‘They Messed with the Wrong One Now’

BEIRUT -- In the annals of modern history, a few moments stand out as pivotal to all humankind: moments when a single human being, during a fleeting moment of intense anger and humiliation, undertakes an act that manifests his or her determination to end the systematic humiliation they experience and instead seek a new life of dignity and full humanity. We can best understand the full causes and consequences of the current citizen revolt across the Arab world -- now reaching into the wealthy oil-producing Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman -- by fully appreciating the incident that sparked it: the desperate act of protest by Mohammed Bouazizi, the 24-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable street cart vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010 to protest two consecutive and related acts that he felt accentuated his sense of abuse and humiliation by the Tunisian state authorities.

The first was when a 45-year-old female municipal officer, Faida Hamdi, and her colleagues overturned and confiscated his cart and its wares, with some reports saying she or her colleagues also slapped and spat on him. The second was when he went to the local governor’s office in the town of Sidi Bouzid to seek a redress of grievance and was refused a meeting with any official. Publicly humiliated and defenseless in front of an uncaring structure of state authority, and prevented from earning the meager income from his street vending that he used to help feed his mother and six siblings, he ended his misery in a final act of gruesome self-immolation that was also an act of desperate self-affirmation. His personal anguish -- as the ongoing Second Arab Revolt reveals -- was also the pain and vulnerability of millions of other Tunisians, and several hundred million Arabs.

By coincidence, when Bouazizi died and the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts started, I was reading a book about the life of Rosa Parks, the African-American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, whose defiance of segregated buses in December 1955 sparked the last phase of the American civil rights movement, ending a tumultuous decade later in the passage of civil rights legislation that ended officially sanctioned racism. I was struck by the powerful similarities between Mohammed Bouazizi and Rosa Parks, two individuals who acted on the spur of the moment to stand up for their rights and to refuse to acquiesce in a humiliating system of home-grown oppression. These single acts of defiance by individuals highlighted the widespread grievances, injustices and human suffering in their society that need to be redressed.

Rosa Parks refused to comply when asked by a white bus driver, James Blake, to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger and move to the back of the bus, as was the custom then in segregated Alabama. Her act initiated a boycott of the bus system by Montgomery’s African-American community, which ultimately ended when the city officials negotiated an end to the segregated system and gave all citizens their basic rights. At a mass meeting of African-Americans at the Holt Street Baptist Church, on the eve of the boycott, the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., only in his mid-20s, was chosen to lead the protest. His words about Rosa Parks could easily have been spoken by any Tunisian or Arab after the death of Mohammed Bouazizi half a world away and half a century later.

King said that African-Americans were “tired” of being segregated and humiliated by their own society, and had “no other option but to protest for their freedom and justice.” He called Parks’ act “an individual expression of a timeless longing for dignity, freedom and self-respect.” He said she was “anchored to that bus seat by accumulated indignities of days gone, and boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn…a victim of forces of history and forces of destiny.”

It is hard to think of a better description of the person, mindset and final desperate act of Mohammed Bouazizi, whose weariness with his life-long mistreatment by his own Tunisian state authorities finally prompted him to undertake his own “individual expression of a timeless longing for dignity, freedom and self-respect.”

These acts by single human beings at pivotal junctures of history are impossible to predict, but when they occur these one-time expressions of the human will to live in freedom, dignity and rights should be recognized correctly as reflecting sentiments that beat mightily and daily in the hearts of tens of millions of their compatriots. A young woman at the church gathering in Montgomery, Alabama, commenting on the police’s decision to send Parks to court for her defiance, said aptly, “they’ve messed with the wrong one now.”

History then changed forever in the United States, as it is now doing in the Arab world, because Tunisian police officer Faida Hamdi also messed with the wrong one now.