IN mid-June, the Syrian poet known as Adonis, one of
the Arab world’s most renowned literary figures,
addressed an open letter to the Syrian president, Bashar
al-Assad. The stage was set for one of those moments,
familiar from revolutions past, in which an intellectual
hero confronts an oppressive ruler and eloquently voices
the grievances of a nation.
Instead, Adonis — who lives in exile in France —
bitterly disappointed many Syrians. His letter offered
some criticisms, but also denigrated the protest
movement that had roiled the country since March, and
failed even to acknowledge the brutal crackdown that had
left hundreds of Syrians dead. In retrospect, the
incident has come to illustrate the remarkable gulf
between the Arab world’s established intellectuals —
many of them, like Adonis, former radicals — and the
largely anonymous young people who have led the protests
of the Arab Spring.
More than 10 months after it started with the suicide
of a Tunisian fruit vendor, the great wave of
insurrection across the Arab world has toppled three
autocrats and led last week in Tunisia to an election
that many hailed as the dawn of a new era. It has not
yielded any clear political or economic project, or any
intellectual standard-bearers of the kind who shaped
almost every modern revolution from 1776 onward. In
those revolts, thinkers or ideologues — from Thomas
Paine to Lenin to Mao to Vaclav Havel — helped provide a
unifying vision or became symbols of a people’s
aspirations.
The absence of such figures in the Arab Spring is
partly a measure of the pressures Arab intellectuals
have lived under in recent decades, trapped between
brutal state repression on one side and stifling Islamic
orthodoxy on the other. Many were co-opted by their
governments (or Persian Gulf oil money) or forced into
exile, where they lost touch with the lived reality of
their societies. Those who remained have often applauded
the revolts of the past year and even marched along with
the crowds. But they have not led them, and often
appeared stunned and confused by a movement they failed
to predict.
The lack of such leaders may also be the hallmark of a
largely post-ideological era in which far less need is
felt for unifying doctrines or the grandiose figures who
provide them. The role of the intellectual may be
shrinking into that of the micro-blogger or street
organizer. To some, that is just fine. “I don’t think
there is a need for intellectuals to spearhead any
revolution,” says Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-born poet and
novelist who has written extensively on the Arab Spring
and now teaches at New York University. “It is no longer
a movement to be led by heroes.”
That belief may soon be tested. As revolts continue in
Syria, their leaderless quality — so useful in deterring
crackdowns by the secret police — has become a
liability. Organizers in and out of the country are now
struggling to shape a set of shared political goals, and
intellectual coherence and leadership is increasingly
seen as important in that process. “No one wants to be
accused of hijacking the revolution,” says Sadik Jalal
al-Azm, a Syrian philosopher and advocate of greater
civic freedoms. “This excessive fear is becoming a
hindrance.”
To some extent, the intellectual silence of the current
uprising is a deliberate response to the hollow
revolutionary rhetoric of previous generations. The Arab
nationalist movement began in the 1930s and ’40s with
idealistic young men who hoped to lead the region out of
its colonial past, backwardness and tribalism. The
Syrian political philosopher Michel Aflaq and other
young writers and activists found inspiration in
19th-century German theories of nationalism, and
envisioned their Baath Party as an instrument for
modernization and economic justice.
But the party and its misty ideas were soon hijacked
and distilled into slogans by military officers in Syria
and Iraq, whose “revolutionary” leadership was really
just the old tribalism and autocracy in a different
guise. In Egypt too, Arab socialism soon became little
more than a pretext for dictatorship and reckless
policies at home and abroad. Arab nationalism reached
its zenith — or its nadir — in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi,
who saw himself as a godlike intellectual, publishing
his own fiction and imposing his delusional Third
Universal Theory on Libya’s hapless people. Everything
in Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya was styled “revolutionary.”
When the rebels overthrew his government this year, they
found it difficult to separate the names of their own
revolutionary councils from the ones they were
overthrowing.
The protesters who led the Arab Spring had grown tired
of the stale internationalist rhetoric of their
forebears, which had achieved little for the
Palestinians and had deepened the divisions among Arab
states rather than unifying them. They wanted to focus
instead on the failures of their own societies.
“Previously, everything was reduced to the exterior: are
you pro- or anti-American, what is the role of Israel,
and so on,” says Hazem Saghieh, the political editor of
the London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat. “This
revolution is entirely different.”
The shift in emphasis to civil rights and democracy at
home did not come out of the blue. Some Arab
intellectuals began speaking this language long ago,
including Mr. Azm, the Syrian philosopher, who after the
humiliation of the 1967 war with Israel published a
groundbreaking book called “Self-Criticism After the
Defeat.” Others followed suit gradually, and during the
short-lived “Damascus Spring” a decade ago, Syrian
intellectuals signed the Declaration of the 99, a call
for greater civil rights and openness. Many were jailed
afterward. The bravery and persistence of these
intellectuals — and others like them in Egypt — may have
quietly prepared the ground for the uprisings this year.
But in recent years their voices often went unheard,
because their secular language had little resonance in
societies where political Islam was becoming a dominant
force. Nor did Islamic reformers fare much better when
they tried to cast their political critique in religious
terms. The Egyptian scholar Hassan Hanafi, for instance,
in the 1980s began calling for the creation of an
“Islamic Left,” a socialist ideology rooted in religion.
He was branded a heretic and had to seek police
protection after receiving death threats from jihadists.
His work gained an audience in Indonesia, but not in his
own country, said Carool Kersten, a lecturer at King’s
College London who has written on Islamic reformers.
Not all Arab intellectuals fell into these traps. Alaa
al-Aswany, the Egyptian novelist, became a fierce critic
of the government of Hosni Mubarak in recent years,
protected from arrest by his celebrity. He was among the
first writers to speak to the protesting crowds in
Tahrir Square in January, and in March, he delivered a
punishing performance during a televised debate with
Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister appointed by Mr.
Mubarak. The following day Egypt’s ruling military
council fired Mr. Shafiq, and many credit Mr. Aswany
with the achievement.
But Mr. Aswany made clear from the first that his only
real goal was to serve as a bullhorn for the demands of
the protesters in Tahrir Square. He offered no ideas of
his own.
Inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, the current Arab
tumult has been compared with the uprising against
Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, the last great
social upheaval of comparable scale. Intellectuals
played a much more prominent role in those movements. In
Poland, for instance, “the unification of intellectuals
and labor unions was really important,” said Anne
Applebaum, a columnist and the author of an
authoritative book on the Soviet gulags. “They helped
shape the movement and ran its publications. They
facilitated conversations between various workers’
groups. They functioned like the Facebook page of their
era.”
The dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel wrote an
essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” that became a kind
of blueprint for how to survive with dignity in a
totalitarian country, and later emerged as a champion of
his country’s Velvet Revolution.
It may be that the connecting role these figures played
is less needed today. It may also be that the
ideological platforms of earlier revolutions are
obsolete, given the speed of communications and the
churn of new perspectives. “It is too fluid, too
fast-moving, too complex,” says Peter Harling, a senior
analyst with the International Crisis Group. “It is too
difficult to come up with a paradigm. People are looking
for short pieces that illuminate some aspect of what
they’re going through, not grand theories.”
Still, Mr. Harling added, among Syrian intellectuals,
“none of them has articulated any kind of
forward-looking political platform,” and that failure
has contributed to anxieties about the protest
movement’s direction.
To the extent that any ideas have arisen from the Arab
Spring, they relate to the “Turkish model” — the
often-heard hope that Turkey’s blend of mildly Islamist
ideology and democratic governance can inspire similar
success in Arab lands. But this analogy is a facile one,
and may well yield disappointment in the months and
years to come.
Turkey’s experience is hard to replicate, in part
because the country has had the kind of thoroughgoing
revolution against tradition that Arab intellectuals of
the 20th century only talked about. Starting in the
early 1920s, Turkey’s great autocrat, Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, overhauled the country’s education system,
bringing over the American reformer John Dewey to advise
him. He abolished the caliphate and gutted the country’s
legal system, instituting a strict separation of church
and state. The first elections took place in 1946, and
only after decades of struggle (and several coups
d’état) did Turkey start earning applause for its
democratic ways.
Without that punishing preparation, the Arab world’s
new revolutionaries may end up repeating history, even
if they do study it. Last week, amid the euphoria over
Colonel Qaddafi’s death, a few skeptical voices could be
heard in the din of triumphant Internet messages in
Arabic.
“Let the killing of Qaddafi be a lesson to the
revolutionaries as much as to the rulers,” one Arab
Twitter user wrote. “And let revolutionaries everywhere
remember that Qaddafi came to power by making his own
revolution 40 years ago.”
