The ripple effect of the ‘Arab awakening’ has now spread to a much wider area than any informed observer could have guessed at just six weeks ago. While the regional and foreign media have, understandably, focused on the most observable protests, they have largely failed to convey the simultaneous discontent unsettling governments in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Sudan, and Yemen. Each of these countries has now shown some readiness to assume the mantle of non-violent revolution after the success of popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt, but they may now also be considering the armed resistance which stands poised to end decades of tyranny in Libya. Astonishingly, there are signs that freedom fever may also have spread to Saudi Arabia. In late February, after generations of the unembarrassed kleptocracy, the monarchy announced that it would presently enact welfare reforms worth $36 billion. But the octogenarian King’s hasty bribe may well prove too little, too late.
Most coverage of the protests has focused on the region’s disappointed youth and their yearning for freedom, but it is worth remembering that much of the anger vented in the ‘days of rage’ arose not only because of the rampant corruption which Western governments have tolerated and often encouraged, but as a response to the ease with which rulers like Mubarak were allowed to torture, imprison and murder their political opponents. The West’s hypocrisy in this regard has played no small part in the radicalization of politics throughout the region.
Five years ago, in a study of al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, Lawrence Wright noted that “One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt.” There the brutal mistreatment of Sayyid Qutb and his acolytes, among them Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the founders of al Qaeda “created an appetite for revenge.” Wright notes that the “main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime… Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it justice—was all-consuming.”
One indication of America’s unconscionable indifference to this situation has been its willingness to use Egypt for “extraordinary renditions” during its war on terror. Significantly, when the fate of President Mubarak was being negotiated just a few weeks ago the Obama administration seemed quite willing to accept the appointment of Omar Suleiman to the office of vice-president as a reasonable starting point for a transition to democracy. As Mubarak’s former spy chief, Suleiman was deeply implicated in the regime’s long record of human rights violations and, in the case of Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen arrested in Pakistan in October 2001, Suleiman reportedly carried out some of the torture himself. In an Op-Ed article for Al Jazeera English, Lisa Hajjar, co-editor of the independent current affairs website Jadaliyya, notes that Habib’s memoir recounts his being “repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman.”
Given its long record of doing business with people like Mubarak and Suleiman, it is hardly surprising that the West has reacted so diffidently to the burgeoning freedom movement in the Middle East. However, the diplomats and intelligence services which so completely failed to discern what was brewing on the ‘Arab street’ might yet take comfort from a very different prison story from the region.
In The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker, the documentary film-maker Jen Marlowe recounts the story of Sami Al Jundi, a Palestinian who served a 10-year prison sentence after being arrested for bombmaking with several other would-be terrorists. Although Al Jundi was tortured following his arrest and interrogation, his time in prison turned into an unlikely philosophical journey. Inside the jail he was befriended by an extraordinary Palestinian community who had won—through hunger strikes and other nonviolent protests—access to extensive reading material and the right to form study groups.
Marlowe writes that “For the first three years of his confinement, Sami sat with five other new prisoners in a circle on the concrete floor of their cell for six hours a day, six days a week, being instructed in great detail by two older cellmates/teachers.” In addition to learning the history of Arab nationalism and other relevant political background, he read, and occasionally re-read, the work of Dostoevsky, Rousseau and Gandhi. He read the fiction of Steinbeck, Twain, Jack London and a host of other Western writers. “He read The Odyssey and The Iliad three times each. He read the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. He read the letters that future Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote from prison to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, a future prime minister herself.”
Together with this immersion in political and religious thought, Sami met regularly with his fellow prisoners to practise the virtues of self-criticism. From this remarkable cultural vantage point, he became a committed apostle of the non-violent movement, and after his release, despite the rampant corruption which has marked the Palestinian Authority in recent years, he has remained committed to peaceful political resistance.
These starkly contrasting stories speak directly to the current turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa. The heroism of Tahrir Square and the quiet persistence of peaceful protesters in Bahrain have shown that the supposedly benighted Arab world has actually learned the lessons of liberation movements in the West profoundly well. But the carnage in Libya and the prospect of further killing in Iran and elsewhere could overwhelm these successes and turn non-violent victory into the exception rather than the rule. As these peaceful revolutionaries have looked towards their putative allies in the West, they have been greeted with a disgraceful amount of temporizing and second-guessing. Some of that seems to be ebbing, finally, as the EU, Britain and the US belatedly respond to prospect of genuine democratization in the region. If, collectively, the West fails to abandon its chronically low expectations of the Arab world, it will marginalize itself, along with the Mubaraks and Suleimans of this world, during this crucial phase of transition. If, however, it comes to its senses early enough to make common cause with men like Sami Al Jundi the Middle East could have a future that is unimaginably better than its recent past.
