A forgotten history

When people think about revolutions across Middle Eastern and North African history, they often forget that many of these countries were undergoing revolutionary changes in the beginning and middle of the 19th century. In many ways, European colonial intervention at the end of the 19th century disrupted that process of indigenous revolutionary change, where autocrats were being questioned and revolutions were beginning to simmer throughout the educated and middle classes – and indeed in many rural areas as well – in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran.

When the Europeans intervened, often on the pretext of suppressing the disorder associated with these revolutions, it was a case of arrested development. The Europeans intervened to prop up the old, creaking dynastic ruling families of these countries. In doing so, they froze political development and then imposed their own pace upon it rather unjustly, therefore accusing the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa of being unready for political development. Of course, they had been very ready for political development, but this had been disrupted by European intervention.

Consequences of European intervention

After that, the revolutionary impulse – which you could say exists in all societies, particularly in the face of oppressive and unrepresentative power – became targeted much more towards anti-colonial movements and against the elites who had collaborated with the colonial powers to retain their own dynastic thrones. Revolution begins to be a feature of the early 20th century.

American flag in the 1919 Egyptian revolution. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

The early anti-colonial revolutions in Egypt in 1919, in Iraq in 1920 and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s were all suppressed violently by the colonial authorities. In that sense, it reinforced the dependence of those who ruled upon colonial power, which is how the colonial powers wished it to be. They wanted to reinforce for the dynasties that they had no independent power of their own.

This meant that after the Second World War, when the European Empires began to retreat from the region of the Middle East and North Africa, the dynasties and the systems of power that had depended upon them for their authority and their military might began to be vulnerable to revolutionary movements. In the 1950s and 1960s, you begin to see uprisings and revolutions across much of the Middle East and North Africa in the name of not only national liberation, but liberation from conservative reactionary regimes that had ruled dictatorially with the help of colonial power.

European views of development

The European powers had a notion that they were intervening to develop the regions and the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. This notion was twofold. One part focused on infrastructural development, which meant bringing about new forms of not only State administration but also infrastructure in a material sense. However, another more sinister aspect of their understanding of development involved a racist view of many peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, seeing them as underdeveloped and therefore at a stage of development that required, indeed justified, European intervention and guidance.

This was the basis of the mandate system that the League of Nations set up in the wake of the First World War to rule the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. So there was an infantilism in European imperial thought whereby the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa were not yet ready for self-rule, which was very handy because they weren’t going to get self-rule anyway – the European powers were determined to retain control themselves.

Diversity of the Middle East and North Africa

The Middle East and North Africa is a deceptive expression. It has become a geographical expression, which was determined in part by imperial mapmaking. What is the Middle East, other than a fiction of European imperial powers? Nevertheless, the area that one might suggest stretches from the Atlantic to the eastern borders of Iran, which as a whole has been called the Middle East and North Africa, is very varied in terms not only of its geography and its human resources, but also its particular histories. It would be a terrible mistake to homogenise it.

Both outside powers and local ideologues have sought to homogenise this area, either through the call of Arab nationalism or through the call of Islamism. Because people are all Muslim, they must all have the same political project; because they’re Arab, they must all have the same political project. Yet the history of the last hundred years has demonstrated that this is not the case. In different countries, in different parts of the region, you have different societies, different experiences and different State traditions as well.

Disappointment following modern revolutions

One of the features of the 20th century across the region was the disappointment that attended the revolutions that erupted after the European powers had withdrawn. These are the revolutions that overthrew the monarchy in Egypt, the monarchy in Iraq and the old republic in Syria. And they had a lot of popular backing; people thought that revolution was going to be a way in which new forms of self-determination and new democracies might emerge.

However, one of the sinister features of these revolutions is that the officers of the military establishment played a very powerful role in all of them. This coloured the regimes and the politics that developed thereafter in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. So there was an inevitable disappointment of hopes, of all the aspirations that had seethed under colonial rule. Many people had felt that once colonialism was replaced, they would have had a chance of self-determination. But most people found themselves completely excluded because politics was dominated by a self-determined elite of military officers.

The rise of military power

This is partly because when the colonial administrations were in power, they paid a huge amount of attention to the security apparatus and the administrative apparatus of the State, but paid very little attention to civil society or the growth of democracy. On the contrary, they were often fighting against democratic impulses within these countries. It’s therefore not surprising that with the withdrawal of European powers, the most developed administrative and corporate entities would be in the military.

An arms instructor from Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'ath Party leads Arab and Iraqi men through a military drill on March 10, 1999 in Baghdad, Iraq. Photo by Northfoto.

From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, there is a growing entrenchment of authoritarian military rule and a disturbing use of repression in the name of progress. Many of these outfits were themselves seduced by a sense of development in which they, like the European powers before them, had the sole key to how to develop the country. There was an emergence of vanguardist parties, such as the Ba’ath Party, particularly in Syria and Iraq, as well as the Nasserist Party in Egypt, and all of them felt that they knew better than the people, and that the people should be guided by them. This is a recipe for a very authoritarian rule from top-down rather than from bottom-up.

Resistance against oppression

Inevitably, forms of resistance against this oppression emerge throughout the region at different times and in different places. In Iraq, there was an increasing armed resistance in the name of Kurdish nationalism in the north of the country, as the Kurds realised that self-determination didn’t seem to apply to them but brought them under the control of Baghdad and the Arab regime, and more importantly, they had no say in an authoritarian dictatorial system. In Egypt and Tunisia, trade unions and non-unionised labour began to organise resistance to what the political economy of privilege and injustice was bringing about in those countries. Other similar forms of rebellion took place elsewhere.

One theme that becomes increasingly prominent from the late 20th century is the Islamist tendencies of those who look to Islamic parties as a restatement of moral purpose. They often take heart from a reading of Islamic history that suggests that the unjust rulers should be overthrown. So you have a large number of rebellious and sometimes quite violent Islamist movements across Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.

In the heart of it all, of course, there’s the unrealised state of Palestine. The European colonials had created the conditions whereby Israel could be established but had created no conditions whereby Palestine could be established. The Palestinian revolution therefore becomes a continuing symbol of the unrealised hopes of independence, as well as a reproach to those Arab regimes that had come to terms with that defeat in 1948.

The Arab Spring in context

One of the problems in the way the Arab Spring or the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 have been represented is that they came out of the blue. They didn’t; there was a long antecedent history of rebellion and repertoires of resistance that people could draw upon in 2010–11.

Kefaya activists organise a protest against Mubarak, in front of the Press Syndicate, 27 April 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

In Tunisia, it would be inconceivable to think about the uprisings of 2010–11 without thinking about the uprisings of 2008 in some of the most deprived areas of the country and, going back to the 1980s, the bread riots that shook Tunis and elsewhere. Equally in Egypt, although the regime in power under Mubarak wanted to keep the impression that everything was calm, it certainly wasn’t. From 2005 onwards, there had been massive strikes and demonstrations in the textile weaving areas and many other areas of the Egyptian labour force.

There was a sense in which the understanding of what was at stake had long been there. Of course, it took some exceptional heroism and bravery, and the coincidence of revolution that is not always predictable, to lead to the uprisings of 2010–11, which were spectacular and unexpected in the views of some. But the more you look at them, the more you realise that they had threads that go back before 2010 itself.

Understanding the origins of revolutions

Revolutions everywhere, but certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, are a reflection of the State in which they happen. When you look at a revolutionary event, you have to think about what process it is part of. What kind of State has invited what kind of revolution?

Then, one has to think about the history of the State, the composition of the State, the dynamics of the State, and how resistance has itself been implicated in the way that State has been performed. So when thinking about Middle Eastern revolutions, rather than seeing them all as the same thing, you have to think, how did particular kinds of State invite particular kinds of revolution and lead to the kinds of outcomes that we’ve seen?

Discover more about

revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa

Tripp, C. (2013). The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East. Cambridge University Press.

Gerges, F. (ed) (2014). The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World. Cambridge University Press.

Chalcraft, J. (2016). The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World. Cambridge University Press.

Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa