Was it a revolution, then, what happened in Tunisia and Egypt? Or merely a revolt, an Arab-style anti-incumbency? The young people of Tahrir Square didn’t sound like revolutionaries. There was no programme, no alternate vision, no theory. They wanted the presidents-for-life thrown out, period. According to Western correspondents in the region, it was also, and crucially, a matter of “face” — pride, dignity, prestige, izzat.
“This isn’t manifest-destiny stuff,” an English journalist told the American writer Gore Vidal in the early 1960s in Cairo; Vidal put it in “Passage to Egypt”, an essay he published in 1963. The Englishman was explaining why Egyptians were reconciled to President Gamal Abdel Nasser despite a weak economy and constant infusions of foreign (American and Soviet) aid. “It’s that these people really believed they were inferior to everybody else. They thought they really were scum... wogs. For centuries. Well, Nasser’s changed all that. He’s shown them they’re like anybody else. [...] He’s made these people proud to be Egyptians.”
This is a foreign correspondent chatting at a hotel bar, which is practically a cliche in itself. But he makes the same argument about “face”. It’s not “manifest destiny”, a sense of national character and purpose (the term comes, unsurprisingly, from American history) that guides Egyptians, but a disprivileged person’s jealous keeping up of appearances, a salve for the shame of reality. Mubarak shamed his citizens; he had to go.
Perhaps this is true. Perhaps the change was made easier because the rather overbearing attention of the West has moved away since the 1990s — toward Iraq, Af-Pak, Israel-Palestine, Saudia Arabia, China. After all, the US supported Nasser for fear of the Soviets doing the same.
But “face” is a nebulous concept. Surely a similar kind of “face” is also important to us Indians? Did “face” have nothing to do with the revolutions in Europe in 1989? There people outgrew their governments and, like comically short trousers, the governments were left looking silly and threadbare. After that it was easier to laugh at them, and then to take them off. The governments failed, but credit still goes to the people.
And “face” doesn’t fully explain why the fire in West Asia and North Africa spread so fast and so far. The trouble in Tunisia reportedly started when an unemployed and despairing young man named Muhammad Bouazizi in the small town of Sidi Bouzid poured petrol over himself and lit a match. He died of the burns, but — not unlike the anti-Mandal self-immolator Rajiv Goswami — he came to embody the anger of his generation. Apparently it had just needed the right spark. Now Arab rulers from Libya to Oman are feeling the heat all at once. On that scale, it has to be more than active dissent.
Revolution or not, that question will be answered by the aftermath. Tunisia and Egypt both have a numerous and educated middle class; the institutions are strong. What happens in Libya, the Levant and Arabia will be much more interesting and explosive — potentially a real revolution.
And what will the books about this revolution be like? The first ones out will be by correspondents and policy types. They will trace the superstructure, from Tunisia onward, and the foundations, from the birth of Islam past 9/11. Journalists will focus on the leading figures. Essayists will write on the intellectuals and the slogans. Only later will the true stories emerge — in literature as in politics — in the words of writers of fiction.
