Arabs Are Back To History
By Salim Nazzal
19 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org
Arabs are back to history in the most creative way paving the way towards the emerging of new Arabs. These are the words of Saif daana the Palestinian professor of sociology predicting in an article published at Al Jazeera site that the current revolution will not stop unless all the Arab despotic regimes become history.
The events on the ground show that Danna optimism is not ungrounded. Most Arab observers point out that the waves of protests which they call the ”Arab revolution” have become a contagious phenomenon moving from one Arab country to another.
In the time being there are four active uprisings (not to mention the latent and potential uprisings) which combine the slogan of the Tunisian revolution about the dignity of the citizens, and the Egyptian slogan that “Folk want the regime to go”. In Algeria the demonstrators were faced by thousands police troops and two were shot dead and many others injured.
And in a step to calm down the situation the Algerian foreign minister declared that in few days the state will remove the emergency laws imposed, during what the Algerian call the “Red decade”. This is the period between 1990 and 1999 which witnessed clashes between the state and the armed Islamists and left about 150,000 dead. While Libya located now between two “revolutions” in Tunis and Egypt, is witnessing what is described as the largest waves of protests since kernel Gaddafi took power in 1969 in a military coup d’état.
These protests, met by live bullets by the police are spreading for the first time in most of the Libyan cities. Though of the difficulty to know how many were shot as the regime is blocking the media, Libyan opposition sources say that at least 75 protesters were shot dead by the police and its militia. These sources say also that the regime is using armed Africans to shoot at the demonstrators which is sign in their view that the regime is having problems with the Libyan police which probably reject to shoot at the demonstrators.
Bahrain, the only Gulf country which has relatively strong left wing tradition compared to other gulf states, and which is less wealthy due to its limited oil fields, witnessed strong riots leaving few killed and the army took over the major squares at the capital.
And yeman is continuously facing various protests both in the south not happy with the union imposed by the north in the 90s which led to the dismantling of the Marxist regime of south Yemen, and the north where thousands of university students have been demonstrating in the last weeks calling the president to step down.
The Arab region is changing rapidly and in a rocket speed; an Arab politician told me yesterday in a phone call .In his view Arab regimes have now two choices, either to change or to be changed. But when I asked him about the possibility that these regimes with long history of corruption change its policy overnight, he said that he doubts that it is able to do so as the time of miracles has gone, but it could not too ignore the fact that the fist of despotism is getting weaker and each regime knows that it has no insurance to protect itself.
The question of political and social reform and the questions related to the current revolutions and its impact on future political life and its capacity to change the statues queue has become the major topic in the Arab editorials of the Arab media since the eruption of the Tunisian revolution.
The Lebanese political writer Saad Muhyo predicts that the sectarian and the tribal culture are the biggest losers in “the citizenship revolutions” to use his words.
In his article under the title “By By extremitism” Muhyo assumes that the religious fanatism was used as a pretext by the colonial powers to occupy the region, and by the despotic leaders to market themselves in the west as the wall against extremitism. In muhyo view these revolutions will lead in the end to the emergency of a liberal Islam as it was with the reform Muslim thinkers like Al Kawakbi and Abdu at the late 19th century. Even though Muhyo does not exclude the possibility of counter revolutions he thinks that it has become very difficult to return the time back to the pre revolution era.
In the view of most pro democracy Arabs the western world has been swinging between “supporting the regimes which preserve our interest” or “supporting the democratic forces in the Arab region”. But it is obvious that the western countries choose to support the regimes. Most western countries including the USA did not welcome the revolutions in Tunis and Egypt, but they changed their positions when they realized that there is no point in supporting falling regimes.
The Syrian thinker Burhan Galion criticized the western stereotyping about the Arab region which was in his view dominated by the idea that the region is unable to change towards democracy and modernism due to the dominance of the religious culture.
Indeed the news in western media about the Arab region has been in the last decades connected with religious extremism. This thinking is likely which paved the way towards the so called civilization clash theory which dominated the western thinking during the past decades. But as we are witnessing these historical changes it is obvious that the clash of civilization theory has lost its credibility if it had any.
Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian in the Middle East, who has written extensively on social and political issues in the region.
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