By Fawaz Alfawaz
The recent tumultuous events in the Arab region evoke lots of concerns, hopes, and soul searching. The region is gripped with seemingly socio-political tectonic events of historical proportions. Long serving autocrats are being forcibly deposed by the newly discovered power of the people. The masses did not raise the lofty pan Islamic or Arabic cries of ideological dimensions. The popular demands seem congruent with the previous revolutionary movements be it in the realm of bill of rights or democratic imperatives.
Yet if one looks under the hood, into the constituents of the underlying social fabric, things look altogether different.
The Arab citizenry are angry and frustrated with the existing order .The veneer of political participatory process is the outer shell of a more complex psychological search for identity, elusive religious reforms, and the fear of governance long gone astray . Thus my contention that these events are not a harbinger of revolutionary changes, but rather of the psychological variety.
One cautionary note is in order here: not all the countries are in the same scale. Egypt with a strong state tradition is radically different from the blindly driven sectarian demands in Bahrain, or the extra mis-governance in the Libyan case .Yet, one can construe a common denominator of anger weaving the range from the almost regimented if not disciplined rule in Oman to the hurt and abused Iraqi people. All these peoples are angry because they share the same underlying structural symptoms.
If one listens to the people and tries to understand their emotions, read their compulsions, and assess their demands, one can make the judgment that the people are gripped with anger rather the imperatives of the revolutionary material.
The breaks with the religious pretensions are not there, the epistemological wonderings are missing, and finally, the readiness to sacrifice the short term gains for the long term national goals are conspicuously lacking. Hence, the philosophical infrastructure of a revolution is simply not there. I am not aware of any comparable period in Arab history or any other nation for that matter. It remains for the unfolding future to tell us if it is a harbinger of a more dangerous phase or just a wave of anger that will be consumed by its own energy.
