Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
In recent years, walls have proliferated in Egypt. Some, as Samuli Schielke and I write in the new issue of Middle East Report, are liberally decorated with political graffiti and other, more quotidian types of writing. Whether thus adorned or not, the barriers confront citizens with political and economic power rendered in concrete.
The box-office hit Argo brings back long-faded memories of the Iran hostage crisis for many Americans.
News in November 1979 that US diplomats had been taken hostage in Tehran shocked the United States. Students stormed the US embassy, blindfolding 52 Americans and threatening them at gunpoint. The hostages, held captive for 444 days, immediately became the nation’s top news story and dogged President Jimmy Carter’s unsuccessful reelection campaign.
Aarts, Paul et al. From Resilience to Revolt: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Amsterdam: Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice Research and Documentation Center, June 2012).
Beinin, Joel. The Rise of Egypt’s Workers (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 2012).
Bishara, Amahl. Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
Brynen, Rex, Pete Moore, Bassel Salloukh and Marie-Joëlle Zahar. Beyond the Arab Spring: Authoritarianism and Democratization in the Arab World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012).
In September 2012, declining living standards ignited a firestorm of street protests and strikes in the West Bank. The immediate spark was a sharp increase in fuel prices, alongside an increase in the value-added tax (VAT) rate. It seems that the protesters had a message for Palestinian Authority (PA) policymakers: It is no longer acceptable to blame all of Palestine’s economic woes on Israeli occupation. Demonstrators were demanding that the PA manage the economy better, the occupation notwithstanding.
Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb, eds. Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt (London: Zed Books, 2012).
Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt is an insightful volume addressing the various forms of inequality that plague Egyptian society, with particular focus on the poor and working classes. With few exceptions, the chapters have a strong structuralist undertone; many use a political economy approach to describe class conflict. The volume’s title notwithstanding, most chapters treat the concepts of marginality and exclusion as afterthoughts, and only a few grapple with marginality as a theory.
The culture of protest associated with the Egyptian uprising has attracted a huge amount of media coverage — much of it, unfortunately, partial and superficial. Partial, in that it privileges hip-hop to the virtual exclusion of every other kind of nationalist and protest music sung by musicians and crowds during the 18 days of the original Tahrir Square occupation, January 24-February 11, 2011. Superficial, in that it fundamentally misapprehends the role of music in the revolt.
Egypt’s Coptic community marked the passing in 2012 of two widely known and influential public figures. The first was the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, who died on March 17. Shenouda had celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of his enthronement as patriarch the previous November. The second was Milad Hanna, professor of civil engineering at ‘Ayn Shams University and veteran writer on public affairs in the state-owned al-Ahram newspaper, who passed away on November 27. While Shenouda was the leader of the Orthodox Church hierarchy and thus of the clerical establishment, Hanna was one of the most prominent and outspoken members of the Coptic laity.
During the 18-day uprising of 2011, police disappeared from the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities at the same time that the state emptied the prisons of thousands of convicts. Neighborhood watch brigades, typically led by young men, sprang up to fill the security void as reports of criminal violence mounted. Face to face, or via Facebook, these “popular committees” quickly organized themselves and spread beyond urban centers, driven by the imperative of community defense. In the words of one committee founder: “Committees were everywhere in villages and cities.
A string of tiny lights bows from the awning of the Star of Freedom café across an unpaved plaza to the globe of the municipal lamppost, whose light the government has not turned on in years. Tabletops of tea and dominoes spread from the café’s cramped interior and fill the horseshoe-shaped plaza, rimmed by a hardware store, a bright yellow barber shop and a mosque with an optometry office for the needy. A zigzagging tuk-tuk blares spastic pop music over the din of evening conversation.
The armed forces were a central part of the Egyptian regime from 1952 onward. They supplied the Free Officers who toppled the monarchy and replaced it with a republican order. All four presidents of the era hailed from the military’s ranks. The army was known to control a large economic empire, and senior officers regularly went on to lucrative careers after retirement. Unlike in Tunisia, where the army was kept marginal under Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt was widely considered to be an officers’ republic. Why, then, did the military not intervene to save President Husni Mubarak when Egyptians rose up against him in early 2011? Why did the army decline to crush the uprising, when its Bahraini and Syrian counterparts tried to do so?
Whoever has something to say in Egypt these days can write it on a wall. Ahmad loves Rasha; the revolution continues; build unity between Christians and Muslims; make Egypt an Islamic state. Private garage, no parking; we are all Egyptians; don’t forget the martyrs of the revolution; apply for a job; those looking for marriage, call this number. ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards). Fuck the Muslim Brothers; I’m a Muslim Brother and proud. Invoke God; the ultras rule Egypt; call Hasan for television and other electrical repairs.
On June 29, 12 days after he was elected president of Egypt, Muhammad Mursi ascended a Tahrir Square stage and issued a dramatic pledge to guard the revolution launched there the preceding spring. Mursi opened his jacket, revealing that he wore no bulletproof vest, thumped his chest and yelled, “I fear no one but God!”
Interpreting a revolutionary event is a contentious undertaking. Why it began, how it unfolded, to whom its legacy belongs — these are questions of enduring debate. The mass protests in Egypt that deposed Husni Mubarak and continued for months in 2011-2012 still generate divergent narratives and competing claims. In the struggle over meaning, reality and possibility are continuously measured against one another. Questions abound as to how much the country should change, and how much it actually has. A tension between continuity and change occupies a central place in political discourse and is manifest in the simple use of language.
The course of the Egyptian uprising offers reason for both optimism and pessimism.
On the down side, the post-Mubarak system, such as it is, exhibits plenty of characteristics of the old one. As Ahmad Shokr and Joshua Stacher detail in this issue, Egypt’s new civilian government, drawn from the ranks of the Society of Muslim Brothers, has advanced no comprehensive reform vision adequate to address the country’s deep-seated inequality and poverty. The Brothers rather seem stuck in “Washington consensus” nostrums of the 1990s and 2000s. They are asking Egyptians simply to trust them to execute “structural adjustment” in ways that ameliorate social injustice, rather than exacerbate it, as Husni Mubarak’s programs did.
In Egypt’s constitutional crisis today, there are echoes of the rise of the National Islamic Front (NIF) in Sudan.
On any given day, provided her paper of choice still features international coverage, the average American newspaper reader can expect to be treated to one or two articles on attempts to halt advances in Iran’s nuclear program. These articles might cover efforts to levy fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic; they might relay news of discussions among Iran’s primary interlocutors on the nuclear question, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the so-called P5+1), about diplomatic overtures. Or the stories might echo the mounting calls for airstrikes or other military action to delay and disrupt the progress of Iranian nuclear research.
Two of today’s headlines together provide a good example of the work of imperial forgetting. On the front page of the New York Times, a story about the depiction of torture in the forthcoming national revenge flick Zero Dark Thirty shows how little debates have advanced over the past decade. “Reasonable” interlocutors in the Beltway remain stuck in the inane exercise of sparring over whether some utterance extracted by waterboarding in 2003 somehow contributed to the chain of events that led to Navy SEALs shooting an unarmed man in the face at point-blank range in 2011.
Perusing US media coverage and analysis of the crisis in Egypt over the last two weeks has been quite disappointing. As the protests against the elected president Muhammad Mursi escalate, the main players in the struggle and the stakes involved are often mischaracterized. Some might ask: Why does this matter?
One can only imagine the nods of self-satisfaction when an Israel Defense Forces planner came up with “Pillar of Cloud” to name Israel’s subsequent eight-day aerial assault on Gaza. By lifting this metaphor from several well-known passages in the Torah, the IDF sought to portray the operation as a divinely sanctioned mission to clear the skies of Palestinian rockets through an immovable force from above, while also branding its heavily marketed Iron Dome missile defense system. It was a three for one.
President Muhammad Mursi’s Thursday night address did not mollify protesters, but it clarified the stakes in any dialogue between his supporters and the National Salvation Front led by Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdin Sabbahi and Amr Moussa.
