This article presents the “Dark Age” as an analytical term, entailing a definition that makes it possible to identify the dynamics of its rise and fall as well as the characteristics of ideas opposed to it. This analytical task necessitates moving beyond a common understanding of the Dark Age as merely an era of great calamities, focusing instead on how it is designed with an intention to close off all attempts to escape it. This condition, then, creates a tension between political stagnation and social dynamism that eventually reaches the point of revolutionary explosion. We derive this definition by comparing the Arab region (1974-2011) with the European region (1815-1848). We then examine how the inhabitants of the Dark Age coexisted with it – that is, how or from where there emerged a sense of what is usually called “hope” in circumstances that seemed to offer no room for it, and how this feeling interacted with the social dynamism toward change in society.