The expected revolution, the reality lived

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the process called the Arab Spring, many events of commemoration and reflection are being organized. For these events, most of them held online because of the pandemic, ten years is a long accumulation of experience for reviewing and reflecting on everything, from the naming of the process to the nature of the events that took place. Yet this period is, without doubt, a very small span in the history of humanity.

In the warm days when the Spring still looked its most beautiful, Münsif el-Mazruki, one of the leaders of the Tunisian link of the Revolution, who later became President, was asked during a speech on a visit to Ankara about the shortcomings of the revolution. His words, which I have never forgotten, shed light on a very important truth of historical sociology:

"What do you think a revolution is? Something that happens overnight? A one-directional process that unfolds in a frictionless environment with no resistance against it? Do you know within how many decades the French Revolution, which gave history the concept of revolution, settled onto its track? You probably imagine that it was over and done with in 1789 and drew a definitive line between two eras. Yet the French Revolution was a long process in the midst of every kind of betrayal, intrigue and attempt at counter-revolution, in which blood also flowed in streams."

Indeed, revolution is a convoluted process, one that made Marx laugh bitterly at what was happening even 60 years after the revolution and made him write Louis Bonaparte's 18th Brumaire.

The concept of revolution is one of the most important ideological concepts of the twentieth century. It is a talismanic concept, loaded with an extremely intense messianic meaning. A talismanic moment that, once it comes about, would end all our complaints about this world at once, make the sheep a friend of the lamb, resolve all the conflicts between people, end poverty and establish justice. Revolution is the name of the hope that utopia, with all its impossibility, will turn into reality. It is a savior awaited by the masses who are uneasy with the existing situation. However intertwined it may be with secular or atheist worlds of belief, it belongs to the same emotional world as the expectation of the mahdi-messiah.

It is something awaited. And the thing awaited will in fact never come as it was awaited, in the form in which it was expected. The problem, as human beings, is most often in our expectations about the future. In our not being sufficiently open to what is coming, in our insistence on seeing the future within the compass of our own time, on keeping it within that compass...

The Arab Spring was expected, but it was not as expected. It did not turn out as expected. For Arab societies, for all Muslims and, in a way, for the whole world, it became a test, like everything that is awaited. Perhaps it gave some people the opportunity to compare what was expected with what it brought. Do expectations not sometimes form our own limits, our own troubles? Might the real revolution perhaps lie in changing our expectations?

That all the revolutions in the Arab Spring were sought to be strangled by coups and counter-revolutions, and that in many places things became even worse than before the revolution, does not mean that the revolution, or what was lived and what came, had no function whatsoever. That it shook people out of the established order of the routine into which they had been carried away, and showed that statuses quo that seemed eternal were not at all unchanging and unshakable, has in itself been an important function of what took place.

Indeed, what is going on today in Egypt, Syria and Yemen is the practice of a jahiliyya that thinks a heavier tyranny is needed to bring under control peoples who want change and want to take ownership of their own will. In this jahiliyya, regrettably, the world's most civilized, democratic countries and its most primitive despotic states are in an unnamed alliance.

Yet according to one account, revolution in the Arab countries was perhaps not something the Western world was expecting, but it was something it welcomed very well at first and then, becoming confused again, changed its attitude. I think this point needs to be understood very well. What did the Western world expect from the Arab Spring, and what did it find? When the revolution it had not expected came, at first it likened it to a spread of its own world of meaning and values. Young people, using the internet and social media, were demanding freedom, dignity and bread. These were familiar, they were Western-type demands and Western-type movements. These movements could at most stir the national feelings of belonging of Western man, as a spread of the Western world.

But whatever happened, happened afterwards. That lovely Revolution began to flow toward a direction that was not at all understood, whose outcome was not known, an unknown direction, no longer the kind of change we know and recognize from the West. And with time the prominent names and profiles of the Revolution ceased to be familiar. Those who came to the fore as revolutionaries did not resemble their "children" (their boys). From that moment on, there was a risky situation that by any means deserved, in every case, to be brought under control.

For that reason, whatever the Revolution led to among the Arab peoples, in the Western centers of power it turned into a counter-revolution that worked against itself. They showed that the democracy they want in their own countries they in fact do not want at all in Islamic countries. They exposed their place among the greatest obstacles to democracy in the Islamic world.

We will continue these reflections of ours, which I thought through on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Egypt's 25 January Revolution, at a later time.