Some commentators insist that what began in Tunisia in December 2010 and almost immediately afterwards spread to large parts of the Arab world were revolutions. Millions of people took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and several other Arab capitals, demanding better living standards, only for these demands to quickly escalate to the fall of their countries’ regimes.
With the passage of days, the numbers of protesters swelled. The energising mix of anger about the past and aspirations for the future drew wide social segments from the upper classes to the poor and across age groups from the elderly to children.
For many, the word revolution was not only justified, but it also carried and conveyed the innate feelings that brought these large social groups together in different parts of the Arab world at that moment in time. In this view, the major demonstrations across the region and the demands for root-and-branch change were revolutions against political and economic structures that had failed and whose failures had been accumulating for decades.
They had resulted in layer upon layer not only of poverty, corruption, and waste, but also of what for many felt like a colossal lethargy sapping their societies’ potential, depriving the elderly of any meaning to their past and the young of any promise for their future.
For others, however, the demonstrations of 2011 were revolts, with the difference in view transcending mere semantics. In this understanding, the demonstrations and the momentum that sustained them for weeks were eruptions of anger that had been building up for decades. But these eruptions were momentary in time and space. The anger was real, deep, and widespread, but the desire for total change, for the utter transformation of socio-political and economic structures, was confined to specific political forces and to some social segments.
In this understanding, the majority perhaps wanted a change of leaders, and certainly a change of their entourages that had wielded immense influence over several decades, but not necessarily transformations in the structures of power in their countries.
There have been many accounts of the Arab uprisings over the past 15 years that detail how counter-revolutionary forces managed to sap the energy of the demonstrations, divide the political forces, and conquer the will for change. A lot of what went into them is real. In addition, there were regional forces that worked to stem the momentum that the Arab uprisings had unleashed. Some of these forces were extremely powerful in terms of financial resources and international influence. But at heart the fundamental problem that the Arab uprisings faced was that their will for total transformation was far from widely shared amongst the largest social segments.
This unveiled a problem that had been lurking at the core of the uprisings, but that the euphoria and momentum of the early months of 2011 across almost the entire region had shrouded. Many of the largest segments of the demonstrators that coalesced behind the grand slogans of the uprisings were in different intellectual and emotional places from those of the small groups whose activism and rhetoric and courage had ignited the flame of the demonstrations in the first place.
These small groups were in most cases inspired by Western notions of fundamental human rights. As the movements they called for grew in scale and started to become serious uprisings, most of their more vocal members envisioned their countries on fast tracks towards liberal democracy.
For several months, and perhaps for the romantic types for a couple of years or so, the dream of some Arab countries discarding the legacies of many decades of autocracy and lethargy and acute under-development only to rise like phoenixes from the ashes into advanced societies upholding highly enlightened values seemed vividly real. But the tenets of Western liberal democracy were far from the aspirations and frames of reference of the large social segments that had given solidity and scale to the uprisings.
Camaraderie in the streets between people of vastly different backgrounds and often opposing values and ideas about the future lessened the differences. But the conflict of minds was inevitable. Public rhetoric quickly came to portray these vastly different views, especially at a time when the media was truly free and diverse and fuelled by a sense that the Arab world was undergoing a historic moment of change.
Sometimes things became ugly. Voices from the groups that had led the first waves of the uprisings expressed highly condescending views, not only about former fellow demonstrators, but also about large sections of their own societies. Many in the largest social segments that had formed the bulk of the demonstrations felt that they were the ones that had made these demonstrations evolve into political tsunamis. The Arab uprisings did not, as the French saying goes, “eat their own children.” But many of the children were far from the threshold of political maturity.
In almost all the countries that witnessed major uprisings, a vacuum was created that the new revolutionary groups were either too disorganised to fill or too inexperienced to recognise. The result was that older political movements, largely in the Islamist camp, were the well-funded, well-organised, and sufficiently experienced players that saw the historical opportunity and attempted to catch it.
As the next article in the series will show, this resuscitated one of the oldest sociopolitical struggles in the Arab world’s experiments with modernity.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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