On the success (or failure) of the Arab Spring and the Islamists

The events that began in Tunisia 13 years ago and developed with a domino effect across the entire Arab world had an appearance of extraordinariness. This created the opinion that such things could only happen through outside intervention. Yet in all of these countries there were very serious sociological conditions ready to set things in motion, with the countries influencing and inspiring one another. These displayed characteristics very similar to the developments that affected the whole of Europe in 1968.

It is very tempting to imagine a power that controlled all these processes from the beginning, because it is a very easy way of thinking and feeds on the "superpower" delusions rooted in our minds.

It would of course be naive to say that there are no truly powerful forces in the world that want to bring all of the world's developments under control. But however strong the desire for control, social events most of the time develop outside control.

The greatest skill of these great powers lies not in starting events and steering them in the direction they want, but in many cases in their dexterity at bringing under their control events that began in some other way.

With its claims and its promises, the Arab Spring was not a process that these powers could in any way have initiated. On the contrary, the process contained potentials that would threaten the system they had rigged from the outset.

The present world order was established to ensure that Muslims, and among them Arabs, and Arabs and Turks, never unite in any way. The conditions that imposed the present order on the Islamic World formed after the First World War and still continue. All the troubles experienced in the Middle East today stem from the resistance of the international political order to the natural sociological developments that push toward this union. The peoples are drawn to one another and want integration, but in between, the watchtowers erected against this union keep working attentively.

Had the Arab Spring not been stopped by forced interventions but continued as it began, today there would be a very different Arab World, Middle East and Turkey relations. The matter of the stopping of the Arab Spring is of course not just a simple fear of democracy felt by some Arab monarchies. The fear of democracy in the Islamic world exists not only in the Arab monarchies or in the oligarchies of some of them; a greater one exists in the USA, Israel and European countries. For a democratized Islamic world would, for them, be one that has slipped out of their control and means the end of the order they deemed suitable for the Middle East.

A true democracy in the Middle East that achieved the integration of people and state would threaten, before anyone, Israel's present mode of existence. For all of Israel's present occupying, expansionist and violating existence is owed to fragmented regimes severed from their peoples.

The Arab Spring was not a process begun by Islamists or conducted with Islamist claims and slogans. But in the first democratic experiences put forward in all the countries, the Islamists emerged as the most effective and most successful actors of the process. In fact, this also explains why a resistance to democratization has been sustained until now.

The prominence of the Islamists means precisely that all Arab and Muslim peoples would draw closer to one another and the possibility of their union, and this frightened both the Syces-Picot order and its addendum, the Camp David order. Perhaps this was the reason why the Arab Spring process was stopped through coups, counter-revolutionary interventions, and the commission of the gravest massacres and all kinds of crimes against humanity.

The things we now hear, that the Islamists could not succeed in this process, could not put forward a project, and could not renew themselves, are truly very strange. In which of these countries, and what kind of solution, could the Islamists offer? Especially when not the slightest room has been left for any political role.

In the countries where revolutions have been stopped through extraordinary interventions and coups, not only political party activity but every kind of civil activity has been halted. In an environment of despotism in which anyone found to have any link to an Islamist formation is immediately thrown into the dungeon, what kind of miracle is expected of the Islamists? What scale could one proceed from to measure the success or failure of the Islamists, most of whose leading members have been killed or imprisoned, and many of whom are in exile?

Those who take no interest in the unparalleled human rights violations the Islamists have been subjected to in these countries and present their failure with great joy cannot hide their own psychological complexes either. They never wanted to hear a successful Islamism story. What they always wanted to hear was this, and they did not refrain from recounting this story with great hope even at the most successful moments of Islamism (even from their own standpoint).

Yet in this process the Islamists showed that they were on the side of democracy, human rights, freedoms, the peoples, and the brotherhood of peoples. They acted within the circle of legitimacy and succeeded in this field. They also proved that the more they remained in this field, the more successful they would be both in better administration, better governance, and in offering the peoples a new hope-vision.

Those who today regard them as failures, it is understood, regard as successful those who have turned their countries into a complete open-air prison and a mire of corruption, merely because they are in power de facto; the Islamists never aspired to such a success.