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What Joseph Massad gets right about the Arab Spring / A Thread. Yeah I know. Massad's piece @MiddleEastEye last week has inflamed online opinion, as no doubt it was intended to. But for all the criticism, he gets two things right 1/ https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/secular-liberals-destroyed-arab-uprisings-dont-let-it-happen-again
I don't propose to detail every objection; Twitter has already picked that carcass clean. But 1) he overstates the role of the West, especially at the start of the uprisings. There were "tentacles", certainly, but their sucker-prints were not there at the very beginning 2/
2) He elides too much politics, as if the end were forseeable from the start. It was not. There were years of political decisions. After the initial shock, powerful elites in every country, from Cairo to DC, asked, how can I make this about me? And then they got involved. 3/
Massad is right on 2 points, both crucial for the future of Arab political movements. 1, an economic critique that isn't expansive enough. Here, Arab liberals aren't alone. There is a much broader argument about the Left's failure to offer a coherent alternative to capitalism 4/
2nd: there *is* a strain of liberal Arab opinion that seems to prefer a robust defence against what it perceives as the intolerance of Islamists. Minorities, the marginalised and women sometimes take this view, given the weight of social conservatism most often falls on them. 5/
Did these constituencies destroy the Arab Spring? Don’t be ridiculous. Unlike the organised Islamists, liberals were disorganised and harassed by regimes. It should remain a matter of immense pride that so many faced down the regime's guns, day in and day out, without support 6/
But what they did do was provide intellectual ballast to the idea that religious conservatism was a threat that required a firm hand to counter. That strain of opinion is still there, let's be honest, in every country of the Arab Spring, and beyond 7/
Here, I don't propose to discuss whether such conservatism does require that response. What interests me is why Arab liberals espouse such a reactionary view. And there are two answers. (Everything is in twos today, Twitter.) 8/
The first is: they are frightened. Socially conservative movements are baked into the fabric of Arab societies. Add in political control and many liberals rightly fear their life’s liberties could be curtailed. The rest of us should listen long and hard before we disagree. 9/
The 2nd is more intriguing: because #ArabLiberalism has not fully formulated an ideology separate from western liberalism and Islamists. There is a long history why and I’ll return to it another time. But this tweet from @ingy_mh is worth pondering 10/ https://twitter.com/ingy_mh/status/1350863683350646788
Arab liberals and left-wing movements need to build the same organisational ability and policy prowess as their opponents. They need allies, at home and abroad. That is the way to ensure they can succeed when the next political opening appears 11/
