http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/03/arab-feel-good-revolutions-egypt-tunisia
It feels good to be Arab these days
The revolutions in
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The Arab awakening, for that is what it is, which began in
It is said that since the great Arab conquests of the first millennium and Saladin's victories, Arabs have known only defeats, decline and degeneration, a fate doomed to persist. What is happening today has great political significance
I am a Lebanese descendant of the generation that has seen the rise and fall of Arab nationalism. Carried by the idealism of the 1960s, we saw Nasser as the personification of those values of freedom, justice and dignity that spread across the world, from
Not until the late 1990s did a powerful and inspiring figure appear to Arabs in the form of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese Shia resistance group Hezbollah. Through Hezbollah's ending of the 25-year Israeli occupation of south
This, combined with the autocratic leaders, monarchs and dictators, created a lack of belief in us Arabs, that we could aspire to belong to countries in which freedom, justice, creativity and democracy prevail. We have been led to believe that these are not Arab attributes. Instead, we are mostly known for our dictators, oil, conservatism, religious fundamentalism, illiteracy rate and last but not least ultra-consumerism (that old Gucci outfit underneath the burqa).
This is the "Arab malaise", to use the expression of the late Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir in his remarkable essay Being Arab. It penetrates to our core, to our history, eating away at our pride, even to our relation with Arabic. In
So the revolutions in
The Egyptian revolution, though not yet over, has also taught us something about the Arabs that Kassir had clearly foreseen
And so it has been. It feels good all of sudden to be Arab these days.
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Egypt protests – day of departure live updates
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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