The highest price of revolution is confronting the real state of society, writes Abdel-Moneim Said There is no such a thing as a free lunch, and no such a thing as a free revolution. And here is the worst part. You never know the price of a revolution until it is too late. There is of course the initial price of a revolution, which is the loss of life and property. Then there is the other price, which is that you create a new situation that may not have much to do with your initial intentions, and may turn out to be the exact opposite. Revolutions, it has to be said, acquire certain sanctity, derived from their ideals: justice, freedom, democracy, and human dignity. This, unfortunately, is no guarantee against the turbulence that revolutions may set in motion, the bloodshed that comes with it, or the possibility of countries falling apart. In international experience, there have always been conservatives who regarded revolution with profound suspicion. The French Revolution produced a whole gamut of anti-revolutionary thinkers. In reaction to the French Revolution, the Americans passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, through which they hoped to keep revolutionary zeal at bay. In Arab and Muslim tradition, scholars have always warned of what they called "major sedition", which in modern terminology may be called a revolution. One popular scholar, Abu Hamed Al-Ghazali, went as far as challenging the judgement of the philosophers who wish to challenge the status quo. Ibn Rushd, another 12th century scholar, known in the West as Averroes, took the opposite view of the argument. Conservatives, needless to say, can go too far in defending a status quo that is basically indefensible, and therefore may unnecessarily hinder the process of change. But as of the 19th century, a certain branch of conservatism began to advocate reform as a means of achieving the aims of revolution without having to go through its painful path or to risk its false starts. My generation remembers well the wave of national independence movements in the 1950s. And we all know that many revolutions of that time were little more than military coups with reform agendas. Some people like to judge revolutions by their consequences rather than ideals. This is why some oil rich countries refer to their use of financial assets in bettering the life of the general population as a "revolution". The result, in at least some of these oil rich countries, is that the average citizen becomes beholden to the munificence of the state. Over the past six decades or so, everyone has had a revolution of sorts, even if these revolutions brought about little more than the bloated bureaucracy of authoritarian regimes. So far the Arab Spring, which has run into several seasons since it started over a year ago, has been something of a disappointment. The elite may have seen their power diminished. The grip of the military may have weakened. But the masses that had taken to the streets in search of a dream have had their hopes dashed. And in general, the Arab Spring has not brought us any closer to the way of life that the 20th century should have brought along. The soil has been shaken under our feet; this much is true. Things that the dictators repressed for decades have come out into the light -- this too is true. So now we can all look into the mirror and see a truer image of who we are. And the image may be more complex than we expected, and it is definitely less harmonious than we had wished it to be. Right before the Arab Spring, Sudan split apart. And we claimed that it was all a foreign conspiracy, or the result of the mistakes of the Sudanese leadership. Now, Libya stands on the verge of partitioning, and Yemen is about to split up, and God knows what will happen to Syria once the dust has settled. In Egypt, the scene is quite interesting. Before the revolution we had a centralised state and the general population looked homogeneous enough, with allowances for marked differences in the peripheries -- namely in Sinai, the Western Desert, and Nubia. When Pope Shenouda passed away recently, we all shed tears. Some of these tears were for the loss of a great man, and others were for the loss of security that came with his departure, for the late pope was a mainstay of national unity at a time when unity is in short supply. The price of Arab revolution can be initially calculated in terms of loss of life and property. But the latent price is even higher. The latent price is that we have come face-to-face with the true nature of Arab society, not the fairy tale that had been promoted by the ruling elites, the fairy tale that was created through years of security control and propaganda. Sadly, the new Arab elites were not ready to lead the way. We don't have the likes of Vaclav Havel, the Czech president who allowed Slovakia to secede then reunited with it in the framework of the EU. We don't have the likes of Lech Walesa who steered Poland away from the Warsaw Pact and -- after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- into NATO. When the moment of change happened in Europe, the elite was flexible enough to negotiate a workable future. In the Arab world, this doesn't seem to be happening. The elite doesn't know how to deal with the new reality, nor does it seem to have a plan for a better future. In Syria, there is a clear lack of vision in high places. In Egypt, the situation is too sad for comment. In Libya, there is talk of partitioning even before the new state has taken shape. So far the only ones ready to lead the way seem determined to take us back into the past, not into the future this country has been hoping for.
