The "silent anger" of the Arab peoples

"Orientalists long thought that the Arab peoples, who have been living meekly under dictatorships, had been anesthetized, that because they had never experienced freedom they did not know it or had forgotten it, and thus saw dictatorships as part of their own existence. Yet the silence of these peoples stemmed not from their having given up on freedom or never having known it, but from their ever-growing anger. The Arab Spring is the name of the explosion of this anger.

Today, the relative silence among the Arab peoples whose Springs have been interrupted everywhere except Tunisia must likewise not be counted in favor of the enemies of democracy. No one can know when or how this angry silence will explode, and when it does, no force can stand in its way."

These words of Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Movement, who last week gave a conference at the SETA Foundation in Istanbul on "The Arab Spring and the Tunisia-Ennahda Experience," constitute in my view the most illuminating expressions on the current course of the Arab Spring.

Indeed, since the Second World War, the silence of Muslim peoples in general and Arab peoples in particular has been a subject that Western orientalists interpreted in favor of the West. Only Westerners knew freedom and its value, and so rising up against despotic dictators and making revolutions was in their character. Easterners, on the other hand, did not know the value of freedom, and so there could be no such sociological event as revolution in their history. Since they were already under the influence of a fatalistic religious mentality, they would accept whatever befell them as fate and be content. The strongest proof of this was that they had been living with the dictators over them for a long time. Not a leaf stirs in Arab history, you see.

One thing this reading neglects is that a significant portion of these Arab peoples, only fifty or sixty years ago, that is, right after the Second World War that Europe was going through, waged epic struggles for liberation and freedom against colonial occupiers.

This is not a very long history. The recent history of the democracy that Europe boasts of is not very old either. This is an example of how hasty Europeans are in boasting about themselves. In fact, they also forget, and make others forget, how full the process of colonizing the Arab peoples, before or immediately after the First World War, was of epic examples of resistance. I think it is unnecessary to list Emir Abdelkader and Abdelhamid Ben Badis from Algeria, Omar Mukhtar from Libya, and a great many other examples from Tunisia, Yemen and other countries.

Second, the theft that the orientalist discourse displays when it compares West and East by showing off its courage is a bonus. After all, it is they themselves who usurped the freedom of these peoples, who are thought to have forgotten freedom because they found it usurped. It is again the Westerners who ruled the Arab peoples first through inhuman colonial administrations, and after colonialism through dictatorships established by giving these peoples an illusion of freedom.

Ruling the Arab peoples through bloody, criminal dictators whom they themselves support, and then shamelessly producing for themselves a title of superiority from the discourse that these peoples have forgotten freedom... The point is of course not merely to derive a title of superiority at the level of discourse; by working up this superiority, it is a shortcut to the idea that these peoples do not deserve to rule themselves anyway, or will not be able to rule anyway, and therefore must be ruled by others...

In these dictatorships that stand on the Westerners' own support, taking action for freedom, going out into the streets, attempting revolution is not like "staging risk-free actions that cost not a single person's life, like the generation of '68," in the words of Michel Foucault.

Foucault said exactly this in 1968, against the orthodoxy of the '68 ideology, which, while everyone was out on the streets for freedom, criticized him for being nowhere to be seen and asked where he was: "True," he said. "I was not in Paris, where taking action for so-called freedom required paying no price. I was in Tunisia at that moment, where the simplest demonstration for just a little more freedom and dignity was suppressed by the state with volleys of gunfire, and dozens of people had to pay for this demand with their lives, and I was taking part in those actions."

The '68 protests, when compared with the Arab peoples' struggles for freedom, seemed like a game to Foucault, and he did not refrain from saying so.

The Arab peoples are silent, true, but this does not mean they have forgotten freedom or given it up. Their silence is from their anger. We saw during the Arab Spring what this anger can lead to when it explodes. Today all the Arab peoples continue to accumulate this anger inwardly.

However, we had ended our previous article with the question "What about the AB's and ABD's initial stance and messages supporting the Arab Spring?", to seek its answer later. The answer was in fact very simple. The AB and ABD media interpreted the Arab peoples' stirring with a demand for freedom at first precisely through these orientalist prejudices: the Arabs have finally modernized/Westernized because they are now demanding freedom. The Arab Spring had, to all appearances, no Arab or Muslim side. Since they were demanding "freedom, bread and dignity," they were now cutting their ties with an Arab culture that had no freedom in its lexicon. Besides, the youth who led the revolutions were acting by using the latest emblematic instruments of Western communication technology such as Facebook and Twitter. Therefore the revolution bore neither an Arab nor a Muslim signature. They could rest assured and even relish watching the spread of the hegemony of Western culture.

Indeed, the first reflections of the Arab Spring in the Western media were entirely full of emphasis on the youth living like Western youth and using Western social media networks. For a long time they believed, or wanted to believe, that "our kids" were making the revolutions. In time, as they saw that the revolution was actually being made by the oppressed Arab and Muslim peoples, their whole orientalist worlds were shaken, and the result of this shaking was the severing of their emotional ties with it.

From that moment on, what happened became again an internal problem of the eastern world. Let those who die die, let those who are tortured be tortured, let them be exiled. The survivors, the torturers and the murderers were theirs anyway.