"But
while spontaneity provided the Revolution with much of its
elements of success, it also meant that the transition to a
new order would be engineered by existing forces within the
regime and organized opposition, since the millions in the
streets had no single force that could represent them."
Cairo.-
Never has a revolution that seemed so lacking in prospects
gathered momentum so quickly and so unexpectedly. The
Egyptian Revolution, starting on January 25, lacked
leadership and possessed little organization; its defining
events, on Friday, January 28, occurred on a day when all
communication technologies, including all internet and
phones, were barred; it took place in a large country known
for sedate political life, a very long legacy of
authoritarian continuity, and an enviable repressive
apparatus consisting of more than 2 million members. But on
that day, the regime of Hosni Mubarak, entrenched for 30
years and seemingly eternal, the only regime that the vast
majority of the protesters had ever known, evaporated in one
day.
Though
the regime continues to struggle, practically little
government exists. All ministries and government offices
have been closed, and almost all police headquarters were
burned down on January 28. Except for the army, all security
personnel disappeared, and a week after the uprising, only
few police officers ventured out again. Popular committees
have since taken over security in the neighborhoods. I saw
patriotism expressed everywhere as collective pride in the
realization that people who did not know each other could
act together, intentionally and with a purpose. During the
ensuing week and a half, millions converged on the streets
almost everywhere in Egypt, and one could empirically see
how noble ethics—community and solidarity, care for others,
respect for the dignity of all, feeling of personal
responsibility for everyone--emerge precisely out of the
disappearance of government.
Undoubtedly
this revolution, which is continuing to unfold, will be the
formative event in the lives of the millions of youth who
spearheaded it in Egypt, and perhaps also the many more
millions of youth who followed it throughout the Arab world.
It is clear that it is providing a new generation with a
grand spectacle of the type that had shaped the political
consciousness of every generation before them in modern Arab
history. All those common formative experiences of past
generations were also grand national moments: whether
catastrophic defeats or triumphs against colonial powers or
allies.
This
revolution, too, will leave traces deep in the social fabric
and psyche for a long time, but in ways that go beyond the
youth. While the youth were the driving force in the earlier
days, the revolution quickly became national in every sense;
over the days I saw an increasing demographic mix in
demonstrations, where people from all age groups, social
classes, men and women, Muslims and Christians, urban people
and peasants—virtually all sectors of society, acting in
large numbers and with a determination rarely seen before.
Everyone
I talked to echoed similar transformative themes: they
highlighted a sense of wonder at how they discovered their
neighbor again, how they never knew that they lived in
“society” or the meaning of the word, until this event,
and how everyone who yesterday had appeared so distant is
now so close. I saw peasant women giving protestors onions
to help them recover from teargas attacks; young men
dissuading others from acts of vandalism; the National
Museum being protected by protestors’ human shield from
looting and fire; protestors protecting captured baltagiyya
who had been attacking them from being harmed by other
protestors; and countless other incidents of generous
civility amidst the prevailing destruction and chaos.
I
also saw how demonstrations alternated between battle scenes
and debating circles, and how they provided a renewable
spectacle in which everyone could see the diverse segments
in social life converging on the common idea of bringing
down the regime. While world media highlighted uncontrolled
chaos, regional implications, and the specter of Islamism in
power, the ant’s perspective revealed the relative
irrelevance of all of the above considerations. As the
Revolution took longer and longer to accomplish the mission
of bringing down the regime, protestors themselves began to
spend more time highlighting other accomplishments, such as
how new ethics were emerging precisely amidst chaos. Those
evidenced themselves in a broadly shared sense of personal
responsibility for civilization—voluntary street cleaning,
standing in line, the complete disappearance of harassment
of women in public, returning stolen and found objects, and
countless other ethical decisions that had usually been
ignored or left for others to worry about.
There
are a number of basic features that are associated with this
magnificent event that are key, I think, to understanding
not just the Egyptian Revolution but also the emerging Arab
uprisings of 2o11. Those features include the power of
marginal forces; spontaneity as an art of moving; civic
character as a conscious ethical contrast to state’s
barbarism; the priority assigned to political over all other
kinds of demands, including economics; and lastly autocratic
deafness, meaning the ill-preparedness of ruling elites to
hear the early reverberations as anything but
undifferentiated public noise that could be easily made
inaudible again with the usual means.
First,
marginality means that the revolution began at the margins.
In Tunisia it started that way, in marginal areas, from
where it migrated to the capital. And from Tunisia, itself
relatively marginal in the larger context of the Arab World,
it travelled to Egypt. Obviously the situation in each Arab
country is different in so far as economic indicators and
degree of liberalization are concerned, but I was struck at
how conscious the Egyptian youth were of the Tunisian
example preceding them by just two weeks. Several mentioned
to me their pride in seeming to accomplish in just a few
days what Tunisians needed a month to accomplish.
Marginality
appears to have been an important factor within Egypt as
well. While much of the media focus was on Tahrir Square in
central Cairo, to which I went every day, the large presence
there was itself a manifestation of a possibility that
suddenly became evident on January 25, when large
demonstrations broke out in 12 of Egypt’s provinces. The
revolution would never have been perceived as possible had
it been confined to Cairo, and in fact its most intense
moment in its earlier days, when it really looked that a
revolution was happening, were in more marginal sites like
Suez. The collective perception that a revolution was
happening at the margins, where it was least expected, gave
everyone the confidence necessary to realize that it could
happen everywhere.
Second,
in every sense the revolution maintained throughout a
character of spontaneity, in the sense that it had no
permanent organization. Rather, organizational needs—for
example governing how to communicate, what to do the next
day, what to call that day, how to evacuate the injured, how
to repulse baltagiyya assaults, and even how to formulate
demands—emerged in the field directly and continued to
develop in response to new situations. Further, the
revolution lacked recognized leadership from beginning to
end, a fact that seemed to matter most to observers but not
to participants. I saw several debates in which participants
strongly resisted being represented by any existing group or
leader, just as they resisted demands that they produce
“representatives” that someone, such as al-Azhar or the
government, could talk to. When the government asked that
someone be designated as a spokesperson for this revolt,
many participants flippantly designated one of the
disappeared, only in the hope that being so designated might
hasten his reappearance. A common statement I heard was that
it was “the people” who decide. It appeared that the
idea of peoplehood was now assumed to be either too grand to
be representable by any concrete authority or leadership, or
that such representation would dilute the profound, almost
spiritual, implication of the notion of “the people” as
a whole being on the move.
Spontaneity
was a key element also because it made the Revolution hard
to predict or control; and because it provided for an
unusual level of dynamism and lightness—so long as many
millions remained completely committed to a collective
priority of bringing down the regime, represented in its
president. But it also appeared that spontaneity played a
therapeutic and not simply organizational or ideological
role. More than one participant mentioned to me how the
revolution was psychologically liberating, because all the
repression that they had internalized as self-criticism and
perception of inborn weakness, was in the revolutionary
climate turned outwards as positive energy and a discovery
of self-worth, real rather than superficial connectedness to
others, and limitless power to change frozen reality. I
heard the term “awakening” being used endlessly to
describe the movement as a whole as a sort of spontaneous
emergence out of a condition of deep slumber, which no party
program could shake off before.
Further,
spontaneity was responsible, it seems, for the increasing
ceiling of the goals of the uprising, from basic reform
demands on January 25, to changing the entire regime three
days later, to rejecting all concessions made by the regime
while Mubarak was in office, to putting Mubarak on trial.
Removing Mubarak was in fact not anyone’s serious demand
on January 25, when the relevant slogans condemned the
possible candidacy of his son, and called on Mubarak himself
only not to run again. But by the end of the day on January
28, the immediate removal of Mubarak from office had become
an unwavering principle, and indeed it seemed then that it
was about to happen. Here one found out what was possible
through spontaneous movement rather than a fixed program,
organization or leadership. Spontaneity thus became the
compass of the Revolution and the way by which it found its
way to what turned out to be its radical destination.
It
proved therefore difficult to persuade protestors to give up
the spontaneous character of the Revolution, since
spontaneity had already proved its power. Spontaneity thus
produced more confidence than any other style of movement,
and out of that confidence there emerged, as far as I could
see, protestors’ preparedness for sacrifice and martyrdom.
Spontaneity also appeared as a way by which the
carnivalesque character of social life was brought to the
theater of the revolution as a way of expressing freedom and
initiative; for example, among the thousands of signs I saw
in demonstrations, there were hardly any standard ones (as
one would see in pro-government demonstration). Rather, the
vast majority of signs were individual and hand-made,
written or drawn on all kinds of materials and objects, and
were proudly displayed by their authors who wished to have
them photographed by others. Spontaneity, further, proved
highly useful for networking, since the Revolution became
essentially an extension of the spontaneous character of
everyday life, where little detailed planning was needed or
possible, and in which most people were already used to
spontaneous networking amidst common everyday
unpredictability that prevailed in ordinary times.
But
while spontaneity provided the Revolution with much of its
elements of success, it also meant that the transition to a
new order would be engineered by existing forces within the
regime and organized opposition, since the millions in the
streets had no single force that could represent them. Most
protestors I talked to, however, seemed less concerned about
those details than with basic demands the fulfillment of
which, it appeared, guaranteed the more just nature of any
subsequent system. As finally elaborated a week after the
beginning of the Revolution, these demands had become the
following: removing the dictator; resolving the parliament
and electing a new one; amending the constitution so as to
reduce presidential power and guarantee more liberties;
abolishing the state of emergency; and putting on trials
corrupt high officials as well as all those who had ordered
the shooting of demonstrators.
Third,
remarkable was the virtual replacement of religious
references by civic ethics that were presumed to be
universal and self-evident. This development appears more
surprising than in the case of Tunisia, since in Egypt the
religious opposition had always been strong and reached
virtually all sectors of life. The Muslim Brotherhood itself
joined after the beginning of the protests, and like all
other organized political forces in the country seemed taken
aback by the developments and unable to direct them, as much
as the government (along with its regional allies) sought to
magnify its role.
This,
I think, is substantially connected to the two elements
mentioned previously, spontaneity and marginality. Both of
those processes entailed the politicization of otherwise
unengaged segments, and also corresponded to broad demands
that required no religious language in particular. In fact,
religion appeared as an obstacle, especially in light of the
recent sectarian tensions in Egypt, and it contradicted the
emergent character of the Revolution as being above all
dividing lines in society, including one’s religion or
religiosity. Many people prayed in public, of course, but I
never saw anyone being pressured or even asked to join them,
in spite of the high spiritual overtones of an atmosphere
saturated with high emotions and constantly supplied by
stories of martyrdom, injustice, and violence.
Like
in the Tunisian Revolution, in Egypt the rebellion erupted
as a sort of a collective moral earthquake—where the
central demands were very basic, and clustered around the
respect for the citizen, dignity, and the natural right to
participate in the making of the system that ruled over the
person. If those same principles had been expressed in
religious language before, now they were expressed as is and
without any mystification or need for divine authority to
justify them. I saw the significance of this transformation
when even Muslim Brotherhood participants chanted at some
point with everyone else for a “civic” (madaniyya) state—explicitly
distinguished from two other possible alternatives:
religious (diniyya) or military (askariyya) state.
Fourth,
a striking development after January 28 was the fact that
radical political demands were so elevated that that all
other grievances—including those concerning dismal
economic conditions—remained subordinate to them. The
political demands were more clear that any other kinds of
demands; everyone agreed on them; and everyone shared the
assumption that all other problems could be negotiated
better once one had a responsible political system in place.
Thus combating corruption, a central theme, was one way by
which all economic grievances were translated into easily
understandable political language. And in any case, it
corresponded to reality because the political system had
basically become a system of thievery in plain daylight. For
months before the revolution, virtually everyone had a story
to tell me about the ostentatious corruption of the business-cum-political
elite that benefited most from the system. They tended to be
a clique clustering around Mubarak’s son. Some of its
members, reportedly, stood behind the recruitment of thugs
who terrorized the protestors for two long days and nights
on February 2-3.
Fifth,
as everywhere in the Arab World, a key contributing factor
was autocratic deafness. The massive undercurrent of
resentment that fueled this volcano was stoked over years by
the ruling elites themselves, who out of longevity in office
and lack of meaningful opposition completely lost track of
who their people were and could no longer read them, so to
speak. They heard no simmering noise before the Revolution,
and when it erupted they were slow to hear it as anything
other than an undifferentiated noise. The one-way direction
of autocratic communication allowed for no feedback and
presented every recipient of its directives as either
audience or point of incoherent noise. Throughout the
Revolution this deafness of ruling structures was evident in
the slow and uncertain nature of government response. On the
day following the January 25 demonstrations, editors of
government newspapers belittled the events. On January 28,
when all Egypt was in flames and many world leaders had
issued some statement of concern, the Egyptian government
remained completely silent—until Mubarak finally spoke at
midnight, saying the exact opposite of what everyone had
been expecting him to say. He thought he was making a major
concession, but one which—as any intelligent advisor would
have told him—could only be interpreted as a provocation,
resulting in several more days of protests. Then on February
1 he made another speech, also thinking that he was making
major concessions, although again, it was received by many
protestors as the height of arrogance.
He
was, in a sense, always responding to what he must have
understood as incoherent noise, emerging from
undifferentiated masses that could be allayed by the
appearance of compromise. Arab state autocracies had long
been accustomed to approach their people with either
contempt or condescension. They were no longer skilled at
any other art of communication (although Muhammad Shafiq,
the new prime minister, has been trying to do his best in
those arts). Clearly, autocratic deafness was a major factor
in escalating the revolution. Many protestors suggested to
me that what Mubarak said on January 28 would have resolved
the crisis had he said on January 25, when he said nothing.
And what he said on February 1 would also have resolved the
crisis, had he said it on January 28.
When
none of these concessions succeeded in diffusing the crisis,
Mubarak’s new appointees had no serious arguments to
explain why he wanted to stay in power for just a few more
months, and in the face of a determined revolt that did not
in fact challenge many other parts of the system. On Feb. 3
his new prime minister said that it was not common in
Egyptian culture for a leader to leave without his dignity.
He cited as evidence the salute given to king Farouk as the
free officers forced him to leave Egypt in 1952! And on the
same day, his new vice president opined that it is against
the character of Egyptian culture to so insult the character
of the father, which he claimed (in a moment of
forgetfulness of the revolution just outside) Mubarak was to
the Egyptian people. And the president himself asserted on
that same day that he could not possibly resign, since
otherwise the country would descend into chaos--astonishingly,
still not realizing what everyone else in the country knew:
that it was already there.
In
the absence of autocratic deafness, all successful
politicians, including manipulative ones, know that one art
of maneuver consists of anticipating your audience’s or
enemy’s next step, so that you are already there before it
is too late. Here we had the exact opposite situation: a
lethargic autocracy, having never known serious contest, was
unaware of who its enemies had become, which in this case
was more or less the vast majority of the country. That on
February 2 some of Mubarak’s supporters found nothing
better to do than send camels and horses to disperse the
crowd at Tahrir, seemed to reflect the regime’s antiquated
character: a regime from a bygone era, with no relationship
to the moment at hand. It was as if a rupture in time had
happened, and we were witnessing a battle from the 12th
century. From my perspective in the crowd, it was as if they
rode through and were swallowed right back into the fold
that returned them to the past. By contrast, popular
committees in the neighborhood, with their rudimentary
weapons and total absence of illusions, represented what
society had already become with this revolution: a real body,
controlling its present with its own hands, and learning
that it could likewise make a future itself, in the present
and from below. At this moment, out of the dead weight of
decades of inwardness and self-contempt, there emerged
spontaneous order out of chaos. That fact, rather not
detached patriarchal condescension, appeared to represent
the very best hope for the dawn of a new civic order.