The Arab Spring was ignited by a young male street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia who burnt himself after the police harassed him and confiscated his items on the street. Bouazizi’s death had sparked the anger of many Arabs across the Arab world and many Arab dictators were toppled as a result. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was toppled as with Tunisian President Ben Ali and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad survived the Arab Spring by massacring hundreds of thousands of his own civilians. Others like Jordanian King Abdullah II remained unscathed.
Looking back, the Arab Spring with its magnitude and persistent effects looks like the start of a secular and long-term period of change in the Arab world. Europe had its own century of revolutions succeeded by massive wars and then more revolutions in Eastern Europe before it established a stable and prosperous liberal democracy. The Arab world has its own characteristics, culture and religion, predominantly Islam, and its history will be different from Europe’s but there is no denying that the Arab world will continue to change and with its young generations becoming ever more educated with an infinite resource of information thanks to the internet, the cultural disparities between the older and the younger generations will ever continue to increase. Even Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman knows that this is inevitable and he wants to project himself as the person in Saudi Arabia that is mediating this process between different generations and thinking.
Last year, women in Iran nearly caused a full-scale revolution by simply refusing to wear their hijab (head-scarf) which was only quenched by brutal repression and thousands of killings by the regime’s security forces. In 2019 an image of a woman assertively addressing a crowd during the Sudanese revolution of 2019 went viral on the internet. And women in the Arab Spring played an important role too, although their participation was not as visually equivalent to men. Women protesters in Egypt suffered systematic sexual harassment in the Arab Spring and the police even used sexual harassment and rape as weapons against female protesters. Today, Arabic women are ever increasingly more vocal on the internet and they have much more anger accumulated in them than many Arab men, because Arabic women, apart from experiencing the same life under authoritarian regimes as men, also suffer for the fact of being women.
So, wouldn’t it be logical then, that if Arabic women are even more victimised than Arabic men, it’s their anger which may unleash the next Arab Spring?
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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