Loved Egyptian Night: The Meaning of the Arab Spring

Why did the Arab Spring have such calamitous outcomes?

Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 and what it led to amounted to a political revolution.

But the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria - countries with quite different histories and political traditions - were never revolutions. As Hugh Roberts explains, the bitter ends of these episodes were inscribed in their misunderstood beginnings. To celebrate these uprisings as 'revolutions' preempts and inhibits critical analysis and expresses an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

After so much wishful thinking, what remains is the debris of a cynical pretension. Outside interference, ostensibly on behalf of these 'revolutions', reduced Libya to anarchy and condemned Syria to a devastating proxy war now in its twelfth year.

In Egypt, the Free Officers' state was re-booted in its most brutal ever form. The Americans and Europeans did not vainly try to help the Egyptians or anyone else escape from authoritarian rule. Instead, they contrived to seal them up in it. The long oppression of these societies, Kipling’s 'loved Egyptian night,' is not going to be ended by the Western powers; these days it is guaranteed by them.

Hugh Roberts is the Edward Keller Professor, Emeritus, of North African and Middle Eastern History at Tufts University. From 2001 to 2012 he lived in Cairo, where he led the International Crisis Group's North Africa Project. His books include The Battlefield: Algeria 1988–2002 and Berber Government: The Kabyle Polity in Precolonial Algeria.