Will There Be a Second Arab Spring?
SOURCE: THE DAILY BEAST
BY: CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
PARIS — Those of us who lived through long days and longer nights in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011, back in those early hours of what was called the Arab Spring, remember the excitement, the enthusiasm, and the hope that filled the air like the evocative scent of the jasmine necklaces sold on Egypt’s streets. But, like the flowers, the hopes faded quickly, and wilted, and were thrown in the dust. And one wonders if the optimism of that moment can ever be brought back.
Within months of those first popular uprisings, the Arab Spring turned to a long and brutal winter. New dictatorships replaced the old in some parts of the Middle East. Other countries descended into chaos and civil war, pushing millions of refugees across borders, not only in the region but into Western Europe.
Then, in the middle of the decade, the so-called Islamic State seemed to come out of nowhere to conquer huge swathes of Syria and Iraq.
As the scholar Gilles Kepel writes in his new book, Beyond Chaos, to be published in French this month, the aspirations and euphoria of the Arab Spring quickly became the “hostages” of the jihadists as ISIS spread its influence “from Mesopotamia to the marginalized European banlieues.”
ISIS inspired or directed terror attacks from Paris to Orlando, San Bernardino to Berlin, fueling instinctive xenophobia and fear in Europe and the United States, driving engines of radical right-wing populism in Western politics, helping to sunder the United Kingdom from the Continent and push Donald Trump into the White House.
Today, after vast bloodshed, the Islamic State that had as its motto “endure and expand” has proved able to do neither. It is little more than a vestigial collection of fighters on the run, trying to survive in a small corner of Syria with a few outposts scattered from Nigeria to Afghanistan. It also has a much reduced presence on that other great battleground, the Web.
The mosque in Mosul, Iraq, where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself caliph of a new theocratic empire in the summer of 2014 was reduced to rubble in the summer of 2017. On the shattered minaret soon afterward someone scrawled “Fuck ISIS.”