The First Year of the Tunisian revolution
Résumé
When Mohammed Bouazizi, age twenty‑six, set himself on fire in front
of the governorate of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, this sacrifice
not only sparked a revolutionary process that washed away the twenty‑three‑year‑old
Ben Ali regime in less than a month. It also triggered a
wave of political turmoil all over the Arab world that has been described
as the “Arab spring”, as the Arab equivalent of the 1789
French revolution or of the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall, and
as the “Arab revival”. My own historical interpretation,
which complements other disciplinary approaches, is that this “Arab
revolution,” developing through a “democratic uprising,” is rooted in the
two‑centuries‑old experience of the Nahda/Renaissance and
is fulfilling the promises of the “Arab liberal age,” which Albert Hourani
situated from 1798 to 1939. Tunisia and Egypt stood at
the forefront of this historical movement, just as they did in 2011...