Egypt's experiment with an Islamist government has passed 100 days. Mohammed Morsi, the second choice of his party, soft-spoken and hardly charismatic, has managed to stay in power and is even seen to be making progress. He has pulled off several tricky political set pieces - successfully challenging the old guard of army generals, hectoring the Iranians about Syria and pulling off a trouble-free visit to the United States.
Yet three months of an Islamist government in the Arab world's most populous country has added to the clamour - from commentators, critics and politicians - asking what the Arab Spring has done, for individual countries, for the region and for the world. The killing last month of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, raised these questions most forcefully in the United States, with the presidential contender Mitt Romney implying that he would have stood more strongly by Hosni Mubarak.
Such questions, however, can't be answered easily. Events are moving swiftly - and yet too slowly for many - in the Arab republics that saw uprisings, and there is no inevitability to what comes next. The emotion of revolution, to paraphrase William Wordsworth, needs to be recollected in tranquillity.
That historian was Eric Hobsbawm, who died last week and was considered by many to be Britain's greatest historian of his day. He was writing of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, a seminal event 56 years ago this month, which provides some perspective on the nature of today's revolutions.
Like the Egyptian revolution, Hungary's uprising was a spontaneous demonstration of people power. After the Second World War, the troops of the Soviet Union moved into Hungary, and never left. In the months before October 1956, there seemed to be some political opening in the country, and many left-wing groups began to organise. On October 23, they marched, at first a few thousand, until, by the end of the day, an estimated 200,000 people had taken to the streets of Budapest.
The authorities reacted hesitantly, but after the crowd tore down a statue of Joseph Stalin, the Hungarian secret police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. The protests escalated - the following day, some protesters carried weapons and within a few hours, Soviet tanks had entered Budapest.
What followed was a slow, uncertain unravelling of the political order. For several weeks, there were armed clashes between Hungarian protesters and the army. Embolden by broadcasts from the West, protesters appealed for help from abroad in the belief that it would eventually arrive.
The Politburo in Moscow appeared to back down, publishing in Pravda, then the newspaper of the Communist Party, that troops would be withdrawn. Then, abruptly, Moscow changed tack and mobilised the military to crush the uprising.
No help came from the West and the uprising was put down.
Hobsbawm, writing many years later, called the uprising "a classic instance of the narrative of justified popular insurrection against oppressive government". Yet the events of 1956 were testing for Communists and Marxists across the western world, who saw - more clearly than ever before - the willingness of the Soviet apparatus to use violence to maintain its rule. With Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation a few months earlier of the deceased Stalin, the disillusionment of the West's "useful idiots" was complete, and many deserted communism.
Hobsbawm did not. Admitting the crushing of Hungary's dissent was brutal, he nevertheless appeared to come to the belief it was also inevitable, a judgement even his colleagues considered callous. "The insurgents' programme was beyond reach," he wrote. "In retrospect, given their historical context, there is an air of inevitability about the flow of events, as there is about the direction of a great river."
For Hobsbawm, what happened in 1956 was merely a wrinkle in a longer thread of revolution - a revolution he was still waiting for when he passed away at the age of 95.
That central insight is essential to understanding the Arab Spring, as the politics of the various post-uprising countries twist in unpredictable ways. The key to judging the outcome of the revolutions is the context out of which the revolutions grew. Mr Morsi's 100 days in power can only be judged by the tasks he faced, leading the Arab world's largest country and buffeted by stronger powers.
Hobsbawm's instincts were right about revolutions, even if his politics led him to misread the Soviets. Authoritarianism was built into communist states from their beginnings, and entrenched after Stalin's long rule. As much as Hobsbawm, many years later, saw the offer from Moscow's Politburo to withdraw Soviet troops as a capitulation, it was no such thing: the tanks were already on the lawn as the presses of Pravda rolled.
The Arab revolutions have just begun. The cycles through which they will pass will be violent, as in Libya, sometimes unexpectedly, even irrationally so. There will be times, for those watching, and especially for those living through them, that it will seem as if the gains of the revolution have been squandered.
But it is important to understand the world out of which they grew. What can seem in hindsight so safe was actually stagnant, societies that were calm on the surface because of fear were actually bubbling below. In the end, popular insurrection was justified in the republics because the promises of those Arab governments were built on oppression and lies.
On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
