We have seen how the first century of Arab secularisation, extending from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, reflected the historical and evolutive process and potential of Tanzimat state culture over the prevalent cultures of Arab societies, and its greater organisational efficacy. This state's insertion into a combined and uneven direction of global development tended to subordinate the localism of Arab societies and, gradually and unevenly, to attune their changing intellectual and practical resources, in various measures, to the implicit secularising direction of modern history. A second point to emerge has been that of the incipient separation of the once dominant official cultural register emerging from the immediate past or asserting continuity with it, and the new culture's ineluctable integration, unevenly and by degrees, into a global culture based on modern cognitive and ideological goods, with secular content and points of reference. This culture became the constituent feature of a new class of intellectuals – educators, lawmakers, and literary figures – with the basic elements of what might arguably be compared with bourgeois culture based on education, the Bildungsburgertum, one that came to be dominant and was implicitly and explicitly nurtured by the state, its institutions, and new means of communication, especially the press and education. It must be said with reference to the sometimes violent instability of this social group, especially in Egypt, that it did not succeed in crystallising itself as an estate, status class, and in differentiating itself sufficiently in terms of the functional differentiations of modernity, as this was undermined at once by individual identification with state patronage and by exposure to social, political, and religious pressure. Unlike the situation in nineteenth-century Germany, for instance, the state itself did not make sure it guaranteed the autonomy of the cognitive field.

The induction of Arab societies into the basic cognitive, ideological, and normative culture of universalist modernity through the instruments of the state and its intellectuals was, as shown already, met with resistance under a variety of circumstances.