Arab Spring

A Catch-22 for Scholars

By: Khan Yasir

Title: The Arab Spring: Rebellion, Revolution and a New World Order
Editor: Toby Manhire
Year: 2012
Publisher: Guardian Books
Pages: 303
Title: The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism
Author: Hamid Dabashi
Year: 2012
Publisher: Zed Books
Pages: 272

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 in which they live. 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
let’s 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 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 now on my table for the purpose of analysis.

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. 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 will substantiate that these conclusions, as repeatedly asserted, are not the
immediate by-products of the Arab spring but were 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
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 would not have 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 & 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 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 e.g. 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 article 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:

1. 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”.
2. 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 held 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 that: “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?
3. 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 e.g. 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.
4. 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”.
5. 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 somewhere 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 they
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 e.g. 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 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
about 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 soaring popularity graph of Egyptian
President Mohammed Mursi 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.

(This review-article was first published in the 19 August 2012 special issue of
the Radiance Viewsweekly, “Arab Spring: Promises and Challenges”)