The Arabs entered modernity with the entry of the modern world – soldiers, merchants, diplomats, and capitalism – into Arab lands. Modern history removed Arabs from the cultural and civilisational continuity that they came to think had persisted for centuries, and impelled them to changes and breakthroughs in all domains of society, culture, and political structures. These changes traversed these domains and sectors, provoking new developments unevenly, articulated by a structural connection between the Arabs and world history with its centre first in Europe, and then the Atlantic, and finally in the Atlantic and East Asia, with a dispersed geographical centre uniting the world into the single temporal unit of today's advanced capitalism.

Modernity is a general indication of a historical evolution that took place in the context of modern world history. It indicates modalities of connection with and entry into global history: a centralised state whose influence penetrates society, relying on means of communication and the dissemination of a centralised culture, new means of organising production and reproducing labour power through the market and unevenly freeing the operations of production from domestic, patriarchal, and family environments.

To these one can add the increasing use of industrial and quasi-industrial methods and the educational and technical skills that these methods engender, instead of artisanal work practices, as well as the spread of cultural and political associations with modern characteristics such as political parties and societies, while rational models of administration and its structures are introduced in the institutions of the state. This necessitates conceiving implicitly or explicitly a linear temporality that seeks to impose itself on the operation of production in general. The values of global rationality spread and in fact achieved primacy in public output. The associated desiderata included a view of truth based on science or even scientism, an anthropocentric conception of the political system, whether in terms of the Left or of the Right, with ideas of popular organisation, concepts of nationalism, democracy, and socialism, veneration of political leaders, party-political life, and information and educational output. Finally, these signs of entry into modernity were closely connected with marked social changes affecting both urban and rural social groups that had moved to cities.