SIX

From the Fall of Despots to Societies in Turmoil

Tunisian Democracy, between Social Divide and Jihadist Peril

Tunisia was the first of the “Arab Spring” countries to have its “revolution.” It is also the only one that succeeded in replacing its dictatorship with liberal institutions, something to which it aspired from the start. The constitution adopted in January 2015 thus could be hailed as “the most democratic in the Arab world.” This rarity is explained by a resilient, relatively numerous middle class educated in Arab and French bilingual secondary schools that were legacies of Bourguibaism and the French Protectorate. It could also draw on sources that led to a reform of mindsets and administration starting in the nineteenth century. At the time, Tunisia had courageous statesmen who knew how to fit their country into the Muslim and Ottoman universe, but also how to mold its own identity and modernize it. This was reinforced by integrating a group of people made up in part by Janissaries of European origin and diverse prisoners Tunisian pirates had captured on the high seas or in coastal raids. Once these outsiders had converted to Islam, they endowed the country’s coastal region with a cosmopolitan elite whose descendants still stand out today.

Of the six “Arab Spring” countries, Tunisia was also geographically the closest to Europe. A large share of the population consequently was more in tune with democratic systems and how they worked. Nearly a tenth of Tunisian nationals lived abroad, the vast majority in France, who regularly traveled back and forth with the bled (homeland). Working out some complex compromises, this extensive middle class piloted the transition after the dictatorship ended. With the latter’s disappearance, long-submerged social structures rose again to the surface. Tunisia was fortunate to have the virtues of the past compensate for the defects of the present—even if the country’s fragmentation still posed formidable challenges.

The uprising and its aftermath went through several dynamic stages. First, the provisional government laid the groundwork for a constituent assembly election. The Ennahda Islamists won them and built a coalition with two secular parties that would be nicknamed the “troika.” It confronted a social crisis in which the impoverished steppe border areas in the south and mountainous west opposed the prosperous coastal regions of the northeast. It also had to deal with persistent Salafist proselytizing and jihadist violence exploiting this geographic split. When the new power proved unable to meet these challenges, civil society, unions, and employer organizations pressed for the formation in January 2014 of a government of technocrats.

Legislative and presidential elections followed, with the Nidaa Tounes secular party emerging the victor, making its founder chief of state in December. Schisms in his group, however, led him to seek support from his former Ennahda opponent for forming a national unity majority. It started governing on August 26, 2016. This Tunisian-style “grand coalition” lowered the political temperature and helped to democratize the Islamist party. Still, it was an unwieldy arrangement, and urgent reforms were slow in coming. It was a delicate balancing act for a society whose economy, mired in corruption, would not take off. Meanwhile, Libya next-door was melting down, and the persisting terrorist spectermobilized the government into budgeting large sums to fight it.

In 2015, shocking attacks on tourists at the Bardo Museum and a seaside hotel were reminders that Tunisia had supplied many foreign fighters—some estimates went as high as 4,000 to 6,000—to the Islamic State. Since Bouazizi’s suicide by fire, the social and geographic divides in Tunisia had not been overcome; on the contrary, they were transferred to the ballot, emphasizing the disparity between secularists and Islamists. In the 2014 balloting, the former received the most votes in the more prosperous and populated northeast Tunisia, which made Beji Caid Essebsi president of the Republic. In the impoverished southern and western areas, Moncef Marzouki and his Ennahda partner ran ahead where they had carried all the districts three years earlier. It was as if the democratic process kept returning to square one at Sidi Bouzid, where the uprising had started on December 17, 2010. Symbolizing the sociogeographical rupture, this town has links to the port city of Sfax, with its big business and olive groves, but also to the expanse of barren steppe devoid of resources that Bouazizi’s family called home.

The Sidi Bouzid Spark

The political process set in motion in Tunisia by the young street vendor’s suicide made possible a temporary but crucial democratic interaction between social classes. It was an element missing in Egypt and Libya, the other two North African coastal countries whose regimes would also be overthrown. At first, extreme left militant groups of unemployed graduates acted as yeast for the movement. Within just a few days, it connected the province with the capital’s populous outskirts, swollen by a rural exodus. By occupying the public space, the pressure these young people from the impoverished banlieues put on the authoritarian grid imposed by the ruling powers suddenly overwhelmed it.

At the same time, the combination of the regime’s rapacity, massive unemployment, and bad governance was exacerbated by the sharp rise in food prices. It now emboldened the urban middle classes to confront Ben Ali head-on. It did not matter if people had accommodated themselves to the dictatorship or lived in terror of its ubiquitous repressive police—they all now saw their chance to overthrow the despot. They would do it by allying themselves with the poor youth population, who had taken over the street for good, demanding “bread and dignity.” This and other social demands mixed more or less happily with the “liberty and democracy” slogans chanted by the residents of the more well-to-do parts of Tunis. The military hierarchy, which came from the same middle class, refused to back up the police in putting down the insurrection. (Some years before the uprising, when I had been invited to lecture at the general staff college, I remember being struck by the liberated tone that prevailed there, very different from the university that was locked down by the intelligence services.) This made it possible to kick the president out quickly with minimal loss of life. During the transition that followed Ben Ali’s forced departure on January 14, 2011, residents from the capital’s bourgeois districts at first shared control of the provisional government with people from the coastal towns. However, some of these had compromised with the former regime, or had only opposed it halfheartedly, and vengeance-seeking pressures from the street made it impossible for them to remain in power.

Nevertheless, a general atmosphere of freedom following decades of dictatorship prevailed. It led to the freeing of all political prisoners and the return of exiles in February and March 2011. Diverse Islamist actors were suddenly free to appear on the political scene. The propaganda discourse they developed linked their loathing of the fallen power to its secularity. This animosity had been on display during the Habib Bourguiba era (1956–1987), although Bourguiba’s successor Zineddin Ben Ali had distanced himself from it. He had an immense minaret erected in Carthage and paraded himself on the pilgrimage to Mecca, seeking to adapt to the insidious Islamization that had been rearing its head in Tunisia since the 1970s. He even sought to use it to his advantage. However, identifying secularity with the unbelief of an unjust ruler usurping divine sovereignty is a truism in Islamist rhetoric. Doing so was even more expedient because the imprisoned militants, Ennahda cadres especially, had been subjected to outrages, including torture. This gave them the aura of quintessential victims, even among their secular adversaries. The return of Ennahda’s founder Rached Ghannouchi on March 31, 2011 helped turn it into a disciplined party endowed with an ideology, in stark contrast to a secular movement that was spread too thinly across numerous small groups. Some of these, in any event, were nothing more than vehicles for the personal ambitions of their respective leaders.

Meanwhile, the intensified social demands from the impoverished neighborhoods were taken up by the growing numbers of Salafists supplanting the leftists that had started the revolution. They also took advantage of the disappearance of a discredited police force to substitute adherence to sharia for the failing public order—that is, as long as it was not just a proxy for rackets, extortion, and assault, as had been the case during the Algerian jihad of the 1990s in the areas controlled by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The anxieties roiling the middle classes were deepened by the freeing, in a spasm of revolutionary fervor, of terrorists, some of them veterans of the Afghan, Chechen, or Iraqi battlefields. The most famous was a native of Menzel Bourguiba near Bizerte who called himself “Abu Ayyad al-Tunisi” (Seifallah ben Hassine). On bin Laden’s behalf, he had masterminded the assassination by two Belgian Maghrebis of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan on September 9, 2001. Al-Tunisi also had links to the attackers of the Djerbian synagogue of El Ghriba in April 2002. Upon his release from prison, he founded the Ansar al-Sharia organization (“Partisans of Islamic Law”). It would become the major Tunisian jihadist group, combining intensive proselytizing and clandestine activities until it was banned in August 2013 for murdering secular politicians.

Thus, the Ennahda Movement came to be regarded by at least part of Tunisia’s middle class (even some secularists) as the sole organization capable of assuring public order. In the public mind, it had two things going for it: some of its leaders had been persecuted by the hated deposed regime. Also, in restoring order, it did not upset the social hierarchies very much, in a trade-off for the increased Islamization of the political sphere. On February 21, 2011, violent protests by the poor in front of the Kasbah, seat of the provisional government, raised fears of uncontrolled rioting and the start of class warfare. The subsequent move to install Ennahda, a party born from the Muslim Brotherhood, at the head of the government when it won the October 2011 Constituent Assembly elections had special backing. It came from the High Commission for the Achievement of the Objectives of the Revolution, a body comprised of independent jurists Tunisians had created to steer the transition. It had no equivalent in any other country in which an “Arab revolution” had occurred. The proportional balloting it organized limited the landslide that majority voting would have produced, forcing Ennahda to form a coalition with two secular parties. These were the extreme left Congress for the Republic (CPR) presided over by Moncef Marzouki and the social-democratic Takattol (“Democratic Bloc”) led by Mustapha Ben Jafar. Together, they would form the government nicknamed “The Troika.” In this way, Tunisia avoided the fate of Egypt, where the Islamists, by scooping up three-quarters of the seats, set up a violent confrontation with the army.

Nineteenth-century Russians used to pull their mud- or snowbound cars out with a team of three horses. The middle or shaft horse did the work, pulling with its head down while the two flanking it were whipped into a gallop. The comparison is apt with the Tunisian coalition, in which each member pulled at their own pace to bring the differing energies of social, regional, and complementary ideologies to bear. A native son of the country’s neglected south, Moncef Marzouki, a neurologist educated in France where he lived and practiced for years, became the first brown-skinned Tunisian chief of state (although it was only a symbolic post during the transitional period of 2011 to 2014). Mustapha Ben Jafar, blond haired and blue eyed, from an Ottoman lineage, became president of the Assembly.

Ennahda designated the engineer Hamadi Jebali as prime minister—the real power broker. He was a graduate of Arts et Métiers, the elite engineering Parisian school. Hailing from the coastal town of Sousse, he embodied the stream within the Movement that was most open to political compromise with the secularists and the middle class. In 1987, he had planted a bomb in a hotel in the city of his birth, for which he later formally apologized. On October 29, 2011, a few days before taking office, he granted me an interview. He said that the party had abandoned the totalitarian legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been modeled on communist organizations, in favor of a social-democratic orientation. He rejected the strategy of Algeria’s FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), which led to civil war and political breakdown in the 1990s. Instead, he approvingly cited the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) as the ideal, hoping it would get him support from Europe and the United States.

A year later, on September 12, 2012, it was President of Tunisia Moncef Marzouki who described the Ennahda militants to me as “democrats with a strong religious streak—like the European Christian Democrats—and, on the social level, rather liberal-conservative.” He tasked CPR, his own party, with the role of “leading deep-going social reforms.” After a year in business, the Troika had to deal with persistent tensions boiling up from the Tunisia of the disenfranchised, and Marzouki predicted an electoral loss if these reforms were not implemented—he would be proved right two years later. He was sure that the Salafists were the “ideological mask that only served to express the social demands of the poor.”

However, Marzouki’s reading of the situation, mirroring the standard Marxist downplaying of religion as mere superstructure, was wide of the mark. Its error was in not paying attention to the cultural rupture around which the Ennahda Movement, and its violent expression as jihadism, organized society’s lines of fracture. It also failed to see that they derided the idea of class struggle. In fact, while belonging to the “disinherited” is a powerful mobilizing engine, rigorous Islamic expression redraws the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat in totally different terms—as a battle determined by “allegiance and disavowal,” or al-wala wal baraʾa. This Koranic expression has become the operative phrase and principal slogan of Salafists and jihadists alike.

As they construe it, there are the true believers (who swear “allegiance” to the revealed Truth and its interpreters), versus the apostates, heretics, and unbelievers, from which the first “disavow themselves”. This rupture is absolute and makes living side by side in the same social body impossible. There remained only two choices then: either set up enclaves that would metastasize to envelop all humanity (as the Salafists wished), or establish an entity purified by terror and massacre (of which the ISIS “caliphate” would become the ultimate expression between 2014 and 2017).

In Tunisia, starting in mid-2012, the consensus between “moderate” Islamists and secularists embodied by the Troika was tripped up by these challenges. Whether or not to go along with the extremists translated into a fundamental difference about the nature of the constitution, the reference to Islam embodied in it, and the acceptance of freedom of conscience. This was the deal breaker between Ennahda and the secular middle classes. The latter had given the Movement its due, but accused it of weakness responsible for the growing jihadist violence that reached a peak with the dramatic attacks of 2015. This would upset the political balance of power, starting in 2013, to Ennahda’s detriment. It would also make Rached Ghannouchi’s positioning evolve.

The Salafists debuted their strategy of confrontation at the University of Manuba, an eminently symbolic place on the capital’s outskirts. They moved to take over its Faculty of Letters and Humanities, which they regarded as a bastion of unbelief. They insisted on female students covering their faces with a full veil (niqab), forcibly took over the dean’s office, hauled down the Tunisian flag down to replace it with the caliphate’s black and white banner with its Islamic profession of faith. All this happened in November 2011 just as the Troika started its work. The Salafists took advantage of some Ennahda ministers’ lenient attitude to continue disturbing campus life as they drove to dominate the balance of power. Their principal agitator, the jihadist Mohamed Bakhti, released from prison in March 2011, told me that they aimed to “to expel the professors, all atheists and watch dogs of the French who brainwashed them.”

Next, after the university, in June 2012 the art scene came into the Salafists’ crosshairs. They trashed an exhibition in the Abdellia Palace in La Marsa, a town in the capital’s residential suburbs. The victimized visual artists were then the ones prosecuted, with the concurrence of the public prosecutor’s office, for “violating the sacred.” This referred specifically to an installation of female heads covered in scarves sticking out of a heap of stones wrapped in religious texts that called for the stoning of adulterers. The charges put on display that part of the judiciary was vulnerable to being infiltrated by the Salafists. A comparable situation arose in Egypt in 1995. The judges there had automatically divorced a professor, Nasr Abu Zayd, from his wife against the couple’s will on the grounds of his “apostasy.” The charge had been leveled by Islamists, and was enough to dissolve the marriage tie between a Muslim woman and a spouse who would henceforth be excommunicated.

And it would be at Sidi Bouzid, ground zero for the Arab revolutions, that the confrontation in the symbolic and normative domain the Salafists sought to dominate culturally would take on material form. The Ansar al-Sharia association led by Abu Ayyad occupied the town’s main mosque located on the newly named “Mohamed Bouazizi Avenue.” The jihadists called it Tawhid (“divine oneness”) mosque, which is the key precept in their ideology. In its name, they excommunicated all their enemies accused as idolaters, and therefore of practicing polytheism of one kind or another. Their aim was to seize control of the uprising and capture its momentum for their own program. On September 5, 2012, the city’s last bar that still served beer was ransacked.

Two days later, as Friday prayers let out, Tawhid mosque’s preacher informed me that Bouazizi could not be called a “martyr” as popular sentiment routinely made him out to be. He stated, “He did not sacrifice himself in the Way of Allah…but the desperate youth of Sidi Buzid, today will follow in the Way of Allah!” Then he made clear where his movement diverged from Ennahda: “They favor democracy, which represents unbelief, and we excommunicate democracy as contrary to divine sovereignty, for if the majority of people agree on sin then sin becomes law. Their objectives are good—install the Islamic State—but their methods are bad.”

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Banners hung by the mosque exit soliciting contributions by the faithful to the Salafist collection box showed photos of atrocities committed by the army of Bashar al-Assad—labeled “Shiite”—against Syrian “Muslims”—by extension, Sunni. Shiism dated back to ancient times in Tunisia, when the Fatimid caliphate, who followed that creed, founded its first capital Mahdia (“city of the Messiah”) in the tenth century. It still survived in the traditional devotions. In fact, a discreet contemporary revival started when the fame of Lebanese Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah convinced some Arab nationalists that the Party of God alone was capable of fighting Israel. In the popular imagination, the fight against Zionism and for the Palestinian cause always trumped the intra-Muslim conflicts. But Ansar al-Sharia shifted the line demarcating Good and Evil inside Islam so that it lay between true believers and apostates. It claimed to incarnate the former while it excommunicated the latter along with assorted other heretics. In the process, it goaded its followers to leave for Shām to train in armed jihad against al-Assad “the Shiite.”

At the weekly souk on Saturday, September 8, 2012, the day after my exit interview with the preacher at the Tawhid mosque, they unfurled the same banner in the middle of the marketplace. This signaled social control and moral order in the poorer neighborhoods. I chanced to run into Abu Ayyad himself two days later in front of this same mosque, his presence there witness to the importance the jihadists assigned to making the Sidi Bouzid revolutionary icon their own. The exchange with him went quickly downhill, however, when a French-Tunisian in his entourage, speaking in the accents of the Paris Islamic banlieues, singled me out as an “enemy of Allah.” This would be one of the famous terrorist’s last public sightings. On September 14, a YouTube video posted by a California Copt titled “The Innocence of Muslims” was judged by Islamists to be offensive to the Prophet. In retaliation, from the al-Fath (“the conquest”) main mosque in the Tunisian capital, Abu Ayyad called on the faithful to vent their anger against America, resulting in the United States diplomatic chancery and an adjoining school being torched. In Libya, Ansar al-Sharia’s sister organization had just killed the American ambassador during an assault on the consulate in Benghazi on September 11, the anniversary of the “blessed double raid” of 2001 against New York and Washington.

The Democratic Surge against Salafism

The day before the torching, I raised the question of Salafism and violence with Rached Ghannouchi. For Ennadha’s president, the abuses could be blamed on “oppression during the Ben Ali era”; those who carried them out were “victims, unemployed youth, ex-convicts.” He thought that Salafism would be extinguished with the expansion of the “moderate current in political Islam.” It would co-opt them and show them the light, like the Social Democrats had done for the European ultra-left. Not fully grasping the problem, the party apparatus seemed to think it was a case of youth needing to sow its wild oats, and Ghannouchi cited his own youthful radicalism as having mellowed with time.

A number of observers at the time regarded this sort of talk as appeasement. In the months and years to come, in the face of the campaign of attacks and assassinations, it would no longer hold water. Worry about the escalating violence reached into pious middle-class ranks, tipping the fall elections of 2014 and costing Ennahda its parliamentary majority. Three weeks after the meeting with Ghannouchi in Tunis, I met him again in Doha on October 8, 2012. He was the star attraction at a conference sponsored by Qatar for the purpose of promoting dialogue between nationalists and the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter would guide the former with the motive of capturing the momentum of the uprisings. The natural gas emirate gave U.S.$1.5 billion to the Tunisian Troika for this purpose. All the Brotherhood nobles were in attendance at Doha—this included the organization’s Syrian, Egyptian, Sudanese, and, notably, Palestinian leaders.

Soon after, in early 2013 violence descended on Tunisia. As prescribed by the third-generation jihadism theorized by al-Suri and al-Zarqawi, it targeted first the “apostates” represented by law enforcement officers and secular politicians. Next on the list were “impious” tourists. It proceeded initially by mirroring the growing Syrian conflict, where thousands of Tunisians were fighting, then emulated the terror in Europe, which also involved many binational Tunisian individuals. On February 6, 2013, the Arab nationalist lawyer Chokri Belaid was assassinated. His funeral brought out a million people—more than the demonstration of January 14, 2011 that had hastened the fall of Ben Ali. The member of Parliament for Sidi Bouzid, Mohamed Brahmi, met the same fate on July 25—the anniversary of the abolition of the beylicate, followed by the proclamation of the Tunisian Republic by Bourguiba, in 1957.

The two execution-style murders were claimed in December of the following year by Boubaker El Hakim, the veteran French-Tunisian jihadist from the Buttes Chaumont neighborhood of Paris. In his video communiqué from Syrian territory, where he had become one of the principal ISIS cadres, he decreed that Tunisia was a “land of war” (dar al-harb) where armed jihad waged against one and all was now licit. However, the immediate effect of the two assasinations was to destabilize Ennahda. The head of the government, Hamadi Jebali, resigned in the days following the Chokri Belaid assassination. His successor, Ali Laarayedh, threw in the towel after the Brahmi murder. A large part of Tunisian public opinion blamed the Islamic party, including some who had voted for it in 2011, for letting the radical Salafists run amok.

The way out of the deadlock linked to the terrorist crisis would be crafted by another independent body like the High Authority of 2011. This one went by the name National Dialogue Quartet and had the backing of even more powerful social forces than the earlier panel. It brought together the UGTT (Tunisian General Labor Union), the UTICA (Tunisian Union of Industry, Trade, and Handicrafts) employer association, the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Lawyers Association. This coalition saw the light of day after Mohamed Brahmi’s assassination, which took place just as the mass demonstrations against President Mohamed Morsi shook Egypt, leading to his removal from office by the army. Elected in June 2012, Morsi had Islamicized the political sphere to such a degree that it resembled what the most intransigent of Ennahda’s militants could only dream of. This included Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution that hounded the neighborhood secular associations.

Morsi’s dismissal, followed by violent suppression of the Brotherhood, worried Ghannouchi deeply. It led him to sign on to a compromise for the sake of preserving his vital interests. At the time, his party was drawing heavy criticism for having, if not colluded with the jihadists, at least given them a free hand. It bothered the moderates even among his electoral base. Ghannouchi agreed to having the Quartet draw up a road map that would end with the Troika’s resignation, the writing of a secular constitution, and the appointment of a team of technocrats. This then cleared the way in January 2014 for Mehdi Jomaa, a French-Tunisian top executive of the Total oil conglomerate, to step in as interim prime minister until the legislative and presidential elections that autumn. The secular Nida Tunis party and its founder Beji Caid Essebsi would emerge victorious from them. Essebsi, a former Bourguiba minister who had put distance between himself and Ben Ali before serving as interim head of the government in 2011, was then elected president. His campaign received substantial support from the United Arab Emirates, who sought to counter rival Qatar’s sponsorship of Ennahda. For its efforts, the Quartet received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, and were praised for having safeguarded the democratic transition in Tunisia.

This noteworthy international recognition, if anything, made it even less likely that the jihadists would be laying down their arms—not with Tunisia henceforth led by a secular party, guided by a constitution that respected the “freedom of conscience,” the bane of the Islamists! Tunisia was unique among Arab countries in achieving this, as the academic Arabist Dominique Avon demonstrated with supporting texts in his June 2014 article, “The Tunisian Constitution and the Issue of Individual Freedom.” However, the country had been decreed a “country of war” by Boubaker El Hakim in 2014 after ISIS in June of that same year proclaimed its self styled caliphate in the newly captured Mosul. Law in the caliphate was then reduced to putting into practice literal, Salafist interpretations of Koranic precepts. And the “dawla” (Islamic State) from that time on controlled important infrastructures of the territories it took over. That allowed it to coordinate and project terrorist actions from conquered areas, including a country like Tunisia whence several thousand of its foreign fighters had come.

Infiltrating Tunisia across the porous Libyan border was easy once that state had collapsed following Gaddafi’s demise. While Paris reeled from the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket in January 2015, two jihadists on March 18 massacred tourists visiting the antiquities at Tunisia’s Bardo Museum, with twenty-two dead. Next, thirty-eight more vacationers were slain by a submachine gun-wielding terrorist on a hotel beach near Sousse. That same day, in France, the chief executive of a company was beheaded by an employee who stuck the severed head on a pike between pro-ISIS banners before sending a photo of it to a correspondent in Shām. ISIS also claimed the two Tunisian massacres. The murderers had been trained in a camp located at Sabratha, a Libyan town near the border. Besides the human drama, the economic consequences—estimated at a billion U.S. dollars—were catastrophic for Tunisia’s tourist industry, which employed nearly 10 percent of the workforce.

The elasticity of terrorism, whose katibas—or brigades—trained inside Algeria and Libya, was exemplified by the beheading of a shepherd who refused to let the jihadists steal a sheep from him on November 13, 2015. It happened in a mountain range overlooking Sidi Bouzid, a few hours before the attacks on the Stade de France and the Bataclan in Paris. The shepherd’s head would be found at a distance from his cadaver the next day. The date and place of this murder showed the conjunction between local, run-of-the-mill jihad and its most elaborate international projection. It was also a reminder that the town and region that sparked the Arab revolutions remained symbols of the unsolved equation linking the social problem and its capture by Islamist extremism.

On March 7, 2016, several dozen armed men claiming to be ISIS moved into the town of Ben Guerdane, a hub for Libyan contraband some nineteen miles from the Tunisian border. They killed seventy people before security forces could restore order. There it was, still a symbol of this “excluded” Tunisia in which the terrorists hoped to find important collaborators. In the 2014 elections, Ben Guerdane had flown in the face of the majority vote of the rest of the country, with 84 percent of the votes cast for former president Marzouki, who came from near there (against 16 percent for Caid Essebsi), and 70 percent for Ennahda (versus 11 percent for Nida Tunis). The ISIS raid’s failure marked jihadism’s first substantial military defeat and boosted the badly eroded self-confidence of the security apparatus. But it also served as a reminder that socioeconomic shortcomings were this movement’s favorite focal point for grievances. This was emphasized by the title of the 2017 annual report issued by Jussur, the Tunisian think tank: “To Get Tunisia Moving Again.”

Regional Fracture and Social Peril

However impressive, the democratization of the political scene had its Achilles heel. Public freedoms had indeed expanded, with freedom of conscience guaranteed by the constitution and marriage between Muslim and non-Muslim legalized. However, the virtuous work of solving social conflicts had ground to a standstill in the Assembly of the Representatives of the People (ARP). Meetings in the Bardo Palace lacked zeal and the proceedings were undermined by schisms and the dynastic ambitions of those who, in the Arab world, are called the children of the zaim (“chiefs”). Two years after its electoral success, Nida Tunis, the party of the nonagenarian president of the Republic Beji Caid Essebsi lost its parliamentary primacy, to Ennadha’s benefit. The modest achievements of the government led by Hammadi Essid caused the chief of state to launch a “national initiative” on June 2, 2016. Its purpose: recapture the support of the UGTT workers union and form a governing majority with its former Ennahda Islamist adversaries. However, the coalition was built on compromises that, in effect, blocked the reforms needed for closing the gap between the “two Tunisias.” While the relatively prosperous northeast coast was integrated with globalization, the southern and western hinterlands were left out. They were wide open to cross-border smuggling and vectors for terrorism and corruption.

This fundamental problem, dissected in a most informative, influential report by the International Crisis Group published in May 2017 (“Blocked Transition: Corruption and Regionalism in Tunisia”), threatened the continuity of democracy itself in the only nation to have emerged with it from the Arab Spring of 2011. One of the biggest immediate challenges faced by the new prime minister, mid-forties Youssef Chahed, who took office on August 27, 2016, was expanding access to credit. At the time, credit was monopolized and channeled by hidden interests linked to the relatives of the deposed president Ben Ali. Aspiring entrepreneurs in the hinterlands were shut out by the banks and prevented from making investments and growing their local economies. Instead, they had to operate in an informal economy that also nourished jihadism.

The young prime minister set a vigorous anti-corruption campaign in motion that cleaned house in his administration. Starting in July 2017, it resulted in jail terms for influential profiteers, some of whom had been close to the former regime. Their networks called the shots during the—not always spontaneous—protest marches in January 2018 against the rise in the cost of living projected by the government’s appropriations bill. Concurrently, the decriminalization of homosexuality was underway, as was legislation granting equality in inheritance to women. (Under sharia, they were entitled to just half of a man’s share.) But this ferment of civil society initiatives mainly concerned the middle classes. The future of democratization would remain in doubt unless the social fractures that sharpened the contrast between the “two Tunisias” were repaired.

Meanwhile, the return of the Islamists to the corridors of power had upset the United Arab Emirates. They felt betrayed, considering the support they had given the Nida Tunis campaign to eliminate Ennahda, that thorn in the UAE’s side. The party, for all its proclaiming itself as “moderate” now, still registered on the international Muslim Brotherhood scene, godfathered by UAE’s neighbor and archrival Qatar. In a fit of pique, Dubai’s Emirates Airline in December 2017 barred Tunisian women from boarding its planes. The motive: the airline had been warned that female kamikaze jihadists were preparing to go after one of its airplanes. Like the other Mediterranean countries of the African shore involved in the Arab Spring, Tunisia thus found itself held hostage in the struggle for hegemony over the future of Sunnism. Egypt and Libya would show how acute the fallout from this conflict could be. In Tunisia’s case, the downsides were counterbalanced by its closeness to Europe. Also, surprisingly, there was the permeability effect that a resilient, large middle class—fairly secularized, attached to French bilingualism and European democratic values—had on the lower-middle class. The latter tended to prefer speaking Arabic, and they formed the base for Ennahda as well as supplying its leaders.

In an interview I did on 2 February 2018, Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi insisted that he wanted to exercise power within a consensus (tawafuq) instead of through direct confrontation with his rival Nida Tunis. He would be content with a proportional ballot (such as the High Instance to Safeguard the Assets of the Revolution had introduced in 2011) that favored governmental coalitions. The Islamist party went so far as to run a Jewish candidate in the municipal elections of May 2018 in Monastir, Bourguiba’s native town (where the candidate had next to no chance of success). The initiative invited diverse interpretations, but it had no precedent anywhere in the Arab world. The merciless suppression of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in July 2013, which we will analyze below, convinced their imitators in North Africa that an authoritarian strategy of Islamizing society meant political suicide. Ennahda came out on top in these elections, but, as its leader had told me, it sought consensus. The party even gave its support to Youssef Chahed, the head of government, against the rivals in his own party, thus guaranteeing with its parliamentary majority that he would remain in power.

In 2017, the Jordanian-American academic Safwan Masri published a book titled Tunisia: an Arab Anomaly that was hotly debated in Tunisia and other Arab states. It rejected the widely held optimistic view of the Tunisian democratic transition as the norm, where civil wars and the return of authoritarianism were unhappy accidents. Instead, the author credited Tunisia’s unique past for enabling the working of a virtuous process among social minefields. In other words, it was the exception, while the chaos prevailing elsewhere was the rule.

The traits acquired during Tunisia’s long history were not encountered anywhere else in the Arab world, one that Masri knew well. He had been educated in Jordan and in the Levant, and he deplored the ground they had lost during fifty wasted years of despotism that correlated with a Salafization of minds. As such, the Ben Ali dictatorship could be an aberration, all the more easily recovered from because it was a blip in more than a century of modernization from within. This is a seductive thesis, leaving aside that its determinism could be more nuanced: it underlines that the Arab Spring uprisings could only rebuild anew by respecting deep historical structures. Hence, they had to do an inventory of their heritage, instead of losing themselves in bittersweet illusions.

In that light, the Tunisian modernization dynamic, from the days of Hayreddin Pasha, grand vizier of the Tunis regency in the third quarter of the nineteenth century down to Habib Bourguiba from 1956 to 1987, had not changed: it was still a top-down modernization engineered by political and coastal elites without penetrating into the backcountry. This dilemma, which contributed to marginalizing the southern and western regions, is still the major barrier to achieving a stable democracy in Tunisia today. And it has furnished the vector for radicalization ever since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid.

After President Essebsi died on July 25, 2019, a few months before his tenure was to end, both parliamentary and presidential elections took place in September and October. To the surprise of many, all political parties were sent back packing by the electorate: even Ennahda, while it retained the first place in the ballot box, barely reached one-fifth of the votes. The split between secularists and Islamists lost much of its significance, while both, as incumbents, were voted out en masse. The parliament, at the time of this writing (November 2019) seemed atomized between a plurality of factions which did not bode well for a strong government, and Rached Ghannouchi, 78, was elected president of the parliament on November 13. The Islamist leader, now always wearing a tie, benefited from the votes of his secularist competitors who seemed not to fear him much any more.

As for the presidency of the republic, the second round of the election pitted against each other two candidates who were newcomers to politics. Media tycoon Nabil Karoui, nicknamed “the Tunisian Berlusconi” came second with 28 percent—after he had been jailed during the campaign for tax evasion. The victory was carried with flying colors by a retired assistant professor of constitutional law, Qaes Saïd, with 72 percent of the vote, though he had not campaigned at all. His claims to fame were that he had proved adamant for the defense of the Law since the ouster of former dictator Ben Ali (who coincidentally died in Jeddah on September 19, 2019), had never held any position in politics, and was a frequent TV guest. As opposed to the politicians who usually express themselves in Tunisian vernacular, he was famous for speaking only classical Arabic on screen, uttering socially conservative and fiercely anti-Zionist views in a monotone. Even though the turnout was very low—less than 57 percent in the second round—it was striking that the youth countrywide had voted for Mr Saïd at over 90 percent, and that the hinterland had plebiscited that outsider at the expense of the traditional elite from the coastal cities. The social divide between the “two Tunisias” remained center stage, but for better or worse, social resentment translated into votes, and was channeled by the ballot box, instead of taking to the streets. At least, the democratic institutions created in 2011 still held, in spite of a decade of malfunction and the overall mediocrity and corruption of the political class. And as obstacles go, this regional and social class disparity is relatively manageable, compared to the much more worrisome situation in Egypt.

In the Valley of the Nile, too, a powerful reformist movement had sprung from missions in Europe by scholars like Sheikh Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, author of The Gold of Paris. Published in 1836, the book chronicled his voyage to France and the lessons he drew from it for regenerating the country of his birth. As we will see in the pages that follow, this process went off the rails under Nasserite populism beginning in 1952. Its pretend socialism dressed up the restoration of a military power structure inspired by the Mameluke dynasty. It would haunt the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and it would end in deadlock.

Egypt Between Muslim Brotherhood and Military Society

On February 11, 2011, General Omar Suleiman, vice president of the Republic and for two decades the head of military intelligence, announced that Hosni Mubarak was stepping down. He added that Mubarak’s powers had passed to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. This bombshell news came after tens of thousands of young Egyptians had occupied Cairo’s Tahrir Square for eighteen days. Here they had captured the attention of the world’s television networks, especially Qatar-based Al Jazeera’s satellite network. It broadcast live 24/7 directly from the events on the “Midan” (which literally translates as “square,” though the word means “esplanade,” like the National Mall in Washington or the Champ de Mars in Paris).

It was a primer on what a revolution in action looked like, brought to Arab living rooms from Casablanca to Basra, from Benghazi to Damascus, from Sanaʽa to Bahrain. It also broadcast to many of Europe’s poverty-stricken banlieues peopled by Muslim immigrants and their offspring. Cairo, the timeworn capital of heroic Arabism of the Nasser era—muzzled by successive military regimes, swollen by the world’s highest population growth rate, choked with smog, paralyzed by chaos, bureaucracy, and corruption—suddenly had a fresh vision. Once more, it had a starring role in fashionable media coverage that lasted from January 25 to February 11, 2011. During those eighteen days, all Arab eyes and those of many others around the world were riveted on Tahrir Square. The liberated acres of the Midan provided the stage for putting on a kind of egalitarian social utopia theater. All the evils afflicting Egyptian society would be dispelled here, and everyone would talk and reconcile and live happily ever after.

Earlier, Al Jazeera had televised the images of Ben Ali’s fall, and in doing so had popularized the digaj! (from the French dégage - “get out!”) of the young people from the poor quarters of Tunis. Once translated into Arabic (Erhal!) from the folksy French-Tunisian slang, it added one more element to the momentum building toward the Egyptian revolt. The exiling of the Carthaginian leader opened the prospect of overthrowing the irremovable Cairo pharaoh. But Al Jazeera was a vector for the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood backed by the Qatar emirate. Insidiously, it set about subliminally implanting in its viewers the idea of the Brothers as destined to lead Egypt and the Arab world of tomorrow.

With the young “revolutionaries” (thawwar) of Tahrir Square already marginalized by the end of 2011, Egypt, by then rid of Mubarak, found itself caught between the rock of the Muslim Brotherhood and the hard place of the military. The former won the parliamentary, then the presidential elections in June 2012 with their candidate Mohamed Morsi. They were driven out of office on July 3, 2013, after the Tamarod (literally: “rebellion”) movement brought millions of their opponents into the streets, with the active support of the military. The army gradually reasserted its control during the year it had in effect let the Brotherhood do its thing while it used the time to prepare its comeback. Marshal el-Sisi replaced Morsi as head of state, taking his place in the continuum of top military brass represented by Colonel Nasser, Generals Sadat and Mubarak, and the Mameluke emirs before them.

In Tunisia, toppling Ben Ali had led to democracy, with all its flaws. In Egypt, after the utopian, chaotic interlude of the uprising, two opposing authoritarian regimes succeeded each other starting in the summer of 2012. The second, the military, prevailed and returned to power in July 2013 stronger than ever. The strength of the army’s control over the state apparatus had structural causes that reached deeper than most observers—including the author of these lines—realized in midst of the euphoria of the uprising.

*  *  *

In December 2011, ten months into the upheaval, I had dinner in Cairo with the general said to be the “brains” on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. My late friend the novelist Gamal al-Ghitani had introduced me to this rare opportunity to socialize with the military thinkers. As we dined in Heliopolis, a residential suburb of Cairo, in the headquarters mess of the super-elite Air Defense Forces, the general explained the Council’s strategy to us.

In essence, it called for letting the Muslim Brotherhood win the elections, the presidential one included, to let them expose their sectarianism and incompetence for the whole country to see. The people, wised up by the disastrous experience, would quickly call on the army to take power back for good and rescue them. We listened politely to what he had to say. Meanwhile, an old-fashioned maître d’ served us a dish in which shellfish floated in a thick white sauce that seemed straight out of the 1950s, the bygone era of King Farouk. No doubt it was this dated recipe that brought home to me how out of touch our host’s retrograde words sounded. The plugged-in intellectuals and impatient revolutionaries that I hung out with from dawn to dusk had definitely written off this obsolete, pathetic army around the time of Mubarak’s fall. It was time for Egypt 2.0 and the joyful, fecund disorder of Midan Tahrir, where “it is forbidden to forbid”—resurrecting the key slogan of Paris 1968!

In the autumn of 2012, when I reread the overlong manuscript for The Arab Passion [Passion Arabe], my travel diary of the Arab Spring, I edited out the account of the Heliopolis evening. Our host’s prediction now struck me as anecdotal and hardly worth including. Despite thirty years of familiarity with life on the banks of the Nile, I had been taken in by the ambient enthusiasm. I had failed to foresee that the Heliopolis prediction uttered by the general at the dinner table in December 2011 would come true with a vengeance a year and a half later—and in effect bring the uniformed men back to iron-clad power.

The Tahrir Square Protest

The protest on Tahrir Square was an uninterrupted show put on by some tens of thousands of educated young people for the most part. It was broadcast on television, which made the movers of the uprising seem larger than life, and also suddenly gave them access to globalized elites whose language and memes they shared. But this would not have allowed them to join with either the poor youth, overrepresented in a country with eighty million inhabitants in 2011 (with another twenty million new arrivals eight years later), or the middle class writ large.

For eighteen fateful days, between January 25 and February 11 2011, there were numerous angry eruptions in other Egyptian towns, from Alexandria to Aswan, during which the demonstrators torched local offices of Mubarak’s NDP (National Democratic Party) and police stations. However, these sporadic outbursts of popular fury were not enough to stoke an insurrection that would irrevocably end in revolution. The uprising went around in circles on the Tahrir esplanade, both literally and figuratively, all actions captured by TV camera lenses mounted on the balconies of the surrounding apartment buildings. The pressure on Mubarak reached the point where the general staff sidelined him. High-ranking officers now had the chance to rid themselves of the increasingly dysfunctional oldster obsessed with the project of founding a hereditary monarchy. Afterward, the rebellion marked time. It did not succeed in energetically penetrating the immense human territory of a country suffocating under galloping population growth. It would finally sweep aside the Muslim Brotherhood wave that, in the end, broke on a wall of bayonets.

Tunisia’s small size (eleven million people), relative remoteness from the Middle East, nearness to Europe, strong middle class and weak army turned it into a revolutionary laboratory. But whatever happened there would not imperil the entire region’s stability, or its insertion into the global system. By contrast, the enormity of Egypt’s being caught up in an insurrectional dynamic could only mean major, instant repercussions that would rock its environment. The tremors potentially ran from the security of the oil monarchies on the other side of the Red Sea, to the delicate equilibrium of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that adjoined the Sinai through the Negev, and especially the Gaza Strip, controlled since 2007 by Hamas.

True, the Egypt of 2011 had lost its former Nasserian aura. It could no longer boast of having the region’s best-educated elites, media that controlled information and entertainment of the Arab world as they had done after the Middle East had freed itself from European colonial domination. The Egyptian educational system foundered when it opened to take in the impoverished masses, and the once famous Cairo radio station “Voice of the Arabs” was now replaced by satellite networks broadcasting from Dubai and Doha. The redistribution of oil and gas revenues coming from the Gulf was the source of all of the Middle East’s wealth. Egypt, the Arab giant of yesteryear had grown obese, nearsighted, and arthritic. But if it collapsed, it would still destabilize the entire neighborhood. Simply by tilting to one side or the other in the fight for hegemony, the overpopulated Nile Valley would upset the regional balance of power.

The Muslim Brotherhood took power at the ballot box in Cairo on June 30, 2012 with Qatar’s support. Soon, financial aid for the Morsi presidency followed to the tune of three billion dollars. Doha’s rivals from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait resented it all as an unacceptable provocation. They put their riches behind eliminating the “brotherist” regime and abetting the army’s takeover in 2013, raising the stakes with twelve billion U.S. dollars in subsidies for Marshal el-Sisi. Now would have been the proper time for letting the wind of freedom that swept through Tahrir Square in January–February 2011 blow—but after three years, there was only a slight stirring in the air. It was like the nessim, that springtime breeze the Egyptians celebrate every year to mark the Nile Valley’s unchangeable permanence since pharaonic times.

Hosni Mubarak’s seemingly never-ending reign was strengthened by the United States of George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. Egypt’s ruler was flush with the politico-military victory over the Egyptian jihadists that had been stepping up their attacks between 1992 and 1997. Mubarak seemed like an effective rampart against bin Laden and his imitators. Numerous “enemy combatants” captured in the Afghan-Pakistan theater by American forces were turned over to the Egyptian security services headed by General Suleiman. They were interrogated under the “extraordinary rendition” program, over the protests of humanitarian organizations who were against using torture to extract confessions.

Just as Syria’s Hafez al-Assad had promoted his son Bashar to be his successor in 2000, like Gaddafi had wanted to set the stage for his son Saif al-Islam, Mubarak had also started to pave the way for his offspring Gamal to succeed him. Lacking his own ties to the army, Gamal was instead close to business circles, major corporations with international connections. They soaked up all bank credits, to the detriment of SMEs, and enjoyed multiple income streams, from tariff barriers to various subsidies. The growth of a class of very wealthy individuals fed feelings of injustice and resentment toward the Mubarak family. They were stigmatized in popular usage as “the 1 percent” because of their acquaintance with the president’s son, as depicted in The Nile Hilton Incident, a film by Tarik Saleh (screened in 2017).

However, Egypt’s drift into monarchy, mocked by the Egyptian pundit Saad Eddin Ibrahim as being a “monarpublic” (gumlukiyya), flew in the face of the succession system the general staff back in Nasser’s day had put in place. It revived the tradition of the Mamelukes, a non-hereditary dynasty that had governed that country from the thirteenth century to the start of the modern era, which coincided with Bonaparte’s Nile expedition in 1799. The Mameluke military chiefs delegated supreme command to one of their number, and if that emir had a son he would be eliminated, if necessary, when the father died. That way, power returned to the select body set up to designate the next leader according to the rules and internal balances. Hence, Nasser’s or Sadat’s children no longer played a political role. The precedent Mubarak was trying to create for his own son lost him the support of his generals. They responded by reactivating the “Supreme Council of the Armed Forces,” an authority, very much in the Mameluke tradition, that evicted the president from office, closing the eighteen days of Tahrir Square protest on February 11, 2011.

The origins of these days of unrest were social, denominational, and human rights-oriented. As was also the case for the other uprisings in the region, the economic climate at the turn of the decade was marked by rising world prices of grains and hydrocarbons. It made the average shopping basket more expensive, especially since rapidly growing Egypt (the population nearly doubled during Mubarak’s thirty-year rule) was the largest importer of wheat on the planet. In a country where one in five people lived on less than two U.S. dollars per day, a high birth rate is perceived as ensuring intergenerational solidarity. Islamic proselytizing moreover encourages unbridled reproduction, seeing in it the promise of armies of jihadist soldiers that would swamp the world. To make a bad situation worse, the government-mandated family planning program was one of the first casualties of the 2011 uprising. Since then, Egypt’s population growth has shot up again, like it did in Tunisia, but with absolute numbers eight times higher.

In 2011, half of Egypt’s population was under the age of twenty-five. Among holders of high school degrees, representing nearly a third of their age cohort, 50 percent of men and 80 percent of women were unemployed. Hiring by the government sector had bloated the unproductive bureaucracy and stifled all initiative—providing fodder for innumerable jokes (nukat). But government jobs, too, had been cut drastically by the structural adjustment policies insisted on by the IMF. During the era of Nasserite socialism, practically anyone with a degree could have a career in government. On the eve of the uprising in January 2011, the public sector furnished only about 20 percent of total jobs in the economy, and at significantly lower salaries. The outlook for jobs commensurate with qualifications was made all the more dire because educational standards collapsed under the impact of mass education. It created a tidal wave of “relative deprivation” that sociologists regard as one of the factors motivating educated youth to join revolutionary movements, as observed in the Tunisian case.

Among other consequences of the mediocre quality of degrees was that Arabian Peninsula states now balked at employing Egyptians. With many emigrants hence returning home, the flow of remittances from abroad also diminished. Ultimately, it was international aid that underpinned the country’s survival. Sadat had made obtaining it the bedrock of his policy, negotiating American civilian and military aid worth 1.7 billion dollars annually in 2010. This was his reward for signing the peace treaty with Israel, in force since 1979. However, the continual worsening of Egypt’s demographic and economic situations led to a growing dependence on the IMF (whose demands for reform triggered hunger riots), the European Union, and, increasingly, on the Gulf oil kingdoms. The latter then used this decisive political leverage to influence Egypt’s emergence from its revolutionary phase, as shown first by Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and then by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates throwing in their support with the military.

In such a stressed environment, the military top brass was seen to be the keeper of order in the decades before the uprising. For the country’s major partners, this was the lesser evil compared to the risk of Egypt imploding and destabilizing the entire Middle East. But this perpetually repeated security plug-in only worsened the economic, social, and cultural decline, while also eroding public freedoms. On this highly flammable fabric, the revolutionary spark seems to have been ignited by three types of fuses.

For the leftist militants denouncing capitalism and worker exploitation, the cause of the conflagration lay in the great strike on April 6, 2008 at the Mahalla al-Kobra textile mill, located 100 miles from Cairo in the Nile Delta. The 20,000 workers out on strike, would exemplify the emergence of new labor struggles. Awareness of these events would henceforth spread in the digital world, their power of example multiplied via social networks. Such a fusion of the real and virtual worlds was embodied by the “April 6 Youth Movement” formed to support the strike. Its principal activists would later be trained in the Balkans by NGOs close to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who had previously contributed to the fall of local authoritarian regimes.

Using social networks, the militants of “April 6” were the first to call for the January 25 demonstrations on Tahrir Square. They popularized the “Revolution 2.0,” phrase, which was then widely picked up by the media as a catchword for the Arab Spring. But the Egyptian workers’ movement, despite recurring walkouts over very low salaries or failure to pay bonuses, was only a secondary factor. The formal private sector supplied just 10–15 percent of jobs. The vast majority of the poor—about 70 percent of the population—survived by dealing in the informal, or “gray” economy, while the more lucky depended on tourism windfall. However, all were affected negatively in real time by economic disturbances. The drop in foreign tourism after January 25, 2011 and the stagnation of investments translated immediately into a lower standard of living for a great number of Egyptians subsisting from day to day. They blamed it on the spectacle televised from Tahrir Square and its depressive effects on economic activity.

The catalyst for the uprising, however, would not be the workers’ movement’s rise in power after all, but the fatal police beating of 28-year-old pharmacist Khaled Said. Arrested in an Alexandria cybercafé for unclear reasons, this young, elegant, middle-class man had studied in the West. Images of his bruised body and broken bones went viral on the Internet. The episode was seen as par for the course where the explosive violence the police forces were allowed to mete out was concerned. In contrast to Bouazizi, who had burned himself alive at Sidi Bouzid, Said did not come from a disinherited background and was no social symbol—factors on which the class alliance against Ben Ali had been built in Tunisia. The young pharmacist personified a brutal attack on universal human rights.

But eight months went by between his murder on June 6, 2010 and the fall of Mubarak on February 11, 2011, where only three weeks had elapsed between Bouazizi’s fatal gesture and Ben Ali’s exile from Tunis. The mobilization, in effect, was mediated by Facebook’s sales manager for the Middle East Wael Ghonim, a thirty-year-old, upper-middle-class Egyptian based in Dubai. He put up a page, “We Are All Khaled Said (Kollona Khalid Saʿid),” and in so doing he devised an international virtual network whose “friends” assembled behind their screens rather than in real-world protests in the street. In Tunis, the poor youth of the disenfranchised neighborhoods had joined with the urban elites in a single movement against the dictatorship, thus priming the virtuous democratic process that Egypt lacked. “We Are All Khaled Said” became the main slogan on Tahrir Square; but it supported a demand for human dignity in the face of torture, and not a dynamic of political mobilization. As for Wael Ghonim, he would later back the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi, in June 2012.

In a final curtain-raiser to the eighteen-day uprising in January–February 2011, the political and denominational malaise of a regime on its last legs manifested itself in two different but equally disastrous events: the parliamentary elections in November–December 2010 and the New Year’s Day massacre in a Coptic church in Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood winning eighty-eight out of 518 seats in the parliamentary elections of 2005 had indicated to the West, led then by George W. Bush in the White House, that the Islamist opposition represented an organized threat. In a post-9/11 context, this had reinforced the West’s determination to help Mubarak contain it. In December 2010, by contrast, the ruling National Democratic Party wound up with nearly all of the MPs, following an election marked by blatant stuffing of the ballot boxes and voter intimidation. This combined with a very low 23 percent participation rate that locked the institutional political framework: either Mubarak would stay in office and be re-elected president in the autumn of 2011 or he would be succeeded by his son Gamal.

The military hierarchy hated the latter prospect and harbored reservations about the former in view of the 82-year-old ruler’s advanced age. The upshot was that the street would meet with sympathy if it called for an end to Mubarak’s presidential obstinacy. Washington also signaled its disappointment. President Barack Obama, who had controversially chosen a hijab-wearing Egyptian American as an advisor, was trying to set U.S. relations with Islam on a new course after his predecessor’s “War on Terror.” He simultaneously advocated for democratization and for “engaging” the Muslim Brotherhood, who were seen as exemplifying a pious modernity, of which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey embodied in those days the highest expression.

Such was the overall political deadlock when the slaughter at the Coptic church of the Two Saints, in the deprived Sidi Bishr district of Alexandria, took place during a midnight mass on January 1. The Copts had previously been the target of many dust-ups instigated by very powerful local Salafist groups that condemned all Christians as infidels. This latest massacre resulted in twenty-three deaths. After initially blaming a Palestinian group linked to al-Qaeda, the police arrested a Salafist in the neighborhood, Sayyid Bilal. He died under torture, so his guilt was never affirmed. His spiritual kin turned him into a bearded martyr whose face they superimposed on that of Khaled Said in works of propaganda. Some of them later joined the revolutionary goings-on in Tahrir Square in the hope of taking over its leadership.

The families of the slain Copts, meanwhile, rejected Mubarak’s offer of condolences. To the Christian community as a whole, the regime had proved itself at best incapable of defending it against the Islamists’ atrocities, and at worst indifferent to them. Some went so far as to suspect intelligence services of having staged a “false flag” operation, that is, of having instigated the attack before “disappearing” its perpetrator. In any event, the inquiry produced no explanations. But it did succeed in alienating the Coptic population from the ruling power, and young Copts would be a highly visible presence on Tahrir Square.

This bundle of discontents was tinder for an uprising, especially since Mubarak was no longer regarded as master of the game. He was isolated in the General Staff for his dynastic ambitions and badly regarded inside Washington’s Beltway, where as recently as January 14, Ben Ali’s fall had been applauded as heralding a democratizing of the Arab world. The final catalyst was the call by the “April 6 Youth Movement” for a demonstration on January 25. Ironically, it was a holiday on which the police celebrated their own uprising against the British in 1952, a decisive event in Egypt’s independence. The regime had then repurposed the uprising’s significance to glorify its own repressive apparatus.

However, the leftist movement’s call for the third year in a row to subvert such a symbol and rediscover its original inspiration now lit the match that would set the country on fire. Opposing groups succeeded in entering Tahrir Square by side streets discreetly left open by the military while police anti-riot squads blocked the great avenues leading into it. The authority of the security forces was stymied the entire day by 15,000 demonstrators. The same happened the following evening. Clashes with the police mushroomed, but the army did not intervene. Not, that is, until the ruling National Democratic Party’s headquarters building facing the Egyptian Museum on the Midan was torched two days later. That is when the tanks rolled in. But they had been deployed more to check the museum would not burn and contain the situation than to end it. On January 28, the Muslim Brotherhood called on their followers to come to the square. With that, the mobilization’s size changed, passing a threshold of 100,000 people.

In making this decision, the Brothers broke with more than half a century of caution, a legacy of the ferocious Nasserite repression of 1954 that saw several of their leaders mount the scaffold and most of their cadres put behind bars. That cut the head off the organization until Sadat allowed it to be resurrected in a controlled fashion during the 1970s to fight campus leftists. Since that era, the Brotherhood had enjoyed a state of tolerance: it was not allowed to compete with the military in the political domain but was encouraged to use its influence to provide social services in lieu of the state. It ran a welfare network (khayri) of clinics, kindergartens, summer camps, trade unions, businesses, banks, and credit unions, all conforming to sharia. And, of course, scattered all over the country were mosques and cultural and religious centers with the Brotherhood behind them.

In line with the liberal message that the ruling powers wanted to communicate to the outside world, the Muslim Brotherhood would from time to time be allowed to stand for election and send representatives to Parliament—as they did in 2005. But they had little legislative clout in the face of the all-powerful executive. And if they crossed any red lines, their leaders made round trips to prison. With their members organized in a strict hierarchy, carefully indoctrinated, and selected for their potential to reach positions of responsibility in the tanzim (organization), the Brotherhood co-managed Egypt in effect as the army’s junior partner. All the while. they spread their tentacles, biding their time for the day when they would replace it.

The Muslim Brothers on the Offensive

What went into their decision to go all in on January 28 is not known. For one thing, the move was deliberated upon in secret. For another, as it would turn out, their reentering politics in this way, to eventually challenge the army, had catastrophic consequences. In July 2013, the military top brass finally came down on them even more violently than during the Nasserite repression that had destroyed it in 1954. In the meanwhile, between the spring of 2011 and the summer of 2013, the Brotherhood had taken turns with the military using popular mobilization against each other. First, the Brothers had co-opted part of the uprising’s legacy by voting for their candidate Mohamed Morsi in the Presidential election of June 2012. Next, the army secretly went along with the demonstrations organized against President Morsi by the Tammarod (“rebellion”) Movement in the spring of 2013, also in the name of flouted revolutionary ideals. So it went until Marshal el-Sisi seized power definitively on July 3, before being elected president on May 26, 2014 with over 96 percent of the vote—a tally worthy of the ancien régime.

In that process, the first open show of force by the Brotherhood to capture the insurrectional momentum on Tahrir Square took place February 18, 2011 during the Friday prayers that followed Mubarak’s fall. Everyone occupying the Midan was lined up facing Mecca, transforming the square into a vast, open-air mosque. The sermon was delivered by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born major international figure in the Brotherhood who had been naturalized as Qatari and became Al Jazeera’s chief television preacher. He had flown in from Doha just for the event. This celebrity sermon was to showcase the successful ending of three weeks of practically uninterrupted coverage of the Tahrir Square demonstrations by Qatari sponsored satellite TV channel.

Qatar’s strategy, in step with the United States, whose president had urged Mubarak to resign on February 4, was to rely on the Brotherhood to hijack the Arab upheavals wherever they occurred—and to promote the pious middle classes as the region’s leaders. This was the fantastically wealthy but underpopulated, gas-rich emirate’s chance to manage populous stand-ins that let it hold its own against its powerful Saudi neighbor. The Saudis, of course, regarded the Brotherhood as their major rival in the quest for hegemony over Arab Sunnism, and the upheavals as threatening.

In June 2011, this process of taking power went into setting up ad hoc Islamist political parties to stand for election during the transition period. The main two were the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (hizb al-horeyya wal ʿadala) of the Brotherhood and the Party of the Light (hizb an nour) of the Salafist Call movement (daʿwa salafiyya). Meanwhile, multiple utopian revolutionary groups that wanted to keep squatting Tahrir Square (it would be ritually occupied every Friday for a year) battled with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to keep the agitation, or “street politics,” going. It would ultimately peter out, but not before confrontations degenerated into more casualties.

For their part, the Islamists invaded the electoral field after mobilizing their troops in the street: on July 29, 2011, a monster demonstration—the biggest since the January uprising—saw a million people gather on the Midan. For the most part they were duly-bearded Salafists who had come from all over the country in buses chartered for the occasion. They clamored for Egypt to become an Islamic state, proclaiming the superiority of divine sharia over any constitution, and they demanded that Mubarak be tried. They agitated for carrying out purges with greater vigor, and they pressured the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which seemed to be dragging its feet. They made sure to segregate men from women on the square that had previously symbolized liberal utopia, and they chased out the secular militants who had been camping there since July 8.

Between Mubarak’s fall on February 11, 2011 and Mohamed Morsi assuming office on June 30, 2012, seven elections were held: three referendums and two ballots each for the parliamentary and presidential elections. The Tahrir revolutionaries were incapable of participating as such, and only managed to field a few small groupings whose vote tallies were negligible. The old, discredited regime failed to rebuild a successor to Mubarak’s NDP, dissolved in April 2011, to contest the legislative elections between late 2011 and early 2012. The Brothers’ Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Salafists’ Nour parties won in a landslide with 73 percent of the seats, amplified by the voting method. And yet, on the second ballot of the presidential election in June 2012, General Ahmed Shafik, the army’s candidate and Mubarak’s last prime minister, had a vote total of 48.27 percent to Morsi’s 51.73 percent.

As Hala Bayumi, Bernard Rougier, and Clément Steuer showed in their contributions to Egypt’s Revolutions (published in 2015), voter behavior during this period organized along two fault lines: Islamists versus secularists, and revolutionaries versus counterrevolutionaries. In the legislative elections, the revolutionary-counterrevolutionary dynamic was missing, and the religious parties easily beat their secular competitors. They succeeded in capturing the vision of the uprising by tying it to a readiness for change, but they organized it around a sharpening of Muslim identity as sole guarantor for restoring order from chaos by any means.

The atmosphere of the uprising became less and less joyous as economic and social problems gradually worsened, which Al Jazeera unflinchingly showcased daily. On the first ballot of the presidential election, the field was wide open: General Shafik was hard on Morsi’s heels, with each getting just under a quarter of the votes. Three other candidates split the rest: the Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi, with a fifth of the votes, received support from Egyptians faithful to the revolution but hostile to the army and Islamism. The ex-Muslim Brotherhood dissident and liberal Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (17 percent) assembled a motley coalition of Salafists and Islamic leftists trying to drape themselves in the spirit of Tahrir. Finally, Mubarak’s former minister, Amr Moussa, with 11 percent, would concede to General Shafik the secularized middle class, which was still more afraid of the beards than they were disillusioned by the military. Morsi won the second round of ballots not only due to a massive crossover vote from Aboul Fotouh, but also because Sabahi’s non-Islamist voters went over to him. They hoped he would safeguard at least part of the revolution’s gains against the prospect of the army taking over again.

The Army Returns, the Salafists Deploy

President Morsi’s base was therefore quite narrow on the day of his accession on June 30, 2012, and he wasted no time in reducing it further. By undertaking to “brotherize the state,” he drastically alienated the supporters that had switched from Aboul Fotouh and Sabahi in the hopes that Morsi would safeguard the revolution. A geographic analysis of the election also showed that the vote in the cities—where the demonstrations had taken place—went much less for Morsi than the rural vote, especially in Upper Egypt, did.

An anti-authoritarian uprising was not long in coming. It broke out in autumn of 2012 in the streets of Cairo, unspooling from the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. Ironically, the Brotherhood militias took on the repressive crowd control function that had previously belonged to Mubarak’s now largely demobilized police. Concurrently, the courts kept striking down decisions made by the new administration. The Tammarod (“rebellion”) collective began in April 2013, supported by the groups that had issued the call to go into the streets on January 25, 2011, among them the April 6 Youth Movement. Spokespeople dedicated to the workers’ cause were appalled at how the government was aligning itself with Islamist capitalist interests, such as billionaires Khairat al-Shater and Hassan Malek, both leading figures in the Brotherhood and role models for the successful pious entrepreneurs.

The military top brass, staying behind the scenes to avoid spooking the “revolutionaries,” backed Tammarod when it organized a gigantic demonstration on June 30, 2013, the first anniversary of Morsi’s election. The helicopters clattering overhead signaled the army’s approval. On July 3, the president was dismissed by Minister of Defense Marshal el-Sisi, the new strongman. He delivered a statement to that effect with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the Coptic patriarch, the head of the Salafist Nour party, and various liberal politicians next to him. The Muslim Brotherhood was mercilessly repressed: the two sit-in protests it attempted to hold on Cairo squares to revive the Tahrir spirit were dispersed by force, resulting in what is known as the Rabaa square massacre. The official death toll on August 14 was over 630—it was four times that number according to the Muslim Brotherhood, and independent newspapers reported it at 1,400. Human Rights Watch stated that 40,000 people accused of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood would be imprisoned in Egypt—among them Morsi, who was sentenced to death, and all the cadres who had not managed to flee the country.

The Egyptian paradox is that the ex-revolutionaries would have lent a hand in returning the army to power if only to confront Islamist authoritarianism. That did not prevent many from dissociating themselves later from Marshal el-Sisi and winding up in prison. Tahrir Square had not only failed to kindle a democratic process, but three years later had ultimately given the military greater control, which then led to a restart of jihadist violence. This paradox raises several fundamental questions about the nature of politics in the Arab world. In Egypt, in contrast to Tunisia, there was no strong enough autonomous middle class to allow for the election of a constituent assembly shared between secularists and Islamists by proportional representation. The Tahrir revolutionaries did not know how to connect with the impoverished youth who never set foot on the Square, so as to forge an alliance that could control Mubarak’s ouster and stabilize the transition into institutional politics. The military removed the president in both countries, but while general Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak was stepping down to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, there was no such military body in Tunisia to seize power. As for the Ennahda Islamists, they could not put on public prayers—nor had there been any in Tunis—the Friday after Ben Ali fled, whereas Sheikh al-Qaradawi made a spectacular political show of leading them on Tahrir Square after Mubarak’s resignation.

But the vise grip in which the Brothers and the generals had Egyptian society, which prevented the revolutionaries from moving on to erect democratic institutions, itself raises a question. One of the answers to why the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings had different outcomes lies in the demographic explosion on the banks of the Nile. Because of it, the majority of the population of a country with scarce resources—tourism, the Suez Canal, emigrant remittances, a bit of oil—had been put in an immensely precarious state. The entrepreneurial middle class had too little clout to become politically independent, so the power remained in the hands of hierarchized, hidden castes.

The ruling power’s ace card then was maintaining order by hemming in the masses coercively or through religious regimentation—that is, as played by the military on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood on the other. Beyond that, the lack of economic viability had Egypt depending totally on foreign aid, whose donors valued stability above all. The IMF’s push for structural reforms, however, quickly ran into limits when hunger riots broke out. The oil monarchies only funneled credits to the faction that would serve their respective agendas for regional hegemony; Qatar sustained the Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates the military. These insurmountable structural deficiencies stymied any democratic process in Egypt after 2011.

Suppression of the Brotherhood, listed as a terrorist group by the el-Sisi regime, eliminated the one entity that might have challenged the army. However, it did nothing to impede either the growth of the Salafist movement or the resurgence of jihadist violence—quite the contrary. The head of the Nour party had, in fact, pledged allegiance to el-Sisi on the occasion of the military’s July 3, 2013 coup deposing Mohamed Morsi. The Salafists, then, so long as they did not criticize the authorities, were free to spread their version of Islam.

In a country where their Shiite nemesis is practically absent (even though both Cairo and Al-Azhar University were founded in the tenth century by the Shiite Fatimid dynasty), the Salafists made the Copt community their target of choice, regularly cursing them as infidels. In the meanwhile, they offered a vast network of places of prayer in the informal settlements that helped maintain social ties, advocated submission to the authorities, and thwarted attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to restart social networking through their charities. As they provided charities that replaced the now-destroyed Brothers networks, and in doing so decisively helped the military to rule over the poorer areas, they had—as a quid pro quo—a free hand to renew attacks on churches, as well as assaults on the Christians and their proprety. The American NGO Coptic Solidarity denounced the el-Sisi administration in May 2017 as such:

Egypt is increasingly becoming an “ecosystem” conducive to Jihadist violence. [President el-Sisi] allows the Salafists and other Islamists to dominate the public sphere, spreading their hate speech via state-owned media and educational curricula. Publicly labeling Christians as “infidels” and “kuffars” amounts to a license to persecute and kill them.

Several dozen churches were destroyed by mobs treating the Copts as scapegoats for Morsi’s dismissal, as the Coptic Patriarch Tawadros had been present at the scene of the July 3, 2013 coup. Over the next few years, intersectarian incidents multiplied, with the violence peaking for one six-month period, from December 2016 through May 2017. A hundred Copts were massacred in attacks claimed by ISIS that happened during mass, on pilgrimages, or on Christian holy days such as Palm Sunday or Ascension Day.

Wiping out Christian celebrations and places of worship in the Land of Islam being bedrock Salafist doctrine, the jihadists implemented it simultaneously—beyond Egypt, throughout the territories they controlled in Syria and Iraq, and against the Copts in Libya. Starting in February 2015, ISIS disseminated a video showing twenty-one immigrant Copt workers having their throats cut on a Mediterranean beach. They called it a message from “the south of Rome” to “the nation of the Cross,” and a promise to fill “with Christian blood” the ocean into which the West had “thrown the body of Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”

But it was in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt that the explosion of jihadist violence reached its high point, thus fitting the country into the regional environment shattered by the Arab uprisings. Sinai had been conquered by Israel during the June 1967 war. While it was finally returned to Egypt in 1982, its population was held in suspicion and contempt by the security services dispatched there from the Nile Valley. During the Israeli occupation, young Bedouins had forged ties with activists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. They set up networks that drew closer to al-Qaeda. Beginning in 2010, these networks attacked the Jewish state with missiles while sabotaging the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline, which attracted severe government repression.

With the 2011 uprising, when Sinai tribes camped on Tahrir Square, anti-Israeli sentiment merged with rage against the Egyptian police, who had been accused of abuse and torture in Sinai on a vast scale. The result: police stations were destroyed by heavy weapons fire, likely from contraband that come over the border from Libya. After the fall of Gaddafi, there had followed looting of his immense arsenals, parts of which were captured by the Sinai jihadist group Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (“Supporters of the Holy Sanctuary [Jerusalem]”). The name alluded to the jihadist group’s original anti-Zionist orientation, which would make itself felt during the spring of 2011.

After Morsi’s overthrow, Sinai Jihadists redirected their activities against the Egyptian state, which they had declared apostate along with all its agents. Ansar Bait al-Maqdis multiplied its murderous attacks against police, soldiers, and judges in the Sinai as well as in the Nile Valley. In November 2014, it pledged allegiance to the ISIS “caliphate” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, calling itself from then on, “Sinai wilaya [province] of the Islamic State.” Under this name, it took credit for the attack on a plane filled with Russian tourists as it took off from Sharm El-Sheikh on October 31, 2015, resulting in 222 deaths. This attack coincided with Moscow’s troops intervening in Syria, where they had just moved into the Hmeimim base on September 30. On November 24, 2017, a massacre at the Rawdha mosque in Bir al-ʿAbed during Friday prayers killed over 300 of the faithful. A place of Sufi worship, the mosque had been cursed by name in the previous issue of the ISIS English-language magazine Dabiq. The attack was justified on two grounds: because the Salafists consider Sufism, which venerates saints, to be a heresy, its practitioners could be killed freely; furthermore, they accused the dominant local tribe of collaboration with the security services.

Jihadism’s cumulative body count in Egypt between July 2013 and the Rawda mosque massacre in November 2017 cannot be pegged accurately, but is comparable to that of the government suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood following Mohamed Morsi’s ousting. Eight years later, the joyful memories of the eighteen days from from January 25, when Tahrir Square was first occupied, to Mubarak’s fall on February 11, 2011, seem to belong to a different era. The face-off between army and jihad closed the democratic parenthesis and invited questions as to whether democracy is even possible in a number of Arab countries.

For the record, I had coffee in Esnah, a town in Upper Egypt, on April 15, 2011, when the revolutionary euphoria was still at its height. For the first and, in retrospect, only time in nearly four decades of frequenting the banks of the Nile as a foreigner, I was free to wander about. Gone was the police presence that used to strictly prohibit straying outside predetermined itineraries (this was before the ISIS-led terror wave would transform the area into an off-limits zone where everyone was a potential hostage subject to beheading). In passing, I heard on the coffee house radio that a Copt general had been appointed head of the nearby Minya governorate—an unexpected step. A local Islamist protest forced the nomination to be withdrawn within a few days. Meanwhile, from the mountains of Afghanistan, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader, reminded his native country that it was necessary for “Islam to dominate Egypt and not to be dominated there.”

Libya Disintegrates: From Rogue State to Tribal-Jihadist Lawlessness

The third despot to fall during the Arab uprisings, Muammar Gaddafi, met the most violent fate—a fitting end to his extraordinarily brutal, demented reign. He was lynched while hiding in the city of Sirte, where he had taken refuge after a NATO warplane had bombed his escape convoy. Having governed in an extreme mode during his forty-two-year regime that gave rise to the term “rogue state,” he bequeathed its curse on Libya. The country went through an erratic uprising in which Western military powers led by France and the United Kingdom intervened alongside the Arab Gulf states.

On the way to becoming a failed state after its fruitless elections in the summer of 2012, Libya ended up with two contending governments, one based in Cyrenaica and the other in Tripolitania. These regional entities, each born of a long history, regained their autonomy after being unified during the dictatorship. Yet even their self-proclaimed leaders did not completely dominate their territories, split up as they were among multiple militia fiefdoms that in part reflected ancient tribal divisions. From then on, local and international jihadist networks entered the fight to control Libya’s oil fields and infrastructure, as well as human trafficking. Meanwhile, money showered on the actors from rival Arab oil monarchies seeking clientele.

As with Libya’s neighbors, Tunisia and Egypt, the process of eliminating Gaddafi took shape around a demand for respecting human rights. The Libyan uprising thus emulated the demonstrations in Tunis and Cairo, which Libyans followed avidly on the Al Jazeera network. Tripolitania is culturally close to North Africa; it belongs to the world of couscous, of which Sirte forms the eastern limit, and its dialect mixed with Berber is Maghrebian. Before the uprising, workers immigrated there from the neglected regions of south and east Tunisia, sending home valuable remittances. The area had been colonized by ancient Rome, as witnessed by the ruins at Leptis Magna and Sabratha with their bilingual Latin and Punic inscriptions.

A stark contrast, Cyrenaica (Barsa in Arabic—or Jebel Akhdar [“green mountain”]) is located only 211 miles from Crete. Ancient Greece set up trading posts here at Cyrene and Ptolemais, where the road from Memphis in the Nile valley via Siwa and the western oases ended. The region, which came under Lagid domination in antiquity, falls within the zone of Egyptian influence. Before Gaddafi’s fall, its population included up to 1.5 million immigrants from the neighboring country. The dialect resembles ones spoken from Alexandria to Aswan, and rice is a staple of the diet. In the twentieth century, Italian colonization brought diverse culinary traditions, such as the rustic pastas with spicy sauces called makruna. These were brought over by peasants from Puglia and Calabria, who settled on these arid lands only to be decimated by disease and Bedouin raids.

This grassroots culinary unification was one of the birth certificates of modern Libya, which formed specifically around evicting the occupier. Italy’s political, cultural, and linguistic penetration remained skin-deep during its 32-year occupation (1911–1943). The colonial period was marked mainly by abuses, followed by repeated Libyan revolts against the infidels under the banner of jihad. The most famous was that led by Omar al-Mukhtar, hanged by the Mussolini regime in 1931. Al-Mukhtar became a major symbol of an identity at once Libyan and pan-Islamic, but ultimately was not enough of a unifying figure to permit overcoming the hardy regional antagonisms. These resurfaced immediately with the “Libyan Spring,” which from the start progressed differently in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. In the Saharan province of Fezzan in the south, formerly administered by France, separatism emerged among the tribes. This would facilitate the immense migration from Africa to Europe through Libya following Gaddafi’s demise.

Starting on February 15, 2011, one month after Ben Ali fled and four days after Mubarak quit, riots erupted in Benghazi, the Cyrenian metropolis, following the arrest of a human rights activist. Protesters occupied the city’s main square, rebaptizing it “Tahrir Square,” which everyone knew either from having been to the original in Cairo or watching the Egyptian upheaval on Al Jazeera.

The lead figures of the Benghazi demonstrations were the mothers, sisters, and widows of the mass killings at Abu Salim, a prison where Ghaddafi had had 1,200 suspected jihadists executed on June 29, 1996. Fifteen years later, the women still demanded justice. In the ensuing days, contingents of deserting soldiers helped the revolt occupy the ruling power’s local centers, and on February 25 they liberated Cyrenaica from Gaddafi’s clutches after fighting that cost a thousand lives. Meanwhile, Tripolitania remained under regime control following a violent crackdown that choked off the unrest in the capital.

Libya found itself cut in two—unlike the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt that brought their nations together, and where the dictators were helpless to kill the insurrection because they lacked the support of their armed forces. In March 2011, Gaddafi sent a column of tanks to attack Benghazi—they would have to cover more than 500 miles along the coastal highway. In Tripolitania, the regime had crushed the demonstrations, especially in the town of Zawiya, west of the capital. Then it laid siege to Misrata, whose large port with its free-trade zone supplied the whole country with imported products and where a commercial middle class had developed.

On March 5, a National Council of Transition that had been formed on February 27 in Benghazi declared itself the sole representative of Libya. The Western countries recognized it five days later. On March 17, the UN Security Council authorized protective measures for the Libyan people, while Gaddafi’s armored column battered the rebel defenses. Al Jazeera televised the crowd on Benghazi’s newly minted Tahrir Square as they waved French and British flags and the banner of King Idris, deposed by Gaddafi on September 1, 1969. On March 19, the tanks, their dust clouds already visible from the city, were destroyed by Franco-British air strikes supported by the Americans “leading from behind,” as President Obama put it.

The West Strikes, a Nation Disintegrates

Whatever else may be said about it, the intervention by the West under UN and NATO auspices played a decisive role in Gaddafi’s fall. Besides saving the Cyrenian city in extremis from a bloodbath, it broke the siege of Misrata by destroying Gaddafi’s tanks that were pounding the port city. Finally, on October 20, Western forces intercepted the fleeing dictator’s convoy, leading to his death by lynching. The intervention was internationally praised at the time for moral and political reasons; the liberal West could not possibly stand idly by while a madman dictator massacred his own people. This would have meant betraying its ideals and admitting to ethical, diplomatic, and military weakness in the immediate Mediterranean environment.

The French essayist Bernard-Henry Lévy had been deeply involved from the start of the uprising on the side of the Benghazi insurgents, and had actively lobbied French President Sarkozy to intervene. He defended the rebellion’s underlying ideology at length, even after Libya turned into a free-for-all that tore the nation apart and rocked its southern and northern neighborhoods. Both France’s subsequent presidents, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron, criticized Sarkozy’s lack of a political backup plan for the military operation and its unintended consequences—with the pieces left for the two of them to pick up. In a speech to the Tunisian parliament on February 1, 2018, Emmanuel Macron said the following about the persistent chaos in the country next-door:

Europe, the United States and others undeniably are responsible for the current situation, responsible for having imagined, whatever we think of a leader, that we could substitute ourselves for the will of a people to decide its future. That, when you come down to it, removing a tyrant would solve all problems. Collectively, we have plunged Libya these last few years into lawlessness, without being able to correct the situation.

In January 2013, one of those consequences had French forces intervene in Mali in Operation Serval on the hunt for a group of jihadists who had crossed the border with arms pillaged from Libyan arsenals. Furthermore, Europe as a whole subsequently had to face hundreds of thousands of illegal African migrants shipped to its shores by Libyan traffickers, modern-day slavers emerging from the “thawwar”—that is, the perverted “revolutionaries” of the Arab Spring.

The system Gaddafi built secured him an exceptional four decades in power. It was based on a kind of indiscriminate terrorism blended with permanent revolution in domestic politics. In the process, he wasted some of the largest oil reserves on the African continent. As light crude extracted at very low cost and located close to the European consumer markets, it was Libyan black gold. It abundantly financed the despot’s every whim with a practically unlimited income stream. In a state with only six million inhabitants, the income was distributed to double up on traditional tribal allegiances with individual clientelization, all the while keeping the country supremely fragmented.

In his Green Book, Gaddafi railed against representative democracy, the multiparty system, freedom of the press, and so on as frauds. Sovereignty was to devolve into “people’s committees” that swore obedience to him as the “ Guide” and blended executive, legislative, and judicial powers. It was a set-up that mimicked the Red Guards during the Chinese revolution, which perpetuated disorder to reinforce Mao Zedong’s absolutism. The “masses” (the regime called itself a “massocracy”—a translation of the Arab-coined word jamahiriyya) were regularly invited to rise up against designated scapegoats. For their efforts, they would receive randomly awarded free vehicles, homes, and food all paid for by hydrocarbon money.

To create an unvarying dependence on the despot’s arbitrary rule, in Libya there was no long-term investment in infrastructure—in contrast to the Gulf emirates with their comparable ratios of population to income. It was therefore impossible for a Libyan middle class to develop—with isolated exceptions, such as in the port city Misrata—that could accumulate its own wealth. This would have threatened the dictator, who kept himself surrounded by family and a circle of relatives and close friends. In Bedouin fashion, they were called ahl al-khayma—“the people of the tent.” It was Gaddafi’s way of mixing his Third-Worldist ethic with the traditions of his tribal origins.

Paralleling this mode of governing at home, Gaddafi pursued an erratic regional politics. He pushed for mergers with his Tunisian neighbors or the impoverished Egyptians salivating over his fabulous wealth. However, his unpredictability rendered these unions null and void shortly after they were proclaimed. His pan-African ambition led to confrontations with Paris, especially in Chad, ending in the attack perpetrated by Libyan intelligence on a DC-10 of the French airline UTA going from Brazzaville to Paris. The plane exploded midair above the Ténéré desert on September 19, 1989, killing 170.

This followed the destruction of a Pan Am Boeing 747 that had departed London for New York on December 21, 1988, only to blow up over Lockerbie in Scotland. This had also been done on Gaddafi’s orders, to avenge the bombardment of his Tripoli palace by the American air force. This, in turn, had been retaliation for the bombing by Libyan agents of a Berlin discotheque ten days earlier, in which two GIs had perished. All of it happened in the context of Tripoli’s support for multiple terrorist groups in Europe: the Basque ETA in Spain, the Corsican FLNC in France, the Irish IRA, the Italian Red Brigades, and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. The Berlin attack had been revenge for an incident between the Libyan and American navies the previous month in the Gulf of Sirte.

Despite the cumulative evidence pointing the finger of guilt at Gaddafi, he always managed to negotiate his political survival by dispensing the incredible largesse that his oil revenues made possible. Thus, in January 1970, it was France that supplied 110 Mirage jets to Libya—an all-time record for French arms sales. Notwithstanding, ten years later, the French embassy in Tripoli and the Benghazi consulate were set ablaze by a crowd that had been duly incited by their ruler. Following the sentencing of Libyan agents by a French court in the affair of the DC-10 explosion, Gaddafi agreed to make financial amends.

Following 9/11, he convinced Western leaders that he, like his neighbor Mubarak, would be a bulwark against terrorism…the jihadist kind, naturally. The United Nations lifted their sanctions. Various Western countries, among them the United Kingdom and France (which, as we have seen, would be in the front ranks of the military operation intending to liquidate the regime in 2011), gained access to fabulous commercial markets. This occurred in a climate marked by various scandals—from the prestigious London School of Economics awarding an honorary doctorate to Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, to the despot’s official visit to Paris on President Sarkozy’s invitation on December 10, 2007. On this occasion, Gaddafi pitched his heated tent in the gardens of an official guest residence. Conferring on the dictator the respectability that he craved, the invitation was criticized by defenders of human rights, but it ended with the signing of ten billion dollars’ worth of contracts. On March 21, 2018, Nicolas Sarkozy was questioned in a court case if his victorious 2007 election campaign had been financed with fifty million dollars from Libya, as claimed by diverse intermediaries and Saif al-Islam, the dictator’s son.

Libya’s relationship with Islam was imprinted by the fantastical messianism that Gaddafi attributed to himself, in which the Green Book substituted for the Holy Texts. After first carrying out a violent repression against Sufism, mainly found in Cyrenaica and on which King Idris, whom Gaddafi had deposed in 1969, had relied, the latter created his own calendar. To tie it in with the Gregorian calendar starting with Christ’s birth, the year zero coincided with the Prophet’s death in the year 632 (ten years after the Hegira in 622 as in the Muslim era). The calendar was divided into solar (not lunar) months named after various heroes of Libyan history. For believers, this hodgepodge was blasphemous. In the eyes of the Salafists, Muslim Brothers, and other jihadists, it symbolized the despot’s heresy.

But Gaddafi knew how to manipulate the emotions of the pious masses with great campaigns against “Islamophobia” that served his own ends. However, on February 17, 2006, a demonstration in front of the Italian consulate in Benghazi went off the rails. The protest was orchestrated against a Roman minister seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with cartoons of the Prophet published in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The demonstration turned into a riot against the regime before being put down, with twenty-seven killed. This slaughter was memorialized as the “Day of Rage” on the initiative of a Libyan in exile in early 2011, during the favorable climate created by the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators. The preventive arrest on February 14 of the main lawyer for the families of the Islamists massacred on in Abu Salim prison triggered the troubles that would lead to the Benghazi uprising.

Right from the start, the religious imprinting of demands linked to human rights was much more prevalent in Libya than in its two neighboring countries. After four decades of any critical thought being crushed, the only authentic resistance, weak and persecuted as it was, came from the Islamist movement. Founded in the 1950s as the Libyan Islamic Group (al-jamaʿa al-islamiyya bi libia), the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood had welcomed its Egyptian namesakes as they fled Nasser’s repression in 1954. The movement was then hunted down after Gaddafi’s 1969 “revolution.” Surviving primarily among exiled students abroad, it still ran a secret network of contacts inside Libya. During the 1980s, a thousand young men took part in the Afghanistan jihad. Several would become high-ranking Al Qaeda cadres.

After the fall of Kabul, the returnees formed the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (al-jamaʾa al-mouqatila) in 1995, which made three assassination attempts on Gaddafi in 1996. In revenge, 1,200 alleged members and followers of the Muslim Brotherhood were imprisoned and executed on June 29 of that same year. This massacre gave the activists in Cyrenaica—where most of the victims were from—a great moral legitimacy with their friends and fellow fighters in the struggle against the despot. Here was an odd juncture of the defense of human rights and promotion of jihadism. Many Muslim Brotherhood members were present on Benghazi’s Tahrir Square in February 2011. Numerous Libyan Islamists who had found refuge in the United Kingdom had help from London in returning home. Some of them liaised with the British during the offensive against Gaddafi.

In Libya’s west, where these movements were less deeply entrenched, the regime was gradually liquidated by militias formed on a tribal and regional basis. The port city of Misrata, which had the nucleus of a middle class born out of foreign trade, played a key role from the start in national deliberations due to its central geographic location and business wealth. The Arab city of Zintan, perched in the mountains of the Jebel Nefussa, raised a considerable military force and notably controlled a landing strip where Western arms were delivered to the rebellion. These two rival militias displayed their power by moving on key districts of the capital, leading to its fall on August 20–21, 2011.

Tripoli fell under the combined effect of a general uprising of the population and encirclement by brigades from the “revolutionary” tribes streaming in from throughout the country. Shortly beforehand, Gaddafi vanished; his whereabouts would remain a mystery until he was intercepted and killed two months later. Each militia gathered up trophies after the victory. The Misrata fighters grabbed the kitsch sculptures from the barracks-palace of Bab al-Azizia. The haul included a giant fist crushing an American F-4 Phantom jet to commemorate the “resistance” to the U.S. bombing of April 15, 1986, which Gaddafi had survived. The booty would decorate the museum of the local martyrs, to highlight the grand narrative of the city’s fighting in the front lines of the revolution.

In the same spirit, the city obtained Gaddafi’s remains on October 20. As already described, his convoy was stopped by a NATO air strike en route out of Sirte, the stronghold of his Qadhadhfa tribe. The former dictator was seized and lynched, and then killed under unclear circumstances. His cadaver was put on display in a Misrata garage, where it was subjected to many outrages to exorcise the despot’s mythical status before being buried in an unknown location. Meanwhile, the fighters from the city of Zintan managed to capture the most famous of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam, as he tried to cross the border into Niger. They locked him up in a subterranean dungeon and refused to surrender him to the provisional government in Tripoli or the International Criminal Court in the Hague. They held on to him to use as a bargaining chip in any future negotiations for settling the Libyan issue.

The violence unleashed to hasten the regime’s end, which was sealed by NATO’s air strikes, furthering the country splintering into fiefs ruled by armed militias. This prevented the formation of a nationwide civil society. After forty-two years of dictatorship in which one man held all authority, his fall plainly showed that the national feeling was above all cemented by the revulsion that he evoked. But there was no institution in any of its long history that could have given Libya a positive dimension capable of propelling it into the future. Consequently, the elections organized under international supervision in July 2012, using voting materials furnished by the UN, only created the illusion that a democratic transition could flower, in imitation of its two neighboring states. However, the middle class that in Tunisia had supported the Supreme Authority for Safeguarding the Achievements of the Revolution in 2011, or the Quartet in 2013, had no equivalent in Libya. And, unlike in Egypt, there was no centralized army to impose national unity.

During the campaign and on election day, as I roamed from the hills of Cyrenaica and Benghazi through Sirte, Misrata, Zintan, and Zuara to Tripoli, I was struck by the stupefying proliferation of candidates’ color photos. They included a number of faces with full beards identifying the Salafists. All of it was the reaction to four decades of oppression when a single image, that of Gaddafi, and only the color green were allowed. Still, few of the candidates presented any kind of program; the words “Islam, democracy, justice, freedom” were mostly hype overlaid on hollow professions of faith. In the east, the federalists demanded control of the oil revenue, three-quarters of which came from their territory, believing themselves as having been harmed by Tripoli back to the days when Gaddafi had appropriated all of it.

The Brothers and the Tribes

The Islamists were organized on a national scale, but even they entered the battle in disarray. The Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists of varied stripes, and former “Islamic fighters” convened after April 2011, then once more in Istanbul in October under the auspices of Erdoğan’s AKP party and Qatar. The thought was to have Libya serve as the geopolitical hyphen between Ennahda’s Tunisia and Morsi’s Egypt, and thereby make one Brotherhood empire of eastern coastal North Africa. However, even within this movement, intertribal and regional conflicts prevailed over allegiance to a shared ideology. Post-November 2011, each component reasserted its independence to maximize its own electoral prospects. In this they acted no differently than the other Libyan factions, each with its own armed group whose bullets in the final analysis prevailed over any ballot box.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the Islamic Fighting Group’s former emir, now led the Party of the Nation (hizb al-Watan), which used Qatar Airways colors for its propaganda materials. Originally, Belhaj had been a companion of bin Laden in Afghanistan, and he had followed him to Sudan after 1992. However, he split from al-Qaeda over his belief that they should prioritize the fight against the “near enemy” —that is, Gaddafi—instead of the American “far enemy.” This put him at odds with bin Laden.

Belhaj was arrested in Malaysia in 2004 on a tip from American and British intelligence. Eventually, he was turned over to Gaddafi, then still allied with the West, as part of the high-level “extraordinary rendition” policy. (Belhaj actually sued the British foreign minister at the time over Britain’s role in his kidnapping, which somehow seemed linked to a lucrative gas exploration contract Libya had awarded to Anglo-Dutch Shell. He won his lawsuit, and received a British apology and 2.2 million pounds in compensation.) He was imprisoned and tortured in Abu Salim and condemned to death, but the sentence was not carried out. Instead, he was released in 2010 by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who made him his privileged interlocutor. The regime was making an overture to the Islamists at the time to help smooth the way for Gaddafi’s son and heir to take over from his father. And, when the uprising was rumbling in February of the following year in Tripoli, Belhaj was asked to appeal for calm.

He fled instead and, relying on his jihadist and tribal network, organized the “Brigade of the Martyrs of 17 February” (commemorating the bloody repression of demonstrations against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet in 2006). Belhaj’s entry into Tripoli on August 20–21 was carefully staged by the Al Jazeera network, on which Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on February 21 had called for the killing of Gaddafi by “any Muslim capable of it.” And so it was Belhaj who breached the wall of the Bab al-Azizia barracks-palace, again before the same TV cameras. He was promoted to military governor of the liberated capital where his force clashed with the non-Islamist Zintan militias. From then on, the veteran jihadist would be recycled into the world of Islamic politics of the “brotherist” persuasion. Still, he could not capitalize on his credentials at the ballot box due to tribal dissension: his Party of the Nation tallied a risible vote total in July 2012. The coalition that emerged victorious from the polling stations was led by a former dignitary of the Gaddafi regime turned dissident, Mahmoud Jibril, well regarded in the United Arab Emirates and therefore hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Thus, like Egypt and Tunisia, Libya was turned into an arena for the rivalries between the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. This encroachment was facilitated by the country’s splintering, in which competing militias were on the hunt for cash and prepared to ditch opportunistic alliances instantly if it would maximize gains. It was a great game where access to dribbles of the oil revenues, the resale of weapons pillaged from Gaddafi’s arsenals, and profits from trafficking African migrants to Europe against a background of jihadism were the pieces in the puzzle of the post-Gaddafi failed state. The aggregate framework for this scenario remained intact from 2012 to 2017 without any truly significant advances, with no individual actor capable of starring in the Libyan drama or of cooperating with the others to install a central authority.

On September 11, 2012, eleven years after al-Qaeda’s “blessed double raid” on New York and Washington, the American ambassador to Libya was killed by a crowd assaulting the United States consulate in Benghazi. The protest was ostensibly about the broadcast of an anti-Islamic video by an American Copt, and had been instigated by the Ansar al-Shariʿa group. Aggravating the security situation in this manner favored the autonomy of Cyrenaica, where one of Gaddafi’s former dissident generals, Khalifa Haftar, was the rising power. He had been promoted to the rank of marshal to command a Libyan National Army base in Benghazi, and had the active support of Marshal el-Sisi after he assumed power in Egypt in the summer of 2013. Also backing Haftar was the coalition hostile to the Brothers led by the United Arab Emirates. At first, he allied himself with another opponent of the Islamists, the Zintan militias who by that point held the airport and several of Tripoli’s districts. Facing them was a league of diverse Tripolitanian troops affiliated to varying degrees with Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Misrata’s important military force. They sided with the Brotherhood and enjoyed support from Qatar and Turkey. The failure of the Assembly elected in 2012 to form a functioning government led to a new election in June 2014 from which a House of Representatives (HoR) emerged. However, the election was quickly invalidated by a court. This resulted in two competing parliaments: the GNC (General National Congress) in Tripoli and the HoR installed in Tobruk, east of Benghazi, where the armed jihadi presence made for an unstable situation. In July–August 2014, the Fajr Libya (“Dawn over Libya”) coalition of Misrata soldiers and Islamists drove the Zintan men from their positions in Tripoli and on the airport, thereby consolidating power directed by the Muslim Brothers in the capital.

Jihadist Expansion and Human Trafficking

From the summer of 2014 to the winter of 2016–2017, ISIS thrived on the territory of the failed Libyan state. For the international community, it was one of the two most perverse effects of the spring 2011 uprising. The other was the landing of more than half a million African illegal immigrants on Europe’s shores after they had boarded ship in Libya. Both situations posed security problems. The reaction by European voters to the heavy influx of migrants translated directly into a rise in of the extreme right parties, from Italy to Spain.

Several hundred local jihadists from 2012 on had joined the ranks of the insurgents in Syria, where they formed the Battar (“of the sharp sword”) brigade. In the spring of 2014, many of these fighters returned battle-hardened to the port of Derna in Cyrenaica, where they ruled by force. They assassinated their opponents, whipped and stoned drinkers of alcohol, gay people, and adulterers. Taking control of the city in October, the jihadists celebrated with military parades, using the occasion to pledge allegiance to the “caliphate” that had been proclaimed in Mosul on June 29. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi accepted them on November 13 and ordered Libya to be divided into three wilāyat (“provinces”) of the Islamic State.

The new “caliphate” forces took advantage of the conflicts between Benghazi and Tripoli to move into Sirte starting in January 2015. Here they established what would be their major stronghold over the course of the next two years. Situated in the Qadhadhfa tribe’s domain and Gaddafi’s last refuge, the region had been heavily fought over and pillaged by the Misrata brigades. Signing up with ISIS after duly “repenting” and submitting to jihadism allowed the local tribesmen to make a fresh start politically by turning their enemies of yesteryear into infidels or apostates. Their region controlled the terminals of most of Cyrenaica’s defunct oil pipelines, and its central location made it the ideal jumping-off point for raids toward the east and west.

Sabratha on the Tripolitanian coast also fell to the jihadist returnees from Shām, who set up more bases in districts of Benghazi and Tripoli. In the capital they bombed the grand hotels, such as the Corinthia, on January 27, 2015. These attacks and others against military and civilian targets took several hundred lives. The beheadings of twenty-one Egyptian Copts and thirty Ethiopian Christians in April, all broadcast in propaganda videos, were the closest to Europe that ISIS had ever committed such barbarous mass slaughters. They followed on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher supermarket massacres in Paris on January 7 and 9 of that same year. However, in the midst of the chaos in Libya, the jihadists seemed like just one more militia adding their mayhem’s toll to the uncountable number of victims of battles fought throughout the country. Thus, their emergence scarcely raised an eyebrow among a Libyan population accustomed to all sorts of atrocities.

This indifference contrasted with the great anxiety gripping Europe and the West, which set the stage for new armed interventions. Jihadism that spread from the Fezzan province into Mali forced France in January 2013 to launch the military operation codenamed “Serval” to take back the towns of Gao and Timbuktu. Tunisian jihadists, like those responsible for the Bardo and Sousse attacks in March and June 2015, trained in and fell back to Sabratha. Fear of attacks on ships by boats in the manner of ancient Saracen pirates, or with missiles launched from the ISIS-controlled coast, led to renewed operations by American and French air power and Special Forces to whittle down the jihadist positions, just as they had done against Gaddafi’s forces in 2011. In Sirte, it took seven months until December 2016 for the fighting to wind down. In Benghazi, it would take until July 2017 to overpower the last al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Ansar al-Sharia holdouts in the central districts of the Suq al-Hut (“the fish market”) surrounding Tahrir Square, the now rundown cradle of the February 2011 uprising.

Just as in Egypt, where the regime that emerged from the coup d’état of July 2013 allowed the Salafists plenty of leeway to check the Brothers and the jihadists, the Cyrenaica enclaves were destroyed by troops led by Marshal Hafter allied with the local jihadists, with comparable results. The jihadists, who took their cues from Rabiʿ al-Madkhali—a Saudi ulema who had followers throughout the Arabic-speaking Sunni world as well as in European Muslim immigrant communities—swore allegiance to the Marshal and enmity toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

Just as the Egyptian Copts had paid the price for the regime-Salafist alliance by being cursed as “infidels,” the Ibadite Berbers of Libya were condemned as “heretics.” At the same time, measures to restrict women’s freedom of movement and expression were instigated by preachers in the mosques. As for the ISIS fighters, unlike in Syria, they failed to control their territories in a uniform, lasting manner. Even within their ranks, tribalism prevailed over shared ideology, weakening their action capabilities and making it possible to finish them off in the areas they had dominated from Derna to Sabratha. In the spring of 2018, ISIS forces regrouped in the ungoverned southern parts of Fezzan. Fighters returning from Syria and Iraq after the fall of the ISIS caliphate gravitated there, only to be subjected to regular AFRICOM (United States Africa Command) air strikes: it considered the ISIS forces to be a resilient threat, capable of conducting isolated suicide attacks, but not of permanently occupying urban areas.

The other major concern of the international community, and primarily of Europe, tarnished forever the image of the “Libyan Spring.” This was the massive illegal export of hundreds of thousands of Africans fleeing poverty from Tripolitanian ports to Italy, and from there to the rest of Europe. Beyond the humanitarian drama of those lost at sea or rescued in extreme peril from unseaworthy vessels, these were masses of impoverished, young, barely educated people. Their reception by a rich but aging continent plagued by unemployment and worried about its demographic decline posed a fundamental political problem in receiving countries. The disquiet born of what the extreme right called “the great replacement” resulted in right-wing parties scoring gains in elections from one end of Europe to the other.

Such sentiments were stoked by the migrations, set in motion by the serial upheavals following the Arab Spring, of Africans coming up through Libya, or of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and even Afghanistan via Turkey. European measures adopted in 2017 to impede the Mediterranean sea crossing significantly reduced the flow of migrants. This consisted primarily of bribing Libyan coastal tribes with EU money to stop the boats from leaving the beaches. However, these stranded migrants were then subjected to daily abuses. The low point was reached in November 2017, when the press observed the operation of black slave markets in the Tripoli area.

Thus, the Libyan Arab Spring, born in the enthusiasm of “Revolution 2.0,” hit rock bottom six years later. It had regressed in effect to the era of the Muslim slavers who used to traffic African “unbelievers” captured in raids in the forests and on the savannahs across the desert. Reduced to chattel and sold, the slaves were herded along the same routes that trucks now rolled over, packed with illegal immigrants. This appalling act echoed other slave markets opened in Mosul between 2014 and 2017. There, ISIS sold women and children of the Yazidi community they had captured after overrunning their lands. These were the sorts of markets that the French-Tunisian Boubaker El Hakim wanted to set up in Europe to auction off non-Muslim families once the black ISIS banner fluttered over the Elysée Palace.

At this juncture, the mediation taking place under UN auspices was codified on December 17, 2015 by the Libyan Political Agreement of Skhirat (in Morocco) between the rival “governments” in Benghazi and Tripoli. It hardly had a chance of succeeding. Each party to the agreement reckoned that it had more to gain by pursuing its own objectives than by building a national consensus. Two years after signature of the accord, on December 17, 2017, Marshal Haftar officially broke it, announcing that he was prepared to make himself the military leader over all of Libya. These ambitions rose to the fore at the very moment when the instability of the country’s alliances obscured any prospects for peace in the medium term.

In the summer of 2014, the militias in Misrata and Zintan, “kingmakers” during the early years of the revolutionary process, had fought each other hard in Tripoli for control of the capital—with the latter on the losing end. Now, both gradually found themselves marginalized. This came as a result of the consolidation of the centers of power in Benghazi, where Marshal Haftar was in command, and in Tripoli, where Fayez al-Sarraj, recognized by the international community, had the backing of local militias. Misrata had played a crucial role in crushing the jihadist stronghold of Sirte in late 2016, but now saw itself paid little in return—the more so since its established businessmen in Benghazi had been expelled by the local tribes in exchange for supporting Marshal Haftar’s enemies. The upshot was that on 28 March 2018, a Misrata delegation went to Zintan for an improbable reconciliation between the traditional rival cities. The objective was to find a way of conserving what was left of their influence in the country’s two de facto capitals. In Zintan, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, from his house arrest, expressed the ambition of returning to a time when order reigned. Never mind the abuses committed by his father the dictator—even that was much to be preferred over the current chaos. These statements competed with the somewhat similar ones entertained by Marshal Haftar in the fight for overall leadership on the country.

However, the confrontation between the tribes and Libyan militias took place in a relatively civilized framework, compared to the Syrian situation that we will turn to in the next section. Syria’s was a full-blown civil war fed by the heightening of indelible interdenominational hatreds. In Libya, the warring parties played by the traditional rules for raiding: never close the door to reconciliation once the blood price has been paid. Only the inrush by ISIS temporarily threatened these balances when intensified by an ideology that took spectacular violence to extreme ends. But, finally, even jihadism was boxed in by the resilient tribes which defeated the militants in coordination with the Western bombing campaign of 2017. Except for the Ibadite Berber minority, concentrated in Jebel Nefusa, at Zuwara, and in the capital, where they were well integrated despite the Salafists cursing them as heretics, this was Sunni country.

Moreover, one institution had proved resilient against all odds: the National Oil Company (NOC). It had continued to collect the royalties paid by the importers of Libya’s hydrocarbons. It then split the proceeds according to a formula that varied according to the balance of power among tribes as well as temporary alliances and their permanent reversals. Despite the extent of the Libyan “anomie,” as President Macron put it in his Tunis speech of February 1, 2018, the obstacles to reconciliation were economic rather than structural, even if they were sustained by the competition between the Turkish-Qatari and Egyptian-Emirati blocs for primacy over the region’s Sunnism. That was entirely the purpose behind the mediation organized by the UN, which persisted in 2018 despite the imperfect process it began superintending in December 2015 at Skhirat. It enjoyed strong support from the international community, which, if not atoning, is still paying the price for the badly conceived European-American military intervention that contributed to Gaddafi’s elimination in 2011—only to open the doors to chaos.

This was the meaning of the conference organized in Paris for May 29, 2018 by Emmanuel Macron. It brought together the head of the Government of National Accord (GNA), Fayez al-Sarraj, with Marshal Haftar, nearly a year to the day after a first meeting on July 25, 2017. The meeting also included Aguila Saleh Issa, president of the House of Representatives elected in 2014 and based in Tobruk, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khaled al-Mishri, president of the High State Council in Tripoli. The meeting aimed to make a fairly broad spectrum of Libyan political figures face up to their responsibilities. This came at a time when the populists carried the parliamentary elections in Italy on the back of the migration crisis originating in Libya.

For Europe, the Libyan status quo was no longer acceptable, if only because of the political consequences for the member states’ electorates translating into a steady drift toward the extreme right. With the representatives of twenty states and six international organizations present, the summit committed to holding legislative and presidential elections on December 10, 2018—an initiative that presupposed a true process of restoring trust among the main players, starting at the local level. Meanwhile, Marshal Haftar’s forces conducted yet another offensive to subdue the jihadist stronghold at Derna, and the fighting in Fezzan intensified among groups seeking to share in the financial windfall from trafficking human beings from Africa. All through 2019, Marshal Haftar’s forces, with financial support from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, moved toward a besieged Tripoli. They were repelled by a coalition of fighters that feared Haftar would impose an authoritarian regime reminiscent of Gaddafi—mimicking his colleague and major sponsor Marshal el-Sisi’s iron-fisted rule in Egypt. With Saudi and Emirati help, the Benghazi based army confronted the Tripoli coalition dominated by Muslim Brothers and supported by Qatar and Turkey. A fragmented Libya remained a battlefield by proxy for Arabian peninsula oil states competing for hegemony on the Sunni world at large.

Conclusion: Democracy, Containment, or Chaos

Three uprisings took place in the eastern part of North Africa in 2010–2011. They greased the skids for ousting the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan dictators, but then went their different ways due to the social and national specifics of each country. Tunisia alone succeeded in putting together a democratic transition. But as for using the “Tunisian Spring” as an example for the rest of the region, one must use caution: was it not, after all a uniquely Tunisian scenario? Did it not have going for it the power of a middle class that is largely bicultural—Arab-French and European-Muslim—and had it not grown out of a process of modernization begun in the nineteenth century? Wasn’t this what enabled Tunisia to build institutions impossible to replicate elsewhere, as analyzed by Professor Safwan Masri, who called it an “Arab anomaly”?

Be that as it may, Europe has a vital interest in sustaining Tunisian democratization by seeing it become better integrated in the northwest Mediterranean prosperity zone. This will be key to strengthen a pole of stability while the jihadist menace remains resilient, as Sinai reminds us, despite the reverses inflicted on ISIS in its Syria-Iraq stronghold in 2017 and al-Baghdadi’s killing on October 27, 2019 by U.S. special forces. In this book’s third part, we will see how identifying good practices, among them educating a youth that will become tomorrow’s middle class, can nevertheless instill likewise values across the entire region.

On the banks of the Nile, by contrast, a resilient military power carried the day, despite being challenged by the Muslim Brotherhood, another secretive and hierarchical organization. The utopia envisioned at Tahrir Square could not transmute itself into a democratic process able to overcome the army and Brotherhood duo. The Egyptian masses, impoverished and overpopulated by a continuing birth rate much higher than the rate of economic growth, could not come together like a sovereign people in the sense of the Greek demos. With daily survival the overriding imperative, the population remained a crowd (ochlos) under dual influencers: the military, which kept it in check, and Salafism, which gave it hope for the afterlife if they submitted to a religious norm in its most literalist dimension. This vicious cycle could only continue thanks to Egypt being bankrolled by the Arab rentier oil monarchies, who subsidized this demographic giant to keep it on their side in the context of internal battles for regional hegemony. This short-term solution created a highly uncertain dependency, the more so in an economic climate of falling hydrocarbon prices due to oil and shale gas extraction in America.

Finally, in Libya, eliminating the dictator who transformed the country into a rogue state had opened a Pandora’s box that no one knew how to shut again, after years of all-out tribal warfare and a jihadist episode. The international community played a decisive role in ousting Gaddafi, but did so without a back-up political program for the aftermath of its military offensive. It focused foremost on keeping the resulting Libyan lawlessness from spilling over its borders. That was the significance of the operation led by France in Mali, starting in January 2013, to keep the Sahel from being ripped apart by jihadists coming from Libya. The same applied to the bombing of ISIS enclaves in Libya in 2015–2016 to keep them from threatening the neighboring states and the Mediterranean. And, finally, the same applied to the multiple moves made to stem the flow of illegal African migrants making for European shores from the Libyan coast. The national reconciliation process initiated by the UN had its ups and downs, including Marshal Haftar denouncing it in December 2017, convinced that only a strong military like the one in Egypt could reunify a failed state. Nonetheless, it was at least a possible framework, however fragile, for emerging from chaos.

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Egypt and Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, were exposed to intrusions by the oil monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula who sought to influence the Arab Spring’s evolution with billions of dollars in subsidies. In an initial phase, Qatar, aided by the soft power of its Al Jazeera satellite network, smoothed the way to power for the Muslim Brotherhood—with Ennahda in Tunisia, the Morsi presidency in Egypt, and the “Libyan Dawn” coalition in Libya. Then it was the United Arab Emirates’ turn to render substantial support in concert with Saudi Arabia to the Muslim Brotherhood’s adversaries, personified by the two marshals—el-Sisi in Cairo and Haftar in Benghazi—and including the Nida Tunis party. But this competition for hegemony took place within the politico-religious context of Sunni Arab Islam, and, from that standpoint, it did not take on an existential character. And, more to the point, it happened after the despots had been toppled. On the other hand, the uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, the other three cases we will now turn to, were taken hostage by the interdenominational fault line between Sunni and Shiites, preventing—or at least slowing considerably—the fall of their respective regimes demanded by the demonstrators.