On December 17, 2010, an insignificant young man, a fruit vendor, set himself on fire in the obscure Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. His name was Mohamed Bouazizi, and he offered up his life in protest against the humiliations he had endured at the hands of government agents. The incident might have passed unnoticed—but someone snapped a photograph. The image of Bouazizi in flames, stumbling across a nondescript public square, imparted a terrible lesson in the effects of alienation and despair. By the time he died of his burns on January 4, 2011, the Tunisian public had taken to the streets. Ten days later, Tunisia’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in power since 1987, fled the country just ahead of a sweeping tide of protests.
A man on fire had inaugurated what we now somewhat uneasily call the Arab Spring. (I won’t use scare quotes for the label: but what seemed like a blossoming of freedom at the time was soon consumed, like Bouazizi himself, by fire and blood.) Dictators who had strutted on center stage for a generation, sitting atop structures of arbitrary power that had been in place for half a century and more, suddenly wobbled, toppled, fled, expired—or brutally fought back to retain a shred of their past glory. The mood of revolt in Tunisia spread like a contagion to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, even Saudi Arabia: consequences varied, but it became clear that strange new forces had been let loose upon the world, and not only in the Middle East.