By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, October 3, 2022 On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in captivity three days after she was abducted by “morality police” in Tehran for allegedly breaking the dress code imposed by the Iranian ruling regime. Almost immediately protests broke out across the country. As of the time of writing these lines, a week after Mahsa Amini’s death, the popular protests are only intensifying and thereby insisting on the revolutionary event-ness (per Badiou) of the historical moment. What instigated the protests is not the exceptionality of the incident but rather the commonality of what it represents in terms of legalized violence against the doubly and triply marginalized.
In all societies that live under oppressive regimes, revolt takes place regularly and in various individual and collective forms. Once in a while, an incident would have a domino effect triggering a simultaneous, unplanned, popular uprising that overwhelms the police apparatuses for a few days, weeks, or more. Sometimes the protested regime would not get a chance to resume its totalitarian grip on power, which may result in the ultimate collapse of the police state altogether. While the Arab Spring movements successfully brought down several oppressive regimes, the Islamist movements hijacked almost every popular uprising, which resulted in widespread disbelief in the democratic plausibility and strategic effectiveness of uprisings. However, what happened in the Arab Spring is something Iranians already experienced in the 1979 revolution when Khomeini’s followers hijacked the revolution. While this Iranian uprising, like the uprisings of the Arab Spring, might suffer from the absence of a revolutionary agenda for establishing a new social and political order, it will nonetheless be immune to at least one type of counterrevolutionary infection, which is Islamism. This protest movement’s spontaneous adoption of the Rojava-Bakur revolution’s motto, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,” “Women, Life, Freedom,” is a promising sign in terms of the prospects of moving beyond not only religious fundamentalism but also other forms of male-chauvinism and nationalism.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Thursday, December 12, 2019 For decades, Sunni Islamism was led by Saudi Wahabism, while the Muslim Brotherhood developed strategies for taking over governments. When King Salman assumed power in Saudi Arabia in 2015, a major shift took place in Saudi politics. For the first time in the history of the kingdom, Wahabis were confronted in the centers of power. This coincided with the escalation of Turkey’s Islamist ambitions to become the leading Sunni imperial power, led by Erdoğan. The center of Sunni Islamism gradually moved from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, and this was reinforced when the Saudis came out in support of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to reinstall their ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Erdoğan, on the other hand, lost a strategic ally when Morsi was deposed by el-Sisi.
Parallel to this shift of the Sunni centers of gravity, Al-Qaida was losing ground while ISIS emerged as the main force capable of recruiting fundamentalist youth to join jihad. As many of Al-Qaida’s funding sources dried up due to new Saudi policies, Turkey did everything short of openly professing support to empower ISIS. Erdoğan’s regime allowed tens of thousands of jihadis to join ISIS from 2012, when ISIS became a major force in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars, to 2018, when it ultimately fell under the Kurdish attacks supported by the United States.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Despite a decade of resistance since the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, another Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has yet to be born. In its way lie Sunni and Shia Islamist blocs, which have been remarkably successful in preventing entire societies from stepping forward. In countries where they have assumed state power, Islamist forces have been aggressive and totalitarian, while elsewhere they have hijacked popular liberal movements of regime change in recent years. Ultimately, if the anti-Islamist resistance does not soon bring down the main sponsors of the Sunni and Shia blocs—the Turkish and Iranian regimes, respectively—the coming era will be no less bloody than the period from 1919 to 1945.
In my view, the avalanche that will topple the regime in Iran is gaining speed, but as for the Sunni bloc, I am less optimistic. The Kurds are the last obstacle to Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman caliphate, and it seems they are being left to face their heroic yet tragic fate alone. If the Islamist momentum of militarization and mobilization is allowed to continue building, it will eventually shatter the prospects for international peace. Perhaps only then, looking back on these days, will liberal democracies recognize their own culpability for failing to support anti-Islamist struggles in the region.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Sunday, June 16, 2019 The ongoing Sudanese revolution has emerged at a time when most of us had already given up any realistic hope for what has become known as the Arab Spring. Yet, if anything, the revolutionaries in Sudan have the best chance yet of simultaneously defeating both nationalist dictatorship and religious fundamentalism. This would be no small feat; it would arguably mark the most significant historical turning point in the struggle for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since World War II.
Since the protests began in Tunisia in late 2010, the Arab Spring has repeatedly failed to deliver on its promise of democratic governance. I argue that this is primarily because the protest movements have simply not been revolutionary enough to break free from the dominating orbit of the retroactive forces of nationalist dictatorships and religious fundamentalism. Under these circumstances, the non-violent, mostly liberal movements were quickly neutralized, demonstrating the degree to which the death of the Left has left contemporary societies at the mercy of fascist forces.
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By Richard Herzinger · Friday, August 23, 2013 The Egyptian military has drowned the already weak hope for a transition to democracy in Egypt in blood. That during the storming of the Muslim Brotherhood’s protest camps, 600 people were killed and snipers fired at unarmed demonstrators cannot be justified by any state declared emergency. The military has thus shown that it is willing to unleash ruthless violence in order to sustain its power interests in ways almost reminiscent of the massacres of the Syrian regime.
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By Bassam Tibi · Thursday, June 30, 2011 The ongoing Arab uprising against long-standing authoritarian regimes has sparked hope and admiration for the prospect of democratization. Yet in no country can one yet say that democracy has been firmly established—not yet in Tunisia, nor in Egypt (still under military control), nor in any of the other embattled territories. (Despite sectarian strife the two Arab countries approaching a bit a functioning democracy are Iraq and Lebanon.) Given the instability of democracy in the Arab spring, it is crucial to examine not only the potential of an Islamist participation in it, but also the peril of its hijacking. Unfortunately the western discussion often misperceives the role of Islamists. Islamists have not been the leaders of the uprising; on the contrary, like cautious Leninists, they are hoping to take over, eventually with the help of the exceptional sophisticated organizations of their movements. The fact that ruling dictators in the Middle East have typically presented themselves as the alternative to the Islamist movement indirectly gives undeserved credit to Islamists, who can be misunderstood as opponents of dictatorship. This dynamic makes it harder to touch on the core issues frankly. A solid assessment of Islamism and the winds of change in the Arab world require an adequate understanding of the forces in operation.
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