The Arab
Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East. By Marc Lynch. Public
Affairs, New York, 2012. 269 pp.
The
Invisible Arab: The Promise and Peril of the Arab Revolution. By Marwan Bishara. Nation
Books, New York, 2012. 258 pp.
The Arab
Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East. By Tariq Ramadan. Allen Lane, London, 2012. 274 pp.
Can there be anything interesting and worthwhile to say, in full-length
book form, about a series of events that is still ongoing? Such is the problem
facing writers who have decided to tackle the Arab uprisings. The desire to
capture a historical moment is hard to resist, as is the temptation to make one’s
imprint, and thus we are flooded with a series of instant books about a complex
set of events, even though we are barely beginning to understand what just
happened and much more is still hidden from us.
It is little surprise that
many are rushed and sloppy, that others appear to engage in an act of spinning
events to suit a particular ideological narrative (The Islamists are coming!
Post-Islamism! The Arabs have awakened from their slumber!
Post-post-colonialism! The collapse of the American world order! Etc.) and yet
more, perhaps wisely, favor personal narrative and ground-level flavor over
grand analysis. Those books that seek to deal with not just the individual
uprisings but offer a bird’s eye view of the entire span of events in the Arab
world in 2011 have a particularly daunting task. With this in mind, it is fair
to say that none of the works reviewed here achieve this with much success. The
better ones, however, provide some original thinking in how to understand these
events, place them in context, and highlight those aspects that the authors are
best-placed to understand because of their prior research or unique
perspective.
First, a note on the phrases
these three authors have chosen to describe what is most commonly called the “Arab
Spring,” a phrase made popular by the media but rightly rejected by many
analysts and participants in the uprisings, either because of its European
connotations or its inadequate seasonal quality and the way it invites lazy and
laborious sequels (hot summers, winters of discontent, etc.). Marwan Bishara, a
broadcaster on Al-Jazeera English, is the most enthusiastic and incautious of
these writers and goes straight for “revolution” in the singular, in line with
his view that the uprisings form a coherent whole. Tariq Ramadan, the
Swiss-raised Islamist public intellectual, prefers awakening because he feels “the
Arab world has shaken itself out of its lethargy… apparent resignation and
silence.” Marc Lynch, an academic and prolific policy wonk, opts for “uprising”
in the singular, in good part because his book stresses the commonalities about
the events across the region.
Lynch
does the best job of justifying his choice of the singular to highlight what is
a common, shared experience in the multiple Arab uprisings. His success is
based in good part on his previous scholarship on what he calls the “new Arab
public sphere,” and on Al-Jazeera in particular, and its role in reviving
shared Arab sentiment to an extent unseen since the heyday of pan-Arabist
ideology in the 1960s. The book excels in its first chapters in providing
context for the rise of Al-Jazeera and its emergence not only as a
counter-narrative to years of stale state propaganda, but as a political agent
in its own right. Lynch is also rare among commentators on the Arab uprisings
to forcefully make the case for an active civil society and culture of protest
prior to 2011, which seems to make the term “awakening” rather inappropriate. "The decade of the 2000s,” he writes, was, in effect, “one long wave of intense
popular mobilization spanning the entire region.” The main difference, he
argues, is that such uprisings between independence and 2011 were generally not
successful and, even when on occasion breakthroughs took place, they were
easily reversed and replaced by new forms of authoritarianism (and might be
again). So ingrained was this lesson in the Arab consciousness for the last two
decades that many believed successful uprisings were essentially impossible.
So how did the impossible
take place? Lynch cites several reasons, focusing chiefly on the unexpected
(and possibly urged by Washington) departure of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali from
Tunis on January 14, 2011, and the galvanizing role of the Egyptian uprising
and the occupation of Tahrir Square two weeks later. He also repeats an
argument he has made elsewhere for a decisive part by the Obama administration,
which he says engaged in “near-constant dialogues at all levels up and down the
ranks of the Egyptian military, pushing it not to fire, with multiple daily
phone calls pressing the case.”
Perhaps.
But in arguing there was a crucial role for the U.S. Lynch provides little
evidence. One wonders whether he was taken in by the narrative provided by his
(top-notch) sources in the Obama administration, or perhaps ignores the
possibility that, just like the Egyptian regime, the American regime was
divided over what to do about one of its most important allies in the Arab
world. It is hard to simply dismiss as miscommunication the contradictory
statements by U.S. officials and the very different interests of America’s
diplomatic, economic and military elites in the country—or to ignore Washington’s
early endorsement of a takeover by other military figures than Mubarak, whom by
January 29, 2011, was clearly a spent force. The reality is that no book
published thus far, aside from a few biased and unreliable insider accounts,
has told us the full story of the power struggles inside the regimes, which is
at least as important as the mobilization on the street.
Tariq
Ramadan addresses the question of foreign influence repeatedly in his work, but
very much unsatisfactorily. His main argument is that the uprisings have the
potential to amount to a second emancipation from the West, by a rediscovery of
“authentic” local values and a much-needed intellectual effort to rethink Islam’s
role in public life, and especially questions of governance. The argument is
interesting even if one suspects that Ramadan will see as more authentic ideas
coming from his fellow Islamists, despite the long history of other political
ideologies in the region. (Indeed, historically Islamism is a modern, even
twentieth-century, phenomenon.) But he is right in arguing that there is an
urgent need for a redefinition of the public good in Arab societies, far away
from “the endless controversies between ‘secularists’ and ’Islamists’… which
allow opposing sides to sidestep self-criticism: the mere presence of their
opponents, rather than the quality of their programmatic outlook, ends up
justifying their political involvement.”
Ramadan’s
argument takes for granted that Islam has a central role to play in these
societies, and urges that politicians and thinkers who want to refer to
religion must think beyond the stale debates of the last century. He writes: “If
the reference to Islam is to make sense, it must be couched as an invitation to
reclaim meaning instead of transforming the religion into a real or symbolic
instrument designed to induce guilt or justify repression, if not to reduce
women and men to infantile status.”
That debate is indeed taking
place in the Arab world among both
progressives and conservatives, but has much further to go—as the sorry state
of Egyptian politics shows. But, perhaps because Ramadan is a Western Muslim
rather than an “Oriental” one, he appears far too obsessed with Western ideas
of what makes a “good Muslim” and a “bad Muslim” (Ramadan’s essay on the topic
is reproduced in an appendix, along with other short writings of the past
decade). His book is also marred by hazy conspiratorial thinking—again and
again, he feels it is necessary to remind readers that the Egyptian activist
Wael Ghonim worked for Google, that other activists received training from
Eastern European dissident groups funded by Western governments, and that the
whole thing might have been in part a Western plot. This very much detracts
from his call to for an intellectual renewal to deal with the region’s
political challenges ahead.
Whereas
Ramadan speaks of the good Muslim being an “invisible Muslim” (i.e. one whose
heritage is airbrushed out to be accepted into modernity), Marwan Bishara
speaks in a different way of the “invisible Arab.” This is his depiction of the
political funk the region has sunk in, particularly since the 1980s, where
citizens were crushed by apparently omnipotent autocratic regimes and a world
order that perpetuated this condition (a common hope of both Ramadan and
Bishara, despite their divergent ideological viewpoints, is that the uprisings
will undo not just local despots but the neoliberal world order). Bishara
believes in the uprisings as having a teleological nature, in that they serve a
Great Purpose: to shatter the idols of our age. “It’s the political and
economic culture behind the economic disparities that are drawing out the
masses,” he claims, making links so many others have made with the Occupy Wall
Street movement and the global economic crisis.
All three writers must
provide narratives of the events that unfolded starting late 2010 and into 2011—in
the cases of Lynch and Bishara, the narratives occupy the bulk of their books.
But while Lynch offers neatly organized CliffsNotes, Bishara’s narrative is
messier. In both cases, since there is little original research involved or
previously unknown details, there is little that will add to the informed
reader’s knowledge. In choosing the bird’s eye-view, they have not contributed
to a better understanding of the individual uprisings. Between the two, Lynch
provides much more insight in his analysis of social media and Al-Jazeera’s
outsize political role—perhaps surprising since Bishara after all works for
Al-Jazeera and might have been privy to its inner workings. But in the end it
is telling that there is more new to say about the meta-narrative of the Arab
Spring—the assertion of citizenship, the role of regional and global powers,
how new technologies contributed to the assertion of a newly dominant discourse
of revolt and liberation, the rise of Islamists and the challenges they face—than
the events themselves.
Issandr El
Amrani is the publisher of the Arabist, the
popular Middle East blog, which he founded in 2003. He is a columnist for the Egypt Independent and The National,
and has written for the Economist, Financial Times, London Review of Books,
Guardian, TIME, and Foreign Policy. He can be followed on Twitter at @Arabist.