The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution and a New World Order
Ed.: Toby Manhire
2012
Guardian Book Services, PO Box 582, Norwich. NR7 0GB
Pages: 303
Price: £8.49
The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
Hamid Dabashi
2012
Zed Books Ltd., 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK
Pages: 272
Price: £12.99 | $19.95
Reviewed by KHAN YASIR
The people want the overthrow of the regime.
Our weapons are our dreams.
(Slogans from Tahrir Square)
Historians have always avoided writing about the period they live in. Unavailability of sources and uncertainty about what-will-happen-in-the-end are two great stumbling blocks while writing contemporary history. A greater impediment is personal prejudice because, in the age of TV and internet, no person can escape having an ‘opinion’ on a current historical event, say 9/11, Iraq war, or Arab Spring.
But over the years this caution has been jettisoned and recent events are now authoritatively interpreted. Journalistic sensation has slowly crept into scholarly dissertations. In an age when sensation-sells and competition is cut-throat, the humble and falsifiable tone of interpretation has paved the way for academic arrogance and cocksureness. And so Arab Spring, a phenomenon as recent as 2011, is ‘analysed’ in books that have sprung up this year in astonishing numbers. Two special books from that heap, different in kind and tenor, that have depth and importance in the message they convey, right or wrong, are here in study.
The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution and a New World Order, edited by Toby Manhire, is a journalistic work that can prove to be a primary source for some future research on the Arab Spring. This book is a selective compilation of the posts from The Guardian’s blog on Middle East while Arab Spring was in full swing. These posts span over 30 December 2010 to 19 December 2011. This blog, still alive, comprises spoken-and-written despatches from Guardian correspondents, wire reports, blogs, tweets, videos, and rejoinders etc. As many as 212 pages of the book consist of these posts. The second part of the book is an anthology of different journalistic articles and opinion-pieces and this section spans over 90 pages.
The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism by Hamid Dabashi is more of an intellectual and interpretative work. More than hows of the Arab Spring the author is concerned with whys. What Arab Spring means for the future of the world is special focus of the book. On the basis of the Arab spring, the author has set upon deriving some incredible conclusions. A deep reading of the book substantiates that these conclusions, as repeatedly asserted, are not the immediate by-products of the Arab Spring but had been there in the mind of the author since long. However, as the Arab Spring unfolded, he saw vindication of his theory bit by bit, and chose to refine and recount those conclusions to the world.
GENERAL READING OF THE SPRING
Ian Black, The Guardian’s Middle East Editor in his introduction to Manhire’s edited volume, began with arguing that Arab Spring was “spontaneous, unforeseen and contagious”. Dabashi too notes that in those months, “there was a synergy in the air” and that the “winds of the Arab Spring have travelled way beyond the Arab world”. For Dabashi this spring is a new dawn that involves remapping of the existing world. In this world, Tahrir Square has become an extended metaphor and it is no longer possible for dictators to curb and censor the voice of the people.
All the scholars that have analysed Arab Spring have concluded that the Arab Spring was leaderless. Ian Black argues that according to him the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia was triggered by the self-immolation of Bouazizi and that his misery was “emblematic of a generation of young people with no hope of a decent job or independence”. He attributes Tunisia’s successful transition to a sizeable middle class, a homogenous population, relatively advanced women’s rights, a civil society and non-political generals and also links to the former colonial power.
Dabashi recognises the spring as not only leaderless but also ideology-less. For him Arab revolutions were transnational uprisings turning the world upside down. In Dabashi’s own words, “The world we have hitherto known as ‘the Middle East’ or ‘North Africa’, or ‘the Arab and Muslim world’ all part and parcel of a colonial geography we had inherited, is changing…”
He emphasises that we do not have necessary conceptual and theoretical tools to describe what had happened and is happening in the Arab world. Dabashi says, “These uprisings have already moved beyond race and religion, sects and ideologies, pro- or anti-Western”. To use a phrase repeatedly used by Dabashi, Arab Spring has progressed like an open-ended Novel and not like a teleological Epic. Post-Spring era is a “yet-to-be-named world”.
The author insists that the Arab Spring was “not the consequence of any ideological mobilisation” and argues further that instead, “they were mobilised against ideologies”. The core argument of the book is that Arab Spring marks the end of colonialism as a condition for knowledge-production; this is end of an era referred to as post-colonialism.
In author’s own parlance, “The Arab Spring is not a fulfilment but a delivery. This is what I mean by its being the end of postcolonialism: the Arab Spring is not the final fulfilment of a set of ideologies but the exhaustion of all ideologies, a final delivery from them all”.
CRITICISM OF WEST
Ian Black candidly points out that Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia, “branded itself, at home and abroad, as a bulwark of stability against extremism”.
Another analyst in the second section of the book notes, “Gaddafi wanted to scare the western world off with the alleged threat of an Islamic emirate.” And had these regimes not incited so much popular fury, the west would have been very glad in accepting these dictatorships as bulwark against so-called extremisms.
The facts mentioned in the book are highly critical of the west’s double standards as far as the lofty terms like justice, liberty, equality and democracy are concerned. For e.g. CNN’s Ben Wedeman tweeted from Cairo:
# Teenager showed me teargas canister “made in USA”. Saw the same thing in Tunisia. Time to consider US exports?
UN’s helplessness, US and UK’s hypocrisy, China and Russia’s vetoes, India and Brazil’s abstentions are all ruthlessly criticised. For e.g. George Monbiot, in his opinion-piece on the issue of sanctions on Syria, articulates, “Though both the UK and the US committed the crime of aggression in Iraq, there is no prospect of sanctions against them. This is the justice of powerful.” Western countries’ different responses to the spring in different countries were also castigated severely. London-based Tariq Ali, in his opinion-piece, reprimands the US for Iraq war; he wishes: If only they had left him [Saddam Hussein] to be removed by his people instead of an ugly and destructive war and occupation, over a million dead and 5 million orphaned children!
Hamid Dabashi is severe in his criticism of ‘the west’ – a phrase that he always uses within commas as for him ‘the west’ is not mere a geographical location but an idea – an oppressing idea; oppressing not only in monetary terms but intellectually as well. The novelty in Arab Spring is that, “These revolutions are not driven by the politics of replicating ‘the west’ – rather, they are transcending it”. Dabashi asserts emphatically that a ‘mode of knowledge’ is manufactured from the ‘position of power’ and the primary job of this mode of knowledge is to justify and sustain that power. For example in this mode of knowledge we refer to most of the Asian and African countries as ‘Third world’.
While uttering this term thousands of times we don’t seem to realise that the very thirdness of this world presumes the firstness of the west. Dabashi takes this point further to argue that with the emergence of the Arab Spring this colonial mode of knowledge that was viciously sustained even in the post-colonial age has finally come to an end.
It is to connote this ‘end’ that Dabashi painstakingly invents and repeatedly invokes bulky-terminologies like ‘end of westernism’, ‘end of Middle East studies’, and ‘end of Europe as an idea and identity’. In short, Dabashi is trying to argue that ‘the West’ is dead as it could not bear the shock of Arab Spring and the resultant awakening. The summation of the bulky terms mentioned above in his own parlance could be as follows, “These revolutionary uprisings prove every theory of modernisation, Westernisation, Eurocentricity, the West as the measure of the Rest, the End of History, the Clash of Civilisation, ad absurdum, wrong. Furthermore, they pull the rug from under an entire regime of knowledge production.”
Dabashi criticises the portrayal of Arab and the Muslims in the western media and argues that this portrayal can no longer deceive the common people in the west. He says, “Libraries and museums of scholarship, journalism, visual and performing arts, imaginative landscapes, and so forth, have been produced to manufacture the figure of the Arab and the Muslim as the absolute, and absolutely horrid, reversal of the white man…” He argues that even so-called scientific magazines like National Geographic do not ‘represent’ the cultures they portray but ‘manufacture’ them. It is a constant process to ‘constitute, manufacture, engineer – reality’ by western press and even academic disciplines like Anthropology and even Middle East Studies. But what has now changed? Dabashi answers that the deception of Western media now lays exposed as now it has, “to compete with Egyptian bloggers, Syrian tweeters, Tunisians on Facebook, Yemenis on YouTube, Bahrainis writing opinion pieces for Al Jazeera”.
Dabashi has also responded to the ‘scholarly’ attempts for instance by The Economist that sought to integrate the Arab Spring into the global rise of the middle class (we have seen that Ian Black shares the same optimism for Middle Classes). According to Dabashi the sinister aim of such attempts is to globalise the phenomenon and take the Arab and Muslim element out of the revolutionary surge.
Dabashi is all furious over the Orientalist scholars like Bernard Lewis who in one of his articles for Jerusalem Post, written in the context of Arab Spring, argued that democracy is a political concept alien to Arabs and Muslims, it has no history in Arab and Islamic world and, “they are simply not ready for free and fair elections”.
Dabashi furiously reprimands Lewis: When will ‘they’ be ready? When, exactly, will they be grown up and… become complete human beings? What is it about ‘them’ (Arab, Muslims, Orientals) that has made them so categorically incapable of practicing democracy, the rule of law, self-respect, decency? What sort of pathological condition is it that leads a man to think so little of an entire portion of humanity, and yet spend his entire life ‘studying’ them?
ROLE OF ISLAM
If the topic is Arab World the factor of Islam has to be necessarily dealt with; but many intellectuals, for some dubious reasons, simply shy away from the task. Manhire’s edited volume is not a full-fledged book, however, in Introduction, Ian Black says that in post-spring Arab countries, transition to democracy is not enough; he asserts, “simplistic slogans like ‘Islam is the solution’ are not enough to deal with the problems of the least developed Arab economies and societies – high birth rates, poverty and illiteracy.” More eloquently he concludes, “The revolution can be tweeted but the transition cannot.” The book with all its posts and opinion-pieces is silent on the question: what was the role of Islam in the Arab Spring?
Dabashi is clearer on this question, his answer is… None! This ‘none’ is explained as follows, “In the making of revolt language is everything… the language we are hearing in these revolts is neither Islamic nor anti-Islamic, neither Eastern nor Western, neither religious nor secular – it is a worldly language….” For Dabashi popular awakening as a result of Arab Spring brings with it a cosmopolitan worldliness. And, “The rise of this cosmopolitan worldliness announces the end not only of militant Islamism but of all absolutist ideologies and the false divisions and choices they have imposed on the world.” With the Arab Spring the world has entered a ‘post-ideological’ phase and as a result all ideologies be it third world socialism, or anti-colonial nationalism, or militant Islamism – all are now redundant.
Here again he coins some phrases like, ‘end of political Islamism’ and ‘end of Islamic ideology’ etc. The world, according to Dabashi, is witnessing a ‘ground zero of history’. He does not stop at this but call shots at Syed Qutub, Jamaluddin Afghani, Ayatollah Khomeni, and Ali Shariati; they all, according to him, have “misinterpreted our dreams and thoughts and delivered them as nightmares”. With an unrestrained vengeance, he opines that these people did nothing except perpetuating the myth of ‘the west’ by projecting Islam as its binary opposite. The whole ideology of militant-Islamism, he stresses, was invented in combative conversation with the west.
In his own words, “Islam had developed in conversation with an interlocutor” and “If you take ‘the West’ away from ‘Islamic ideology’ it will fall; it cannot stand on its own”. In short, as far as Dabashi is concerned, Islam played no role in Arab Spring; on the contrary, political ideology of Islamism lies exhausted as an outcome of the spring.
However Dabashi, seeing the possibility of Islamists coming to power, is realist enough to confess that: “…it is next to impossible to imagine that Islamists in Egypt will maim, murder, silence, imprison, purge the universities, launch a cultural revolution, or force into exile non-Islamists…”
CRITICAL EVALUATION
No revolution, in history of mankind, was spontaneous and unforeseen; neither was Arab Spring. The causes are multiple; it was like lava that did burst on a fateful day. The ‘causes’ that are enumerated by the western media, for e.g. economic discontent or the self-immolation of the Bouazizi, could be immediate-cause that triggered the revolutionary mechanism. But such causes alone cannot ignite a revolution unless assisted by a whole army of causes existing beforehand. Ian Black perhaps recognised this ‘inevitability-factor’ to some extent when he articulates beautifully, “Like revolutions in other times and places, they seemed impossible beforehand and inevitable afterwards.”
The notion of uprisings being leaderless is equally implausible. Charles Tilly, a famous scholar of social revolution, has theorised very distinctly that however disgruntled and discontented are the masses – unless they are guided by some sort of organisation and leadership, they cannot deliver a revolution. What we saw in Egypt and Tunisia was not some hoodlum-tactics of an agitating mob but highly organised demonstrations and protests. Even Dabashi holds that the participation of people in Arab Spring was more than the participation-rate of any other revolution; he at more than one place quotes different authors approvingly to the effect: “Very few revolutions in history were more organised than the Egyptian revolution” – without any semblance of organisation and without any trace of leadership: how can this be possible?
Dabashi’s comments are very precise on mode of knowledge that a power creates to justify and sustain itself. It is perhaps the invisible and intangible effects of this power that even those who are sympathetic to a phenomenon like Arab Spring tends to think it in terms of ‘western’ milestones. For example, Ian Black regards what is happening in Arab as “Berlin-wall moment of the Arab world”. At first glance it seems a pretty decent description for an audience that is acquainted with Berlin-wall moment but not with the Arab Spring. But the description implies that Arab Spring and all the euphoria that Arab world is going through is nothing new for the west as it has all happened ‘here’ before, so ‘they’ in the Arab world are coping up and are following in ‘our’ footsteps. Even Dabashi’s contempt for ‘militant Islamism’ or everything ‘ideological’ can be traced to the post-modernism – a postcolonial ideology – whose end he is so vociferously proclaiming.
A tendency slightly more obnoxious than the above one is taking the credit for everything good in the world. And so, some attributed the Arab uprisings to the global rise and awakening conscience of the Middle Class. Dabashi has severely dealt with this point as discussed above. Many others dubbed these revolutions as ‘Wikileaks-revolution’ or ‘Twitter & Facebook revolution’, even a sensible person like Ian Black has toyed with the earlier idea in his Introduction though not conclusively. But this tendency is so blatantly erroneous that many open-minded westerners have vigorously criticised it. In his opinion-piece, Timothy Garton Ash argues, “The uprising isn’t born of Twitter or Wikileaks. But they help.” Mona Eltahawy more eloquently puts it as: “internet didn’t invent courage.”
A common mistake by scholars of interpretation is the tendency to stand apart, to come to some unusual and anomalous conclusions, and to predict the most unlikely things. This tendency is manifest all over the book by Dabashi. It is strange that a scholar and cultural observer of his calibre overlooked the fact that human beings by their very nature are ideological beings. There can be an era of post-this or post-that ideology, but there can be no era of post-ideology. Post-modernism is most obvious example; it set upon eradicating ideologies and instead of succeeding ended up in becoming yet another ideology. Not only I disagree with Dabashi on his erroneous thesis of ‘End of Political Islamism’, but am also critical of his over-optimism and premature conclusions when he refers to ‘End of Westernism’ and even ‘End of Middle East Studies’.
However the greatest blunder in the efforts to interpret Arab Spring is their dealing with the Islam-factor. Islam is either ignored or has been shown to play only a diminished role in the uprisings. Somewhere this portrayal is ignorance and at some place mischief. Both the books, tacitly or bluntly, argue that these uprisings have nothing to do with Islam. Dissertations can be written on the flawed nature of this conclusion but obviously here we have time and space constraints. I will limit myself to some (from the plentiful) instances mentioned in these very books that prove how basic and substantial role Islam has played in the Arab Spring.
Day of departure (4 Feb. Egypt), Day of victory (18 Feb. Egypt), Day of rage (25 Feb. Iraq), Day of rage (11 Mar. Saudi Arabia), Day of no return (11 Mar. Yemen), Day of your silence is killing us (29 Jul. Syria), Day of unity and people’s will (29 Jul. Egypt), Day of patience and perseverance (29 Jul. Yemen), Day of the no fly zone (28 Oct. Syria), Day of the one demand (18 Nov. Egypt), Day of departing ambassadors (18 Nov. Syria), Day of the last chance (25 Nov. Egypt) – These and many other ‘days’ were celebrated on the streets; and on these days the protests were mammoth and shook the foundations of the reign. Such ‘days’ were organised at every critical juncture of the spring. It is not a coincidence that all these days were FRIDAYS. As recent as on 16 June 2012 Sudan too celebrated a day: “Friday of elbow-licking”. It is high time that the connection of politics with religion in Islam is understood in the right spirit by the scholars.
Whenever a dictator, be it Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi or Assad, delivered a speech, he castigated in particular Islamists and Muslim Extremists. This negatively verifies the fundamental role that Islamists played in the revolts. It must be noted that those dictators were not speaking on their whims and fancies but on the definite reports of their dreaded intelligence agencies. Several of such speeches are quoted in both the books. For example, Ian Black’s assessment of Bashar Assad’s 20th June Speech; even Dabashi mentions that on 5th Feb. (After Day of Departure on 4th) newly appointed Prime Minister Omar Suleiman said he would talk with opposition parties, including Muslim Brotherhood. Why this special mention of Brotherhood? After all they played no role in the spring, isn’t it?
It was argued in intellectual circles that people were motivated by only economic (or politico-economic) and not ideological considerations for the spring. But the popular feeling regarding Islam seems to falsify this hypothesis. In a post from Libya (23rd Feb.), a woman told AP, “Mercenaries are everywhere with weapons. You can’t open a window or door. Snipers hunt people. We are under siege, at the mercy of a man who is not a Muslim”. The greatest flaw the woman found in Gaddafi was not his brutality, not his exploitation, not his dictatorship but the fact that he is not a [true] Muslim.
As early as 25th January Jack Shenker reports from Cairo that pamphlets widely distributed among protestors declared that “the spark of intifada” had been launched in Egypt. ‘Allahu Akbar’ was a frequent chant of the protestors as Ian Black himself notes in an article on Bahrain. Soumaya Ghannoushi, in her opinion-piece on female protestors of Arab Spring, says, “Another stereotype being dismantled is the association of the Islamic headscarf with passivity, submissiveness and segregation. Surprising as this may be, many Arab woman activists choose to wear hijab. Yet they are no less confident, vocal or charismatic…”
Only Wadah Khanfar deals with the Islamic question in Arab Spring substantially in an opinion-piece titled candidly: Those who support democracy should welcome the rise of political Islam. Khanfar refutes those many voices that warn to the effect that the Arab Spring will result in Islamic winter. Khanfar talks about electoral success of Islamists in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Yemen and presents AKP of Turkey as successful example of a general Islamic frame of reference; a multi-party democracy; and a significant economic growth.
Dabashi on the other hand is under many misunderstandings about Islam, Islamic movement and political Islamism, as he calls it. At one place he has regarded Islamism as Nativism – the two notions are poles apart. His interlocutor-argument is true to the extent that in every age Islam responds to the respective jahilliya but to derive that if this jahilliya is taken out Islam cannot stand on its own is like arguing that when there will be no disease, doctors will die of starvation. No they will not, they will keep improving our health for good. His argument that “No national hero such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, or Mohammad Mosaddegh will emerge from these revolutions…” stands flawed if the `2`soaring popularity graph of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is kept in mind.
Islam till now was in the hearts, in the mosques, in the prayers, and in the slogans of the Arab people. Through Arab spring, fed up by nationalist fraud and socialist deception in the last century, Arab people strived to bring Islam back into their lives. The manifestation of this claim is the twin-fact that: in Arab world where revolution has not yet come, Islamists are brutally suppressed; and where revolution has come, Islamists have gained landslide electoral victories.