Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East

406 Pages·2013·2.988 MB·English

by  Paul Amar, Vijay Prashad

PAUL AMAR VIJAY PRASHAD editors
D I S PAT C H E S
F R O M T H E
A R A B S P R I N G
Understanding the
New Middle East
dispatches from the arab spring
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Paul Amar and Vijay Prashad
Editors
Dispatches from
the Arab Spring
Understanding the New Middle East
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
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Copyright 2013 LeftWord Books
First published in the United States in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dispatches from the Arab spring : understanding the new Middle East / Paul
Amar and Vijay Prashad, Editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-8998-9 (hc) isbn 978-0-8166-9012-1 (pb)
1. Arab Spring, 2010– 2. Arab countries—Politics and government—21st
century. 3. Middle East—Politics and government—21st century. I. Amar, Paul
(Paul Edouard), 1968– II. Prashad, Vijay.
JQ1850.A91D58 2013
909'.097492708312—dc23
2013018884
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Introduction Revolutionizing the Middle East
Paul Amar and Vijay Prashad vii
Tunisia Nouri Gana 1
Egypt Paul Amar 24
Bahrain Adam Hanieh 63
Saudi Arabia Toby C. Jones 89
Yemen Sheila Carapico 101
Algeria Susan Slyomovics 122
Morocco Merouan Mekouar 135
Libya Anjali Kamat and Ahmad Shokr 157
Syria Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto 204
Jordan Jillian Schwedler 243
Lebanon Maya Mikdashi 266
Palestine Toufic Haddad 282
Iraq Haifa Zangana 308
Sudan Khalid Mustafa Medani 325
Acknowledgments 355
Contributors 357
Index 363
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Introduction
Revolutionizing the Middle East
paul amar and vijay prashad
Imperious despot, insolent in strife,
Lover of ruin, enemy of life!
You mock the anguish of an impotent land
Whose people’s blood has stained your tyrant hand,
And desecrate the magic of this earth,
Sowing your thorns, to bring despair to birth.
—Abul-Qasim al-Shabbi, Ila Tughat al-Alam
it is time to rethink how we all apprehend the Arab world. The
myriad revolts and revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring unleashed
forces of emancipation and spirits of social justice that swept across the
region with unprecedented speed, ferocity, and joy. As these epochal
movements faced violent devolutions and frustrating detours, horizons
of transformation remained in question. But there is no doubt that
the ways we in the region and around the world learn about, report on,
and appreciate Arab peoples and politics were definitively revolution-
ized. In this light, this volume reintroduces global publics to the Arab
world and dispenses with old paradigms of understanding. We set aside
“authoritarianism studies” that depicted governments as impermeable
monoliths. We dispose of the “political sociology of the Arab Street”
vii
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that represented popular movements as mindless, reactive mobs. And
we dismiss the “Arab exceptionalism” that for decades conceived of the
region as culturally unfit for the cultivation of democratic politics or
social justice claims. Like the dictators of so many Arab countries, these
regimes of perception have been toppled, and in their places we offer
fresh starts. We offer modes of engagement and analysis inspired by
the methodology of revolt, and our chapters are authored by activist
scholars whose writings pulse with the rhythms of revolt. We provide
a comprehensive reintroduction to the entire region, not just those
countries and spectacles that most captivated the media. Our aim is to
weave comprehension of new forms of domination and resistance into
the whole cloth of social history, political geography, cultural creativity,
global political economy, and power politics. We insist that the study
of the Arab world is no longer limited to grasping the intractability of
imperial or colonial or bellicose pasts: it is turning to recognize the
exciting imminence of global futures.
After the match of revolt was first lit in Tunisia in December 2010,
flames moved rapidly across North Africa to the Gulf states and onward
into West Asia. Urban centers and rural enclaves of Egypt, Bahrain,
Yemen, Libya, and Syria filled with everyday people who were willing to
sacrifice their lives for a new dispensation. The guns of the regimes came
out rapidly, unwilling to let go of the way things were and, to their minds,
should always be. Every ruling elite believes itself eternal and, even if
secular, in its place by divine right. Every ruling elite believes, as well,
that those who rise up are either deluded or drugged, proxies for some
global chess game that they do not understand. But the self-immolation
of Mohamed Bouazizi set the dial to Courage, and, despite the gunfire
and the tear gas, the crowds paralyzed their rulers and opened a new
historical time for the region.
This remarkable set of events has been called the Arab Spring, in
honor of the annual rebirth of nature after the winter thaw. But there
is nothing cyclical about these protests, nor is there anything natural.
These are the products of a set of unique events, based on local politi-
cal grievances and global structural forces, and they are the products
of human bravery and ingenuity. Our book recognizes the currency of
the expression Arab Spring but styles these transformations more in
terms of a new Arab Revolt, al-Thawra al-Arabiyya, a nod certainly to
viii introduction
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the great uprisings of 1916–18 and 1936–39, and in terms of a new Arab
Revolution, as it is referred to by peoples and parties within the region
today. This term hearkens back to the Nasserite phase of 1952–67, but
it also reflects the fact that various mobilizations in the Arab world
today are referencing, in contentious and contradictory ways, the Ira-
nian Revolution of 1979, Eastern Europe’s civic revolutions of 1989–92,
South America’s antimilitary uprisings of the 1980s, “Pink Tide” new
left populisms of the 1990s, and Bolivarian revolutions of the 2000s.
Each term—spring, revolt, revolution—has its advocates and its
detractors. The term Arab also has its limitations, particularly when
the Revolt settled into Libya and across the Maghreb. There non-Arab
Imazighen/Amazigh people (known derogatorily as the Berber) forced a
crucial part of the uprising, and one of their grievances is that they were
discriminated against by the Arabs.
Arab Spring, nonetheless, has become a shorthand term for the exhil-
arating show of force of suppressed social classes against the despotic
regimes that governed from the Maghreb to the Mashriq, from one end
of the geography that holds Arabic-speaking peoples to the other. But
what is it that galvanized them, and why did their revolt happen as if
in a tidal wave? How do we understand the initial moment of 2010–11,
and the time that follows? How do we grasp the local dynamics, the
hasty removal of such long-standing leaders (Qaddafi, forty-two years;
Mubarak, thirty years; Ben Ali, twenty-three years), their security states
willing to dispense with them when confronted by largely nonviolent
protesters? How do we make sense of the imperial retreat in the face of
these protests, an imperial power bloc from the Atlantic world and its
Gulf Arab emirs, whose tentacles suffocated the dreams of the Arabs
with maniacal intensity? How do we make sense of the restoration of the
older imperial power bloc, the Atlantic world with its Gulf Arab clients
and Israel, using the Trojan horses of the International Monetary Fund
and humanitarian intervention to make inroads into North Africa and
West Asia?
The retreat came momentarily in the early part of 2011, and then
counterrevolution found ways to reassert itself (only provisionally, we
sense) in the Arabian Peninsula and then in Libya and Syria. In Egypt
and across the region, newly legitimated Islamist leaders surprised
many observers by tucking themselves in swiftly and comfortably with
introduction ix
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