Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation took place a year ago today. Since then, a new and profound reality has emerged
In mid-February as Egyptians revelled in the wake of Hosni Mubarak's resignation I was standing at ground zero of another revolt, a hospital in Manama.
An Indian doctor, with a Bahraini ID, showed me to an intensive care unit where one of his colleagues, Sadiq al-Ikri, was recovering from a savage beating by Bahraini security forces the night before. A woman's voice screamed frantically from a television screen on the wall. Heavy weapons were mowing down people in Benghazi, she said.
"She's Libyan," explained the clearly worried doctor. "It's happening there too."
At that point it seemed difficult to know where to look, or where to be to cover what was taking place across the Middle East. The regional order was imploding. And everywhere, from Morocco to Yemen was starting to feel its effects.
As more wounded were wheeled into Manama's Salmaniya Medical Centre, it soon became clear that the vantage point to report from didn't matter so much as coming to grips with the collective theme of what was happening.
As I stood in the clinical calm of an intensive care unit, chanting from demonstrators outside started to drift through the hospital corridors. "Down with the Khalifas," was one defiant cry from thousands of Bahrainis who were using the ambulance zone as a protest hub. And then came another, far more poignant chant: "We don't fear you anymore." Time after time throughout this past 12 months, comprehending the Arab awakening has come back to this.
Around 30 hours later I was standing on the waterfront in Libya's second city, Benghazi. A flight to Cairo, then a 20-hour drive along the coast of post-revolutionary Egypt and across the border into Gaddafi's Orwellian state had landed me in a world far removed from the opulent order of Bahrain.
The city was still smouldering from a violent battle several days earlier that had ousted regime loyalists. And on the storm-swept shoreline, a mood that I had never sensed anywhere before was convulsing from a heaving crowd. "Leave Gaddafi, leave," they chanted. "Your dogs scare us no more."
Behind the crowd towered a court house and a state security building, both of which had functioned only as tools of state repression for more than four decades. They were always used to dispense Muammar Gaddafi's will, never justice. To even approach either place for several generations prior would have been courting danger or death.
But, just like the seething protesters in the hospital car park in Manama, the millions in Tahrir Square three weeks earlier, and the thousands who overthrew Tunisian despot Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali a year ago last December, fear had been replaced by empowerment. It was new and intoxicating. And it was not about to be surrendered lightly.
As much as they appreciated it, at first Benghazi people didn't seem to know what to do with newly won freedoms. People feared, rightly as it turned out, that Gaddafi would come for them again. A regime that entrenches itself through fear and repression cannot simply walk away from such a profound indignity. Dissenters must be crushed and their silent backers terrified back into submission.
When Gaddafi's troops returned in mid-March the plot seemed to be going to a well-worn regional script of brief revolts being followed by savage reprisals.
But this was different. From Benghazi to Damascus; from Paris to Washington, everyone seemed to recognise it. On the streets of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in May, it was not hard to get a sense of a longing for change, even with the pervasive secret police and an almost pathological sense among people that Gaddafi and his henchmen were everywhere.
"All I want is the chance to speak my mind," said one man as we drove through a loyalist suburb. "The chance to do what you in England can do, choose who you believe in, what you do."
Personal dignity is paramount in the Arab world, perhaps more so than anything else. When a Tunisian vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself alight after an official slapped him and refused to renew a permit for his vegetable cart it was seen across the region as far more dignified than desperate.
The resonance of Bouazizi's story was enormous and the means of telling it electrifying. The reach and impact of pan-Arab cable television and social media was far greater than any dictator could control.
Bouazizi's tale and millions like it destroyed the default position that an individual's destiny was largely outside his or her control. A new and profound reality has emerged – self-determination is not only possible, it is an entitlement.
Throughout this remarkable year a collective personal dignity has gradually been reclaimed. It is evident in the resilience of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Yemenis who continue to defy a brutal regime backlash against their demands for a greater voice. And it is clear in the determination of people to reject a preordained status quo.
There are some lingering problems, though, some of which are legacies of the past three to four decades. Accountability, on any level, remains largely absent in Arab society, which is structured around an entrenched system of patronage, where powerful figures dispense favours at will, often subverting natural justice.
And, despite the widespread access to a plurality of views, independent, or critical thought, is not common. World views are largely aligned behind sect, or leader. Despots such as Bashar al-Assad and Mubarak have spent decades de-educating and impoverishing people to the point where several generations have limited knowledge, skills or wealth, or means to do much about it.
I finished the year back in Cairo, where the euphoria of January gave way to 12 stagnant months. "We need a leader, we need someone like Mubarak," said one man who longed for more old-order certainty.
Across town in Tahrir Square, a web-addicted 21-year-old with a smartphone saw things differently. "We are free to shape this society now. Everyone wanted what we have now. Egypt had to change and it will. It's going to take a long time, but one thing we learned from our uncles is to look at history over decades, not years."