ON DECEMBER 17, 2010 in the Tunisian backcountry prefecture of Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old street vendor named Tarek (going by Mohamed) Bouazizi set himself on fire following a run-in with a town policewoman. This human drama—one of several similar instances in North Africa at the time—sparked the firestorm that in a burst of enthusiasm then would be called “the Arab Spring”. In the new year 2011, regimes from Tunisia to Bahrain, with Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria in between, fell or came in for violent shocks, ending in some cases in civil war. The frenzy, whether directly or indirectly, touched off uprisings of varying sizes in every other Arab state. Several of these regimes would engage the revolutionary forces politically, financially, or militarily to either support or repress them.
Most of the world’s media and NGOs indulged in the hope that democratization would ensue, and the region would escape from the false choice between dictatorship or jihadism. They enthused about a “Revolution 2.0” in which social networks played an active role. However, the movement quickly took a different turn, as from behind the smartphone screens deep cracks in society came out into the open. In the months following the outbreak of insurrection and the fall of despots, the young, educated, urban middle classes were outflanked. Internal as well as regional forces much older than those liberated by toppling the established order took over. In most cases, the Islamist parties linked to the Muslim Brotherhood hijacked the revolt they had no part in bringing about. They did so at the ballot box where possible, through street demonstrations after Friday prayers, and in skirmishes with the police or the army.
The Al Jazeera satellite network, financed and controlled by the gas emirate of Qatar, broadcast this evolution live, offering Arab living rooms a front-row seat at the key symbolic moments of these “revolutions.” Most notably, this included the eighteen-day occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir square, which ended in Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, 2011. But it also made the Brothers into media personalities and movement leaders, rather than the secularized young people. This “Brotherizing of the revolution” is assumed to have channeled the upheavals that lay ahead by entrusting the region’s fate to its pious middle classes. The Turkish-Qatari axis basked in Washington’s approval under the Obama presidency, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), a Turkish blend of Islamic ethic with the spirit of capitalism, providing the point of reference.
Faced with this “Brotherist” axis coopting the revolutionary dynamic for its own ends, other forces in the Sunni sphere responded with a counteroffensive. The oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula under Saudi and Emirati leadership constituted the point of its spear and its grand paymaster. This counterrevolution relied on military hierarchies—especially in Egypt, where it led to Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi taking power in the summer of 2013—and equally on a vast Salafist sphere of influence enveloping the shantytowns.
The counteroffensive benefited from Riyadh’s patronage, redistributed the windfall of its petrodollars, and contended with the Muslim Brotherhood for control of the Islamist landscape. Yet, its collective allegiance to the Saudi regime rested on shifting sands, and its penetrability to jihadist themes posed a problem. The relationship would become more complex the more powerful Prince Mohammad ben Salman al-Saud grew, starting in 2015. In Saudi Arabia, this led to the Wahhabite religious establishment being shunted aside—a considerable if unforeseen secondary effect of the “Spring” of 2011. Sunni unity would not survive this fracturing linked either to support, or hostility, to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, this post-revolutionary internal splintering fostered a kind of one-upmanship. It led to the reemergence of a terrorism that the dynamics of democratic uprisings had temporarily stifled. From 2012 on, “third-generation jihadism” resulted in multiple attacks on Islamic lands in the Mediterranean region, the Middle East, the Sahel—and in Europe. They were carried out along lines defined by its strategists, the two “Abu Musabs,” al-Suri and al-Zarqawi.
This turn of events sharpened the antagonisms between Sunnis and Shiites in the Near and Middle East. In effect, the uprisings in Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen were taken hostage by the struggle between Iran and the Arab oil monarchies for dominance over hydrocarbons and the future of the Levant. The Arabian Peninsula leaders immediately saw Bahrain’s revolt in terms of a clash between the Shiite majority population and the Sunni dynasty. Military intervention by the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf—united until the 2017 rupture that pitted Qatar against the other members—crushed it on March 14, 2011.
In Syria, by contrast, President Bashar al-Assad’s power, based on the Alawite minority, was at first bolstered by Teheran and its allies. The Assad regime’s resistance to the uprising that began in late March 2011 also benefited decisively from Moscow’s aid. It confronted an insurrection in which the Sunni and then the Islamist and jihadist elements would eclipse the original general protest. The Iranian-Russian strategy of projecting military force on the ground in the winter of 2017–2018 would gain the upper hand over the rebellion. Initial encouragement from the West faded away while the image of the uprising was appropriated by the Islamic State—though support from the oil monarchies pitted Qatar against its rivals. Similarly, in Yemen, tribal and traditional regional elements intersected in democratic stirrings that evolved into a confessional split with by al-Qaeda on one side and the Houthis on the other.
The deepening of this fault line between the two main branches of Islam fostered a process of “Salafization” in the Sunni camp. The partisans of this doctrine also theorized a rupture with the Shiite “heretics” (rafidha), advocating their eventual extermination by jihad. It was on Iraqi soil that this animus first played out. The American occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011 had ended with the paradox of Shiite parties—clients of Teheran, Washington’s sworn enemy—taking power. This doctrinal hostility now morphed into massacres of Shiites on the instigation of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It then spread to Syrian territory, labeled the Alawites as “heretics” also, and cursed them as such. The attempt to knit jihad and rebellion against the Assad regime together under the banner of Sunni identity was finalized on June 29, 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s spokesman proclaimed the Islamic State’s “caliphate.”
With these front lines drawn, international jihadism concocted a new fantasy. It rallied militants from areas ranging from North Africa to the European “banlieues of Islam” to the defense of Muslims oppressed by a novel enemy. No longer would they fight the usual specters—the colonialist, then imperialist, Christian West “crusader” or the Jewish and Zionist state of Israel. Instead, they were called to do battle against a heresy within Islam itself that few had heard of. Even fewer, from Cairo to Marrakesh and from Marseille to Molenbeek, would have encountered it. This sudden introduction of Shiism as public enemy number one helped consolidate Salafist doctrine. It also strengthened the Salafists’ claim that their ideology incarnated the pure faith best: it alone was truly obsessed with pronouncing anathema on the followers of Imam Ali. The doctrine’s literal, decontextualized reading of the Scriptures, also excommunicated into the bargain all Sunni “bad Muslims” like the Sufi mystics. Their tombs and mausoleums could be systematically dynamited before massacring their faithful.
The spread of this dogma and weaponizing it as jihad manifested itself in having the letter of Koranic laws applied to non-Muslims as well. They would either be condemned to death as “infidels” or reduced to slavery. Such was the fate of Iraq’s Yazidi community. In territories taken over by ISIS starting in the year 2014, Yazidi women were turned into sex slaves and the men killed. This was also the fate reserved for Europe, tarnished in the contemporary Salafist vocabulary as the land of unbelievers (kuffar). It led to hundreds of people being murdered in horrific attacks.
Several thousand young Europeans from Muslim immigrant backgrounds or freshly converted heeded the call to do battle. They left the impoverished banlieues in their countries behind and headed to the “Shām” for indoctrination and military training. Some of them returned home to kill their fellow citizens by “legitimate terrorism” as the holy texts instructed the Salafists to do. One of the chief activists in this complex web was the French-Tunisian Boubaker al-Hakim, born in the Parisian district of Buttes-Chaumont. In Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online English publication, he wrote in March 2015:
I say to my brothers in France: do not look for specific targets, kill anybody! All the kuffar over there are targets!…I say to them: soon, by Allah’s permission, you will see the banner of La ilah ila Allah [“There is no god but Allah”—the Islamic State flag] fluttering over the Elysee Palace—[the French presidential residence]. The Islamic State is close now. By Allah’s permission, the march is advancing towards you. And, inshallah, your women and children will be sold by us in the markets of the Islamic State!
In less than five years, the enthusiasm of the universal democratic slogans of the “Spring” and of their “Revolution 2.0” had turned into the fatal Salafist backwardness expressed in those lines written from Raqqa. In the end, the Islamic State’s “caliphate” isolated itself through its own extremism, and during the military offensive of 2017 it was wiped off the face of the earth. However, it also weakened and fragmented the Sunnism of which it had wrongfully proclaimed itself the herald.
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When Tarek Bouazizi, the fruit and vegetable seller, set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, his act could have been interpreted as the classic jihadist “martyrdom operation” of the twenty-first century. Rather, it countered it. Suicide had become terror’s most blatant operational mode for speeding up the end of “unbelief” by spreading death and demoralization. Bouazizi, however, differed from the “volunteer martyrs” (inghimassi) of jihad: he did not try to kill anyone but himself. (He succumbed to his injuries in a hospital the following month.) Witness statements would suggest that the self-contained way in which he carried out his act resembled how Buddhist monks self-immolated fifty years earlier, during the Vietnam war. It was not a typical al-Qaeda attack, but the outcome of an individual process. Instead of a militant act prompted by ideology, it mixed social hopelessness with the humiliation of having your face slapped by a policewoman. The unfortunate man had no known partisan or religious affiliations.
Bouazizi could not have imagined how his act would be reinterpreted by the town’s jobless graduates and dissident unionists close to the Marxist extreme left. They turned him into a figurehead of “the people” because he had been exploited; in time, he would acquire mythical status. He became the martyred icon of the “Arab revolutions” as proclaimed from Tunis to Bahrain in 2011, with their symbolic slogan of “the people call for the regime’s fall” (ash shaʿb yurid isqat an nizam).
The notion of a people made supreme by “demo-cracy”—the word derives from the Greek dèmos—runs counter to the Islamist canon, which instead offers the concept of the umma, the Community of Believers. This entity chooses its members first on the basis of religious affiliation, then by how intensely they commit to making sharia the law of the land. For the Salafists, there can never be popular sovereignty, because sovereignty is exclusively Allah’s purview. No political body can justly legislate unless it strictly abides by His word.
The threat posed by al-Qaeda had struck the United States to its core, to the extent that Washington held off criticizing regimes in the Mediterranean Middle East as authoritarian and corrupt so long as they acted as bulwarks against jihadist terrorism. Emboldened by such forbearance, the three despots ruling over the eastern part of coastal North Africa enjoyed remarkable longevity in office. In Tunisia, (November 1987 to January 2011) Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been in power for nearly twenty-five years, Muammar Gaddafi had kept his grip on Libya for forty-two years (August 1969 to August 2011), and Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for three decades (October 1981 to February 2011). The extreme rapacity of the ruling powers had even the upper classes, which profited while the public lacked freedom, suffering under the political system. Boundless corruption, predation, and cronyism thus had considerably eroded the social backing across the board for the regimes in place.
Contributing to this were the dynastic tendencies of the three despots. Ben Ali rained excessive privileges on Leila Trabelsi, his second wife and a hairdresser by profession, as well as on her kin. Mubarak did the same for his son, Gamal, and Gaddafi did so for his favorite child, Seif al-Islam, and his brothers. This alienated the Tunisian and Egyptian middle classes, and what was left of it in Libya. Th urban groups, from which the military officers came, in each country would quickly dissociate themselves from their regimes. After several weeks of unrest, they were ready to make common cause, at least temporarily, with the impoverished young people to accelerate the transfer of power.
This distancing became clear when the Tunisian general staff refused to back up the police who were trying to contain the demonstrations in the capital. The military leadership further confirmed its sympathies when it sent Ben Ali off in an airplane on January 14, 2011. This happened less than a month after Bouazizi had self-immolated. In Egypt, it was the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that dismissed Mubarak on February 11, barely eighteen days after the occupation of Tahrir Square had started. The slogan “the army and the people are the fingers of one hand” (al gaysh wa-sh shaʿb id wahed) became a popular slogan.
The dissolution of governance during the century’s first decade was not the only problem. Added to the mix of grievances were not just the structural problems the regimes ignored, but also economic calamities that functioned as triggers. An OECD report published in December 2011 titled “The Socioeconomic Context and Impact of the 2011 Events in the Middle East and North Africa Region” highlighted a surprising increase in youth unemployment in the region between 2005 and 2010. Only in the oil monarchies of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) was it masked by massive civil service employment. Everywhere else in the region, it was the highest in the world after Sub-Saharan Africa—little wonder, given that the under-25 age group made up half of the population (peaking at 65 percent in Yemen).
Demographics were outstripping economic growth and an already bloated public sector was approaching maximum capacity. Tunisia, where the fuse was lit and the associations of “unemployed graduates” took a leading role, perfectly illustrates these trends. In 2010, the lack of jobs affected at least 30 percent of its fifteen- through twenty-four-year-olds. In Egypt, it affected 25 percent. Even more dire, in both countries, 15 percent of university graduates were officially unemployed (the real rate was certainly higher). This young, educated population was the engine powering the start of the uprisings, and it came up with the first slogans. In a phenomenon long known to sociologists, they grew out of the “relative deprivation” of would-be elites blocked from rising socially at the dawn of the revolutionary process.
In the end, other events brought the decade’s hidden tensions to the surface. One was the sharp rise in the price of food. Global warming and resulting fires had devastated the grain fields of several exporting countries, Australia and Russia foremost. The Arab world, a net importer of grain, saw commodity prices increase by roughly one-third between late 2009 and early 2011. Then the rise in oil and gas prices severely affected countries that produced little or no oil, among them Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Syria, which were already coping with insurrections. The cost per barrel rose from U.S. $62 to U.S. $103, which resulted in doubling the price of butane gas canisters widely used for cooking. Historians and economists have long known that grain and flour price inflation had a major impact on starting the French Revolution in July 1789, when paying for bread could devour half of a commoner’s income. In today’s Arab world (excepting the oil monarchies), basic foodstuffs still represent a big part of the lower middle-class housewife’s shopping basket. The sudden jump in food prices in the winter of 2010–2011 sparked furious defiance of regimes whose despotism had been tolerated so long as there was still the hope of even a modest rise in the standard of living. Now, in this desperate atmosphere, the slogan of the Egyptian left—Kifaya! (“enough is enough”)—which had barely resonated until then, was now heard everywhere. In the streets of Tunis, they added the colloquial French-Maghrebian expression Digaj! (“get out of here!”—from French “dégage!”) to their diatribe against the powers that be.
The Two Great Types of Revolutionary Situations of the “Arab Spring”
Looking past the multiple twists and turns of fate specific to each of the six main uprisings during the winter of 2010–2011, in hindsight we can distinguish between two major types. Each, in turn, reflects three distinct national situations.
The coastal states of eastern North Africa—Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—comprise the first type. They ousted their rulers quickly, whether by exiling, jailing, or executing them. To achieve these outcomes, civil society in each country managed to sustain the revolutionary process. One key reason was a relative ethnic and confessional sameness that let them forge temporary alliances to different degrees among social classes. They collaborated in pulling down the regime, temporarily putting aside all antagonisms in a “moment of enthusiasm.” This was the famous phrase by which Karl Marx described the “spring of the peoples” of the European revolutions of 1848. Although separated by a century and a half, that spring and the “Arab Spring” of our time are strikingly similar, if we consider that both were democratic phenomena, gave rise to immense hopes, and would fail in the end. Except for Egypt, where the mainly Orthodox Coptic Christian minority equals about 8 percent of the population (but stripped of political clout), the three countries are almost exclusively Sunni and of Arab lineage. The only exceptions are the Ibadi Berbers of the Nefusa Mountains and the city of Zuwara in Libya, and of Djerba island in Tunisia, and the black Africans of Libya’s Fezzan. Lacking the necessary internal resources or international connections. these minorities could not weigh in on the shared future.
And yet, after their respective dictators’ fall, each state embarked on a different path—all of them ultimately impacted by terrorism. Tunisia was the exception, in that it installed a democratic parliamentary government. Here, Islamist and secular parties alternated in taking power peacefully. The uprising allowed Tunisia to reconnect with a long history characterized—until the Bourguiba era—by modernizing reform movements as far back as the nineteenth century. However, considerable socioeconomic weaknesses burdened its future, allowing the jihadists to emerge in 2012.
In Egypt, the July 2012 election of a president who was a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood was followed a year later by a revolt, encouraged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that advocated a return to military rule. There, again, history cast its long shadow. It revived the governing mode of the Mamelukes, a non-hereditary military dynasty that predated Egypt’s modernist and reformist orientation, which prevailed from nineteenth-century Egypt to the 1950s, when Nasser’s populist dictatorship swept it away. And, under the ensuing regime of Marshal el-Sisi, jihadism started to raise its head again, most notably in the Sinai Peninsula.
In Libya, Western intervention played a crucial role in Gaddafi’s downfall. It substituted for the internal social dynamics that were too weakened by the unbelievable brutality and omnipresence of his tyranny. A primitive splintering of the country among tribes competing for trickles of oil revenues prevented reassembly of a viable political entity. Moreover, some regions came under the temporary control of jihadists. And this “failed” Libyan state became the main jumping-off point for the clandestine trafficking of Africans to Europe, a continuation of the historical Muslim trade in black slaves. If the balance sheet of the “Spring,” with the exception of Tunisia, is fairly calamitous on a scale that we will analyze below, these three countries, although partly exposed to terrorism, at least did not have to cope with a major split between Sunni and Shiites and its dire consequences.
The second type of “Arab Spring” was characterized by Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Located in the eastern half of the Arab world, these countries experienced a religious disintegration that had more of a political impact than in North Africa. Their uprisings were taken hostage, immediately or gradually, by sectarian revolts. These trumped any potential alliances among social classes that might have let the people “bring down the regime,” as the famous slogan demanded. There scarcely existed a unified “people” that could conceivably make this demand where the fault lines intersected as the established order faltered.
Bahrain’s revolt was the first one that was put down by sectarian motives. Here, a permanent protest against the dynasty had taken over Pearl Square, in the capital city of Manama. It was an imitation of Tahrir Square—only in Cairo it ended on February 11, with the army deposing Mubarak. The majority of the demonstrators in Pearl Square, like the Bahrain population, were Shiites. That they were confronting a Sunni royal family was a prime factor in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Qatar intervening on March 14. With Bahrain, they were all members of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC). Solidarity among sovereigns also carried weight in this decision, as did the risks of having an unstable—and destabilizing—island situated near the major Saudi oil fields and the Qatari gas industry.
Sectarian hostility played a comparable role in Yemen and in Syria but along different lines. In Yemen, the GCC oil monarchies had been worrying for years about Iranian activism among the Zaydi population, which made up the majority of the populace in the northern mountains and in Sanaʽa, the capital of the unified state formed by reintegrating the former South Yemen in May 1990. However, this branch of Shiism had minimized its differences with Sunnism to the point where their followers prayed in the same mosques. I observed this singular arrangement personally as late as the 1990s. It contrasted sharply with the Twelver Shia of Lebanon or Iraq as well as Bahrain, in which case the lines dividing places of worship and dogmas of each denomination were very explicit.
Around this time, aggressive Salafist preaching had begun to make itself heard in northern Yemen. It came with deep pockets and it targeted Zaydi “heretics,” converting their children to Sunnism while excommunicating the parents. The reaction was not long in coming. It took the form of the Houthi movement, whose name derived from the family at its head. Under threat, its followers moved closer to majority international Shiism, and Teheran would soon detect in these new associates a kind of up-and-coming Hezbollah. This is also how the Saudis saw it. They were haunted by the vision of an armed faction aligned with Iran installed on their southern border.
At first, the Yemen insurrection in the spring of 2011, a mix of tribal and regional considerations, succeeded in removing the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. It seemed then that the process might evolve into a form of democratization based on the traditional tribal ways of negotiating and striking compromises. However, in September 2014 the Houthis instead moved out of their stronghold in the country’s northwest and took the capital of Sanaʽa. This triggered the retaliatory mechanism that ended in the Saudi-Emirates military intervention the following year. From then on, Yemen became the second front in the rivalry between the Sunni and Shiite blocs, paralleling the one across which they had faced off already in the Levant.
It was indeed in the Syria-Iraq space that the “Arab revolutions” mutated into intra-Muslim religious wars devolving into chaos. At the start, only Syria was affected by democratic protests. Iraq was caught up in the logics of intra-communal massacres given free rein by the departure of American troops in the fall of 2011. The early unrest in Syria gradually took on a sectarian coloration: teenagers would paint the slogan “the people call for the regime’s fall” on a wall. After their arrest, a protest demonstration would end in deaths. These would be avenged by burning local offices of the Baath party in power. It would end with paratroopers taking over a mosque and killings in the place of worship. The democratic forces had wished to transcend religious confessionalism and model their actions on the Egyptian events, where Muslims and Christians had marched in unison to oust Mubarak. The Syrian resistance wanted to get rid of Bashar al-Assad in the same manner. Every Friday, they organized theme-based marches. Then, with desertions by Sunni soldiers multiplying, they formed the “Free Syrian Army.” However, revolutionary unity would be shattered by sectarian pressures.
The opposition was heavily Sunni and gained footholds in the urban and rural working-class districts inhabited by followers of this majority denomination. The loyalists, in return, united around the Alawite sectarian bond and interests beholden to the regime. They were concentrated on the Mediterranean coast and in the capital. Starting in the summer of 2012, when the insurgents had taken over most of Aleppo, the Syrian rebellion would teeter between regional logics of religious hostility. On the one hand, the petrodollars flowing to the armed groups from the Arabian Peninsula sped up the inroads Salafist and jihadist ideology made in their midst. The financiers wanted them to spearhead the resistance against Iran expanding its influence in the Levant. On the other hand, Teheran committing its Revolutionary Guards and other Shiite proxies especially Lebanese Hezbollah to defend the Assad regime saved it from the expected collapse. At the same time, however, it aligned the Damascus ruler in the “Shiite crescent” that benefited from the decisive military and diplomatic support of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This is how the Sunni insurrection in Iraq’s western provinces linked up with the one in eastern Syria along the Euphrates valley to Aleppo and the Turkish border. It was led by the “Islamic State in Iraq,” the organization inspired by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which would subsequently call itself the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (Shām) and go down in history in English as ISIS or ISIL and in French under its Arab acronym: Daesh. ISIS took Raqqa in 2013 and followed by seizing Mosul in June 2014. For the next three years, until it lost both cities again in the fall of 2017, the “Islamic State”—the dawla, as its followers called their self-styled caliphate—became the monstrous end result, the evil offspring of the democratic aspirations of the “Arab Spring.” It was the crowning of the third-generation jihad strategy originally laid out by al-Zarqawi and al-Suri. This incarnation on Levantine territory of the Islamist “counter utopia,” obsessed with purifying the social body with massacres, grafted itself onto the sectarian fragmentation and intensified it. Its violence was coordinated with the terrorism that struck the heart of Europe from 2015 to 2017. It also hit North Africa, the source of sizable contingents of foreign fighters for ISIS. In this sense, the ISIS caliphate constitutes the speculum that lets us observe contemporary jihadism in vivo as an ideology that would come to wreak cataclysmic havoc on the Mediterranean Middle East.
To understand its full scope, the pages that follow will look back on the eight years that separate the flowering of the “Arab Spring” from the final fall of ISIS. This retrospective will trace the sequence of events in each of the major countries involved. A genealogical interpretation will be proposed for approaching the differing dynamics of the Mediterranean coast and the Persian Gulf. At the same time, these pages will seek to describe the contamination that the mushrooming of jihadism effected. Most notably, it inflamed the antagonism between Sunnism and Shiism. This is steadily becoming the major fault line running through the conflicts tearing the region apart. And these conflicts are having a lasting effect on its fragile relations with the rest of the world.