From the beginning, the Arab Spring radiated an Islamic flavor, but that was only part of the story. There is a not unjustified tendency to see the hand of Islam at every stop and turn in these heady days of Muslim assaults and advances, and while Islam’s agenda must be studiously monitored and analyzed, some other factors in the Middle East must be assessed as well.

Ethnicity competes with and contains the feasibility of a complete Islamic conquest. In Iraq and Syria, the robust Muslim-lite Kurds have proven robust in rejecting Arab nationalism and Islam alike. In Algeria, the Kabyle Berbers assert their own secular national spirit against sharia. The extraordinary case of southern Sudan’s secession is a resolute statement of Christian/animist African tribes successfully slipping from the vindictive Arab crush of oppressive jihadic Islam.

Culture as a variegated rich cloth of human liberty and individuality plays a role in checking the monolithic supremacy of Islam. In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood was rather promptly thrown out of power, there is a large repertoire of cultural assets – the press, music, theatre, and literature - that parallel the Islamic identity of the country. In Lebanon, the creative and spirited Christians, especially the Maronites among them, have been leaders of cultural creativity in scorning the repressive character of much of Shiite Islam in the land of the cedars.

Tribalism as a native framework of loyalty and identity precedes the state structure and the Islamic religion. In Libya and Yemen, tribal resilience preempts the extensive religious pretentions of Islam to organize public and legal affairs.

Politics in the name of the incumbent regime denotes withstanding destabilizing religious rumblings. In Jordan the Hashemite dynasty, for all of its frail legitimacy, has deflected the challenge of the Muslim Brotherhood, by neutralizing Islam as a political principle. Much the same could be said of the Moroccan monarchy deftly keeping fundamentalist Islam at bay. Among Palestinians, the Fatah/Hamas split demonstrates the PLO’s unease with accepting Islam alone as the legitimizing stamp of Palestinian peoplehood.

Islam is undoubtedly strong and rampant, but is yet stymied in launching successful religious revolutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Religion has its place of honor in the minds of men and in organizing their need for something meaningful and uplifting in their lives. The transcendent and the realm beyond stir up imagination and direct us to a religious belief. But other forces are part of the public arena of ideas and levers of power. Religion is much but not everything in the Arab Spring, whose sprightliness is not Islamic at all.