al-Yaqza
Common themes within Arab historiography are that of sleeping and waking. The common explanation is as follows. After the founding of Islam, the Arabs woke up. They established a cultural and political force that stretched from Cordoba to Delhi, introducing a form of thought that that abhorred hierarchy and aristocracy and stressed the equality of the individual before God. They advanced the sciences and humanities in a way that changed the world. But this Golden Age was not to last; the Arabs fell into corruption and division, fighting amongst themselves for material wealth until their power was fully destroyed by the Mongols.
For 800 years, the Arabs have been locked in a period of sleeping, dominated culturally and economically by foreign powers, waiting for the Awakening (al-yaqza). In the mid-20th century Arab hopes were centered on the figure of Gamal ‘abd al-Nasser, an Egyptian military dictator who promised this awakening by overthrowing the old dictators and introducing a new Arab cultural renaissance. Pan-Arab nationalism was to usher a new era for the Arab world but ended in a false start. Nasser would focus much of his rhetorical energy on Israel; when the Arab military effort against Israel failed spectacularly so did Arab nationalism, as his philosophy was tied strongly to his personality.
This brings us to the winter of 2011. One of the most amazing characteristics of the revolutions sweeping the Arab world right now is that there isn’t an Arafat, or a Nasser, or a Qaddafi that can be painted as the face of the revolution. It is the Arab people themselves who have risen up against their corrupt leaders to establish their faces and their place in history. The Awakening is real and it seems to be happening right now.
This awakening throws into question many of the fundamental assumptions about the Arab world from across the Western political spectrum, which is certainly why the media and the political sphere have reacted with a good deal of confusion.
"Why didn't we just poke them?"
In March of 2003, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq. The public rationale was ostensibly to destroy weapons programs, but the ideological reality was rooted in the neoconservative notion that the United States has a profound moral duty to spread liberal democracy to those suffering under authoritarian systems by whatever means necessary. Of course Iraq was an ideal target; the United States had been involved in military conflict with the country for 12 years and ideologues had built up an extensive case for the invasion of the country. But underlying neoconservative philosophy was a very important assumption: the Iraqi people are impotent to conduct such regime change themselves and as such we are morally obligated to assist them. In other words, the Arabs are sleeping, and we need to wake them up.
The events of the winter of 2011 deeply challenge these assumptions. If Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali can overthrown by nonviolent protests, why not Saddam Hussein? These dictators all presided over similar systems; sham elections, kleptocratic ruling families, violent suppression of the opposition, so on and so forth. Egypt and Tunisia, like Iraq, are primarily secular countries with an educated but economically strangled middle class.
It took the Egyptian people a matter of weeks to overthrow their leader and establish the foundations for democracy; it has taken the American military a matter of years and trillions of dollars to do the same in Iraq. Jon Stewart glibly remarked that “if Twitter and Facebook can start a revolution in Egypt then why did we invade Iraq? Why didn't we just poke them?” This might be truer than we think.
The secular backlash?
The recent protests call into many of the assumptions that the left holds about the Arab world as well, specifically about the nature of grievances and radicalism. In 1979 Iran held a popular revolution that deposed the secular and western-supported Reza Shah Pahlavi. The revolution, which included participants from all social strata, would be later co-opted as an Islamic Revolution by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who would establish a virulently anti-Western religious dictatorship that would end up to be far more repressive than his predecessor.
The common historiography around this event is as follows: America and Britain supported a Western dictator at the expense of Iranian democracy in 1953, and as such the religious fanaticism that resulted was an expected and predictable consequence. This type of thinking is commonly replicated in discussions about the roots of Islamic radicalism; Noam Chomsky famously said “If you want to end terrorism, you have to stop being terrorists."
It should be known that this type of thinking has always been rather shallow and tendentious. India suffered far worse repression during the 200 years of direct domination under the British than can be said for the Shah of Iran, and yet its revolutionary leaders did not pursue the same type of violent anti-liberalism as the Iranian clergy did.
But even if we take this type of assumption as is, the current Arab awakening draws it further into question. The leaders of Egypt and Tunisia were in place for a similar period of time to the formal Iranian dictatorship. Egypt and Tunisia both had western-supported dictators who quite unabashedly quashed democratic rule as well as suppressed religious fervor. Surely, given the extent of repression in these Western-supported secular Arab countries we should see a significant backlash against secular rule and a demand to return to the glory days of the Islamic Golden Age, as is the wish of Osama bin Laden, shouldn’t we?
But as it turns out the trajectories of the revolutionaries of 2011 have been very different from that of 1979. Islamic opposition parties have played a very muted role in the current revolutionary season, and the political expression seen thus far has been along secular and liberal lines. Z’vi Barel in Haaretz noted
“They're not shouting "God is great," but "corruption out," "dictator out" and "we want jobs." Such nice slogans make you identify with them. In the words of "The Internationale": "arise ye workers from your slumber.”’
The situation in the Arab world is of course still fluid. But that in itself should be a source of excitement; the Arab people are no longer politically frozen behind the faces of their corrupt leaders, be they pro-Western or anti-Western.
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