Voices of the Arab Spring

Just a few days before Zein El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia, his secret police were torturing a student union leader, Malek Sghiri. After repeated beatings he was brought in front of ‘an old man with sparks flying from his eyes. This was a political interrogation’.

Often, the flame of revolution was passed on from parents to children

The investigator gave Sghiri a cigarette and sat in front of a red file full of papers. Without any emotion, he looked at the youth and said: “In 1991, inside this very building but in a different room, I was one of those who interrogated your father”.

Sghiri’s retort surprised both the old man and himself. “I hope God grants you a long life that you might get to interrogate my son as well.”

I’ve come across this anecdote in a collection of memoirs of the Arab world’s 2011: the award-winning Writing Revolution: The Voices From Tunis To Damascus (recently published by IB Tauris). They reveal very different perspectives from the violent Islamism that increasingly is taking up European attention.

Despite the wide range of experience represented by the eight countries covered, the Tunisian anecdote condenses many themes that emerge: the organised brutality of jaded security forces, the defiant black humour of protesters and organisers of resistance, the surprise of both as societies find new ways of imagining themselves.

With one exception, the accounts were written in 2011. Given what has happened in several countries since – the emergence of well organised Islamist groups of various hues, including thuggish ones – we might expect to find multiple ironies and naïve expectations.

But that’s not the case. Several accounts were written while the struggle to topple the dictator was not yet over (and in some places still isn’t). And, while the memoirs were written in the quick of the events, they’re not quite raw experience. Many of the writers are professional, journalists or creatives and, in any case, their prose conveys experience filtered by numerous discussions with fellow conspirators and activists.

The result can’t be called analysis but it is a set of studied portraits where every detail is chosen to convey what it’s like (or was like) to experience not just the Arab Spring, in its multiple versions, but also the mundane repressiveness of everyday life that preceded it.

Safa Al Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian freelance journalist who feels she must apologise to every Arab (except perhaps, she quips, to Libyans) for being Saudi.

One day, walking in public with her obligatory abaya (head covering), thinking of the contrast between what other Arabs were achieving and the miserly concessions granted in Saudi Arabia, she was accosted by an officer of the religious police, half her size, and asked to close her abaya.

A shouting match develops in a make-up shop and within moments other religious police converge on the scene, “with crackling walkie-talkies and hovering security guards... People around me froze, staring. They couldn’t tell if I was crazy or what the religious police were doing”.

This is a portrait of a society where authority has become illegible, losing legitimacy and trying to compensate by force and greater obsession with minor details. Religion doesn’t rule; it tries to keep up and can’t.

A meeting of religious sheikhs, from the Shiite minority ends up in a public relations disaster as they avoid the very topic they met to discuss (justice for the Shiites) and lose any authority they may have had over the youth they’re supposed to lead, who, instead, turn to street protests.

Any European who believes that the Arab world is the way it is because it reflects, like a perfect mirror, some primordial set of beliefs and culture, evidently hasn’t had any conversations that matter. A profound sense of decadence and deterioration pervades the societies portrayed in this book.

It can be seen in the very physical environment of Yasmine El Rashidi’s Egypt, whose family house in a privileged neighbourhood has seen the views from its windows change: from gentle grass slopes to rusty fences, barbed wire and filthy government plaques; from a mango tree and flowers to weeds and dry soil.

In the young Mohamed Mesrati’s Libya, it could be seen in the internet cafes where porn sites are trawled even by old men who don’t bother to hide their excitement.

In Jamal Jubran’s Yemen, it was the measures taken by a rough, socially insecure President, with many chips on his shoulder, to undermine the very institutions of the country and set one part against the other.

What’s clear, in fact, is that, in many cases, the power of the regime was established not by imposing traditional social mores but by violating them. In several cases – Libya, Syria and Yemen among them – people just assume that their leaders simply hate them.

Hence, the surprise and the hope that many of the uprisings left behind them, even when they failed. For a few months, at least, ordinary people found they could overcome fear. Not only. Despite years of having one part of society pitted against the other, sectarianism incited by the State itself, public squares were used as places to re-imagine society.

The giddy fellow-feeling and sense of civic responsibility expressed itself often in crowds spontaneously cleaning up public spaces and keeping a neighbourly eye on each other. It did not last long. But another lesson of these memoirs is how often the flame of revolution was passed on from parents to children.

ranierfsadni@europe.com