Looks like the anger of the patient Arab is finally beginning to scorch the deserts. From Maghreb in the west to the Levant in the east, raging masses are sweeping the Arabian streets, torching the fortresses of their tin pot dictators. Their demand: Freedom and bread, in that order.
Already, the iron men of Tunisia and Egypt have passed into history. The others are awaiting their Ides.
It all started last December when an impoverished street vendor in the central Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid, immolated himself to protest his hopeless life. Within weeks, his daring modus was picked up by scores of people across the Arab world including North Africa, thus triggering visions of a trans-continental Intifada.
Compared to the earlier uprisings, though, the latest one has a few redeeming differences. First and foremost, this one, unlike the Palestinian uprisings, is not intended to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Nor is it seeking to resurrect a long mummified Caliphate. This is an uprising designed to dethrone the local effendis and pashas, who perpetuated themselves into eternity, the potentates who turned their illegitimacy into a divine right to rule, like they have been doing as brazenly as in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, Syria and Libya, and through duct-tape reforms as in Egypt and Jordan.
After Tunisia and Egypt, the flames are now leaping up to the rest of the Arabian skies. Algeria and Yemen are bracing for the inevitable, while in Morocco and Mauritania, Sudan and Syria and even in Jordan, a restless population is busy plotting their new destiny. Middle East experts claim that these stirrings could be the baby steps of what they predict to become the giant strides of a revolution that would change the Arabian fate lines.
They say the Arab world’s Berlin Wall moment has finally come.
While only the politically naïve would buy the argument that the current movement would lead to the collapse of the Arab oligarchy in a flash, like it happened in Eastern Europe in the 90s, not many are betting their pennies or pounds, either, that the movement would get crushed like the student uprising in China. There is consensus only on one thing — that not since the bread riots of 1977 has the Arab world seen such public wrath against its military-propped regimes and hereditary monarchies as it’s witnessing now.
Why is the present uprising seen as different and far reaching? For one, this has been a movement engineered by modern technology. For a people who are only used to changing regimes mostly through violent coups and assassinations, or, at best, through guided parliamentary elections, uprooting entrenched regimes through social networks like Facebook would sound futuristic. But that’s exactly what is happening in a world where people’s commitment to their governance has so far been in inverse proportion to their commitment to religion.
Small beginning
The Egyptian uprising began with the details of a youth’s killing in Alexandria circulating through a Facebook group. Set up in the name of Khalid Said, the 28-year old victim of police brutality, the group gave a call for protests across the country. Messages sent through e-mail and SMS asked Egyptians to gather at Cairo’s Tahrir Square, or the Liberation Square.
What eventually won the day for a people, armed with weapons no more lethal than their laptops and mobile phones, was their grit and determination kept alive through their virtual connectivity. Egypt has thus become the first country in history to stage a political revolution through fibre optics.
With Egypt showing the way, the rest of the Arab world is getting wired up for a redux of the same text-message revolution.
Again, this uprising, unlike the previous ones, is not led by the Green Flag of Faith, but by the colours of nationalism. While Allah-o-Akbar is still the marching song for the thousands storming the streets, they are not led by the mullahs and muthawas, but by young middle class men and women, most of them in their 20s and 30s. The political Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and even the more radical ones like al-Qaeda and other sundry outfits are only peripheral players, at least for now.
But the most striking feature of this Intifada is that it is not Arab or even Islamic in spirit. The signature is, unmistakably, far eastern, more precisely Buddhist or Hindu. Consider the following: The Tunisian movement began with a vendor’s suicide. It was followed by several other instances of self-immolation elsewhere. In Egypt, two men set themselves on fire in the first days of the protests; one of them later succumbed to his injuries. In Mauritania, a middle-aged businessman alerted journalists before setting himself ablaze in a car parked outside the Senate. In Algeria, Tunisia’s next-door neighbour, there have been at least seven immolation attempts since the uprising began.
Self-immolation as a political protest has been a popular weapon in countries with Buddhist and Hindu influence, but not in the Islamic world. Even when militant Islam turned suicide bombing into one of its deadliest weapons against stronger enemies, official Islam forbids taking one’s own life or separating the body from the soul as taboo. For some strange reason, the Arab Muslims, this time, have made a distinction between self-immolation and suicide bombing. This revolution is being fought not by suicide bombers but by self-immolators, by people who don’t kill others, but kill themselves. Martyrdom is made sublime not by killing one’s enemy but by shaming him.