The Arab Spring
A fruit vendor set himself on fire in a town of 40,000. Three presidents fell in 281 days.
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You think you know how this one starts. A vendor sets himself on fire to protest a dictatorship, and the dictatorship falls.
That is not quite what happened. Mohamed Bouazizi did not stand outside a palace or a parliament. He stood outside the local governor's office, in a town of forty thousand people, after an inspector took his fruit cart and his scale, worth about two hundred dollars, and refused to let him inside to complain.
Two more presidents fell within the year that followed, in three different ways, and of the six countries this shook, exactly one became a democracy.
Scene 1Sidi Bouzid
December the seventeenth, two thousand ten. Mohamed Bouazizi pushes his cart to its usual spot outside the governor's office in Sidi Bouzid. He is twenty six.
A municipal inspector named Faida Hamdi confiscates the cart and the electronic scale. Witnesses say she slaps him. He goes inside to complain. They refuse to see him.
At eleven thirty in the morning, he stands in front of the building, douses himself in paint thinner, and strikes a match.
He is taken to a hospital in Sfax. He dies on January the fourth.
Protests reach Kasserine, Thala, and Tunis within days. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who has ruled Tunisia for twenty three years, sends riot police and snipers. At least three hundred thirty eight people are killed.
On January the fourteenth, twenty eight days after Bouazizi struck the match, Ben Ali boards a plane for Jeddah. He never comes back.
The same three words are attributed to crowds within weeks, in Tunis, in Cairo's Tahrir Square, in Tripoli, Sanaa, Manama, and Damascus.
· December 2010
“Ash-sha'b yurid isqat an-nizam. The people want the fall of the regime.”
Three words, and no leader, no party, and no manifesto behind them beyond that. It is the only thing every uprising in this story agrees on, and it is the last thing they agree on.
Scene 2The square
Egypt follows. On January the twenty fifth, 2011, tens of thousands march in Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez.
By the Day of Rage, January the twenty eighth, the police have been overrun and the army has deployed. By February the first, over a million people fill Tahrir Square.
On February the second, pro Mubarak men on horses and camels charge into the crowd. An unnamed protester in the square, unnamed in the record, is filmed saying this.
· Battle of the Camel footage, broadcast by Al Jazeera · February 2, 2011
“We are peaceful. We are peaceful. They are killing us.”
Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for thirty years, addresses the nation on February the tenth and refuses to resign. The crowd watches on a giant screen and erupts in fury. The next day, his vice president appears on television for thirty seconds to say Mubarak has decided to step down. Mubarak is eighty two.
Scene 3The pipe
Libya's uprising begins February the fifteenth. Muammar Gaddafi, in power for forty two years, promises to hunt protesters alley by alley, house by house.
A week later, Gaddafi says this, on television, from his compound.
· Televised address from Bab al-Azizia, Tripoli · February 22, 2011
“I will fight on to the last drop of my blood. Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution. I am the glory of Libya, I am the glory of Africa.”
NATO intervenes on March the nineteenth. Seven thousand seven hundred air strikes follow over seven months. On October the twentieth, rebel fighters drag Gaddafi from a drainage pipe outside Sirte, beat him, and shoot him.
Three dictators. Two hundred eighty one days.
Scene 4Everyone else
The other three uprisings never get a Sirte moment.
In Bahrain, a Shia majority marches for political rights against a Sunni monarchy. On March the fourteenth, twelve hundred Saudi troops cross the King Fahd Causeway to crush it.
In Yemen, a journalist named Tawakkol Karman has been organizing protests in Sanaa's Change Square since two thousand seven. That October she becomes the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In December, in Oslo, Karman says this.
· Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, Oslo City Hall · December 10, 2011
“History has proven that criminal individuals who have committed crimes against humanity have had the worst ends.”
The following month, Yemen's president signs away power after eleven months of protests and defections. The country collapses into civil war within three years.
In Syria, Bashar al-Assad simply refuses to leave. By twenty twenty six the war that followed has killed more than five hundred thousand people and displaced six million six hundred thousand more as refugees.
Scene 5The fork
Tunisia holds free elections in October 2011.
Egypt holds its first competitive presidential election in June 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood's candidate wins it.
One year later, on July the third, 2013, General Sisi removes him in a military coup.
Libya fractures into rival governments and militia rule. Syria becomes a proxy war. Yemen becomes a famine. Morocco and Jordan survive through limited constitutional reform.
Of the six countries where a ruler was directly challenged, one becomes a democracy.
Five accounts
Five accounts of what those years meant, and none of them agree.
revisionistRevolutionary / Youth / Democratic
The revolutionaries
The first account belongs to the people who built it, and it begins six months before Bouazizi, in that internet cafe in Alexandria.
The photograph Khaled Said's family took at the morgue, jaw broken, skull fractured, teeth knocked out, became the Facebook page that had half a million followers within three months, and it is the page that posted the call to march on January the twenty fifth.
The revolutionaries had no vanguard party, no ideology, no armed wing. In Tunisia, a labor union with five hundred thousand members called the strikes that paralyzed the country. In Egypt, the square itself became a government: field hospitals, food committees, a newspaper printed on the pavement.
Here is Ghonim, from Tahrir, days after Mubarak fell.
“The barrier of fear has been broken.”
Read the full account
Narrative
On June 6, 2010, six months before Bouazizi, two plainclothes officers from the Egyptian Interior Ministry dragged a 28-year-old man named Khaled Mohamed Said from an internet cafe in Alexandria. They beat him to death in a doorway across the street. His family photographed his face at the morgue: jaw broken, skull fractured, teeth knocked out. The Interior Ministry said he had choked on a bag of marijuana. On June 10, Wael Ghonim, a Google marketing executive based in Dubai, created a Facebook page titled "We Are All Khaled Said." Within three months, it had 500,000 followers. On January 25, 2011, Ghonim posted the call to march. Between 50,000 and 80,000 people arrived at Tahrir Square.
Asef Bayat, in Revolution without Revolutionaries (2017), called these "refolutions": uprisings with revolutionary aspirations but reformist methods. No vanguard party, no ideology, no armed wing. The organizing infrastructure was the mosque, the football ultras, the Facebook page, and the labor union. In Tunisia, the General Labour Union (UGTT), with 500,000 members, called regional general strikes that paralyzed the country. The revolutionaries did not seize the state. They occupied public space and waited for the state to break.
The 18 days in Tahrir became the democratic movement's founding narrative. On January 28, the "Day of Rage," protesters overran police lines across Cairo. The police disappeared by evening. The army deployed but did not fire. On February 1, over a million people filled Tahrir. The square became a self-governing commune: field hospitals staffed by volunteer doctors, food distribution by neighborhood committees, a newspaper printed on the pavement. Ahmed Harara, a 31-year-old dentist, lost his right eye to a rubber bullet on January 28 and his left eye to birdshot on November 19, both times while filming.
The movement's fatal weakness was its refusal to organize. The revolutionaries built a square, not a party. When Mubarak fell, they had no structure to contest elections or draft a constitution. The Brotherhood had 80 years of organization. The military had 60 years of institutional power. Egypt's first free parliamentary elections (November 2011-January 2012) gave Islamist parties 73% of the seats. The revolutionaries who had filled Tahrir won almost nothing.
The Tunisian exception proves the analysis. The UGTT brokered between Islamists and secularists during the 2013-2014 crisis. The National Dialogue Quartet negotiated a constitution adopted in January 2014. Where institutions existed to channel revolutionary energy, democracy survived. Where they did not, the revolution consumed itself.
Arguments
- The uprisings had no vanguard party, no ideology, no leader; they were "refolutions" that combined revolutionary aspiration with reformist methods
- The killing of Khaled Said in Alexandria (June 2010) and the Facebook page it spawned mobilized tens of thousands before the first march
- Tahrir Square became a self-governing commune for 18 days, but the movement built a square, not a party
- Tunisia's democracy survived because the UGTT and civil society provided institutional structure; Egypt's revolution failed because no comparable institutions existed
Sources
- Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring
- Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power
- The Arabs: A History
bystanderAuthoritarian Stability / Regime
The regime
The second account is the one every falling government was making at the time, in its own words, and Syria said it loudest.
On January the thirty first, 2011, Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal this.
“Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”
Five weeks later his own security forces were firing on unarmed demonstrators in Daraa.
The argument had three parts. Order: Egypt's state employed five point six million people, and its army owned an estimated twenty five to forty percent of the economy. Identity: a state guaranteeing Alawites, Christians, and Druze against a Sunni majority. And the alternative: look at what happens when the state actually falls, in Libya.
Saudi Arabia spent one hundred thirty billion dollars on housing, unemployment benefits, and a new minimum wage, before a single protester reached its own streets.
Read the full account
Narrative
On October 20, 2011, the day Gaddafi was dragged from a drainage pipe and killed, Syria's state news agency ran the footage on a loop. The message was clear without commentary. On February 24, 2011, Assad told the Wall Street Journal: "Syria is stable. We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that, Syria is stable." Within five weeks, his security forces were firing on unarmed demonstrators in Daraa.
The authoritarian stability argument had three components: order, identity, and the alternative. Order meant economic function: electricity, fuel, bread subsidies. The Egyptian state employed 5.6 million people in 2011, roughly 30% of formal employment. The army owned an estimated 25-40% of the economy. Identity meant the state as guarantor against sectarian fragmentation: Assad protecting Alawites, Christians, and Druze against a Sunni majority; Bahrain's Al Khalifa preventing Iranian influence over a Shia-majority population. The alternative meant the observed results: Libya after Gaddafi, Iraq after Saddam.
General Sisi's July 3, 2013 coup was framed not as counter-revolution but as correction. The Tamarod campaign claimed 22 million signatures, more than Morsi's 13 million votes, petitioning the military to remove him. The number was disputed. The grievances were real: fuel shortages, power cuts lasting 8-12 hours daily, attacks on Coptic Christians. On July 3, Sisi appeared on television flanked by the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the Coptic Pope, the head of the Salafi Nour Party, and Mohamed ElBaradei, a cross-section of Egyptian society endorsing the removal of its first elected president.
The cost was immediate. On August 14, 2013, security forces cleared two Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo. Human Rights Watch documented at least 817 killed at Rabaa al-Adawiya alone, "the worst single-day killing of protesters in modern history." The Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organization in December 2013. Morsi was imprisoned. He collapsed in a Cairo courtroom cage on June 17, 2019, and died. He had been held in solitary confinement for nearly six years.
Jordan and Morocco survived through calibrated concession. Jordan's King Abdullah II dismissed his prime minister in February 2011. Morocco's King Mohammed VI announced a constitutional referendum in March, approved in July with 98% support. Saudi Arabia pre-empted protests with $130 billion in social spending: housing, unemployment benefits, salary increases, a new minimum wage. The monarchies that survived did so through co-optation, identity politics, and the visible catastrophe of revolution next door.
Arguments
- The regime argument had three components (order, identity, and the observed alternative of state collapse in Libya and Syria)
- Egypt's military owned 25-40% of the economy; the state employed 5.6 million people; revolution threatened material survival, not just political power
- The Rabaa massacre (August 14, 2013, at least 817 killed) was the cost of counter-revolution, paid in Brotherhood blood
- Gulf monarchies survived through $130 billion in social spending (Saudi Arabia) and cross-border military intervention (Bahrain)
Sources
- The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East
- Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt
- All In: The Spread of Conflict in the International System
victorIslamist / Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood
The third account belongs to an organization that had been organizing since 1928, eighty three years before this moment.
By 2011 it had chapters in every Arab country and the deepest grassroots network in the region: clinics and schools that reached millions the state had abandoned. When Egypt held its first free parliamentary elections that November, its party took thirty seven and a half percent of the vote, and Islamist parties together held seventy three percent of parliament.
That was not a hijacking of the revolution. It was eighty years of organizing the secular opposition had not done.
Mohammed Morsi won the presidential runoff in June 2012 with fifty one point seven percent of the vote. Here he is, campaigning in Tahrir Square that same month.
“We do not want anything from the revolution. We want what the people want.”
His government lasted three hundred sixty eight days.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, a 22-year-old schoolteacher. By 2011, it had 83 years of continuous existence, chapters in every Arab country, and the deepest grassroots network in the region: health clinics, schools, and charity networks that reached millions of Egyptians whom the state had abandoned. When Egypt held its first free parliamentary elections in November 2011, the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party won 37.5% of the vote. The Salafi Nour Party won another 27.8%. Islamist parties together held 73% of parliament.
Shadi Hamid, in Islamic Exceptionalism (2016), argued that Islam and liberal democracy have a fundamentally different relationship than Christianity and liberal democracy. Christianity's "render unto Caesar" tradition separated religious and political authority. Islam's tradition, in which Muhammad governed Medina as both prophet and head of state, does not. This does not mean Islam is anti-democratic. It means democratization in Muslim-majority societies will produce governments that incorporate Islamic law in ways Western secular democrats find uncomfortable. The Brotherhood's electoral success was the predictable result of 80 years of grassroots organization the secular opposition had not built.
Mohammed Morsi won Egypt's presidential runoff on June 24, 2012, with 51.7%: 13.23 million votes to Ahmed Shafik's 12.35 million. His government lasted 368 days. Morsi's errors were real: a constitutional declaration granting himself powers beyond judicial review, a constitution drafted after secular members walked out, unchecked fuel and electricity shortages. His supporters argued the deep state had sabotaged him from day one. The fuel shortages that plagued his presidency disappeared within 48 hours of Sisi's coup.
In Tunisia, Ennahda under Rachid Ghannouchi won 41.5% of Constituent Assembly seats in October 2011. Ghannouchi made a decision the Egyptian Brotherhood did not: he formed a coalition with secular parties, accepted a constitution without sharia as a source of legislation, and voluntarily stepped down in 2014. Ennahda survived. The Brotherhood was destroyed.
The destruction was comprehensive. The Egyptian state designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization in December 2013. Security forces arrested an estimated 40,000 members. Morsi was held in conditions the UN described as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, denied adequate medical care for diabetes and liver disease. On June 17, 2019, he collapsed inside a soundproof glass cage during a court session, spoke for seven minutes requesting to address the judge, and fell. He was 67. For the Brotherhood, the lesson was unmistakable: winning elections does not mean winning power.
Arguments
- The Brotherhood's electoral victories were the predictable result of 80 years of grassroots organization, not a hijacking of the revolution
- Islam and liberal democracy have a different structural relationship than Christianity and liberal democracy; democratization in Muslim-majority societies produces Islamic governance
- Morsi's government was undermined by the deep state; fuel shortages disappeared within 48 hours of the coup
- The 2013 coup taught Islamists that winning elections does not mean winning power; the lesson has not been forgotten
Sources
- Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World
- Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East
- The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement
revisionistGeopolitical / Realist
The realists
The fourth account says the revolution ended the day outside money noticed it, and it can put a date on that.
On March the fourteenth, 2011, twelve hundred Saudi troops crossed the King Fahd Causeway into Bahrain, to make sure a Shia majority near Saudi Arabia's own oil fields never got what Tunisia got.
Qatar funded the Brotherhood through Al Jazeera and roughly three billion dollars in direct support. Saudi Arabia deposited five billion dollars in Egypt's central bank within weeks of the coup that removed it. The revolution was fought with chants. The counter revolution was fought with checkbooks.
NATO's seven thousand seven hundred air strikes over Libya were authorized to protect civilians and ended by removing a government. Russia cites Libya as the reason it vetoed Syria resolutions seventeen times.
Here is what Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, said to CBS News when Gaddafi was found and killed.
“We came, we saw, he died.”
Read the full account
Narrative
On March 14, 2011, 1,200 Saudi troops and 500 UAE police crossed the King Fahd Causeway into Bahrain in armored vehicles. The Bahraini uprising, a Shia-majority population demanding political rights from a Sunni monarchy, had begun with a peaceful march to the Pearl Roundabout on February 14. For Saudi Arabia, the calculus was not about Bahrain. It was about the Eastern Province, where the kingdom's own Shia minority of 2-3 million lived on top of its largest oil fields. A successful Shia uprising 25 kilometers across a causeway was an unacceptable precedent.
Marc Lynch, in The New Arab Wars (2016), argued that the people's revolutions were absorbed into proxy conflicts within months. Qatar funded the Brotherhood through Al Jazeera and an estimated $3 billion in direct support to Egyptian affiliates during 2011-2013. Saudi Arabia deposited $5 billion in Egypt's central bank within weeks of Sisi's coup. The UAE provided another $3 billion. The revolution was fought with chants. The counter-revolution was fought with checkbooks.
Libya was the first test of military intervention. NATO's Operation Unified Protector, authorized by Resolution 1973, launched 7,700 air strikes over seven months. The mission experienced "mandate creep": from civilian protection to regime change. Libya fractured into rival governments in Tripoli and Tobruk, with 1,700 armed groups operating by 2015. Russia and China cited Libya as the reason they would never again permit a humanitarian intervention to become regime change. Russia vetoed Syria resolutions 17 times between 2011 and 2021.
Syria became the central battlefield. Iran deployed Revolutionary Guard advisors and funded Hezbollah (8,000 troops in Syria by 2013). Russia launched air strikes on September 30, 2015, attacking not ISIS but the moderate rebels threatening Assad. Turkey invaded northern Syria in August 2016 to prevent Kurdish autonomy along its border. The United States armed rebel groups through a CIA program (Timber Sycamore, 2013-2017, ~$1 billion per year) while simultaneously arming the Kurdish SDF against ISIS. CIA-backed rebels and Pentagon-backed rebels fought each other.
By 2015, the "Arab Spring" as a people's movement was over. What remained were proxy wars, refugee crises, and the wreckage of states. Six million Syrians fled the country. One million crossed the Mediterranean to Europe in 2015, strengthening far-right parties across the continent. Alternative for Germany entered the Bundestag in 2017 with 12.6%, campaigning against Syrian refugee resettlement. The Arab Spring's consequences did not stop at the region's borders.
Arguments
- Saudi Arabia's intervention in Bahrain (March 14, 2011) demonstrated that regional powers would use military force to prevent democratic contagion
- NATO's Libya intervention (7,700 air strikes) morphed from civilian protection to regime change, poisoning the Security Council's willingness to act on Syria
- Russia vetoed Syria resolutions 17 times; its September 2015 air campaign targeted rebels, not ISIS, and saved Assad
- CIA-backed rebels and Pentagon-backed rebels fought each other in Syria; the proxy war's absurdity was its defining feature
Sources
- The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East
- The Internationalization of the Arab Spring: Regional Powers and the Diffusion of Revolution
- The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency
vanquishedWomen's Experience / Feminist
Women's experience
The fifth account starts less than a month after Mubarak fell, when the Egyptian military detained seventeen women from Tahrir Square and forced them to submit to what soldiers called virginity tests, examinations conducted by a male military doctor while soldiers watched.
A protester named Samira Ibrahim sued the military over it. She won. The doctor was acquitted on appeal.
Women had been in this from day one. On January the eighteenth, a twenty six year old named Asmaa Mahfouz posted a video calling Egyptians to march.
“I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I will hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor.”
Tunisia guaranteed gender equality in its 2014 constitution and equalized inheritance rights. Egypt's post coup constitution had fewer protections for women than the one it replaced. Human Rights Watch counted at least one hundred eighty six cases of mob sexual assault in Tahrir Square between 2012 and 2014.
Read the full account
Narrative
On March 9, 2011, less than a month after Mubarak's fall, the Egyptian military detained 17 women from Tahrir Square and forced them to submit to "virginity tests": invasive examinations conducted by a male military doctor in the presence of soldiers. Amnesty International documented the cases. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, then head of military intelligence, defended the practice on CNN: the tests were conducted, he said, to protect the military from accusations of rape. A 25-year-old protester named Samira Ibrahim sued the military. She won. The military doctor was acquitted on appeal.
Women had been in the revolution from day one. Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, posted a video blog on January 18, 2011: "I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I will hold up a banner. Perhaps people will show some honor." The video went viral. In Yemen, Tawakkol Karman (32, journalist, mother of three) had been organizing protests since 2007. She set up a permanent camp in Sanaa's Change Square. When the government issued an arrest warrant, thousands surrounded her tent. In October 2011, she became the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nawal El Saadawi, 80 years old, slept in a tent in Tahrir for three weeks. She had been imprisoned under Sadat, exiled under Mubarak, divorced at 27 for refusing to stop writing. "For the first time," she said, "I feel that I am in a free country." She died in 2021, at 89, having lived long enough to see the revolution and its reversal.
The outcomes for women diverged more sharply than for men. Tunisia guaranteed gender equality in its 2014 constitution, required gender parity on electoral lists, criminalized domestic violence (2017), and equalized inheritance rights (2018). Women held 36% of Tunisian parliamentary seats in 2019, higher than the EU average. In Egypt, the post-coup 2014 constitution contained fewer protections for women than Mubarak's 1971 constitution. Human Rights Watch documented at least 186 cases of mob sexual assault in Tahrir Square between June 2012 and June 2014.
In Libya, women who served as medics and organizers were pushed out of political life by militias. In Syria, women and children constituted 76% of refugees. Child marriage among Syrian refugees in Jordan rose from 12% in 2011 to 32% in 2014 (UNICEF). The revolution promised equality. It delivered it in one country.
Arguments
- Women were central to every uprising. Asmaa Mahfouz's video helped launch January 25; Tawakkol Karman won the Nobel Prize; Nawal El Saadawi occupied Tahrir at 80
- The Egyptian military's "virginity tests" (March 2011) weaponized sexual violence against female protesters within weeks of the revolution's success
- Tunisia advanced women's rights further than any other Arab country (gender parity in parliament, criminalized domestic violence, equalized inheritance)
- In every other country, the post-revolutionary order had less space for women than the dictatorship it replaced
Sources
- Women and the Arab Spring: Taking Their Place?
- A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence from the Middle East to America
- Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
- "Virginity Tests" and the Egyptian Military
The turn
And here is what each account cannot afford to say.
Revolutionary / Youth / Democratic
The revolutionaries call having no vanguard their virtue, and say less about the cost. Egypt's first free parliament gave Islamist parties seventy three percent of the seats.
From the record
The revolutionaries' failure to build political organizations capable of winning electionsInternal divisions among protesters over Islamism, secularism, and minority rightsViolence committed by some protesters against police and state propertyThe economic demands that drove much of the participation (unemployment exceeded 30% among Egyptian youth in 2011)Authoritarian Stability / Regime
The regime's account counts the jobs and the sects it protected, and says almost nothing about the corruption and the police brutality that put people in the street to begin with.
From the record
The regimes' own role in creating the conditions (corruption, unemployment, police brutality) that caused the uprisingsThe Rabaa massacre as state violence orders of magnitude beyond any protester violenceThe self-fulfilling nature of the stability argument; Assad destroyed Syria to prove that without him, Syria would be destroyedPolitical prisoners, torture, and enforced disappearance as tools of regime survivalThe Brotherhood counts its votes, and says little about how it governed with them: a constitutional declaration Morsi granted himself, and fuel shortages that vanished within forty eight hours of the coup that removed him.
From the record
Morsi's governance failures (the constitutional declaration, the Islamist-dominated drafting process)The Brotherhood's sectarian rhetoric that alienated Christians and secular EgyptiansInternal authoritarianism within the Brotherhood's own organizational structureHamas (the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch) and its governance record in GazaThe realist account explains the money, and reduces everyone underneath it to a pawn. Millions of people had genuine grievances that no foreign treasury created.
From the record
The genuine popular grievances that drove the uprisings; this perspective reduces agency to great-power competitionThe moral distinction between civilians protesting and states bombing themThe democratic aspirations of millions who were not pawns in a proxy gameRussia and Iran's direct complicity in atrocities against Syrian civiliansAnd the women's account is the best documented of the five, and still the smallest audience. Tunisia is the one place any of it held, and even there it took a labor union.
From the record
Conservative women who supported the Brotherhood or opposed the revolution on religious groundsWomen within the security forces and regime structuresThe pre-revolutionary women's rights infrastructure that enabled post-revolutionary gains in TunisiaMale allies who advocated for gender equality within the revolutionary movements
Look past all five accounts, and the same three words produced a democracy, a military dictatorship, a failed state, a civil war, a famine, and two monarchies that bought their way out of hearing them.
Close
The cart and the scale that Faida Hamdi confiscated were worth about two hundred dollars.
That confiscation became the symbol of an uprising that reached seventeen countries.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 2010-2012
- Killed
- Tunisia: ~338, December 2010-March…
- Displaced
- 10.7MCombined population of primary countries: Tunisia, Egypt…
- Place
- Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco, Jordan
Key figures
- Mohamed BouaziziTunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation on December 17, 2010 triggered the uprisings; died January 4, 2011, age 261984 to 2011
- Zine El Abidine Ben AliPresident of Tunisia for 23 years (1987-2011); fled to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011; first Arab leader toppled by the uprisings; died in exile September 19, 20191936 to 2019
- Hosni MubarakPresident of Egypt for 30 years (1981-2011); resigned February 11, 2011 after 18 days of protests; sentenced to life imprisonment, later acquitted; died February 25, 20201928 to 2020
- Bashar al-AssadPresident of Syria; refused to step down; survived the uprising through military force, Russian air power (from September 2015), and Iranian-backed militias; over 500,000 Syrians died in the resulting civil war1965 to ?
- Tawakkol KarmanYemeni journalist and activist; organized protests in Sanaa's Change Square; first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2011); called "Mother of the Revolution" and "Iron Woman"1979 to ?
- Mohammed MorsiMuslim Brotherhood leader; won Egypt's first competitive presidential election (June 2012, 51.7%); overthrown by military coup July 3, 2013; collapsed and died during a court hearing on June 17, 20191951 to 2019
- Abdel Fattah el-SisiEgyptian Defense Minister who led the July 3, 2013 military coup against Morsi; president of Egypt from 2014; oversaw the Rabaa al-Adawiya massacre (August 14, 2013, at least 817 killed according to Human Rights Watch)1954 to ?
- Muammar GaddafiLeader of Libya for 42 years (1969-2011); captured and killed by rebel fighters outside Sirte on October 20, 20111942 to 2011
Primary sources
· The chant spread across every Arab Spring country within weeks; it was heard in Tunis, Cairo's Tahrir Square, Tripoli, Sanaa, Manama, and Damascus · December 2010 - February 2011
“Ash-sha'b yurid isqat an-nizam. [The people want the fall of the regime.]”
· Filmed during the Battle of the Camel, February 2, 2011, when pro-Mubarak thugs on horses and camels attacked demonstrators; footage broadcast by Al Jazeera · February 2, 2011
“We are peaceful. We are peaceful. They are killing us.”
· Televised address during the Libyan uprising, broadcast from Bab al-Azizia compound, Tripoli · February 22, 2011
“I will fight on to the last drop of my blood. Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution. I am the glory of Libya, I am the glory of Africa.”
· Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture, Oslo City Hall · December 10, 2011
“History has proven that criminal individuals who have committed crimes against humanity have had the worst ends.”
Threads
- September 11 and the War on TerrorNineteen men with box cutters turned the world’s most powerful military against two countries that didn’t attack it.
- The Sykes-Picot AgreementWhen the Islamic State bulldozed the Iraq-Syria frontier in 2014, amid the wars that followed the Arab Spring, it filmed the act and called it "The End of Sykes-Picot." A hundred-year-old map was still a battlefield
- The Algerian War of IndependenceIn 2011 Tunisia and Egypt fell to protest while Algeria stayed quiet. The FLN that won independence in 1962 still governed, and a generation that remembered the war and the 1990s that followed did not rise