Master thesis The revolutionary subject in the Egyptian revolution
Global studies Student: Rawan Hamid (51929) Supervisor: Sune Haugbølle Key strokes: 191.660 Date: 03/01/2019 Roskilde University
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Abstract Formålet med dette speciale er at undersøge det revolutionære subjekt, der har eksisteret under de Egyptiske opstande. Igennem undersøgelsen identificeres de diskurser der har hersket blandt de væsentligste revolutionære grupperinger, der deltog under opstandene. Disse undersøgelser eksekveres for at etablere typologier, der kan skabe en dybere forståelse af den pludselige masse mobilisering og dens drivkræfter. Dette studie har taget udgangspunkt i teoretiske koncepter omkring politiske forestillinger og ideologier, der er med til at analysere det revolutionære subjekts selvopfattelse. Udefra analysen kan der konkluderes, at udviklingen fra en ’’revolution’’ til en ’’modrevolution’’ kan forklares på baggrund af en indviklet politisk scene, ideologier og differentierede værdier blandt den Egyptiske befolkning. Analysen indikerer, at denne udvikling først og fremmest skyldes at de revolutionæres indre konflikt af modsigende værdier er præget af religion på den ene side og liberalisme på den anden side, samt den fase af usikkerhed, der har præget den politiske scene i Egypten efter Hosni Mubaraks fald. Dette har fået det revolutionære subjekt til at søge imod en stabilitet og religiøse værdier for at kreere en mening i en meningsløs og usikker tilværelse.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction...... 5 Five snapshots of contention in Egypt ...... 5 1.1 Problem area ...... 7 1.2 Problem formulation...... 9 1.3 Outline of the thesis ...... 9 2 Theoretical Framework ...... 11 2.1 Structuralist revolution theories ...... 12 2.1.1 Political process approach ...... 14 2.2 The revolutionary subject ...... 15 2.2.1 The second revolution ...... 16 2.3 Concepts and contributions ...... 19 3 Methodology ...... 21 3.1 Philosophy of science ...... 21 3.2 Case study: Egypt as a case ...... 21 3.3 Sources of data ...... 22 3.3.1 Secondary sources ...... 22 3.3.2 Primary sources ...... 23 3.3.3 Processing of data ...... 23 3.4 Limitations of the study ...... 24 4 Literature review ...... 25 4.1 Social media and contemporary activism ...... 25 4.2 The counterrevolution ...... 29 4.3 Identity and the revolutionary subject ...... 33 5 Analysis ...... 37 5.1 A blurred scene of political ideologies ...... 39 5.2 Defining Arab Liberalism ...... 40 5.3 Introduction to the Egyptian revolutionary subjects ...... 42 5.4 The initiators...... 43 5.4.1 The intellectual ideologist ...... 43 5.4.2 The emergence of a new young intellectual ...... 44 5.4.3 When optimism turns into frustration ...... 45 5.5 A chaotic field of revolutionaries ...... 48
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5.5.1 Chapter conclusion ...... 51 5.6 The frustrated follower ...... 52 5.6.1 The Egyptian middle-class ...... 52 5.6.2 The middle-class during Mubarak ...... 52 5.6.3 Revolution without revolutionaries?...... 53 5.6.4 The return to God ...... 54 5.6.5 Chapter conclusion ...... 55 5.7 The workers ...... 57 5.7.1 The Mahalla uprisings ...... 57 5.7.2 The proletariat as a revolutionary subject ...... 58 5.7.3 A working class without hope ...... 59 5.7.4 A revolution within the revolution ...... 60 5.7.5 Independent trade unions ...... 61 5.7.6 The workers position during the Morsi regime ...... 62 5.7.7 The crisis over the constitution ...... 64 5.7.8 Chapter conclusion ...... 65 5.8 The Islamist revolutionary...... 67 5.8.1 The Muslim brotherhood during the Mubarak regime ...... 67 5.8.2 A highly organized party ...... 68 5.8.3 The power of religion ...... 70 5.8.4 Conclusion chapter ...... 71 6 Discussion: A society split between hope and frustration ...... 72 6.1 A revolution of the human? ...... 72 6.2 A split revolution ...... 74 7 Conclusion ...... 77 8 Bibliography ...... 78
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1 INTRODUCTION
The Arab uprisings or the so-called Arab spring unexpectedly erupted in late 2010 and early beginning of 2011. In the beginning it was characterized by huge and largely peaceful protests in several Arab countries. It started out in Tunisia by a young frustrated man, who was tired of the socioeconomic malaise and political repression in his country, and thus lit himself on fire. Soon, the mass protests forced the Tunisian president to leave office. The protests soon awakened all over the Middle East starting out with Egypt, also suffering from many of the same systemic maladies. The protestors gathered at Tahrir square in the center of Cairo, eventually also forced their president Hosni Mubarak to resign. Meanwhile the protests sprang up elsewhere in the Middle East, from the Persian Gulf to North Africa, most dramatically leading to the death of the Libyan president Muhammar al- Gadhafi. Then, as many already predicted, the storm of the Arab spring sprang to the regime in Syria, which began to encounter mass protests. However, the regime in Damascus unleashed a brutal crackdown against the opposition. Debates in both academic and policy making fields circle around the meaning, outcomes and possible consequences of the mass protests (Haas & Lesch, 2012). Even though several Middle Eastern countries have experienced the same sudden kind of mass mobilization in the same time period, they do differ a lot, due to their different political cultures and political histories. This thesis therefore mainly focuses on the events in the aftermath of the uprisings of the 25th January revolution in Egypt, to create a delimitation of a very wide literature concerned with the Arab uprisings within the period of 2011 and summer 2013.
FIVE SNAPSHOTS OF CONTENTION IN EGYPT 1. 25. January 2011: The police open fire on Anti-Mubarak protestors as they head for the governorate building. By the evening, several authors were killed in violent confrontation with security forces. The day after demonstrations were held outside of the police station Suez. While the crown swells to several hundreds of people, the police officers start to fire tear gas in an attempt to disperse the demonstrators. Young man in the crowd respond by letting of fireworks, and by nightfall the police stations were on fire.
2. 2. February 2011: A column of pro-Mubarak protestors approached the Talaat Harb entrance in the Tahrir-square. The army confronts those protestors by brandishing pistols and fire
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repeatedly in the air. Weeks after this episode, large posters and banners depicting the scene are erected outside of military bases and army checkpoints all over the country.
3. 22. November 2011: Protestors were throwing stones at soldiers, police and central security forces in Muhammad Mahmoud street. Security forces react with volleys of tear gas and birdshots, while wounded protestors were transported to improvised field hospitals. Senior Muslim brothers were confronted by secular activist in the Tahrir-square, whom they denounce for selling out the revolution for electoral gain. For safety reason the Muslim brothers withdraw from the Tahrir-square.
4. 30 June 2013: Uniformed police offices lead a protest march to remove Islamist president Muhammad Morsi. Meanwhile a huge crowd of civilian protestors were waving with Egyptian flags saying: The police and the people are on one hand”. 33 million of Egyptians have taken to the streets to call for new presidential elections.
5. 14 August 2013: Heavily armed police and Egyptian army bulldozers surround a Muslim Brother protest occupation in a public square in Eastern Cairo. The following hours, the police and military personnel launch a sustained assault on the forty-seven-day old occupation, and 900 protestors were killed.
These snapshots of collective violence, mass mobilization and repression are taken from the very key moments and events of contentious street politics lived in Egypt since 2011. The witnessed restoration was not inevitable, due to Hosni Mubarak’s resignation on 11 February 2011, following eighteen days of unruly mass protests in Egypt’s cities. Over the following months and years however, a deeply flawed democratic transition unfolded under direction of the Supreme Council of the Armed forces (SCAF). This revealed new problems for Egypt’s revolutionaries. Military powers and old regime were still intact, and thus divided the convened forces that had come together in Midan al-Tahrir. In the second rounds of presidential elections held In June 2012, the eventual triumph of the Muslim Brotherhoods’ president Muhammad Morsi, seemed to presage a new institutional rubric, in which the state might be brought under democratic control. However, instead the new regime revived abiding anxieties and uncertainties about the Islamist takeover and dictatorial intent. Thus, a second mass of protests against Morsi’s presidency paved the way for a military coup in July 2013. The
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military charged a new protest law that criminalizes the opposition to the military-backed government. In the following years after the 2013 coup, the security forces killed over 3.000 protestors and tens of thousands of regime opponents were detained. Human dignity and social justice continue to be routinely violated through the state’s use of torture and sexual violence against its opponents (Ketchley, 2017). The military, bureaucratic civil securities have gained full control over the state apparatus, and the economic structure, based on a neoliberal strategy remained unchanged. Consequently, four years after the uprisings were at least at the moment triumphed by the counterrevolution. However, the most surprising fact is that the counterrevolution was not that it succeeded, but mostly because it had been accomplished on the waves of the mass mobilization. (De smet, 2015). The disappointments, reversals and retrenchments the trajectories and legacies the January revolution in Egypt present, are important puzzles for political sociologists and observers of the Arab uprisings. Several questions including the split of the revolutionary coalition, the position of the military and the quick overthrow of a seemingly well-fortified dictator were raised. However, most importantly due to this thesis, the identification of the revolutionary subject is an increasingly discussed aspect to of contemporary revolutions like the 25th January revolution in Egypt.
1.1 PROBLEM AREA Several authors taking outset in a post-Marxist understanding of contemporary revolution theory are very concerned with not only the structuralist, statist and societal understanding of the revolutionary uprisings, but also the very individual level in which these uprisings evolve. Alain Badiou in his work Theory of the subject characterizes the revolutionary subject, who defines its politics in terms of the lack of the system’s structural excesses, as being caught between impatience and courage. Badiou identifies the subject outset of identity, class and gender. Thus, he to some degree dissociates from the Marxist understanding of the proletarian subject as the primary concern. He defines class differences as weak differences, and while the subject of the masses is a disappearing subject, it is only the revolutionary subject that persists in the end. Of course, Badiou notes that the subject of the crowd under rebellion does not disappear. However, the question remains one of allegiance to the revolution and the courage to go beyond the law of the state. The rethinking of the revolutionary subject outset of a class and gender viewed perspective is very interesting to put into perspective with the events of the uprisings in Egypt. As observed in this thesis, the Egyptian uprisings offered a variety of different actors during the revolution, who can’t be simply identified or placed within a traditional Marxist understanding. While the revolution first started within certain groups of
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rebellions, the evolvement of the uprisings within the two years after the 25th January events also developed these individuals further into different directions (Haugbølle, 2015). Thus, the examination of the revolutionary subject during the Egyptian uprisings is a very important contribution to understand the development of a revolutionary subject in contemporary revolutions. When categorizing the revolutionaries in ideological terms, they have been variously described as liberals, leftist, secular and a gang of thugs. In practice however, they didn’t own any clear ideologies nor organization. The revolutionaries were united by their main struggle and a shared effect of rejection and didn’t really share any common ideological goal. Often, we mainly associate and think of the revolutionary subject in terms of the liberal youth and online activists and bloggers among them Wael Ghonim, Alaa Abdel Fattah, Khaled Said, Israa Abdel Fattah, Ahmad Talima, Wael Abbas etc. Also, popular figures, artists, authors and highly respected TV program presenters such as Yosri Fouada, Reem Magid, Deena Abdelrahman, Lilian Dawoud and Bassem Youssef all actively supported the uprisings. However, while of course those figures meant a lot for the development of the revolution, especially in the initial stages of the uprisings, there is the other side of revolutionaries which didn’t gain as much attention in the media. These underrepresented groups of revolutionaries are however very important figures to make sense of the political scene that existed during this crucial moment of revolution. Who were these revolutionaries? What does their differences and similarities about their dreams, frustrations, political ideologies and imaginations tell us about Egypt’s political culture?
Previous authors within revolutionary theory such as Eisenstadt, Moore, Page and Skocpol (1979) argue that revolutions are a product of divergent class interests in a constant fight for state power. However, this thesis is inspired by the theoretical work on the revolutionary subject examined by Lauclau and Mouffe and Alain Badiou. Due to the uprisings in the Arab world, a new alertness arose concerning activism, activists, mobilization and their potential ability to change social and political structures. Arab intellectuals who have been close or somehow involved in the Arab uprisings began reflecting on the aspects of activism, identity and the intellectuals’ relation to society, social stratification and mobilization. Lauclau and Mouffe and Alain Badiou point out the importance of leaving behind the idea of revolution as a time-limited event and rather view it as a cycle of change in the political sphere. Therefore, instead of focusing on the reasonings behind the failing revolution since 2013, it is of importance to understand the aspects, which generate, or don’t generate mobilization (Haugbølle, 2015). Some draw on comparative, theoretical perspectives from sociology activism such as Beinin, Vairel and Camau’s important work (Beinin & Varel, 2011; Vareil & Camau 2014). Others focus on activism through the theoretical field of contentious politics (Gerges, 2015),
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while others including Schielke (2017) have published micro-stories of the activist milieu and social historical studies on overlooked revolutions in the 20th century (Tikriti, 2013). These approaches aim to break through the poor theoretical and comparative work that has been done on social movements before 2011.
This study therefore aims to identify the existing discourses ruling among some of the main important characters, who were part of generating the revolution in Egypt, and trying to create a typology of the different revolutionary subjects within the context. The aim of this typologies is to gain an understanding on how ideological positions and social imaginaries evolved and developed in interaction with each other.
1.2 PROBLEM FORMULATION In order to examine the issue, the thesis will be guided by the following problem formulation:
How can an identification of the revolutionary subject during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings provide us with an understanding of the post-revolutionary split political sphere and the emergence of the counterrevolution in Egypt?
Working questions:
1. Who were part of the uprisings during 2011 in Egypt?
This question helps us define and create typologies of the main Egyptian revolutionary subjects.
2. What do the characters’ discourses and political imaginaries tell us about the political scene in Egypt between 2011-2013?
This question helps us identify the important discourses in the Egyptian political sphere during the uprisings, and their interplay.
3. How did the outcome of the revolution between 2011-2013 evolve and emerge new social imaginaries and self-perceptions among the revolutionaries?
1.3 OUTLINE OF THE THESIS This study consists of seven chapters. Chapter one covers the problem area, problem formulation and the working questions that have guided this study. Chapter two lists the different theoretical approaches within revolution and mobilization literature and ends with a section focusing on the
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theoretical direction that inspired this study. Chapter three contains of a literature review of the different theoretical discussions concerned with the Egyptian uprising. Chapter four describes the choice of methodology, by highlighting the ontological standpoint of the thesis. Also, a discussion of the different sources of data used in this thesis, will be given. Chapter five, the analysis, is divided into four different section in which an examination of the main revolutionary subjectivities is established. Chapter six provides a discussion of the revolutionary subject after the Egyptian uprisings. Lastly, chapter seven presents the conclusion which sums up the findings of this thesis.
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2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The following chapter creates an overview of the literature on revolution and mobilization theory. The aim is to create a historical view on why contemporary theorists again began viewing social revolutions and mobilization through Marxist inspired lenses. Contemporary Marxist debate on revolution centers around the question of the subject of politics. According to Harvey (2011) the question therefore is no longer the Leninist examination of What is to be done, but rather the Who is going to do it? Marxist theories of social transformation thus are very concerned with the nature of the revolutionary subject. Especially Laclau’s (2005) examination of the revolutionary subject in his book on Populist Reason attempts to bring to the fore the subject of people as a political category instead of a datum of the social structure. The return to understand people as a political category, he argues, could be understood as an expansion of our horizons, because it presents other categories beyond class. Laclau’s conceptualization of the revolutionary subject becomes very important in the Egyptian case. The events of the 25th Egyptian revolution and its aftermath have shown how different types of rebels and protestors have occurred in the beginning of the uprisings as well as have evolved during the two years after the occurrence of first events of the uprisings. To be able to fully understand these phenomena it is important to dig deeper into the individual subject present during the events and their evolvement and changing pattern in the aftercoming two years period. People who participated in the collective action of overthrowing the Hosni Mubarak regime suddenly split into different groups of protestors with different demands and understandings of democracy, freedom or even religion. What can the evolvement and appearance of the revolutionary subject tell us about the political culture during this politically critical and crucial time period?
Ideology - in the sense of ontology, - class struggle and revolutionary subject are considered important aspects of how mobilization and revolutions are possible. Marxist inspired structuralists dominated in the 1970’s and 1980’s sociology, but ever since other tendencies within revolution theory such as Moore, Paige, Eisenstadt and especially Skocpol (1979) have dominated the social revolution literature. Skocpol among others, mainly has his focus on the conflict between farmers, state elite, military and other social groups, who are in a constant struggle for economic and political power. They considered ethnicity and ideology as factors of secondary importance. Structuralists analysis of the relationship between economy, classes, state and mobilization were gradually undermined. Moments of revolution in the real world developed literature on social movements, and especially the Charles Tilly inspired literature concerning contentious politics, more or less, became one with
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revolution sociology. That created a wide theoretical field, which now creates a framework for analysis concerning revolutions since 2008 (Tarrow, 2012).
The next sections start out by presenting structuralist theorists within the field. One group views structure through a statist point of view, while the other theoretical end has a more class structuralist approach. The political process inspired group within the field brings the concept of contentious politics into the picture. Finally, a representation of current Post-Marxist authors within the field, will be given.
2.1 STRUCTURALIST REVOLUTION THEORIES The following chapter consists of an overview of structuralist authors within the field of social revolutions and mobilization. An older tradition of theory - starting out with Marx on the left and Tocqueville on the liberal right, had its focus on the broader range of movements, which they placed in the historical context of state building and capitalism. They saw conflict inscribed in the very structure of society. In this section I take my theoretical bearings based on this broad tradition, while next section will survey more recent approaches that concern contemporary phenomenology of social movements.
Earliest theorists including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, conceived revolution as macro-historical episode, which relates to a society’s structural development, rather than individual volition or collective choice. They saw collective action rooted in social structure, and thus left little space to examine the political mechanisms that induce individuals to mobilize and interact with institutions or opponents. Marx was concerned with the problem that the workers movement would not succeed unless a significant part of the members cooperated. He explained the difficulty by focusing on the role of class mobilization, and how hard that was to accomplish, due to the role of intermediate classes and political groupings, the role of ideologues in weakening the dispositions of the workers and the effectiveness of collective mystification and political ideologies. However, a form of consciousness had to be created, which would transform economic interests into revolutionary action, and since Marx had never seen a political union or party, he lacked a developed understanding of political leadership.
On the other theoretical end called ‘Western Marxism’ by Perry Anderson (1976) and other thinkers such as Rosa Luxemburg, Gyorgy Lucaks, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci created a better understanding of these problems. The most important of these figures is Antonio Gramsci, who
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centered his writings on the idea the revolutionary working-class consciousness must be a collective project. For Gramsci the development of a worker’s consciousness was necessary, and he therefore did conceive the worker’s’ movement as a collective intellectual, whose prime task was to create a new political culture. The party must build a historic bloc around the working class. Secondly, the organic intellectual must come from within the working class. However, Gramsci’s approach has its complications and became criticized for not considering the battle within the gates of bourgeois society or the differentiation between countries according to whether their opportunities for revolution were strong or weak. Gramsci’s theory – like Marx – was credited for lacking a theory of political mobilization and for paying insufficient attention to the role of the state. However, despite of the criticism Gramsci’s understanding received by contemporary Post- Marxist theorists, his theory nevertheless received attention by authors, among them Brecht de Smet who in his book Gramsci on Tahrir contributed with an important aspect of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. De smet zeroes in on the complex dynamic of Egypt’s revolution and counter-revolution and shows how a Gramscian understanding of the revolutionary process provides a powerful tool for charting the possibilities for an emancipatory project by the Egyptian subaltern classes (Ibid).
On the other theoretical non-Marxist end, classical theorists such as Alex de Tocqueville and Max Weber played an important role. Weber argued how states evolve from traditional forms of authority to charismatic leadership to legal rationalism, mostly reflected on bureaucratic administration. However, while Weber understood the role of the state better than his Marxist colleagues, he paid insufficient attention to the conception of the give-and-take relationship between contentious actors to society. Tocqueville on the other hand, in both Old regime and the French revolution (1955) and the recollections of the 1848 revolution (1992), tells us more about contentious politics, because he drew on the far-from-universal lessons from the French revolution, which he abhorred. He viewed revolutions as both structurally and culturally determined. What is interesting about Tocqueville, however, is that he viewed revolution through the French history, and payed little attention to what was brewing in America. Marx and Tocqueville were both structuralist, the former in classist, and the latter in statist terms. Moreover, both Tocqueville and Gramsci had strong affinities to culturalism, the former in the influence of intellectuals on politics, and the latter which views party as collective intellectual (Ibid).
Modern culturalists and structuralists started reappearing in the 1960’s and 1970’s mostly known by the neo-Tocquevillian culturalists, Francois Furet and the neo-Tocquevillian structuralist Theda Skocpol. Furet, stepping in the footsteps of Tocqueville, drew a causal link from the abstract thought
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of enlightenment intellectuals to the excesses of the terror during the French revolution. Theda Skocpol, the American historical sociologist, however placed the French revolution in a comparative framework with Russian and Chinese revolutions. She saw them all three in the light of international pressures, agrarian conflict and statist factors. Her theory gained popularity due to her combination of sociology and statist structuralism. However, again Skocpol’s statism left little space for the political process. Later in her work the revolutions in the modern world (1994), Skocpol softened her elemental statism, and added relevance of urban classes and interclass coalitions to it. She also admitted that revolutionaries and ideologies help in making revolutions. Within the social movement field however, she was left in the background as there existed deeper cultural approaches pioneered by authors such as Lynn Hunt (1984 and rational approaches by Popkin (1977) and Taylor (1988). However, they all were basically static, beside of Charles Tilly whose focus was on longer-term contentious episodes (Ibid).
2.1.1 Political process approach The structuralist approach was attacked by theorists, who paid greater attention to the political process. In the United States theorists such as McAdam, Tilly, and in Europe Richt, Krisi and Della porta were examples of this shift from structure to process. While most of them acknowledged social change and social cleavages in sources of contention, only Tilly paid attention to capitalism and state building, as much as he did to the political process. Tilly was especially interested in what he called contentious events. The history of interaction between contention and changes in political regimes, political conflict and regime change laid the foundation of Tilly’s work. But while American and European scholars working with recent periods of contention, made great strides in understanding endogenous processes, mobilization, recruitment and political structuring, they forgot about the broader structural relations among movements, parties and states. Thus, a study of how contention occurs, who engages in it, and which events are crucial for its beginning and eventual demobilization, are not considered in the political process approach. The problem with both resource mobilization and the political process approach are that they are extremely movement-centered, and thus don’t give space to track how movements interact over time with other elements of the polity (Ibid). As Sidney Tarrow (2012) argues as a criticism to the classical political process approach, mechanisms such as identity shift and actor constitution, that break the cleavage between structure and action are of high importance for understanding the dynamics of contention. Thus, Tarrow mentions the importance of linking structure and process in a dynamic process. The actuality and importance of Sidney Tarrows and Charles Tilly’s political process approach and the increased awareness of linking
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structure and process together, also becomes evident in current literature working with the Egyptian uprisings and the counterrevolution. Neil Ketchley’s (2017) work Egypt in a time of revolution is inspired by the post political process approach by considering the diverse forms of mass mobilization and contentious politics that emerged during the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and its aftermath. By opposing the top-down, structuralist and culturalist theoretical understandings of revolution, he pays close attention to the evolving dynamics witnessed in Egypt since 2011, while linking those to the events within a larger social and political context. However, eventhough Ketchley joins the awareness of the revolutionary subject and identity in the uprisings in Egypt, he still lacks to explain what subjective forces and dynamics pushed the Egyptian uprisings without taking the statist and structural dynamics into consideration. That is where the Post-Marxist approach enters the scene by mainly focusing on the subject as a political category instead of datum of the social structure. By examining the subject beyond structure, the field of revolution theory expands its horizon by understanding the revolutionary subjects demands without a pre-existing normative understanding based on for instance class-based structures.
2.2 THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT Among the different scholars, different problematizations were raised, which finally leads us to the main theoretical discussion in this thesis concerning the question of events and mobilization in a new critical perspective, inspired by theorists examining the revolutionary subject within a post-Marxist frame. The shifting theoretical focus from the structural to the individual level on mobilization, especially reappeared in the aftermath of the uprisings in the Arab world in 2011. Within that theoretical framework authors including Lauclau and Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou examined whether a revolutionary subject evolves, and goes beyond seeing the working-class as the main historical subject. One theoretical approach within the field is the Post-Marxist understanding. The sudden social mobilization in 2011 created a place for rethinking political power and cultural and social structures (Haugbølle, 2015). Alain Badious rethinking of Marx’s revolutionary consciousness and his conception of the so-called event is especially interesting for the Egyptian uprising in 2011. As Badiou (2014) argues the uprisings were a monumental event, which create a space of opportunities for revolutionary mobilization. According to Badiou every event is a reactivation of important, but also unclarified events in the past. The event surprises with unpredictability, due to its unusual results and unpredictable outcomes. In that sense the event must be understood as the awareness of a structural crisis, which can mobilize a social condition (situation). Thus, to create an
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adequate understanding of the event, one must engage with it critically. In the field of Social movements theories, Middle East sociologists as well as the above-mentioned pioneers within the theoretical field Charles Tilly, McAdam or Sydney Tarrow, all concluded, that too structuralist and rationalist understandings of mobilization aren’t adequate. Instead it is more important to understand the revolutionary subject’s worldview and the repertories, they create and take use of during the mobilization process. Thus, Tilly’s contentious politics must be understood as contentious performances, that are unpredictable, instead of stable repertoires. Revolution therefore became not only a question of historical studies, but also one of existing social structures. The event as we have experienced during the Arab uprisings in 2011 opened an arena of possibilities, creation of new identities and new revolutionary subjects. It changed the Arab society’s perception of themselves, and what they are capable of. Some would argue, that theoretically it is more correct to call the events of 2011 as uprisings, civil wars, protests or even transactional processes. However, the concept of revolution now has made its way through Middle Eastern literature, and in public speaking the Arab spring or uprisings are generally referred as thawrat (revolutions) and the revolutionaries as thuwar. Revolution became a central theme, which inevitably brought back the Marxist theoretical framework. However not only within the Post Marxist theoretical end, the interest for the revolutionary subject is blooming (Ibid.).
2.2.1 The second revolution Another important genre working within the theoretical field, interested in the revolutionary subject, is the one working with memory and analysis of the uprisings, which bind past revolutionary’s experiences with the revolutionary uprisings today. The aftermath of the 2011 uprisings opened a number of questions for researchers in the Middle East and beyond. Questions like, what does failure mean for revolutionary movement, and how is direction created when the possibility of historical direction is circumspect, were raised. However, despite of the different outcomes of these questions, one thing theorists interested in revolution in the Middle east, can agree on: The spontaneous social mobilization opened a new horizon of expectation and introduced new Social imaginaries, that opened the possibility of reimagining the political settlement and future direction of whole societies. Reinhart Kosellek provided one of the most authorized theorizations of the reconfiguration of political imagination. The French revolution, according to Kosellek, was symptomatic of the way in which political concepts accelerated in new ways between 1750-1850. People began experiencing time differently – as a series of ruptures opening up to reconfigured power structures. While Lynn Hunt provides a micro-study of the French revolution, Kosellek has a helicopter view of the
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emergence of modern political subjectivity. Most ordinary people experienced a radical change of their basic ontology. Events such as the French revolution threw these ontological changes into relief and showed the possibility of changing physical and political space. Even though a comparison between French and Arab revolutions is fruitful, because it makes us think about the structure of revolutionary processes, the Egyptian 2011 revolution differs as it was defeated. New worlds have been displaced by the counterrevolution in Egypt. However, there are still detected similar processes, and similar question that should be raised. Lynn Hunt’s inquiry into the political imagination opened for several important questions. How did people conceive their present, past and future and how did this revolutionary temporarily change as the uprisings unfolded? Furthermore, the question if revolutions ever arrive to their intended end, becomes important. Do revolutions somehow always fail to arrive at what they purport? In other words, what are the long and short-term horizons of revolution, and how is it possible to measure them (Ibid). New research agendas focused on neo- authoritarian states, securization and state fragmentation, replaced the preoccupation that dominated much of the Middle East studies in 2012-2013. In the article by Middle East Critique The ends of revolution: Rethinking ideology and time in the Arab uprisings (2017) based on the outcomes of the conference ‘The ends of revolution’ held under the auspices of the research group Secular Ideology in the Middle East (SIME) at Roskilde university, it is argued that there should be put a pause to the easy classification of ‘failed revolutions’. Instead there is a need to move on as events continue to unfold, because there might be a risk to close relevant debates about the nature of the uprisings, because detailed ethnographies only begin to appear in the years after 2011. Thus, either we view the uprisings as failed revolutions or on the side long-standing, long-lasting social transformations. In Middle East literature – sociologist and liberal, political thinker, Hazem Saghieh, also arguments that one should distinguish between revolution as a political process, which includes regime change, and revolution as a cultural process. Saghieh calls that process the second revolution, in which structures can change from the bottom in relation to generations, classes, religion and gender. These are necessary factors in redefining the relationship between state and society. To some degree it reminds us of Skocpol’s concept of social revolution. The revolution inevitably should last longer than four years in the Arab countries, exactly as it has been the case in past revolutions in France, Russia and China. However, Saghieh and several other Middle east thinkers are convinced that change is happening, despite of the current crisis in activist movements. Thus, social change is embedded in the failed revolutionary projects, and is part of the whole overall change process. This stands in contrast to Skocpol’s understanding of social revolutions, in which she argues that
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revolution is completely depended on the breakdown of political structures and states military. Saghieh however, like other authors interested in the revolutionary subject, argues that change happens at a deeper ideological level (Ibid.). So, how do these authors contribute to the field of revolutions? The question on how mobilization processes are created, and how it develops in confrontation with violent regimes, is a very complicated question, and as both Badiou and Laclau argue, it nevertheless depends on the context. Therefore, due to the discussion in this theoretical section, it can be concluded that understanding an evolving revolutionary subject within a certain social class, is doubtable. Thus, the interesting question to raise is whether the whole idea of the revolutionary subject mainly based on traditional class-based understanding, shall be revised? Jack Goldstone already back in 2001 pointed out, that a mainly structuralist framework for understanding revolution isn’t enough. Neither Skocpol’s historical understanding nor the SMT’s updated models, have been sufficient to create an understanding of the processes of revolution. This thesis is inspired by the above created overview of the different theoretical frameworks in this chapter within both SMT and revolution theory, as well as the Tilly inspired contention politics framework, created an overall picture of the unclarified aspects and limitations within the field of revolution theory. Authors such as Samuli Schielke (2017) and Neil Ketchley (2017) with each their own theoretical and methodological approach, made an attempt to get closer to understand the political culture during the uprising in Egypt in 2011 and its aftermath. Schielke (2017) views the revolution in 2011 as only one part of the story. Based on an in-depth ethnographic field research, he aims to gain an understanding of the hopes, frustrations and anxieties experienced by Egyptians in their everyday lives. It takes most dramatically outset in the Arab uprisings between 2011-2013, but also includes many other important stories about that moment. Schielke most importantly examines the aspect of thin ideology which young Egyptians pre-2011 experienced in an exhausted political, social and ideological landscape. It was a utopian imagination of a flimsy range of options for betterment in an expanding and changing world. Prior the uprisings in Egypt there was created a so- called politics of everyday life due the combination of frustration and rapid social change that defines part of cultural globalization and expectations of modernity. Asef Bayat (2010) also identifies these politics of everyday life in the Middle East, that was dominated by hopes of perfection in every aspect of personal life. There did exist hopes about romantic love, marriage, migration and a better life abroad that were utopian on an individual level, but at the same time were potential movers of politicization, which explains the events of the uprisings in 2011. Schielke observes the fact that
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lower-middle class Egyptians had these private utopias that structured available ideologies of betterment. On the other side however, the turn to Salafism and piety is a sign of the loss of God’s presence in daily life. While the pressure of migration was based on the idea of a better life, the search for moral perfection has to do with the shattering comfortable moral ambiguity in a world where success and immoral goes along, and the pursuit of perfection in love and marriage are symptoms of transformation of family, all these embodied experiences created the basis of ideological orientation for the future. Neil Ketchley (2017) on the other side, opposing a structuralist top-down approach, contributes to the field of literature, by systematically accounting how Egyptians banded together to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, drawing on more than 8.000 protest events, interviews, video footage and photographs. Ketchley shows that the causes and consequences of Mubarak’s ousting can only be understood by paying attention to the evolving dynamics of contentious politics witness in Egypt in 2011. His aim is to shed a new light on the trajectories of the Arab spring and recurring patterns of contentious collective action found in the Middle East. Even though these authors differ in their theoretical approach, they function as an important contribution to the field social movements and mobilization in Egypt, as they are getting closer to understand the political culture through not only theoretical, but also empirical based research, dealing with the revolutionary subject.
2.3 CONCEPTS AND CONTRIBUTIONS The existing literature on revolution and mobilization, has proven to be increasingly aware of the importance of the revolutionary subject and the role of identity-creation to explain contemporary revolutions. However, their methodological approach, despite of focusing on a bottom-up methodology to understand the revolutionary subject, either approach it within a class-based understanding of subjectivity or through Tilly inspired lenses by mainly focusing on the political process. While these approaches are very appreciated literature within revolution theory, and of course contributed to a huge and important part of understanding the field of revolution, it nevertheless is important to contribute with a methodological approach examining the identities evolved and emerged during the Egyptian uprisings. Schielke with his ethnographical approach in his work Egypt in the future tense, already made an attempt to dig deeper into the lives and experiences of different individuals, who were in one way or another involved in the Egyptian uprising in 2011. This thesis, therefore, is inspired by Samuli Schielkes important work and categorizations of the revolutionary subjects in Egypt and aims to build further upon his work through a discursive methodological approach inspired by Laclau & Mouffe. Thus, this thesis will build further on recent
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literature on the revolutionary subject and political culture by examining individual biographies, who are representative for tendencies. The identification of tendencies helps us create a picture of the revolutionary subjects existed during the uprisings in Egypt in 2011. The analysis will draw on the above described concepts, to establish an adequate examination of the revolutionary subject. First, the concept of political imagination theorized by Hunt and Kosellek, is an important aspect for understanding how people conceive their present, past and future, and how the revolutionary temporarily changes while the uprisings unfolded. Second, Badious’ and Schielke’s examination of thin ideology is an important contribution when studying the revolutionary subject to gain an understanding of the personal struggle and internal conflict the Egyptian individual goes through. Finally, a discussion inspired by Hazem Saghies concept of a second revolution will be established. These insights become an important part of understanding why the events of the 2011 uprisings occurred in the first place, while at the same time making sense of the occurrence of counterrevolution.
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3 METHODOLOGY
3.1 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE This thesis is based on a poststructuralist and constructivist approach. Proponents ontological approach share the goal of understanding the complex world of lived experience from the point of view of those who live it. The goal is to make sense of the life world of the individual to get an insight of the actor’s definition of a situation. The lived reality and situation-specific meanings that constitute general object of investigation, is thus constructed by social actors. That means actors, times, places, events and phenomena through complex processes of social interactions that involve language, history and action (Schwandt, 1998). The approach aims to generate knowledge about the social structures, and the reasonings behind their connections. Constructivism shows that even our most enduring institutions take outset in collective understanding, which are reified structures that once were considered controversial by human consciousness, and now are taken for granted. Moreover, constructivism believes that human capacity for learning has its greatest impact on the manner on how social actors attach meaning to our material world, and cognitively form their social world they know. Collective understanding thus, provide the individual with reasons why things are as they are, and indicates how it should use its material abilities and power (Adler, 1997). In this regard, the chosen theoretical framework in this thesis with the nature of the study fits well within the poststructuralist and constructivist approach. The different theoretical directions working with the revolutionary subject through either a cultural or Post-Marxist perspective consider the importance of socially constructed realities, while also taking into consideration the importance of structure and the role of the revolutionary subject within it. The authors within the theoretical framework, work critically with the understanding of the event which creates an in depth understanding of the revolutions and breaks through the already established manifestations regarding revolution and mobilization (Ibid).
3.2 CASE STUDY: EGYPT AS A CASE This thesis adopts a single case approach since the focus is exclusively on Egypt. More specifically the study takes outset in a representative case or the typical case defined by Bryman (2012) and Yin (2003), as one that captures the circumstances and conditions of a commonplace situation instead of examining cases that are extreme or unusual (Yin, 2013 & Bryman, 2012). Furthermore, Bryman states that this type of a case normally is selected for two reasons. First, this specific case is relevant
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for a range of cases representing a broader category of cases, or if it allows the researcher to examine key social processes that exist in a case (Bryman, 2012). Given that this thesis is interested in investigating the revolutionary subject during the Arab uprisings, Egypt as the typical case was found to be the most appropriate in providing empirical knowledge on an under researched topic in literature on Egypt and the revolutionary subject. Egypt is found to be the most studied case, when it comes to the Arab uprisings, and thus provides us with a wide range of empirical data. Also, individuals engaging during the uprisings in Egypt, were well known actors, who turned out to be very important actors during the initial stages of the Arab uprisings. This study examines the revolutionary subject, and thus Egypt appears to be an appropriate case to examine, due to the wide access of gainable information about the individuals engaging in the uprisings. Compared to other cases, such as Syria, this might have shown to be an issue, due to the lack of access to eventual biographies and opinions expressed. Finally, Egypt is an illustrative example of a society with very different minorities. Due to the very wide range of minorities existing and engaging in the uprisings in Egypt, it is an interesting and important case, when examining the revolutionary subject. Of course, while the huge amount of secondary data in the case of Egypt might be an advantage for the analysis, it might however give challenges in the sense of being over studied. First, the gap in the literature must be very clarified and well argumented, but a researcher might also find himself being too influenced by previous literature on a certain field, and thus needs to be aware of the that fact.
3.3 SOURCES OF DATA This study relies on mainly secondary data collected throughout the study and is supported by a primary source to contribute to the knowledge gained through the secondary sources.
3.3.1 Secondary sources The secondary sources consist of interviews, art and articles relevant for the study. The most used and relevant sources are the documentary The Square (2013) by Jehane Noujaim and the 858 archives. The 858 archives are a vast collection that documents famous and tragic events, as well as more mundane ones. It is a collage of scenes and moments that add up to an incomplete but very rich people’s history. In addition to the chosen interviews, the analysis takes use of graffiti (Gröndal, 2013) pictures and relevant Tahrir-documents (UCLA library, 2011) that create an illustrative insight into the political culture in the time period between 2011-2013.
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3.3.2 Primary sources To support and nuance the empirical data online, I conducted an interview with a young 28-year-old Egyptian revolutionary named Kareem Alaa Mansoura, currently working as an engineer and living in Tanta, a city outside of Cairo, to create a more comprehensive picture of revolutionary youth in Egypt, and their role in the uprisings between 2011-2013. This interview functions as a nuanced picture and important contribution to the examination of the revolutionary subjects, due to the interviewees political background and social status. The interviewee presents a group of revolutionaries that are underrepresented in the found secondary sources available online, and thus functions as a supportive source to the secondary sources. Moreover, secondary sources always bear a risk of being either biased or only present a certain group of people. Thus, this interview is an authentic and nuanced first-hand source that supports the credibility of this study.
3.3.3 Processing of data The method used to examine the collected data in this thesis, is a discourse analysis of interviews, articles, writings, arguments and art produced by the revolutionary subjects, who played an important role during uprisings Egyptian revolution. There are different ways of practicing a discourse analysis. They share an understanding of discursive constructed reality, which never simply are reflections of already existing realities. Discourses are the way we make sense of the world and all aspects of it, in which some realities seem less plausible and natural than others. Identity is created due to the interaction with different subjective positions within the discourses. This study takes outset in Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s approach of discourses analysis., which constitutes of both poststructuralist language philosophy and Post Marxist theory concerning hegemony. Their approach is the most poststructuralist theory within the field of discourse analysis, as they believe that the social world is discursively constructed by meaning and language’s instability. Thus, discourses can always change and reshape when encountering other discourses. Their discursive approach focuses mainly on the overall existing discourses by examining the overall patterns circulating in society in a certain time period or certain social context. This thesis analysis the overall discourses existing among the subjects in this study, and thus takes us of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis. Their concept of discourse is based on the idea of discursive conflicts and encounters that fight for hegemony. The concept of conflict they define as antagonism, in which different identities evolve within the respective discourses. A discourse establishes itself by so called nodal points, which refers to the fight for discourses. A discourse analysis based on Lauclau and Mouffe’s analysis is all about the creation of certain discourses and subjective positioning happening in those specific nodal points. By
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approaching the existing discourses in the empirical data in this thesis through a poststructuralist- based analysis, it provides us with an understanding on how discourses are formed and converted due to certain nodal points, and how they exist in a constant hegemonic fight (Schwandt, 1998). That includes a detailed analysis on how identities are created based on subjective positions within the discourses and their interactions. The Egyptian uprisings will be examined through nodal points by analyzing the revolutionary subjects’ biographies, interviews, writings etc. The analysis through nodal points will provide us with an understanding of the discourse’s interaction and power positions towards each other, and thus help us define typologies in which we can make sense of the revolutionary subjects.
3.4 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY The findings of this study cannot be generalized to present a conclusive case of the revolutionary development and the connection to the revolutionary subjects in the Arab uprisings, as they are context dependent. Also, the choice of main characters playing an important role during the uprisings in Egypt in 2011, can lack on representability as there might be revolutionary subjects during the uprisings, who were under represented in the media and other forums. However, despite of the lack of generalizability in this thesis for being a single-case study, it provides us with important findings on the revolutionary subject and its role for the overall understanding of mobilization in current social revolutions in the Middle East. Additionally, this study functions as a contribution to new empirical knowledge in an under researched theoretical field.
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4 LITERATURE REVIEW
In the following literature review I will create an overview of the literature concerning the Egyptian uprisings since 2011. Most literature examining the Egyptian uprisings between 2011-2013 are rapports and journalistic story-telling’s mainly concerned by the events at the very beginning of the revolutionary uprisings. More interesting literature however, appeared in the aftermath of the uprisings, as the development during the years took an interesting turn. This unexpected and surprising turn became an interesting research area for theorists interested in the field of revolution and mobilization processes. The Arab uprisings and specifically the uprisings in Egypt function as an important contribution to revolution theory, as they add to different angles and perspectives to revolution theory and understanding in the 21st century. Two years on from the Arab spring, we began to see the publication of first in-depth scholarly studies that examine the precise causes and consequences of the events, and they seek to move beyond the inevitably simplified narratives and journalistic rapport initially provided by the media.
Thus, the following literature review will have its focus on the evolving literature in the aftermath of the 25th January revolution in Egypt, which has a more analytical theoretical approach to the Egyptian uprisings, and an in-depth examination of the events in the period between 2011-2013.
An overview of the field will clarify the important concepts in current literature, and thus create consensus throughout the study.
Four main areas have especially been examined in the literature scene concerning the uprisings in Egypt. Therefore, due to the wide literature on Egypt, the review is organized into three sections:
1. Social media and contemporary activism 2. The counterrevolution 3. Identity and the revolutionary subject
4.1 SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONTEMPORARY ACTIVISM One of the new phenomena’s during the uprisings in Egypt, and generally during the revolutions in the Middle east during this period, is the significant role of Social media and mass mobilization. During the early uprisings of 2011, which saw the overthrow of Zine-el Abadine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the role of Social media and networking was widely reported. This also became clear by the very authorities attempt to fight against popular pressure for change, and the
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Egyptian government’s move to block the internet and phone access in 2011. These events demonstrate the extent to which Social media was seen as a powerful and potentially subservice source. Thus, several authors analyzing the reasoning behind the sudden mass mobilization in Egypt claimed Social media as being one of the new main driving forces, which made the revolution in Egypt possible (C. Radsch, 2016).
Of course, there is a very wide range of literature concerning the use of social media and its role during the Egyptian uprisings in 2011. The new phenomena of social media in mass mobilization has been of such huge interest for authors within the field of contemporary revolutions, that the literature ended up experiencing a boom of different perspectives and theorizations regarding the topic ever since the beginning of the Egyptian revolution in 2011. Thus, due to the very wide literature on social media, this chapter delimits itself to the most influential literature, or in other words, controversial insights and perspectives on the role of social media, since there has been a huge amount of journalistic rapports and books functioning mainly as first-hand rapports of the events in the beginning of 2011. One of those interesting authors interested in the role of Social media during the Egyptian uprising is Courtney C.Radsch (2016), who in his work Cyberactivism and journalism in Egypt – Digital dissidence and Political change aims to go beyond the tired argument about whether or not social media caused the revolution, and instead examines the particular ways in which the Egyptian individual adopted, adapted and integrated information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create political participation, pioneer new forms of cyberactivism and shape a youth movement that was bound up by new media. While other researchers were much driven by press coverage of the latest internet-based platform, by providing a theoretical framework to analyze how the confluence of the right technology used in the right way and time can generate powerful outcomes, his book on the other hand explores the individual and collective processes of contention, and the role new media technologies played in it. Radsch therefore, by drawing on concept of mechanism, contentious repertoires from social movement theory and Bourdieu’s field theory, aims to analyze who these people were who risked violence and incarceration to take to the streets and to their blogs, and why they risk life to participate and collective action? That analytical framework proposed in his work, is an important contribution to the field of literature by explaining how cyberactivism can have political impact on authoritarian regimes. Another important author within the field, David Faris (2013), also examined the local context that allowed Social media to play this significant role of mass mobilization in Egypt. Faris points out that it was the particular circumstances in Egypt that allowed the revolution to take off, much more than
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the spark from Tunisia. He refers to the blogging and digital activism stretching back into the 1990’s within the combination of sustained and numerous protest movements and independent press. Faris shares Radsche’s argumentation by arguing that much of the research on the impact of the Internet in the Middle East has been anecdotal. The understanding of social media is driven by the latest application (like Twitter) and the impact of these technologies and seems to change with every new protest or Facebook group. Faris therefore argues, that the goal should not be to ask what the impact of Social media will be, but rather to generate robust theories that can help us understand events as they are happening and make probabilistic predictions about the future. David Faris in his book Dissent and revolution in a digital age, social media, blogging and activism in Egypt seeks to do that by examining the pre-history of the revolution in Egypt by focusing on the development of online media activism and drawing on fieldwork conducted in Egypt well before the escalation of social unrest in 2011. His analysis focuses on the period between 2005 and 2011, that is around the time of multi-candidate presidential elections. His book functions as a documentation of an informative history of Egyptian digital activists and their political confrontations with Mubarak’s government in the years preceding the uprisings. Faris argues for the centrality of local conditions in setting state of the digitally mediated in confrontation with the Egyptian regime, in contrast to accounts that examine the importance if international factors instead. Faris is particularly interested in the mobilizational potential of social media networks, which he argues can trigger informational cascades in interaction with independent media and on the-ground protestors and organizers. In turn these informational cascades challenge regimes to maintain their control of informational hegemony, as well as they can stimulate collective action. Merlyna Lim (2012), Canada Research Chair in Digital media and Global Network Society, also in her work Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004–2011 argues that to fully understand phenomena such as the Tahrir revolt, it is necessary to look beyond the period of late January and early February 2011 and beyond Facebook and Twitter. She mentions that every moment has a history, including the Tahrir square and the Arab uprisings that were built on years of civil society movements in the region, online and offline. Lim starts out by arguing that online activism can be traced back all the way back to the rise of the Kefaya movement in 2004, followed by oppositional activists in the Egyptian blogosphere, which was way before the appearance of Twitter and Facebook. By delving into the history of online activism in Egypt from 2004-2011 Lim’s goal is locate the actual role of social media in mobilizing populist movements over a longer space of time and over a broader geography. She thus argues that the Egyptian uprising
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wasn’t merely technological but also sociopolitical. Social media presents spaces and tools that can enable the emergence, connection, collapse and expand of social movements. It did so by sustaining longstanding networks of labor opposition by creating new connections among middle-class youth opposed to the regime, as well as by supporting the circulation of the stories about regime repression and police brutality. Thus, social media helped political change by expanding the sphere of participation, especially by reaching the country’s unemployed and disaffected urban youth. However, Lim is still of the opinion that these media were not the only or even the principal source of information of political mobilization that led to the downfall of Hosni Mubarak. Although social media helped creating context for revolution and played an essential role during the heady days of the Tahrir square protests in the beginning of 2011, their ultimate role continues to play out in the evolving future of the Egyptian revolution.
Merlyna Lim however, was far from being the only author within the theoretical field that were interested in understanding the so called ‘social media revolution’ within a broader technological and historical context. Christian Sturm and Hossam Amer (2013) in their work The Effects of (Social) Media on Revolutions – Perspectives from Egypt and the Arab Spring also digged deeper into the phenomena of social media by looking at the role of technology during prior revolutions such as the French Revolution In 1789. They argue that principal characteristics such as easy access and how entry barriers in terms of costs were already one of the main factors that supported the development back in the French Revolution. However, the only element that has changed constantly over the centuries is the speed of creation and transmission of the information flow. Thus, they conclude that the Egyptian uprisings should rather be called a movement of media technology. Thus, social media can’t be said to be the main factor of the Tahrir revolt’s success. The events would not have happened unless there was a social and political reality on the ground. So, eventhough social media played a role, it should not be considered an exclusively responsible factor of the events, and reality on the ground which according to Sturm & Amer could have led to the same movement even without social media involved. Another very influential author within the field of Social media and mobilization, Paolo Gerbaudo (2012), examined the role of social media in this work Tweets and the streets- Social media and contemporary activism. While his book isn’t specifically focused on the case of Egypt, it nevertheless mentions Egypt as an important illustrational case to understand the role of social media and mass mobilization. In his book he analyzes the culture of new protest movements of the 21st century. He
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examines the relationship between social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. His analysis revolves around the question on what social media, with its constitutive evanescence and multiplicity, can tell us about the movements that have adopted Social media as the key mean of communication, and how the communicative practices constructed reflect the forms of organization of contemporary social movements. His main argument is that the use of Twitter and Facebook does not replace the physical reality, but instead it is used as a part of a project of re-appropriation of public space. He argues that Social media can be seen as the contemporary equivalent to what newspaper, posters and so on were for the labor movement. It is a new way of people to come together, or what Gerbaudo terms as the choreograph collection action.
Above mentioned authors are all concerned with the impact of Social media in mass mobilization and revolutions in 21st century. The review above outlines the most important authors within the field, but there is a wide range of academic authors who have been concerned with the social media phenomena. The examination of social media leads us to the next very examined area of analysis within the literature of Egypt and mobilization.
4.2 THE COUNTERREVOLUTION Another very discussed question raised in the aftermath of the uprisings in Egypt in 2011, is how an authoritarian regime came under sustained attack from below only to violently resurrect itself. When the revolutionary events of late 2010 started out in Tunisia, not only reinvigorated the mass emancipatory politics in the Arab world, but also inspired social movements all around the world. For many researchers interested in the field, particularly on the Left, the so-called Arab spring, was not wishful thinking of the possibility of a permanent revolution, but rather it proposed a possibility of a transition from political to social emancipation by the popular mass movements. However, unfortunately those mass uprisings have led to either devastating civil wars or the restoration of the old ruling classes (Ketchley, 2017). Thus, several authors within the literature field examined what this process can teach us about the prospect and legacies contentious politics in the Middle East and North after the Arab uprisings. The revolution in Egypt and the transitional, intermediary and contested development that occurs between 2011 and 2014 have provided a captivating subject for scholars within that topic.
Perhaps one of the most compelling outcomes of the January revolution 2011 in Egypt was the contradictory relationship between the people, the army and the Egyptian nation. After the Egyptian
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people were able to topple a dictator who belonged to the military establishment, Hosni Mubarak, the people on the other side overwhelmingly accepted that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) would rule the people for a transitional period until a new president was elected. SCAF remained in power until June 2012 until Mohammad Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential election. After a brief period however, the military ousted Morsi in July 2013 and the people in June 2014 again elected the new president Marshal Abdel Fattah-Al Sisi, who was a member of SCAF and served as Minister of Defense during Morsi’s presidency. This contractional behavior raised a couple of questions among authors interested in the field. Wy would the Egyptian people return to military/authoritarian setup after millions took the streets demanding the download of the Mubarak regime?
According to Dalia Said Mostafa (2017), professor at university of Manchester, the relationship between the army and the people in Egypt is extremely important, when we want to dig deeper into the trajectory of the 2011 January Revolution, both its achievements and its setbacks, which are still unfolding. In her book The Egyptian Military in Popular culture – Context and critique she angles the issue from the popular culture to investigate the cultural implication and influence of the military figure in Egyptian society. Through an analysis of a range of representations in Egyptian popular culture, Dalia Said (2017), aims to demonstrate that the relationship between the Egyptian people and their army resist any simplistic interpretations, as it only can be understood in the context of the nation and nationhood within a broader historical and political framework. Egyptian’s self-perception of nationhood is closely associated with the formation of a modern army, which goes back the 1820’s, and thus Egypt is defined as a nation-state in association with a strong army. Therefore, Dalia Said argues, that the story of the Egyptian nation and its army is complex with a long-lasting historical root that infuses the popular imagination the collective memory of the society as a whole.
Other authors within the field such as Dalia Fahmy & Daanish Faruqi, Philip Marfleet and Bernard Rougier & Stephane Lacroix are all very interested in the very same issue Dalia Said proposes. While they differ in their methodological approaches and some minor outcomes, they all attempt to analyze how the different political groups interactions influenced each other and led to the emergence of a counterrevolution. How can the revolution best be understood by examining the complex changing relations among its principal actors and what to the contradictions of liberalism in Egypt tell us about contemporary ramification of the state of liberalism in Egypt?
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While the above-mentioned authors attempt to examine the counterrevolution by digging deeper into the different political actors and their interactions during this crucial time of revolution, other authors within the field draw on different theoretical angles to make sense of the events of the counterrevolution.
Neil Ketchley (2017), one of the very influential and important authors within the field of mobilization and Egypt, is concerned with the emergence of the counterrevolution in Egypt in 2011 and its aftermath. The highly contentious nature of the decisions and developments that took place in this era provide a fitting context, which Ketchley has chosen to tackle in his book. His book Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring draws on over two years of fieldwork, involving multiple research trips carried out in Egypt between 2011 and 2015. The evidence includes 8000 protest events, several interviews, video footages and photographs to illustrate and provide a systematic account of how the Egyptians managed to band together and overthrow the regime. Neil Ketchley takes outset in the definition of contentious politics as:
“Episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants”
In this mode, Ketchley views the 25th January revolution, the post-Mubarak democratic transition and the anti-coup mobilization, not as a distinct phenomenon, but rather as an understanding on who is making claims, how these claims are made, the objects of those claims and the regime responses to these claims. From a series of points and bottom-up explanations Ketchley connects these puzzles to create a broader pattern of political change in post-Mubarak Egypt. According to Ketchley this can only be understood by paying close attention to the evolving dynamics of contentious politics witnessed in Egypt since 2011. He pursues an analytical and empirically grounded research of the way in which Egyptians have mobilized- or demobilized in the three years after Mubarak’s ousting in 2011. Ketchley analysis how the Egyptians were able to overthrow a dictator of three decades in just three weeks, and how to account the position of the military during the eighteen days of mass mobilization. Ketchley (2017) has a hard time to justify an analytical categorization of revolution when reflecting of trajectory of post-Mubarak politics, even though the scholarly definition of revolution had expanded considerably in the past few decades. Contemporary revolutions came to be marked by a double rejection of both the old regime and the Muslim brothers in Egypt, which makes revolutions seem as pathways to political liberalization, which strengthen the international order.
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Theorists working with this vein have very quick adopted the 25th revolution as an evidence to prove this new modality and revolutionary action. However, Ketchley argues, despite these tentative parallels than can be drawn between the revolution’s repertoire of contention and political developments in Egypt, this designation was premature, as the Mubarak-era was never upended and remains intact even today. Thus, according to Ketchley, the 2011-2012 presidential elections in Egypt did not result in civilians exercising meaningful democratic elections over the state. Thus, Ketchley argues, that no democratic or political revolution could be said to have occurred. Therefore, due to his analysis the 18 days of the 25th revolution is better captured by the concept of a revolutionary situation. By revolutionary situation Ketchley means: “1) contenders or coalitions of contenders advancing exclusive competing claims to control of the state or some segment of it; 2) commitment to those claims by a significant segment of the citizenry; 3) incapacity or unwillingness of rulers to suppress the alternative coalition and/or commitment to its claims”.
Another important author concerned with the field, Brecht de Smet (2015), examines in his book Gramsci on tahrir the complex dynamics of Egypt’s revolution and counterrevolution. He aims to illustrate how a Gramscian understanding of the revolutionary process can provide a powerful tool for charting the possibilities for a truly emancipatory project in Egypt. Brecht de Smet’s application of Gramsci’s take on Caesarism illustrates how the current situation in Egypt demonstrates the ways that national histories and global power relation define, enable and displace resistance and social transformation. De smet, in his second part of the book outlines the history of Egypt from the nineteenth century to 2015, linking its historical trajectory to the expansion of capitalism as the world- historical process in order to examine the Egyptian revolution. After dealing with Egypt’s subordination to British Imperialism during the nineteenth and early twentieth century and Nasserism as a form of Caesarism, he concludes that the recent revolution is as a mass mobilization against the global neoliberal offensive. He furthermore argues that the inability of the Egyptian working class to establish its hegemony over the revolution is because of the lack of directive Centre precipitated the consolidation of the counterrevolution in a Caesarist form under the leadership of the commander El- Sisi.
Walter Armbrust (2017), cultural anthropologist associate professor in modern Middle Eat studies, also is concerned with the phenomena of counterrevolution and political fight experienced in Egypt. In his academic article Trickster Defeats the Revolution: Egypt as the Vanguard of the New Authoritarianism published in Middle East Critique, he does in contrary to above mentioned authors, not analyze the defeat of the January 25 Revolution as simply a victory by the old regime. However,
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Armbrust understands revolution as a liminal crisis, which allows us to see the rise of El-Sisi as both a revolutionary outcome and as an instantiation of a New Authoritarianism, that strides towards power in the wake of the 2011 revolutions. Armbrust’s point of departure is that the Egyptian counter- revolution was a coherent movement even before El-Sisi overthrew Mohamad Morsi, and not just a resurgence of the old Mubarak regime. Also, Armbrust raises several questions on how to examine the connection between the revolution and the wave of authoritarianism. Is there a misrecognition of the counterrevolution as a potential end of the 25 revolution, or was El-Sisi a revolutionary outcome, although not being the one proponents of the revolution intended? Finally, Armbrust is concerned with how the rolling back of Egypt’s revolution can be connected to broader global political- economic structures. Liminality in his work is understood as the intermediate stage in a transition. Eventhough liminality often is controlled by ritual – that is not the case in revolutions, because there is no conventionalized means for closing of the state of being in-between. Under certain circumstances, Armbrust argues, Tricksters-beings in liminality can become potentially dangerous in politics. El-Sisi can be seen as a Trickster politician. However, more broadly he argues that she structures of liminality through the global political economic order of capitalism on one side creates a generalized precarity outside the most elite levels of society, while at the same time predisposes those compelled to live in precarity to be attentive to political Tricksters. Thus, according to Armbrust, liminality can be viewed as both the beginning and the end of revolution.
This section drew a brief picture of the recent literature concerned with the appearance of the counterrevolution in the aftermath of the 25th January revolution in Egypt. Some draw on empirical field work, while others aimed to analyze the counterrevolution through different theoretical approaches and comparisons to previous relevant revolution theory. The following section reviews the literature that tries to make sense of contemporary revolutions by taking outset in the very revolutionary individual.
4.3 IDENTITY AND THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT Another area, examined especially in the last couple of years, is the importance of identity and the revolutionary subject, which sheds a light on how to understand revolutions in the 21st century through the lenses of subjective understanding and identity-creation during the period of the Egyptian uprisings. Samuli Schielke (2017), a social and cultural anthropologist, mainly working with Egypt, has been aware of the fact how an understanding of the revolutionary subject is of high importance to understand the motivational factors that led to the mass mobilization experienced during the
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Egyptian uprising between 2011-2013. In his book Egypt in the future tense, the ‘revolution’ itself isn’t the focus of the story. However, Schielke aims to analyze the story of a longer trajectory of the pressing and often frustration expectation of something better to come. The unity of hope, anxiety, frustration and struggle is not only characteristic for a revolution, but also in fact for all kind of expectations, whether they were religious, political or economic expressed by the Egyptian society during that time period. During ethnographic research Schielke could conclude some very important points. His empirical research showed how the Egyptian individuals view the relationship between money, religion and destiny. One moment they are despairing, and seconds later they are trusting god on their destiny, which made Schielke reach a sort of synthesis by thinking about the general problem of hope in an uncertain and unpredictable world. He approaches the conclusive question by examining freedom, destiny and autonomy. Schielke describes the trouble with a changing world in which one is constantly promised more and new things. This were the capitalist process, according to Schielke, becomes an important aspect because when the process provides goods and gratification on the condition of constant growth, capitalism constantly raises expectations, and thus undermines lives that once were safe and certain. It creates pressures that once might have seemed unimaginable. As these pressures might appear troublesome even under conditions of relative health – under conditions of poverty as in Egypt, they are extreme. This becomes very evident by the ethnographic research and individuals Schielke talked throughout the book. Thus, freedom, hope and destiny are problematic to maintain in the invisibility of the material and relational preconditions experienced in a society as Egypt. They are all too hard to overlook and have mostly to do with class, education, citizenship, demography, family traditions, religious commitments, gender but especially money. The rights to claim, speak out and make choices are not freely available as they are all grounded in a gendered and class-conscious economy.
Noha Mellor (2016), professor on Arab media, also examines the importance of subjective identity in her work The Egyptian dream: Egyptian national identity and uprisings. However, Mellor beside of having an ethnographic approach as Schielke, differs from Schielkes theoretical approach by combining the discussion of Egyptian identity with a broader picture of national identity and political issues that continue to split the Egyptian society. Mellor argues in her book that the current fragmentation of Egypt’s political scene reflects the increasing social division in a country where the people are demanding a redefinition of their identity. Her focus is on how the societal context that caused the internal conflict in Egypt and zooms in on the Egyptian society and its multiple layers, which Schielke also considered an important aspect of Egyptian individual identity. She zooms into
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the role of language and identity that enforced the national discourse in Egypt. Joel Beinin and Frederic Veidel (2013) also joined by zooming into the political culture and revolutionary subject by practicing ethnographic research. The case studies used in their book Social movements, mobilization, contestation in the Middle East and North Africa are inspired by social movements theory but do also expand on and critique the theory’s classical concepts of political opportunity structures, collection action, mobilization structures and repertoires of contention, by conduction an intensive fieldwork. The strong empirical base allows the reader to understand the contexts, culturally conditioned rationally as well as the strength and weaknesses of local networks. It provides a substantive understanding of the happenings in the Arab world before and since the uprisings in 2011. Joel Beinin and Frederic Veidel explain the contentious politics of the working classes, the dissident intelligentsia and unexpected forms of Islamism mainly since the 1990’s. While they are drawing on revisionist social movement theory, they discover the regions huge amount of political contestation and mobilization, that neither are about democratization nor violence or social anarchy. Their work successfully worked as an alternative to neo-orientalist clichés defining the Middle east in terms of being anti-modern or even anti-Western culture, that consists of mainly authoritarianism, terrorism and political radicalism. It also functioned as a well-argued criticism to the social movement theory, such as that of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly. Thus, Joel Beinin and Frederic Veidel aimed to analyze the Egyptian political culture, before and after the uprisings in 2011, without such stereotypes. Instead they focused on case studies to show the reality of the pollical culture in MENA.
The authors described above draw a brief picture of the new upcoming literature on the revolutionary subject in Egypt and in the Middle East in general. Apart from their different theoretical approaches, they are all a part of a new methodological wave, which focuses on the individual sociological level by taking use of ethnographic research and case-study based field work. While there is a wide range of literature on the reasonings and possible causes behind the counterrevolution and the role of Social media and its impact on mass mobilization and uprising in Egypt, the literature on the revolutionary subject, even though becoming an increasingly discussed topic, still lacks adequate information to provide us with an understanding on how to analyze revolutions in the 21st century by identifying and understanding the revolutionary subject.
The following analysis aims to go beyond the traditional categorizations and typologies of the revolutionary individual in Egypt, to gain a further understanding of the political culture during this important revolutionary moment. The study relies on Schielke’s categorization of the revolutionary
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subject in Egypt to create a starting base of framework conceptualization and combines it with different material that appeared during the revolutionary period such as interviews, documentaries, archives and art to gain a more comprehensive picture of the revolutionary subjectivity. Who were the ‘revolutionaries’ and what can they tell us about the development of the revolution from 2011- 2013. The identification of the revolutionary subject is an important milestone to gain a deeper insight into the political culture during this very important revolutionary moment, as it can tell us more about the Egyptian individual’s political and social imagination on how they conceive their present, past and future. Secondly, Schielke’s important conceptualization of thin ideology becomes relevant to understand the very personal struggle of the Egyptian revolutionary individual, and how that led to the events after January 2011.
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5 ANALYSIS
When you are working hard and worried about your country’s future, when all your work is for nothing, because only the corrupt go ahead, bow – bow – bow your head down, because your country is a “democracy”. When freedom of expression is a crime, when you have to hide your beliefs in your head, when I can see shame in your eyes, then join your pain with mine, bow – bow – bow your head down, because your country is a “democracy”. When the army is your “protector”, while turning its back to the country, abusing their power, hiding safely behind their uniforms.
The song passage above is taken from the Egyptian-American documentary film ‘The square’ produced in 2013 by Jehane Noujaim which depicts the ongoing Egyptian Crisis until 2013.
The song is written by Ramy Essam, who became the title of the ‘revolutionary singer’. He sang the song at the Tahrir square followed by the military’s brutal attacks on the revolutionaries, who participated at the sit-ins. He was one of the victims of violence and torture by the military forces at the Egyptian museum after the fall of Mubarak (The square, 2013). The documentary ‘The square’, despite of its maybe biased perspective on a certain group of revolutionaries at the Tahrir square, nevertheless functions as an important source for understanding the revolutionary subjects that formed the Tahrir square during the uprisings. It establishes important categorizations of the archetypes that were existing at the time of the uprisings. The important actors presented throughout the documentary are Ahmad, Khalid Abdallah, Magdy Ashour, Pierre and Aida. Ahmad represents the poor and frustrated type of revolutionary at the protests. Before the uprisings he lived from one job to the next. He started working when he was eight years old, and he used to sell lemons on the streets to pay his school intuition in fifth grade. Khalid Abdallah presents the more privileged upper-
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class youth of revolutionaries. He was born abroad, and currently works as an Egyptian actress. He participated actively at the protests at the streets, but also during online-activism by posting live videos and interviews on social media. Pierre and Aida also present the liberal modern youth of Egypt. They both supported the protests online and on the streets. Finally, Magdy Ashour functions as a figure for the Islamist revolutionaries. He is husband and father for four children, and member of the Muslim brotherhood. He has been jailed and tortured during the Mubarak regime, due to his political activism (Ibid.).
The frustration in the song above presents the political culture and imagination that existed during the revolution. But who are these revolutionaries actually? What are their dreams, ambitions, ideologies and frustrations? What occupies them in their everyday life, and what did these protests actually mean to each of them? While there on one side was a common consensus that change must occur, on the other side the revolutionaries didn’t agree on which direction these changes should go. The emergence of this new kind of political subjectivity among an active and visibly minority of people who called themselves ‘revolutionaries’ was the most tangible outcome of the stormy season that began in 2011 in Egypt. Before 2011 the revolutionaries were limited to small circles mainly in the capital, and people rarely took part in any political action even though they had very strong political opinions. Often their political ideologies came to the surface through perfect religious commitment by for instance joining the Salafi movement, or they would write poetry and prose for the sake of an imaginative way out of the ordinary. After January 2011 however, there was a wave of politicization with people participating in uprisings, leaving and joining movements, and being part of huge mobilization. The following analysis aims get closer to the political subjectivity that emerged between 2011-2013, and how it was part of evolving new political imaginaries and change people’s self-perception of their present, past and future. This mobilization encompassed all cities, regions and classes, and were part of creating a discourse and idea of a common Egyptian revolution. It created a feeling that all Egyptians were united at the Tahrir square, but were they actually? Thus, to make sense of the political culture, the following analysis will create typologies and categorizations of the different revolutionaries, who were part of these important events in Egypt, to create an understanding of the struggles and conflicts that emerged between the different revolutionary subjectivities and their political imaginaries. The first part of the analysis attempts to explain Arab liberalism to explain the definition of liberalism used in the analysis, followed by a presentation of the different typologies and an in-depth study of the revolutionary subjects.
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5.1 A BLURRED SCENE OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES Creating typologies in which we can understand and place the revolutionary subjects that emerged during the uprisings since January 2011, is a challenging task not only due to Egypt’s very diverse minorities that are spread all across Egypt, reaching far beyond the subjectivities presented at the Tahrir square, but also due the fact that there exists a pattern of individuals with no clear belonging to political ideologies. This phenomenon is very well illustrated by the young 27-year-old Egyptian engineer Kareem Alaa. Kareem is from a smaller city Tanta located outside of Cairo and was actively participating at the sit-ins at the Tahrir square between 2011-2012. While he was supporting the liberal revolutionaries during the uprising to overthrow Mubarak, he didn’t agree on being a ‘full fleshed’ liberal like other young revolutionaries at the square. He voted for Hamdeen Sabbahi, a Nassirian politician, in the first round of elections in 2012, and for the Muslim Brotherhood in the final round of elections. During an interview in 2018 he describes his belonging to political ideology as follows:
Kareem: “I think it’s better to not have a certain ideology, the way we have it in Egypt. You see, for example when it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, they believe in a free market, even in Saudi Arabia they believe in the same. And a socialist on the other side believes in social welfare. It isn’t the way it is in Europe, we don’t have clear differentiation between a communist, socialist or liberal.”
(Appendix 1, 2018, p.1)
The belonging to political ideology before the 2011 uprisings was already very blurred due to the undefined distinction of political ideologies. This ideological confusion has been even more evolving after the uprisings. Especially young revolutionaries used the term liberal often to describe their fight for freedom, justice and equal rights. However, when having a closer look at these self-announced liberals they do differ a lot in their perception of liberalism, as well as from the universal definition of liberalism, which often is used to describe a liberal in Western academia. Thus, it is important to understand the way in which political ideologies are understood and perceived in Egyptian discourse, and how they differ from the western categorization of political ideologies. The reason behind the confusing scene of political ideologies must be found in Egyptian individual’s historical understanding of policy – and sense making of ideologies in the past, as well as in the present. To fully understand this group of revolutionaries that ended up titling themselves as liberals during the uprisings, an explanation of the definition of Arab liberalism and ideologies will be established in the
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following section, to create a common consensus on how the term ‘liberal’ is used and conceptualized throughout this study.
5.2 DEFINING ARAB LIBERALISM The popular uprisings in the Arab world in 2011 pointed to a political maturity of the masses, and especially the young people. Two current key notions in contemporary Arab discourse are freedom and democracy. While bringing down dictatorial leadership like the Mubarak regime in Egypt, doesn’t alone suffice to mold a culture of democracy, there has been pushed limits by removing barriers of fear and restoring the people to center stage. On one side there is an agreement in the research regarding a sustained liberal thought from the late 19th century in the Arab world, with its main values consisting of individual freedom, civic rights, democracy and constitutionalism. However, there is an uncertainty regarding the identity of its spokesmen and the very definition of a liberal. Three main approaches in the literature of Arab liberalism may be discerned. Two that are radical and one position in the center. A monolithic approach, represented by Wael Abu-Uksa, defines the liberal discourse as a full-fledged paradigm with a clear ideological and political boundary that differentiate it from other ideologies in the Arab world, such as political Islam, Arab nationalism, Marxism and socialism. That might appear as a problematic approach due to the area’s diverse history of ideas in a region saturated with geographical, ethnic, and political diversity. On the other side we have the opposite approach, represented by Charles Kurzman, Roel Meijer, and Christoph Schumann, which rejects the notion of liberalism as a consistent worldview or philosophy (Hatina & Schumann, 2015). Instead they view it as a liberal discourse that is diffused and eclectic and can be discerned in all ideological directions. Kurzman distances himself from the term liberal as a category and instead proposes the term liberal Islam, which according to him appreciated the intellectual variety in Islamic discourse, in which a long line of writers with diverse opinions are represented. Meijer on the other hand holds that neither liberalism or any other ideology in the Middle east exists in its pure form. While he argues, that there are individuals that can be called liberal, it is hard to find purely liberal individuals or any other forms of pure ideology. Therefore, it would be of false perception to limit the research on liberalism or other ideologies by ascribing them to one individual liberal thinker, but rather ideologies must be regarded as composites in which there exists a combination of elements of liberal, republican and communitarian premises. Schumann also adds a another more systemic element by highlighting the absence of any genuine equivalent for the English word liberal and arguing that even those two proudly identity themselves as liberals are scarce. Thus, he argues that
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only an approach that refrains from focusing on one single ideology can reveal liberal manifestations. Furthermore, he argues that the liberal Arab discourse shouldn’t be framed in the light of Western liberal theory, but instead in a context of concrete experience with authoritarianism, which mostly develops and leads to adoption of liberal values. These perceptions, according to Schumann, are applied on the two dominant groups namely the Arab nationalists and the political Islamists – especially in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who as a result of disillusionment eventually advocated liberalization and democratization. In the 1990’s in Egypt mainstream Islamism has developed into a reformist movement and according to Schumann, civil rights and the notion of freedom gained a new prominence in the context of Islamic parties in Egypt. This new intellectual engagement was however not inspired by theory of Western liberalism but was rather a conclusion drawn from negative experiences with ideologically based state power. However, Schumann nevertheless acknowledges the challenges and limitations the liberalization of Islamism has due to the conflict between the liberal values and communitarian-collective tendency of the Islamic parties. These parties are required to react strictly towards whether the state should have responsibility to foster or enforce the observance of Islamic norms in public space. Nonetheless such reservations do according to Schumann’s argument not mean that liberal thought isn’t running through the entire spectrum of Arab ideology. And it’s important to take into consideration the individuals or groups who define themselves as liberals and also identify with the basic ideas of liberal theory, not only in institutional terms, but also in ethical terms including personal liberties, tolerance and religious freedom. These ethical aspects are very much criticized by Arab socialists and Islamists, and thus the liberals constitute of a numerical and ideological minority. The third approach falls between monolithic and heuristic and views the liberal current as a discourse group and analytic category. This current isn’t represented in organized parties or mass movements, but rather in the several form of the new media and the transnational spaces between the Arab world and the West (Ibid.).
The conceptualization of Arab liberalism is important because it enables us to understand a blurred political scene of ideologies that existed before the uprisings and became even more ideologically overlapping after the revolution. Most importantly it is crucial to highlight and keep in mind that in one way or another the liberal ideology runs through the entire spectrum of Arab ideologies. Thus, based on the very wide spectrum of the term Liberalism in Middle Eastern discourse, the term in this study will be used to describe the revolutionary subject that ascribes to the core values of freedom and democracy. The next chapter will aim to get closer to this revolutionary subjectivity by creating typologies of the revolutionaries that existed and evolved during the Egyptian 2011 uprisings.
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5.3 INTRODUCTION TO THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECTS As already initiated in above chapters, the task of creating typologies in which we can understand and categorize the revolutionary subjectivities that emerged along with the Egyptian uprisings in 2011, is a complicated task due to the blurred political scene. Nonetheless to be able to somehow create a pattern in which we can understand the political scene and the revolutionary subject during this crucial revolutionary moment, we must place the numerous subjectivities that emerged and evolved during this time period into categories. So how can we divide and categorize a huge revolutionary Egyptian scene that goes far beyond the overly represented subjectivities at the Tahrir that have filled the media? That is why I chose to establish four overall categories:
1. The initiators 2. The Followers 3. The workers 4. – And the Islamist revolutionaries
The initiators are the group of revolutionaries, whose majority are leftist and often belong to the more privileged class with a more or less clear ideological position. They present the youth that actively gathered people at the streets using social media and other online platforms.
The followers are the revolutionaries who participated in the protests at the streets, and wanted change, but without clear vision of which direction they want things to change.
The workers present the revolutionary subjectivity that was present outside of the ‘Tahrir revolution’ frame. They participated and initiated worker strikes at the working-places and fought for independent trade unions and higher wages.
The Islamist revolutionary consists mainly of Salafists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have a clear vision of political Islam, which they aim to implement through a sharia-law based constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood members have been fighting for their political recognition for many years during the Mubarak-regime by approaching a more moderate political Islamist ideology.
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Figure 1: Typologies of the revolutionary subjects
5.4 THE INITIATORS
5.4.1 The intellectual ideologist The intellectual ideologist is the revolutionary individual, who already existed in small circles around Cairo and Alexandria before the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. They mainly consist of young educated Egyptians, but don’t necessarily believe in a certain ideology or support a certain political party However they mostly identify themselves as either secularists, liberals or communists, and they do share a common idea of freedom, democracy and equal rights. Egypt already a couple of years before the uprisings at the Tahrir square 2011 experienced a huge expansion of online writers and bloggers.
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For instance, Wael Abbas, an outstanding blogger, who run a blog called Egyptian awareness, posted video and hosted discussion on issues such as the mass sexual harassment of women in the streets of Cairo, ballot stuffing in Egyptian elections, and torture at the hands of the police (Al Jazeera, 2007). Another very prominent blogger in the Egyptian arena Hossam- al Hamalawy, a self-described socialist also hosts a blog called 3rabawy, and feels totally comfortable discussing his personal political persuasion on the blog (Al Jazeera, 2011).
5.4.2 The emergence of a new young intellectual In January 2011 these bloggers took real action by pursuing a common goal and getting the Egyptians on the streets. After 2011 this new young intellectual evolved and became even more present in their methods in which they organize and oppose the authorities. With their strong political opinions and slogans on social media on for instance the ‘We are all Khalid Said’ Facebook group and countless numbers of other blogs, they were able to appeal to a huge part of the Egyptian society who has experienced injustice. The new young intellectual organized itself due to modern means of communication such as Twitter and Facebook and turned into an alternative arena for fueling the conflict in the era of the Muslim Brotherhood. The young intellectual gathered in independent arenas that assumed different means of expression. They didn’t attempt to cooperate with official sites, the way the old intellectuals did, who participated in events such as the Independent Culture Coalition. Through a vision including minimal agreement on the politically and culturally front, the patriarchal authority transformed in most cases into a target for ridicule and cynicism. Most importantly however, the institution lost credibility among a new generation, for whom its restrictions were no longer acceptable. The rejection of the institution allowed the new intellectual to fully declare their opinion to the military through available means such as marches, sit-ins, poster, blogs chants, short-films and testimonies (Momani & Mohamed, 2016). Some of the very important activist figures during the beginning of the Egyptian revolution became Nobel-prize winners such as Wael Ghonim, Google's former head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, who helped trigger the uprisings with the We are all Khaled Said Facebook page. He called for protests in January 2011 to demonstrate against the beating to death of a man by two plainclothes police officers. Israa-Abdel Fattah, also known as Facebook Girl helped found Egypt's 6 April Youth Movement in 2008, which later became a driving force during the street protests of the Egyptian revolution in 2011 (Al Jazeera, 2014).
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Figure 2: Israa Abdel- Fattah’s signs reads: No negotiations on women rights (BBC, 2016) Alaa Abdel-Fattah is also one of Egypt’s most prominent and leading secular figures in the 2011 uprising. Since his imprisonment, calls for his release have regularly trended on social media. Other self-announced liberal figures like Khalid Talima and Ahmad Douma also played a key role in the uprisings. Ahmad Douma after already serving a three-year prison sentence for organizing protests without permit, later was jailed for life after being convicted of rioting, inciting violence and attacking security forces (Ibid.). Also, the art of graffiti was a valve for young liberals to express their dissatisfaction with the regime and remained among the most important arts of expression, and even evolved into an area of conflict between the new intellectuals and authority. The graffiti drawings that were covering the walls al over Cairo were expressing protest and establishing a new discourse. It forced the authority to scrub of the drawings, only for them to be redrawn by the revolutionaries the next day. Thus, Graffiti artists have become targets of the authority (Momani & Mohamed, 2016) Below are some examples of the graffiti drawings on the walls of Cairo, which became so popular, that they were collected into the work by Mia Gröndahl (2013) Revolution graffiti- street art of the new Egypt.
5.4.3 When optimism turns into frustration The revolutionaries in the beginning of 2011 were driven by love for the nation, which created a feeling of cohesion and community within the country. There emerged a collective protest identity, centred on a rejection of the Mubarak regime and the construction of a new ‘Egyptianness’. While
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the revolutionaries didn’t agree on what Egyptianness meant or even on what their main reasons for protesting were, they nevertheless began to identify strongly with the notion of a new Egypt in opposition to Mubarak. Slogans such as “I used to be afraid, now I’m an Egyptian” or “lift your head up high, you’re Egyptian” (irfa ‘rasak fawq, inta masri) developed a label of ‘Egyptian’ regardless of religion, gender and ideology (Gunning & Baron, 2014). Especially, in a country like Egypt with a history of fights between SCAF, the Muslim brotherhood and leftist, this new discourse brought hope and optimism to an otherwise very pessimistic living.
Pierre, a young activist points out: “The most beautiful thing about this revolution is that we were all united. We forgot our political differences and came together and succeeded together.” (The square, 2013)
The Muslim brotherhood despite of their conflicts and disagreements in the past also joined the leftist revolutionaries at the square without second doubts. Magdy Ashour, an old member of the Muslim brotherhood, hopes that people finally will realize that they misunderstood the Muslim Brotherhood (Ibid).
Aida, a young feminist activist also had high hopes for the cooperation between the Muslim brotherhood and the leftist:
”Usually the Muslim Brotherhood is our biggest fear, but inside the square now everyone is different. After the government Graffiti 1: Alaa Abdel Fattah with Mina Daniel, the Christian turned it into a life or death situation, it didn’t revolutionary who was killed at a peaceful protest 9 October 2011 (Gröndal, 2013) matter who you are or what you are doing.” (Ibid).
Especially, the younger generation of revolutionaries were filled with hope for the future. Khalid Abdallah, the young online activist expresses his optimism about the uprisings:
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“I know why I am here, and I know why I want to be here. I came from three generations who have been fighting for social reform and political freedom in this country. And here we have the discourse of democracy, freedom of social justice being changed in the Middle East and I am extremely proud to be here.”
(The square, 2012)
Unfortunately, the peaceful atmosphere at the square didn’t last for too long. After the fall of Hosni Mubarak peoples demands remained unmet. Political parties started organizing and the split between the revolutionaries and their political plans for the country started appearing on the surface and creating split between the Egyptian people. The short moment of euphoria experienced in the spring of 2011 quickly passed and was replaced by bewilderment and doubt, and then bitterness, anger, frustration and eventually an Graffiti 2: Tahrir square (Gröndal, 2013) increasing loss of faith in peaceful action.
The political discourse that were based on a clear idea ‘that we are all one’ turned into a discourse of mistrust and anger. The gap between the initiating young revolutionaries and the Muslim brotherhood became bigger and bigger, and the more the elections in 2012 were moving on, the more the conflict and hate between people evolved. The revolutionaries accused the Muslim brotherhood for selling out the revolution and cooperating with SCAF. On the other side the Muslim Brotherhood felt as they were not given
Graffiti 3: the military is hungry for a protester. Mural by any chance to prove themselves and their good the Winged Elephant (Gröndal, 2013) intentions. They were accused of stealing the revolution, because they weren’t protesting at the square in the beginning of January 2011 like other the revolutionaries did. On the other side, the liberal revolutionaries after several attacks from SCAF and massacres at the several sit-ins in which hundreds of people lost their lives, started experiencing
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resistance and hate by part of the Egyptian society. They were called thugs and traitors: Some people consider us traitors and agents.” Israa Abdel Fattah says (Al Jazeera, 2014). Ahmad agrees: “The good people are being called traitors, while the traitors are called heroes.” (The square, 2013)
Wael Ghonim in an interview with the privately-owned Egyptian channel Dream TV after his release from prison also send a clear message to the Egyptian people by saying:
“If you want to arrest me, that's your right. But there are laws and I am not a terrorist or a drug- dealer. We have to tear down this system based on not being able to speak out (…) I want to say to every mother and every father that lost his child, I am sorry, but this is not our fault. "I swear to God, this is not our fault. It is the fault of everyone who was holding on to power greedily and would not let it go.” (Al Jazeera, 2011).
5.5 A CHAOTIC FIELD OF REVOLUTIONARIES After the fall of Mubarak and along with the emergence of new political movements the political scene turned from being one entity into a split scene of revolutionaries.
“One of the best things that has happened since the revolution started is the political engagement. So many parties were created, so many young people are joining them, a lot of movements are being created. For the first time in 60 years, 27 million Egyptians take to the streets to vote.” (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 2012)
This is how Wael Ghonim, the young liberal activist describes the political scene at the Tahrir square after the 25th January uprisings in Cairo in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. As already mentioned, in the beginning of the uprisings in January 2011 there existed a highly motivated and optimistic discourse of community and solidarity, which is very a very refreshing discourse that hasn’t existed among the Egyptian’s since the era of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. This blurred scene of political ideologies and revolutionaries was also evident in the numerous amounts of different parties that appeared after the 25th of January uprisings. Over 95 different parties were established, only 24 of them gained a seat at the parliamentarian elections in 2012, and in the 2015 parliament only five of the initial parties established after the uprisings in January, 2011 remained having a seat – namely the liberal Egyptians, The Egyptian Democrats, The guardians of the revolution (national party), the reform and development party (Liberals) and the Al-nor party established by the Salafists (Ahram
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online, 2017). And even these parties, observers argue mostly consist of members that used to support the overthrown Mubarak regime (Al Jazeera, 2017). This political scene experienced a sudden boom of liberal political activism, only to quickly loose it again. Below are some of the documents that were spread across the Tahrir square.
Source 1: Tahrir Documents, UCLA library (2011)
These documents are some examples of the demands and requests by the different movements and parties that appeared after the 25th January uprisings. For instance, we have an Islamist party the
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shadow-regime of the revolutionary youth established by Ali Abdoul Azis. They demand real and fair law processes against the previous Mubarak regime and independence of the media and Azhar Sharif (A religious community) from all authorities. A supporter of the party Fouad Jad Al-Karim Al-drousi, a political adviser and professor at Azhar university in Cairo adds to the requests by demanding: Social justice, equal work-rights, caring for older people, widows and orphans and finally a development and modernization of the public sector. On the other side we have the liberal, social and democratic parties. One of them being The Egyptian social democratic party which was established in 2011 and mainly fights for the justice of the workers. They as well have four requests including democracy, social justice, solidarity and equal rights. The 6th of October youth movement was another movement present at the Tahrir square. The movement was already founded by Ahmad Maher in 2008 and consists of young Egyptians, who don’t follow any certain political ideology. Their demands include: Democracy, a new constitution, free elections, freedom, equality, tolerance and accept of the others. Finally, the leader of the People’s party of the socialist alliance, which is a liberal political party founded in January 2011 by Abd Al Aziz Hanini, Fatima Ramadna and Khalid Al-Sawy, in a speech announces that they are on the streets because the political economy always in favor for the rich, while the poor people suffered. Thus, they want the old Mubarak regime to be gone, and they are ready to alliance with every socialist, communist and liberal movement or party to achieve justice, freedom and dignity for the Egyptian people (UCLA library, 2011). These documents are only few examples of a very wide pollical sphere that appeared after the January 2011 uprising. Source 2 Tahrir Document, UCLA library (2011) There is a huge number of liberal
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democratic parties that were established during this short time period, and at the same they nearly differ in their demands, requests or political ideologies. Of course, while some share a more Islamist political direction, it is hard not to wonder whether it is possible for all these different movements and parties not being able to organize themselves together. Jenna Krajeski (2011) argues that for young people who have lived their entire lives under an autocrat rule, organizing into parties, defining a platform and identifying leaders to sell to the Egyptian society, is an exercise in the unknown. During Mubarak the liberal thought has been systematically undermined as an ideology and practice. A half-century of intense repression thus resulted in a political sphere with no clear consensus liberal- democratic leaders, and the fact that liberalism often was associated with pro-West and anti- religion didn’t help either. Instead, there emerged a confusing hodgepodge of competing groups and individuals. Moreover, the so-called ‘Facebook revolutionaries’ were confronting a task of spreading their message to people located in places which barely were touched by internet and social media. Often these masses outside of Tahrir, whose votes were necessary, were being ignored (Krajeski, 2011). This huge amount of parties and their lacking ability of organization, eventually functioned as an advantage for the Muslim brotherhood, which both in the past and during the 2011 uprisings were very much upfront when it comes to political organization and mobilization strategies. As Ahmad describes it: They were the only group in the square. They have a leader telling them what to do. They are highly organized.” (The square, 2013).
5.5.1 Chapter conclusion The political fragmentation after the fall of Mubarak’s regime illustrates very well the political culture during an uncertain political moment during the Egyptian uprisings. While the liberal initiators cooperated with other political forces to overthrow the old regime, the situation after the fall of Mubarak quickly turned into a messy scene of political fragmentation, mistrust and lack of organization. The split political sphere and lack of common political strategy experienced at the tahrir square and all over Egypt is a very interesting phenomenon of the Egyptian uprisings. How can we make sense of this social constellation, and what are the social and political dynamics that existed during this revolutionary? The next chapter will dig deeper into this phenomenon.
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5.6 THE FRUSTRATED FOLLOWER This chapter examines the revolutionary subject during the Egyptian uprisings which in this study are defined as the followers. The frustrated follower consists of the lower-middle class Egyptian that was living under poor conditions during the era of Hosni Mubarak. They went to the streets only knowing that they want something to change. Finally, an analysis of the paradoxical morality existing among this type of revolutionaries will be established, to create a further understanding of the sudden turn of revolution into a counterrevolution.
5.6.1 The Egyptian middle-class To fully understand the role of the followers during the uprisings we need to understand the history of a middle class which had for decades been courted by the regime, and now was at the forefront of the demonstrations and ended up demanding its overthrow. Thus, it is important to understand the motivation of the participants in this middle-class uprising, reaching beyond the theory of economic hardship. According to De Tocqueville the middle class is essentially composed of “isolated individuals preoccupied with the well-being of themselves, their families, and immediate friends.” Their passions are involved in making money, and hence do not usually become political, let alone revolutionary” (Kandil, 2012). So how can we explain this sudden mobilization among the Egyptian middle class? To understand this process, we need to dig deeper into the middle-class role during the Mubarak regime and how the political elite was part of shaping the middle-class.
5.6.2 The middle-class during Mubarak When Mubarak became the new president in 1981 his first task was to deal with the country’s disastrous economic situation. Egypt was importing 60 per cent of its food requirements by he time Mubarak took office, and the non-productive nature of Sadat’s business stratum was not able to generate jobs, which left the state as the primary employer. During Sadat a new class fragment emerged, in which new oligarchs belonged to merchant and construction class, whose business was kicked off through state contracts and partnerships with foreign corporations. The country before the end of the 1990’s came under control of perhaps two dozen family owned conglomerates, and they mostly employed a relatively small workforce, mostly from the upper class, which they quickly came to dominate. No other middle-class fraction or even the political leadership dared resist these new economic masters. The regime could no longer block capitalists out of the state bureaucracy. The economy was determined to be restricted to long neo-liberal lines, ignoring the country’s severe
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poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, deteriorating public services, urban congestion, pollution and all the rest (Kandil, 2012).
Kareem Alaa (2018) describes an example of the corruption during the Mubarak regime:
“It was very corrupt under the Mubarak regime. Houses and areas weren’t fairly divided between people. Mubarak was the one deciding who to give the lands and houses to. Money wasn’t registered, and the best lands were quickly sold to the rich class, who started building villas and mansions. And of course, for us nothing was left.”
(Appendix 1, 2018, p.2)
The president’s son and his family and political and business associates were all imprisoned for financial corruption and abuse of office to amass wealth weeks after the January 2011 revolt. The middle class had long been nurtured by the regime, but their sudden turn against it can be explained by the fact that aside from the uppermost crust of the Egyptian bourgeoisie, all other middle-class fragments not only suffered, but also believed that the worst was yet to come (Kandil, 2012).
5.6.3 Revolution without revolutionaries? While one explanation of the counterrevolution can be found within the inability of leftist movements to organize, another explanation must be found within the revolutionary subject’s internal struggle of immorality and utopian ideologies of freedom and democracy (Schielke, 2015).
A young activist during an interview in the documentary ‘the square’ describes the revolutionaries as follows: “Our problem as revolutionaries is that most of the time, we only object and say no, and we never suggest alternatives.” (The square, 2013). He is not the only young revolutionary at the square frustrated about the fact that what was going on during the 25th revolutionary was a revolution without revolutionaries. Kareem Alaa presents an example of a follower who protested at the streets and supported the initiating revolutionaries, but without clear ideology:
“I voted for Morsi because he had an academic background and it was in general a strong political party. I preferred him because at least he had people and an organized group behind him. In the first round I voted for Hamdin Sabbahi. However, you must be aware that our people don’t have a certain or stable ideology. The thing is that we are not like in the western world in this sense.”
(Appendix 1, 2018, p.1)
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Asef Bayat (2017) in his work Revolution without revolutionaries understands the uprisings as aimed at destroying the political and economic power of the state but wasn’t yet revolutionary enough to alter the old order. He argues that the uprisings failed to operate on the scale of institutions, and he alludes to three reasons for that:
1. Lack of focus on any particular demands or alternatives 2. Lack of an intellectual anchor 3. - and an inherent lack of radicalism.
Thus, he titles the Egyptian revolution as a half revolution, since he still is of the opinion that something changed inside of the Egyptian individual. Khalid Abdallah, online liberal activist and Egyptian actor, after the 2012 referendum, in which the Morsi-party got elected, said that: “This idea of a ruling pharaoh is still controlling us.” The Egyptian individual still expects to be leaded by someone, and thus has a hard time to organize itself and lead itself into the direction they wish to see. How can we make sense of this tendency? What are the reasons behind the decisiveness among the revolutionaries? This aspect will be further examined in the next section.
5.6.4 The return to God This section aims to go deeper in explaining the driving social dynamic forces that can explain a revolutionary subjectivity that emerged among a middle-class in Egypt, which is defined by the lack of ideology and direction. This tendency is an important milestone in understanding the emergence of the counter-revolution in the Egyptian revolution. This is where Schielkes (2015) definition of thin ideology becomes important. He observes the fact that lower- middle class Egyptians had private utopias of structured ideologies of betterment on one side, and religious commitment and moral perfection on the other side. He highlights the paradoxid in which people often speak in very different tones and arguments about different topics. While young Egyptian man often ridicule Salafi activist, with their long beards and precise ritualism, their idea of a profoundly religious figure is often identical to the ones of a Salafists. Young people often argue for very conservative and strict standards of gender relations while at one time while expressing more liberal ideals of romantic love at other times. While conducting the interview with Kareem Alaa it became clear how this tendency frames him in many ways:
Kareem: “See, I think it is great that the wave of liberal and leftist were initiating the movement and were able to mobilize people. I think what they did was huge and great, and one day I will be proud to tell my children that I supported these revolutionaries and were part of this revolution. They really
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made a huge difference for Egypt, but when it comes to democracy and freedom, everyone differs. Wael Ghonim for instance is a real liberal, meaning a real liberal supporting every and each liberal value. He really represents the wave of real liberals, but when it comes to me, I am different than them. For instance, they support sexual freedom and so on.”
Rawan: “So, you are saying that you don’t support sexual freedom?”
Kareem: “Yeah, 100 % not. That is for sure, and I guess 99 % of the Egyptian people would agree with me. In the end I am a Muslim. See, everyone did agree that something had to change. Everyone who had just a little bit of conscious wanted Hosni Mubarak gone, but after that we started splitting into different directions.”
(Appendix 1, 2018, p.3)
This commitment to religion illustrates a social imaginary among the lower middle-class Egyptian that might as well be explained by Bayat’s concept of a revolution without revolutionaries. Schielke (2017) defined three key modalities of morality to explain the reasons behind this social imaginary generally existing not only in Egypt, but all over the Middle East. The first of the key modalities of morality, defined by Schielke, is religion, understood most importantly as an objective set of rules based on the Qur’an and the Sunna, which provide guidelines of a good life, that in the end leads to paradise. Another equally central modality for everyday moral actions and judgments, and in many points intertwined with religion is respect (ihtiram) mainly referring to social standing in the community, acceptable good behavior, one’s responsibility for family, and wealth, especially when it comes to a young woman’s respectability, which often is key to her standing as a person and chances for marriage. This ‘honor-shame complex’ of the gender aspect has often been mentioned as a core moral sentiment in ethnographic studies of the Middle East. The third key of morality is closely related to respect, as it is about the way people understand family and kinship. They describe the intimate relations of children, spouses and relatives, and thus the recognition of patriarchal and maternal authorities (Schielke, 2015). This emotional dimension cannot simply be reduced to respect, as it symbolizes the sense of being and belonging together, which by Suad Joseph (1999) is fittingly described as ‘connectivity’.
5.6.5 Chapter conclusion This chapter came a step closer to understand the split political sphere that appeared after the fall of the old regime by examining the important aspect of commitment to religion and morals that existed
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among a huge part of society, drawing on Schielkes conceptualization of thin ideology. The lower middle class, termed as followers in this study, followed the initiating leftist revolutionaries in their protest against the old regime. However, they were not knowing what alternative they wanted, and suddenly in an uncertain scene of endless possibilities, found themselves having to take decisions over their own destiny, while being split between morality on one side and a wish for freedom on the other.
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5.7 THE WORKERS During the beginning of the uprisings, Western and Egyptian media reported the explosive Tahrir square protests as mainly organized by middle-class movements of students and intellectuals, battling for political freedom and armed with social media. This popular narrative’s discourse holds that it was mainly when young people initiated the popular uprisings, that Egyptian workers shut down the country’s port and public services in solidarity. However, a historical view indicates the quite opposite. It established a picture of years of labor organization that laid the groundwork for the protests during the 2011 revolution (Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014). Also, academic literature often inclined to forget or undermine the parallel revolutions happening all around Egypt, among them the workers strike. The examination of the worker as a revolutionary subject is important to take into consideration to fully understand the political sphere beyond the ‘Tahrir square revolution’. What was their role individually and collectively, and how did the workers political imaginaries evolve and change along with the revolution? The following chapter will start out by establishing a brief historical view of the workers movement, followed by an examination of the workers role during the 2011 Tahrir square revolution and beyond. The chapter sums up by analyzing the tendency of a parallel revolution and lack of proletariat hegemony.
5.7.1 The Mahalla uprisings A turning point in the sociogenesis and emancipatory struggle of the Egyptian workers started in the 1980’s with the strikes of the textile workers of Ghazl al-Mahalla – the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kubra. Ghazl al-Mahalla is of economic and symbolic importance to the whole Egyptian workers movement. It is the biggest factory in the Arab world occupying 1,000 acres of land and employing some 27,000 workers. Since Mahalla’s foundation, it has often acted as the vanguard of the working class by initiating protests and articulating the interests of the Egyptian working class. The first real strike was in 1938, followed by the important strike in 1988, in which the workers for the first time clearly stated, ‘Down with Hosni Mubarak’. This strike however was brutally repressed by security forces, and after its defeat, the workers were paralyzed through the 1990’s. In 2008 the workers stroked once again and demanded a national minimum wage, improved living conditions, and raised political slogans against the president and his son. There was a pressure on the strike committee to cancel the strike, but in the end mahalla workers and their families participated in the street protest as citizen and were met by violence and the insurrection was quelled. After the revolt the Mahalla movement disintegrated, and despite of the talk about creating an independent trade union, this formation did not develop beyond the level of the strike committee.
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The proletarian movement lost its center and its vanguard with the defeat of the Mahalla uprising. Nonetheless, the Mahalla protests had initiative a new wave of worker movement that did not simply subside after 2008, but instead encouraged other workplaces and sectors to stimulate demands and organizational forms. The movement found a new model for organization in the form of Real Estate Tax Authority Union (retau). It inspired even before other movements to create their own independent trade unions even before the 25th January revolution (Ibid.).
5.7.2 The proletariat as a revolutionary subject The intensity of popular mobilization experienced during the ’18 days’ uprisings forced the highest military commanders to sacrifice Mubarak. Anne Alexander & Mostafa Bassiouny accordingly argue in their work Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution that it was not only the scale of popular mobilization that transformed the regime’s crisis, but also its character. It was not until the workers began to protest as workers through strike action, that Mubarak’s fall occurred. The government during the first week and a half of the uprising locked out the workers of their workplaces by closing companies, banks and shops. Once the government had reopened businesses on February 2011 however, workers brought back the insurrection into their workplaces by striking or demonstrating as class actors. Their demands included the setting of a minimum wage, the employment of temporary workers, the return of privatized companies to the state, the reinstatement of workers fired for striking, and equal pay for workers. Despite the fact that workers often did not list the fall of the Illustration 1: Adams, 2011 regime among their demands, they nevertheless chanted the same radical slogans as the occupiers on Tahrir. The regime’s capital strike was replaced with spontaneous workers protest that imported the uprisings to workplaces over the whole country. The strikes functioned as a threat due to their damage on both short-term interests of private capitalists, public companies, and military entrepreneurs and direct threat to the economic structure of the historical bloc (Ibid.). De smet (2016) argues that except by a reconfiguration of the economic structure the political revolution could not succeed, and the economic structure could not transform unless the political power was captured by the subaltern classes. Also, according to Alexander & Bassiouny the strikes played a role in dispersing the revolution back outwards, from the major public
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squares into new spaces across the cities. They argue that the insurrection had was born in the suburbs and carried inwards, to the heart of the cities with the marches which fought through ranks of police to seize the major public squares. A new urban geography of revolution was born due to the strikes.
5.7.3 A working class without hope “No matter how much or how hard you work, everything goes to the thieves in this country.”
(858 archives, 2011)
This slogan has filled the streets at the numerous labor strikes all over Egypt in 2011. The above chapters created a brief picture of the workers political action before and during the 25 January revolution. This chapter aims to create a deeper insight into the revolutionary subjectivity that occurred and evolved among the workers. How can we understand their political imaginaries and self-perception during the uprisings?
During the Mubarak regime, despite of the existence of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), which were originally set up by Nasser in 1957, the work conditions at the huge Egyptian companies were very poor and corrupt (Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014). A worker employed at Cairo express, whose interview is published at the 858 websites, describes the conditions at Cairo express during the Mubarak regime, which later lead to strikes:
“Basically, our pay was around 165 Egyptian pounds every month. It doesn’t pay anything. Already the rent is around 600 Egyptian pounds. They used to make us sign new contracts every year, so we won’t get paid salary increases. So, if you worked 15 years it counts as one year. Also, I didn’t even have a health insurance. I need a health insurance at least for myself, because if something happens to me, who is going to pay for my family? I am in a huge debt already.”
(858 archives, 2011)
After the fall of Mubarak, the employees at Cairo express demanded higher wages, followed by a reaction of the management by firing 11 workers. The other workers at the company, as well as at the other Cairo express departments in Luxor and Aswan ended up striking. The management however didn’t accept the requests and ended up firing everyone including the employees at the other departments.
“We thought that after the revolution we had the freedom of speech and requests through our unions, which we were informed about now, so we thought we could ask for a higher wage, but then we got
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fired. We have thousands of Mubarak’s everywhere.” The Egyptian worker at Cairo express concludes (858 archives, 2011)
5.7.4 A revolution within the revolution “If we work as one integral part, we can achieve something. We want to negotiate with the state minister, who is part of us, but we refuse to negotiate with the military who exists and is controlled by foreign forces. The political revolutionaries were not able to achieve something at Midan al-tahrir within the ten days. However, we can achieve something by striking at our work-places. The revolution must start with us. We will really start out this revolution.”
(858 archives, 2011)
This passage is taken from a Shebin al kom textile workers strike in April 2011. This discourse has been existing all over Egypt among the workers that viewed the ‘Tahrir revolution’ as not being able to create successful change. The most notable aspect about this discourse, however, is how there was a revolution within a revolution, or in other words there existed parallel revolutions. While of course, there has been workers among the Tahrir revolutionaries, most of them however were protesting outside of the Tahrir frame. Despite of the use of the same slogans as the Tahrir revolutionaries, the fall of the Mubarak regime initially wasn’t part of their demands. The Tahrir revolution has been mainly characterized by the intellectual youth and online activists with other priorities such as freedom and democracy, which the workers not consider their first priority in their ‘political fight’ or necessarily identify themselves with. Thus, the workers represent a revolutionary subjectivity that existed beyond Tahrir. From the beginning of the uprisings there existed a continuous exchange that had taken place between Tahrir and participants from other Cairo neighborhoods, provincial and even rural areas. When the regime closed the roads, farmers who were not able to return home, joined the protests at the Tahrir, and when they returned to their own cities, they often transposed the participation in the self-governance existing at the square to the local sites of protests. However, these connections were very poor due to the connections lack of system and coherence. Representatives of the four independent unions at the square decided to constitute the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) as a potential Centre for the workers’ movement. Based on demands that emerged spontaneously from the strike movement since 2006, they formulated a class program including a national minimum and maximum wage, the right to establish independent trade unions and the abolition of the GFETU, the right to strike and protest, the renationalization of privatized companies, the cleansing of the public sector of corrupt managers, improved healthcare,
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and the abolition of temporary contracts (Alexander A. & Bassiouny, 2014). De smet (2015) in his book Gramsci on Tahrir refers to Gramsci’s emphasis of a permanent revolution understood as the formation of proletarian hegemony. In other words, there is a need for a hegemonic apparatus that actively and consciously integrates the different lines of development of the class struggle. He refers to the Russian revolution of 1905 and 1970, in which soviets’ worker’s and soldier’s councils connected the class struggle with the fight for democracy under the leadership of the working class. In the Egyptian uprisings however, the popular movement lacked such a directive organ that takes decisions. Thus, de smet argues, in order to transform the situation at Tahrir, its revolutionary ‘governance’ had to be shared with neighborhoods and workplaces all over Egypt. Tahrir did not have to only function as an alternative society, but also as the hegemonic apparatus of the revolutionary movement by connecting to the struggles waged up by the popular mases outside its border. The ‘Tahrir revolution’ had to transform its concrete political imaginary into national leadership. Neil Ketchley (2017) moreover argues that the labor protests during the 25th January revolution were uncoordinated with few advanced anti-systemic demands and began out to late. Newspaper account record that workers and state employees are being present in the earliest anti Mubarak protests, but that was mostly alongside other political forces, and there was no record of large sustained labor protests in Egypt’s industrial heartlands in the first two weeks of the protest Mubarak. By the time the labor protests really began to mobilize, the military officers were openly defecting to the protest occupation in Midan al Tahrir and elsewhere.
5.7.5 Independent trade unions One of the main important developments in the beginning of the uprisings is the growth of the independent trade unions in the wake of Mubarak’s departure on 11th February 2011, which played a huge role in the organization and coordination of the different struggles and strikes and have almost entirely been formed since the 25th January movement started. Over half a million Egyptians, including workers, farmers, and pensioners began forming their own syndicates and trade unions. These unions were linked together in an “Independent Trade Union Federation”, with an estimated 150 separate unions and syndicates (Alexander A. & Bassiouny, 2014).
These new unions were called independent as they were a contrast to the old trade unions the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), which were originally set up by Nasser in 1957. These unions did not act as tool of struggles for the working class, more than they were instruments to control the working class. As Haitham Mohjamedein, a labor lawyer and advisor for several independent trade
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unions, explains in an article entitled “The road to trade union independence” on Ahram Online (2011):
“Since its creation in 1957, the government controlled GFTU has opposed demands by workers and their movements, condemning strikes and sit-ins and informed on labor leaders. The main role of the trade union was to ensure the subservience of labor to government, and later on, private business as well (…) GFTU approved the privatization of state-owned enterprises which laid off hundreds of thousands of workers because of blatantly corrupt deals and wasted public funds. It also actively participated in the suppression of labor protests against the privatization process.”
Nevertheless, these unions were the only mass organizations available for workers, which forced revolutionaries to work inside them. In the months after February 2011, power shifted from the old GFTU to the new independent trade unions. While the workers were building their new unions, they were struggling for the breakup of the old GFTU, which on the 4th of August 2011 lead the Minister of Labor Ahmed Al-Boraie to declare the GFTU as dissolved (Alexander A. & Bassiouny, 2014).
5.7.6 The workers position during the Morsi regime Despite of the establishment of independent trade unions, the euphoria amongst the Egyptian masses after the fall of Mubarak did slowly disappear. A harsh reality in which political, social and economic conditions have barely changed, did set in (Adams, 2011). Especially after the 2012 elections in which the Muslim brotherhood party won the election, the workers were far from satisfied, especially with the establishment of the new constitution, which didn’t consider the rights of the poor workers. Morsi took concrete steps to ensure the continuation of the military’s economic and political privileges by protecting the police from reform on one side and strove to maintain the old-trade union federation’s domination of workplace organization on the other.
Official statistics indicate a decline in key conditions of many workers’ living standards during 2012– 13. Unemployment rose from 12 per cent in the last quarter of 2011 to 13.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2013. According to The Annual Bulletin on Employment, Wages and Hours of Work for the year 2012 experienced an increase in the average worker’s wage in the public sector of LE657 per week in 2011 to LE845 per week in 2012 but records the wages of workers in the private sector as falling from LE397 in 2011 to LE395 in 2012. Monthly Bulletin of Indices of Consumer Prices for the month of April 2013 indicates that the rapid rises accompanied the deteriorating wage packets. Since January 2010 the overall inflation on consumer prices stood at 36 per cent, and on food and drinks the prices
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even experienced a rise of 53 per cent rise for the same period. This meant an increased pressure on the living standards for millions of working-class families, who spent around 30 per cent on their expenditure in food and drink. Also, no changed in taxation policies has occurred, in which the limit for tax exemption was revised upwards from LE9,000 to LE12,000 per year in the state budget for 2013–14. This rise has been set in 2011 and failed to take into consideration the rising inflation and stagnant or declining wages (Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014).
“We just want a normal life, we don’t ask for a car or a house, but just for food. We don’t want to go on the streets and beg.” This was the discourse during the many worker strikes that appeared since President Morsi came to power (858 archives, 2012)
A report by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights documents in 2012 a marked increase in the rates of social protests, especially labor protests. The ECESR also reported a further rise of social protests in 2013. According to a report by the Democracy Index issued by the Centre for International Development in 5,544 protests took place in the period from January to May 2013. Not all of them were labor protests, but they did contest a leading place in the overall number of social protests. As illustrated in figure 1 2013’s Figure 1: Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014 report from the IDC gives a total of 864 protests. whereas a further 33 per cent were directly workers’ protests. The source of the data analyzed is based on media reports on protests, and thus there are many reasons why these sources can’t report some protests and report inaccurately on others. Also, the exact number of participants is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, it is still reasonable to conclude that these figures indicate an overall trend of a rise in social protests during Morsi’s presidency.
The demands that the workers raised over the preceding years remained unmet despite of the fall of Mubarak. The dissolution of the ETUF’s executive was only carried through at the top level of the Federation, and not at the middle level of the general unions, nor the workplace union committees. The dissolvement of the lower levels of the Federation sends a clear signal of the unwillingness of state officials to relinquish the ETUF as a means to intervene in the workplaces. The Muslim Brotherhood proved to be an important ally of the ETUF bureaucracy, as he dissolution of the ETUF opened an opportunity for the insertion of a few more members of the Brotherhood into the top of the
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Federation. The Brotherhood continuously determined the facilitation of a bureaucratic model of trade unionism patterned precisely on the ETUF can be seen in the draft law on trade-union organization drawn up in 2012. Their remaining existence in the law provoked an unusual degree of unity across the two major independent union federations, and the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of mounting a ‘savage’ attack on workers’ rights.
Campaign leaflets prepared by the EFITU laid out the independent unionists’ criticisms: “The Brotherhood’s draft law proposes trade-union structures in the form of a pyramid (workplace union committees – general unions – general federation). All authority is concentrated in the general federation, which the government or security forces can put under pressure, while the workplace union committees have no powers. Workers themselves are the decision-makers. They must be able to elect their leaders freely and exercise authority over them.”
(Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014).
5.7.7 The crisis over the constitution The economic program by Morsi ‘Renaissance Project’, confirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment to the neoliberal norms of the old regime. In the new constitution Morsi stated that presidential decision could not be challenged by any entity. Liberal, leftist and the revolutionary youth groups called protests that brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets. Meanwhile the final votes on the draft constitution were rushed through Constituent Assembly, but still it was lacking almost all representation of other non-Islamist political groups. During the Mubarak regime there was an obligation of apparent in constitution of the state to guarantee social rights including to housing, free health care and education. The 2012 constitution however, either deleted many of these provisions or couched the relevant clauses relevant clauses in ambiguous language and refused to specify any mechanisms for their implementation. While article 14 included the provision of a minimum and maximum wage, there was no specific criteria for the relationship between them, and moreover allowed exceptions to the maximum wage, which was only applicable to state employees. The same article also linked wage levels to productivity rather than prices, which was a very provocative decision after years of inflationary pressure on the cost of living. Article 63 also states that the state is not required to find jobs for citizens or support the unemployed or guarantee to provide social insurance (Ibid.). Shahend, a leader of the workers and feminist movement, fighting for the rights of the poor, farmers and working-class all-over Egypt, during an interview published at the 858 website argues:
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“We want the constitution to be based on the wishes of workers and peasants in this country, and not only laws in the favor of the rich businessmen ruled by American-Israeli political and economic plans. They made very broad law formulations in the constitution, which are ambiguous and open for interpretation (…) Morsi wants to control the country through religion.”
(858 archives, 2012)
The 2012 constitution was a recast version of the old regime, but one where the balance has tipped even further towards neoliberalism. In the light of the form of unions independent of the state, it was mainly the old-Nasserist system that stayed intact, but the only different this time, that they had a liberal cover. The large number of strikes and social protests against the new constitution consisted of a major alliance of the National Salvation Front, a coalition encompassing Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi, liberal figures such as Mohamed ElBaradei. The character of that front combined elements of the old regime and mainstream liberals, and thus precluded any serious orientation on social demands (Alexander & Bassiouny, 2014). “Morsi controls and owns the military. He changes out people at the states apparatus as he likes, and according to their party’s interests.” Shahend continues (858 Archives, 2012). The ideological terrain that fought over the constitution was in favor of the key elements of the old regime.
Furthermore, Shahend argues that the farmers and workers that were functioning as representatives at the parliament, often where chosen by based on criteria such as if they own land: “Not everyone can represent the farmers and workers in the parliament. Just because you have a certain number of square meters of land doesn’t mean you know what is going on, on the ground. The regime is corrupt and only wants certain people with money to be represented at the parliament.” (Ibid.).
5.7.8 Chapter conclusion The Tahrir revolution has been mainly characterized by the intellectual youth and online activists and often undermined the role of the workers that presented a revolutionary subjectivity beyond the ‘Tahrir revolution’ Eventhough there were some workers among the protestors at the Tahrir square at the initial stages of the revolution, they later shifted into worker strikes at the work-places. Moreover, the exchange that had taken place between Tahrir and other neighborhoods, provincial and even rural areas often lacked system and coherence. Suddenly this political scene emerged into parallel revolutions with different discourses and demands all over the country. There was a lack of hegemonic apparatus among the workers, and Tahrir suddenly only functioned as an alternative society instead of transforming its political imaginary into national leadership. During the Morsi
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regime, the workers position also didn’t became better, as despite of the emergence of the independent trade unions, the dissolution of the ETUF’s executive only was carried through at the top level of the Federation, and the Morsi regime formulated ambiguous formulations of workers’ rights in the constitution.
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5.8 THE ISLAMIST REVOLUTIONARY The mass uprisings that appeared across the Arab region in 2011, and suddenly toppled long- entrenched authoritarian regimes, were composed by ordinary citizens. It appeared that ideologically based social movements, long perceived to be the agents of social and political change, weren’t able to bring about such change. For a brief moment, it seemed as if these movements lost their role as the agents of change, and instead were replaced by non-ideologically committed coalitions of ordinary citizens. In the Egyptian uprisings, it was not the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest and most organized social and political movement, that started the revolution – actually they were late in officially joining the ideologically diverse revolutionary forces. However, things took a turn after the removal of Hosni Mubarak, when the arena of contestation moved from the street to negotiations with the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) and directly to the ballot box. That is when Egypt’s non-ideological coalitions were replaced as the main actors by the Muslim Brotherhood. What are the reasonings behind this sudden turn of main revolutionary’s and political change setters? How can an organization which initially wasn’t part of pushing the revolution, suddenly be able to stand politically strong and collect a huge part of the Egyptian people to vote for them? To make sense of this process it is important to understand the political and social dynamics that were driving factors for this crucial moment of political culture between the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the 2012 elections. Thus, it is important to take a look at the impact the Muslim brotherhood had on the political scene in this time period, as well as how they were able to organize themselves as a strong political party and gain popularity and credibility among the Egyptian society. Finally, it is important to dig deeper into the Islamic revolutionary’s political imagination about their past, present and future (Momani & Mohamed, 2016).
5.8.1 The Muslim brotherhood during the Mubarak regime During the more than thirty-year regime of Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood went through both periods of political openness and repression, which caused significant changes in its political behavior and political strategies. Following the assentation of Anwar Sadat by militant extremists in 1981, Mubarak released many brotherhood members imprisoned under Sadat, and began to build a relationship and use the brotherhood as a counterweight to growing extremism in Egypt. Even though Mubarak allows the Muslim brotherhood to remain socially and political independent, they still were officially banned from direct political participation. In the 1990’s the Muslim brotherhood started criticizing the government and its policies, redefining its nature and its relationship to the regime. What once was a movement primarily focusing on social services now was evolving into a more
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formal party with political ambitions. In the 1990’s the Muslim brotherhood took a clear standpoint against the regime by joining the opposition party, Al-Wafd. The Muslim Brotherhood had an ability of organizing and mobilizing itself very quickly, and thus allowed it to publicize its political ambitions. It had resources in rural areas and a presence in urban areas, which led to the effective distribution and rapid mobilization of its efforts, which proved to be more efficient than the regime. In the Muslim brotherhood’s electoral success in 2005 the brotherhood issued a statement saying that their top priority is to press for general political reform in Egypt, or islah, which is primarily based in instituting Sharia principles. The Muslim brotherhood focused a lot on transparency. Given the enormity of its mandate in 2005, the brotherhood filled a four-story building in the Minyal district of Cairo with experts on parliamentary issues, dedicating entire floors to social, economic, and political legislation. The building sits on a major road in a bustling neighborhood, and thus signaled the nature of the brotherhood’s work to both regime and the public masses. Also, the brotherhood launched its own website nawabikhwan.org (no longer in existence), to provide information on their activity and voting behavior, stream video conferences, and offer taped broadcasts to various media outlets. Thus, the Muslim brotherhood ran on a strategy of transparency, and became the most visibly organized political group in the country. The Muslim brotherhood began to be the regime’s largest threat, because its social activities and now its strong political presence were beginning to highlight the gross incompetence of the Mubarak regime. The brotherhood with its ideological moderation and political activity emerged as the new face of political Islam in Egypt, and nevertheless served as the undoing of the Mubarak regime. Short while after the 2010 parliamentary elections, millions of Egyptians filled the streets in Tahrir square among them moderate members of the brotherhood, and eighteen days after they overthrew Mubarak (Ibid.).
5.8.2 A highly organized party During the revolution the Muslim brotherhood was not at the forefront of political protests and did not actually participate in the initial uprisings. They seemed to have taken a strategy in which they wanted to avoid upsetting either the protesters or the government, unsure where the revolution might lead. This move that seemed to avoid challenging Mubarak directly was taken not well by the Egyptian revolutionaries. It increased both the tension with Egyptian society and within the brotherhood itself. There was a discourse among especially the leftist revolutionaries, that was deeply angry about the Muslim brotherhood stealing the revolution from them:
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“The Muslim brotherhood has not really participated in these protests whatsoever. They want the elections to go forward as planned, and they are being accused to buy the revolutionary use of political opportunism.” Khalid Abdallah argues (Tahrir square, 2013).
Due to the increasing tension towards the Muslim brotherhood, we can’t help but wonder how the Muslim brotherhood got the majority of voices in the second round of the 2012 elections. This phenomenon can be explained by taking a closer look at the Brotherhoods’ well thought strategy of political organization, and the important role of religion. Compared to other political groups and political forces, the only united group with a leader apparent at the Tahrir square was the Muslim brotherhood. Their history of organization and geographical existence outside of the ‘Tahrir square’ were two very strong advantages compared to other unorganized groups with no clear common ideology as described in chapter four. This was not only an advantage compared to their opponents, but also within the Brotherhood itself. Magdy Ashour, member of the Muslim brotherhood, and activist at the Tahrir square argues: “If there were alternatives, I wouldn’t want Morsi.” (Tahrir square, 2013)
Magdy’s wife furthermore argues:
“Honestly, I don’t care about whether it is Mubarak or Morsi. We just wat a decent man to rule with justice. I don’t care if he is a Jew. Magdy has five children. How does he provide for them?” She argues in a frustrated voice, implying that the Muslim brotherhood at least provides them with economic security (Ibid.).
The Muslim brotherhood, especially during the time of uncertainty after the fall of Mubarak, functioned as both an only alternative and economic rational and safe choice, for both supporters of the Brotherhood and beyond. Moreover, the brotherhood was very well represented and spread all over Egypt among them many women. Schielke during his work on his book Egypt in the future tense conducted an interview with Baybar, a leftist revolutionary resident in the village Nazlat al-Rayas. He described the pattern of voters at the referendum ballot box in Nazlat al-Rayas as follows:
“Then towards the evening came a wave of uneducated people, mainly women. They mostly voted yes, because the Muslim Brothers had told them that it would please God, and because they were not used to saying no.”
(Schielke, 2015)
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Baybar points this out as a fundamental problem as they are mostly men among the revolutionaries, and in the village society they are not really allowed to talk to women that are not relatives. In contrast, the Muslim brotherhood mobilized the female vote in the 2012 referendum by letting their wives and daughters go on friendly home visits and arguing that voting yes for the constitution was voting yes for Islam, stability, a better economy, and the accomplishment of the goals of the revolution (Ibid.). This dialectical use of religion and economic stability as a strategic policy to reach to people leads us to analyze why religion mattered so much to people after the fall of Mubarak, and make sense of this important tendency, which we slightly have touched upon in chapter five.
5.8.3 The power of religion The people who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood party during the 2012 referendum can be divided into two groups. First, the Islamist revolutionaries, who also during the pre-revolutionary era, were supporting the Muslim brotherhood including the Salafists. The other group is including the group of revolutionaries, which I previously defined as followers in chapter five, and who were part of the initial uprisings at the Tahrir square. They didn’t have a clear ideological position, but they wanted something to change, including the fall of Mubarak. Authors within the field like to differentiate the activists from the Salafists to make sense of the revolution, but the question isn’t about how they differ, rather than what they share. By understanding the commitment to religion these groups share, we can understand how they ended up voting for the Muslim brotherhood in the 2012 referendum.
Schielke (2017) argues that in circumstances where all promises of a good life are in some ways troubled, religion often offers a powerful promise and clarity. For many people religion is an important part of their lives and imaginations, and often a direct source of a good life. He especially focuses on the term ‘iltizam’ or commitment, which he argues is current in Egypt. To understand Salafi commitment, we must take into account the specific character of given activist movements as well as the personal idiosyncrasies and comparative moments of activist dedication. However, Salafi commitment is not about strictly follow a path more than it is about cultivating a Salafi mood, or in other words a way to think about god in everyday life. The mood opens a path of dedication for those who for various reasons, look for a certainty, a certain sense of purpose or a way to tell them right from wrong. Also, key religious practices have a strongly suggestive character due to their repetitive nature, in which they create clear hierarchies, clarity and certainty. This commitment has also increasingly been strengthened among other revolutionary groups. The uncertainty after the fall of Mubarak, and the numerous political movements and parties that emerged along with it, were leading
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into hundred different directions, and with hundreds of different ideologies, which evolved into a huge mess of uncertainty about the future. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood with its well organized and religious character functioned as a straightforward solution during a confusing time. “Morsi is a man who I trust with my religion. Can’t I trust him with my politics too?” Magdy Ashour argues (The square, 2013). This discourse indicates that there existed a strong belief in god and religion commitment. The Muslim Brotherhood was a political symbol for this belief, and this the brotherhood used by running a political strategy based on religion to gain further sympathy and credibility among people.
5.8.4 Conclusion chapter The referendum elections in 2012, in which the Morsi-party ended up with the majorities of votes, chocked the nation, especially among the leftist revolutionaries. However, eventhough many didn’t expect this outcome, the Muslim Brotherhood played their cards on a well thought political strategy. First, they were an organized party already before the 2011 revolution, and they were the only united group with a leader at the Tahrir square. Moreover, their political organization and members are distributed all over Egypt, and thus were able to appeal to all layers of society beyond the bigger city intellectuals and youth. Also, they were good at mobilizing women compared to other revolutionary groups. However, beside of their political organization, the political scene after the fall of Mubarak was filled with uncertainty and doubts. The lower middle-class was split between commitment to religion and values of freedom and democracy on the other side, while at the same having worries about their future economic situation. Thus, many of them sought towards a stable solution, that promised them a good life. The Muslim brotherhood, in the name of religion appealed to these group of people, which turned out to be a successful political strategy.
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6 DISCUSSION: A SOCIETY SPLIT BETWEEN HOPE AND FRUSTRATION
Where did the revolution leave us after the ups and downs experienced between 2011-2013, and the following counterrevolution? What did it change inside of people, or did it? The political Egyptian scene is filled with open unanswered questions, frustrations, hopelessness and anxiety on one hand and hope and courage and a feeling of empowerment on the other. As a lot of researchers, among them the important Egyptian author Alaa Al-Aswany (The guardian, 2016), concerned with the Egyptian revolutionary subject argue, this revolution hasn’t been a political revolution more than it has been a human revolution. It changed people’s perception of themselves and created the identity of a ‘revolutionary subject’ which is able to speak up. This chapter discusses the political culture after the revolution, and where it has left a society that suddenly were able to mobilize and overthrow a 30-year old regime, only to quickly turn back and accept a harsh reality of violence, repression and authoritarianism. These sudden changing events over a short time period created paradoxical emotions among the Egyptian people, but nevertheless necessary emotions as Bjørn Thomassen argues.
6.1 A REVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN?
Several authors such as Bjørn Thomassen (2014) and Bayat Asef (2017) have each in their own theoretical approach been very interested in the transitional phase of the Egyptian revolution, or what some authors in academic terms describe as liminality. Thomassen describes this phase in his book Liminality and the modern- living through the in-between as follows:
“Liminality is a universal concept: cultures and human lives cannot exist without moments of transition, and those brief and important spaces where we live through the in-between. Such transitions mark us, they stamp our personalities, and that is the way it will always be.”
(Thomassen, 2014)
While a lot of authors working with the Egyptian revolution focused a lot on the outcome of the counterrevolution and the ‘failure’ of the revolution to implement democracy, these authors view this ‘failure’ as a necessary transitional step towards change. Bayat in his work revolutions without revolutionaries draws on a protester’s sign reading “Half revolution, No revolution.” He maps out the Arab uprising’s path to meaningful change – defying authoritarian powers that have governed for
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over three generations. Bayat scrutinizes how ordinary people through revolutionary mottos and dreams, formulate their concerns and express their demands through revolutionary acts. Despite of the fact that of course the goals of the Egyptian revolution did not fully materialize, the movement nevertheless generated Alain Badiou’s notion of a “communism of movements”, Bayat argues. All the activities at the Tahrir square- from fighting to eating and sharing evolved a new era of doing politics (Bayat, 2017). Ahmad during an interview conducted for the documentary the square clearly feels the change within people: “If you ask me what the revolutions biggest victory is? It’s that kids today play a game called ‘protest.” (The square, 2013)
Bayat (2017) contends that what characterized the most enduring legacy of the Arab uprisings, is the transformation in consciousness. While the Egyptian uprisings on one side seemed to have failed to replace autocratic states, it has on the other side empowered the urban subaltern – including the poor, women and youth, and mobilized them into tackling long-lasting political structures. These social groups, according to Bayat learned how to manage their livelihoods at a time of economic crisis, and became a symbol of consciousness and bravery, generating the spirit of resistance and struggle. Ordinary people transformed as they gained power and agency. Specific realms such as setting up a new union in Egypt and removing employers who violated traditional employment rights, suddenly evolved a new agenda among people. He concludes by suggesting that we must look for long-term results, and that the shift from an oppressive old to the new liberatory will not succeed without relentless struggle. Khalid Abdallah, young liberal online activist argues as such:
“There is no way in which the goals of the revolution: Bread, freedom, justice, dignity – there is no way in which these things can be achieved in two years. What you can do is lay the ground for them to actually happen. You don’t have your rights when you have taken them for granted, when you are killed – things become very clear. I think what is happening is more powerful than any individual and any organization. Something fundamental inside people has changed. I don’t know how you kill that.”
(The square, 2013)
Khalid Abdallah argues how something fundamental changed inside of people. Thomassen describes this process as both social and personal. This liminal process, he argues, reminds us of the moment we left our parent’s home, and the strange mixed feelings we experience of joy, anxiety, freedom and homelessness. This unsettling sensation of infinity and openness of possibilities, that also occurred
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during the liminal moment in the Egyptian revolution, at some moment, sooner or later, will mobilize people into searching for a new frame to settle within (Thomassen, 2014). However, while the liminal process changes something within people, the kind of change occurred after the uprisings, might be under discussion.
6.2 A SPLIT REVOLUTION “Before the uprisings, despite of the corruption, you always knew the reasons, and inflation wasn’t as bad as it is now. This inflation had a huge influence on me and my friends, and despite of the bad situation during the Mubarak regime, the economic situation in the country wasn’t as bad as it is now. In the beginning of the uprisings in 2011, I was very hopeful. I thought now something might change in this country. I will finally become rich and get my rights. I thought 2-3 years from now one. Egypt will look differently, and we will achieve equal rights, but unfortunately this was very naive of me and other people to believe. We were very optimistic, but things in reality are just different. After this, we experienced emotions of depression and hopelessness. I wish we never were given this hope, because anyone who first gets hope, will end up even more frustrated and disappointed. If you haven’t had hope and ended up disappointed, you will at least always still have hopes and dreams about the future, that something might still change. But if something huge like this happens, and still nothing changes, this is the worst feeling ever you can experience in life.”
(Appendix 1, 2018, p.2)
This is how Kareem Alaa describes the political scene in Egypt during an interview conducted in 2018. Kareem already before the 2011 revolution was politically active by supporting the Nobel Peace Prize Mohammad ElBaradei, who in 2012 became founder of the constitution party ‘hizb al-destour and aimed to protect and promote the principles and objectives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, according to liberal ideals. During the Egyptian uprisings in 2011 Kareem actively participated at the sit-ins at the Tahrir square. However, he now argues that his mission is not for the country anymore, but only for himself. His friends and family feel the same, because things became very complicated. People tried to change something, and they gave up now, especially after the Morsi-regime people experienced the chaos and instability, and lack of security that appeared. “At least now you feel secure.” he continues (Ibid.)
Ahdaf Soueif, Egyptian novelist and commentator also concludes that the people are realizing that they are further than ever from their aims:
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“The killings they suffered, the fascist phase when they colluded in the killing of others – all count for nothing. The grand projects touted by the government – even if they are real – will have no effect on the lives of the poor (…) The infrastructure of people’s daily lives – hospitals, schools, transport, employment – is getting worse. The reasons people came out in 2011 are still there – are more acute. The euphoric hope generated by Ben Ali’s swift departure from Tunis has been replaced by horror at the spectacle of Libya, Syria and Yemen. People feel they have tried what is available – revolution, political Islam – and nothing has worked. Where is the alternative, they ask.”
(The guardian, 2016)
He concludes by arguing that the regime is trying to do anything to ensure that there is no alternative. The regime is cancelling student elections, closing cultural spaces and outlaw associations. Also, especially journalists, photographers, students and doctors and engineers all endure harsh conditions in jail (Ibid.). Alaa Abd El Fattah, an important Egyptian blogger and most prominent activist during the uprisings faced a trial on a 15-year prison sentence for violating the country's protest law. It was the harshest sentence given to secular activists amid an ongoing government crackdown that mainly targets supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Alaa Abdel Fattah during an interview in 2017 looks back at the revolution and says:
“I spent most of 2014 in prison, yet I still had lots of words. But by early 2015 as I heard my sentence I had nothing left to say to any public (…) I have nothing to say: no hopes, no dreams, no fears, no warnings, no insights; nothing, absolutely nothing. I try to remember what it was like when tomorrow seemed so full of possibility and my words seemed to have the power to influence (if only slightly) what that tomorrow would look like. Now tomorrow will be exactly like today and yesterday and all the days preceding and all the days following, I have no influence over anything.”
(The guardian, 2016)
The liminality process seemed to have turned from being very optimistic with a discourse of empowerment and self-rule into being a hopeless sphere of disappointment. People have tried all alternatives of change, and ended up at the exact same place, with the exact same regime as the one during the Mubarak era. This disappointment lies deep inside of people. Nevertheless, as Ketchley concludes in his work ‘Egypt in a time of revolution’: “If and when the next episode of mass mobilization occurs, Egyptians will be able to draw on a readymade repertoire for making public
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their defiance, even if their methods of dissent are now problematically familiar to the forces.” (Ketchley, 2017)
Although the disappointment of the revolution has been huge, it is still reasonable to argue that an awareness of mobilization and political organization had been awakened inside the Egyptian individual, which has been repressed under the rule of Mubarak. Now people can draw back on a readymade repertoire of revolution when mass mobilization occurs. Thus, the picture indicates that a new revolutionary subjectivity was created, which despite of people’s disappointment, now is engraved deep inside of people’s memories and self-perception.
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7 CONCLUSION
This study sought to investigate how an identification of the existing revolutionary subjectivities during the Egyptian uprisings can explain the split political sphere after the fall of Mubarak, and the emergence of the counterrevolution.
Therefore, this study has established four different categorizations of the revolutionary subjects that existed during the uprisings. The leftist and liberal revolutionaries (the initiators) at the Tahrir square were not able to organize due to lack of experience and knowledge. Additionally, the repression of liberal ideology and values during the autocratic Mubarak regime, made people associate liberalism with something western and anti-religious. These obstacles made it hard for the liberal youth to organize, compared to the Muslim Brotherhood that has a long history of political organization. Moreover, the split political sphere can be explained by the moral struggle of commitment to religion and liberal values. The followers, consisting mainly of the Egyptian lower middle-class, followed the initiating leftist revolutionaries in their protest against the old regime, but without vision for an alternative. After Mubarak’s fall, they suddenly found themselves in an uncertain scene of endless possibilities with an unknown future. Thus, they quickly sought towards something known with certain rules and rituals, and this is where religion became an increasingly important aspect of the development of the revolution. The Muslim brotherhood, while of course being a well-organized party distributed all over Egypt, also played their cards right by appealing to the people in an uncertain political sphere filled with doubts about the future. Many people followed a stable solution, that promised them a good life, and the Muslim brotherhood appealed towards these needs in the name of god, which turned out to work well for them based on the outcome of the 2012 referendum. Finally, the ‘Tahrir revolutionaries’ excluded other groups of revolutionaries such as the workers, who with their own demands outside of the Tahrir square, were initiating worker strikes at their work places. The exchange that has taken place between Tahrir and other areas often lacked system and coherence, and there was a lack of hegemonic apparatus for revolutionaries all over Egypt. The Tahrir square suddenly only functioned as an alternative society instead of creating a common political imaginary including revolutionary groups all over Egypt. Thus, the analysis of the revolutionary subject indicates that the role of religion, lack of strategic political organization and the appearance of parallel revolutions in other areas all influenced the outcome of the 2012 elections and are part of explaining why the revolutionaries ‘failed’ in implementing their initial demands on a long-term basis, and quickly fell into old patterns.
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