The two previous chapters described and analysed sites of historical breaks in modern Arab history that accompanied its entry into a new universal era. The state assumed a presence of a novel nature, seeking to expand beyond taxation, military control, and overall administration (including the administration of law and cult), attempting in effect to penetrate society and remodel it. This presence brought with it features whose potential was not realised integrally in the ways that had been intended or that had been implicit. This was due to global political factors complemented with social conservatism in Arab societies favourable to a patrimonialist view of the state, social organisation, and culture. State and institutions, with their universalising dimensions, worked to restructure official culture, a culture that was connected to the state, to the future orientation of society and to universalist modules of political and social thought based on a secular compound of utilitarianism, scientism, and evolutionism. Analysis in the previous chapter of the link between sources of authority – both Islamic and the secular sources associated with modern global thought – showed that the fundamental positions for modernist Islamic reformist thought consisted of different strains of Western evolutionism apologetically redacted. Islamic reformist thought presented the range of its concerns as though they were based on Islamic authority. This authority was nominal, founded on illusion and on the interpretation of a supposed past in the light of the present, removing pastness from the Islamic past. In the same breath, it removed the actuality of actual Western ideas that became global as the West went global, both as exemplary and as colonial, soft as well as hard: positive, harmful, progressive, reactionary. This Western universalism contained elements of Enlightenment and of the counter-Enlightenment, as well as elements promoting subordination and backwardness. As a result, the world –including Ottoman and post-Ottoman lands – was making entry into the universalism of Europe from a subordinate position, by choice or by necessity. Entry was also being made to a new temporality that was the vehicle of historical breaks, a recent past with a high degree of internal articulation subverted by emergent conditions making for the modern reforming state, a state with an emergent reconfiguration.