Egypt: Much more than a `Facebook revolution'

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February 18, 2011 -- There has been much written in the mainstream and even the alternative media -- much of it superficial -- about the uprising in Egypt, and previously in Tunisia, being a "Facebook revolution" and/or a "Twitter revolution". Rare have been analyses that try explain the deeper dynamics at play beneath the surface, which put the effectiveness of cyberspace organising tools into a political and class context. Exceptions to this are two very useful articles that appeared in the February 12, 2011, edition of the India-based left-wing journal, Economic & Political Weekly, which map the interaction between the build-up to the uprising in Egypt and developments in the labour and working-class movements, and how they influenced the technology-savvy young men and women of Egypt.

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Why Egypt's progressives win

By Paul Amar

On February 6, 2011, Egypt’s hastily appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman invited in the old guard or what we could call the business wing of the Muslim Brotherhood into a stately meeting in the polished rosewood Cabinet Chamber of Mubarak’s Presidential Palace. The aim of their tea party was to discuss some kind of accord that would end the national uprising and restore “normalcy”. When news of the meeting broke, expressions of delight and terror tore through the blogosphere. Was the nightmare scenario of both the political left and right about to be realised? Would the US/Israel surrogate Suleiman merge his military-police apparatus with the power of the more conservative branch of the old Islamist social movement?

Hearing the news, Iran’s Supreme Leader sent his congratulations. And in the United States Glen Beck and John McCain ranted with glee about world wars and the inevitable rise of the Cosmic Caliphate. 

On that same day, an unnamed White House official told the Associated Press that any “academic type” who did not focus on the Muslim Brothers and see them as the principle actor in this drama “was full of sh*t”. The White House seemed to believe that Suleiman, chief of Egypt’s intelligence services, was the kind of keen mind they could depend on.

In reality, the Suleiman-Brotherhood tea party turned out to be nothing more than another stunt staged by Nile TV News. Images of the Suleiman-Brotherhood tête-à-têtes were broadcast at a time when Suleiman’s legitimacy and sanity were appearing increasingly shaky within Egypt, and when this particular sub-group of the Muslim Brotherhood, who represent only one fraction of one faction of the opposition, was trying to leverage an unlikely comeback. As reporters obsessed over which Brother was sitting with Suleiman, they continued to ignore the continuing growing power of the movements that had started this uprising.

Proving Nile TV and the pessimists wrong, 1.5 million people turned out on February 7 -- the biggest mobilisation [to that point] in this uprising. Commentators focusing on the Muslim Brotherhood had completely missed the real news of the past two days. The ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) leadership had been savaged from within. In a desperate attempt to salvage his phantom authority, Mubarak had tossed his son Gamal and a whole class of US-linked businesspeople to the lions, forcing them to resign and froze their assets. And at the same time, Egyptian newspaper El-Masry El-Youm reported that the Muslim Brotherhood's youth and women’s wings had split from the main Brothers’ organisation to join the leftist 6 April Movement. The men sitting around Suleiman’s table were left without much of a movement behind them.

Bands of brothers

The Society of Muslim Brothers [Muslim Brotherhood] is not a marginal force in Egypt. It is very well organised and can be credited with providing health, education, legal aid and disaster relief to citizens ignored or neglected by the state. But it is not Egypt’s equivalent of Hizbollah or Hamas. As Mona El-Ghobashy has described, in the 1990s, the Brotherhood made a definite break, transforming its secretive, hierarchical, sharia-focused form into a well-organised political party, officially banned but occasionally tolerated. In the past two decades it has made significant inroads into parliament via alliances with other parties and by running independent candidates. The Brothers now fully support political pluralism, women’s participation in politics, and accept the role of Christians and communists as full citizens.

However, with the rise of other competing labour, liberal and human rights movements in Egypt in the 2000s, what one can call the “new old guard” of the Brothers (the ones that emerged in the 1980s) have retained a primary focus on cultural, moral and identity politics. The “new old guard” feel this distinguishes them from other parties, a fact they confirmed by appointing a rigid social conservative Muhammad Badeea as their leader in 2010. This leaning can thus bring the “new old guard” more in line with the moralistic paternalism of Mubarak’s government and set them against the trajectory of new youth, women’s and labour movements. This leads to new possibilities of splits within the Brotherhood, as youth and women’s wings feel drawn towards the 6 April coalition.

The moral-cultural traditionalist wing of the “new old guard” is composed of professional syndicate leaders and wealthy businessmen. In the 1950s-'80s, the movement regrouped and represented frustrated elements of the national bourgeoisie. But this class of people has largely been swept up into new opportunities and left the organisation. The “new old guard” of the Brothers’ business wing has started to look like a group of retired Shriners (a secret fraternal organisation linked to the Freemasons), except that in North Africa, Shriners have stopped wearing fezes.

In the past decade this particular wing of the Brothers has been partially co-opted by Mubarak’s government from two angles. First, the Brothers were allowed to enter parliament as independent candidates and have been allowed to participate in the recent economic boom. The senior Brothers now own major cell phone companies and real estate developments, and have been absorbed into the NDP machine and upper-middle class establishment for years.

Second, the government wholly appropriated the Brothers’ moral discourse. For the last decade and more, Mubarak’s police state has stirred moral panics and waved the banner of Islam, attacking single working women, homosexuals, devil-worshipping internet users, trash-recycling pig farmers, rent-control squatters, as well as Baha’i, Christian and Shia minorities. In its morality crusades, the Mubarak government burned books, harassed women and excommunicated college professors. Thus, we can say that Egypt has already experienced rule by an extremely narrow Islamist state – Mubarak’s! Egyptians tried out that kind of regime. And they hated it.

In recent years, as described in the work of Saba Mahmood and Asef Bayat, people have grown disgusted by Mubarak’s politicisation of Islam. Egyptians began to reclaim Islam as a project of personal self-governance, ethical piety and social solidarity. This trend explicitly rejects the political orientation of Islam and explicitly separates itself both from Brotherhood’s activities and Mubarak’s morality crusades.

Military as middle class

At one time, the Muslim Brotherhood represented frustrated, marginalised elements of the middle class. But that story is so 1986! Now there are a wide range of secular (but not anti-religious) groupings that represent emergent economic patterns within the country. Moreover, these groups are swept up in a whirlwind of political-economic energies coming from new or renewed world influences and investors – Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Israel, Dubai, China, Turkey and Brazil, as well as the return of remittance flows into the country as Egyptian professionals got swept up in the Gulf emirates’ building and development boom.

In the context of this new multidimensional globalisation, in which East/West divides and post-colonial patterns are radically remade, the Egyptian military, a misunderstood economic actor, has come to play a very interesting economic role. The military’s economic interests are split in interesting ways. Since the military has been prevented by the Camp David treaty from making war, it has instead used its sovereignty over huge tracts of desert and coastal property to develop shopping malls, gated cities and beach resorts, catering to rich and modest Egyptians, local and international consumers and tourists.

The military's position vis-à-vis the uprising is thus complicated. It hated the rapacious capitalists around Gamal Mubarak, who sold off national lands, assets and resources to US and European corporations. But the military also wants tourists, shoppers and investors to consume in its multibillion dollar resorts and venues. The military identifies very strongly with representing and protecting “the people”, but also wants the people to go home and stop scaring away the tourists. The military will continue to mobilise this in-between position in interesting ways in the coming years.

Suleiman’s intelligence services (mukhabarat) are nominally part of the military, but are institutionally quite separate. Intelligence is dependent on foreign patrons (Israel and the US primarily). But the actual army and air force are quite grounded in the economic and social interests of national territory. The army’s role in countering Suleiman’s lust for repression was crucial to saving the momentum of this uprising. On February 4, the day of the most terrifying police/thug brutality in Tahrir Square, many commentators noted that the military was trying to stop the thug attacks but was not being very forceful or aggressive. Was this a sign that the military really wanted the protesters to be crushed? Since then we have learned that the military in the square was not provisioned with bullets. The military were trying as best they could to battle the police/thugs, but Suleiman had taken away their bullets for fear the military would side with the protesters and use the ammunition to overthrow him.

Bullets or no, the military displaced the police, who had stripped off their uniforms and regressed into bands of thugs. Security in Cairo was being taken over by the military. In public spaces and residential quarters we witnessed the return of a 21st century version of futuwwa groups. As Wilson Jacob has described, in the 19th century futuwwa were icons of working-class national identity and community solidarity in Egypt. Futuwwa were organised groups of young men that defended craft guilds and working-class neighbourhoods in Cairo. But the futuwwa reborn on February 1, 2011 are called peoples’ committees and include men of all classes and ages, and a few women with butcher knives, too. They stake out every street corner, vigilant for police and state-funded thugs who would try to arrest, intimidate or loot residents.

Role of women

Given the threat of sexualised physical violence from Mubarak’s police/thugs, there is a gender dimension to this reimagining and redeployment of security and military power during this uprising. In the first days of the uprising we saw huge numbers of women participating in the revolt. Then the police/thugs started targeting women in particularly horrifying ways – molesting, detaining, raping. When the police were driven back and the military and the futuwwa groups took over, they insisted that “protecting” the people from thugs involved filtering women and children out of public spaces, including Tahrir Square. But women in this revolt have insisted that they are not victims that need protection, they are the leading core of this movement.

On February 7, women’s groups, including the leftist 6 April national labour movement, anti-harassment, civil rights groups and the women’s wing of the Muslim Brotherhood re-emerged in force in downtown Cairo by the hundreds of thousands.

Gutting Gamal’s globalisation

On January 28 the headquarters of Mubarak’s ruling NDP burned down, and with it, Mubarak’s substantive authority was turned to ashes. The rising military and national-capital interests then spat on those ashes on February 5. On that day, they ensured that Gamal Mubarak would resign as head of the political office of the NDP. In his place, Hosam Badrawy was named the new secretary-general of the NDP. The choice of Badrawy reflects the direction the winds are blowing now. Badrawy holds the dubious honour of being the man who founded Egypt’s first private-sector health provider in 1989. All Egyptians are constitutionally guaranteed access to free and universal health care. But Mubarak, under orders from the International Monetary Fund, made draconian cuts to the public health service beginning in the 1980s. Badrawy has championed the privatisation of health care, and has created a national private health-care industry with significant capital and legitimacy.

This industry is threatened by global competition and describes itself in nationalistic, paternalistic tones. Gamal Mubarak serving as a vehicle for foreign investment posed a threat to national businesspeople like Badrawy. Badrawy also served in the past as the director of the NDP’s human rights organisation, a particularly contradictory job to hold during a time of mass repression and torture.

Naguib Sawiris, the self-proposed chair of the “Transitional Council of Wise Men”, is similar in some ways to Badrawy. Sawiris is a successful nationalist businessperson. Sawiris heads the largest private-sector company in Egypt, Orascom. This firm has built railways, beach resorts, gated cities, highways, telecom systems, wind farms, condos and hotels. He is a major financier in the Arab and Mediterranean regions. He is also the banner carrier for Egypt’s developmentalist nationalists.

On February 4, Sawiris released a statement proposing a council of wise men who would oversee Suleiman and the police, and who would lead Egypt through the transition. The proposed council would be a so-called “neutral, technocratic” body that would include Sawiris, along with a couple of non-ideological members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s business wing, some strategic-studies experts and a Nobel Prize winner. Would this Nobel winner be Mohammed ElBaradei, the peace laureate and opposition leader? No. They had found an Egyptian laureate in organic chemistry.

Women, Microbusinesses and workers

We can now understand why we witnessed the emergence, in the first week of February 2011, of a coalition around nationalist business figures in alliance with the military – a military which also acts like nationalist middle-class business. This group ejected the “crony globalisers” and “barons of privatisation” surrounding Gamal Mubarak. Would this group then cement their hold on power, to rule the country with Suleiman as their hammer? No.

Other massive social forces were also at work. They are well organised. Legitimacy, organisation, new vision and economic power are in their hands. The new nationalist business-military bloc cannot develop the country without their participation and mobilisation. It is crucial to remember that this uprising did not begin with the Muslim Brotherhood or with nationalist business. This revolt began gradually at the convergence of two parallel forces – (i) the movement for workers’ rights in the newly revived factory towns and micro-sweatshops of Egypt, especially in the last two years, and (ii) the movement against police brutality and torture that mobilised every community in the country for the last three years. Both movements feature the leadership and mass participation of women (of all ages) and youth (of all genders). There are structural reasons for this.

First, the passion of workers that began this uprising does not stem from their marginalisation and poverty, it is from their centrality to new development processes and dynamics. In the very recent past, Egypt has re-emerged as a manufacturing country, although under the most stressful and dynamic of conditions. Egypt’s workers are mobilised because new factories are being built, in the context of a flurry of contentious global investment. Several Russian free-trade zones and manufacturing settlements have opened up; and China has invested in all parts of the Egyptian economy. Brazil, Turkey, the central Asian republics and the Gulf emirates are diversifying their investments.

They are moving out of the oil sector and real estate, and into manufacturing piece-goods, informatics, infrastructure, etc. Factories all over Egypt have been dusted off and reopened, or newly built. And all those shopping malls, gated cities, highways and resorts have to be built and staffed by someone. In the Persian Gulf, developers use expatriate labour but Egypt usually uses its own workers. And many of the workers in Egypt’s revived textile industries and piece-workshops are women. If you stroll up the staircases into the large working-class apartment buildings in the margins of Cairo or the cement-block constructions of the villages, you will see workshops full of women, making purses and shoes, and putting together toys and computer circuit boards, for sale in Europe, North Africa and the Gulf. These shop workers joined with factory workers to found the 6 April movement in 2008. They were the ones who began the organising and mobilising process that led to this uprising in 2011, whose eruption was triggered by Asmaa Mahfouz circulating a passionate Youtube video and tens of thousands of leaflets by hand in slum areas of Cairo on January 24, 2011. Mahfouz, a political organiser with a masters in business administration from Cairo University, called people to protest the next day. And the rest is history.

Microbusinesses

Egypt’s microbusinesses have been politicised and mobilised in very dynamic ways, again with important gender and sexual dimensions. Since the early 1990s, Egypt has cut back welfare and social services to working-class and lower middle-class Egyptians. In the place of food subsidies and jobs they have offered debt. Microcredit loans were given, with the IMF and World Bank’s enthusiastic blessing, to stimulate entrepreneurship and self-reliance. These loans were often specifically targeted towards women and youth. Since economically disadvantaged applicants have no collateral to guarantee these loans, payback is enforced by criminal law rather than civil law. This means that your body is your collateral. The police extract pain and humiliation if you do not pay your bill.

Thus the microenterprise system has become a massive set of police rackets and “loan shark” operations. Police sexualised brutalisation of youth and women became central to the “regulation” of the massive small-business economy. In this context, the microbusiness economy is a tough place to operate, but it does shape women and youth into tough survivors who see themselves as an organised force opposed to the police state. No one waxes on about the blessings of the market’s invisible hand.

The economic interests of this large class of microentrepreneurs are the basis for the huge and passionate anti-police brutality movement. It is no coincidence that the movement became a national force two years ago with the brutal police murder of a youth, Khaled Saeed, who was typing away in a small internet café that he partially owned. Police demanded an ID and a bribe from him; he refused, and the police beat him to death, crushing his skull to pieces while the whole community watched in horror.

Police demanding bribes, harassing small microbusinesses, and beating those who refuse to submit had become standard practice in Egypt. Internet cafes, small workshops, call centres, video-game cafes, microbuses, washing/ironing shops, small gyms constitute the landscape of microenterprises that are the jobs base and social world of Egypt’s lower middle classes. The so-called “Facebook revolution” is not about people mobilising in virtual space; it is about Egyptian internet cafes and the youth and women they represent, in real social spaces and communities, utilising the cyberspace bases they have built and developed to serve their revolt.

The Egyptian difference

In the case of the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s, the “bazaaris of Tehran” (the medium-sized merchants and shop owners) ended up serving as the crucial “swing vote”, moving the Iranian Revolution from left to right, from a socialistic uprising towards the founding of an Islamic republic. In the case of Egypt, the social and political force of women and youth microentrepreneurs will lead history in the opposite direction. These groups have a highly developed, if complex, view of the moral posturing of some Islamists, and they have a very clear socioeconomic agenda, which appeals to the dynamic youth wing of the Brotherhood. The progressive groups have a linked network of enterprises, factories, identities and passions. They would go to any length to prevent the re-emergence of police brutality and moralistic hypocrisy that have ruled them for the past generation.

The women and youth behind the microbusinesses, and the workers in the new Russian, Chinese, Brazilian, Gulf and Egyptian-financed factories seem to be united. And they grow more so each day. Microentrepreneurs, new workers' groups and massive anti-police brutality organisations obviously do not share the same class position as Sawiris and Badrawy and the rich men in the “Council of the Wise”. Nevertheless, there are significant overlaps and affinities between the interests and politics of nationalist development-oriented groups, the newly entrepreneurial military and, vitally, the well-organised youth and women’s social movements. This confluence of social, historical and economic dynamics will assure that this uprising does not get reduced to a photo opportunity for Suleiman and a few of his cronies.

A Cheshire cat is smiling down on Suleiman’s tea party.

[Paul Amar is associate professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This article appeared in India's Economic & Political Weekly.]

The road to Tahrir

By Charles Hirschkind

February 12, 2011 -- Economic & Political Weekly -- While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this spectacular mobilisation had been sown as far back as the early 2000s and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, Twitter and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media, activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across the institutional barriers that had until then polarised Egypt’s political terrain, between more Islamic oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

Since the Islamist revival in the 1970s, Egypt’s political opposition had remained sharply divided around contrasting visions of the proper place of religious authority within the country’s social and political future, with one side viewing secularisation as the eminent danger, and the other emphasising the threat of politicised religion to personal freedoms and democratic rights.

This polarity tended to result in a defensive political rhetoric and a corresponding amplification of political antagonisms, a dynamic the Mubarak regime has repeatedly encouraged and exploited over the last 30 years in order to ensure a weak opposition. What was striking about the Egyptian blogosphere as it developed in the last seven or so years is the extent to which it engendered a political language free from the problematic of secularisation versus fundamentalism that had governed so much of political discourse in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Virtual public sphere

The blogosphere that burst into existence in Egypt around 2004 and 2005 in many ways provided a new context for a process that had begun somewhat earlier, in the late 1990s: namely, the development of practices of coordination and support between secular leftist organisations and associations and Islamist ones (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood) — a phenomenon almost completely absent in the prior decades. Toward the end of the decade of the 1990s, Islamist and leftist lawyers began to agree to work together on cases regarding state torture, whereas in previous years, lawyers of one affiliation would almost never publicly defend plaintiffs from the other.

The most successful experiment at reaching across Egypt’s political spectrum came in 2004 with the emergence of what is called the Kifaya movement, a political formation that brought together Islamists, Muslim Brothers, communists, liberals and secular-leftists, who joined together on the basis of a common demand for an end to the Mubarak regime and a rejection of Gamal Mubarak’s succession of his father as president. Kifaya was instrumental in organising a series of demonstrations between 2004 and 2007 that for the first time explicitly called for the president of Egypt to step down. This was an unheard-of demand prior to that moment, insomuch as any direct criticism of the president or his family had until then always been taboo and met by harsh reprisals from the state.

Kifaya not only succeeded in bringing large numbers of people of different political persuasions into the streets to protest government policies and actions; they were also the first political movement in Egypt to exploit the organising potential of the internet, founding a number of blog sites from which to coordinate and mobilise demonstrations and strikes. When Kifaya held its first demonstrations, at the end of 2004, a handful of bloggers both participated and wrote about the events on their blogs. Within a year, the number of blogs had jumped into the hundreds. Today there are 1000s of blogs, many tied to activism, street politics, solidarity campaigns and grassroots organising. Many of the bloggers who helped promote the Kifaya movement have played key roles in the events since January 25.

Citizen journalists/activists

One event highlighted the political potential of blogging in Egypt and helped secure the practice’s new and expanding role within Egyptian political life. It had long been known that the Egyptian state routinely abused and tortured prisoners or detainees (hence the Washington’s choice of Egypt in so-called rendition cases). For its part, the state has always denied that abuse took place, and lacking the sort of evidence needed to prosecute a legal case, human rights lawyers and the opposition press had never been able to effectively challenge the state’s official position. This changed when a blogger named Wael Abbas, whose blog is titled al-wa’i al-masri (“Egyptian Awareness”), placed on his blog site a cellphone-recorded video he had been sent by another blogger that showed a man being physically and sexually abused by police officers at a police station in Cairo. (Apparently, the clip had been filmed by officers with the intention of intimidating the detainee’s fellow workers.)

Once this video clip was placed on YouTube and spread around the Egyptian blogosphere, opposition newspapers took up the story, citing the blogs as their source. When the victim was identified and encouraged to come forward, a human rights agency raised a case on his behalf against the officers involved that eventually resulted in their conviction, an unprecedented event in Egypt’s modern history. Throughout the entire year that the case was being prosecuted, bloggers tracked every detail of the police and judiciary’s handling of the case, their relentless scrutiny of state actions frequently finding its way into the opposition newspapers. Satellite TV talk shows followed suit, inviting bloggers on screen to debate state officials concerned with the case. Moreover, within a month of posting the torture videos on his web site, Abbas and other bloggers started receiving scores of similar cellphone films of state violence and abuse taken in police stations or during demonstrations.

This new relation between bloggers and other media forms has now become standard: not only do many of the opposition newspapers rely on bloggers for their stories; news stories that journalists can’t print themselves without facing state persecution — for example, on issues relating to the question of Mubarak’s successor — such stories are first fed to bloggers by investigative reporters; once they are reported online, journalists then proceed to publish the stories in newsprint, citing the blogs as sources, in this way avoiding the accusation that they themselves invented the story. Moreover, many young people have taken up the practice of using cellphone cameras in the street, and bloggers are constantly receiving phone footage from anonymous sources that they then put on their blogs.

This event played a key role in shaping the place that the blogosphere would come to occupy within Egypt’s media sphere. Namely, bloggers understand their role as that of providing a direct link to what they call “the street”, conceived primarily as a space of state repression and political violence, but also as one of political action and popular resistance. They render visible and publicly speakable a political practice — the violent subjugation of the Egyptian people by its authoritarian regime — that other media outlets cannot easily disclose, due to censorship, harassment and arrest. This includes not only acts of police brutality and torture, but also the more mundane and routine forms of violence that shape the texture of everyday life. For example, blogs frequently include reporting on routine injustices experienced in public transportation, the cruel indifference of corrupt state bureaucrats, sexual harassment encountered in the streets, as well as the many faces of pain produced by conditions of intense poverty, environmental toxicity, infrastructural neglect, and so on.

Facebook 'general strike'

The blogosphere was joined by another powerful media instrument in 2008. On April 6 of that year, a general strike took place in Egypt, an event that saw vast numbers of workers and students stay home from their sites of work or school. The strike, the largest anti-government mobilisation to occur in Egypt in many years, had been initiated by labour activists in support of striking workers at the Mahalla textile factory who had for months been holding out for better salaries and improved work conditions. In the month leading up to the strike, however, the aim of the action enlarged beyond the scope of the specific concerns of the factory workers. Propelled by the efforts of a group of activists on Facebook, the strike shifted to become a national day of protest against the corruption of the Mubarak regime, and particularly against the regime’s complete inaction in the face of steadily declining wages and rising prices.

Most stunning about the event, and most worrisome to the Egyptian state, was the way the idea of a general strike had been generated: Esra’ ‘Abd al-Fattah, a young woman with little experience as an activist, who lived just outside of Cairo, had initiated a group on Facebook calling for a sympathy strike with the textile workers. Within two weeks, close to 70,000 Facebook members had signed on. Political bloggers also began to promote the strike, and by the time April 1 came around, most of the political opposition parties had been brought on board and were vigorously trying to mobilise their constituencies. When April 6 arrived, Egypt witnessed its most dramatic political mobilisation in decades, an event that brought together people across the political spectrum, from Muslim Brotherhood members to the activists of the Revolutionary Socialists.

Egyptian Facebook activists and bloggers took up and extended the political platform that the Kifaya movement had introduced into Egyptian political life, the same exact platform that has brought millions of Egyptians into the street in January-Febriary 2011. Four issues have defined a common moral stance: a forceful rejection of the Mubarak regime and a demand for its end; a stand against tawrith, or “succession”, specifically Gamal Mubarak’s succession of his father as president of the country; a demand for the expansion of political freedoms and the creation of fair and democratic institutions; and a condemnation of routinised state violence.

Common ground

Although those who forged this common ground online have done so through different institutional experiences, and have brought with them different conceptions of the place of religion within politics, they write and interact as participants in a shared project. While they recognise the difference between their political commitments and those of other online activists, they engage with an orientation toward creating conditions of political action and change, and therefore seek to develop arguments, styles of writing and self-presentation that can bridge these differences and hold the plurality together. As one secularist blogger put it in commenting on the protocols of online engagement: “The atheists reign in their contempt for religion, while the religious bloggers — who would not even accept the existence of non-believers in the first place — can now see some shared values.”

For Islamist activists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, this agenda marks a radical shift. Until quite recently, Islamist political arguments have focused on the importance of adopting the sharia as a national legal framework, and on the need to counter the impact of Western cultural forms and practices in order to preserve the values of an Islamic society. Granted, an earlier generation of intellectuals linked to Islamic political parties had, since the mid-1980s, emphasised the necessity of democratic political reforms. Leading Islamist writers such as Fahmi Howeidi, ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Messiri and Tarek al-Bishri had attempted to build a movement that would bring about an end to the rampant corruption afflicting Egypt’s political institutions and establish a solid basis for representative governance, but their viewpoints generally remained marginal within Islamist political currents, and the organisations they tried to establish were largely undermined by the state.

For many of those making up the new generation of Islamist activists, however, the goal of creating a flourishing Islamic society must start with the reform of Egypt’s stultified authoritarian system and, therefore, with the development of a political discourse capable of responding to the requirements of this task. This political reorientation can be seen in a statement made a few years back by Ibrahim Hodeibi, an important voice among the new generation of Brotherhood members and a well-known blogger. Writing in the context of a debate with fellow Brotherhood members about the future of the organisation, Hodeibi suggested that the Brotherhood slogan, “Islam is the solution”, should be replaced by the religiously neutral “Egypt for all Egyptians”. This is indeed the call we hear today rising up above the streets of Egypt.

These online activists have played a key role in transforming the conditions of political possibility in Egypt during the last decade, and of paving the way to Tahrir Square. They have sought out and cultivated new forms of political agency in the face of the predations and repressive actions of the Egyptian state. They have pioneered forms of political critique and interaction that can mediate and encompass the heterogeneity of religious and social commitments that constitute Egypt’s contemporary political terrain.

[Charles Hirschkind teaches anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is based on research conducted in 2008 with a group of bloggersin Egypt.]

Submitted by Terry Townsend on Sun, 02/20/2011 - 19:19

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by Linda Herrera

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/612/egypts-revolution-2.0_the-facebook-factor

Image removed. [Image by Carlos Lattuf]

The call for a Day of Rage on January 25, 2011 that ignited the Egyptian revolution originated from a Facebook page. Many have since asked: Is this a “Facebook Revolution?”  It is high time to put this question to rest and insist that political and social movements belong to people and not to communication tools and technologies. Facebook, like cell phones, the internet, and twitter, do not have agency, a moral universe, and are not predisposed to any particular ideological or political orientation. They are what people make of them. Facebook is no more responsible for Egypt’s revolution than Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type was responsible for the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth century. But it is valid to say that neither the Reformation nor the pro-democracy rights’ movements sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, and much of the region would have come about at this juncture without these new tools. Digital communications media have revolutionized learning, cognition, and sociability and facilitated the development of a new generational behavior and consciousness.  And the old guard simply do not get it. 

Around the globe, far beyond Egypt and Tunisia, we are witnessing a monumental generational rupture taking place around digital literacy, and the coming of age of Generation 2.0. They take for granted interaction, collaboration, and community building on-line. The digital “non-literate” or “semi-literate” tend to be either the very poor lacking means, access to, or time for digital media, or the older generation, the pre-digitals, who do not see the value in changing their communication habits. Many from the pre-digital generation are quick to deride innovations such as Facebook and Twitter as being tools that indulge the egoistic tendencies of the young or which are colossal time wasters. While these critiques hold some validity, they capture only one side, and a small side, of a complex and epic generational sea change that is underway and that is being facilitated—not driven in some inevitable process—by the availability of new communication technologies and social tools.

A youthful global digital generation is growing in leaps and bounds, and social media, of which Facebook is just one platform, is a decisively important factor in it. Youth use social media for a range of social, academic, political, leisure, personal, creative, sexual, cultural, commercial, and other activities. Some characteristics of this global generation are excessive communication, involving many people in decision making, multitasking, group work, blurring of public and private, sharing, individual expression, and collective identification. Another important distinction between the generations is that the digital generation take what media theorist Clay Shirky calls “symmetrical participation” for granted. In other words, they are not passive recipients of media and messages, as in the days when television and print media ruled, but take for granted that they can play a role in the simultaneous production, consumption, interaction with, and dissemination of on-line content. Youth in the Middle East and North Africa share the features of their global generational counterparts but with some important additions and differences. 

In politically authoritarian states like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, youth have been fashioning Facebook into a vibrant and inclusive public square. They also use it to maintain their psychological well being as a space to metaphorically breath when the controls and constrains of the social world become too stifling. A 22 year old blogger and avid  Facebook user explains, “It’s such a release to go on Facebook. I feel so liberated knowing there’s a place I can send my thoughts.”

The Rise of the “El-Face” Generation

In October and November 2010 I was in Egypt conducting research with university students in Alexandria and Cairo from diverse social class backgrounds on their media use. Many of them were using a new colloquial term, “El-Face” when talking about Facebook. These Facebook users carry traits of being politically savvy, bold, creative, outward looking, group regulating, and ethical. And their numbers are fast growing. In March 2008 there were some 822,560 users.  After the Arabic version of Facebook was launched in March of 2009 usership jumped. By July 1, 2010 there were some 3,581,460 Facebook members, making for an increase of 357.2% in a two year period. The site has become increasingly Arabized, though many users show dexterity in using both English and Arabic.

In the months running up to the parliamentary elections in November 2010 there was much speculation about a possible shut down of Facebook. Adult pundits in the more mainstream media (semi-governmental newspapers, popular Arabic television talk shows) took up the cause of Facebook. They expressed their paternalistic concern about the potentially corrupting force of Facebook on the youth in a familiar moral panic mode. On her popular television talk show, for instance, Hala Sarhan lamented the lawlessness of Facebook, asserting it to be a dangerously free zone in need of restrictions. Others argued that without adult supervision, youth could be lured and tricked by dangerous elements into sedition (fitna). They worried Facebook was fueling sectarian tensions between Christians and Muslims that could lead to violence.

These public Facebook experts are mainly sexagenarian and septuagenarian educators, policy makers, government officials, and academics of a pre-digital age. They are using a pre-digital political cognition and institutional understanding to discuss new media today, and they are direly off the mark. Drawing on older understandings of the media they view Facebook as the new space of ideological control, the place to capture the minds and hearts of the citizens; like state television but accessible through the internet. Some of them are sincere in their worry that dangerous elements, like radicals and criminals, will try to befriend youth on Facebook and lure them in subversive activities. Others are clearly more interested in maintaining raw power and want to find effective ways to keep youth in their fold and under their thumbs. The ones vying to maintain control of the youth reason that if youth are spending time on Facebook, then all the government needs to do is go in and set up its propaganda machinery there, capture and control the hearts and minds of youth on Facebook, it’s that simple. The government has established a presence on Facebook, though a somewhat pitiful one, setting up pages for the National Democratic Party (158 people “like” it), Gamal Mubarak (the page has been removed since the uprising), Hosni Mubarak, and other government figures and causes. But these are not picking up traction. The youth are not buying it, and the more the regime people interlope into Facebook the more they lose legitimacy.

The community of “El-Face” is developing a cultural, political, and ethical universe of its own. It has its own codes and is a regulated space to some degree. There are certain red lines, as Hoda and Amir, both 21 year old university students at Alexandria University, that should not be crossed: you should not use the space to insult each other’s religion, for pornography or sexual harassment, for advertising or selling things, for spreading false rumors, or for spying. When a Facebook friend crosses these lines others intervene by way of posting a corrective comment on their wall, starting a conversation on the post in question, or by defriending them. 

Last October many youth were worried that the government would close down Facebook.  In discussions with a group of students from the Political Science department at Cairo University, they explained that the government feared the flurry of critical political activity that would invariably precede an election. Though many expressed that turning off Facebook would be akin to suffocating them, as one young man put it, it would be like  “blocking the air to my lungs”, they insisted they would not ease up on their pre-election Facebook activities. These included  mocking the president, his son, the system, and the whole electoral process. They stood defiant. A 21 year old female student proclaimed, “We don’t care! We’re not afraid of them. What are they going to do, arrest millions of us?” 

Their Facebook activities also included a commitment to demanding justice for the brutal killing of one of their own, Khaled Said. It was striking last October how every youth I encountered in and out of the university was talking about Khaled Said. His story, which came out of Facebook, not Al-Jazeera, the newspaper, or any other media, has by now received much international coverage. The events leading to Khaled’s killing originated when he supposedly posted a video of two police officers allegedly dividing the spoils of a drug bust. This manner of citizen journalism has become commonplace and youth are getting more emboldened to expose the festering corruption of a police force that acts with impunity. On June 6, 2010, as Khaled Said was sitting in an internet café in Alexandria, two police officers entered and asked him for his I.D.. He refused to produce it and they proceeded to drag him away and allegedly sadistically beat him to his death as he pleaded for his life in the view of witnesses. The officers claimed that Khaled died of suffocation after swallowing a packet of drugs. His family released a photograph to an activist of the broken, bloodied, and disfigured face from Khaled’s corpse. This photo, and a portrait of the gentle soft skinned face of the living Khaled, went viral. The power of photographic evidence combined with eyewitness accounts and popular knowledge of police brutality left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was senselessly and brutally murdered by police officers, the very people who are supposed to act in the interest of public safety.

A Facebook page, “We are all Khaled Said” was set up and we now know that activists from the Facebook group 6 of April Youth Movement, and Google executive Wael Ghoneim who is becoming a national hero as instigator of the Day of Rage (see below), were involved in this. The page led to a movement, first for justice to bring the killers to court to pay for their crime, and then, something much bigger. On the heels of the Tunisian revolution and fleeing of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the “We are all Khaled Said” group called for a Day of Rage, a march against “Torture, Corruption, Poverty and Unemployment” for January 25,  2011, the date the Regime designated to “celebrate” the police. Scores of Facebook users changed their profile pages to show their support for this march. Below are some of the samples of their profiles pictures.

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The uprising took off in a way that no one anticipated. On January 27, Facebook, along with telephones and internet, went off. Nevertheless the revolution grew and persisted. When the internet came back up on February 2 there was a conspicuous fluttering of pro-Mubarak profile pictures scattered around college students’ friends’ lists that had the uncanny look of iron curtain style propaganda posters.  Though this is pure speculation, it is highly likely that a committee from the Ministry of Information got together to try to decipher how to infiltrate and conquer Facebook. Operating on a pre-digital mindset, they designed and released a poster about 25 January to appropriate the Day of Rage and rewrite history. That poster (Image #4) reads: “Day of Allegiance to the Leader and Commander. We are all with you and our hearts are with you. The campaign for Mubarak, Security for Egypt.”

 
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Another profile photo which showed up among university students after the blackout was one that reads:  “With all my heart I love you Egypt, and I love you oh President.”

 
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These posters lacked the spontaneity, show of emotion, creativity of the other profile posters, and smelled of infiltrators, something not well tolerated in the Facebook public square. This pitiable attempt to turn back history and try to capture the allegiance of youth through manipulating Facebook was a sign of how desperately out of touch the regime has become. It is also indicative that it has lost its grip on the ideological state apparatuses, and once that occurs there is nothing left at its disposal but the use of force; or surrender.

Within three days these images of 25 of January as a day of loyalty to the President disappeared from Facebook. On Feburary 8, a new profile photo among Egyptian youth began spreading spontaneously. It was the image of one of their own, Wael Ghoneim, on the day of his release after twelve days disappearance (he was detained by police). The image is from a game-changing interview conducted with him on February 7, 2011 on a satellite channel. This interview, where he admits to organizing the initial protest, set to rest doubts that the revolution was the plot of enemy foreign agents. His display of emotion for the martyrs of the revolution touched the nation, and beyond. That may very well have been the nail in the coffin of the state’s media wars.

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What is happening in Egypt is not a Facebook Revolution. But it could not have come about without the Facebook generation, generation 2.0, who are taking, and with their fellow citizens, making history.