Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

By Samuel Tadros

Offering insights on Egypt's failed revolution—how it happened and why it did not succeed—author Samuel Tadros argues that, as Egypt continues on its destructive downward path, it is important to examine the role that its revolutionaries played in that trajectory. He raises long-unanswered questions about those revolutionaries: Who were they and where did they come from? What was their ideological and organizational composition? Why were they angry with the Mubarak regime? What were their demands and aspirations for a new Egypt? And how did they attempt to achieve them?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817917463

Book preview

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Many of the writings associated with this Working Group will be published by the Hoover Institution. Materials published to date, or in production, are listed below.

ESSAY SERIES:

THE GREAT UNRAVELING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

In Retreat: America’s Withdrawal from the Middle East Russell A. Berman

Israel and the Arab Turmoil Itamar Rabinovich

Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt Samuel Tadros

The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent Fouad Ajami

The Weaver’s Lost Art Charles Hill

The Consequences of Syria Lee Smith

ESSAYS

Saudi Arabia and the New Strategic Landscape Joshua Teitelbaum

Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle East Habib C. Malik

Syria through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect Enemy Nibras Kazimi

The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan Ziad Haider

Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah: The Unholy Alliance and Its War on Lebanon Marius Deeb

[For a list of books published under the auspices of the WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER, please see page 76.]

The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

www.hoover.org

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 648

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California, 94305-6010

Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

For permission to reuse material from Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt, by Samuel Tadros, ISBN 978-0-8179-1745-6, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8179-1745-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8179-1746-3 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-8179-1747-0 (mobi)

ISBN 978-0-8179-1748-7 (PDF)

The Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledges the following individuals and foundations for their significant support of the

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

Herbert and Jane Dwight

Beall Family Foundation

Stephen Bechtel Foundation

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Mr. and Mrs. Clayton W. Frye Jr.

Lakeside Foundation

CONTENTS

Series Foreword

by Fouad Ajami and Charles Hill

Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

About the Author

About the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

Index

SERIES FOREWORD

The Great Unraveling: The Remaking of the Middle East

IT’S A MANTRA, but it is also true: the Middle East is being unmade and remade. The autocracies that gave so many of these states the appearance of stability are gone, their dreaded rulers dispatched to prison or exile or cut down by young people who had yearned for the end of the despotisms. These autocracies were large prisons, and in 2011, a storm overtook that stagnant world. The spectacle wasn’t pretty, but prison riots never are. In the Fertile Crescent, the work of the colonial cartographers—Gertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceau—are in play as they have never been before. Arab nationalists were given to lamenting that they lived in nation-states invented by Western powers in the aftermath of the Great War. Now, a century later, with the ground burning in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and the religious sects at war, not even the most ardent nationalists can be sure that they can put in place anything better than the old order.

Men get used to the troubles they know, and the Greater Middle East seems fated for grief and breakdown. Outside powers approach it with dread; merciless political contenders have the run of it. There is swagger in Iran and a belief that the radical theocracy can bully its rivals into submission. There was a period when the United States provided a modicum of order