Written by Al Naffah | 11 August 2011
Posted in Comment - Middle East

Egypt uprising. Photography: Jonathan Rashad

The immortal words of the 10^th century Iraqi poet Al-Mutanabbi - arguably Arabic literature's answer to William Shakespeare - are as appropriate in their original manuscripts as in the drawl of a Damascus taxi driver. Such is the proverbial nature of colloquial Arabic that the past masters of literature survive; their message eternally repeated and reinforced by the mouths of all that speak it.

Recent events in the Middle East have reinforced another phrase, with its own connotations and nuances. The 'Arab Spring' that was declared to have first blossomed with the death of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi has now been with us for over seven months.  The term itself is now a vivid kaleidoscope spanning revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, war in Libya and major unrest in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and many other countries. Even as we enter August, the 'summer' many predicted still seems a long way off.  In many instances, it looks as if autumn will come first.

Whilst the Arabic language press appear to have almost universally opted for the more objective term 'Arab Revolutions' (ath-thawrat al-arabiya) to describe the ongoing events, the Western media have preferred labels of a more prophetic - even optimistic - nature: an 'Arab Awakening' which presupposes an 'Arab Wakefulness'. An 'Arab Spring' presupposes an 'Arab Summer'. The very title is coloured by a host of expectations.

But in times of great change, it is all too easy to get carried away.

As the cracks started to show in Tunisia and Egypt, some were quick to draw comparisons with the  fall of communist regimes in 1989. Ruthless regimes representing outdated ideologies, all of them falling like dominoes – we'd seen it all before, apparently.

But it hasn't quite turned out like that. And as similarities with 1989 begin to wane, NATO forces unable to oversee an end to the stalemate in Libya and opposition movements in Syria and Yemen stalling, the comparison has become less and less fashionable. Using history as a measure to explain and predict events often has its benefits, but it can also provide us with a false sense of security when the reality could not be less secure - we have little idea what will happen next.

Attentions have often turned to the slogan of the popular demonstrations. 'The people want to bring down the regime' (ash-shaab yourid isqat an-nizam), has been roughly, and sometimes hastily, interpreted as 'the people want democracy' by many in the West seeking to explain the revolts, enabling us to envisage a strategic goal beyond the current instability.  A winter characterised by corruption, injustice and tyranny – a summer born of efficiency, equality and liberty. It all seems so perfectly logical.

And what about the 'Arab' bit of the 'Arab Spring'? BBC’s Security Correspondent Frank Gardner correctly points out the statistics: out of 22 Arab countries, five have had uprisings, one has had major clashes and others have had 'small stirrings of dissent'. Gardner warns against the application of a 'one-size-fits-all template to every Arab country currently experiencing upheaval' and reminds us of an often overlooked fact: 'The Arab world does not tend to behave as one homogeneous bloc any more than Europe does; it is a thousand different shades of grey and all the richer for it'. Every situation is different, as we have seen. The message is clear: Under no circumstances can we afford to generalise. But with our favourite seasonal label, the tendency has been to do just that.

One wonders what Edward Said would make of all this. In his controversial but nonetheless influential 1978 book Orientalism, the late Palestinian-American Columbia University professor warns of the dangers of crude categorisation and prejudices which he claims dominate Western perception of the Arab world. All Arab societies are homogeneous, dissimilar or even outright antithetical to their Western counterparts - a prejudice patterned with romantic ideals of an Arabian 'other' that all but cements the divide between the West and the East.

Orientalism has been rife for centuries in Western scholarship, literature and art, Said argues, from the writings of Sir Richard Francis Burton and Gustave Flaubert to Disney's Aladdin. Are we in danger of 'orientalising' the political change sweeping the Middle East? And does an Orientalist outlook bring with it certain foregone conclusions and undue assumptions? A 'Springtime in Arabia' does seem to fit rather nicely within the Orientalist canon.

Of course, it is important to keep things in perspective. What is currently happening across much of the Middle East is not to be underestimated. There exists little dispute that a large proportion of those protesting are doing so for values and rights taken for granted in democratic systems of government. There is little dispute that current, or recently toppled, autocratic regimes fall short of providing these values and rights in the eyes of many. And there is little dispute that their time is quickly running out, or has run out already. At the risk of engaging in springtime semantics – we know much about the seed, but we're only kidding ourselves if we think we know anything about the flower.

It was not Hillary Clinton but rather Muammar Gaddafi who stated that 'democracy, if put into practice, is indisputably the ideal method of government', in his now infamous 1975 Green Book. Based on his 42 years of uninterrupted rule, evidently Gaddafi's understanding of the term bears little resemblance to any variant of Western liberal democracy as we know it. Neither indeed, does the system employed in the Arab world's only recognised 'democracy', Lebanon, which requires the distribution of political power to be proportional to religious representation.

That is not for a moment to assume that democracy is incompatible with the Arab world, for such a claim would be to ignore the very crux of this argument, and begin a whole new debate entirely. We cannot know until it has been tried. Nevertheless, we can be relatively sure that any Arab 'democracy' resulting from these current uprisings will be subject to influences so profound that there exists a large probability that what emerges does not quite resemble the 'Western-style democracy' many previously expected would characterise an 'Arab summer'. Islamic fundamentalism will have as important a role to play in any future Arab government as it does currently; perhaps with added legitimacy, given the free elections that one would expect to accompany any democratic system. And let's not mention the other 'I' word. As Gardner rightly reminds us, 'when free and fair elections do take place, there is no guarantee they will automatically usher in better government '. We cannot afford to jump to conclusions.

I hasten to clarify that this is not a call to be unduly pessimistic – quite the contrary.  All those who support democratic principles and values have good reason to remain optimistic that political change in the Middle East will bring with it great advances. All those who believe in the removal of despotic dictators who murder their own people can remain optimistic that this is eventually achieved, at least in certain cases. And all those who believe that democracy will prevail in the Middle East need not change their minds just yet. It just might look a little different to what was expected, and take a little longer. Perhaps a lot longer.

In the meantime though, one would be foolish to ignore Al-Mutanabbi's words.

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