Where did these uprisings, wholly unanticipated in the West, come from and where do they lead? I spoke to Fuad Nahdi, a seasoned observer of the Arab and Muslim world who has travelled extensively in the region as a journalist for Reuters, The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian and the BBC, most recently contributing leader articles for the New York Times on the unfolding events in the Middle East. Nahdi is a dedicated Muslim, founder of the moderate Muslim magazine Q News, and I met him just back from his Hajj trip to Mecca, but he is also a Londoner and convinced secularist. I wanted to find out how the events of the past year looked to him. Had he expected them? “The notion propagated by some in the West that acceptance of dictatorship and lack of freedom is part of the Arab mentality is false,” says Nahdi, “This revolt was long overdue. People reached a tipping point. These governments failed in the basic things governments are supposed to do – to provide security, jobs, respect for human life and dignity. It’s just too much, someone running the country for 30 or 40 years, siphoning off the wealth as if it belonged to their family. People wanted change.”
As for the actual trigger for the uprising, he locates that in a surprising place. “When someone asked me at the time why this happened I didn’t call it the Arab Spring,” he says. “I said, ‘This is Obama’s revolution.’” While many may have forgotten the time when Obama, now so beleaguered at home, seemed to promise a new alignment of the West and the Rest, the American president’s speech in Cairo in June 2009, where he spoke of the right to freedom and self-expression, “inspired a whole Arab generation”. This was combined with what Nahdi sees as a changing of the West’s attitude to its client states, the dictatorships it had propped up and supported for decades. “In 1982 when the Assad regime in Syria crushed an uprising and killed 20,000 people, nobody blinked an eye.” When the people took to the streets in Tunis and Cairo in early 2011, Western governments were no longer willing to simply ignore government repression, and “suddenly Mubarak was afraid to send in his troops and crush it.”
He also credits the emergence of social media, which focused worldwide attention on events on the ground. “It’s not just about mobilising people to come and join the protests, but also about telling the whole world what is happening. I think this made it possible for the revolutions to take place, because the dictators were afraid to crush them. In this globalised village, this would no longer be tolerated.”
Yet, while the protests that toppled the regimes had a youthful image, and were underpinned by liberal notions of freedom and democracy, the political parties that have had the most success in the wake of the revolutions have been conservative in character. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennhada party won 41 per cent of the vote in October’s elections, while in the November elections to Egypt’s new parliament, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was outlawed under Mubarak, was backed by 40 per cent of the electorate. Why has a revolution that appeared to be built on liberal foundations led to the triumph of Islamic conservatism? “Egypt has got nearly 90 million people,” explains Nahdi. “The total number who demonstrated, even if you are very generous in your estimate, was less than two million. Those two million were the residents in major urban centres. They are the people who have had the iPad 1 and want the iPad 2, or who have got a Toyota and want a BMW. The majority of the people are living in poverty and were not part of the revolutionary process, because they are too busy worrying about the next meal.”
Rural voters are more likely to vote for traditional and conservative parties, and more likely to be religious, but for Nahdi this isn’t the full explanation. It’s also a rational democratic choice. “People want to give a chance to the Islamic parties to see if they can deliver,” he says. “These people have not come from Mars. They are part and parcel of the people. They have never been given a chance. They are there because they have earned credibility over time. While the West trained the armies, and supported regimes that exploited and subjugated the people, the mullahs were the ones who offered resistance. So they have credibility, people will listen to them. Whether their solutions are relevant or valid is a different question.”
It is this question that is now causing concern for observers in the West. Having welcomed the triumph of freedom in the Middle East last year, some are forecasting the rise of a new set of Islamic theocracies in the region. Does Nahdi think such concerns are valid? “The Muslim Brotherhood is talked about as if it is one monolithic entity, but there are many Muslim Brotherhoods, and there are different strands of what they understand politically, socially and culturally, so you have got to put that into perspective. I have tried to read all the manifestos of the political parties, and I haven’t seen anything out of this world, anything that is inspired by the divine. They are people trying to work out if they can deal with issues of corruption, unemployment, roads, hospitals and education. I don’t think any of the parties’ ideas are going to be against the interests of the people, or the people will not support them, they will revolt against them.”
Which brings us on to Sharia. While Tunisia’s Islamist leader, Rashid Al-Ghannushi, has distanced the Ennhada party from Sharia, the institution of an Islamic legal structure is integral to the Muslim Brotherhood platform, and Libya’s interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil caused controversy in October when he said the country’s National Transitional Council had “adopted the Islamic Sharia as the main source of law”. Does Nahdi not see this as a cause for concern? “The fear about Islamic politics is a valid one,” he says. “Islamic politics has been misused by some elements who hold extremist views. But when you talk about Sharia, what is Sharia? There are so many things you have to understand about Sharia – it is not all about the chopping off of hands, or the subjugation of women.”
What does he mean by Sharia then? “The Sharia is for the protection of five things: your intellect, your spirituality, your property, your honour and your family. The family is considered to be a fundamental brick of building the society. So the laws are made to protect the family. And from the Islamic perspective, the right of citizenship involves not protecting your rights and safety for this world, but also for the hereafter, because the hereafter is also important.”
There is a lot of heightened rhetoric and scaremongering around the idea of Sharia in the West, and certainly many of the basic values of the Muslim Brotherhood – family, honour, property – would not look out of place in the manifesto of a centre-right European party. But what of those who are not concerned with the hereafter, or whose notion of family differs from the mainstream? What about the fate of the minority religious groups, like the 25 Coptic Christians gunned down by security forces in Egypt in October? What of the atheists? If the new democracies in the Middle East are to be built on Sharia, it is difficult for Western observers to retain the optimism they felt watching the crowds call for freedom in Tahrir Square last February.
Nahdi concedes that the risk of sectarian violence stalks the region, yet he cautions against Western hypocrisy. “The West cannot have its democratic cake and eat it,” he says. “We cannot have a situation like we had with Hamas in Gaza where we keep moving the standards. If we say that it is the voice of the majority that should be heard, who are we to decide that an Islamist party that is voted into power in a legitimate way is not good for these people? In the past, much that has come from the West has been for the oppression and exploitation of the people. Now people criticise the Muslim Brotherhood, because they don’t want to do anything with the West in a relationship in which they are being exploited or their people are being abused or not treated with integrity. What will the West do now? Is it going to value its interests in the region, or is it going to value the rights of the people?”
For all our anxieties about Sharia and Islamism, can political leaders and commentators in the West legitimately turn around and pronounce the revolutions a failure when the people exercise their newly acquired democratic right to vote for parties with which they disagree? While Westerners might wring their hands over the choices Arab voters make, Nahdi still thinks it is important to remember for how long the people of the West stood by as their governments supported oppressive dictatorships. The West has a huge responsibility in the region, but must learn a new form of engagement. Despite the successful ousting of Gaddafi, for example, Nahdi holds to the view that NATO’s military action was the wrong approach, and has sown the seeds of further conflict. “I thought there was a lot of room for a negotiated settlement in Libya,” he says. “The African Union under South African leadership was looking at ways to negotiate a smooth transition. But now I think Libyan society has been shattered, and there was a lot of unnecessary blood spilled. There were nearly 30,000 bombing sorties, which destroyed almost the entire infrastructure of the country and killed innocent people. Libya is a tribalistic society, and we have removed some of the problems but created even deeper ones.”
Similarly, in those Arab nations where the uprisings have not been successful, Nahdi sees a danger of further degeneration into chaos. In Yemen, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh clings on to power, he points to the fact that there is the highest number of weapons per capita in the world, while in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad has killed more civilians in his suppression of the revolt than Gaddafi did in Libya, regional and religious divisions mean there is a risk of a continued bloody internal conflict even if Assad himself is overthrown or persuaded to step aside. And one year on from the inspirational events in Cairo and Tunis, those still fighting to remove oppressive regimes perhaps face greater challenges. “The first Arab Spring caught everyone unawares,” says Nahdi. “There’s not going to be a second one because the intelligence services and armed forces are going to be ready for them. They will divide, they will switch off the SMS messaging, they will pre-empt things. They have learnt a lot. The regimes in the region have been studying this and making sure that it does not happen again.”
While there are certainly reasons to be pessimistic, it is far too early to write off the Arab Spring as a false dawn. It is perhaps a symptom of the speed of revolutionary upheavals – and the daily-update culture of social media like Twitter – that we want to decide the outcome immediately. Yet as history shows, it takes time for revolutions to give way to stable social and political conditions. “People want to see quickly what’s going on, where it’s going,” says Nahdi. “There’s no deeper attempt to understand what’s happening. There’s a difference between protest and engagement. Protest is just protesting about something, but engaging is also sitting down and thinking about what you are all about. The whole movement needs to move from a state of protest to a process of engagement. By collapsing these dictatorships people are now open and discussing ideas. It is the responsibility of the West to facilitate this, not demonise what is going on. The people will make their own decisions.”
