I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet

Author:Souad Mekhennet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10

This Is Not an Arab Spring

Germany and Tunisia, 2011

Along with the rest of the world, I spent the first half of 2011 watching the Middle East erupt. In January, a month after the Tunisian fruit seller, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, triggering nationwide protests, Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali resigned after twenty-three years in office. In February, shortly after Nick and I left Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak was deposed after thirty years in power. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was battling a vigorous armed opposition in a conflict that would engulf that country. And in Syria a movement to overthrow Bashar al-Assad was beginning. The international community pledged support to the rebel groups, and the whole region was flooded with weapons.

At the beginning, I’d shared in the general optimism I’d felt among the demonstrators, whose message was, “We want a change in our country, and this is why we are protesting.” I understood their anger and their feeling that they needed to mobilize more people so that their voices and their message could be heard. For decades, the leaders of some of these countries had spoken out against monarchies, claiming to be republics or democracies. But while they might have technically been so, in reality small elites held all the power. Friends of the presidential family grew richer while others stayed poor. They might as well have been kingdoms. Moreover, some Arab leaders had underestimated the influence of social media in their countries. They did whatever they could to control the local press, but the growing availability of the Internet had given their people other sources of information and new ways to communicate.

As the revolutions unfolded, however, I grew increasingly troubled by the way the “Arab Spring” was being covered in the international press and what Western leaders were saying about it. People seemed to believe that the countries of the Middle East would now transform themselves overnight into open, Western-style democracies. In many cases, this was what the protesters said they wanted. But putting it into practice would be an immensely complicated decades-long project, which no one seemed to be talking about. I sensed that many in the West—and some in the Arab world as well—had given themselves over to magical thinking.

Sometime in late winter or early spring, I got an urgent-sounding text message from an imam in Berlin whom I’d known for a couple of years: “Salam Souad, can you call me? It’s important.”

“I see more and more young people inside my community who say they will go and fight jihad,” he told me when I reached him.

“So what’s new?” I responded. For more than a decade there had been a steady stream of young Muslim men seeking to fight in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, following the path of the September 11 attackers.

“They are not planning to go to Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he answered. “They are talking about Libya or Syria.”

“But who do they want to fight?” I asked him. “What jihad?”

“I don’t know, but there is someone here you should meet.

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