Some insist that what had begun in Tunisia in December 2010 and almost immediately after spread to large parts of the Arab world were revolutions. Millions of people took to the streets in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and several other Arab capitals, demanding better life standards, only for these demands to quickly escalate to the fall of their countries’ regimes. With the passage of days, the numbers of protesters swelled. The energising mix of anger about the past and aspirations for the future drew wide social segments, from the upper classes to the poor, and across age groups, from the elderly to children. For many the word revolution is not only justified; it carries and conveys the innate feelings that had brought these large social groups together, in different parts of the Arab world, at that moment in time. In this view, the major demonstrations across the region and the demands for utter change were revolutions against political and economic structures that had failed, and whose failures had been accumulating for decades, resulting in layers upon layers of not only poverty, corruption, and waste, but also what, for many felt like colossal lethargy sapping their societies’ potential, depriving the elderly from any meaning to their past, and depriving the young from any promise for their future.

For others, these demonstrations of 2011 were revolts. The difference transcends mere semantics. In this understanding, the demonstrations and the momentum that sustained them for weeks were eruptions of anger that had been building up for decades. But these eruptions were momentary in time and space. In this view, the anger was real, deep, and widespread, but the desire for total change, for an utter transformation of the socio-political and economic structures were confined to specific political forces and to some social segments. In this understanding, the majority perhaps wanted a change in the leaders, and certainly in their entourages that had wielded immense influence for several decades, but not necessarily transformations to the structures of power in their countries.

There are several accounts of the stories of the Arab uprisings in the past 15-years that detail how counter-revolutionary forces managed to sap the energy of the demonstrations, divide the political forces, and conquer the will for change. A lot of what went into these accounts is real. In addition, there were regional forces that worked to stem the momentum that the Arab uprisings had unleashed. Some of these forces were extremely powerful in terms of financial resources and international influence. But at heart, the fundamental problem that the Arab uprisings faced was that the will for total transformation was far from widely shared amongst the largest social segments of these countries.

This unveiled a problem that was lurking at the core of the uprisings, but that the euphoria and momentum of the early months of 2011, across almost the entire region, had shrouded. That is, many amongst the largest segments of the demonstrators that coalesced behind the grand slogans of the uprisings were in different intellectual and emotional places from the ones in which were the small groups whose activism and rhetoric and courage had ignited the flame of the revolutions in the first place. These small groups were, in most cases, inspired by western notions of fundamental human rights. As the movements they had called for grew in scale and started to become serious uprisings, most of their vocal members envisioned their countries on fast tracks towards liberal democracy. For several months, and perhaps for the romantic types, for a couple of years or so, the dream of some Arab countries discarding the legacies of many decades of autocracy and lethargy and acute under-development, only to rise, as if phoenixes from dust and ashes, into advanced societies upholding highly enlightened values, seemed vividly real. But the tenets of Western liberal democracy were far from the aspirations and frames of reference of the large social segments that had given solidity and scale to the uprisings.

Camaraderie in the streets and squares between people of vastly different backgrounds and often opposing values and ideas about the future, lessened the differences. But the conflict of minds was inevitable. And quickly public rhetoric came to portray the vastly different views, especially at a time when media was truly free and diverse and fuelled by a sense that the Arab world was undergoing a historic moment of change.

At moments it got ugly. Exacerbated voices from the groups that had led the first waves of the uprisings expressed highly condescending views, not only about former fellow demonstrators, but against large sections of their own societies. And many in the largest social segments that had formed the bulks of the demonstrations felt that they were the ones that had made these demonstrations evolve into political tsunamis. The Arab uprisings did not, as the French saying go, eat their children. But many of the children were far from the thresholds of political maturity.

In almost all cases in the countries that had witnessed major uprisings, a vacuum was created, that the new revolutionary groups were either too disorganised to fill, or too inexperienced to even recognise. The result was that older political movements, largely in the Islamist camp, were the well funded, well organised, and experienced enough players that saw the historical opportunity and attempted to catch it. As the next article in the series will show, this resuscitated one of the oldest sociopolitical struggles in the Arab world’s experiment with modernity.