Trailblazers of the Arab Spring

350 Pages·2013·1.74 MB·English

by  Joshua Muravchik

Table of Contents

Title Page
Foreword
Preface

The Protester
The Politician
The Revolutionist
The Publisher
The Activist
The Feminist
The Dissident

Epilogue
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
Foreword
This is a book about the people who are driving the most
important revolution of the 21st century—the insurrection
against the despots who have been ruling Muslim-majority
nations in the Middle East and North Africa.
It’s a revolution that hardly anyone predicted, but, against all
odds, in 2004, Joshua Muravchik set out, as he put it, “to
identify individuals in the Middle East who could make
democracy possible.” Josh (and I can call him that since I’ve
known him for 16 years, back to when we played together on
the American Enterprise Institute softball team) will readily
admit that he wasn’t rushing to print because he thought the
overthrow of Hosni Mubarak or Zin El-Abidine Ben Ali was
imminent. But he recognized what few others did: There were
brave, smart individuals working quietly and passionately, at
home and in exile, to bring freedom to countries that had never
known it.
What Josh wanted to show was that, scattered about Middle
East communities, there were men and women who dreamed of
living in a society that mirrored our own in terms of freedom,
opportunity, and equal rights and who were devoting
themselves at great risk to making this dream a reality. Their
family histories, their sacrifices, their ideological origins, the
roots of their motivation—in fact, their very existence—were
nearly unknown.
Why? One answer is that American policymakers were not
unhappy with the status quo in the Middle East, and if there
were democrats seeking change, hardly anyone in the West
cared—or noticed. That began to change, as Josh writes, after
the attacks of 9/11, when policymakers acknowledged that the
Middle East conflict between autocracy and democracy, like
the conflict over the nature of Islam as a religion, was playing
out on our own shores and that, ultimately, a freer Middle East
would mean a safer world. During her confirmation hearings to
be Secretary of State in 2005, Condoleezza Rice explicitly
repudiated past policy: “In the Middle East, President Bush has
broken with six decades of excusing and accommodating the
lack of freedom in the hope of purchasing stability at the price
of liberty. The stakes could not be higher. As long as the
broader Middle East remains a region of tyranny and despair
and anger, it will produce extremists and movements that
threaten the safety of Americans and our friends.”
So, after 9/11, we had good strategic and moral reasons to
recognize that Middle East democrats existed and needed to be
nurtured. But the history of the West’s ignorance of what Josh
calls the “voices of democracy” is more insidious. These voices
were, after all, Arab, Persian, Kurdish, and the like, and our
understanding of their culture, history, and politics was scant
and informed by prejudice and myth. Part of that myth was that
(despite the experience of Indonesia and Turkey) Muslims
aren’t ready for freedom, or really don’t want it, or haven’t
absorbed enough 18th Century Enlightenment ideas to achieve
it. In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy in
2003, President George W. Bush said, “In many nations of the
Middle East ... democracy has not yet taken root. And the
questions arise: Are the people of the Middle East somehow
beyond the reach of liberty? . . . I, for one, do not believe it.”
This was a minority view at the time. It probably still is.
The Gdansk Shipyard may have seemed a bit exotic in 1980,
but we could understand Polish workers rising against
communism as they had done before. But who are people like
Hisham Kassem, Mohsen Sazegara, Rola Dashti? Josh
Muravchik knows them. He tells their stories.
This approach—the emphasis on the personal—may be
unexpected for someone of Josh’s background. He is a scholar
of intellectual history, author of Heaven on Earth: The Rise and
Fall of Socialism, among other important books. But he chose
here to present life narratives, and he does something I’ve
never encountered before: He allows us to see, from the inside
out, how these Middle East democrats see the world and how
they could risk everything for freedom despite (or perhaps
because of) the traditions in which they were raised—in Egypt,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, Kuwait, and Syria.
The publication of the initial version of this book in June 2009
was prescient. Almost too prescient. The very month of
publication, crowds swept through Tehran, protesting a
fraudulent presidential election and spawning the Green
Movement, the greatest threat to Iranian tyranny since the
overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Then, on December 17, 2010,
Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and protests forced
Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power 28 days
later. In what seemed a continual passing of the baton from
one group of revolutionaries to the next, Mubarak fell in
February 2011, and by autumn Muammar Qaddafi of Libya was
dead, and Syria was aflame.
Josh realized he needed to add these more recent events to
the story. The book you hold in your hands includes an
absorbing account of the Arab Spring in the form of an
epilogue and updates to the biographies of the seven subjects.
All in their 40s or 50s, their often lonely voices found numerous
echoes in the younger, computer-savvy generation, whose
protests culminated in the demonstrations in the streets of
Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, and Deraa. Josh draws on his post-
revolution trips to Tunisia and Egypt to recount these events
and offer some well informed speculation about where it all
may lead.
The Bush Institute wanted to co-publish this book in part
because of President Bush’s commitment to freedom, in the
Middle East and around the world: “Freedom is universal.
People who do not look like us want freedom just as much.”
When the Institute, the policy innovation arm of the George
W. Bush Presidential Center on the campus of Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, was launched in 2009, our very
first program was something called the Freedom Collection.
The original concept was to gather video histories from
dissidents and freedom advocates, like Vaclav Havel of the
Czech Republic—mainly as an archive to encourage those who
live in the United States and other free countries to support the
spread of human freedom. We soon realized, however, that
there was another vital audience: other dissidents and freedom
advocates who were on the front lines in places like Cuba,
North Korea, Burma, and, yes, many nations in the Middle
East.
These personal histories of dissidents are critical for two
reasons: First, they provide moral support to today’s freedom
advocates, who can understand their place in history and
realize that they aren’t alone, and, second, they present
practical solutions—how the Solidarity movement brought
down communism in Poland, for example, or how the Dalai
Lama drafted the free Tibetan constitution. We now have
scores of such interviews, and we are using technology to make
them available to dissidents in closed societies and others
around the world. Josh’s book fits the strategy of the Institute
and our belief that it is personal stories that inspire, educate,
and ultimately produce change. As Josh writes, “The realization
of democracy in the region depends on people like the seven
whose stories are told in this book.”
We wanted to co-publish for two other reasons as well. First,
Josh Muravchik, who is a fellow in Human Freedom at the Bush
Institute, is a serious scholar with a wide and deep background
in both global and Middle Eastern politics and history. Second,
he is that rare bird among international relations PhDs: a clear
and graceful writer. But you’ll soon see that for yourself.

James K. Glassman
Founding Executive Director, George W. Bush Institute