The Phrase ‘Arab Spring’ Has Become Synonymous With Shattered Dreams of Liberation
By
Nesrine Malik
21 Dec 2020
At the end
of 2010, I was en route to Sudan for Christmas, scouring Arabic social media in
search of scraps of information about a story unfolding in Tunisia; a story the
Arab media was censoring and the western media was still ignoring. A street
trader, Mohammed Bouazizi, had set himself on fire in protest at the government
in the city of Sidi Bouzid, sparking demonstrations that spread across the
country.
A girl’s fingers painted with the flags of Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia
and Libya during a demonstration in Taiz, Yemen, in June 2011. Photograph:
Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
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Weeks
before the protests toppled Tunisia’s president-for-life, you could see that
something about this uprising was different. There was something about the way
the protests resonated in households around the Arab world, the intensity of
the moral outrage and the force of the momentum that felt new and exciting.
But even as
I wrote then about their promise and potential, I never imagined that they
would become what we now call the Arab spring. At the time, it was simply unfathomable
that peaceful protests would overthrow an Arab dictator. It had never happened
before. No one even knew what that would look like.
A decade
later, when the phrase “Arab spring” has become synonymous with shattered
dreams of liberation, it is painful to think back on the early days and weeks
of protests. It is painful now to remember the heady months of joy and optimism
– the sense of power that we had as Arabs for the first time in our lifetimes.
Most of
all, it smarts to remember the sense of camaraderie and excitement: when you
cried in streets and cafes with strangers, crowded around a radio or a TV as
the news of another dictator’s demise came through; when you congratulated them
on their country’s revolution and they promised that this time your country
would be next.
File photo
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And it
stings to remember all the acts of bravery: the moment when a friend called
just before going down to join a protest, and left their parents’ phone number
in case they never came back. When you consoled the families of those who had
died, and found their parents were not grieving, not cowed; they were
determined that their childrens’ deaths would not be for nothing.
And yet,
when we look across the Arab world today, it is hard to believe this happened.
Only the “Tunisian revolution” remains intact. Every other country affected has
either collapsed into chaos and civil war, as in Libya and Syria – or, like
Egypt, has entered a new era of dictatorship, darker and more oppressive than
ever before. What has come to pass looks like a fulfilment of the warnings that
were issued against the protests from the start: this will only lead to even
more political instability.
Many who
lived through the days of promise don’t like to talk about them now. When they
do, it is almost with embarrassment; a contempt for their younger selves, at
their naivety and recklessness. “You cannot have freedom and stability,” an
Egyptian man told me earlier this year, reflecting on the failed revolution.
“This is what we have learned.”
And so the
legacy of the Arab spring is not just the atrocities and authoritarians that
followed – but the fact that it is now held up as a repudiation of the very
notion of protest. “We blame ourselves,” Hafsa Halawa, an Iraqi Egyptian woman
active in the post-Tahrir political movement, told me last week. “But we are
also blamed.” The revolutionaries have their own regrets to contend with, but
now they are also condemned for underestimating the scale of the challenge they
were facing.
“You didn’t
know what you were up against, you didn’t know what you were getting yourself
into,” Halawa says they are told. “But we failed because there was too much
pressure on the protest movement to become this political animal. Once
protesters overthrew the regimes, they were expected to take their place.”
Even in
Tunisia, Bouazizi’s name has lost its sanctity. His family was smeared and
harassed, accused of profiting financially from the death of their loved one,
and joined the other millions of Arab spring exiles to leave the country. In
his home town, a Guardian reporter met a woman walking past the giant picture
of Bouazizi erected in his memory. “I curse at it,” she said. “I want to bring
it down. He’s the one who ruined us.”
But all
this finger-pointing and self-flagellation obscures the real truth about the
Arab spring, which is that it failed because it could not have succeeded.
Peaceful transition was simply impossible, at that time and in that manner.
What we underestimated – from Syria to Sudan – was not the power of the
military or the brutality of the security services, or the tenacity of the
entrenched interests and elites that would do anything to maintain their power.
What we missed was actually the lack of any real counterweight to all these
things.
The problem
was the absence of enough of the forces necessary to the success of a
revolution rather than the presence of too many counter-currents against it.
Because dictatorship isn’t just about the rule of one man, it is about the
sterilisation of democracy. After the despots fell, it became clear that decades
of despotism had salted the earth. There were no opposition parties to harness
and guide political energy, no charismatic figures who had returned from exile
or escaped imprisonment to galvanise political movements, and no room for
political discourse because there was no media ecosystem or intellectual space
that was healthy enough to resist capture by conspiracies and sectarianism.
The very
thing that made the Arab spring a shocking historical force – that it was an
organic, people-powered movement that had no leader or ideology – eventually
cannibalised it. The vacuum swallowed the revolution. In that faltering, there
are echoes, and lessons, in the resistance faced by anti-establishment
movements in the west, from Black Lives Matter to the challenges to the centre
ground from the left. What the Arab spring came up against was a universal
conundrum – how to convert the forces that demand equality into those that
deliver it.
Today, it
is hard to see beyond the established narrative of failure: the millions
displaced in Syria, Libya and Yemen; the dead and the missing; the bodies
filling Egypt’s political prisons. But a closer look reveals a lingering
affirmation of what was once so exciting, not least in the insecurity it has
sown among the leaders who followed. Egypt’s relentless police state is a sign
that the military and security services have learned that the threat of another
revolt is so potent they cannot permit the slightest transgression. Like a
jailer whose charge once escaped but has since been recaptured, the country’s
paranoid leaders will go to preposterous lengths to make sure it never happens
again.
And so
everyone, from young women on TikTok posting dance videos to doctors struggling
with Covid, is seen as a threat to the airless monoculture that needs to be
maintained to suffocate any challenge. It is a futile effort. Discontent
continues to swell, as corruption and economic struggles push people to abandon
rational calculations, to spill out into the streets and into certain detention,
torture and even death.
This has
been the ticking metronome, marking out time since the protests began a decade
ago – one moment a fear for life and livelihood, and the next a desperate,
passionate, undaunted rage. You can see this dual consciousness in polls that
show a majority in eight countries across the Arab world agree their societies
are far more unequal now. But in five of those countries, a majority say they
do not regret the Arab spring protests. It is a tense and fragile winning
margin for the forces of the ancient regime. Things may be worse than they were
a decade ago, but there is one fact that is now clear to the despots and the
people alike – a fact that gives the people an advantage they lacked the first
time around. It can happen. It has happened before. Now we know what it looks
like. And next time, we will know what is required of us.
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Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
Original
Headline: The Arab spring wasn't in vain. Next time will be different
Source: The Guardian
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/the-phrase-‘arab-spring’-become/d/123840