Time for change in the Arab world

It was clear that the protest movements that took place in all of Egypt's big cities after Friday prayers would form the biggest link of the movement that had begun in Tunisia some time ago and was starting to spread in waves to all the countries of the region. That a citizen's protest in Tunisia against an apparently simple and routine police intervention would trigger a social movement on such a scale was perhaps not expected, but it is not incomprehensible. What is very hard to explain sociologically is that the model the regimes under this wave of protest had developed and relied on in their relations with their own peoples since the First World War could still continue in this form. Undoubtedly it could not go on like this.

In his book The Fear of Fundamentalism, Bobby S. Sayyid wrote that the main characteristics of all these regimes were being cut off from the will of the people, the continuation of colonialism after independence through a kind of self-colonization, and necessarily the de-Islamization of social life. Sayyid also said that Kemalism formed the typological model of all these programs.

Much was made of the fact that the movement in Tunisia was a result of the new social networks that technology made possible. This is true, and since it took shape and developed through very loose ties in this respect, it was highly probable that it would occur as a kind of straw fire and surrender to the first organized structure it encountered. Indeed, it is seen that the movement's lack of a proper leadership mechanism led the former chief of the general staff, who had become a hero in the people's eyes over time by not firing on the demonstrators, to emerge as the strongest among the possible alternative leaders.

Truly, the army's not confronting the people's movement in Tunisia with harsher resistance is one of the possible explanations for this movement's developing so easily. The Tunisian people's showing in this way their discontent with a dictatorship that had lasted 24 years has lifted the cover off all the forms of government in the region and brought the truth out in its bare form.

Regimes designed for the Cold War period and established largely with the support of Western countries are doomed to fall outside history in the face of the world's new order. In an environment where the world is integrating and models of government are becoming increasingly democratic, regimes that have no function left other than obstructing the development of their own peoples are becoming an increasingly heavy burden to bear over their own peoples. The rope that held the leadership of these countries had been stretched very tight, thinned ever further and was ready to snap at any moment.

The young people who first triggered the demonstrations in Egypt in the last few days and carried them to Friday are literally a "new generation." These youths, between the ages of 16 and 27, consist of people with no past membership of, or experience in, any political organization.

These young people, who have the same sociological characteristics as those who emerged in Tunisia and other countries on this occasion, perhaps for exactly this reason carry no fear, because they are demanding their most legitimate rights, a good life, freedom and respect. They are demanding their own future. Beyond the Shari'a, socialism, a new regime, a utopia or similar political demands, they want to live humanely, and in this respect they are very different from the political movements in the history of Egypt or the other countries of the region. That these movements, developing in an entirely spontaneous way, emerge one after another with the same characteristics throughout the Middle East shows how strong the sociological ground behind them is. This sociological ground may perhaps make the leadership mechanism of the current movements a target for new greedy Pharaoh candidates, but we can foresee that on such a strong ground a politics and mechanism of government below a certain level will no longer hold.

Almost all the young academics from Egypt and other Arab countries who took part in the Arab-Turkish Social Sciences Congress (ATCOSS), held in Ankara some time ago by us, the Strategic Thought Institute, in cooperation with Cairo University, reflected in all their discourse a desire for a new future for their own countries. All the signs of this desire showed themselves under the intense interest shown in Türkiye's experience of democracy.

The finding that the world cannot change without changing itself stood out as one of the most conspicuous thoughts of that congress.

The Arab world today appears to have crossed the threshold of changing itself.