Before (and After) the ‘Arab Spring’: From Connectedness to Mobilization in the Public Sphere more

ARMANDO SALVATORE BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’: FROM CONNECTEDNESS TO MOBILIZATION IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE Old and new media in the ‘Arab Spring’ T he ‘Arab Spring,’ which started in Tunisia at the end of 2010 but fully erupted through the Egyptian revolutionary events of January and February 2011, has had the merit of triggering a set of interrogations not only concerning the role of ‘new’ media in the revolutions, but also and more broadly on the key question of how to transform the connectedness built among people through communication forums and media into a sustained political mobilization. No doubt the role of new media in the uprisings immediately struck actors and observers alike, at the evident risk of overestimating their impact. The revolution has been dubbed the revolution of the ‘street’, but also the revolution of šab…b al-feisbuk (‘the youth of Facebook’), and, not least, the revolution of alJazeera. Neither should we neglect the role of literature, movies and TV serials. The Yacubian Building, originally a novel by bestselling author Alaa al-Aswani, and which made a splash in all three genres (the film was the most expensive one ever produced in Egypt), depicted a few years ago in dramatic tones the corruption of several layers of Egyptian society and especially of a crucial component of the Egyptian bourgeoisie centered on the nouveaux riches, famously dubbed ‘the fat cats’ after Sadat’s launch of infit…| (economic opening) in the mid-1970s. They came to dominate the ruling party by building a sort of compensation chamber of corrupted crony-capitalism supported by a diffuse state thuggery, and were in more recent years epitomized by nobody less than the son of Hosni Mubarak, Gamal, who became a candidate to his father’s succession as Egypt’s president: an issue which the Egyptian public crudely but correctly dubbed tawr†Å (inheriting). Not surprisingly Gamal Mubarak became one of the first and favorite targets of revolutionary anger. As reminded by Enrico De Angelis in his contribution to this collection, a similar situation triggered off the revolt in Syria, whose initial spark was ignited by the simple fact that some children copied on a wall a revolutionary slogan that they saw on al-Jazeera, likely taken from an Egyptian graffiti: al-ša¼b ya¡na¼u Åawratahu: ‘the people stages its revolution’. Clearly the image of the Middle East surging to the attention of a global audience was this time substantially different from the familiar stereotypes retrieved by serial headlines on events usu- Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 5-12 © Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino – Roma 6 ARMANDO SALVATORE ally privileging extremism and repression, thus telling stories of political violence without political progress. As stressed by Eugenia Siapera in this volume, while official media and public intellectuals in the West have historically failed in conveying a dynamic view of the region, web activists and bloggers (particularly the ‘bridge bloggers’ interfacing, also culturally and linguistically, between the region and the wider world) have shown during the last few years a capacity to perform better in creating and disseminating plausible narrations about the concerns of people, and particularly of the youth, in the Middle East. Such recent developments have increasingly shown that activism and coverage are strictly intertwined to determine the success or failure of a public sphere. Not by chance the so-called social web (blogs and social networks) has become the best incarnation of the ‘foreign elements’ evoked by besieged dictators as the agents sowing discord and subversion in a purportedly healthy and docile social body: an accusation that does not (or no longer) hold even just as a caricature. Evidently the role of new media and particularly of the social web in the revolutionary outbreak should be carefully weighed by looking at the growing importance of these media in the everyday life of several social and political groups in North Africa and in the Middle East. On the other hand, one should shun the impression of the blogosphere and of social networks as the agents of a sudden surge of virtuous public sphere dynamics. Unlike countries ruled by other authoritarian regimes, in Egypt a public sphere of connectedness and discussion has been in the making particularly since after the 1990s. In this decade the media arena became more plural than in the 1980s, i.e. during the first decade of Mubarak’s era, when state-owned TV stations and state-controlled newspapers held the monopoly on information and tiredly chewed on government paroles. It is important to remind that this development occurred in the long decade of the 1990s, only interrupted by 9/11, when the ‘civil society’ wave spilled over from Eastern Europe to the Muslim world and furthered hopes for democratization in face of the perpetuation of various types of autocratic regimes, variably associated with the ongoing neoliberal globalization and then with the ‘War on Terror’. The early enthusiasm for civil society as a panacea against corruption and authoritarianism was clearly misplaced, not least because many of the same Western governments and donors that were ostensibly supportive of the ideal where in fact undermining it through the continued support of authoritarian regimes or via aid policies that weakened rather than strengthened associative bonds of basically spontaneous cooperation (Salvatore 2011a). Yet while the role of civil society, soon to be identified with Western-certified NGOs, became less obvious, the classic kernel of the public sphere showed a capacity to revitalize itself. Several newspapers saw the light especially in the late 1990s, mainly published by young journalists. The watershed of the launch of Al-Jazeera in 1996 cannot be overestimated: the new TV channel started to broadcast all the news which state-owned TV did not give and, most critically, to frame them via the public perception of the fading legitimacy of their governments. They did so also through such innovations like online polls and call-in programs where the audi- BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 7 ence could debate with the TV guests. Satellite TV impacted over time tremendously on the entire spectrum of old and new media, also affecting internet and the booming blogosphere from its beginning. By the mid-2000, also pushed by the Iranian experience, some bloggers in Egypt started to play the role of citizens ready to mobilize fellow citizens on matters of common concern. They partly followed the lead of Al-Jazeera in devising new forms of connectedness and participation, often culminating in what has been named ‘citizen journalism’ (Onodera 2011). In so doing they often resorted to different registers of colloquial forms of speech, sometimes paired with a ‘global-ecumenical’ type of English, thus marking, as stressed by Charles Hirschkind in this volume, a sharp distance from the language of all official actors in the public arena, a disconnection from ‘the system’ (al-ni©…m) as a whole. It is worth stressing that also many young supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood or of other Islamist groups showed their appreciation for this type of communication. As a result, the divide between a secular and an Islamist camp, which had been earlier shrewdly exploited by the Mubarak regime, started to show an increasing porosity. As evidenced by Hirschkind, it was less a matter of rallying the two main blocks of the opposition on a common program than the even more significant move towards finding an overlapping language expressing common resistance to the abuse and violence of the regime. Seeds for a new transversal public reason were sown ever since, which were to provide the basis of a common resistance by a ‘disfigured social body’. Blogs became icons of this disfigurement. Footage on abuse of the population by security forces projected visually the new tunes of a vernacular language often bordering on registers of vulgarity, which however, far from scandalizing even the most pious components of their audiences, were considered an adequate reflection of collective injury. Words regained their mighty sense as sounds of violence. At the same time, bloggers firmly kept the bar of their activities on a conception of the ‘common good’ (ma¡la|ah ¼ammah) that resonates well with the Islamic discursive traditions. From everyday communication to political revolution The question of the relation between everyday communication and political revolution is not entirely new, but the coincidence between the eruption of the ‘Arab Spring’ and the final stage of the parallel research projects that are bundled in this issue of Oriente Moderno pushed us to raise the question of connectedness and mobilization with sharper eyes and perhaps also with a new confidence in the transformative capacities of socio-political actors in the region. By reviewing at the beginning of this collection the increasing significance of media studies related to Islamic studies and the Arab world through the lenses of autobiographical materials, Dale F. Eickelman, a pioneer in conducting and promoting research about new media in the Middle East, provides us the necessary historical depth in discussing what between the 1960s and the 1990s began to be identified as ‘new’ media (from audiotapes to videotapes up to satellite TV and cellphones) and how people skillfully learned how to appropriate and use them even 8 ARMANDO SALVATORE in spite of diffuse and enduring authoritarian rule. Eickelman reminds us how he, a leading anthropologist of Islam and the Middle East, got drawn into new media and public sphere issues and encouraged a discussion of the different ways in which media studies and Islamic studies might weigh off and interpret the impact of novel modes of communication on the inherited structures of religious and political authority in the region. More broadly, this research trend has helped reformulate the crucial question of how a public sphere can emerge and take form even before the onset of any deep transformation of the political system. In parallel, this is also the issue, on the scholarly side, of how individual research trajectories and targeted institutional investments may affect the capacity of sociology, anthropology and Islamic studies to capture and convey the meaning of the ongoing transformations. Yet not all research can be promoted and planned. Scholars should also learn how not to be caught by surprise. To Eickelman’s deeper background and experience I wish here to add my own, more recent, field-related incidents and insights. In one of my latest stays in Egypt I was asked by a friend and fellow sociologist, Ahmad Zayed, at the time Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, to give a presentation on nothing less than the ‘public sphere’. This happened at the presence of colleagues and students on a sunny Christmas day, at the end of 2007. After lazily pushing a few powerpoint slides showing commonalities and differences between public sphere dynamics in the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ (with the inevitable glimpse on paintings of coffee houses from London to Istanbul), I concluded with a few remarks on the potentially positive role of the social web, including social networks like Facebook, a website I had just stumbled into and become member of, mainly for idle curiosity. My mentioning of blogs and social networks was met by my Egyptian colleagues, mainly fellow sociologists, with a sense of disarray, or even with an illconcealed outrage. My remark was taken by them as a further proof of the vanity of the latest Western justification of the idea of the public sphere as an arena of democratization, based on the assumption that through a sheer cumulative discussion and critique of authoritarianism and corruption key socio-political changes can be affected. The most obvious and legitimate critique leveled at my conclusion was: what is the merit of ‘chatting’ and so connecting powerless private rooms if the public space par excellence, the street, is inaccessible for political protest? Indeed what both Western and Arab media had started years earlier to dub the ‘Arab street’ was ever more painfully away to be under the control of citizens willing to manifest their grievances. Under the state of emergency existing since 1981 it was prohibited that more than five people publicly gather without prior authorization. The security apparatus of the Mubarak regime appeared at the time of my presentation as efficient as ever. After the lecture I was asked by some other Cairo University colleagues, this time political scientists, to give some seminars to further deepen the issue, but I declined since I felt that it might be a losing enterprise: repression, torture and a tight security control, internationally legitimized by the fact that the Mubarak regime postured as a regional bulwark against terrorism (and his regime equated almost every form of BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 9 opposition to it), was evidently drying up the terrain itself on which a public sphere could thrive, by turning connectedness and discussion into tangible mobilization. Yet then, just a few weeks after my delusional performance on the potential role of social networks in the public sphere at Cairo University, the ‘Facebook girl’ took the center stage. As also mentioned by Albrecht Hofheinz in this volume, on March 2008 Esraa Abdel Fattah, a quite inexperienced activist, decided to support a strike in a textile factory by launching a Facebook group that rapidly gained tens of thousands supporters among the mainly young Egyptian members of this social network, who thus far had appeared to be busier with the more futile applications available on it rather than with mobilizing people under a common political banner. A feedback effect was induced among the most militant component of the internet activist and blogger community, who eagerly joined the initiative. Good last, a broad coalition of oppositional groups and parties cutting through the leftist-secular/Islamist divide jumped on the wagon and on the key day, April 6, 2008, declared their support for the initiative. Going much beyond the original intent, the mobilization on that day targeted the corruption of the regime and the deteriorating economic conditions of the vast majority of the Egyptian population. Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath of the protest day the girl was arrested and the official press accused Facebook of harboring an anti-national conspiracy. Nonetheless, the 6th of April group was to become a crucial symbolic rallying point of all oppositional initiatives well into the 2011 revolution. That the ‘street’ could not be conquered by the activities of social networks alone was confirmed the following year in the Iranian case, with the unsuccessful protests that followed the contested presidential elections of June 2009. Yet in Egypt the balance was turned around in the mobilization that followed the brutal murder of Khaled Said which occurred in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, at the hands of two members of the Egyptian security forces. The event triggered off an unprecedented momentum of popular mobilization especially among the youth, the biggest and best covered one prior to the ‘Arab Spring’. Khaled Said was a computer programmer who, on an early summer day, was working on the second floor of an internet café in his home neighborhood in Alexandria. Two officers from the Sidi Gaber police station entered the premises and brutally beat him to death, also by knocking his body against the stairs of the building while he was pushed outside to their car. Apparently he was killed for having posted on internet sensitive footage showing those officers intent on sharing the booty from a drug seizure. After the death of what soon became the single most famous young šah†d of the internet era in Egypt, his martyrized face was adopted as a profile picture by a growing number of Facebook members. Numerous testimonies were collected on various websites and blogs, which added to and magnified the impact of the uninterrupted flow of denunciations of the previous years against the brutal actions of police and security forces. Now the circle between the web and the ‘street’ was finally about to close. Several public events were convened in various 10 ARMANDO SALVATORE Egyptian cities, where long lines of young men and women, standing at a distance of several meters from each other (so as not to constitute a ‘gathering’ under the Egyptian emergency law), lined up along the banks of the Nile or the Mediterranean, in order to remember Khaled and his brutal murder, by simply taking with them and reading a book of their choice. Mostly dressed in black, as documented by a number of videos uploaded on internet, some took with them a Koran, other many other books. Visibly girls with headscarf intermingled with unveiled ones. It was an impressive demonstration of transversal solidarity and common resistance. New actors, fresh strategies The effectiveness of the protest, despite numerous arrests, led Mona Eltahawy (a journalist and activist of Egyptian origin writing from the US, who was on her way to become a global spokesperson of the rebellion of the Arab youth against their corrupt and violent regimes), to publish on August 7, 2010 an article in the Washington Post in which she proclaimed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter had become the new means of manifestation of political protest in the Arab world. Eltahawy attacked those critics who dubbed such media platforms as mere outlets for venting out the frustrations of young people in those countries. She was sanguine in seeing in such dismissive criticism no more than the latest version of an orientalist and ultimately racist image of ‘apathetic’ Arab masses, as ever at the mercy of regimes that, while clearly anachronistic in terms of global standards of democracy and governance, were considered as aligned with the purportedly backward cultures of the majority of their populations. She stressed that the silent yet massive protests against the brutal murder of Khaled Said proved exactly the opposite trend, namely that the web activists were finally able, after many of them had been fighting hopeless struggles and paying a high price in blood, to conquer real public space (Eltahawi 2010). At this juncture another character took possession of the scene, soon destined to become one of the main personalities of the revolution of January 25, 2011. Wael Ghonim, a thirty year old computer engineer, since January 2010 head of the marketing division for Google Middle East and North Africa (and therefore a young rich professional), in the wake of the June 2010 events moved rapidly towards becoming one of the most popular web activists in Egypt while working from his home in Dubai. After the assassination of Khaled Said he launched a blog and a twin Facebook page, each with a double name: El Shaheed (‘the martyr’), and We are all Khaled Said/kullun… ³…lid Sa¼†d.This page gathered evidence on assassinations and other violence and abuses perpetrated by security forces (as well as protests against them), and it did so also by aggregating pre-existing materials found on scattered blogs. Wael Ghonim returned to Egypt to participate in the mounting protests during the month of January 2011 with the excuse to take a vacation from his work for Google in Dubai. He was among the several dozens of web activists that the Egyptian security forces arrested in the night between January 27 and 28, on the eve of the ‘Friday of rage’ in which the protest swept through the streets of Egyptian urban centers and the security BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 11 forces killed hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young people. Detained for 11 days at an undisclosed location, in a subsequent interview after his release he stated that the January 25 revolution was developing as Wikipedia, since each participant contributed content, while the names of the contributors remained unknown. For this reason he dubbed it ‘Revolution 2.0’. He concluded by claiming not to be a hero, for the simple reason that no one can be the hero of a similar revolution. Such statements, which he made in the 60 Minutes TV show with Harry Smith (see the article of Hofheinz in this volume), followed a quite dramatic interview on a popular private Egyptian satellite TV channel (Dream TV): such appearances reveal a singular combination of intellectual ingenuousness and political ingenuity by a fine knower of the technical, rather than political potential of social media who happened to be, almost in spite of himself, a revolutionary activist. No surprise that his role in the revolution was quickly wrapped in a thick curtain of conspiracy theory, this time spun less by Egyptian authorities than among global media scholars and activists. The event, the protagonist and the responses speak new meaning to established patterns of representing intellectual authority in the region. This is reflected by the way the probably most famous (self-appointed or otherwise) speaker for ‘European Muslims’ whom the University of Oxford in 2009 called to a chair endowed by media-savvy Qatari institutions, Tariq Ramadan, reacted to the event. Whether he was thinking of Wael Ghonim or not, in a key-note speech he gave at the American University of Beirut in early April 2011 Ramadan espoused the thesis that the revolution had been steered by social media manipulated from outside Egypt. One was inevitably reminded of the allegations, during the days of the uprising in Egypt, of former head of intelligence and, for just a few days, vice-president Omar Sulayman, who stated that ‘foreign elements’ were behind the revolt: a weak yet familiar pattern of official propaganda variably staged, in the following weeks and months, by the rulers of such countries like Libya and Syria. Yet apart from the inevitable focus on (and initial puzzle with) the ‘Arab Spring’ and the much too easy rhetoric on the ‘Revolution 2.0’, the longer sequence of events shows that in just two years, between April 6, 2008 and June 6, 2010, on the hard ground of politics occurred what my Egyptian colleagues and I could neither predict nor hope for in December 2007: virtual and public spaces came into a mutual synergy and produced a formidable potential for mobilizing a broad variety of actors; a mobilization that, though costing a certain loss in terms of the kind of ‘political subjectivity’ that was typical of earlier revolutions of the modern and contemporary eras (Salvatore 2011b), seems to fulfill in unexpected ways the promises the public sphere (Salvatore 2007). The immediate sparks of revolution, namely socio-economic grievances, are certainly not to be associated with the web, but the preparatory work and the ability to transform a rather passive connectedness into active mobilization are the outcome of a cumulative activity in which no single activist can easily exercise a formal leadership. This phenomenon also concerns those spheres where intense blogging has 12 ARMANDO SALVATORE not (or not yet) been matched by revolutionary outbursts, as shown by the contributions of Maha Taki and Sarah Jurkiewicz in this volume. From the raw language and violence-exposing footage of the blogosphere run by enthusiastic activists and targeting the crimes of the security forces (well documented by the contribution of Charles Hirschkind in this volume) to the more subdued yet also ritualized and often carnivalesque atmosphere of Facebook (Rahimi 2011), creating connectivity between young people whose participatory activism is rather latent, a new public sphere with an unexpected revolutionary potential has emerged to world attention and has become the epicenter of a new internationalism. An important collateral effect in the short term and on the global level has been a growing solidarity between the young activists of the ‘Arab Spring’ and several young scholars around the world who have voiced and echoed worldwide the protest slogans in the decisive days of the revolution, during which access to the internet had been blocked by the Egyptian regime. This has been a living example of ‘critical networking’, now providing a precious critical window to area studies and Islamic studies (Chambers 2011). References Chambers, I. (2011) “Cultural Studies, the Social Web, and the Analysis of Political Transformations”, paper presented to the workshop Between Everyday Life and Political Revolution: The Social Web in the Middle East, Naples, 21 March. Eltahawy, M. (2010) “In Egypt, Twitter Trumps Torture”, Washington Post, 7 August, p. A13 Manoukian, S. (2010) “Where Is This Place? Crowds, Audio-vision, and Poetry in Postelection Iran”, Public Culture, 22, 2, p. 237-263. Onodera, H. (2011) “Raise Your Head High, You’re an Egyptian! Youth, Politics, and Citizen Journalism in Egypt”, Sociologica, 5, 3. Rahimi, B. (2011) “Facebook Iran: The Carnivalesque Politics of Online Social Networking”, Sociologica, 5, 3. Salvatore, A. (2007) The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. ––– (2011a) “Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal Connectedness”, Third World Quarterly, 32, 5, p. 807-825. ––– (2011b) “The Elusive Subject of Revolution”, The Immanent Frame, 16 February (available online at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/16/the-elusivesubject-of-revolution/).