The Days

The revolution contagion in North Africa that started in Tunisia, and has crept to Egypt before crawling back to Libya, has infected the Middle East.

Now Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, are having their own sufferance of political turmoil fueled no less by widespread discontent with ruling cliques of various histories, lengths of rule, ideologies, and motivations. The ruling elites of these countries, lulled by long years of tranquility and strong and stubborn hold on political power, never have anticipated that open dissent and defiance will one day come to their doorsteps, so much so that when this arrived, each had different levels and degrees of responses to the revolutionary situation.

Syria, temporary home to over 17,000 overseas Filipino workers most of whom are household service workers, is the latest country in the region to be rocked by the upheaval. One of the most tightly-controlled societies in the Middle East, Syria, for over a week, now has been battling loud protests of tens of thousands of its citizens in the southern city of Deraa, close to the country’s border with Jordan. The protesters are demanding political reforms, jobs, and an end to oppression.

The protest began when security forces of President Bashar Al Assad arrested school children for writing political graffiti for the protestors. The arrest ignited the fuse of a clicking time bomb, bottled-up frustration over years of authoritarian rule, economic decay, and suppression of human freedoms. The Syrian government’s response was quick. Its security apparatus, backed up by plainclothes police, fired live bullets and teargas, killing scores and injuring hundreds.

Instead of backing down, the protesters became more emboldened, and spread their street revolution to Latakia, a Syrian coastal city to the east. Last time I watched Al Jazeera, even Damascus has become a battleground of the protest.

What’s happening in Syria is also happening in Jordan, the Hashemite kingdom ruled by King Abdallah and his beautiful and famous wife Queen Rania.

In Amman, Jordanians are demanding the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Marouf Al-Bakhit, who was just appointed in February as part of King Abdallah’s promise of reforms. The King has also raised the salaries of public servants and given subsidies for basic commodities, but still the Jordanians could not be placated. They want more.

Who will win as revolutionary fervor sweep the region and threw existing political structures into disarray? This is the question foremost in many observers’ minds.

Professor Fawaz Gerges, director of the Middle East Centre at the London School Economics, posits that it will be the people themselves who will emerge victorious from the rubble of the revolutions.

“The people’s movements are not just calling for a tinkering of the system, but for the restructuring of entire authoritarian system along more pluralistic and socially just lines,” he wrote.

“The winners are the people of the Middle East who have been politically oppressed for decades. Millions of voiceless Arabs and Muslims have regained their voice(s),” he added.

Indeed, as I write this, the peoples of the various countries of the region where the revolutionary storm is swirling seemed to be coordinating their actions as if giving timelines for their experiments in political enterprise.

In Bahrain, the activists have declared every Friday, their day of worship, as “Day of Rage”.

In Yemen, where the protests are over a month old, Yemeni youth, who lead the peaceful people’s uprising against President Abdullah Saleh, have called last Friday as “Day of Departure” even as Mr. Saleh has not departed and remains defiant.

Activists in Syria are bracing for more protests that could unnerve Mr. Assad. They have called for “Day of Dignity” mass actions every Friday at mosques across the country and it seems the call has gained more traction.

Whatever “day” a day is called following the almost daily mass protests across the Middle East, one thing is sure. It seems the days of quiet and tranquility in the Middle East are over, replaced by days of uncertainty and state of nervous flux that no political pundit can predict, but only speculate. And until political stability returns to the region, there would certainly be more “Days of Death” for activists who are dying as a result of governments’ brutal crackdown against peaceful dissent.

Gone, indeed, are Taha Hussein’s “The Days”. The title of his three-part autobiography, “The Days” chronicles Hussein’s life, transformation, and achievements as a one of Egypt’s greatest thinkers and intellectuals. As one of modern Egypt’s most influential writers, Taha Hussein lived in the days when Egypt—and the rest of the Middle East—was re-awakening, hopeful, and optimistic about its future.

That future is now uncertain, yet bold in what shape Arabs and Muslims would like it to become.They want the days of the future to be “Days of Democracy” and it is in their hands and will if these will be realized.