[Reader-list] Road to Tahrir by Charles Hirschkind

[Swadhin Sen]

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/09/the-road-to-tahrir/



The road to Tahrir


posted by 
Charles Hirschkind






			
				

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
mobilization 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 polarized Egypt’s political terrain,
between more Islamically-oriented currents (most prominent among them,
the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones. Since the rise of 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 secularization as the eminent danger, and
the other emphasizing the threat of politicized 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 thirty 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
secularization vs. fundamentalism that had governed so much of
political discourse in the Middle East and elsewhere.
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
organizations 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 ’90s, 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, joined 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 organizing a series of demonstrations between 2004
and 2007 that for the first time explicitly called for the president of
Egypt to step down, 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 street to protest government policies
and actions; they were also the first political movement in Egypt to
exploit the organizing potential of the Internet, founding a number of
blog sites from which to coordinate and mobilize 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
organizing. Many of the bloggers who helped promote the Kifaya movement have played key roles in the events of the past two weeks.
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 U.S.’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 forth, 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 film-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, practices of 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.
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
mobilization to occur in Egypt in many years, had been initiated by
labor 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 the first of April came around, most of the
political opposition parties had been brought on board and were
vigorously trying to mobilize their constituencies. When the sixth
arrived, Egypt witnessed its most dramatic political mobilization in
decades, an event that brought together people across the political
spectrum, from Muslim Brotherhood members to 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 these
days. 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 routinized state
violence. 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
recognize 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 shari’a
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,
emphasized 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 organizations 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 organization, 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 today. 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. From the latest news reports,
it is clear that many of them are now being arrested and beaten for
their efforts. The regime has again shown itself implacable in its
disregard for the people of Egypt.
For a longer version of this article, see “New Media and Political Dissent in Egypt,” Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares 65, 1 (2010): 137-153.—Ed.

								Tags: blogs, Egypt, Kifaya movement, new media, protests, social media, Tahrir Square

Swadhin Sen Archaeologist - Assistant Professor   Dept.of Archaeology            Tel:       +88 02 779 10 45-51 Ext. 1326 Jahangirnagar University      Mobile:  +88 0172 019 61 76   Savar,Dhaka. Bangladesh    Fax:      +88 02 779 10 52    swadhin_sen at yahoo.com; swadhinsen at hotmail.com www.juniv.edu