it is peculiar to find some of the same authors sporting a visionary optimism when it comes to the future. I. Ibrahim predicts parliamentary rule, confederation between Egypt, Sudan, and Libya, and a whole new format for inter-Arab relations. S. E. Ibrahim flatly submits that "the next decade is going to be one of human rights and democratization in the Arab World." The abyss between these two positions suggests wishful thinking and immaturity of thought.
