THE CASE OF THE ARAB UPRISINGS: THE PESSIMIST AND/OR CYNICAL SHIFT

This perennial lens is not static. It does change in character but mainly on the edges. The recurring themes through which the region is interpreted, historically and now, have a remarkable staying power that is rooted in centuries of interaction, conflict, and in the associated process of knowledge production.

The uprisings took everyone by surprise. Reports, analysis, and writings on the uprisings in the United States during the first few months spoke of masses that defied authoritarian rule by going to the streets and risking life and limb (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2011). The images were compelling. There was no predesignated location or space in the collective mainstream discourse to place these images. So they floated for sometime, unanchored and untheorized.

The events and the images were simply reported as new, promising, and good, nearly across the board, with few exceptions, in government, media, academia, and even pop culture (McGlynn Reference McGlynn2011). Reverberations of the Arab uprisings (mistakenly dubbed the Arab spring) were witnessed and reported worldwide, from Wisconsin to Portugal (Van Gelder Reference Van Gelder2011). However, no sooner than the uprisings and their consequences became messy, chaotic, and violent (especially when the victims were non-Arab as was the case with Libya), we began to detect a different trend that had actually started to rear its head prior to this fall and, specifically, the September incidents in Libya involving the attack on the US Embassy. This trend gradually did away with the euphoria and the actual mass social mobilization against dictatorship and focused instead on the content of these uprisings, as though to take a second, skeptical look that renders the unfamiliar, familiar, through reinterpretation. Often, analysis and reporting in mainstream media went full circle back to square one to interpret the meaning and content of the uprisings through the good old perennial lens (Cafferty Reference Cafferty2012).

The uprisings were still uprisings, but, according to growing trends in mainstream media, the motivations and goals became increasingly suspect: according to the changing narrative, the uprisings were motivated by problematic goals that range from exclusionary ideologies to sectarianism and tribalism (Khalaf Reference Khalaf2011). The goals were considered equally problematic, ranging from some Islamist end embodied in an Islamic state to various primordial formulas (Maher Reference Maher2012) always couched in something seemingly incomprehensible, yet familiar when it comes to things Arab or Middle Eastern (ironically, when actions, outcomes, and events in the region are incomprehensible, many observers feel more at home with that). When unfathomable, the Middle East or the Arab world can make much more sense to proponents of the dominant discourse because it comports with essential assumptions about the region.

When events in the region are perfectly understandable, such as the mass mobilization for democracy and against dictatorship, they can be confusing, eliciting a dog's half-tilted head—because people are not exactly sure what to make of it as it is not part of their worldview of the region. Too many assumptions would have to be called into question. It is just not parsimonious. But let us not culturalize too much: this is not about Americans in the first degree. It is about American power and the structural positionality that allows analytical faux pas to be consequential.

THE OTHER MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SHIFT

However, it is noteworthy that this shift did not just occur in the United States. There were various academic, journalistic, and political currents that fed into this shift from near and far, including from the region itself. In particular, three currents/groups stand out in their support of this shift: (a) minorities, (b) parts of the anti-imperialist current, and (c) liberal intellectuals dismayed by the postuprisings' “Islamist turn.”

Briefly, minorities living in places like Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and especially religious minorities, evaluate outcomes based on specific metrics or criteria: specifically, they ask whether they will fare better under an alternative form of rule (other than the secular and relatively proreligious minorities policies of, say, Hafiz/Bashar al-Asad and Saddam Hussein). The answer is overwhelmingly no. All it took was sweeping Islamist electoral victories and the emergence of what is called “jihadis” among revolutionaries in Libya and Syria to convince them of the downsides of future alternatives (Starr Reference Starr2012). The production of knowledge associated with this current is usually couched in more mundane language about politics and freedom.

As for a part of the anti-imperialist current, it is fixated on Syria, and considers the showdown in Syria as one between imperialism and resistance to it while discounting the particularities of Syria's legacy of domestic repression. This is a big can of worms that involves more polemics than analysis. Suffice it to say that this camp uses broader metrics to determine the merits of the uprisings (Ghorayeb Reference Ghorayeb2012). Although the peculiarities of the Syrian case might be compelling—and in my view, it is indeed compelling in forcing us to look at the big picture—this camp ends up unwittingly collapsing all the Arab uprisings into the case of Syria and, thus, unintentionally reinforcing the narrative above: the pessimist shift in assessing the uprisings (Todhunter Reference Todhunter2011). The writings by proponents of this camp are usually uncompromising and not open to debate: they are of the G.W. Bush variety—you are either with us (as anti-imperialists) or against us, and “us” has been dubbed “the Syrian regime.”

Finally, we have seen a flurry of writing by various academics and pundits that are dismayed by the Islamist turn after the uprisings. I will not refer to specific authors, but this current is of two varieties: one that supports the uprisings but wonder if the outcomes are a reflection of some cultural-Islamic essence that was bound to resurface. This strand confers too much weight and power to the “Islamists” and limits time-horizons unnecessarily by focusing on the first post-uprisings round of elections and struggles (Bradley Reference Bradley2012).Footnote ¹ The second strand is just allergic to Islamists victories. This strand parallels the concerns of the first group but not from a minoritarian perspective. Rather, from an ostensibly elitist liberal secular one (“Egyptian Author Sayyid Al-Qimni: We Have Tried Islamic Rule for 1,400 Years and It Has Failed” 2012) that is today finding common cause in places like Egypt (temporarily) with other revolutionaries among the Left. (The disclaimer here is that the leftist portions are usually more critical of the abuse of power than of Islamists in power (El-Hamalawy Reference El-Hamalawy2012).) This trend is more effective in giving credence to the pessimist shift.

MOVING FORWARD

It is important to scrutinize this pessimistic shift in interpreting the uprisings because it reflects less a sober analysis of what is going on in the region from a broader historical point of view and instead privileges all sorts of static and problematically historical lenses—not just the perennial lens discussed above. Concomitantly, this shift is also both cold and elitist: although it is ostensibly concerned with rights and freedoms going forward, it does not recognize the cumulative magnitude of suffering, pain, and humiliation that afflicted people (politically, economically, and socially) in the region during the past decades. It also does not recognize sufficiently that Islamist electoral victories (precluding Libya) are, in part, a function of repression by ostensibly secular dictatorships over several decades. No one should be shocked.

Finally, proponents of this shift do not account for a potential counter-factual: that the door is open to do more independent development, even if not inevitable, compared to the pre-uprising period when that door was firmly shut. Much depends on circumstances, and on various power struggles and dynamics in the medium term, when the dust settles a bit on more mundane “political” questions.

The takeaway message from observing this shift, which by no means is ubiquitous, is that the uprisings were never theorized as a continuous mass preference that was brewing and latent. This preference for revolt/protest was obstructed by force and adaptation, and sometimes by strategic considerations related to the existence or nonexistence of preferable alternatives.

The uprisings were a surprise. And though they surprised everyone, including all of us who did not foresee them happening so soon, they surprised different constituencies for different reasons: those of us who have been laboring in pedagogical and research terms to explain the brewing process over the past decades were surprised by the timing of the uprisings. Others were surprised by their content. But because the uprisings were not properly theorized and historicized as an extension of real conditions that were contrasted with general and generic preferences of various large groups, circumstantial developments easily swayed many reporters and analysts. In other words, because the uprisings were not seen as grounded in basic desires that are universally shared, they were easily attributed to something specific to the region and its peoples and cultures as soon as they produced the “wrong” outcomes.

SOME POSITIVE IMPLICATIONS

Although the uprisings put a dent in the perennial lens through which the region is viewed, they did not affect its core assumptions that continue to drive research, reporting, and analysis. The uprisings, however, have indeed set the stage for a kind of debate and public discussion for which there where no readily available and “obvious to all” metrics prior to the uprisings. The sheer number of conferences, symposia, workshops, lectures, and roundtables examining the Arab uprisings is staggering. More positively, at least ostensibly, is the fact that the uprisings reinvigorated existing projects, organizations, and publications dealing with the region, and led to the creation of a plethora of new ones, primarily in cyberspace.

The net effect for Middle East studies, in terms of both research and pedagogy, has been positive, but not systematically so. The obstacles to a systematic development of Middle East studies lies not only with the perennial lens, and other negatives, but also with what is not sufficiently being exercised in the field by its practitioners, notably, ending the ghettoization of the Middle East (or the region, or the Arab world) in terms of scholarship as well as in classrooms. To that end, there is no substitute to rigorous comparative work. To be sure, this is an issue across area studies. Clearly, other reasons exist that hamper a more cumulative development of Middle East studies, and some are subtle having to do with methodological malaise, hegemonic paradigms, politico-analytic safe-havens or bubbles, and, to be abrupt, a dearth of rigorous critique. There are works that are simply analytically unsound. “Orientalist” and reductionist writings do not have a monopoly on being problematic. Approaches that are critical of the dominant discourse on the region can be problematic as well. In fact, the presence of an often hostile and/or reductionist dominant discourse has pushed many of scholars, myself included, to tolerate substandard research within what can be called a politico-analytic safe-haven.

It is not enough to be against Islamophobia, or critical of Orientalist tropes, or of neoliberal paradigms and designs. Orientalists, Islamophobes, and proponents of neoliberalism are also critical of their own. It is time to go beyond such critique, even amid the onslaught from the various centers of power and from the dominant discourse. We cannot afford to wait until power relations are equal before we are analytically ruthless with one other. The Arab uprisings offer an indispensable opportunity to end the ghettoization of the region, engage the disciplines even further, and build new theoretical paradigms that contribute new knowledge to the social sciences.

To use neoliberal language, now more than ever there is a growth-market not merely for critiquing the most problematic aspects of the dominant discourse, but also for replacing them with sound analytical frameworks. Even if power centers are still likely to get their fill from think tanks that tailor policy to interests, as opposed to sober analysis, the general public regionally, globally, and in the United States is increasingly more receptive. This changing value on the spectrum of receptivity is, alas, not a function of persuasion, or even simply the Arab uprisings. It is structural, reflecting a different political economy of power distribution globally, as well as the beginning of the end of the absolutist hegemony of “free market” ideology. Just like “Islam” is “not” the solution, the “free market” is also not the solution. Although this is no longer a controversial assertion, globally speaking, our intellectual and paradigmatic tasks ahead are more challenging.