Marwan Bishara's The Invisible Arab.

There is a stunning passage in Marwan Bishara’s The Invisible Arab that sings like a canary:

As for the internal, it is about doing something that is changing; to change the society, and we have to keep up with the change, as a state and as institutions. You have to upgrade yourself with the upgrading of society. There must be something to have this balance. This is the most important headline…internally, there must be a different kind of changes: political, economic, and administrative. These are the changes that we need. But at the same time you have to upgrade the society and this does not mean to upgrade it technically by upgrading qualifications. It means to open up the minds. Actually, societies during the last three decades, especially since the eighties have become more closed due to an increase in close-mindedness that led to extremism. This current will lead to repercussions of less creativity, less development, and less openness. You cannot reform your society or institution without opening your mind. So the core issue is how to open the mind, the whole society, and this means everybody in society including everyone. I am not talking about the state or average or common people.  I am talking about everybody; because when you close your mind as an official you cannot upgrade and vice versa.

This is the remarkable Bashar Assad distilling for us the essence of the past 50 years of Arab politics: an oafish, strangely featherbrained kind of despotism that reduced the very serious business of leadership to utter nonsense--a thing as devastating as the whip it came with.

Not that we Arabs were not in on the cruel joke from the outset. It’s not by coincidence that Syria’s most famous fictional character is the prankster Ghawwar al-Tosheh, whose singular mark was in acting out the gibberish that Arab life had become under systems hell bent on turning the day into a conundrum.

Reading Bashar above is reminiscent of listening to Ghawwar’s sidekick, Husni Barzan, in the 1971 smash hit series Sah al Nawm (Good Morning!) penning his never finished article thus: if you want to know what is in Italy, you have to know what is in Brazil.”

As Bishara would have it, this is the overarching narrative of the Arab revolts: marauding dictatorships “whose practice is antithetical to any sense of human progress…”  Over decades, a sneaking suspicion about “Arab exceptionalism”—that somehow we were impervious to history’s forward march—grew into conventional wisdom, and not only among observers looking on with bemusement, but also by many an Arab looking out in lament. Arab authoritarianism, it was thought, had built up a sturdy house with no exits because Arabs had it in them to succumb, surrendering body and soul, mind and voice.

Those who have consistently rejected the very idea of this exceptionalism are now basking in the sun. And The Invisible Arab’s contention that the source of the region’s quandaries is “political par excellence” draws breath from these rejectionists’ counter argument. The past 50 years were not foreordained, Bishara is saying, but the handiwork of post-colonial viscerally illiberal regimes whose lethal ambition has been to bend state and society to personal whim and wont. That foreign patrons found much to capitalize on and benefit from such regimes made the Arabs’ predicament all the more difficult to overcome. On its face, the point may seem unoriginal, and yet the extent to which Arab exceptionalism still underpins expert opinion on the area justifies the importance Bishara attributes to it. 

In fact, The Invisible Arab is at its most resonant when reconstructing the building blocs of Arab misery that pinned down much of the 20^th century: colonialism’s noxious legacy that found continuity in post-colonial Western interests and policies; “taryeef al sulta” (the pastoralization of authority) as rural, army men overturned a feeble old order and countryside rode roughshod over metropolis; the relentless assault on the embryonic civil state, on citizenship itself; the gross mismanagement of economies that left entire new generations searching helplessly for an education that made sense and a job that allowed for a decent living; the rise of Islamism in landscapes cleansed of all other trends…

These are all elements of a history over which even warring ideologies would nod more or less in consent. Bishara thus describes more than he dissects, and he does that rather well. Equally, that rulers had grown “impatient, insolent and exhausted,” and that the people had simply had enough of humiliation and crumbs, Bishara compellingly echoes in the book, wrapping up with the prelude to revolt.

But, ultimately, Bishara’s pen aims for the sum-up more than the lingering analysis, and hence travels only the surface of a very rich and varied terrain. Nuance is inevitably lost along the way, acutely felt in the Jordanian case, where, ironically, an intra-elite squabble gets the better of a monarchy spared the more dangerous street-level action of the Arab uprisings. More significantly, Bishara’s take on his “miracle generation,” the Arab youth who managed to break the cycle of defeat and resignation, would have benefited from deeper probing. Spotlighting the social media’s impact on them, he states, more than speculates, that ”the Arab youth increasingly comprised a modern, transitional tribe that bypassed borders, religion, and social strata…. [they] transcended traditional hierarchy in favor of open and pluralistic characteristics.” There is little doubt that the youth have been critical drivers of the revolts, indeed somersaulting over the many barriers that walled in their parents, which is precisely why unshackling them from the stuff that inundates identity and thought, not to mention life, cries out for more than the sweeping assertion.

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It’s not surprising that the Bishara’s of this world—seasoned commentators and pundits—should want to weigh in on the surprise of the century, although the sheer velocity of developments and unpredictability of the moment argue for patience and—frankly—studied silence. But this is the age of rapid response: never let a thought, however tiny, go by unmentioned, God forbid. In times of confusion in the midst of tumult, why not a perspective to drill rays of light in the unbearable fog?

The temptation is clear and understandable, but the fear that is no less obvious is that soon enough too much will have been said and too little of it will have survived the turn of events.

For Bishara, al-Jazeera English’s senior political analyst, the urge starts the book itself: “This is an essay about the fall and rise of the Arabs. It is an attempt to understand how their revolutions evolved. What went right, why it is paramount, and how it could still go terribly wrong.” There is no specific ideological prism through which Bishara sets out the plot, just the unmistakably upbeat conviction that the rage we are witness to portends the eclipse of a harrowing era and is proof of the Arabs’ will to take up the fight.

And Bishara has a bone in this fight. His style is close to the heart, oftentimes a mix of romance and oratory. The I is not shy of declaring itself on a page punctuated by authorial predilections and unencumbered by too many footnotes or details of fact. Polls and statistics are thrown in without the usual references, at times giving the text less the feel of an essay than the impromptu remarks of a man in the midst of a heated conversation.

None of this need be a drawback, but Bishara’s is a daunting challenge, when this is 2012, and the so-called revolutions are still nursing in their crib. Which perhaps explains why the book is rather steady on the prologue to those and is uneven on what comes next and how specifically it might express itself. Bishara, alas, is at his most rushed, opting for the checklist approach, when the reader would have liked him to be more deliberate in offering a more measured outlook. And while there is everything admirable in striking a hopeful note in a space too crowded with doomsday scenarios, Bishara’s surefooted optimism often is oddly out of sync with the pitfalls of which he is at least rhetorically mindful. We therefore find him “convinced that the future belongs to the democratic majority of youth and women,” even as he races through the counterrevolutionary forces poised to make it all still “go terribly wrong.” Some of these he gets right, but his treatment of them is casual enough to give his entire take on post-revolution a blithe appearance that renders the book’s foray into the future significantly less artful than its walk through the past.

To the very real threat that reactionary Gulf monarchies pose to “revolution,” Marwan offers this curious warning as if the fight is already won: “If certain Arab monarchies persist in their attempt to resist or sabotage reform and change, the new Arab democracies will need to rally together as a league of Arab democracies.” If Bishara is that certain of victory, it would help if the rest of us were brought up to speed on how these new democracies actually beat the odds.

About Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran’s intrigues against heaving locales, Bishara is similarly confident because, “these regional powers’ conflicting agendas will prevent them from jointly conspiring against them.” How such colliding interests might cancel out the havoc that each of these powers could still unleash, Bishara leaves unanswered. 

On the would-be Turkish Model, the current darling of every Western policy maker and his mother, Bishara is at once coyly enthusiastic and jarringly cursory. He states that “Turkey has inspired cooperation and coordination while Tehran has orchestrated confrontation and conflict, especially with the West,” a bizarrely naive statement for an analyst who knows that the role these two countries play is largely a function of their place on the geopolitical map, their relationship with the West, especially the United States, and the history that has long defined both. Moreover, since Bishara is clearly aware of the West’s exploits in the Middle East, why does he think cooperation with it a more commendable approach than confrontation? And what kind of cooperation does he have in mind exactly?

And so it goes for a whole range of obstacles and propositions already making life hard for Arab revolutionaries who, of course, do not speak with one voice. It could well be that Bishara, eager to stay in the moment, wanted to just touch on these--for the record, so to speak. All the same, the effect is that of an author who lines up many of the usual suspects but can’t quite decide what to do with them.

However, the most inexplicable omissions in The Invisible Arab are those that could have given it a unique flavor and strength. In the most puzzling pass over of all, Bishara chooses to remain mum about al-Jazeera as one of Qatar’s most celebrated, not to mention increasingly controversial, foreign policy instruments. His delicate position is understandable, and the impact on the book is all the more resounding because of it. Bishara does offer negative (and well deserved) commentary on Saudi Arabia’s reactionary push back against the Arab revolts, which renders his silence on the palpably more audacious role of Qatar, another unabashedly conservative Gulf monarchy, particularly unpersuasive.

Still more, although he devotes some attention—and praise--to the “Jazeera effect,” the station’s unprecedented push in bringing revolution to Arab homes, he does not take the opportunity to address some of the more salient criticisms of its uneven coverage of the uprisings, nor does he probe the coverage as an extension of Qatar’s foreign policy. Libya stands out in this unfolding story. While Bishara shares that “there was disinformation regarding Gaddafi’s early bombing of Tripoli, use of mass rape as a weapon…,” conveniently, he fails to point out that it is al-Jazeera itself that observers hold most culpable in spreading such disinformation. (For more on the coverage, read Hugh Roberts’ “Who Said Gaddafi Had To Go,” London Review of Books, Nov 17, 2011). His very brief acknowledgment that the Qatari station “has seen serious internal disagreement within its editorial leadership and made some poor calls and judgment,” not surprisingly, manages to pique the reader’s curiosity while failing to fig leaf Bishara’s decision to skip the subject.

In the end, however, Bishara did not write The Invisible Arab for those who have already invested serious time and thought on Arab history and politics, but for those who are playing catch up—an unenviable position in these confusing times which Bishara succeeds in making less disorienting.

Those who Leave and Those Who Stay

On Lebanon's war and its residues

At a dinner party back in 1995, I had the fortune of sitting next to a professor who braved the entirety of the Lebanese civil war. As I began to share my encounters with the many ills of Lebanon, the professor’s cut down was immediate: “Where do you get off lecturing us about this country’s problems? You left. We stayed. You Lived. We died. We know about pain. You don’t. We are not remotely interested in what you have to say.”

The message was clear. I had opted out of mayhem. Opting back in came with strings attached: silence.

The good professor didn’t know that my family had left way before the civil war, driven out during Lebanon’s supposed heyday by my father’s secular politics, of all sins. He just assumed that we had abandoned ship, and I was content not to stir up that other pot.

So, my riposte was simple: “Absence is no less a casualty of war, professor. We both, each in our own way, endured loss. And just as there is no shame in my family’s decision to turn our back on sectarian bloodshed, there is no honor in yours to live with it.”  

And so it has been, astonishingly, at every other dinner party for the better part of two decades. Last week, as I sat chatting in the living room, the same argument had again erupted at the dinner table between a friend who had recently moved back and another who’d never left. As the upstart proceeded to enumerate this town’s countless aggravations—just as bad today as they were 20 years ago-- the veteran’s retort mimicked the professor’s.

Of the many walls that civil strife erects between a warring people, the one between those who stay and those who leave is perhaps the most fraught with overtones of betrayal. For the former, it’s as if a sense of ownership and belonging is forfeited at the moment of departure, and embraced and claimed—exclusively--at the decision to stay put. For the latter, it’s as if the residents’ conscience had died along with the country’s.

But, of course, never cut such a clean line through dichotomies that mean to carve up life. There are plenty of people who lived the worst of the war and are unrelentingly critical of Lebanon’s self-inflicted tragedies. And then there is the Shawarma Effect, as a chum hilariously described the phenomenon once: happy returnees who land, have their first shawarma sandwich and, faster than you could say “ya hmar!” (you donkey!), drop every good habit picked up in exile, including that silly one of not treating your country as a whorehouse or a garbage dump.

Truth be told, this Lebanese conversation is everywhere you go. “You don’t like it here, leave!” echoes through many a heated exchange between long timers and newcomers in moments of crisis. Citizenship is a hierarchy with unspoken rules of conduct. With right must come gratitude, with equality deference, with freedom quiescence. But, to my mind, what makes this story uniquely Arab and Lebanese is the scandalous assault on citizenship that it does reveal. For regimes that have reduced the state to a personal fiefdom, a family-run affair, the motherland is akin to, say, a restaurant: much like you have no business frequenting a joint to complain openly about the food, you have no business hanging around in your country if its behavior is not to your liking.

And hence, the ease with which accusations of betrayal come, and the defensiveness that accompanies the invitation to leave. Pride in one’s national identity becomes politics of the most partisan kind, the mere call for change incitement.

“Stop complaining and do something about it!” has a welcome place in this argument. It may, in fact, have underwritten much of the potentially radical change we are witnessing today in Egypt and Tunisia. It may even explain—at least partly--the surprising resilience of Syria’s own citizens against a state which has long been hacking at the fundamentals of proper governance as viciously as it has at dissent.

One would have thought that Lebanon might have escaped as the exception, Hobbesian as its jungle is. But sectarianism’s mugging of civil society and the state turned out to be infinitely more effective than Arab authoritarianism’s. Here you might not die or go to jail should you choose to engage in civic action. Instead, you get to run around in circles, or etch beauties in quicksand. Those who complain and actually do something about it finally find themselves having to shape their own little islands of excellence--mighty work that puts to shame a small country--but the effect is that of bubbles floating over a swamp.

The saddest bit about Lebanon is that while it might be the least cruel Arab system towards those who are very eager to change things, it is perhaps the most indifferent towards them.

“You talk like a tourist,” once a friend, who is passionate about this place, told me when I vented about Lebanese corruption. This time around I chose to keep my mouth shut lest my answer do away with the friendship. All I could think of was that famous Arab proverb: “ Wa min al hubi ma qatal.”

“From a certain kind of love, death.”

What Exactly is Going on in Syria?

The Missing Narrative

It was bound to happen. A standoff over Syria! One big prize, two clashing camps, two contrived narratives and a singularly cynical game that has shoved out of the arena anyone and anything remotely moral or principled or ethical or halfway decent about Syria.

Bashar, as they like to say in gringo land, is one lucky S.O.B. Syria simmered while the rest of us got to watch the Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan, Bahraini and Yemeni scenarios—and each is indeed a scenario unto itself—unfold, leaving along the way a trail of instructive lessons, and not only for the Chinese and Russians.

No one, least of all us Arabs, plunged into this uproarious year expecting only the best of intentions or outcomes. Opportunities here, even a sentiment as ridiculously novel as hope, come with warning signs stamped all over them. Only this raw fact could be relied upon as a constant from the moment the people began to openly demand something different, better.

The push for change in this region was always going to be messy, complicated and morally taxing, forcing good souls into terrible choices. Do you remember that scene in Sophie’s Choice, when the Nazi officer at the train station, with the trains waiting to depart for his killing fields, asks Meryl Streep to pick between her son and daughter? “Take the girl! Take the girl!” she finally cries out, when the officer was about to take both.

Only the matter of an unbearably hard existence that finally prompted rage to dare rise against variously vicious Arab systems can be romanticized in the current mayhem. The rest of the story is all about the unavoidably distasteful and hardnosed haggling between the shapers of our future destiny. What the uprisings have so far achieved for the people is a possible seat at the table. And that for some of our patrons is already offensive enough.

Long before the blatantly opportunistic Syrian Muslim Brothers or comically inept Syrian National Council (SNC) or the “fictional” Free Syrian Army (FSA) pretended to believe in the righteousness of Western intervention, the genuinely Syrian and unarmed uprising was racing towards that most God awful question: What will we do, who could we turn to when the going gets really tough with a monstrously tough regime?

And imagine, just imagine, a possibly “revolutionary” mood in the Arab world, with regional and international forces happy to cheer on or tusk-tusk from the sidelines. Imagine something even more extraordinary: Qatar and Saudi Arabia wanting and seeking change in Syria because they’re just appalled by Assad’s brutality and are so very keen on a “democratic” Syria. But imagine something even more extraordinary still: that the people’s battle could actually be won without foreign powers squeezing and isolating, through sanctions and other such non-military means, Assad Inc.

I am not asking you to suspend your disbelief just to score a rhetorical point. I am calling on those making the arguments for each side to actually make them. Because those who warn against foreign intervention, as a matter of principle, and those demanding it, as a matter of life and death, have conveniently elected to sidestep the context that makes the Syrian case the ugly dilemma that it is. 

The very sad truth for the Syrians--for all of us Arabs--is that there is no easy or honorable answer. That’s why practically every single article is so rich with why or why not and conspicuously poor on the practical options left to a people approaching midnight.

The sorriest irony about Syria is that the chatter is all about foreign intervention, or what is referred to as the next best thing—arming the opposition--when, from the outset, neither was ever an option for the powers that be. Because Syria is not Libya, as numerous experts continue to point out, foreign military intervention is just not feasible, while militarizing the rebellion would be tantamount to lighting up Syria, the one scenario everybody wants to avoid at all costs. If Bashar understood one thing, he understood this, and then cleverly proceeded to turn the uprising into a military conflict, inflaming sectarian divisions, egging on vengeance, radicalizing Islamist insurgents, mining minorities’ fears, and pushing regional and international forces to confront the one eventuality they were least keen on for the country.

Astonishingly, the so-called anti-imperialist camp is obsessing about foreign military intervention as if that is the only door open to foreign meddlers. The fact is the West already has quit a bit of what it wants, as I wrote back in May. For them, a weak Bashar is almost as good as a gone Bashar, because the Assads’ regional weight was always an extension of their internal strength. Undercut the latter and you will have contained the former. And that is where Bashar is today: isolated, embattled, trapped and economically enfeebled, with time and energy only for saving his and his family’s neck.

True, the Qataris and Saudis gradually became keen on regaining Syria for the Sunnis, but that, for the West, is hardly a prerequisite to stealing Iran’s (and Hezbollah’s) thunder.

As for Russia, the US, Qatar, the Arab League, the UN and that great piece of theater, regrettably, of all the impertinences we’ve been hearing about, the only one that counts is that of the West insisting that Russia cede its cards in Syria as well, because, you see, it’s all a matter of principle. 

Standoff!

Syrians are dying and will continue to die in greater numbers as Assad stacks up for himself enough chips for that ultimate bargain. And bargain he will. Russia came in to help him do precisely that. Of course, it is all high stakes and very risky, but then that’s what Syria has always been about.

Meanwhile, bizarrely, seasoned observers continue to busy themselves in heated discussions about the pros and cons of foreign intervention, when Syria, whatever it was, is already lost. Soon, brace yourself for the horse-trading, out of which we will begin to see the shape of the new Syria—hopefully still intact.

One Arab's Post-it on the Arab Revolt

Caution: this is not an update.

It’s come to this for the Arab revolt. To be gawked at, poked, bullied, pushed this way and that, pitied by some, feared by many and truly befriended only by die-hards.

It’s not just strangers who gape in wonderment. The locals as well are at once riveted and unnerved by the beast. It’s been, what? 12 months--an ant’s scream out there in the wilderness, but never mind that--a roaring millennium in web years and this creature still won’t reveal its actual colors.   

And so, the guessing game must proceed, because, well…because it simply must proceed. I am not being ironic here. People, decent people, make a serious living off of it. For all I know, the whole world ticks because of it. And, as is our wont, the more uncertain the moment, the more incessant our need to pound it to death and render it benign and reassuringly familiar.  

I suppose, if only for effort, the professionals—journalists, hacks, pundits, anthropologists…--should be thanked. Except that they’re flailing as they hold all ten fingers to the wind, and left with very little to fall back on, they’ve begun to hang on, for dear life, to the same themes.

For a while now, I’ve been feeling like a beggar in these revolts. I go from site to site, rag to rag, pundit to pundit, mind in hand, looking for the rare informed opinion in the piles of junk. There is something distinctly unusual about this upheaval (as Egypt’s SCAF keep discovering after every bold decision turned gaffe), and yet, remarkably, most of the literature divides between déjà vu (been there, done that) and something wicked this way comes.

Often, friends call me as they sit stunned, not from living the revolts but from reading about them. While the Aluf Benn’s of this world can’t quite keep a lid on their overzealous imagination and predict--for sure--a total breakup of the postcolonial Middle East (except for Israel, of course), the Robert Kaplan’s see little more than a “crisis of centralized authority.” Sort of like, “Oh, Jesus, shit, you’re dying;” vs. “Take these! And get a grip on yourself, will you, woman!” after which comes the knowing look back and,” I’ll call ya in the morning,” before the door slams shot.

But these are the ones singing at the door of the echo chamber. The hum inside is all about Islamist upsurge and the equally revelatory it’s one thing to remove a dictator, it’s another to change a regime, which swells into a rapturous crescendo with, we really don’t know what will happen, but, since this is the Arab world, this may well turn out to be a tempest in a Turkish coffee cup. Which actually works out just fine, because the Turkish Model is the best of the available wannabes and the Arab Muslim Brothers are happy to do business even if they look so damn hairy. Win, win, when you think about it—for the West, at least.

Then, inevitably, comes the mind-numbing repeat of the same question: Will they or will they not play nice? After which come the tricky answers to it: yes, no, yes and no, with the same, exact reasons reappearing in different paragraphs in different articles.

Just like that, a year of revolts and we already have a body of consensus, which, soon enough, will solidify into groupthink and then finally cement as conventional wisdom.

Too bad, because—I don’t know? I could be wrong—it seems like the surface has barely been scratched and already vital questions are being left by the wayside for societies in genuine flux. For example, silly as it may sound, what exactly does an Islamist upsurge mean? Would, say, less than 40% of eligible voters qualify as an upsurge, or might it suggest an intriguing twist in the electoral system that lands you with a much bigger slice of parliament than of life? I wonder if it would not make sense to look into who voted for whom and why? (Here are a few hints from Gallup). And where, dare we ask, might these interesting factoids fit in this stimulating discourse?

In the Middle East and North Africa, SMEs [small and medium sized companies] comprise the most substantive part of the economy: there are 12 million SMEs, which make up 95 percent of the private sector… In Egypt, these enterprises account for about 75 percent of total employment and 80 percent of the gross domestic product.

Nothing major, a few questions for more nuance and added insight, so that when the brave types leap into judgments and fall flat on their faces they have something soft to cushion the crash.

Truth be told, there are the rare wise voices reduced, alas, in this din of mad harmony, to whispers. I do need to name names, just because I am so grateful: Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group, Nicholas Pelham of MERIP and the New York Review of Books, Mona el-Ghobashi of Barnard, Khalil Anani of Durham University, along with a few merciful others. (By all means, feel free to click on the links).

Then there is the tempo of these dizzying times which we Arabs get from those, like us, who are living them day in, day out. Raw footage, I call it; or, to borrow from the Economist’s review of Ahdaf Soeif’s new book, Cairo: My City, My Revolution, those “well-observed details [that] have an unmistakable ring of truth…revisionist historians ignore…at their peril.”

But, really, when it comes down to it, what makes these revolts especially intriguing for us Arabs is the utter disarray into which our own clairvoyants have fallen. Once upon a time, we were not meant to tell the difference between conspiracy and conviction, between high principle and base interest, between rhetoric and action. Now, once immovable ideologues are jumping all over the place, ostensible democrats are offended, Islamists are having to discover the meaning of victory (although the West seems to have figured it all out) and brothers in arms are parting company.

The rules are a changing and, for a people who have been stuck for so long in the trenches, that alone is liberating enough. 

Rest in Peace, Nassib Lahoud!

Two years ago, over dinner with a couple of this town’s star journalists, a friend asked me, ”Who is the one Lebanese politician you would miss when gone?” I didn’t skip a beat: “Nassib Lahoud.”

My friend’s devastating comeback was equally swift. “But poor Nassib is already dead.”  

That has always been the tragedy of Lebanon. Decency here is a certain kind of death. And much of what made Nassib Lahoud so magnificent in life and yet so unpromising in politics was his decency.  Remarkably, it was only one of his many handicaps as a politician.  His incorruptibility, his non-sectarianism, his visceral distaste for violence, his peculiar deference to principle made him universally admired but rendered him fundamentally peripheral when it came to the hard politics of this hard place.

I often yearned for Nassib to be more passionate, feistier, wilier, louder. But I was wrong. His was the quiet method, and he loved Lebanon enough not to succumb to her ugly ways.

Of this country’s countless failings, perhaps the most ruinous is her cruel indifference towards her children. And how cruel she has always been to the likes of Nassib, and how kind and generous he was in return.

I knew Nassib and loved him. I know Lebanon, and I am so desperate to love her.

I mourn him today. But I mourn Lebanon even more for her loss.

Between Slaughter and Elections

A harrowing picture to add to the most memorable about 2011: a lone girl standing over a pile of death, some faces barely in their teens; some still in babyhood. The contortions of anguish, you think, as she registers the horrific sight that engulfs her. A family gone, perhaps; a life, hers, theirs, ended by unfathomable, unfathomable, you keep repeating to yourself, cruelty and madness.

You stare and then you click, desperate to leave her, because the moment is you at your most ridiculous.

Not that the murderers in Afghanistan who harvested 63 Shiite souls last Tuesday had it in mind, but the picture of a people dying there while another in Egypt were rambunctiously voting is sort of apt: a juxtaposition of yearnings, one for a nightmarish kind of silence, the other for a less painful existence; two orgies, of death and of life; a clean break between future and past…you pray.

I wonder if I am reading too much into these two events, drawing a line between them that’s not there, or even scrubbing out of them the messy realities that bind trauma to joy in this embattled region.  

In any case, it is early days yet. “Spring” is barely behind us, and already elections are being oversold as good behavior certificates. That’s the thing about elections: they’re so damned convenient. They could be the most visible manifestation of a people’s will or the easiest forgeries of it; they’re the quickest fix for revolution, or war, or peace…when it starts itching for tangible yields.  

And the yield in Egypt, as disheartening as it seems to many, is nothing short of enlightening. You’re too quick to the trigger if you think I am about to marvel at the Islamists’ win. As surprising as it is to those who must have been living on Mars for the past few decades, it is in fact the least interesting revelation about Egypt’s mood and our reactions to it.  

By way of the obligatory preface, let me stress that the motive here is not to debunk the ballot’s judgment in this first round, however imperfect the performance has been: the disorganization, the tricks, the miles-long lines, the money flooding in from some friendly folks in the area looking to elbow their way of life in... It is almost impossible to measure this imperfection’s impact on the final tally, although there is much benefit to the public good in harping loudly and frequently about the point.

And, yes, much can be (and has already been) said against a bizarre electoral process that defies—because, of course, it means to—all sense. In this, the Egyptians are not alone, although they do stand at the extreme end of electoral systems that insist on convoluted interpretations of the people’s intent.

But such are the current rules of this Egyptian game, such are its weaknesses and such is the upshot: the Islamists, combined, are almost sure to enjoy more than 60 percent of the vote and constitute the majority in parliament.

This is not, however, where I really want to go. The elections in Egypt are only a small part of a much bigger, still blank canvas of change. What they draw for us are just a few pieces of the final picture. It’s the trends that dance around them that are worth a lingering thought.  

And one very clear thought for the jubilant and the defeated is that victory should never beget silence—not when the soul of a nation is being negotiated between its people. There is nothing run-of-the-mill about these times and nothing ordinary about the winds that have converged to rid us of a certain way of politics and life. Even when we ought to nod to the ballot’s verdict, there is no tyranny that should attach itself to the fundamentals that will govern the space to which we all need to belong. Otherwise, elections become little more than shortcuts to dictatorship, the most dangerous chinks in the democratic edifice they are meant to protect.

In my last post about Arab Women and Revolution, a few of Islamism’s fans insisted that this is the time to let the winning side show its stuff in quietude. But consensus is never born in silence, it emerges only when the discussion remains vibrant. Track records, ideology, convictions, hope, indeed skepticism, have a role to play in plotting the future’s trajectory, because the future is for everybody, winners and losers alike. Otherwise, let your eyes never leave that lone woman.

Here’s another thought, for what it’s worth: In this first round, voter turnout stood at 52 percent, of which the Muslim Brothers’ party list won around 37 percent, the Salafists' 24 percent. Almost half of eligible voters in these districts did not vote. That leaves the MB and the Salafists with 31 percent (19 and 12 percent, respectively) of the entire spectrum of voters—respectable by any standard but nowhere near enough to put a halt to the country’s momentous discourse.  

What Now for the Women of Egypt?

We are barely through the first stage of Egypt’s parliamentary elections and the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, having clinched well over 50 percent of the vote, are already rhapsodizing about the beauty of democracy which was to the Salafists—until, when was it, yesterday?--a Western concoction alien to the spirit and letter of Islam.

Many are already in a panic. And with good reason. Widen the lens to the larger Middle East and you will very quickly discover that, left to its own devices, Islamism is never in the mood to engage. Witness Iran since 1979, Sudan since 1989, Gaza since 2006… With a majority in parliament, Egyptian Islamists could easily decide there is nothing really to discuss. But what makes these examples uniquely revelatory is the one feature they all share: domination of the state and its tools of coercion by the ruling party. 

Egyptians fretting about their liberties should keep this foremost in their calculus. That, so far, the Muslim Brotherhood is having to argue its case all the way to the altar does suggest that Bayat’s post-Islamist realities have already started creeping into Egypt, but what it also reflects is the MB’s keen awareness of the imperatives of accommodation in a country in which it has considerable reach and influence but one which it does not control--yet. If only for this, Egypt’s future promises to be different from Iran’s or any of these other Islamist polities.

Juxtapose revolutionary Egypt and Iran if you like. You don’t have to peer too closely before the disparities begin to impose themselves. Note how the left quickly sublimated its beliefs to Khomeini’s, and watch the reticence of Egypt’s leftists and liberals, however disorganized they currently are. Register how Iran’s army was swiftly kicked out of the political arena in ‘79, and how Egypt’s very likely will retain much of its heft in Egyptian politics. Mark the fact that Iran’s youth gave all, in awe to the presence and charisma of the septuagenarian Khomeini, and how Egypt’s are just not buying in a marketplace conspicuously empty of such overpowering men.

But, most of all, remember that Egypt’s victorious Islamists will soon populate a government that has already incorporated quite a bit of what they preach, whereas Khomeini had to start practically from scratch. That’s the road Mubarak paved so nicely for his Brothers, and if things turn out badly, that may well turn out to be his most enduring legacy.

But if religious conservatism brings Iran and Egypt together in many social mores and legal codes, so do the years that have tested the solutions of political Islam itself. On that fundamental matter of piety alone, the sure rewards in Iran have been as mocked by burgeoning prostitution and rampant drug abuse as they have been by widespread sexual harassment in Egypt, where close to 80% of adult females are veiled.

The electoral results appear to argue against such talk; after all, how much skepticism can there be in a landslide? And yet, it would be pure folly to assume that the numbers confirm an outright, wholesale embrace of fundamentalist convictions. There is much to disentangle in this unfolding Egyptian story, and we are still on the very first page. What’s more, we all know that only a few of its authors are Egyptian and only some of the events likely to impact it will be homegrown.

As Pankaj Mishra points out in a recent piece, the electoral rise of political Islam may owe much to the Arab people’s deep comfort with Islamic principles as ultimate guidelines in politics as in life. But it doubtless owes just as much to a relentless, decades long hammering of civil society by oppressive regimes that cynically shored up Islamism at the expense of all other trends. 

In any case, we soon will find out, as Mishra puts it, “…whether and how the new Islam-minded rulers of the Arab world will enshrine [diversity and pluralism] in legal and political institutions as opposed to declaring that the Shariah contains all that you need.”  

Needless to say, the quintessential test will be how these rulers proceed on the question of us women. 

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The moment, as unnerving as it is, calls for extreme vigilance and grit, not panic and fear.

The Egyptian revolution has forced the political playing field wide open. It is crucial that it remain so. Just as this new climate has already challenged the SCAF, it shall the MB and Salafists. How these three antagonists-cum-allies interact in this crucial stage is, of course, of serious consequence for the future of a democratic Egypt, but without control over the state’s tools of coercion and violence, the Islamists can neither unilaterally impose their will nor circumvent the judgment of future ballots.

Alas, for Egypt’s women, the path forward will be full of pitfalls and setbacks and insults and assaults and groping... The violence that women have been subjected to in Tahrir Square before anywhere else stands as a sad marker of the misogyny that unites many an oppressor and revolutionary. But Egyptian women need only recall Iran’s in reassuring themselves that tenacity and ingenuity can beat even the worst of odds.