Al-sha‘b
Yurid
Isqat al-nizam!
The people
Want
The overthrow of the regime!
These words, chanted rhythmically all over the Arabic-speaking world beginning in January 2011, promised a transformation in the history of the Middle East. For the first time, mass movements of ordinary people sought to take their political fate into their own hands and shape a better future for themselves. The optimism of their aspirations and the bravery of their efforts met with sympathy and excitement around the globe, especially from believers in the value of self-government. The most exciting, revolutionary aspect of the Arab spring was that the people were acting on their own, wresting control away from repressive governments and the international great powers who had long supported them.
Yet as we know today, the electrifying course of events that began in Tunisia, swept through Egypt, touched half a dozen more countries, and eventually reached Syria ultimately brought little good except to the place where it had begun. Slowly, painfully, by fits and starts, the heroic narrative of the Arab spring was transmuted into something much darker.
There is a word for what happens when nobility, hope, and the human capacity to take action run headlong into conflict, error, and the human capacity to inflict horror. We call that tragedy: the reversal that produces in us the distinctive combination of terror and empathy that Aristotle identified as catharsis. In the Arab spring, the poetic call to change was merely the opening chorus of the drama.
It took seven years for the tragedy to play out. And now, from a distance that is short when measured in historical time but long when measured by how much has happened, a consensus view is emerging about the Arab spring. The view can be stated simply: it was doomed to fail. In retrospect, experts and others are saying, there was no truly transformative political self-determination in those countries where people took to the streets and expressed their will to change. Arab popular self-government was a “mirage,” a “false dawn.”1 Arabs (or maybe Muslims) were “exceptional” relative to the democratic capacities of other peoples.2 Seen through this retrospective lens, it is as though the Arab spring never happened—because genuine political action requires achieving power, and the people never actually succeeded in doing that, whatever they may briefly have hoped and believed.
The purpose of this book is to save the Arab spring from the verdict of implicit nonexistence and to propose an alternative account that highlights the exercise of collective, free political action—with all the dangers of error and disaster that come with it. There is no question that, apart from removing a handful of dictators, the Arab spring did not achieve most of its grander aspirations. I do not dispute that in many ways, the Arab spring ultimately made many people’s lives worse than they were before. Some of the energies released by the Arab spring were particularly horrifying, including those that fueled the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State.
Nevertheless, there was an Arab spring that led to today’s Arab winter. Something—many things—took place. Those things mattered. People whose political lives had been determined and shaped from the outside tried politics for themselves, and for a time succeeded. That this did not lead to constitutional democracy or even to a more decent life for most of those affected is not a reason to believe that the effort was meaningless. To the contrary, the political action undertaken in the course of the Arab spring carried and still carries profound meaning. Failure is always one possible outcome of attempting self-determination. Regardless, the effort mattered for the course of history. And it matters for the future.
In place of the narrative of impotence and impossibility, I want to tell a different story of the arc from spring to winter, from inspired hope to tragic failure. In this account, the Arab spring marked a crucial, historical break from a long era in which empires—Ottoman, European, and American—definitively shaped the course of Arab politics. The participants in the events of the Arab spring and its aftermath took charge of their politics through action. In doing so, they remade and transformed the two big forces that have dominated political ideas in the Arabic-speaking world for the past century, namely Arab nationalism and political Islam.
In what follows, I set out to offer an interpretation of the deep political meaning of the Arab spring and its consequences. This interpretation comprises three main claims, all far-reaching, and all potentially controversial.
My first argument begins with the observation that the Arab spring uprisings marked a new, unprecedented phase in Arab political experience, in which participants engaged in collective action for self-determination that was not conceived primarily in relation to imperial power—neither as the main target of the collective movement nor as its fomenter or supporter. In this important aspect, the Arab spring uprisings differed from the Arab independence movements of the early twentieth century, which were essentially anticolonial. They differed from the Arab revolutions against monarchs, which spanned the years 1920–73 and often had a significant component of anti-imperial ideology. And they differed rather obviously from the constitution making and civil war that followed the imperially initiated U.S. invasion of Iraq.3
The core of the claim I wish to make relates to the political significance of this new phase. In my view, the central political meaning of the Arab spring and its aftermath is that it featured Arabic-speaking people acting essentially on their own, as full-fledged, independent makers of their own history and of global history more broadly. Arabs were acting to choose among possible Arab governments; and the governing forces arrayed against them were similarly Arab forces, not empires or imperial proxies. In basic terms, the events took place in a framework defined by Arab choice and Arab power. Inasmuch as such a thing is ever possible in a world of global interaction and interdependence, the Arab spring and the Arab winter were the Arabs’ own.
That is not to say that imperial powers were not still relevant to the political choices made by Arab actors. The background conditions that shaped the history of Arab political institutions were inflected and shaped by colonialism and imperialism. Protesters in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak wondered whether and how the United States would support the regime. Sunnis in Syria hoped that the United States would intervene militarily to remove Bashar al-Assad from power, as it had already intervened in Libya to defeat Muammar al-Qaddafi. Assad himself ultimately came to rely on a quasi-imperial Russian intervention to defeat the insurgents and ensure his survival.
The point, rather, is that the key decisions—to rise against existing governments, to form new ones, to bring them down—were made from within. They were not motivated or made based on opposition to empire or encouragement from it. Outside forces were relevant to political calculations but did not determine them.
For this reason, the passage from Arab spring to Arab winter should be understood first and foremost as a narrative of self-determination, choice, and consequences, not as a story of heteronomy and external imposition. Moral assessments of credit and demerit, praise and blame, right and wrong must be laid first and foremost at the feet of the participants. According to a discourse shared by many politicians, activists, and academics, the story of modern politics in the Arabic-speaking world has been framed largely in terms of imperial oppression and resistance to it. I am suggesting that the events of the Arab spring and winter warrant a very different framework, one defined by collective political action that was in an important sense autonomous.
The second argument of the book is that Arab nationalism looks very different during today’s Arab winter than it did before the Arab spring. On the one hand, the Arab spring demonstrated the existence of a transnational, even pan-Arab sense of cross-border political identification. Previously, the particularities of national experience in different Arabic-speaking states had made it possible and even fashionable to question the existence of such a broad sentiment. The Arab spring recurred in a great number of Arab countries—and it only visited Arab states. Political events in some Arab countries had massive spillover effects in others, from the imitative, fast-spreading protests and slogans to post-revolutionary struggles to specific techniques of repression. All these reflected the reality of political identification among and across Arab “people” and “peoples.”
On the other hand, within the states where the Arab spring led to major changes, the sense of an existing intraborder Arab nation has been radically undercut, and in some cases destroyed, relative to the pre–Arab spring moment. This collapse of national identity was already prefigured in post-invasion Iraq, with its combination of ethnic (Arab-Kurd) and denominational (Sunni-Shi‘i) cleavages. But where the Iraqi experience could be blamed on imperial intervention, the divisions in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and even Egypt cannot be similarly laid at the feet of an occupier seeking to categorize and control a local population. The divisions in the states riven by civil war are ethnic, denominational, interreligious, geographical, tribal, and ideological. Relative homogeneity along one dimension has not stopped other dimensions of division from becoming fault lines in existential struggles for power.
The takeaway from this profound internal division within some Arab states is that Arab nationalism can no longer be said to function as a plausible or compelling ideology for projecting national unity within Arabic-speaking countries. Indeed, nationalism itself looks very much endangered in the entire region as a consequence of this breakdown of state order. Where at one time Lebanon with its history of civil war might have been seen as an outlier relative to other Arab national units, it now looks more like an archetype. Arab countries that have not undergone civil war in the modern era are no longer even a clear majority among all Arab nations.
It matters, I want to suggest, that this breakdown of national identification is a product of collective efforts at self-determination, efforts that led not to unity but to the opposite. And although imperial powers, especially European ones, undoubtedly played an important part in shaping ethnic, denominational, and tribal divisions in Arabic-speaking countries, those historical influences date back too far to be the immediate causes of contemporary fissiparous tendencies. The realities of contemporary identity have developed during decades of statist ideology, especially the ideologies of Arab nationalism as practiced in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond. The key point is that Arab self-determination has crushed the myth of coherent, unified Arab nations with their own individual national identities.
The third major claim I want to advance is that the events that followed the Arab spring fundamentally transformed political Islam—broadly, the set of ideas and movements that aspire to a constitutional order grounded in the shari‘a.4 Prior to the Arab spring, modern, Sunni, political Islam had undergone a nearly twenty-five-year process in which some of its most prominent exponents began to advocate for Arab states to Islamize their political order by democratic, constitutional means. Yet this model, adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood, had not really been tried. Although movements associated with the Brotherhood had participated in government in Jordan and Morocco, in both cases they did so under the effective control of monarchies that severely limit politicians’ freedom of action. The closest any Arab state came to instantiating modernized Islamic democratic political government was Iraq, where the constitution enshrines the shari‘a alongside democracy and the Shi‘i party known as Da‘wa has provided all the prime ministers since 2005.
After the fall of the presidential regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, parties associated with the Muslim Brotherhood won pluralities or majorities in both countries. As I shall discuss at length, in Egypt, the Brotherhood ultimately failed or was blocked from effectively governing, and after the military replaced the Brotherhood with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Brotherhood was outlawed and suppressed. The question of causation aside, the Brotherhood’s collapse marked a generational end to democratically oriented political Islam not only in Egypt but in the whole of the Arabic-speaking world.
In the shadow of the Brotherhood’s collapse, Ennahda, the Brotherhood-affiliated party in Tunisia, gradually remade itself into a liberal Islamic party rather than an exponent of mainstream political Islam. This occurred formally when Ennahda officially abandoned the core, definitional element of Islamism (a term I use interchangeably with political Islam)—the aspiration to make the shari‘a into the basis of the state’s constitutional order. I will analyze this fascinating and fateful choice later on; here it suffices to say that the successful transition of Ennahda is almost as consequential to the fate of political Islam as the Egyptian Brotherhood’s failure. Ennahda’s self-transformation itself marks an end to political movements advocating political Islamization through democratic means.
Most strikingly, with the Brotherhood and Ennahda in different ways showing the vulnerabilities of democratically oriented Islamism, the caliphate of the Islamic State entered the global stage in the context of the post–Arab spring civil war in Syria. Unlike the Brotherhood and its affiliates, the Islamic State eschewed democratic values and practices. Its version of political Islam can in fact be interpreted as a conscious rejection of the Brotherhood’s modernism and the democratic inclinations to which that modernism eventually led the movement. In contrast, the Islamic State sought to recast political Islam in its recension as entirely continuous with premodern classical Islamic political governance. This was a major move in the trajectory of political Islam. It sustained a functioning state for more than two years, attracting external adherents and achieving some measures of effective governance. But it, too, failed, not because of its murderous brutality but as a result of a sustained military campaign funded by mostly external actors who viewed the Islamic State’s utopia as dystopian.
In advancing these three main claims, the book proceeds in a series of five chapters. Chapter 1 explores the transnational commonalities and differences of the basic demands made by the Arab spring protesters. It introduces my argument about self-determination and begins to consider the question of pan-Arab nationalism via the spread of the uprisings and the symbolic and ideological content of their invocations of “the people.” This chapter is framed as an inquiry into the meaning of revolutionary political action. In it, I ask: Who were the people? What did they want? Who was supposed to perform the overthrow? What regime was meant to go, and what was meant to replace it?
Regime change was not the protesters’ only mantra, needless to say. Alongside demands that took the imperative form “Leave!” (irhal!), protesters called for “Freedom, dignity, social justice,” in the words of one particularly popular rhyming slogan. Many other slogans have received attention in the secondary academic literature.5 The reason to focus on the core insistence that “the people want the overthrow of the regime” is that most of the other demands for change, though sincerely meant, were vague and general, not specific and concrete. Indeed, even the leading slogan was riven with uncertainty. The protesters did not say who would remove the existing regime. Nor did they specify what form of government would bring about their demands. Democracy went unmentioned, surely by design and certainly with important consequences.
Taking Egypt as its focal point, chapter 2 seeks to evaluate moral meaning. Developing my argument about self-determination, I ask here about the agency of “the people.” Did the people act or speak when they created the conditions for the Egyptian army to remove Hosni Mubarak? I argue that the Egyptian people did speak and did engage in genuine political action. Yet I go on to maintain that if we accept that the people called for Mubarak to go, then we must also accept (despite the existence of deep state and military support for the removal protests) that the people spoke when they invited the army to remove Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected post-revolutionary president. This was a colossal moral and practical error, I suggest—yet one for which the Egyptian people bear responsibility.
In chapter 3, I take on Syria and consider the question of responsibility for the disastrous civil war that followed the Arab spring there. Here the focus is first on my larger claim that the Arab spring should not be understood in terms of imperialism and second on my claim about the dynamics of the breakdown of the national state. My suggestion in this chapter is that responsibility for the Syrian civil war lies not with the United States or past imperial powers like France but with the domestic Syrian structures of authority and identity that framed the conflict. In particular, fault lies with the Syrian configuration of a dictatorship dominated by a single denominational minority, the ‘Alawis. Given that power structure, which emerged over a fifty-year period, Sunni, ‘Alawi, and Christian Syrians alike bore a heavy burden of presenting one another with options for avoiding state collapse and civil war. Those options, however, did not emerge, or at least did not emerge with sufficient clarity and plausibility to avoid a violent Sunni-‘Alawi conflict—itself evidence of the failure and passing of the Syrian version of Ba‘thist Arab nationalism.
Chapter 4 addresses the Islamic State, offering a reading of that phenomenon that emphasizes the ideology of the caliphate as a rejectionist version of political Islam. My claim is that the Islamic State is best understood as a utopian, revolutionary-reformist movement that attained success locally and globally because of its appeal to jihadi-Salafi Muslims who were disappointed or disillusioned with other, modernist versions of political Islam. Although dystopian when viewed from the outside, the Islamic State reflected its members’ intentional, articulated aspiration to self-determining political action. The Islamic State did not just happen and was not foisted on all its members by compulsion. Many joined by choice. In this way, the Islamic State belongs squarely to the Arab spring moment. It was an attempt by some Arabs and Muslims to make their political fate for themselves—albeit in horrific form. Its ideals—and perversions—express a rejection of the failed movement for Islamic democracy, the same movement that also failed when the Muslim Brotherhood government was toppled in Egypt.
Last, in chapter 5, I describe the mixed yet nonetheless remarkable success of Tunisia—a success that makes the other parts of the Arab spring all the more tragic because it shows their failure was not always inevitable. Tunisia, I will suggest, succeeded largely because its people and their leadership took political responsibility for the consequences of their actions rather than seeking help from outside or hoping for internal forces to save them from themselves. Their orientation reflected, heroically, the sense of autonomous collective action that I identify in my first strand of argument as constitutive of the Arab spring. What is more, Tunisians displayed an internal national cohesion even in the face of deep political division, and hence are the exception that proves the rule of Arab national collapse. The consequence was the compromise-driven creation of a liberal Islamic democratic movement, one that deeply influenced the Tunisian constitution. This phenomenon forms an important step in my broader argument about the transformation of political Islam. Yet I conclude that even Tunisia’s noteworthy accomplishments have so far failed to address the economic and social problems that fed the Arab spring where it began. Tunisia solved a problem—but not the problem that caused its revolution.
Having introduced the book, I owe the reader—particularly the specialist reader—a word about what it is and is not. Throughout, my intention is to illuminate themes of political meaning associated with concrete human actions in the political sphere. I am not primarily concerned to explain every detail of what happened—the first question of history—or structurally why it happened—the dominant question of political science. This book therefore is not an attempt to explain precisely why the Arab spring took place when it did or why the outcomes differed from place to place. These questions have received ample attention from other writers and will receive more in the future.6 My views on them are sometimes implicit in the text, but this is not a work of history or of structural political science and should not be taken for one.
My constant question is, rather, what does it mean that these things happened? This is the sort of question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt so influentially asked about the American and French revolutions,7 and indeed about political action itself. To answer the question of meaning, one must necessarily consider the history and structure of events. As a result, I have relied here often on the work of historians, journalists, and political scientists. But the focus of my approach is always on the interpretation of events in the effort to make them meaningful. My theses draw much more on normative arguments about freedom, responsibility, autonomy, possibility, success, and failure than on chronology or causation or contributing factors. I want to encourage you, the reader, to consider a whole complex of ideas that might change your overall sense of what the Arab spring meant and what the Arab winter portends.
The exploration I undertake in this book is indebted not only to Arendt’s question but also to her distinctive conception of political action. As she famously argued, action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”8 What she called “plurality,” and we might call collective action, is, she said, “specifically the condition … of all political life.”9 Through political action, individuals acting together create the lasting stories that give their lives permanence and meaning. As will become evident, I read the Arab spring very much through this lens of collective meaning-making, particularly when I seek to make sense of who the people were and in what ways they may have acted together.
For Arendt, people who engage in genuine collective political action are exercising freedom in the truest sense. Freedom for Arendt is not reducible to traditional free choice or free will. It is, rather, a manifestation of “the new beginning inherent in birth,” when “the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”10 This notion of freedom should be visible in my exploration of how the Arab spring and its aftermath developed in relation to outside, non-Arab imperial powers. As Arendt put it, freedom “has always been spatially limited.” Seen in terms of the realm of political action, the “spaces of freedom” appear as “islands in a sea or as oases in a desert.”11
Finally, for Arendt the value of political action is “intrinsic; it lies neither in the achievement of goals nor in the maintenance of life.” Rather than being measured in terms of success or failure, the true worth of political action “can be judged only by the criterion of greatness.”12 Political action is to be measured by greatness “because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary.” And greatness in turn “can only lie in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement.”13 In what follows, I seek to assess the political action of the Arab spring and its aftermath in the light of this criterion, which I sometimes also call “nobility,” rather than in the more conventional political science language of regime success or regime failure.
In the interests of disclosure, it may also be worth adding that my own stake in the account and argument offered here grows from almost two decades of trying to interpret the trajectory of political developments in the Islamic world in general and the Arabic-speaking world in particular—and from my efforts as an engaged outsider seeking to enable both liberal and Islamic constitutionalism in the Middle East and North Africa. Writing in 2003, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I predicted that free elections in Arabic-speaking countries would lead to experiments in Islamic democracy, and I encouraged the United States to let those experiments run their course in the name of democratic self-determination.14 In 2004, after a truncated stint as constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, I explored the ethical consequences of the Iraq invasion and what already appeared as the contradictions and dire failures of the occupation that followed.15 In 2008, I tried to deepen the continuing debate over Islamic democracy by offering some hypotheses about how classical Islamic constitutional design had worked, how it had failed, and what challenges it would have to overcome in order to solve contemporary governance challenges.16
Since 2011, I have watched Islamic democracy rise and fall with stunning speed in Egypt and observed the antidemocratic ideology of the Islamic State drive its own horrific cycle of death and destruction. In Tunisia, I experienced firsthand the alternative of gradual, compromise-driven constitutional politics, complete with the liberalization of the leading Islamist party there.* One epoch in Arab political history has given way to another, or so I am arguing. What has emerged does not give cause for optimism in the short or even medium term. As an observer and occasional participant, I feel no longer young and idealistic but chastened and middle-aged. Nevertheless, midlife demands meaning-making as much as or more than does youth.
Tragedy, as I depict it here, is not simply destiny—at least not always. To be sure, there is an ancient strand of tragic storytelling that depicts the arc of tragedy as inevitable, with the protagonists’ ends already predetermined by their stars. But there is also another strand that defines tragedy precisely by the notion that the protagonists make choices based on their individual characters and by their actions participate in the construction of their fates.17 As Aristotle put it, “with character, precisely as in the structure of events, one should always seek necessity or probability.”18 The “or” in his statement allows for the possibility that the outcome of tragedy need not be necessary. Probability leaves room for different results.
In this book, I mostly emphasize probability rather than necessity. I portray the protagonists of the Arab spring and winter as political actors participating fully and even autonomously in the shaping of the events described. The creation of political meaning, I suggest, is one path that can follow from making choices that determine the course of one’s own life. Freedom in the deepest sense comes from taking action, and taking responsibility for the consequences.
Yet at the same time I do not deny the powerful, and at times nearly overwhelming, effects of background structures of power and politics on humans striving to become agents of their political lives. In particular, chapter 3 on the emergence of the Syrian civil war acknowledges, as it must, the enormous difficulties for successful political resolution that were created by the denominational structures of Syrian politics. Sometimes tragedy really does resemble necessity. But it is no less ennobling for all that.
This book thus tells a new story of the Arab spring and proposes a new set of meanings both for its events and for the winter that has followed. That meaning is more moral than it is historical. To recognize the presence of genuine political action in the Arab spring is to reject a narrative of nihilism in favor of a call to political responsibility. It is time to recognize that the future of the Arabic-speaking world is and ought to be made by the people who live there, not from the outside. Their successes and failures will be, and must be, their own.
* I made half a dozen visits to Tunis during the key period of constitutional negotiations with my associate, Duncan Pickard. We spent extensive time in conversation with members of the constituent assembly, learning from them, discussing ideas, and offering hundreds of suggestions. It was a privilege to be welcomed as a guest into the drafting and dining rooms of the Bardo, where formal and informal negotiations took place.