1.
It has now been seven years since the start of the upheaval in the Arab world that was heralded as the "Arab Spring." In mid-December 2010, riots erupted in Tunisia, spreading to Egypt and onward to engulf the Arab world.
They preceded what we now recognize in retrospect is an Arab winter. These seven years have not just been long, difficult years in which hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered and millions became refugees. They also reflect the blindness that has afflicted much of the Western elite in regard to our region.
But before we delve into understanding the mechanism that facilitated, and still facilitates, this blindness, it is important to note another milestone – one that we are witnessing at this very moment: the current anti-government protests in Iran, which very much resemble the riots that erupted there in June 2009 over election fraud when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected over reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2009, the riots erupted during then-U.S. President Barack Obama's first year in office. Now, as unrest washes over Iran again, it is in the first year of incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump's term.
It is important to make the distinction between Iran and the Arab world, for many reasons: historically, culturally, religiously and more. However, it is no less important to see the common Islamic denominator between them.
2.
In 1978, Edward Said published his influential book "Orientalism." In it, Said argued that the Middle East as we understand it doesn't exist in "reality." He asserted that it was actually a construct created by researchers and Western observers who viewed the region through their own cultural prism. The result, he explained was a creation called the "Orient" (meaning the east, as opposed to the "Occident" meaning the west).
In Western studies, Said continued, the Middle East is portrayed as a caricature – a collection of images and terms created in a very particular "political" language, which does not reflect "pure" knowledge. In other words, Said accused Western researchers of being racist and failing to truly understand the peoples of the Arab and Muslim world.
Said's assertions dovetailed perfectly with the existing Western sentiments, which were already dominated by guilt over European colonialism and over the exploitation of the Arabs (along with the peoples of Africa and Asia). In the 1960s, a process was set into motion (reaching a fever pitch over the last decade on Western campuses) whereby unofficially, universities shifted from seeking out the "truth," whatever the truth may be, to seeking "social justice."
3.
The four decades since Said's book sparked a passionate debate on the topic have been characterized by efforts to hamstring research and discourse on the Arab and Muslim world. American campuses have become dominated by a culture of victimhood whereby the higher you are in the victim hierarchy (in our terms, if you can prove that you have been screwed more than the rest), the more "right" you are and the more immune you are to criticism.
Criticism leveled against anyone who enjoys the victim status is immediately dismissed as "racist" and as "white supremacy" and a plethora of other labels that justify the incredible violence enacted against anyone who challenges the basic beliefs of the liberal Left. These beliefs have become almost religious axioms – a kind of secular orthodoxy established by an inquisition that regularly burns believers who stray from the path at the stake, with the stake being the media and public opinion.
This inquisition coincides with the ongoing efforts to control the language, and, as a result, control people's opinions – the political correctness mechanism. By deciding what can and cannot be said, this mechanism determines what can and cannot be thought. In this crazy system, the current victim du jour – the one considered the most victimized – is, wonder of wonders, Muslim. The Muslims are seen as having "defeated" the other victimized groups – blacks, gays, etc. – in the race for the bleeding hearts of the Western liberals. You can venture a guess as to where Israel figures on this scale.
4.
This momentous cultural progression, of which we have only touched the tip of the iceberg, laid the groundwork for the way that a dominant portion of the American and European elite related to the riots in the Arab world. It started with the romantic moniker – the Arab Spring (reminiscent of the 1848 Spring of Nations in Europe or the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia) – and ended with unbelievable blindness to the deep undercurrents that ran openly before our eyes but were categorically ignored, alongside censures of anyone who dared interpret the reality differently.
About two weeks after the uprising erupted in Egypt, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman stood in the middle of Cairo's Tahrir Square, drunk with joy, and waxed poetic about what he saw as a reprise of similar events in Europe. He sharply criticized Israel's government for voicing reservations and standing on the sidelines.
He was convinced that this revolution had nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood. "Indeed, what makes the uprising here so impressive – and in that sense so dangerous to other autocracies in the region – is precisely the fact that it is not owned by, and was not inspired by, the Muslim Brotherhood," he wrote in his column, titled "Postcard from Cairo."
A week later, the same Tahrir Square hosted a speech by the man who inspired the Muslim Brotherhood – exiled sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who addressed a crowd of protesters numbering more than a million. Ultimately, Egypt fell directly into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, until their government was overthrown by Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in a military coup.
In his 1999 book titled The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, Friedman predicted that technology, globalization and the information highway (the "Lexus") would triumph over the traditional perceptions representing the old world, or "olive tree." This was also the sentiment that guided Obama's famous Cairo speech in 2009. This way of thinking doesn't see individuals as marveling at momentous historical processes and feeling their own insignificance. On the contrary, it gives the ones who espouse this approach an air of political and cultural hubris – a feeling that they can force history to change its course and become more "rational" and less religious and mythical.
5.
In his book The Plague, Albert Camus describes the residents of the city of Oran, which represents Western civilization, as having failed to learn humility in the way they looked at reality, and therefore helpless to fight off the plague when it attacks.
But just look at what happened to the political "Lexus" in the Middle East. Most of the Arab states were established after World War I, when the European powers divided up the spoils of war. The Western idea of nationality was imposed on the ancient tribal structures of the region's people. Thus, hostile ethnic populations were artificially bound together and branded with a manufactured Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan or whatever nationality.
The Arab Spring may have been a renaissance, but not in the historical, European sense, but in a much deeper sense – a rebirth and return to ancient political constructs, which are much more stable than the artificial groupings that were forced on the Arab nations. A similar renaissance can be seen in Turkey at the moment, where a counterrevolution is being waged against Ataturk's secular, Kemalist revolution as the country reverts back to its traditional Muslim structure.
Iran is an exception because of the Persian history and culture that shaped it before it was conquered by Islam. The revolutionary outbursts there are also an expression of deep, ancient undercurrents rising to the surface from internal cultural and national groups, but in reverse – against the Islamic revolution that was imposed on this nation.
This lesson needs to be at the forefront of our minds when we examine our own personal arena.
