Kifaya

gulfnews.com: Opinion:

The recent protests in Cairo and Beirut have been organised with the chant of a new Arab movement kifaya, Arabic for enough. The word, says the Egyptian democracy advocate and sociologist Dr Saad Al Din Ebrahim, is fast becoming a mantra for millions of Arabs wanting to seize their own destiny. Certainly the slogan has surfaced in banners carried into those street demonstrations, but more important it has now found its way on television shows, read in opinion columns by Arab pundits and certainly advocated by millions of Arabs in the privacy of their homes from Casablanca to Riyadh. Could this one word be a harbinger of a muscular popular Arab revolt such as the movement that guided millions of people in Eastern Europe in shedding their tired old despotic regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union? Scepticism abounds, but so do tell-tale signs that it is in fact building up into a people's revolution, certainly in Lebanon, but also in Egypt and to some extent elsewhere in the Arab world.

I believe, at long last, we are seeing the ellusive Arab Street. They are waking up, and they are discovering they are stong.