Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa by Michael J. Totten

Author:Michael J. Totten [Totten, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction
Publisher: Belmont Estate Books
Published: 2014-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The Woman Who Blew Up the Arab World

Tunisia, 2012

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” – Edward Lorenz, mathematician and chaos theorist

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo—a fateful act that triggered a series of events culminating in the First World War.

Ninety-six years later, on December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of city hall in the small town of Sidi Bouzid—another fateful act that changed the history of an entire region forever.

Protests supporting Bouazizi first turned to riots and then revolution. The crooked authoritarian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in Tunis less than a month later. A copycat uprising in Egypt led to a bloodless military coup against strongman Hosni Mubarak. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was next on the list, though this time it took civil war and aerial bombardment from NATO to be rid of him. Protests against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad mushroomed into a multi-sided civil war featuring the Free Syrian Army, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al Nusra, and the even more terrifying Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which eventually--and perhaps inevitably--sucked int he United States.

Princip died in prison four years after killing Austria’s archduke. He knew what his actions unleashed on the world. He couldn’t participate any further than he already had, but he knew.

Bouazizi only survived his self-immolation for a couple of weeks. He languished, comatose, in a hospital in Sfax the entire time. He had no idea he inspired even a protest, let alone a revolution, a coup and a number of wars.

He killed himself because he could not make a living. And he did it before city hall because he blamed the government.

According to rumors and initial reports, a female police officer spent months picking on him for selling fruit from his cart without a license. Things came to a head when she confiscated his goods and allegedly slapped him. When city officials refused to give his stuff back, he poured gasoline over his head, lit a match and set the world ablaze.

The woman who allegedly slapped him is named Faida Hamdi. I met her at a quiet park just off the main street in town, where she said almost everything published in the media about her is wrong.

We sat in plastic chairs on the grass behind a swing set for children. She ordered—and insisted she pay for—glasses of sweet tea from a concessionaire. A man who looked like an ultraconservative Salafist brought the tea over. I wondered what he thought about a local woman hanging out with an obvious foreign infidel, but if he was perturbed, he didn’t let on.

“First of all,” she said. “I’m not a cop.” She worked for the municipality as a civilian. “My job was to chase away illegal fruit vendors. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t have a truncheon. I don’t carry a weapon at all.

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