Iman Zayat: Arab historic leaders still leave their imprint on nations today

Reading the memoirs of those who lived alongside figures such as Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gadhafi offers a quiet intimacy, a glimpse into how power, in their hands, resembled not a shared burden but a private inheritance. These regimes functioned less as governments than as sprawling family enterprises, sustained by webs of loyalty and favour rather than institutions designed to serve the public. Even the occasional hospital or highway project, celebrated in state propaganda, rarely stemmed from a vision of collective welfare; they were fleeting gestures, strategically deployed to pacify dissent or reward obedience.

Yet time, as ever, blurs the edges. Today, these leaders live on not only in textbooks but also in a mosaic of memories. Documentaries, films, biographies and social media fragments all seek to frame their legacies. Some strive to expose, others to redeem; few capture the full weight of their rule. And in the end, the stories we tell about them reveal as much about our present as they do about our past.

The Nostalgia Industry

Since the Arab uprisings, a quiet cultural ecosystem has emerged, one that seeks to rehabilitate, re-examine, and at times romanticise the region’s fallen strongmen. This nostalgia industry spans a wide range of mediums, from prestige television to the ever-evolving lore of social media, where complex histories are repackaged into more accessible narratives, offering audiences a sense of catharsis, comfort or simply continuity.

In Egypt, the process of rehabilitation has been particularly striking. Prime-time dramas such as “The End” (2020) and “The Choice” (2021) cast the Mubarak era in a softened light: traffic police stand dutifully at near-empty intersections, and civil servants appear punctually in spotless offices. The message is understated yet insistent, what was once viewed as stagnation is reframed as stability, authoritarianism recast as benevolent paternalism.

The trend, however, extends well beyond Egypt’s borders. In Iraq, a viral TikTok trend in 2022 saw users overlay Saddam Hussein-era pop songs, such as Kadim al-Saher’s “Ladghat El-Hayya” (The Snake’s Bite), once a staple of state television, onto montages of everyday life from the 1990s: children queuing for ice cream, traffic officers in neat uniforms, and the vibrant book markets of Baghdad. These clips made no mention of mass graves or the hunger brought on by international sanctions. Instead, they offered a glimpse into the unsettling normalcy of daily life under Saddam’s rule. One particularly jarring edit cut from a joyful wedding video from 1998, complete with champagne flutes and sequined gowns, to a 2003 image of the same hotel reduced to rubble. The dissonance itself carried an emotional charge, echoing a kind of collective trauma.

These works often linger on striking details and these contradictions do not resolve historical truth; rather, they render it tragically compelling.

Western portrayals add another layer of ambiguity, often filtered through their own cultural lenses. HBO’s “House of Saddam” (2008) borrowed narrative tropes from “The Sopranos,” turning despotism into family melodrama, while Netflix’s “The Devil Next Door” (2019) reduced Hafez al-Assad to a near-caricature, more a villain than statesman. These simplifications are not unexpected; the intricacies of regional history are often flattened into binary tales of tyranny and madness. And yet, even these stylised depictions reveal something essential: that autocrats often serve as Rorschach tests, reflecting the political fears and fantasies of the viewer as much as the realities of their reigns.

At its heart, the nostalgia industry is driven by three enduring human impulses: the exile’s yearning for lost places, the trauma survivor’s instinct to reframe painful memories, and the artist’s quest to reconcile historical brutality with private, often tender, recollections. Tunisian film-maker Nadia El Fani put it succinctly: “We don’t miss the dictators. We miss the parts of ourselves that existed in those times.”

What results is a kind of cultural palimpsest, a layered text in which official propaganda, personal memory and the disillusionment of the post-revolutionary era bleed into one another. The lines blur. What emerges is not history in the strict sense, but something perhaps more emotionally resonant: a form of collective memory that transmutes the heavy burden of the past into whatever alloy helps us move forward.

Generational memory gaps

In a 2023 BBC Arabic poll, 42 percent of Iraqis over the age of fifty said they viewed Saddam’s era positively, citing a sense of “order.” Younger respondents, by contrast, associated his rule almost entirely with mass graves and repression. The divergence speaks less to a disagreement over facts than to the differing emotional registers through which history is experienced, each generation haunted by a different set of losses.

“These leaders may be gone, but the shadows of their rule continue to shape national consciousness. They echo in the elders’ nostalgia, the youth’s disillusionment and in the political myths that rise anew from the embers.”

The generational divide is stark. Those who lived under these regimes retain memories shaped by fear, complicity or reluctant admiration. For younger generations, these leaders are not flesh-and-blood figures but symbols, their legacies mediated through family anecdotes, pop culture or political revisionism.

This gap shapes historical understanding. Older Libyans may recall Gadhafi’s early pledges to distribute wealth; younger ones know only the caricature, the capricious autocrat in sunglasses and flowing robes. In Iraq, some remember Saddam’s rule as brutal but orderly, while those born after 2003 know only the instability that followed. These rifts are not merely generational, they signal fundamentally different relationships to authority, loss, and national identity.

The intimacy of memoirs

Memoirs add another layer to this quiet tug-of-war over memory. There is something quietly profound about the way they offer history not as grand narrative, but as personal recollection, whispered across time. Unlike official archives or even documentaries, these accounts give us the sense of peering through a keyhole, watching history unfold through the eyes of those who stood in its inner circles. They become spaces where different truths coexist, each carrying the weight of lived experience. What makes them so moving, and at times unsettling, is their deeply personal nature.

Take “The Colonel and I: My Life with Gaddafi” by Daad Sharab, who was close to the Libyan leader. Her recollections are filled with small, almost ordinary moments that do more than humanise him; they make him familiar, reshaping the distant figure of a man accused of tyranny into something closer to a flawed patriarch. When she blames Libya’s unravelling on the “vipers” surrounding him, she draws on an age-old narrative, one used to soften the legacies of rulers from Nero to Louis XVI. There is something deeply human in this impulse: the need to reconcile loyalty with loss, to mourn a man without excusing his rule.

Then there is “The End of Gaddafi” by Abdel Rahman Shalgham, the former foreign minister who broke with the regime. His memoir strips away sentimentality, revealing a leader consumed by paranoia, ranting about conspiracies, lashing out in fits of rage, incapable of trust even toward his own family. Where Sharab sees simplicity, Shalgham sees cruelty; where she remembers generosity, he documents plunder. The contrast is stark, not because one account is true and the other false, but because both are true in their own ways, shaped by the roles their authors played in Gadhafi’s orbit.

This is the paradox of memoirs: the nearer we draw to power, the more fragmented our understanding grows. These are not mere differences in perspective, they reveal how power warps relationships, distorting reality until the man and the myth become nearly indistinguishable.

Memoirs from authoritarian regimes are more than personal stories; they are acts of preservation, and sometimes, persuasion. When Saddam’s daughter Raghad Hussein, for example, speaks of her father’s love for Iraq, she is not just grieving; she is appealing to something deeper than politics, something familial and intimate.

And this is what makes these accounts so powerful. They are not just records of events but of emotions, of loyalty and betrayal, of admiration and disillusionment. In a world where history is increasingly told in fragments, a viral anecdote here, a TikTok clip there, these personal narratives take on new weight. A single story, tenderly told, can soften the edges of a brutality; a confession, painfully shared, can sharpen them again.

The shrinking of history

In an era of digital speed, even memoirs must compete with faster, more visceral storytelling. A viral clip of Saddam’s trial, a TikTok summary of “Mubarak’s Egypt,” or a dramatised documentary on Gadhafi’s final days now reach broader audiences than any dense biography. The danger is not just oversimplification; it is the gradual erosion of history into fragments. Nuance fades, replaced by algorithms that reward spectacle over substance. The intricate realities that sustained these regimes, the quiet fears, the tacit deals, the uneasy loyalties, flatten into binary choices: hero or villain, order or chaos.

This compression of history carries real consequences. When complex pasts are reduced to slogans, societies struggle to reckon with them, or with the present. Today’s Arab world contends with immense challenges: the war in Gaza, the spectre of confrontation with Iran, the shifting dynamics of regional alliances. In such a climate, the lessons of past regimes, how they emerged, endured and unravelled, should serve as guides. Yet they slip from our grasp, drowned out by crisis and the seductive pull of simpler narratives.

Ultimately, what endures is not a battle over facts, but a question of why we keep returning to these stories. For some, they are tools to navigate the uncertainties of today; for others, a quiet act of reckoning. In countries where archives remain sealed and official histories tightly controlled, personal narratives, even whispered ones, become subtle forms of defiance.

The past never entirely vanishes. These leaders may be gone, but the shadows of their rule continue to shape national consciousness. They echo in the elders’ nostalgia, the youth’s disillusionment and in the political myths that rise anew from the embers.

A message to the new Arab order

For today’s Arab leaders, the fading memory of past rulers offers both warning and opportunity. The old model, personal rule dressed up as governance, repression masquerading as stability, is obsolete. The Arab uprisings demolished the illusion of indefinite autocracy, even if their aftermath exposed the dangers of the void: botched transitions, foreign meddling, resurgent militarism.

Today’s rulers confront a different landscape. Information flows faster than censors can contain, narratives shaped by podcasts and posts as much as by press briefings. Power no longer rests neatly in one seat; it splinters across militias, factions and foreign agendas. Years of institutional erosion have left many states brittle, acutely vulnerable to fracture.

The crises of today demand more than old scripts. They call for diplomacy, durable institutions and a leadership vision rooted not in survivalism but in reform. The longing for order that draws some back to the era of Mubarak or Gadhafi reflects not a desire for tyranny, but for predictability. Yet the answer to contemporary discontent cannot lie in yesterday’s toolkit.

Arab youth, raised amid upheaval, will not mistake paralysis for peace. The leaders who endure will be those who grasp that legitimacy now grows not from fear or patronage, but from attentiveness: to economic pain, political yearning, and the rising threats of climate and conflict.

READ: Muammar Gadhafi rule still haunts Libya

In the end, the future will not belong to those who cling to relics, but to those who understand that real power now lies not in control alone, but in adaptation, foresight, and above all, in the humility to be held accountable.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Maghrebi.org. Iman Zayat is the Managing Editor of The Arab Weekly.

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