Thawrat al-Karāmah: Dignity Revolution

“Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.”
     --Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

In the summer of 2010, my wife and I took a trip to Tunisia. I knew very little about Tunisia at the time, as was true, I suspect, for many Americans. Now, I would guess that if not most, at least many more Americans are familiar with Tunisia, especially as the birthplace of the Arab Spring.

Our tour flew into Tunis and then described a big loop passing through Roman ruins at Dougga, Kairouan, Roman ruins at Sbeitla, the salt pan of Chott el Jerid,  the Berber village of Matmata, the dunes of the Sahara, the Roman amphitheater of El Jem, the popular tourist area of Sousse, and Carthaginian ruins in Carthage, eventually returning to Tunis. While there was much of interest, I have to say the highlight for me was the area around Chott el Jerid and Matmata, where some scenes set on Tatooine were filmed for Star Wars.

Our tour guide made much of how Tunisia was a secular democracy without any of the aspects of radical Islam so disturbing to the West. The impression we received was of a progressive and stable country, and very little we saw challenged that. Indeed, in Sousse, where European tourists were numerous, I purchased a nifty Crusaders-vs.-Muslims chessboard at an upscale shopping center staffed mainly by young women who apparently felt no need to even wear a scarf to cover their hair.

Looking back, however, I can see signs of the political and economic dysfunction that would soon inspire the Jasmine Revolution. Pictures of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had kept a tight hold on power since 1987, could be seen hanging in places of business and one of the reasons we went to Tunisia in the first place was that the poor economy made it one of the cheapest tours available for seeing ancient ruins .

Six months later, in the town of Sidi Bouzid, a 26-year-old vegetable vendor by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi walked to a police station and immolated himself after incidents in which the police had confiscated his goods and insulted him. This set off protests. The Tunisian people had had enough and revolted--no longer would they allow the few with political, economic and brute power to grind them into the dust. Events escalated and Ben Ali eventually resigned. The country recently held an election in which about 60% of eligible voters participated, electing representatives from a handful of parties to a constitutional assembly. The party to win the most seats is the Islamist party Nahda, but at the moment, the party shows no signs of departing from democracy for theocracy.

Meanwhile, the revolution has bloomed, with regimes in Egypt and Libya falling and others in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain under pressure.  No one saw the Arab Spring coming and it is changing an entire region of the world on a scale so large that in future years we are likely to remember it as an era-defining event like the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is too soon, however, to say whether any of these countries will go on to become liberal democracies or, after the manner of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, lapse into regimes no better than what they have replaced. This reminds me of something I read a couple months back in Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes:

“Recall how Arendt describes, in Badiouian terms, the suspension of temporality as the defining ontological characteristic of ontic political action: acting, as man’s capacity to begin something new, “out of nothing,” not reducible to a calculated strategic reaction to a given situation, takes place in the non-temporal gap between past and future, in the hiatus between the end of the old order and the beginning of the new which in history is precisely the moment of revolution.”

While one might say that the events shaking the Middle East are the result of the past--long years of repressive regimes who humiliated their peoples--and that the Middle East is racing toward a new future born of that past, we might also say, after Zizek’s summary of Hannah Arendt above, that they are in a timeless moment that refuses the past but has yet to embrace a future. They are at a tipping point, only no one can say which direction they will fall.

I like to think that Occupy Wall Street is a part of the movement sweeping the Arab world. Like the brave people who gathered in Tahrir Square to demand that then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak step down or the Libyan dentist I saw on the news who had turned into a machinegun-toting rebel and was trading fire with Muammar Gaddafi’s thugs, the 99% in America have had enough of working too hard for too little while the 1% has gone from rich to super-rich and contemplates what comes next. While anything deserving the description “revolution” appears to be a ways off yet, and may never come, I hope Occupy Wall Street will continue and that its methods will remain peaceful but increasingly effective.

A greater worldwide movement against oligarchy would require a different name than “Arab Spring,” but its courageous origins needn’t be abandoned. The Tunisians called their revolution Thawrat al-Karāmah in Arabic. This is a name that could be used by the downtrodden anywhere because it means Dignity Revolution.