It seems that the gap between scholarship and reality remains unbridgeable. Much ink has been spilled on studying Egypt and its political prospects. Most of it seems to have missed the mark. We learned that Egyptian society has been thoroughly Islamized; we read volumes about mosque networks, social welfare circles, identity politics, symbols, rituals, etc. But when Egyptians finally revolted none of this came to play. The demands were non-ideological; the participants were people who never got involved in social or political movements; and the urban heart of the revolt was secular downtown (a neighborhood Islamists never demonstrated in). Again, we were bombarded with articles about cyber movements, social network sites, and the like. Yet when the government shut down the cell-phone and Internet services at the beginning of the turmoil, there was virtually no effect. When asked, many demonstrators had never even heard of Facebook.

Experts warned of the ‘revolt of the poor’, i.e., the starving inhabitants of the inhuman shantytowns that engulf the capital. But spearheading the revolt were the country’s best and brightest. Among them, credit officers, stock market investors, and car dealers (each worth several million pounds), in addition to dozens of actors, pop singers, and other celebrities. Also, nineteenth century doctrines about the passiveness and incurable fatalism that plagues Muslim societies (justifying the ‘democratic exception’) were still circulating when Egyptians were pushing back the men with the black helmets and batons, torching armored vehicles, and mailing tear gas canisters back to sender. Finally, studies warning of the dissolution of social bonds in Egypt, and the absence of modern civil society values failed to explain how doctors formed voluntary medical committees, and fellow citizens set neighborhood watches (to guard against plainclothes police thugs spreading mayhem), and – my favorite – cleaning committees to pick up the food wraps and soda cans left by demonstrators on the streets (Trotsky says revolutions are impolite because rulers don’t bother to teach people manners when they have the chance, but in Egypt it is as polite as it gets).

Items confiscated from looters by volunteers and stored in Cairo mosque as pictured in the NY Times

What are the prospects? The revolt might melt away for lack of political organizations or an identifiable leadership (thanks to decades of security disruptions and detentions). The demonstrators might successfully convince their demigod rulers to implement some desperately needed reforms. Or the revolution might advance unhindered to its final destination (and no one knows exactly what that is). One thing is for sure: whether or not the Egyptian people’s revolt was defeated, Middle East scholars have just been dealt another blow on the head – a real hard one!

I’ve been following the news of major political mobilization from the Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Lebanon, and now I see in Jordan too, with great interest.  Since I was an eyewitness to the changes in East Central Europe, participated a bit and thought and wrote about them during and after, I can’t help but think about comparisons and contrasts.  I think Roger Cohen’s piece drawing the comparison substitutes hope and dreams for careful analysis and is overly optimistic.   Rather for me the comparison leads to questions and concerns.

I wonder why the roundtables that were key to the transition in Central Europe, but also in South Africa and Latin America, and earlier in Spain, which provided a kind of special architecture for the transition from dictatorship to democracy, are not being discussed in Tunisia.

I wonder to what extent there exists in any of the countries the kind of social custom of pluralistic self organization which provided the micro infrastructure for the successful peaceful transition to democracy in Poland, what I call the politics of small things.

And tonight as I watch the dramatic video reports on television of the intensified protests in Cairo, with escalating violence, I worry not only about the frightening likelihood that by the time I wake up tomorrow, there may be massacres in the street ordered by the dictator in a last ditch attempt to stay in power.  I also worry what will happen when he is finally overthrown, and the protestors have their day.

I have no expertise in Egypt and its neighbors beyond what I read in the newspapers and in casual reading of magazine and journal articles.  I tend to think that the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood that the regime propagated has been self serving.  I don’t know how the Brotherhood will act or whether it will act only in one direction.  I worry about sectarian violence, about how changes in Egypt will affect other countries of the region and beyond.  I suspect that the measured and cautious approach of President Obama, supporting democratic rights without daring to say the “D – Word,” as Mark LeVine put it on the Aljazeera website, was motivated by such concerns.  Tonight Obama appeared overly cautious, but tomorrow his approach likely will change, and, in fact, he does underscore democratic ideals in his statement.

But this is not my major concern.  My concern is smaller in a sense.  I want to know what people are saying to each other on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Sanaa.  I know that they are saying “no” to the old regime, but worry that they haven’t developed a capacity to discuss among themselves what they favor, and haven’t developed the means to discuss among themselves alternative principles and compromises.  I examined this issue in a chapter of my book The Politics of Small Things, in which I demonstrate that because the Romanians could only say no, their post communist experience was particularly a tough one.  Because the experience of talking together beyond saying no was more limited in Czechoslovakia than in Poland, Poland had an easier democratic transition.    A democratic aftermath to dictatorship goes beyond the power of no.

Next on DC: Commentary on the situation in Egypt from an expert.