JADALIYYA
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?
HD: At least since the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979, I have been thinking and writing about revolutions. My book Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads (1989) was my first attempt to try to understand the nature of charismatic leadership. My Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1991) was an extensive treatment of the ideological build up of that cataclysmic event in Iran. The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism is thus in effect the culmination of more than three decades of thinking and writing on mass social protests.
Here in this book I work with a number of ideas, among them the ideas of delayed defiance; open-ended (as opposed to total) revolutions; the articulation of the public sphere; and the notion of revolutions unfolding like a Bakhtinian novel rather than a Homeric epic. There are also, of course, classical sociological question of race, gender, and class that I raise, particularly in the globalized context of labor migration. But perhaps the most important idea is that of the end of postcolonialism, which I treat in detail. The book is very much under the shadow of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on revolutions—for example, her comparison of the French and the American revolutions—as well as her emphasis on political space as a haven from violence rather than a systemization of violence, unlike the way that Max Weber, for example, thought of politics.
The Arab Spring is a fast-paced book, following the unfolding events very closely, in order to generate a theoretical space to think about the historical significance of this moment, in comparison with other transnational revolutions, going back to the European revolutions of 1848—which were also called the “Spring of Nations,” or “Springtime of the Peoples.”
How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?
HD: It is most immediately connected to Iran, the Green Movement, and the USA, but also to my Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2008). You may in fact say that the endings of these two books anticipate The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. The particular excitement of this book has to do with the transnational disposition of these revolutions, so that you need to edit your thoughts, between long shots, medium shots, and close ups, to use a film metaphor. So I aim a laser beam on Egypt, or Libya, or Syria, for example, and then I pull back and look at the larger geopolitics and see what are the side effects. It provides an amazing theoretical chess game to play and see how history and theory interface.
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