Madina newspaper THE late great Egyptian singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab used to sing a poem entitled “The Supplication of the Orient”. It opens with “The world was gloomy around it (Orient) ... and with its steps it used to guide the confused and undecided ... a land that never knew shackles… and never bowed its head except to its Creator”. He then asks: “How can a usurper walk on its soil and fill the horizons with cries and groans?” The poem suggests that no empire can achieve its goal unless it has the Orient or Levant as its heart. From this perspective, even the British empire was not able to achieve the status of an empire until it occupied the Arab world. But it lost that honor when it was defeated in the 1956 war. America's imperialist dream did not prosper even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and even after it made its foray into the Middle East by invading Iraq, following its invasion of Afghanistan and other countries in its bid to establish world hegemony. The Bush administration spent so much money on what is now known as its war against terrorism that it helped to bring the United States to the brink of bankruptcy. It appears that the autumn of empires - that started with the crumbling of Tunisia and Egypt and is rocking other Middle East countries - has come knocking at the doors of Washington. The US empire is retreating from the Middle East heavily wounded barely 10 years after invading Iraq. The autumn of empires came on the heels of globalization and the advent of the digital age that greatly helped the downfall of the autocratic regimes of Tunisia and Egypt as anti-regime forces made use of social communications networks like Facebook and Twitter to organize protests that drove away the former Tunisian leader Ben Ali and Egypt's erstwhile strongman Hosni Mubarak. What occurred in Tunisia, Egypt and lately Libya and what is happening in Yemen and Syria is one of the most pervasive images of present-day empires collapsing. These are images that cannot be concealed as people are writing history with their mobiles, on Facebook and other networks in cyberspace. It is in the age of modern technology when world events are brought directly by television into the living rooms of many households and people's awareness of what's going on around them gives them the courage to stand up for their rights as they witness the violence that the tormented human conscience cannot bear in silence. The autumn of empires and the spring that it ushers in for people seeking democracy are not merely seasons in human history. They are precursors of a new era in an age when machines are trying to control the fate of mankind. What is taking place in the countries of the ancient Orient, where empires were born and their death certificates were issued, may mean that the Orient is once again “guiding the confused and undecided”. __
