Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

recalls how he and his fellow left-wing radicals were blindsided by the Islamic Revolution. “Here we had these forces that we thought we had confined to the dustbins of history that reappeared and turned out to have nothing to do with what we had always expected,” he says. “The working classes were nowhere to be seen. All the categories through which we had viewed the world had fallen apart.” 8 The Tudeh, once the most powerful Communist Party in its region, effectively ceased to exist after the Iranian Revolution—a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to real-existing socialism elsewhere. The dream of the brotherhood of man was a powerful one, but it could not compete, in the final analysis, with the brotherhood of believers.
    The man who started the Arab Spring was not an Islamist. On December 17, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in Tunisia, a high school graduate with an income of some $140 a month, changed the course of history. That day Mohammed Bouazizi went to a local government office in his hometown of Sidi Bouzid to register a protest against the police who had confiscated his vegetable cart. The official in charge refused to see him or acknowledge his complaints. Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and set himself alight. 9
    Bouazizi’s death touched off a revolution in his home country that quickly found emulators across the Arab world. In Tunisia itself, the protesters who took to the streets in empathy with Bouazizi’s frustrations brought down the country’s long-entrenched president. In Egypt millions of other demonstrators challengedPresident Hosni Mubarak—and won. Yemenis successfully dislodged their leader, Libyans toppled the regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Syrians rose up against the government of Bashar al-Assad. The unrest spanned, to varying degrees, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Each uprising was different. Economic and political factors worked to unique effect in each country. Yet common to all of these rebellions was an essentially moral impulse: the urge to fight against the corruption and injustice that spring from long years of dictatorial rule.
    The Arab Spring caught the world—not to mention many of the people directly affected by it—completely off guard. But one of the most surprising things about it was, at least initially, the comparatively subdued role of political Islam. Islamist movements exist in all of the countries affected by the Arab revolutions, yet religious activists were relatively inconspicuous in the early stages of upheaval. The demands of the people in the vanguard of change in the Middle East in 2010 and 2011 were remarkably similar to those protesting dictatorship in other parts of the world. Demonstrators proclaimed their desires for an end to tyranny, for free elections and freedom of speech, for an end to corruption, for transparent institutions and good governance, for impartial courts and strong parliaments. They did not call—at least at first—for the implementation of the sharia, for rule by the ulama or a jihadi avant-garde, for God’s sovereignty to override that of the people. For the crowds demonstrating on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Damascus, and Manama, Islam—to paraphrase the famous Islamist slogan—was not necessarily the answer. Many members of the younger generation of activists claimed to see their salvation in parliamentary democracy rather than the precepts of Quranic government.
    Yet the ghost of 1979 has still managed to haunt the Arab Spring. The Iranian precedent has come to seem particularly ominous in the case of Egypt, the country that gave the Arab world its most prominent revivalist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s success in the first free presidential and parliamentary elections since Mubarak’s downfall was, for many Egyptians, the logical outcome of the revolution; for many others, it represented nothing less than a betrayal of the