Don't provide an audience to that orchestra of misery!

The following is a comment I posted on my facebook wall in reply to The Arab Islamists and the naive understanding of secularism, which a friend posted earlier on his page.

I think that the vast majority of the Islamists in the Arab world have shown more open-mindedness, more agility, more grasp of the world around them than their 'secular' counterparts—not to mention that they seem more constructive. The exception of course are some of the extreme Salafists. Despite the enormous pressure that a regime like the one in Egypt face from domestic saboteurs and foreign meddling, there is a good chance that the Islamists will take the Arab world to a new era. There are already clear signs of change in Egypt--structural changes in the economy and also in the governing apparatus. In the meanwhile, the so-called 'secularists' in the Arab world, whose sole claim to secularism is a pathological dislike of religious ideals inherited from a chauvinist French attitude, will continue to provide what they have provided the Arab world in the past 100 years: an orchestra of misery. The problem of secularists in the Arab world—and this is to true to a great extent of secularists in the Muslim world in general— that when they encountered the West they never moved beyond the appearances of what took place in the West. They never understood, if they ever tried, what made the West technically more superior, which is by the way the main area in which the West is substantially different from the rest. They thought, wrongly of course, that if they adopt certain Western habits, such as in code of dress, force the society around them to do so, particularly women; if women and men stop going to houses of worship; if God is made fun of; if the entire cultural heritage of Islam is subjected to ridicule; if people made fun of their parents and grandparents, then somehow they will obtain the transformative power of the word ‘modern.’ Of course, the product of this is evident to anyone with eyes to see: fragmented societies, social malaise, technical retardation, compounded ignorance, self-diffidence, confusion, retreat of scientific spirit (despite the many hymns that continued to be sung in the name of science and rational thought) and an ever-present feeling of debilitating helplessness, neatly camouflaged by a thick layer of pompous sophistry. If it weren’t for the Islamists, who despite all their shortcomings, all their mistakes and who despite having fallen many times into the same snares put forth by their enemies, brought some hope, brought some self-confidence, then the Muslim world including what we call the ‘Arab world’ (a product of a tribal league created by the British), would be today nothing but aggregates of zeros. 
The obsession with hijab, bikinis, nude beaches, intoxicants and other articles related to personal or collective conduct in the public sphere is a direct reaction by the Islamists to the ‘secularists’ central focus on these trappings as necessary ingredients of what was once seen as ‘modernization.’ This focus has been abandoned by most Islamists, although dealing with these trappings and exposing them for what they are is part of the project of undoing the damage done in the name of ‘modernity’ in our part of the world. Khalid Hroub's use of them is a red herring, a part of the Arab ‘secularists’ continuous effort to misinform the public and the world of what is actually at stake in the region. We have seen what the ‘secularists’ done in the Middle East, and we have every reason not to listen to them.