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The “Arab Spring” as Seen through the Prism of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2012

Negin Nabavi
Negin Nabavi*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Montclair State University, Montclair, N.J.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

Revolutions are by nature unpredictable and unsettling. That the wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Arab Middle East began so unexpectedly and spread with such speed, leading to the fall of the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has added to the concern regarding the “new order” that is to come after the initial euphoria. From the outset, the fear has been that these revolutions will follow the same trajectory as Iran did in 1979—in other words, that they will marginalize those who launched the revolutions and provide the grounds for the rise to power of the most savvy, purposeful, and best organized of the opposition groups, namely, the Islamists. Yet when one considers the recent uprisings in the Arab world through the prism of Iran's experiences in 1979, the parallels are not so evident. Mindful of the variations and distinctions between each of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, it would appear that in broad terms, and beyond superficial similarities, there is little in common between the events of Iran in 1979 and what has happened in the past year in the Arab world.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 153 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

NOTES

1 See Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 See Nabavi, Negin, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse and the Dilemma of Authenticity (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 See Jason Brownlee, “Egypt's Incomplete Revolution: The Challenge of Post-Mubarak Authoritarianism,” Jadaliyya, 5 July 2011.

4 See Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, “The Arab Counterrevolution,” The New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011, 42–44.