Revolution without Revolutionaries
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Revolution without Revolutionaries

Making Sense of the Arab Spring

Asef Bayat

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Revolution without Revolutionaries

Making Sense of the Arab Spring

Asef Bayat

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About This Book

The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came before.

Revolution without Revolutionaries is both a history of the Arab Spring and a history of revolution writ broadly. Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished. Protestors call for reform rather than fundamental transformation. By tracing the contours and illuminating the meaning of the 2011 uprisings, Bayat gives us the book needed to explain and understand our post–Arab Spring world.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781503603073
Topic
History
Edition
1
1
Revolutions of Wrong Times
I happen to be an observer of two revolutionary episodes separated by roughly three decades. As a young activist in the late 1970s in Iran, I was engaged in a revolution that opened a new chapter in world politics, the effects of which continue to be felt even to this day. I am referring to the Iranian revolution of 1979, which unfolded almost in tandem with the Sandinistas toppling Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship in Nicaragua, followed by Grenada’s New Jewel Movement (NJM) led by the left-wing Maurice Bishop, which ended the pro-US Eric Gairy’s regime. Not long before, a socialist insurgency had given rise to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the 1970s, while a Marxist-Leninist liberation front was seeking to alter the government in the neighboring sheikhdom of Oman. Arising in the midst of the Cold War, these revolutions spurred a powerful anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, radical democratic, and social justice impulse. I fervently followed these developments—intrigued by revolutionary politics, excited about the prospect of a better future for these nations that had endured repressive autocracies for so long, even though dispirited by their often authoritarian outcomes.
After a span of some thirty years, a new wave of political upheavals overtook the Middle East and beyond. Beginning with the Green revolt of 2009 in Iran, they peaked with the 2011 Arab Spring and were soon followed by a global wave of Occupy movements that raged in the heartland of the capitalist West and spread into some seventy countries. As a committed scholar and sometimes participant in social movements, I closely followed the events surrounding the Green revolt, experienced the political climate prior to the Arab uprisings as a longtime resident of Egypt, and observed the happenings associated with the Occupy movements in North America.
As I juxtapose these two revolutionary episodes, I cannot help sensing how remarkably different they are—not only in their modes of mobilization and organization but especially in their meanings and broader visions. I find the speed, spread, and intensity of the recent revolutions extraordinarily unparalleled, while their lack of ideology, lax coordination, and absence of any galvanizing leadership and intellectual precepts have almost no precedent. But even more striking is that they lacked the kind of radicalism that marked the earlier revolutions and that the ideals of deep democracy, equity, fair property relations, and social justice paled or were more rhetorical than driven by genuine concern anchored on strategic visions or concrete programs. Indeed, it remains a question if what emerged during the Arab Spring were in fact revolutions in sense of their twentieth-century counterparts.
What did happen over the course of the past three decades that altered the nature of radical politics? How and why did the meaning of revolution and the nature of transformative demands change? This book, built on evocations from the earlier revolutions, notably the Iranian experience of 1979, focuses on the Arab uprisings to address the questions of their distinctions and associated implications. At its core, the book aims to offer a new comparative vantage point from which to observe and examine the meaning of the 2011 political upheavals.
Revolutions of the 1970s
On February 11, 1979, a powerful revolutionary movement overthrew the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last of Iran’s twenty-five-hundred-year-old monarchy, replacing it with the first Islamic Republic in the modern world. The victory day followed some eighteen months of intermittent street protests, clashes with the police, labor strikes, and an eventual armed insurrection. The revolution toppled a regime that had emerged in 1953 from a coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against the secular democratic government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, who championed the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. With his return to power the shah, backed by the United States, began to pursue an aggressive policy of modernization, Westernization, and socioeconomic development. Women gained the right to vote, a literacy campaign covered rural areas, and a land reform turned sharecroppers into smallholders and poor tillers into rural proletariat, all set to modernize rural life. But the shah maintained a despotic rule anchored by the notorious secret police, the Organization of Intelligence and National Security (SAVAK), suppressing democratic voices, civil associations, and labor and left movements. Thus, when in 1977, US president Jimmy Carter, following his human rights agenda, called on the shah for openness, the opposition—college students, guerrilla insurgents, supporters of exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the intellectual Ali Shariati—seized the opportunity to express dissent.
A number of liberal secular lawyers, opposition leaders, and intellectuals began writing open letters to the authorities, including the shah, demanding a free press, rule of law, and human rights. The intelligentsia began to regroup, organize, and mobilize. The evenings of poetry reading at Goethe Institute and Aryamehr University in Tehran brought thousands of mostly secular and leftist youths, including myself, into what became a forum to lash out at the government’s repressive practices. Moderate clerics and Islamic figures, such as Mehdi Bazargan, who would become the first prime minister after the revolution, then launched their own evening lectures. Students at Tehran University organized street demonstrations once the academic year began. With the protests in the Qom Seminary concerning a disparaging newspaper article against Ayatollah Khomeini, who was in exile in Iraq for his opposition to the shah, revolutionary protests entered a new phase. Each death in a protest entailed further mourning and marches, generating a cycle of protests that continued for eighteen months. Even the imposition of martial law on September 8, 1978, did not suppress the protests, and demands for the downfall of the shah were voiced as early as February 1978.
The strike of some forty thousand oil refinery workers and the ensuing nationwide general strike in the key sectors of the economy and state administration, including state radio and television, encouraged the revolution and disoriented the regime. By now, the intransigent Ayatollah Khomeini, deported from Iraq to Paris, had become the de facto leader of the revolution; he communicated his messages and directives through personal networks; international media, notably the BBC; and recorded tapes that were widely distributed in Iran. Revolutionaries formed the Provisional Revolutionary Council as an alternative organ of power to that of the shah. The United States and Britain then urged the shah to leave the country for “vacation.” Before his departure on February 1, 1979, the shah transferred authority to a Regency Council and a new prime minister from the liberal opposition, Shapour Bakhtiar, who held little legitimacy on the streets. Only days after the shah’s departure, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to a triumphant welcome. With the army in disarray and the revolution at its height, the ayatollah appointed an alternative government led by Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. It seized power following two days of armed insurrection led largely by the Marxist and Mujahedin guerrillas along with the air force cadets who had defected; they collectively defeated the notorious Imperial Guard, the last vestige of the regime’s resistance.1
The revolution enjoyed widespread support from broad constituencies—modern and traditional, men and women, middle class and laborers—who were connected to a charismatic leadership and a revolutionary organization through the networks of activists operating in the seminaries, mosques, universities, and neighborhoods. The revolutionary strategy and ideology had an intellectual precursor, a body of ideas and visions rooted in both Marxism and political Islam. Many activists had been inspired by the Marxist Fedaian Khalq and Islamic leftist Mujahedin guerrillas, who like the Latin American guerrilla movements had established bases in the northern forests and urban cells. Islamists had sought inspiration from the revolutionary ideas of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb as well as the Palestinian resistance movement. Ayatollah Khomeini had articulated his own vision of Islamic governance in the treatise Islamic Government.2 But none matched the intellectual influence of Ali Shariati, a Marxian Muslim thinker whose ideas of “red” and “revolutionary” Islam garnered a widespread following among political youth and intelligentsia.3 Thus, when the protests in Iran unfolded, many participants had already formed ideas about revolution and revolutionary strategy, even if their meanings and expectations differed. Yet sentiments concerning anticapitalism, popular democracy, and social justice remained key components of both the secular and Islamic intellectual compendium; they came to occupy a central place in the postrevolutionary deeds and debates.
The victory of the revolution coincided with the collapse of authority in the state administration and economic enterprises. Police control had crumbled, many businesspeople had deserted their companies, managers had left factories, landlords departed their large estates, and the rich abandoned homes hurriedly, leaving thousands of lavish properties behind. Thus, landless peasants confiscated large agribusiness estates, factory workers took over hundreds of workplaces, and government employees began to run the ministries and departments. In the cities, ordinary citizens launched a spectacular takeover of mainly public lands and illegal construction of homes, contributing to the rapid expansion of Iran’s urban centers, notably the capital. Some 150,000 housing units—palaces, hotels, villas, and unfinished apartment blocks—belonging to the elites of the ancien rĂ©gime went to the newly established Foundation of the Dispossessed. The new grassroots organizations, notably the “revolutionary institutions” such as the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), paramilitary volunteers, rural Construction Crusade, and Housing Foundation, quickly moved to fill the power vacuum.4 In the end, the Iranian revolution entailed a rapid and radical transformation of the old order; it opened a political future that embraced the republican ideals of popular sovereignty and distributional justice while paving the way for what was to be the long march of political Islam in the world.
Although dubbed “the last great revolution,” the Iranian experience was not the only radical revolution in the region.5 The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a number of revolutionary movements in the Arab world that took their ideological cues from both Nasserite anti-imperialism and Marxism-Leninism. In Yemen, where Britain had forged a federal government run by the local amirs and sultans, a guerrilla group later called the National Liberation Front (NLF) began an insurgency in the early 1960s. Based in the port city of Aden with its militant trade unionism, these southern militants—including exiled workers, intellectuals, officers, and tribal leaders—fought British forces, mobilized the countryside and took territories, defeated the sultans and amirs who owned land, and inherited positions in the tribal hierarchy; by 1967 they had established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.6 The new government nationalized the economy, created central planning, limited ownership of housing for rent, and carried out land reform with some success, as the gross domestic product (GDP) rose by 25 percent by 1973. Yet the poor economic base, scarce foreign exchange, meager skilled labor and inexperienced administrators, and hasty nationalization also had an adverse impact.7 Nevertheless, social reforms proceeded with an impressive outcome. Income equality improved, corruption was reduced, and health and educational services expanded. Considerable efforts were made toward emancipation of women despite continuing conservative backlash—women became legally equal to men and were encouraged to work in public; polygamy, child marriage, and arranged marriage were all banned; and equal rights in divorce received legal sanction. Imams did continue their functions in mosques but lost their social power as education became secularized, religious endowment came under state control, and sharia was replaced with the state legal codes.8 On the whole, emphasis was placed on the egalitarian tenets of Islam.
Like the Cuban revolutionaries, the NLF had transcended its early nationalist position to embrace Marxist politics and armed struggle. During their campaign in the mountains of South Yemen, the rebels read, reflected, and strived to learn from the international socialist strategies—notably Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban experiences—while shedding their “petty bourgeois” Nasserism and tribal mind-set.9 But the more heart-felt inspiration came from the left-wing Arab intelligentsia centered in Lebanon, in particular those associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose secular, pluralist, and progressive ideology had embraced such luminaries as the great poet Mahmoud Darwish, the author Elias Khoury, and the Marxist novelist and strategist Ghassan Kanafani, whom the Israeli secret police assassinated in 1972.
The victory of the NLF in Yemen boosted the insurgency in the neighboring Sultanate of Oman, where the nationalist youth in Salala had established the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman in the mid-1960s to free the southern province of Dhofar from the rule of Sultan Said bin Taimur and his British ally. Disenchanted by the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s defeat in the 1967 war and emboldened by the departure of Britain and the NLF victory in Yemen, the Dhofari liberation movement adopted Marxist-Leninist ideology and aimed to liberate “all of the Gulf from imperialism.”10 Political scientist Fred Halliday, who visited the liberated areas, reported that “wherever we went we saw people wearing Mao and Lenin badges, reading socialist works and discussing.”11 Works by Lenin and Bertolt Brecht and on Palestinian resistance and the Spanish civil war had special purchase, with discussions disseminated on the pages of the weekly Sawt al-Thawra and the monthly 9 Yunyu.12 The Dhofari revolutionary culture received its cue from the revolutionary movements in the Third World at the time, but it drew particularly on the nearby revolutions in Palestine and South Yemen, as well as the experiences of Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries.13 Among the insurgents were ex-slaves, shepherds, fishermen, migrant workers in the Gulf, and fighters from richer families. The insurgency exhausted the sultan and his British ally, even though the fear of Marxist revolutions had caused the conservative regimes in the region—Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan—to extend financial and military assistance to the sultan. But it was the shah of Iran who, by deploying thousands of troops, eventually forced the militants to consider a negotiated settlement.
The legacy of these liberation movements had become part of the intellectual universe of the Iranian revolutionaries—both Marxist and religious—who defeated the shah’s Imperial Guards in their final push to topple the shah’s regime.14 When the Iranian revolutionaries seized the radio and TV stations in Tehran, the leftist Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua were preparing to take the capital, Managua, in a popular uprising that would end the US-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza on July 19, 1979. Established in 1961, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) undertook guerrilla operations against government installations, including the presidential palace, while building support among the rural and urban poor, middle classes, and progressive faction of the Catholic Church aligned with the liberation theology movement...

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