Tunisia, where the Arab Spring started in 2010, has witnessed the assassination of two opposition politicians within five months (Mohamed Brahmi, founder of the secular leftist Movement of the People party, and Chokri Belaid). A car bomb at a hospital in the Libyan city of Benghazi killed nine people. And Egypt’s army staged a coup to remove democratically-elected president Morsi from power. Many analysts and historians are beginning to resurrect the spectre of Arab history and of Islamic history in general, and its chronic tendency to generate more mad dictators and suicide bombers instead of scientists, inventors, artists and… democracies.