As I was preparing this volume for publication, in the spring of 2019, two sets of roughly simultaneous events occurred that seemed very much like afterimages of the Arab spring. First in Algeria and then in Sudan, both countries where 2011 protests failed to make a big impact, large crowds gathered to protest unfree elections that promised to keep in place two old, long-standing dictators, Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Omar al-Bashir. Both leaders resisted for a time, but the protests persisted. Soon enough Bouteflika resigned, and Bashir was removed by the Sudanese military. The people, it seemed, had gotten what they wanted—at least in the moment.
It is too soon to say definitively what will follow the removal of these leaders. Yet in both cases the hopeful tone of the protesters must be measured against the great probability that military regimes will use the protests as a means to replace the old autocratic rulers with younger ones, thus solving the transition problem that characteristically plagues military-backed dictatorial regimes. That, after all, is the descriptive-cynical account of what ultimately happened in Egypt. In neither Algeria nor Sudan does the military seem in jeopardy of being replaced as the dominant guarantor of political authority in the state. Even civil war cannot be ruled out, although its likelihood in both places is lessened (painfully, to be sure) by the fact that Algeria and Sudan have already undergone relatively recent civil wars, Algeria’s between 1991 and 1999, and Sudan’s from 1983 to 2005.
What do these belated mini Arab springs mean, taking place as they are in the depths of the Arab winter? The first lesson is surely that the original Arab spring protests still possess resonance and the power of example—notwithstanding the tragic consequences that followed in most of the places where they occurred. The Algerian and Sudanese protesters were in an important sense following a script that was familiar to them from the events of eight years before. Their songs and slogans were their own, but the precedent for creative use of songs and slogans in public protests to remove dictators had been set in 2011. It was still strong. And it still worked to remove the dictators from power.
A second lesson is that genuine, optimistic political action to change government remains possible in the Arabic-speaking world, even in the face of the experience of tragic failure. That is, the noble aspiration of the people to take charge of their own political destiny has not been eliminated or destroyed, despite the knowledge that failure is not merely possible but probable. Like the Arab spring protesters before them, the protesters in Sudan and Algeria were acting on their own, not in the shadow of empire nor against it. There is something uplifting about this persistence of hopeful commitment to autonomous political action, something especially moving in the light of the very tragedy this book has depicted.
The third lesson is more sober: the 2019 protests carry ennobling political meaning even if they ultimately fail to produce significant improvements in the lives of the peoples of Algeria and Sudan. Realism demands the recognition that Algeria and Sudan have more in common with Egypt and even perhaps Libya and Syria than with Tunisia. The delicate conditions that can nurture the emergence of democratic constitutional government do not appear to obtain in either place. And if the script of the Arab spring was available to the protesters, the script of the Arab winter is available to the military authorities. Continued dictatorship is the most probable result; yet the struggle to do better still carries profound meaning.
In considering these afterimages of spring-in-winter, I am really asking: What comes after tragedy? Aristotle famously used the Greek word “catharsis” to capture the experience of the tragedy’s observer. A catharsis, according to the weight of scholarly interpretation, is a purging or a purgation—an inner experience that transcends the emotions of terror and pity and turns them into something cleansing. In this much-analyzed picture, tragedy functions as a shaper of the viewer’s internal cognitive and emotional state. It reflects that strand in Aristotle’s thinking that sees the greatest human accomplishment as theoria, the speculative use of the mind to achieve what is most divine about us.
But the Arabic reception of Aristotle’s conception of tragedy is, famously, different. Ibn Rushd, the great medieval commentator on Aristotle, interpreted tragedy and comedy through the filter of the very different Arabic literary genres of blame and praise poetry, in which the poet faults or idealizes an enemy or a patron. This reading—or perhaps misprision—is explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his poignant and beautiful orientalist story, “La busca de Averroes” (“Averroes’s Search”).
As Ibn Rushd has it, tragic catharsis “makes souls become tender and prompts them to accept the virtues.”1 This version of catharsis starts inwardly, with the preparation of the soul taking place through the experience of observing tragedy. But it moves outward, to the embrace of character virtues that can then be expressed through actual human action.
In this way, the catharsis of the Arabic Aristotle invokes a different, competing strand of Aristotelian thought—a strand that sees not reflection but the doing of politics as the highest form of human flourishing. The point of tragedy, in this vision, is to offer inspiration for the exercise of virtue, including political virtue. Tragedy can thus be made to have a practical, forward-looking purpose. It can lead us to do better.
The lessons in virtue that tragedy can teach are not pedagogically simple. There is no handbook for successful self-determination. Human conditions and circumstances vary too widely, as Aristotle noted. No single political or constitutional solution will fit every polity.
Yet tragedy seen through the lens of the Arabic Aristotelian tradition may nonetheless guide us toward political virtue, by its capacity to help us do better in the future. Bleak as circumstances are now for Arab politics, there will be changes. New possibilities will eventually emerge. The current winter may last a generation or more. But after the winter—and from its depths—always comes another spring.