The world has yet to settle on an agreed term for the great events unfolding across the Middle East. I was in the depths of the French countryside — out of touch and with a BBC World Service that could only fade in and out of hearing late at night and early morning — during the awe-inspiring Egypt phase. But I was soon persuaded that the designation that Gilles Kepel, the expert on Islamic fundamentalism, assigned them would prove as accurately encapsulating as any. He dubbed them the ”Arab democratic revolution”.
It is definitely all encompassingly Arab. The moment one Arab country, Tunisia, lit the spark, it ignited a fire, a contagion, which all Arabs instantly hoped would spread to the whole ”Arab nation”. They recognised themselves in the aspirations of the Tunisian people and most appeared to be seized with the belief that if one Arab people could achieve what all had long craved so could the others.
It is self-evidently democratic. Other factors, above all the socioeconomic, fuelled it, but the virtual absence of other factional or ideological slogans has been striking. Indeed, so striking that, some say, this emergence of democracy as an ideal and politically mobilising force amounts to nothing less than a ”third way” in modern Arab history.
The first was nationalism, nourished by the experience of European colonial rule and all its works, from the great carve-up of the ”Arab nation” to the creation of Israel, and the West’s subsequent continued will to dominate and shape the region. The second, which only achieved real power in non-Arab Iran, was ”political Islam”, nourished by the failure of nationalism.
And it is doubly revolutionary. First, in the conduct of the revolution itself and the sheer novelty and creativity of the educated and widely apolitical youth who kindled it. Second, and more con
