Public Spaces of Youth in Cairo

chapter 12 From hara to midam: Public Spaces of Youth in Cairo

José Sánchez García

Introduction

January 25th 2012 proved that no one can run the country without the revolutionaries and the Square and the Egyptian People… The Parlia- ment is not a replacement of the Square, and the Square is vital to the Parliament. Declaration of the Presidential Candidate of Destour Party, Hamdeen Sabahi, in an interview granted to the Egyptian on line newspaper Al Ahram, March 4, 2012.1

There has been an intense debate over the role social electronic networking has played in the so-called Arab Spring.2 However, it is evident that social activism here has also thrived on the streets. It was in urban spaces that people transformed into a strong political force.3 The agora of the “Arab street” is a protagonist in the struggle. It has been privileged territory for carrying revolu- tionary demands. In Cairo, Tahrir Square was where citizens voiced their dis- content, showed their power and articulated political counter-discourse. Sig- nificant political events of the “revolution” took place there: the sit-in against first Mubarak and then scaf; Islamist and secularist demonstrations of power;

1 On 25th January 2012 thousands filled Tahrir Square to protest against the military Council and the direction of the political transition. Accessed July 15, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wFkgqo1UBvI. 2 This text is based in the research project genind (2013–15). The Indignant Generation. Space, power and culture in the youth movement of 2011: a transnational perspective. Ministry of Econ- omy and Competitiveness (Spain). vi National Program of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation, 2008–2011. [CSO2012-34415]. http://lageneracionindignada .blogspot.com.es/. 3 As Foucault remarks: “the people comprises those who conduct themselves in relation to the management of the population, at the level of the population, as if they were not part of the population as a collective subject-object, as if they put themselves outside of it, and conse- quently the people is those who, refusing to be the population, disrupt the system” (2007, 65).

294 SANCHEZ the first public speech of president-elect Morsi. Later, popular demonstrations there resulted in the downfall of Morsi. These events immediately direct at- tention to this significant agora.4 Simply, public space cannot be seen just as something that people merely use. People make meaning out of space through how they use it and through this meaning they change the perception of who controls it – and sometimes they take control of it. Thus, “space is filled with politics and ideology; it is not simply the stage of social relations and an arena for actions; it is operative in the assembly of these, showing the interconnec- tion between mental and physical space” (Lefebvre 1974, 135). In that sense, the dissident counter-cultures assembled in Egypt during long years of authoritative governments occupied the Square, highlighting a mes- sage that had been for a long time subterranean but what in fact massive in scale. Their constant, quotidian opposition constitutes a significant element for understanding how the space of Tahrir Square articulated and extended political dissidence. In the Revolution, young people became fundamental political subjects and the midam (or agora) was transmuted into a decisive political space: into a political subject. Young people, male and female, they appropriated a central public space. They combined activism with the lived street experience of local culture at the same time, for example, as ritualistic religious orientation: Friday prayers, mass jutbas, breaking of Ramadan absti- nence, and mulid practices. Here there were also musical and theatrical players and humorous, satiric expressions that manifested political dissatisfaction and disobedience against Egyptian political practices. These expressions were local grammars for resistance to adult-centrist Egyptian hegemony that created a youthful counter discourse.5 After the derogation of the Emergency Law by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (al-Maǧlis al’Alā lil-Quwwāt al-Musallaḥah) all the downtown district -wust al balad – was transformed into a lived space for protest against inequalities and injustices, a space privileged for alternative political practice. Political graffiti represented this transformation – even on Cairo’s administra- tive Mogamma building, the Supreme Court or Mohammed Mahmoud Street

4 Mohammed Morsi addressed the crowd on June 29, 2012. There was a symbolic oath in Tahrir Square one day before the official oath. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/ africaandindianocean/egypt/9366199/Egypts-President-Mohammed-Morsi-takes-a -symbolic-oath-in-Tahrir-Square.html. 5 Discourse is “a system of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak” (Foucault 1972, 24). By local grammars I mean local cultural expressions owned in the place they are produced.