The Struggle on the Square
My friends, this is a remarkable time to be a student of the Middle East. The news coming out of Cairo is exciting, heart-breaking, astounding, terrifying. It’s ironic that I decided to move my research interests to democratization in the Middle East only a week or so before the uprising began.
The great question, of course, is what exactly to make of what’s going on. Will it prove to be futile? Will it spur the Arab world towards a total democratic transformation? Likely, the answer lies somewhere in between; only time will tell.
You’ll recall that I briefly visited Egypt in 2009 while I lived in Jordan. I reflected here around that time that the Middle East seemed to be a powder keg, and it was a matter of when, not if, the explosion would happen. That hardly makes me a skilled political scientist or even a good predictor; anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the region would have said much the same thing. Human beings are feisty and driven, refusing to be oppressed. Egyptians have been biding their time, making the best of their situation, until a moment of opportunity arrived. (They’ve been notorious, actually, for resisting the regime through biting humor, at Mubarak’s expense, of course.)
Well, the camel’s back has been broken. Exactly how it happened still isn’t clear. It’s likely political scientists like me will build careers around trying to answer that question. And where this momentum will go, no one can tell. Mubarak is still in power. There is nothing to bind him to his promises besides the courage of the Egyptian protesters. However, it seems clear that transformation is on the way: the people of the Middle East have rid themselves of one dictator and struck fear in the heart of another. So much of politics is about relationships of authority between citizen and state. Those relationships, in the Arab world, can never be the same again.
I’d like to make a few concrete points. First, fear of the Muslim Brotherhood is overblown. The Brotherhood has been a fairly moderate outlet for middle class professionals to oppose the regime. Yes, the party promotes the idea of a state governed by Islam; many in the Arab world feel that Islam can provide answers to their malaise and failed attempts at governance since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But that doesn’t mean the Brothers could, or even would, turn that idea into reality. In fact, the Brotherhood has shown admirable restraint recently, pledging not to run a candidate for president (in order to mitigate some Western anxiety), and a desire to work with other factions. What happened in Iran will not happen in Egypt, by any stretch of the imagination; the historical context of the (initially moderate) Iranian Revolution was rather unique, as was its hijacking by a charismatic and extreme cleric.
Second, don’t expect what is happening in Egypt to spread verbatim throughout the region, at least not immediately. For instance, there has been a great deal of coverage of Jordan recently. Jordan is not likely to be the next Egypt. The Hashemite Kingdom has its own host of problems: a substantial majority of the country identifies as Palestinian (putting Jordanians, and their originally Saudi monarchy, seemingly in the minority), unemployment is high, the people are poor, water is extremely scarce. But the king and queen are well-loved, and recent protesters have directed their hostilities almost exclusively at the government instead. The monarchy has identified itself with the essence of being Jordanian, in a way that the person of Mubarak never was to Egypt. The king will likely have to make deep democratic concessions going forward, but I would not expect the monarchy itself to change drastically in the near future. Elsewhere in the region, Syria has thus far been able to contain its people’s dissent. The Gulf monarchies have been successful at essentially bribing their people, whom they don’t need to tax thanks to enormous oil profits. Yemen, though, could be a disaster waiting to happen, and seems the most likely candidate to follow Tunisia’s model, albeit with the potential for renewed civil war and a dangerous strain of violent Islamists taking power.
Gang, we’re at the tip of the iceberg. Political life in the Middle East is likely to look very different in the 21st century than it did in the 20th. There may be difficult times ahead, but I hope that the coming transformations will lead to a hopeful era for the people of the Arab world. The hearth of this transformation is fitting; Tahrir Square means “Liberation Square” in English. Liberation from the chains of tyranny is the great dream of many in the Middle East – freedom to govern themselves, to stand and be heard, to realize their dreams, to build a peaceful and prosperous life and future.
