Then the day of reckoning befell the old men in their tawdry palaces, and the old dispensations collapsed. In Tunis and Egypt, Mubarak and Ben Ali, grey modernist dictators that they were, wore dark suits as they were bundled away into discrete helicopters. Meanwhile Gaddafi, the Brother Leader in Libya, went for electric-tribal, or off-military fatigues, big shades hiding his battlefield of a face, like an ageing rock star the morning after an ill-advised binge. In the end he scuttled into the night and a future, he hoped, as the Old Pretender. Head of state at twenty-eight, he had won too young really to surpass his idol and rival, Che Guevara, for all the offbeat adventure, international mischief and female bodyguards a trillion petrodollars could buy. Maybe he could reverse the more normal revolutionary career path and end as other radicals began, menacing from the shadows, an unknown quantity.

The tyrants have left behind them a time of yearning among the people. Sometimes this takes the form of hope. There is a fresh patrimony for millions of ordinary young men and women swindled of any other inheritance, surprised to wake up one day and find that their own innocence, wit and courage have made them heroes, not just in other people’s eyes but, far more importantly, in their own. For a while the grey tenements of Cairo, Tunis and the hundred anonymous cities may seem less drab, the smell of open drains less overpowering, the squeeze onto the minibus to find work or some other place in the world less humiliating.

But only for a time. Soon the new identity will arise: righteous anger of a different kind, inchoate, for no longer being trained on one man and his family. The parasites have been expelled from the body politic but the sickness remains. These are heroes who still have no jobs and cannot marry. Soon many may no longer care about their bright new enfranchisement.

Faith is solace for some, agenda for others. Few ignore it or pay heed to outsiders who want to know what they ‘mean’ by praying in the streets. And in that sense it feels like coming home. They pray because they always have and always will. For many, most perhaps, there really is not that much more to say. True, there are people who hitch faith to a darker world view, one wary of strangers and new ideas and, in the end, of any idea at all, other than defending the Living Tradition from those who would destroy it – those beardless collaborators and emboldened women. There are many doom-mongers who, often with secret glee, predict that the fundamentalists, the Men in Beards, will triumph and the World will live to regret these brief fantasies of freedom. Some even say it is naïve to think Arab revolutionaries yearn for the same dignities as the rest of mankind.

This is an orthodoxy spread by the leaders in the West. For decades they have appeared before batteries of cameras, smiling, to talk about shared history and a common destiny with the tyrants standing at their side in a ritual of mutual affirmation. There has sometimes been vague talk about rights and elections, propitiatory wisps of talk rising into a blue sky at the sunny temple of Reform. But in corridors of power, whether bunkered in the Pentagon or high-ceilinged and parquet floored in Whitehall, or the Quai d’Orsay, there have always been smaller shrines to more potent gods – the essential duality of stability – and oil.

Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem, the great old seats of civilisation, have long featured large on the public map of the Middle East. A more private version, revealed only to wearers of special vision goggles, feature other, stranger sounding places like the Straits of Hormuz and Ghawar, the Nabucco and Bab al-Mandab pipelines, choke points and the floating city of death known as the Sixth Fleet. Vested interests have melded a cult of realpolitik for those who have sought knowledge.

But these naysayers do not understand The Information catalysed into the air now for hundreds of millions of people, like the proverbial aether in the sciences of old, which ended monopoly of thought. The faceless Facebook Revolution. It dripped slowly at first – stories emerged of training camps, going back years, where shock troops of digital freedom were taught by others who had brought down other dictators, taking their inspiration from

an unlikely Prophet, a doddery old college professor half a world away. But these few strands of premeditation only heightened the central feature of the new landscape. A hive mind of glorious system complexity, messy and redundant with multiple emergent properties, has spread across the region and can never be taken back. The meme space is now too laden for anyone to seize it.

Hell-fire preachers can always urge a prayerful crowd to various thoughts and acts of rage, or not, but the young among their flocks will revert straight to what can be described as the world of the ragged-trouser Internauts sending each other cheeky cartoons, furtive, flirtatious texts. They will get lost in video games, storming a remote desert fortress with teammates in a thousand other neighbourhood Internet cafés across two continents. Metal chairs will scrape against cheap tiling floors – a form of global consciousness born under the glare of strip lights.

However, it is by no means finished. There is, of course, the chinless son of his father in Damascus who believes his own hysteria and whose hard men grow in cunning, month by month. When the hard men realised the crowds had rallied against them and did not fear death enough they shot to maim rather than to kill. They started to count not the dead but the disappeared, and the number of living whose fingernails they had pulled out. The old fox of Yemen, who once pretended he was illiterate to stand tall among the hill tribesmen, was blown out of office by a well-aimed rocket attack but his heirs and successors carried on his work unabated until he returned. All the while the country edges towards human disaster on an epic scale.

What comes next? A lot, to be sure; triumphs and setbacks and ideas and people and movements that no one has even dreamed on. But, like all true revolutions, it will take a generation to play out. Many of its own children will be eaten. What began in the early spring of 2011 moves more slowly than the news cycle and instant commentariat demand. In the end it will be change at historical rather than warp factor speeds. At some future time the historians might pronounce that there was no question that everything had changed across the region in those few weeks, and that nothing would ever be the same again.