1. Seth G. Jones, “The Mirage of the Arab Spring,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013, https://
2. Shadi Hamid, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam Is Reshaping the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016).
3. My argument differs radically from that of Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for Zed Books, 2012), written in the first euphoric moments of the Arab spring. There was no “permanent revolutionary moment” that emerged from the Arab spring, and if there was, its consequences were often malign rather than positive. Nevertheless the book reflects some initial recognition that the events of the Arab spring marked a distinctive new era of Arab history in relation to traditional discourses of colonialism and imperialism.
4. For an expansive treatment of this definition, see Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 105–46.
5. See, e.g., Belqis Al-Sowaidi, Felix Banda, and Arwa Mansour, “Doing Politics in the Recent Arab Uprisings: Towards a Political Discourse Analysis of the Arab Spring Slogans,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 52, no. 5 (2017): 621–45; F. A. Al-Haq and A. Hussein, “The Slogans of the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions,” in 42nd Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL), Leiden, The Netherlands, 27–29 August 2012 (Leiden: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, 2012); M. Lahlali, “The Discourse of Egyptian Slogans: From ‘Long Live Sir’ to ‘Down with the Dictator,’ ” Journal of Arab Media and Society 19 (2014): 1–14.
6. For a journalist’s first draft of historical overview, see, e.g., Robert F. Worth, A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). For excellent analytic political science, see, e.g., Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds, The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
7. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963).
8. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. Arendt, On Revolution, 275.
12. Lucy Crane, “Hannah Arendt on the Principles of Political Action,” European Journal of Political Theory 1 (2015): 55.
13. Arendt, The Human Condition, 205–6.
14. Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
15. Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
16. Feldman, Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
17. On different theories of tragedy, see Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1966); W. H. Auden, “The Globe,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 174–76. See also Clifford Leech, Tragedy (London: Methuen & Co., 1969), 38–41; Harold Osborne, “The Concept of Tragedy,” British Journal of Aesthetics 15, no. 4 (1975): 287–93, 289.
18. Note that Aristotle equivocates with respect to predetermination, allowing for either necessity or probability: “With character, precisely as in the structure of events, one should always seek necessity or probability—so that for such a person to say or do such things is necessary or probable, and the sequence of events is also necessary or probable.” Poetics, 1454a, 32–36, Loeb Classical Library, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), emphasis added.
1. Compare Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, new ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 146.
2. Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi or Aboul-Qacem Echebbi (1909–1934), “Idha al-sha‘b yawman arada hayat,” also called “Iradat al-hayat,” roughly, “the will to live.”
3. One important difference is oil wealth. As has been frequently noted, regimes fell mostly in non-oil-producing countries, with the exception of Libya, where the United States and NATO brought down Qaddafi. See, as examples, Brownlee, Masoud, and Reynolds, The Arab Spring, 54; Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 31–32. Of course Syria turned out also to be an exception in the other direction: its regime survived despite no oil wealth. No monarchy collapsed as the result of the Arab spring. The age and health of the dictator also turned out to be important factors.
4. On the use of Arabic language to produce transnational discourse in the Arab spring slogans, see Nazir Nader Harb Michel, “Irhal!”: The Role of Language in the Arab Spring (master’s thesis, Georgetown University, 2013), https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/707400/HarbMichel_georgetown_0076M_12381.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
5. For the pre-2011 literature on Al Jazeera, see, e.g., Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskandar, Al Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002); Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel that Is Challenging the West (New York: Grove Press, 2005). On Al Jazeera and the Arab spring, see Sam Cherribi, Days of Rage: Al Jazeera, the Arab Spring, and Political Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Ezzeddine Abdelmoula, Al-Jazeera and Democratization: The Rise of the Arab Public Sphere (New York: Routledge, 2015).
6. Compare Yassine Temlali, “The ‘Arab Spring’: Rebirth or Final Throes of Pan-Arabism?” Perspectives 2, no. 6 (2011): 46–49, https://
7. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).
8. Compare the diverse collection of essays in Alain Badiou et al., What Is a People? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
9. See Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Judith Butler, “ ‘We the People’: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly,” in What Is a People? ed. Badiou et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 49, 55–59. See also Amira Taha and Christopher Combs, “Of Drama and Performance: Transformative Discourses of the Revolution,” in Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, ed. Samia Mehrez (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012), 69.
10. See Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution: From Its Origins to 1793 (London: Routledge, 2005), and in particular chapter 8 (“The Popular Revolution”), 112–30.
11. Compare Laura Gribbon and Sarah Hawas, “Signs and Signifiers: Visual Translations of Revolt,” in Translating Egypt’s Revolution, 119.
12. The English phrase “will of the people” in association with Parliament can already be found as early as 1689, when it was used twice by Henry Vane, The Cause of the People of England Stated (London: Richard Baily, 1689), 12, 15. Earlier medieval usage of voluntas populi (in contrast) typically related to the justification for why custom may be considered a source of law: because it reflects the consent of the people (consensus populi) or the will of the people (voluntas populi). See Serena Ferente, “Late Medieval Sovereignty in Marsilius and the Jurists,” in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 111.
13. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 267.
14. Al-jaysh wa-l-sha‘ab yad wahda, or in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, al-gish wa-l-sha‘b id wahda. On this slogan, dating at least to January 28, 2011, see Menna Khalil, “The People and the Army Are One Hand: Myths and Their Translations,” in Translating Egypt’s Revolution, 249, 256–60. Khalil notes that the order of the “army” and the “people” was sometimes reversed in the chanted slogan. See also Neil Ketchley, “ ‘The Army and the People Are One Hand!’ Fraternization and the 25th January Egyptian Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 1 (2014): 155–86. See also John Rees, “The People and the Army Are Not One Hand,” Counterfire, July 2, 2013, http://
15. Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
16. Imen Gallala-Arndt, “Constitutional Reforms in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan: A Comparative Assessment,” IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook Med.2012 (Barcelona: European Institute of the Mediterranean [IEMed], 2012), http://
17. Of course, it is also important to note that the term “democracy” is itself subject to different interpretations in different contexts. Polls from 2011 and 2017 suggest that to most Egyptians, the core elements of “democracy” were socioeconomic rather than political or procedural. See Arab Barometer, June 2011, http://
18. See, e.g., Perry Cammack, Michele Dunne, Amr Hamzawy, Marc Lynch, Marwan Muasher, Yezid Sayigh, and Maha Yahya, Arab Fractures: Citizens, States, and Social Contract (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2016), https://
19. Public opinion polls are of some limited use in sustaining my argument, but as a source of evidence they can be interpreted to support various inconsistent positions. Consider, for example, a 2010 Gallup poll, “Egyptians’, Tunisians’ Well-Being Plummets Despite GDP Gains,” https://
1. “Hosni Mubarak’s Speech to the Egyptian People: ‘I Will Not … Accept to Hear Foreign Dictations,’ ” Thursday, February 10, 2011, 4:50 p.m., http://
2. “Text of Omar Suleiman’s Address,” New York Times, February 11, 2011, http://
3. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 175–247.
4. This despite the fact that the internationally recognized Iraq-Syria border is not the one proposed on the Sykes-Picot maps. See Sara Pursley, “ ‘Lines Drawn on an Empty Map’: Iraq’s Borders and the Legend of the Artificial State (Part 1),” Jadaliyya, June 2, 2015, http://
5. “Obama Says Egypt’s Transition ‘Must Begin Now,’ ” February 2, 2011, 8:51 a.m. EST, http://
6. Gallup, “Egyptians’ Views of Government Crashed before Overthrow,” https://
7. Indeed, almost a year later, in April 2014, a Pew poll found that 54% supported the removal of Morsi while 43% opposed it. Pew, “One Year after Morsi’s Ouster, Divides Persist on El-Sisi, Muslim Brotherhood,” http://
8. For a less metaphorical, historically informed account of the tango, including various models for describing both sides’ behavior, see Omar Ashour, “Collusion to Crackdown: Islamist-Military Relations in Egypt,” Brookings Doha Center Analysis Paper, March 2015, https://
9. See Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 254–56. To understand how the army shaped the judicial process, consider, for example, that on April 25, before the presidential elections, the assembly speaker Sa‘ad Al-Katatni stated that Prime Minister Kamal Al-Ganzouri, appointed by the army, had told him that “the ruling to dissolve the Parliament is in the drawer of the Constitutional Court.” The statement reflects the belief by the Brotherhood that the army was pressuring or controlling the court. See Ashour, “Collusion to Crackdown,” 27.
10. Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 256.
11. Wickham points out that in the first round, two other candidates, the Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi and the former Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, jointly won nearly 40% of the vote, more than either Morsi or Shafiq. Her argument is that this shows the revolutionary split facilitated Morsi’s success (ibid., 258). But it could also be argued that Aboul Fotouh’s voters were moderately supportive of the Brotherhood and voted for Morsi in the second round. See also pp. 264–66 on the second round.
12. On this event, and “the war of attrition between the SCC and the Morsi regime,” see Sahar F. Aziz, “(De)liberalizing Judicial Independence in Egypt,” in Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: The Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy, ed. Dalia F. Fahmy and Daanish Faruqi (London: Oneworld, 2017), 85, 106–7.
13. Hesham Sallam argued at the time that the army was divided and that the change could not have succeeded “without the support, if not the leadership of senior military officials.” Hesham Sallam, “Morsy, the Coup and the Revolution: Reading between the Red Lines,” Jadaliyya, August 15, 2012, http://
14. Trager, Arab Fall, 160, also reports a false rumor that Sisi’s wife actually wore the niqab, a rumor mentioned by Zeinab el-Gundy, “Meet General el-Sisi, Egypt’s Defence Minister,” Al-Ahram Online, August 13, 2012, http://
15. On Sisi’s zabiba, see Marina Ottaway, “Egyptians Uncertain about Future under President Sisi,” BBC News, July 3, 2014, https://
16. Mohamed Abdel-Baky, “Rached Al-Ghannouchi: Morsi Victory Announces Death of Mubarak Regime,” Al-Ahram Online, June 30, 2012, http://
17. Nadeen Shaker, “In Cairo, Al-Ghannouchi Warns against ‘Democracy of the Majority,’ ” Al-Ahram Online, June 4, 2013, http://
18. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Egypt Court Strikes a Decree Reimposing Martial Law,” New York Times, June 26, 2012, http://
19. The decree is sometimes depicted as the inflection point where Morsi’s support declined. Gallup found that Morsi’s support was at 57% in November 2012 and declined precipitously thereafter. Gallup, “Egyptians’ Views of Government Crashed before Overthrow,” https://
20. Kirkpatrick, “Egypt Court Strikes a Decree Reimposing Martial Law”; Kirkpatrick, “Judge Helped Egypt’s Military to Cement Power.”
21. Fahmy and Faruqi, eds., Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism, 1–30.
22. Ibid., 2.
23. Ibid., 5.
24. Ibid., 6.
25. See also John L. Esposito, Tamara Sonn, and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 231–32, referring to Egypt’s secular intelligentsia as “faux liberals” and arguing that liberals “not only embraced Morsi’s ousting but also welcomed violent crackdowns on the group and hailed the ensuing military.” The authors single out Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and one-time liberal presidential candidate, and the feminist intellectual Nawal El-Saadawi.
1. See Yaron Friedman, The Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History and Identity of the Leading Minority in Syria (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
2. Nir Rosen, “A Tale of Two Syrian Villages,” Al-Jazeera, October 26, 2011, https://
3. David W. Lesch, “Anatomy of an Uprising: Bashar al-Assad’s Fateful Choices that Launched a Civil War,” in The Arab Spring: The Hope and Reality of the Uprisings, 2nd ed., ed. Mark L. Haas and David W. Lesch (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017), 91, 92, 98–101.
4. Ibid., 101.
5. See, e.g., Worth, A Rage for Order, 80–81.
6. A prime example is the ‘Alawi anti-regime activist and writer Samar Yazbek, author of A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, trans. Max Weiss (London: Haus Publishing, 2012). See Worth, A Rage for Order, 90–92.
7. See, e.g., Michael Hastings, “Inside Obama’s War Room: How He Decided to Intervene in Libya—and What It Says about His Evolution as Commander in Chief,” Rolling Stone, October 13, 2011, https://
8. See Edward N. Luttwak, “In Syria, America Loses if Either Side Wins,” New York Times, August 24, 2013, https://
9. The song “Yallah irhal ya bashar!” competed with a pro-Assad song lyric, nahna rijalak ya bashar! (“We are your men, O Bashar!”). See, e.g., Robert Mackey, “Video of Syrian Protest Anthem,” July 21, 2011, https://
10. I have argued that the root cause of the Syrian civil war was the structure of the ‘Alawi regime. In order to test that hypothesis, it is worth considering the two other civil wars that followed the Arab spring: those in Libya and in Yemen. In neither case was the autocratic regime that preceded the Arab spring in the sole possession of a dominant minority, as it was in Syria. In both cases, however, the collapse of the old regime led to the emergence—or rather, reemergence—of different factions that had been more or less successfully suppressed under the banner of nationalism, much as in Syria. In Libya, the factions that emerged were at first tribal, then regional and, to an extent, ethnic-linguistic. Religious-political ideology played a subordinate but meaningful role. The two main actors in the war’s second iteration received support from different external actors, but the civil war never took on a truly transnational character. The current, third iteration of the struggle—not fully violent as of this writing—seems to have no ideological content at all and features the efforts of General Khalifa Haftar of the Libyan National Army to establish his own one-man rule over the country. In Yemen, the factions were regional and Islamic denominational—Sunni versus Zaydi—as well as tribal. The Yemeni civil war has gradually been transformed into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the dominant Sunni and Shi‘i regional powers. In this way it has come to resemble the Syrian civil war, with the major difference that no winner has yet emerged.
11. UNHCR estimates of January 2019. See https://
1. Feldman, What We Owe Iraq.
2. Ibid., 71–82, where I describe the emergence of ethnic and denominational divisions.
3. See Cole Bunzel, “From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State,” Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, Analysis Paper No. 19, March 2015, https://
4. The best-detailed account available at present is Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). I have relied on Lister’s chronology here.
5. Feldman, After Jihad, 7.
6. In 2016, Ghannouchi self-consciously redefined himself and his party as “Muslim Democrats” rather than “Islamists” committed to “political Islam.” See Rached Ghannouchi, “From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2016, https://
7. Feldman, Fall and Rise of the Islamic State.
8. As Cole Bunzel has argued, the Islamic State ideology was also in important ways Wahhabi, reflecting not the Wahhabism of contemporary Saudi Arabia but that of Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab himself. See Cole Bunzel, “The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Duel of the Islamic States,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 18, 2016, https://
9. I do not intend to embrace this analysis. See my description in Feldman, Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, 92–102, and see David Dean Commins, Islam in Saudi Arabia (London: I. S. Tauris, 2015).
10. For the argument that the Bolshevik Revolution was not only revolutionary but also effectively religious-reformist despite its secularism, see Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of Revolutionary Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Slezkine also offers a characteristically sweeping, brilliant, and overstated narrative of such religious-revolutionary movements from the time of Jesus to the twentieth century.
11. Inna allaha yab‘athu le-hadhihi al-’ummati ‘ala ra’si kulli mi’ati sanatin man yujaddidu laha dinatiha. Sunan Abi Da’ud, No. 4278; in some editions, No. 4291. Chapter location varies from 37–39 by edition.
12. For a close reading of the declaration, see David J. Wasserstein, Black Banners of ISIS: The Roots of the New Caliphate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 3–55.
13. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
14. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 167.
15. Valeria Cetorelli, Isaac Sasson, Nazar Shabila, and Gilbert Burnham, “Mortality and Kidnapping Estimates for the Yazidi Population in the Area of Mount Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014: A Retrospective Household Survey,” PLOS Medicine, May 9, 2017, https://
16. Wasserstein, Black Banners of ISIS, 175; see also Rukmini Callamachi, “Freed from ISIS, Yazidi Women Return in ‘Severe Shock,’ ” New York Times, July 2017, https://
17. Rukmini Callamachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape,” New York Times, August 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?_r=0.
18. The controversial example of Mahmud of Ghazni in his invasions of the Indian subcontinent is worth exploring.
19. It has been argued that the best way to understand IS destruction of ancient monuments is to treat it as part of IS’s more general rejection of nationalism. The basic idea is that the Iraqi nation-state, for example, embraced and preserved antiquities as part of its project of creating a national identity. Since IS rejects the nation-state as a form of idolatry, ancient sites—including old Islamic sites—can thus be associated with idolatry. See Christopher W. Jones, “Understanding ISIS’s Destruction of Antiquities as a Rejection of Nationalism,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 6, no. 1–2 (2018): 31–58. The argument is intriguing if perhaps mildly overstated in requiring IS to have a sophisticated, almost Western-academic understanding of nation-state construction. In any case, it is entirely consistent with my view that IS sought to transcend the nation-state even as it adopted some aspects of state-like bureaucratic behavior.
20. For a differing view, see Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State (New York: Random House, 2016), and especially Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” Atlantic, March 2015, https://
21. See Sahih Muslim No. 2897 (“Abu Hurayra reported the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) as saying: The hour will not come until the Rum are landed at al-A‘maq or at Dabiq. An army of the best of the people of the earth of the day will go out from Medina to them …”) (translation mine). On Dabiq in Islamic apocalyptic literature, see also Wasserstein, Black Banners of ISIS, 177–92. It is worth noting that IS gave up Dabiq ultimately without a major battle.
22. Patricia Zengerle and Jonathan Landay, “CIA Director Says Islamic State Still Serious Threat,” Reuters, June 16, 2016, https://
23. Compare Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 290–321, to Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 108–51. On the rivalry between the two scholars over the “radicalization of Islam” versus the “Islamization of radicalism,” see Adam Nossiter, “ ‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals,” New York Times, July 12, 2016, https://
24. Cf. Scott Atran, “ISIS Is a Revolution,” Aeon, December 15, 2015, https://
25. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 221–22.
26. For an analysis of writing by female IS recruits and members, see Wasserstein, Black Banners of ISIS, 129–45: “the women themselves tell us … that they go to IS territory in order to live lives of freedom, as God wishes them to, serving Allah and preparing for … the world to come.”
27. One anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for this book denounced this argument as “specious” and asked whether the Nazis were “also attempting to act as agents in politics every bit as much as those who took part in the American Revolution.” The answer, of course, is certainly yes. It is a cardinal error of political theoretical analysis only to ascribe political action to those whose methods or actions one endorses.
1. For the best full history in English, see Kenneth Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
2. See, e.g., “US Embassy Cables: Tunisia—a US Foreign Policy Conundrum,” Guardian, December 7, 2010, https://
3. For comparison, on consensus—with a critical edge—see, e.g., Nadia Marzouki and Hamza Meddeb, “The Struggle for Meanings and Power in Tunisia after the Revolution,” Middle East Law and Governance 8 (2016): 119, 126 (“As a matter of fact, the invocation of consensus by the Tunisian ruling elite does not reflect a political and social context of peace and positive adhesion to a popular ideology. Rather it reveals a precarious equilibrium among fragile political forces that are increasingly alienated from social forces”).
4. Marks, “Tunisia,” 39, 319 n. 33. Marks also skillfully discusses the rise of Salafi-jihadism in Tunisia and government responses (38–46). Hamid, Islamic Exceptionalism, 206–14, offers an account of why Tunisians might join IS that is focused on the newness and superficiality of Tunisian democratization. An alternative is to see the Tunisian democratic opening as creating space for a new antidemocratic Salafi politics. For a version of this view, see Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta, “The Rise of Salafism and the Future of Democratization,” in The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 252, 266.
5. I eagerly anticipate such a work by Malika Zeghal, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.
6. On Tunisia’s secularism and its relevance to Ennahda, see Shadi Hamid, Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 191–94.
7. Nadia Marzouki, “From Resistance to Governance: The Category of Civility in the Political Theory of Tunisian Islamists,” in The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 217.
8. The best account of the event in February 2012 is Agence France Presse, “Union Protestors Call for Tunisia Government to Resign,” Daily Star, February 25, 2012, http://
9. This took place on March 16, 2012. See Lin Noueihed, “Tunisian Protesters Demand Islamic State,” March 17, 2012, https://
10. Marzouki, “From Resistance to Governance,” 218. Shadi Hamid, however, relying on a personal interview with conservative Ennahda member Shaykh Habib Ellouze, writes that “80 percent vot[ed] ‘no’ in an internal Shura Council vote” on whether shari‘a should be “enshrined in the constitution.” Hamid, Temptations of Power, 201.
11. See Nadia Marzouki, “Tunisia’s Rotten Compromise,” Middle East Research and Information Project, July 10, 2015, https://
12. Cf. Malika Zeghal.
13. In fact, the UGTT at first took a cautious attitude toward what would become the protests, then turned decisively in their favor. For an important account of the UGTT’s longer history and role, see Sami Zemni, “From Socio-Economic Protest to National Revolt: The Labor Origins of the Tunisian Revolutions,” in The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects, ed. Nouri Gana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 128.
14. Ann M. Lesch, “The Authoritarian State’s Power over Civil Society,” in Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism: The Illiberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy, ed. Fahmy and Faruqi (London: Oneworld, 2017), 121.
15. Feldman, What We Owe Iraq, 52–55.
16. See Zemni, “From Socio-Economic Protest to National Revolt,” 136 (describing the “puppet leadership” of UGTT put in place by Bourguiba in 1978); 137–38 (arguing that UGTT backed nearly all Ben Ali decisions under a “policy of neutrality”); Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 123–24 (writing in 2006) (“Unlike what happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and even the start of the 1980s, the trade union is no longer a vital force these days”).
17. See Zemni, “From Socio-Economic Protest to National Revolt,” 138. For a variant, pre–Arab spring version of the “social peace” hypothesis, which emphasized the success of Ben Ali in gaining control over the union, see Hibou, Force of Obedience, 124, 317n37, citing Sadri Khiari, Tunisie: Le délitement de la cité: Coercition, consentement, résistance (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2003), 33–34.
18. Dafna Hochman Rand, Roots of the Arab Spring: Contested Authority and Political Change in the Middle East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
19. Cf. Zemni, “From Socio-Economic Protest to National Revolt,” 132–40; Hibou, Force of Obedience, 95–105.
20. Worth, A Rage for Order, 202–21, relies on his excellent reporting to suggest that the personal relationship that Ghannouchi forged between himself and Essebsi played the key role in facilitating the compromise. In Worth’s telling, the quartet, which got the Nobel Prize, mostly provided cover for the Ghannouchi-Essebsi deal. “But the national dialogue’s heart and soul was the ongoing conversation between Essebsi and Ghannouchi. They were present at almost all meetings, which sometimes went on until dawn” (210). This seems plausible as an account of events on the ground; yet the quartet nonetheless had a structurally crucial part in cementing socioeconomic continuity.
21. “Tunisia President Says Alliance with Moderate Islamists over,” AP, September 25, 2018, https://
22. Zemni, “From Socio-Economic Protest to National Revolt,” 140–42, argues that Ennahda would have sought neo-liberal reform in the pathway begun by Ben Ali but that UGTT has held this process back. This is a possible interpretation, although it is worth emphasizing that Ennahda’s leadership, especially Ghannouchi, had little in the way of developed economic theory.
23. Compare Hibou, Force of Obedience, xxii (arguing for “necessary transformation” of the UGTT in post-revolutionary Tunisia, which on my view has not happened and likely will not).
24. Hibou, Force of Obedience, passim, but especially 14–16, 242–66.
25. “Tunisia Rocked by Protests over Price Rises,” Guardian, January 10, 2018, https://
26. Max Gallien, “As Tunisia’s Political Consensus Cracks, IMF Austerity May Hit the Rocks,” Middle East Eye, January 19, 2019, https://
27. On the latter, see Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, 148–49.
1. Averroes [Ibn Rushd], Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. Charles Butterworth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 93. Cf. Thomas O. Beebee, “What the World Thinks about Literature,” in Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, ed. Ursula K. Hesie (New York: Routledge, 2017), 61, 63.