Kifaya! (Enough!)
The QandO Blog
Posted by: McQ on Tuesday, March 15, 2005
You’ve probably noted that references to the “Arab Street” have gone missing since it began to appear that not only was Iraq turning the corner, but democracy was beginning to flower in an “Arab spring” in the most unlikely places in the Middle East.
Youssef M. Ibrahim, writing for the Gulf News, notes that the voices of the Arab street sound quite a bit different now than they once did, and some of it will come as a surprise to those who condemned US’s actions and activities in the Middle East:
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Poke around conversations in the cafés up and down Dubai’s creek, the gold souks of downtown Jeddah, or in the privacy of a million homes across the vast Arab landscape and you might hear good things being said about the US President George W. Bush.
Intellectuals, businessmen and working class people alike can be caught these days lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy in Arab lands, cheering his irreverent handling of Middle Eastern rulers who are US allies as he puts pressure on them to hold free elections, release political prisoners and open trade.
And, it is very much an open secret that millions of ordinary Arabs openly embrace Bush’s unvarnished threats against Syria should it fail to pull its soldiers and spies out of Lebanon before the elections there next month.
It may not add up to a love fest for Bush in Arabia as much as it is a celebration by exponentially growing numbers of Arabs of their own liberation.
From Casablanca to Kuwait City, what Bush says mirrors, reinforces, and, in fact, reflects what has long been in the heart: A yearning for human rights, justice, freedom, rule of law, transparency, limits on power and women’s rights. In short civilization as we know it today in the 21st century.
The call for these most basic of rights has been murmured for a long time, but a confluence of events starting with the Arab satellite revolution of the past decade to the most recent assassination of Rafik Hariri on February 14 has transformed it into something resolute.
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To me the key point here is Ibrahim’s reference to Bush’s “hard-edged posture on democracy in Arab lands”. Note he didn’t say they liked Bush, or even the US. But it appears they have come to respect his hard-edged and consistent posture and they therefore grudgingly have come to respect what the US has done and is doing.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to like something or someone I didn’t respect. But I’ve found myself many times coming to like someone I learned to respect.
What the Arab street now seems to reflect is that grudging but growing respect for George W. Bush’s consistent position on freedom in the middle east. Additionally, that position has been backed by the blood and treasure of the US. This point is not lost on anyone in that region except those who purposefully refuse to see it.
The US has committed itself to the process of freedom in the middle east, and as Ibrahim notes, the Arab street is “cheering his irreverent handling of Middle Eastern rulers who are US allies as he puts pressure on them to hold free elections, release political prisoners and open trade.”
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Its intensity differs vastly from country to country, but a common feature underpinning everything is the lifting of that fear which for decades has constricted the Arab mind.
People, men and women, are less worried about getting hurt or arrested than about conveying what is on their minds.
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This is particularly evident right now in Lebanon in which almost a million Lebanese turned out to again protest Syria’s continued presence in their country and dwarfing the staged pro-Syria rally by Hezbollah.
All of that, of course, doesn’t at all mean there’s some sort of love-fest going on between Bush and the US with average Arabs. But it has, as mentioned, begun to engender more respect:
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Regardless of Bush’s intentions - which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion - the US president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigour to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills in the Greater Middle East.
It is enough for someone like me and most of my liberal friends, who have long felt that Bush’s attitude toward the Middle East was all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Arab and Muslim house in order first may not in fact be the right approach to wider justice in the region.
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So now that this has all begun, what will keep it going. Ibrahim asks that question and the answers he receives are encouraging. The Americans may have started it and given it a push, but its fruition rests with the region's people:
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"The answer is within us, not anywhere else,", said a nameless young man, one of the thousands who waved Lebanese flags in Beirut's Martyrs Square the other day to a television interviewer.
In other words, the groundswell itself is the only guarantee of its survival, with more Arabs than ever baring their souls, showing no fear.
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That adds a new word to the world’s vocabulary, one which hasn’t been heard in the area before:
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By now all the world knows the slogan for this nascent peoples’ Arab revolt is kifaya (enough) a word which will enter dictionaries, just as the Palestinian intifida did.
It is both emphatic and vague enough to be all encompassing yet effective: enough of autocrats, enough corruption, enough occupation and enough repression. It has acquired magical and perhaps lasting power.
The Americans saw it and came to give a push for their own motives and reasons. That is nice, but whether they stay or not should not be a determining factor. What does matter is the staying power of the movement itself.
An analyst of the Arab condition, Abdulmoneim Saeed, argued last week in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al Awsat that the “enough” movement can already claim an important achievement - sweeping aside the tired arguments that Arabs and Muslim societies have “special circumstances, special traditions and special cases” which preclude those societies from sharing universal democratic principles.
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Ibriham, though encouraged wonders if this is real spring or a false spring:
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Arabs must not wait for Bush but lead the way and not shrink away when the counter attack begins, remembering well that not a single autocrat will ever be a willing participant in democratic reform.
So one is left to wonder if this moment will last more than a moment, whether it will turn into a repeat of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall or whether it will be a reprise of the truncated Beijing Spring.
For now, all the Middle East has are demonstrators and brave voters who, ballot by imperfect ballot, e-mail by e-mail are burying a culture of fear. And for the moment, that may be enough.
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We shall see.
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