WHEN SAAD EDDIN Ibrahim was in jail just over a year ago, Nelson Mandela sent him an Arabic translation of his memoir, A Long Walk to Freedom. The book inspired Ibrahim to write about his own experience as one of the Arab world’s most celebrated democracy activists, a man who, at age 64, paid a heavy price for his principles in his country’s prisons.

Expected on shelves next year, Ibrahim says his autobiography will be titled A Long Struggle for Democracy a struggle that is far from over, he warns.

Indeed, the first thing Ibrahim did when he was acquitted of charges of defaming Egypt and improper use of foreign funds in March 2003 was re-open his think tank, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies. Since then, the professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo has been going full steam ahead, continuing to advocate at the highest levels (including a recent sit-down with US Secretary of State Colin Powell) for democratic change in Egypt and the rest of the region.

Egypt is a failed state. That’s what it comes down to, really. It tried this, tried that, but didn’t succeed, didn’t draw the right lessons. I think the right lesson is that the absence of democracy is always the beginning of corruption and ruin. When this happens, despots create extremists. Together, they bring about foreign invaders.

But I am optimistic. The next five years, to say nothing about the next 25, will bring many changes. Why? Three elements.

Civil society. 25 years ago, civil society didn’t even exist as a term in Egypt, and I am proud to take some credit for introducing it. It is still in its infancy, but the state is already lagging behind society now. Civil society brought about change, but the government still rules as usual, in the same way as 25 years ago. The only actor that has really been leading the charge for reform has been civil society. We are even dragging the political parties behind us; they are playing second fiddle, really. We get involved because no one else is; we are filling a vacuum. All the innovation and action are coming from civil society and business.

Yes, business. The business class is very important because it is helping create a market economy; the concept of the [free] market in economics is the equivalent of democracy in politics and civil society in society.

Then there is physical infrastructure. Things like roads, communications, access to satellite TV and the internet. Wherever credit is due, these things are very important.

Egypt is so far paying only lip service to reform. We have yet to see any real change. Real change would be amending the constitution to enable Egyptians to choose their own president from among contenders in a competitive, open, free and internationally supervised election. It is only then that people will have hope, that investors will have faith and that the economy will move forward and society will thrive. Short of that, we will keep going around in circles.

Change could come from any source, from within or without. The idea is not to be afraid of external factors because the external factors will only be instrumental and decisive if the internal factors are blocked. We have examples. All the major changes that came to Egypt and the Arab world came externally because internal powers blocked change. The French expedition in 1798 removed the stumbling blocks of both the Ottomans and Mamelukes and allowed Egypt to take off under Mohamed Ali. Something similar is happening now in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been impeding change for 35 years. Now that he has been removed, I think the new government, the new leaders of Iraq, will be able to make changes. But you cannot have change by external factors alone. It is sometimes necessary, yes, but never sufficient.

Bush didn’t come up with the reform idea all by himself. You have people who asked why 9/11 came from this part of the world, and one of the conclusions they came to was that youngsters in the Arab world have no chance to share the power and wealth or to shape their own future. They want change, they find the channels blocked, and so they go to extremes, like radical religious ideology. And when they fail to see change through resistance, they conclude that it is because America supports regional regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Most of the people involved in 9/11 came from these two countries, so the Americans concluded these regimes have to change.

The state breeds fear of Islamism. The important thing is democracy. Call it Islamist, liberal, leftist the emphasis should be on democracy, meaning the government is elected and removed by the people. Turkey is an example. Isn’t that what people are afraid of? Look at the governments in Morocco, Bahrain and Kuwait. These are regimes in which Islamists ran for office, gained some seats sometimes a majority but they never reneged. Give me one example where Islamists who came to power through peaceful means reneged [on democracy]. Where has that happened? Nowhere. The Islamist scare is propagated and marketed by autocratic regimes to intimidate the middle class and the West, to ward off any serious democratic reforms.

Egypt is not the “key” to change in the Middle East. I don’t agree with that thesis. The region is moving ahead with or without Egypt. Look at tiny Dubai. It doesn’t have a single monument, yet has more tourists than Egypt, and Egypt is like an open-air museum. The “edges” of the region, like Morocco, Oman and Qatar, are all moving forward. The region not only cannot wait for us it is not waiting for us.