On 7 September professor Sadik Al-Azm, one of the Middle East’s most notable contemporary thinkers, gives a lecture at the Prince Claus Fund Gallery. Al-Azm speaks about the concept of civil society in relation to the ‘Arab spring’. He makes remarkable observations on citizenship in the Arab world and the Syrian revolution that rises without a ‘Tahrir Square’.

In his lecture Al-Azm states that at its prime, the Arab Spring is the finest hour of the various youthful Arab civil societies on hand. However not to Damascus where the Tahrir Square experience proved impossible. Al-Azm relates how the Tahrir Square masses defeat the dynastic principle of Arab presidents passing power to their offspring, and secure the victory of the democratic principle of the electoral circulation of power.

In Syria, the revolution is often accused of not only being spontaneous, but being leaderless and lacking in strategy as well. Al-Azm however, questions the role of the leading highly organized vanguard party as against the natural spontaneity of the revolutionary masses.

Al-Azm: “In Syria today the form and riseof local coordinating committees lead and energize the street power of the revolution and are responsible for sustaining on the whole the civil non-violence side of the intifada against military rule, martial law and the police state that Syria has been for the last half century.”

Finally Al-Azm emphasizes the importance of the revolutionary moment that shifts from the usual Arab concentration on a single and unrivaled leader to the assembled masses in the Arab Tahrir Squares, making the congregation of men, women and children the true moment of change. This charismatic moment of collective self-assertion is the main contribution of civil society to the Arab world.

To read the whole lecture, please download the document below.