Responsibility for the future is very often a matter of foresight and foresight is always based on insight, as we all know. What does my insight tell me about this whole issue or problem? It informs me that the modern Arabs are truly the Hamlet of the 20th century. Like the endlessly celebrated prince, they seem able continually to join the underlying passion of the elemental to the brooding intellectuality of the cerebral to the lyrical sensitivity of the poetic but only to end up in unrelieved tragedy. The tragedy consists of unending hesitations, procrastinations, oscillations and waverings between the old and the new, between asalah and muca sarah (authenticty and contemporaneity), between turath and tajdid (heritage and renewal), between huwiyyah and hadathah (identity and modernity), between religions and secularity