The Egyptian Revolution Imaginaries of the good life during the 18 days of revolution at Tahrir Square in 2011 PhD-dissertation by Line Mex-Jørgensen Centre for contemporary Middle East studies 2020 Supervised by Professor Dietrich Jung 1 Content FOREWORD ........................................................................................................................................................ 7 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................... 10 Imaginaries of the good life .............................................................................................................. 11 Revolution as prefiguration ..................................................................................................................... 11 Revolutionary imaginaries of the good life ............................................................................................. 13 The Egyptian Revolution as a contestation over modern imaginaries of the good life ......................... 15 Contingency, agency and the modern condition .................................................................................... 16 The political in ordinary life and the importance of ordinary life in modernity ...................................... 18 The global and the local – or how to make the Arab world modern ...................................................... 19 Three ideal typical ways of creating order in modernity ..................................................................... 19 The classical bourgeois subject in restricted liberal modernity .............................................................. 21 The peer-group oriented cultural type of the salaried masses in organized modernity ........................ 22 The post-modern creative entrepreneur in extended liberal modernity ............................................... 23 A discourse-based analytical approach .............................................................................................. 24 Analyzing expressions about the individual ............................................................................................ 26 Analyzing expressions about the collective ............................................................................................. 28 Contribution to the field ................................................................................................................... 30 Overall structure of the dissertation ................................................................................................. 31 CHAPTER ONE: SOURCES, METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS AND USE OF ARABIC ....................................... 34 Design of the study ........................................................................................................................... 34 Selection of sources .......................................................................................................................... 35 First criterion: Time and place ................................................................................................................. 36 Second criterion: Popular nature of the sources .................................................................................... 38 Cross-cutting parameter: Variety in genre .............................................................................................. 39 The collection as a whole .................................................................................................................. 40 Sources included ...................................................................................................................................... 42 Sources excluded ..................................................................................................................................... 43 Change in access to sources .................................................................................................................... 45 Analytical implications of the variety in genre ................................................................................... 45 Use of Arabic .................................................................................................................................... 46 Arabic ....................................................................................................................................................... 47 Translation ............................................................................................................................................... 47 Transliteration ......................................................................................................................................... 48 2 Credibility, transparency and ethics .................................................................................................. 49 Cogency of my sources ..................................................................................................................... 52 CHAPTER TWO: ZOOMING IN ON LIFE AT TAHRIR SQUARE ............................................................................ 54 Literature on the Egyptian Revolution as outcome vs. process ........................................................... 54 Search strategies .............................................................................................................................. 56 Literature telling us something about the revolutionary imaginaries of the individual ........................ 58 The necessary creation of a new self ...................................................................................................... 58 Peacefulness and self-restraint in the relation to the regime’s representatives .................................... 59 Equality and civilizedness in the internal self-organization .................................................................... 59 Historical awareness ................................................................................................................................ 60 Participation, agency and creativity ........................................................................................................ 61 Humor, indirect critique, and breaking the fear barrier ......................................................................... 61 Literature telling us something about the revolutionary imaginaries of the collective ........................ 62 The people ............................................................................................................................................... 63 Youth ....................................................................................................................................................... 64 Women .................................................................................................................................................... 64 The relationship between Muslims and Christians ................................................................................. 65 New hierarchies ....................................................................................................................................... 66 Literature telling us something about the revolutionary imaginaries of the free space of Tahrir Square ........................................................................................................................................................ 67 The creation of a free space .................................................................................................................... 68 The history of Tahrir Square .................................................................................................................... 68 Public space ............................................................................................................................................. 69 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 70 CHAPTER THREE: IMAGINARIES OF THE GOOD LIFE IN AN EGYPTIAN, HISTORICAL CONTEXT ....................... 72 Partially liberal imaginaries at the beginning of the twentieth century ............................................... 73 The semantic creation of the individual .................................................................................................. 73 Notions of peoplehood and the partial levelling of hierarchies .............................................................. 76 Collectivist imaginaries under Nasser ................................................................................................ 78 Unity, collective agency, and the inclusion of previously excluded segments of the population .......... 78 The common Egyptian working for a shared nationalist project ............................................................ 81 Neoliberal imaginaries under Sadat and Mubarak ............................................................................. 81 The neoliberal economic actor ................................................................................................................ 82 The reintroduction of hierarchical distinctions and the dispossession of the majority .......................... 83 Protest imaginaries in the years leading up to the Egyptian Revolution .............................................