Part 2: The Great Arenas of Contention10

Chapter 10: Contention in the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Women in the bread queues of Petrograd in the winter of 1917 set off what toppled a crown three centuries old; a revolution in Iran in 1979 cannot be understood without going back twenty-six years to a coup that aborted a democratic experiment. In both the chapter reads a “deferred contention” whose pressure builds until it explodes, and what happens when a nation’s identity, not only its interests, is threatened. It then looks at the cycle of civilization as a whole: that it is not born without challenge, that its internal contention can be its safety valve or its fuse, and that confronting the other tests its mettle, and it asks whether humanity is still capable of a shared civilization. Its conclusion: no civilization without contention, and no contention without a project.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 28

  The Bolshevik revolution

  When hunger topples the crown

  1917Chapter 10Popular uprisings
• 29

  The Iranian revolution

  A deferred contention that began in 1953

  1953–1979Chapter 10Popular uprisings

The Cases