Uprising in Egypt

February 16th, 2011

The elusive subject of revolution

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Waking up to what looked like a new dawn, and not only in Egypt, a woman on Tahrir Square, who had participated in the last phase of the revolution, said on the morning of Saturday, February 12, “I can’t imagine all this really happened: Who did it?”

This revolution has been dubbed the revolution of the “street,” the revolution of “shabab al-facebook” (“the youth of Facebook”), but also the revolution of al-Jazeera. An astounding variety of people took part in it: everyone from Sufi practitioners to organized soccer fans. The subject of revolution is always elusive. In this case, due to the extraordinary combination of self-organization on the ground and the supportive role of a vast array of so-called new media, the elusiveness is even more striking.

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February 15th, 2011

Withdrawing consent

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For the last month, we have been witnessing, in Tunisia and Egypt, the first revolution of the twenty-first century. We are indeed fortunate to live in the presence of such a world-making event, even if we are not in the streets together with those who are making it a reality in daily life. Hastening to provide analyses of ongoing social and political alterations of such magnitude is always ill-advised, because world-historical events also alter the known modes and means of analysis, especially those crafted by pundits and academics.

Nonetheless, in an attempt to respond to the sublime sentiment of watching an entire people erupt in a collective desire for self-determination, which is, moreover, actualized in the very means of conducting and realizing this desire, I feel a personal exigency to articulate certain elementary observations on what I perceive to be the worldwide consequences of these alterations. I do so in the spirit, not of analysis, but of speculation, and with the self-conscious risk of being an amateur observer.

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February 10th, 2011

Power, normality, revolution

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The degree of success of the Egyptian revolution is still undecided as I write these lines. The situation is critical, and Egyptians are probably facing a long struggle ahead. Whatever the shape of the new normality that will emerge from the revolution, one thing is already certain: The generation of Egyptians who participate in this revolution can never again be governed the way they once were. Their experience of acting and changing their condition, the success of going out to the streets at all on January 25, of throwing back the police on January 28, of establishing law and order in the absence of the police after the lootings of January 29, of organizing mass peaceful demonstrations and putting the entire political system under pressure, has changed the way they understand their scope of possible action.

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February 9th, 2011

The road to Tahrir

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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 Islamicly-oriented currents (most prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

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February 8th, 2011

Space and resistance

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It is illuminating to ponder the recent events in Cairo’s Midan al-Tahrir as we try to understand the relationship between space, power, belonging, and resistance, as well as the productive interplay between physical and virtual space. Communication technologies such as the Internet (especially the websites Facebook and Twitter) and mobile phones aided the organization and publicizing of the protests in Egypt. At the same time, the marches, rallies, and the demonstrations of millions of Egyptians have brought a sense of visibility and immediacy that other means of communication alone would not have been able to secure. As I write this piece, the strong link between virtual and physical space continues to be central to the making of publics that are seen, heard, and legitimized.

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February 2nd, 2011

The dignity of Egyptian youth

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No one expected this unfolding series of events—certainly, no one of my generation (those of us in our mid-forties), nor of my parents’ generation, and the generation in between. But the death, in December 2010, of twenty-six-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who doused himself in petrol and set himself alight, which was soon followed by that of Sidi Bouzid, who electrocuted himself, sparked Egyptian youth into an unprecedented mobilization for radical change—not just political, not just economic, and not only social, but a comprehensive call for the overthrow of a regime that is seen as embodying all that is socially unjust, politically illegitimate, economically corrupt, and legally impaired in Arab societies.

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February 2nd, 2011

Myths of Mubarak

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The term ‘secular’ and its conceptual affiliates are doing a lot of work in misrepresenting the uprising in Egypt. ‘Secular’ politics has been taken to mean ‘good’ politics (limited democratization, stability, and support for the peace treaty with Israel), and ‘Islamic’ politics is being translated as ‘bad’ politics (the myriad dangers allegedly posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies). Accounts of the current situation in Egypt are handicapped by an inability to read politics in Egypt and Muslim-majority societies outside of this overly simplistic and politically distorting lens.

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