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just like regimes, the revolutionary explosion often catches the committed revolutionary by surprise: the teeming masses rose up earlier or later than expected, they moved not by the book and not according to plan, but as a detonation in the normal flow of time.

In 2011, there was no plan for revolution, anywhere, when a whole world region went up in flames after a poor street vendor in a marginal town in Tunisia self-immolated. Nor was there a plan for the great Palestinian intifada of 1987, when a street collision resulted in the death of four Palestinian workers. While both spectacular revolts that followed could be explained by years of insufferable indignities preceding them, there was no specific reason that a specific indignity on a specific day would unsettle the mighty repressive norm that, by then, had seemed everlasting.

Like the 2011 uprisings, the 1987 intifada erupted when there was no hope, no resources at hand to encourage hope, and at a point when rational, realistic minds posited hopelessness as the solid structure of the world.

every revolution gives birth to its own intellectuals, especially where the existing intellectuals refuse to acknowledge its profound originality, and stick to their old system of thought that had predicted either the absence of revolution, or one of a very different character than what came to be. Thus every revolution brings its own knowledge with it; it does not follow an established science.

What comes out in the immediate aftermath of every revolution is not necessarily a new or better system. Before anything else, what comes out is an educational experience, even when a revolution appears to have failed.

Everyone is then encouraged to forget the revolution, to turn attention to what should come next, before they could reflect on how they had managed to unleash a revolution to begin with.

Revolutions are therefore not simply events in time. The last thing they change is the political system, the first thing they change is the culture.

asking questions that yesterday were not even known to be questions

Rare are the revolutions that do not result in books written about them; poems composed in their honor; art that provides them with continuing presence; commemoration that remind of their best hopes; interpretations that establish them as inescapable heritage

the less visible, but more pervasive social traces (ordinary dialogues, new friendships, ongoing thoughts), that revolutions leave behind in their aftermath.

a revolution proceeds as a general invitation to creativity, then lives on as emergent culture--thought, questions, arguments. As it gains expressive maturity and a self-bestowed right to presence, this culture, diverse as it may be, marks the onset of the next round of social transformation

The psychology of the moment is one of elevated spirit, extraordinary time, unusual solidarity, will to sacrifice, interruption of norms, license for originality that may appear unlimited. The aftermath of that moment is typically one of Realpolitik, rational calculations, instrumental thought, power struggles, more ordinary politics. And precisely in that re-emergence of quotidian time there will be much pressure to forget the revolution, long before the counter-revolution has performed any of its tricks.

What we call “education” flowing out of a revolutionary moment is an education that begins from the senses, is felt in the body as energy, in the mind as epiphany, in the soul as “the people”—an abstraction that for a moment becomes concrete, because it has become the person.

The move away from exploring the source and promise of such novelty, and back into the more ordinary, more familiar psychology of “realism,” encourages thinking of the revolutionary act as no more than means to ends.

Ordinarily, epistemological imperialism tends to be a practice of an established mighty authority that, by virtue of its longevity or scope of its power, has become too confident of itself. But epistemological imperialism may also be a practice of opposition that, from long life under a certain power, could only think of revolution as an expression of a right to the same power.

To their participants, a revolutionary gathering exceeds any single demand: it addresses a felt need for a total social renewal. The mission then seems greater than simply replacing one ruler by another. At that moment, the ordinary person is in the revolution precisely because that is where she is not being ruled. There, she finally discovers what seems like an inborn, organic capacity to act as a sovereign agent: without instructions, without authority, even without a guiding tradition.

This total spiritual condition suggests to everyone involved that the revolution is greater than any particularism. The consciousness of totality makes its appearance as a sudden revelation, comparable to prophetic vision: the moment when a hitherto unseen truth illuminates the whole existence

This explosive spirituality resides in the necessity of doing what must be done, with only imagination, rather than plan

another major question rears its divisive head: have we really overthrown the regime? To answer this, we realize that in our temporary unity, we avoided this question too: what was the regime? That we need now to know, because the answer will help us have some plan as to where to go from here, to determine how much of “the regime” is gone and how much still needs to be uprooted so as to arrive at the “goals of the revolution.” For some revolutionaries, the regime was simply the head of the regime. For others, it was an entire corrupt class surrounding it and benefiting from it. For others still, the regime is everyday life—the rotten head has infected all of society, and caused all society, its mores and social relations, to become equally rotten. For those, that society, too, needs to be overthrown. The old society, all of it, was “the regime.”

In an unjust world, there are always alternatives to revolt: the idea of fate; personal hedonism; intellectual immersions; criminality; clannish solidarity; the morality of fortitude; mind altering substances; soothing rituals; suicide; nihilism; graduate study. A revolution, therefore, is always a choice among other choices.

The revolutionary decision therefore is a choice to disregard reality and realism. It is a choice to act as an agent, to act freely and to feel freedom not as a theoretical principle, but as a new force that is itself creating this new person doing what a day before the revolution seemed to be outside of all realism. Revolutions, therefore, are primarily decisions against realism, and as such they create the free person who undertakes them and, in the process, empirically verifies a principle that previously had lacked credibility: that a different world is possible.

A common strategy of betrayal takes the form of the monopoly of memory. Monopoly of memory means that the revolution, along with its memory or heritage, has become monopolized by one faction against all others. In this case, those who see this betrayal will say that the “goals of the revolution” have been abandoned, or that the revolution has strayed from its path. But revolutions may have as many goals as they have revolutionaries, and consequently as many imagined pathways. Here, “betrayal” will be seen in someone’s choice to highlight one goal and disregard another, in someone’s feeling that a preferred path was not taken, even though it could have been, or that the revolution has stopped short, when it could have gone further.

the greatest enemy of all revolutions is forgetfulness, because it attacks the core of the revolutionary experience: how it defied odds, reality, rationality, and all that had seemed ordinary, solid and eternal

the revolutionary pattern of each era corresponds to where power has become porous then

The Arab uprisings of the current era, namely those of 2011 and 2019 (but not the civil wars that followed), reveal shared patterns: they all start out first in marginal, neglected areas, from which they migrate into the well-fortified center. They rely on spontaneity as their art of moving, not on organization, structure, or even a plan. They are suspicious of vanguardism, and seem to intuitively reject any strong idea of leadership. They prefer loose coordinating structures, and “coordinators” emerge as a new revolutionary species, indicating that revolutions now need sharing of information more than centralized guidance. They operate largely at a distance from political parties, and in fact give rise to no party that can claim to represent or embody the revolution. The agent of the revolution and the maker of history is the ordinary person, not the savior leader.

those revolutions spoke in the name of a vague and large entity called “the people,” not of any sub-group, class, tribe, sect, or even the “meek of the earth.” That generality expressed their character as a meeting place of all grievances.

The regime did not know any game other than that of the established system, and thought of the revolution as a passing noise that will dissipate in due time. The main mode of governing had become autocratic deafness, across the entire region.

the counter-revolution already knows that repression alone would be unable to save it from revolution. Thus it needs to fortify itself against the nascent revolutionary culture by promoting counter-revolutionary culture, aimed at the spirit of the revolution. For example: in place of the ordinary person, counter-revolutionary culture elevates the savior leader as the only worthy maker of history; in place of the belief that had emerged in the revolutionary moment of “the people” as an enlightened and noble body, counter-revolution fosters an image of peoplehood as a savage, illiterate mob, to be feared and policed, rather than provided with freedom and entrusted with capacity.

Culture and ideas, therefore, become central battlegrounds in the age of counter-revolution

Just as in the Arab case, where the revolutionary wave met counter-revolution, so did the global wave meet a global counter-wave. Both took place across dispersed geographies, indicating that like the revolutionary wave, the counter-revolutionary wave was inspired by a spreading feeling of threat or creeping disorder. The rise of an inter-linked right-wing populism globally after 2011 may indeed be an expression of a learning process of reaction, indicating the seriousness with which the revolutionary, or at least transformative, challenge was taken. And just as in the Arab case, the global counter-revolution learned from its encounter with revolution, real or imagined, that the old order must be defended in more authoritarian ways in the realm of policing and law, and more vigorously in the realm of ideas and culture.

The revolution was not just a surprising event, but an addition to the known facts of existence. And what was most certainly new here was the capacity to revolt, not what came next. That capacity was what the revolutionary moment had demonstrated.

The universal is always imperialistic when the only knowledge sought through it is confirmatory rather than transformative knowledge.

Discovery, therefore, has from the point of view of epistemological imperialism only quantitative rather than qualitative promise: it adds more of what I already know, not more to what I know.

there was a revolutionary person residing deep inside the conformist, traditional person one had seen earlier. If we do not know how to see that hidden person, we will not see the revolution.

Politics wasn't a favored subject of discussion for the sheikh. The Gulf War's scripted violence had left a strong impression: When prompted, he often reduced political matters to military or special forces' work. He revered the British royal family and the SAS, Britain's commando elite, and was surprised to learn that I had not voted for George H.W. Bush, the liberator of Kuwait. I soon learned that he admired winners in general. An avid sports fan, he supported Manchester United and the Dallas Cowboys, then the reliable champions of British and American football. For the first time in our acquaintance, this love of winners made his unfocused mind appear predictable.

Few Bahrainis acknowledged the large U.S. naval base that remains today

He seemed to be blandly incurious and without serious prejudices. He certainly did not read or write for pleasure. In fact, my ability to make sense of ordinary maps surprised him, as if a mark of special training

While government hours are 7 to 2, a concession to the sweltering climate, I soon learned to arrive by 10, preceding by a half-hour the sheikh and his retinue

I visited the new University of Bahrain and naively asked around for the political science department. The country's public university didn't teach the troublesome social sciences

The sheikh once saw the four-wheel-drive Range Rover he had provided for my personal use covered in mud, the result of a winter downpour that flooded the old part of Manama, which lacked street drains. He winced as if he had been pinched. He politely asked my plans to have the car washed, and I shilly-shallied an answer. The capacious Rover was soon quietly replaced by a small Mercedes 190 with mechanical problems. The exchange worked to my disadvantage in more ways than one, for the Rover's license plates indicated it belonged to the sheikh's father, Bahrain's security chief. The Rover thus conferred comic book superpowers that induced Pavlovian salutes from traffic cops and building guards – such a machine rightly should not have been dragged through the mud. In contrast, a Pakistani mechanic once patched the undistinguished Mercedes with cardboard wrapped in twine.

The monarchy is not wholly bereft of tolerance; it just occurs near the apex, among the family's scattered layer of advisers and aides, many of whom are foreign born. The Al Khalifa are ambivalent about otherwise touchy matters if they judge someone useful to their purposes. Issues such as religion, my shopkeeper-ish Indian ethnicity or my habit of calling the sheikh by name without prefixing his inherited title – unthinkable for a Bahraini commoner – never came up. I wasn't unique: The sheikh's banker, the man who handed me cash each month, belonged to the same Iraqi-Jewish émigré family as Bahrain's current female ambassador to the U.S., also a Jew.

Of course, ownership of the many reefs and islands between the two states had implications for oil and gas exploration. Yet the sheikh always spoke to me as if only family honor mattered. This normally unexcitable man clearly disliked Qatar's Al Thani rulers. He viewed the boundary disputes as a contest between entitled Al Khalifa patricians and Al Thani nouveau riche – possessors of the world's largest natural gas field, rulers of the country with the world's highest per capita GDP, and, one might add, imminent founders of the upstart Al-Jazeera TV network. Propelled by rivalry, Sheikh Fawaz simply wanted to beat them this time.

I also kept mum about the surprisingly incautious lawyers I had met who spoke bitterly about the regime's poor human rights record and discrimination against Shiites. I found these middle-aged men in their cheap, gray suits in almost every coffeehouse or bar I frequented. None appeared bent on importing Iran's revolution. They seemed defeated and physically worn, even underweight, but determined to share with a foreigner their stories of regime prejudice and abuse

Modern Bahrain works on the bases of stark social segregation, selective memory and diversion. I caught glimpses of the thousands of dark-skinned Asian laborers only as they fixed roads in the debilitating heat, or sat in the cheapest curry shops and all-male hookah stands where air conditioning was absent and Indian films played nightly on color TVs. Local lore had it that weather forecasters lied about the temperature to avoid work stoppages. The island's wealthiest foreigners were diverted in ways that assumed – often accurately – an inebriate's view of the good life. Although the teetotaler Sheikh Fawaz showed no interest in nightlife, Manama groaned under the weight of barhoppable hotels and nightclubs. Many clubs featured teams of comely Filipinas belting out pop songs. A large bar in the downtown area catered to U.S. sailors, complete with country-themed karaoke, line dancing and Budweiser beer.

Later that night, Sheikh H. and I talked politics again. Tired, he quietly noted that he hadn't been surprised to hear that the crown prince wasn't liked in the cafes. He said this accorded with his own sense of the future ruler's unpopularity. He added that others in the ruling family had serious doubts about the man, too. They worried that the crown prince was infatuated with the tiny military forces he commanded and wasn't savvy enough to handle the complexities of being emir. But, Sheikh H. admitted, nothing could be done about it. Looking back, Crown Prince Hamad may have felt little need for the savvy of an emir. He succeeded his father in 1999, and, in 2002, elevated his own title from "His Highness the Emir" to the historically unprecedented "His Majesty the King of Bahrain." Today, he shakes that vainglorious title over a resentful patrimony less than one-third the size of Rhode Island.

discrimination and chronic inequality explain the Kingdom's centrifugal politics better than old doctrinal differences. Nonetheless, the strategy of minority rulers cultivating the support of other minorities is a tested one (witness Syria). The Al Khalifa also have a long history of reliance on authoritative foreigners, stretching over a century from Bahrain's days as a British protectorate past independence in 1971. Indeed, Bahrain is now a U.S. protectorate, as the quietly expanding presence of the 5th Fleet confirms. An American arms dealer dubbed "The Merchant of Death" was a recurring figure throughout my stay in Manama.

Sociologists say that pre-modern bureaucracies value personal relations over professional merit. Sheikh Fawaz unwittingly supported this notion when he asked me to attend meetings with foreign investment companies seeking to do business with the national Pension Fund. Initially, I took notes while two chatty Merrill Lynch representatives pitched portfolio options. The reps struggled to discern my relationship with the sheikh they wanted to impress. The scene was repeated with other would-be fund partners, some of whom affected a false camaraderie that left Sheikh Fawaz unmoved. After a while, he asked if I would write a report on the Pension Fund's performance. The idea was laughable – I knew nothing about investment. But I didn't say no. Staring at the fund's data, I parroted the language of "small caps" versus "big caps" and other terms found in the introductory investment texts Sheikh Fawaz supplied, and wrote his report, inserting a couple of charts for gravitas.

the sheikh asked if I would consider writing a doctoral thesis for him at Cambridge or another elite English university. I quickly said no; ethical considerations aside, I knew he was unlikely to do it anyway (a correct assumption, it turned out)

He has severely curtailed foreign and local media since becoming information minister in 2010. In the months preceding the Arab Spring, the anti-censorship group Reporters Without Borders dropped Bahrain's rank from 119th to 144th in the world. As regime apologist, the sheikh still speaks in the same, mildly narcotized cadence that suggests aristocratic ennui more than stupidity. He effusively praises the largely foreign security forces responsible for the killings, torture and detentions, while claiming that outsiders want to destabilize the country. Even so, the minister now insists, the affairs of the Kingdom are "back to normal."

A relieved Sheikh Fawaz – now with 14,000-plus followers on Twitter – ecstatically praised the current crown prince "for his great exertions to return the Grand Prix race to Bahrain." Echoes of the sports-obsessed young heir pinged through my head

He was a rigid and competitive yet unsinister man 20 years ago. What would he have become given a different pedigree? Dictatorships, like Sheikh Fawaz today, work to obscure those choices