The decades-old winter of frozen and fossilised structures and systems in the Arab world are thawing. The term exceptionalism in the Arab context harks back to Samuel Huntington's thesis that envisages the progression of democracy in waves. The third wave was frozen after its initial advances in the 1970s. It never washed the shores of the Arab/Muslim world, according to this thesis. Hence the Arab exceptionalism. Today, the term has been reinvented in the context of the Arab Spring. The Spring is a year old, and not a single crowned head has rolled so far. Hence, the monarchical exceptionalis