Loved Egyptian night: the meaning of the Arab Spring

The Arab uprisings could be described as a missed opportunity to bring meaningful dignity to the people in the region. Since 2011, many things have become worse; in the western media, Gaza was being discussed as a real-estate development plan in early 2025, while Syria was heading towards an uncertain future; meanwhile, Libya and Iraq remain mired in instability. In Loved Egyptian night, Hugh Roberts looks at three Arab countries—Egypt, Libya and Syria—to reflect on the successes and failures of their respective monumental events of 2011. The author is a veteran of the history and politics of the region who does two things beautifully: he writes without chasing the validation of his peers and he writes in the interest of truth. The preface demonstrates that Roberts is one of the biggest authorities on North African and Middle Eastern politics: he has lived in the region and he has been thinking about it for almost half a century. It is hard for any scholar or policy-maker to match his credentials.

Borrowing Marc Lynch's phrase, Roberts convincingly demonstrates that the ‘spring’ did not simply turn into a ‘winter’—meaning the failure of the revolutionary endeavour. Rather, the Arab uprisings have morphed into the ‘New Arab Wars’ (p. 103). For Roberts, the demand for a governance model that treats people with dignity has been instrumentalized without being effectively tackled. The author sees this as a key factor contributing to the conflict dynamics in the region. In the first three chapters, Roberts describes the unfolding of the 2011 events. He starts with Libya, describing how the western intervention that aimed to free the country from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi could not have been any more caricatural. The late Libyan leader was enthusiastically painted as a maniac, and NATO powers drummed home the morality of their action. However, it was not just the wave of uprisings that brought his regime and others down. Rather, it was decades' worth of western campaigning against the Jamahiriya, understood as the sovereignty of the masses (see Matteo Capasso's Everyday politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023). Here, too, Roberts has a key message: the regional developments of 2011 are entangled in much longer histories.

In the chapter on Egypt, Roberts ambitiously untangles the current politics of the country. He focuses on the overthrow of former President Mohamed Morsi to illustrate that the revolution of 2011 and the counter-revolution of 2013 were more complex than they might seem at first glance. For the author, the revolution was only based on aspirations; it lacked political demands. Even if Morsi had won the popular vote, there was too much dissatisfaction with his mandate. Tamarrud, an activist movement for democracy that predated the 2011 events, led the opposition efforts against Morsi. Roberts cites a statement by a Tamarrud member, who claimed that the army's takeover was the real revolution and that the massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood activists supporting Morsi was justified (pp. 46–7). For Roberts, the claim was ‘wishful thinking’, which is reminiscent of the reactions from several commentators outside the region (p. 47). The extent of the disbelief that was reflected in these external reactions seems to indicate how local statements were taken at face value. Moreover, arguing that saying and thinking are the same thing misses the point, especially in a place where there is little that can be done politically, or that can be said without repercussions.

Syria seems to be the bigger puzzle for Roberts. Several external actors, who had been exploiting the territorial and political vulnerability of the country to use it as a battleground, quickly hijacked the country's popular uprisings. Roberts warns that Bashar al-Assad's strategy of not fighting hard enough against the radical Islamists, as they also helped him face the opposition, might not pay off (p. 87). Indeed, it did not, and Roberts cautions that Syria could become another Afghanistan, the disastrous result of external intervention. His prediction was correct—another reason that this book is a noteworthy read. In the last three chapters, Roberts concludes that the Arab uprisings provided an opportunity to trigger new wars and increased contention over power and resources in the region. He turns to Libya once again to discuss how external meddling in the post-Muammar Gaddafi context has sustained statelessness and strategic vulnerability. The author ends with a major insight, arguing that the spectacle of the 2011 Tahrir Square protests in Cairo was almost prepared in order to appeal to a global audience and gain its sympathy (pp. 191–6).

At first, I cringed at the book's title, a quotation from a poem by colonialism apologist Rudyard Kipling. Then, I understood how it conveys Roberts' key message. The Arab region is still treated as a ‘white man's burden’, from the perspective of both western powers and the westernized local elites. To achieve dignity, liberation is needed.