COMMENTARY
A FIRE IN THE MINDS OF ARABS: THE ARAB SPRING IN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
A Fire in the Minds of Arabs:
The Arab Spring in
Revolutionary History
MARK PERRY*
Fire is both the symbol of revolution and its most potent
weapon. Much like the American Revolution and other key historic events, the Arab Spring began with fire when Tunisian street
vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight to protest his treatment by police. Ever since the Arab Spring’s onset, experts have
debated about its eventual conclusion and concentrated on major
forces, including the army and the clergy. The future of the revolutions, however, rests with the masses in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen,
and Syria. The uprisings marked deep and irreversible changes in
the Arab world and will inevitably entail future repercussions. For
onlookers, the best policy is not to interfere, but to let the fire burn.
ABSTRACT
I
n December of 2005, a high level
official of the Islamic Resistance
Movement, Hamas, was invited to
address a small gathering of U.S. and
European senior retired government
officials in a conference room at a
Beirut hotel.1 Joining the Hamas official was a prominent Salafist from
Syria, who’d traveled from Damascus to provide a commentary on the
Hamas official’s presentation. The
meeting’s organizers met to explore
and assess the growing strength of
politically motivated Islamists.
The organizers chose their presenters
well. Both the Hamas and the Salafist officials were articulate, focused,
multi-lingual, well-educated and had
spent years organizing their communities. More crucially, in a little less
than a month, in January of 2006, the
Islamic Resistance Movement’s political message would be tested by the
voters of the West Bank and Gaza,
who would cast ballots for representatives to the Palestinian Legislative
Council.2 The vote was seen as one
of the first tests of political Islam’s
popularity.
The Hamas official began the meeting
with a simple recitation of his movement’s history and structure. He condemned the 1994 Oslo Accords while
paying obeisance to Fatah leader Yasser Arafat (“our great national leader”),
who had died in 2004. But then his
* Independent
Analyst
Insight Turkey
Vol. 16 / No. 1 /
2014, pp. 27-34
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COMMENTARY
MARK PERRY
otherwise predictable address gained
power. The Hamas official described
in compelling detail his movement’s
strategy for the upcoming elections,
which included polling, focus groups,
“message testing,” fundraising, “digital messaging,” the identification of
“swing voters” and “a broad-based
anti-corruption program that,” as he
said, “we believe will appeal to voters.”
The presentation came as a shock to
the audience of Westerners, who’d
entered the room encased by years
of assumptions – that political Islamists were more Islamist than political, that their ability to organize was
confined to the mosque and that they
had much to learn when it came to
sophisticated campaigning. And yet
here was a man who sounded like a
“pol” in the traditional American or
European mold, with a focus on (as
he said) “appealing to a broad reach
of the public,” “focusing on youth and
women,” and “getting out the vote.”
The presentation ended with a prediction. “When the Palestinian people cast their ballots in for the legislative council in January,” he said, “they
will cast them for us. We will win this
election. It won’t even be close.”
Compelling as this was, it had no
impact on the Syrian Salafist, who
sat motionless beside him, listening
to the presentation with barely concealed disdain. He remained unsmiling and without emotion. When he
spoke now it was to recite the Bismallah, in both Arabic and then, for the
benefit of his audience, in English:
Bismi-llahi r-rahmani r-rahim – “in
the name of God, the Most Gracious,
28 Insight Turkey
the Most Merciful.” The presentation
that followed contained an almost liturgical narrative of the role of politics in Islam that focused on the time
of the Prophet and his followers, ladled with pointed references to the
Holy Koran.
But, as soon became clear, this somewhat undistinguished address provided the prologue for the meeting’s
most important moment. For after
his turgid recitation of the founding
of Islam and “it’s most important
political lessons,” the Salafist paused
and audibly sighed, before turning to
his Hamas colleague – the first time
he’d actually looked at him the entire meeting. His words began with a
stunning condemnation of the West,
but ended with a call to action ladled
with anti-Wahhabi views.
“Listen my friend, and listen carefully,” he said as he turned to his Hamas
colleague. “They may let you run in an
election” (and with the word “they” he
nodded to his Western audience) “and
they may actually allow you to win an
election. But they will never, ever, allow you to govern.” And he paused
once again, before ending, dramatically. “So come with me and together we will cleanse our society of this
apostate infection. We will burn them
down. And we will begin in Mecca.”3
Fire is the symbol of revolution and
its most potent weapon. In 1776,
during the American revolution, a
fire consumed British occupied New
York City, destroying over 600 houses, nearly a quarter of the city. George
Washington, leading the revolution-
A FIRE IN THE MINDS OF ARABS: THE ARAB SPRING IN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
Fire is the symbol
of revolution and
its most potent
weapon. The Arab
Spring began with a
fire when Mohamed
Bouazizi set himself
on December 17, 2010
ary army, celebrated: “Providence –
or some good honest fellow, has done
more for us than we were disposed to
do for ourselves,” he wrote.4 Writing
soon thereafter, Thomas Jefferson
worried that his new nation’s pledge
that “all men are created equal” would
start a new fire, this time among his
slaves. He called it “a fire bell in the
night.”5 The Great Fear began the
French Revolution, with the burning
of manors in the countryside, their
pyres lighting the night sky.6 Not long
after, the Jacobins recast the national
calendar, its most important month
being Thermidor – its blazing sun
a symbol of their revolutionary fire.
Originally, the month was called
“Fervidor.”
In 1812, the revolutionary Claude
Francois de Malet, who would be executed for plotting against Napoleon,
eschewed using a “lever” to move society. “With a match one has no need
of a lever,” he said. “One does not lift
up the world, one burns it.”7 In 1830,
Eugene Delacroix painted perhaps
the best known symbol of revolution,
which featured a triumphant army
led by Liberty as she mounts a pedestal of corpses in a fire consumed
landscape.8 In The Possessed, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky writes of a spreading
mysterious fire in a provincial town,
its population transformed by revolutionary plotters. “The fire is in the
minds of men, not in the roofs of
buildings,” a local official shouts.9
The idea that revolutions cleanse societies by burning them lasted into
the twentieth century and is with us
still. The German Revolution, while
giving power to a rightwing tyranny,
began with a fire which burned the
Reichstag -- and then burned Europe.
More recently, the Iranian Revolution
was sparked by a fire at the Cinema
Rex Theatre in Abadan. The fire, on
August 19, 1978, killed 422 Iranians.
The subsequent street protests blazed
out of control and, three months later,
the resulting fervor forced the Shah
and his retinue from the country.10
So too, the Arab Spring began with a
fire. On December 17, 2010 Tunisian
street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set
himself alight to protest his treatment at the hands of the police, who’d
slapped and spit on him. The last indignity came when the police confiscated his scales, the universal symbol
of justice, with which he measured
out his life’s work. Bouazizi’s act of
self-immolation spread from Sidi
Bouzid to Tunis – and then to Sanaa, Cairo and Deraa. Bouazizi was
more prescient than he might have
ever guessed. “If you don’t see me,
I’ll burn myself,” he shouted at his
tormenters.11
Not surprisingly, the revolutionary
fervor that has gripped the Arab
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MARK PERRY
world has left both Americans and
Europeans as shocked as the audience that witnessed the exchange
between the Hamas and Salafist officials in Beirut in 2005. What are we
to make of this “Arab Spring?” Do we
really see what is happening?12 When
will the fire end?
The great historians of modern revolutions, Crane Brinton and James Billington, were the first to identify the
structures of mass political transformations. While both have been criticized by recent scholars as overly simplistic, they retain their appeal – and
their adherents. Both Brinton and Billington view revolutions as organic:
proceeding along a political arc that
begins when a handful of organizers
sense the weakness of an authoritarian state, defy it, then organize violent
street actions that lead, inevitably, to
the overthrow of the “old order.”
While Brinton and Billington disagree on some points (Brinton identifies a government’s financial crisis
as a revolution’s primal precursor,
Billington argues that the spread of
subversive movements is essential),
both identify revolutions as urban,
young, and seeded by the ideas first
seen on the streets of Boston and Paris -- of liberté, fraternité and égalité.
Revolutions, both believe, begin with
a spark, become a fire and end with a
conflagration. This structure is often
described as following the course of
a clock’s pendulum, as revolutionary
societies swing from a stable political center to the unstable extremes,
where instruments of revolutionary
terror, led by extremists, cleanse the
30 Insight Turkey
nation. The message is unmistakable:
Moderates do not storm barricades.
It is a commonplace to note that no
two revolutions are alike. Yet, Brinton
and Billington’s narratives describe
precisely the kinds of movements that
became the Arab Spring. All began
with a symbolic event – an immolation in Tunisia, fiery protests in Cairo
and Sanaa, an uprising in Deraa13 –
all took place in societies governed
by an increasingly weak and bankrupt government, all were fueled by
disaffected youth, all were incubated
in cities, all featured the overthrow of
the old order and all were fueled by
violence.14
In June of 2012, in an article in Foreign Policy, political analyst Charles
Holmes used Brinton to identify the
course of the Arab Spring, while focusing on what he called “the three
Ms of Egypt: the military, the mosque
and the masses.” Citing Brinton,
Holmes accurately predicted the
events he thought we would soon
witness in the streets of Cairo. “Despite the popular revolt against Hosni
Mubarak’s regime last year,” he wrote,
“it remains true that the only political contest that counts in Egypt has
pitted its military generals against the
mosque’s imams and leaders.”15
Holmes’s analysis, composed prior
to Morsi’s election to the presidency,
turned out to be true, and is likely to
remain so: the electorate that rewarded Mohamed Morsi with the presidency turned on him, paving the way
for the coup that brought General
Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to power. Yet, and
A FIRE IN THE MINDS OF ARABS: THE ARAB SPRING IN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
Egyptian army
blocked the
anti-coup
demonstrators
from entering
Tahrir Square.
AA
has Holmes (and Brinton) foresaw, it
now seems likely that Sisi’s hold on
the presidency will be as weak, and
perhaps as temporary, as his predecessors. Indeed, Sisi’s rise may not mark
the Egyptian revolution’s end so much
as its beginning, as the class of moderates represented by both are shoved
aside by the surprisingly persistent
street violence that remains the hallmark of the Egyptian transformation.
This violence is a salient feature of
all revolutions – and what separates
them from the casual revolutions
of stable societies. We all catch ourselves, from time to time, talking
about a music revolution, a revolution
in taste and style or, more recently,
the information revolution, but these
kinds of revolutions, broadly influential though they may be, do not reach
into everyone’s living room. Revolutions in shoe design are bloodless, political revolutions are not. This is the
point of Hannah Arendt’s little-read
but highly respected On Revolution,
in which she argues that the purpose
of revolution is freedom, the empowering of the people.16 Revolutions do
not begin from above, but from below – often by a small group of people
– who believe the state can be toppled
and are willing to convince the great
mass of the people that they are right.
“Even where the loss of authority is
quite manifest,” Arendt writes, “revolutions can break out and succeed
only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its
collapse and, at the same time, willing
to assume power, eager to organize
and to act together for a common
purpose. The number of such men
need not be great; ten men acting
together, as Mirabeau once said, can
make a hundred thousand tremble
apart from each other.” Which is why it is that in political
revolutions it is not the church or
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The violence that sparked the
fire will grow and spread. The
rulers of Jordan, Qatar, the
Emirates and Saudi Arabia live
in fear that the Arab Spring
will come to their countries
the nobility (or the mosque and the
military), but rather the people (in
Holmes’s term, “the masses”) that
matter. And while a small handful
of organizers can spark a revolution,
and often by a simple act of defiance,
it is the great masses of the people
who impel a revolution, who give it
its meaning. It is not Paine, or Robespierre, or Kerensky -- or Sisi – who
are the agents of change, but the people themselves.17
This belief was articulated, most elegantly, at the beginning of our own
era, in 1789, by Emmanuel Joseph
Sieyes, whose pamphlet Qu’est-ce que
le tiers-état? (What Is The Third Estate?) asked a series of questions that
seeded change in France and later in
Europe: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now
in the political order? Nothing. What
does it ask? To become something.”18
Which is simply to say that in Tunisia
and in Egypt, in particular, but also in
Yemen and Syria, it is the Arab peoples and not a society’s imams or generals, who will determine the outcome
of the Arab Spring. In these revolutions, as in all revolutions, Mao’s axi32 Insight Turkey
om that “power comes from the barrel
of a gun” is turned on its head. Power
comes not from the barrel of a gun,
but from the mobs in the streets.19
Future historians will undoubtedly
spend lifetimes studying the course
of the Arab revolutions, just as the
current historical community remains consumed with the events of
Boston, Paris, Petrograd and Tehran.
But it also seems likely that -- if Brinton, Billington and Arendt are correct (that revolutions are, by their nature, structural, broadly predictable
and violent) – historians will see in
these revolutions what very few of us
can see in them now. Even so, Brinton, Billington and Arendt offer a set
of certain, if unintended, guideposts
(what Brinton calls “uniformities”)
for what awaits those in the streets of
Tunis and Cairo.
The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria are not “palace revolutions,” but mark deep and irreversible
changes in the Arab world. The revolutions have not reached their endpoint, they are only beginning;
- The major historical figures that
led these revolutions in their earliest
days will be swept away. Moderates
do not storm barricades. In France,
Danton gave way to Robespierre, in
Russia Kerensky was succeeded by
Lenin and then by Stalin, in China
Sun Yat-sen was eclipsed by Chiang
Kai-shek and (later) Mao. It may be
that future generations will remember Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as well as we
now remember Abolhassan Benisadr
– which is to say: not at all.
A FIRE IN THE MINDS OF ARABS: THE ARAB SPRING IN REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
- The violence that sparked this fire
will grow and spread. The rulers of
Jordan, Qatar, the Emirates and Saudi
Arabia live in fear that the Arab Spring
will come to their countries. Consuming fires of this size are not often
contained, but spread. These rulers
are worried because they should be;
- The “deep state” in Tunisia, Egypt,
Yemen and Syria is not only not very
deep, it is likely already gone. In
Egypt, in particular, the pendulum
continues to swing to the extremes.
So it is that while we (we in the West)
remain consumed with the size of the
demonstration in all of these nations,
it is their persistence that is important;
Which is not to ignore the overriding
question that is now the focus of discussions from Washington to London.
What is it that we, we in the West, can
and should do to influence and shape
these events? In this, we are once
again guided by history. The events of
1789 shocked the world, but were felt
most deeply in England, where Prime
Minister William Pitt the Younger
considered a host of responses -- from
a full military intervention to defend
the French royal family to a studied
and subdued non-interference.
For the French revolutionaries, Pitt
(even more so than the feckless Louis
XVI) represented the world’s reactionary forces. It was Pitt, the revolutionaries charged, who planned
“the treason of Toulon,” seeded
counterrevolutionary conspiracies in
the streets of Paris and authored
“vast plots against the Republic.”20 In
fact, Pitt, like today’s Barak Obama
(blamed by some Egyptians for supporting the “terrorist” Muslim Brotherhood and, by others, for plotting
the Sisi coup) diligently maintained
his distance from the revolution, convinced there was little he could do to
control it.21 Instead, he intended (as
he wrote) to “persevere in neutrality”
and “to take the utmost care” in issuing any statement that would construed as either supporting or opposing the revolutionaries. Instead, Pitt
constructed what can best be called
a “fire break,” jailing British radicals
allied with the French revolutionary
regime at the same time that he distanced himself from ideological conservatives who opposed it.22
Pitt’s path can serve as a talisman for
our own era. Not only is there is little we can do to influence the events
sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi, any
interference either in support of the
revolutionaries or their antagonists
would be resented – and is sure to
fail. In truth, our best policy is to do
what firefighters do when faced with
an overwhelming conflagration: they
let it burn. For, in truth, the fire that
we are witnessing cannot be extinguished: it is not in Tunis or Cairo
or Sanaa or Damascus – it is in the
minds of Arabs.
Endnotes
1. The substance of this, and several other meet-
ings with representatives of Islamist groups, was
summarized by the author in a series of articles
that appear online in Asia Times. See, http://www.
atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC31Ak02.html
2. Hamas won the legislative elections held in
January of 2006, just a little over one month after the prediction given in Beirut. See, http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012600372.html
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MARK PERRY
3. The Salafist repeated expressed his disdain
for Saudi Wahhabism, which he viewed as “a heretical form of Islam.” The comment provided a
context for later U.S. criticisms of Saudi Arabia’s
support for Salafists in Syria, whom the Saudi
government supported.
4.http://www.nyfreedom.com/fire.htm
5.http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/
fire-bell-night-quotation
6.http://tyberven.tripod.com/
7.http://www.executedtoday.com/2012/10
/29/1812-claude-francois-de-malet-and-hisconspirators/
8.http://silverandexact.files.wordpress.com/
2012/02/liberty-leading-the-people-eugc3a8nedelacroix-1830.jpg
9.Cited in Fire In The Minds of Men, James
Billington (Basic Books: New York, 1980), p. 5.
10.The notion that revolutions are fired by ideas
is now a commonplace. George W. Bush used
the conceit in his second inaugural: “Because we
have acted in the great liberating tradition of this
nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom,” he said. “And as hope kindles hope, millions
more will find it. By our efforts we have lit a fire
as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those
who feel its power; it burns those who fight its
progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”
See, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/
articles/radical-son/
11.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/
feb/12/egypt-cairo-street-protests-tunisiamubarak-obama
12. There is general agreement that the term Arab
Spring was first used in an article in Foreign Policy by Middle East analyst Marc Lynch, who later
wrote in detail about the movement in his book,
The Arab Uprising, The Unfinished Revolutions of the
New Middle East, (New York: Public Affairs, 2013)
13.And, I should add, the uprising in Manama,
whose arc has yet to be determined. The revolution in Bahrain will almost certainly take the same
path as those in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria,
but it is likely (given the intervention of Saudi Arabia in support of Bahrain’s rulers) that its timeline
will be much longer.
14.Some readers will likely disagree with my
characterization of events in Syria as revolutionary, arguing that what that nation is facing is
more in the order of a civil war. I will not argue this
point, though I will not cede it, particularly considering that the seeds for that conflict (whether
revolutionary or internecine) fall within the general categories named by Brinton and Billington.
15.Charles Holmes, “The Five Stages of the
34 Insight Turkey
Egyptian Revolution,” Foreign Policy, June 15,
2012. See, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles
/2012/06/15/the_five_stages_of_egypt_s_
revolution#sthash.J1oxPYIb.dpuf
16.http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cul/summary/
v074/74.soni.html
17.Writing in The Guardian in February of 2011,
Slavoj Zizek commented that what was true for
Paris in 1789 was true for Tahrir in 2011, though
Western leaders had difficulty understanding
that fact. “When President Obama welcomed the
uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion
that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo
and Alexandria did not want their demands to be
acknowledged by the government, they denied
the very legitimacy of the government. They
didn’t want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a
dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn’t
simply want a new government that would listen
to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state.” See, http://www.theguardian.com/
global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square
18.See, http://faculty.smu.edu/rkemper/cf_3333/
Sieyes_What_is_the_Third_Estate.pdf
19.Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, argued that
mass street movements are capable of checking
and overawing even the most powerful state, as
every successful revolution shows. In a revolution, he writes, “every decision is liberating.” In a
revolution it is crowds that have power, not those
carrying guns or riding on tanks. The salient feature of the mob that stormed the Bastille is that
they were unarmed, as were those who gathered
in Tahrir Square in Cairo in January of 2011.
20.http://books.google.com/books?id=Jo
YNr3k9I9kC&pg=PA173&lpg=PA173&dq=the
+treason+of+toulon&source=bl&ots=UlwjX
TwjX3&sig=Qs3lulph9pgiryiY4xZvd-ZejKQ&
hl=en&sa=X&ei=3ZvIUqmVIPPJsQSzyYKYDQ
&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20
treason%20of%20toulon&f=false
21.Pitt made his position clear at the end of his
prime ministry. He abhorred the violence in
France, while conceding that there was nothing he
could do to stop it. His decision was not simply
political, he firmly believed that the events in
France were historical, that is to say: beyond his
influence. See p. 240, http://books.google.com/
books?id=RKVCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA186&lpg
=PA186&dq=william+pitt+on+the+french+revo
lution&source=bl&ots=3Br26DP2fH&sig=UkIuR
CMnENprP3af4SksZmx-fgA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=w
7HJUvq5NqTksASd94CgDQ&ved=0CEUQ6AEwA
zgU#v=onepage&q=william%20pitt%20on%20
the%20french%20revolution&f=false
22.http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.
php?id=2454