Of all the definitions that have been tried to describe the events that have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East since the beginning of 2011, the most fitting seems to be ‘fugitive spring’, a tandem that expresses at one and the same time the hope for change and the fragility that the Arab revolts involve. To enter this fleeting dimension means to explore the real protagonists, who at times have remained in the shadows of the movements of the streets, to explore who now intends to gather the fruits of the audacious action of the demonstrators and to govern these states and how this will be done. These states have to address within them – in the context of the international economic crisis – an explosive demand for freedom. It is also means to explore what slogans have been shouted in those streets and how the key words of political and electoral debates such as democracy, participation, rights and, above all, secularity, strike the ear. Secularity is a category as determining as it is variously interpreted and misunderstood in societies which have to deal with a pluralism that came into being with revolutions and govern it. Without forgetting that what is happening along the southern shores of the Mediterranean sea also influences the countries of the whole of the Euro-Atlantic area.

The address of Benedict XVI to the Bundestag in Berlin during his apostolic journey in Germany last September offered a new background to the subject of the relationship between Christian faith and civil life, in particular as regards the idea of law. A text that documents how the foundation of public ethics is written by God into the creation which in itself is accessible to everyone. A sort of constructed bridge which fosters reflection on how, and beginning with which pre-suppositions, men of different religions can make a good contribution to life in common in plural societies, as can be read in the address to the representatives of the German Muslim community. Concern about the public dimension of religion also animates Arab Political Reason by Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabri, who is very clear in declaring that a theory of the Islamic State has never existed and who is acute both in unmasking the myths and ideologies that have marked the development of Muslim political thought and in describing the need for a critique of them.

To go through everything, including every page of history and every historical actor, to obtain every element that can contribute to an analysis – such is the ability of Antoine Messarra, a member of the Lebanese Constitutional Council, who, beginning with his long human and professional experience, interprets what is taking place in the Middle East and North Africa without partisanship or dissimulations, even though he is personally involved. To the point of outlining in a clear way that authoritarian regimes, which have at times been held to be the only ones that are able to defend certain minorities, in reality protect nobody at all, neither Christians nor Muslims, and affirming with conviction that a future for Arab countries will only be possible if that future is founded on law.
 

In the books of this issue: the philosophical debate on secularity; ten lessons on the Arab revolutions;
a photograph of Egyptian society on the point of exploding; the portrayal of Mary in Islamic art; the history  of Dervishes in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. And lastly, to end this section, news from Iranian cinema and the new imagination of Italian directors.