As Professor Caroleen Sayej handed out her syllabus in Government 236, Middle East Politics, a sense of irony clouded the room. Most of the class was well aware of the uproar and civil disobedience taking place in Tunisia and Egypt that was rocking (and continues to rock) the study of the Middle East. Every article and journal on the syllabus somehow suddenly seemed irrelevant. Even Sayej voiced her concern. “I am having a bit of a panic attack,” she joked.
Who isn’t?
What is happening in Egypt and Tunisia is shocking, exciting, and most of all, puzzling. It is nearly impossible to escape the images of popular uprising and turmoil currently streaming out of Egypt and Tunisia. Nearly every day for the past five weeks, the New York Times, along with many other international papers, has run a huge color front-page photo of triumphant, flag-wielding Arabs reveling in protest against their governments. Constant coverage and the general disillusionment associated with the movements aside, it is hard to make sense of all of this. Nobody predicted it – no scholar, no politician, no historian, no Tunisian, no Egyptian.
Ikram Ladkhar ’13, a native Tunisian student in Washington, D.C. at the time, recounts seeing her country passively mentioned on CNN’s news crawl. “I freaked out and started looking for more information online,” she said. “I couldn’t find anything.” She started asking her friends in Tunisia if they had heard any news. They hadn’t. Suddenly, primarily through social media outlets, word began to spread throughout the country of people killed in protests and the shocking demonstration by Mohammad Bouazizi. Students also started coming out and voicing their opinions.
Popular opinion holds that the actions of Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian, helped fuel the revolutionary spirit in the region. Bouazizi was a desperate college graduate who could not find a job in his native country and felt that his government was ignoring his and his peers’ pleas to find real work. In a rage, he lit himself on fire in protest of his government. A small group of Tunisians began to protest in response to the martyred Bouazizi, whose actions were caught on videotape and quickly went viral. Slowly but surely, protests began to pick up momentum, still as largely local movements.
“There was no idea that the protests would go nationwide,” said Ladkhar. As the protests began to swell, the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali began taking decisive action against his people: schools were shut down indefinitely. A curfew was enacted. Tear gas was used against the citizens of Tunisia. Despite these tried and true tactics of absolute power, the Tunisian people would not submit. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs erupted in fury, spreading word of the revolution.
“Members of the lower class were primarily on the street,” said Ladkhar. “My generation was online posting and spreading the word. The Tunisian streets near my home were a battlefield; I wanted to be there.” As the protests raged on, Ben Ali, in an embarrassing stunt, addressed his people in their native dialect, uttering the oft-quoted sound bite, “I understand you!” He promised constitutional amendments, free and fair elections, and ending Internet censorship; crowds of people were shown cheering on television. Later, news sources revealed that the former president had hired people to do this for him. Tunisia’s fury burned even hotter.
By now, we all know how this story ends. Ben Ali fled the country and now Tunisia is in a transition state, the feelings of liberty and freedom far from fading.
Tunisia is not a typical Arab country—very small, it lays in the Maghreb, or North Africa, and is generally perceived to be a more secular country than its neighbors. As great a victory as Ben Ali’s departure was, no one predicted that this revolutionary feeling would spread through the Middle East, particularly to Egypt, a country generally considered the leader of the Arab world.
Nicole Moomjy ’12 was recently evacuated from Alexandria, Egypt after a brief stint studying abroad. Though Cairo was the focal point of most news sources, many parts of Egypt saw similarly intense protests. Moojmy remembered hearing about protests in Tunisia, but her program didn’t stress their importance. They were generally dismissed as isolated incidents that needed no further investigation or concern.
Life went on as usual in Alexandria. Moojmy and her classmates began asking their professors and Egyptian friends whether they believed Egypt would be next. Most answered no, saying that Egypt was too big to fall to a “domino effect,” although political analysts in America were already predicting the demise of Egypt’s authoritarian regime. If true, this would post a serious threat to American interests in the region, since Hosni Mubarak was a key ally for America.
Around the country, Egyptians took a cue from Tunisia and initiated a revolution of their own. Because the Egyptian government blocked Internet usage by its citizens, Twitter and Facebook accounts were roaring with calls to protest the government, and videos of young Egyptians slamming the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who had been ruling Egypt for the last thirty years. These protests were meant to coincide with a holiday called Police Day, a celebration of the Egyptian National Police. Many citizens came out to protest, but there was still no feeling that the regime was in serious jeopardy.
“People were protesting against ‘the government.’ Mubarak’s name wasn’t being mentioned, for fear of imprisonment or death,” said Moojmy.
Once the phone and Internet services were shut down, the citizens of Egypt began to realize that things were truly going wrong. The next day, they knew another protest would be initiated: people had nowhere to protest but the streets. The protest that followed spurred violence and began placing blame directly on Mubarak. Before leaving, Moomjy herself participated in several of these protests.
Afterward, Moojmy and her peers began hearing turmoil from their rooms in the only dormitory in the country still open. They heard sounds of guns being fired, fires raging, and pleads to stop the violence out of mosque loudspeakers. After a tumultuous round of evacuating the nation, Moojmy returned safely to America. She is now living back on campus and enrolled in classes for the spring semester.
On February 11, Hosni Mubarak stepped down as President of Egypt and transferred power to the military. Crowds erupted in joy, some even waving Tunisian flags. Now, as the citizens of Egypt clean Tahrir Square and contemplate the future of their nation, all we can do in America is wait to see what will happen next.
“They are shattering our expectations,” said Sayej of the Egyptian people. “For me, even though there is a human cost and these things are never clean, it is very inspiring to see that people are in collective action and are organizing and breaking with all of the myths about the region being apolitical and submissive.” Sayej will give a talk about the recent developments in the region on February 17th, where she will delve further into the consequences of the revolutions in the Middle East.
The flames ignited by Bouazizi spread to the rest of the Tunisian nation and found their way into Egypt, leaving the authoritarian regimes of both countries in ashes. In the last month, the events in Tunisia and Egypt have rebutted the preconceived notion of the region as a barren wasteland for democracy. We are living history in the present.
In Sayej’s words, “The stage of state consolidation is ending in the Middle East. Populism or uprisings or social groups are forming, the era of building nationalism and domination and compliance is over.”
This is the post-Islamic Middle East, where the people are not fighting against an external power, but are fighting for their human rights and completing the puzzle of nationhood. The paradigm of study for the Middle East will be in a constant flux for years to come. Professors, start revising your syllabi. •
