Four Myths about Protest

It’s now widely recognized that social protest has become a staple of Egyptian politics, what some journalists and researchers have taken to calling an emergent “culture of protest” among an aggrieved citizenry. Opinions differ on when to date the formation of this ‘culture.’ Some date it to 2002 with the pro-Palestine solidarity protests, others to 2004 with labour protests and the birth of Kifaya, still others to 2005 with the mobilisation accompanying the presidential and parliamentary elections. I’m inclined to see it as a grand wave of protest that began in 2000 with several triggers, including the recession and the outbreak of al-Aqsa Intifada. But even more important than the issue of dating protests is interpreting their causes and effects. Since 2005 when pundits dubbed protests a phenomenon, there have been several stock ideas repeated over and over again as if they were self-evident. I want to focus on four that are especially egregious, ideas that are quick to either laud or dismiss protest but are no help in understanding it.

The four myths can be roughly divided into two that are chiefly concerned with the causes of protest and two with its effects. The bad ideas about protest causes assert that: a) the government allows protest as a safety valve and b) that social protest is not about politics, it’s about survival. The bad ideas about protest effects claim that a) widespread protest will topple Mubarak’s regime and b) protest will lead to democracy.

A Grand Wave of Protest

First a few remarks about the current protest wave. It’s not the first such protest surge in the country’s political history, but recalls earlier moments of heightened social conflict in 1946-1952, 1968-1972, and 1977-1980 when various sectors of the population took to the streets to make a variety of claims. What is unique about the current wave is that it’s longer in duration and broader in scope, oscillating between intense peaks and extended troughs. It can be classified categorically, with electoral, rural, industrial, sectarian, cost-of-living, and democracy protests as some of the obvious categories. It can also be broken down into sets of distinct protest issues, participants, and techniques. Spatially, protest is now commonplace in diverse social locations, from campuses to villages to shop floors to marketplaces to schoolyards to train stations, and on the steps of ministries, police stations, courthouses, professional unions, agricultural cooperatives, municipal buildings, and—intriguingly—parliament. This is not counting the street, the public square, and now the highway as commonsense locations for social protest.

We know all this because of the rise of a competitive field of independent media in the past few years that has featured excellent coverage of protest events. Photographs and footage of angry, demonstrating citizens make for juicy teasers that attract more viewers and readers, so editors have their own incentives to cover protest. But increased news coverage has salutary effects: it generates more opinion pieces, more demands on government officials to explain their policies, and more incentives for protesters to clarify (and sometimes escalate) their demands. I’ve always been a news junkie, but reading the independent papers and watching the satellite channels these days is unusually edifying, revealing the extraordinary range of social problems and popular collective action that the government wants hidden or distorted. Consider this random selection of protest events culled from recent news reports: car repairmen amass in front of a police station to protest the municipality’s forcible closure of their workshops; displaced residents of Kafr al-Elw protest in front of parliament to demand compensation housing; three months earlier, Port Said residents had done the same; 300 Basateen families congregate at the Abdeen courthouse to publicise their suit against the municipality for ordering their houses demolished; Beheira villagers erect a road blockade for five hours to protest the killing of a woman and child, blaming a police official for their death; residents of Ezbet Khairallah protest in front of the Cairo governorate building, blaming officials for failing to provide potable water and trash collection.

Fortunately for us press junkies, both the independent and the government media also offer outlets for all sorts of ideas about protest, the good, the bad, and the banal. Let’s focus on the bad.

Bad Ideas

1. Widespread social protest will destabilize or topple Mubarak’s regime. This may be the heartfelt wish of anti-Mubarak activists and the worst nightmare for Mubarak’s rotten shilla, that Egypt will be another Iran circa 1978-1979 or the Philippines in 1986 or Serbia in 2000. It’s especially tempting given that protests characterized Nasser and Sadat’s final years in power, and Mubarak’s succession problem further nourishes the notion that his regime is particularly unstable. For example, both times that demonstrators tore down and destroyed the huge posters of Mubarak (in Cairo in 2003 and Mahalla in 2008), some commentators feared or hoped that this prefigured an actual ouster.

It’s certainly possible for social protests to remove autocrats from power, but it’s definitely not inevitable nor common. It’s doubtful that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi or Ferdinand Marcos were brought down by protests alone. Retrospective accounts may stress the defining role of a tremendous popular revolt, but in reality the autocrats’ downfall was the outcome of a years-long process of regime disintegration, including defection of key regime loyalists, economic and fiscal crisis, and a withdrawal in American support.

There are a host of other problems with this idea, but the worst in my view is the implication that protests are only significant insofar as they affect regime “stability,” anything else is irrelevant. This leads to assertions that either exaggerate or belittle protest events to suit one’s political commitments. Thus, activists see in every public demonstration or worker collective action a direct threat to Mubarak’s survival, and regime supporters ridicule every protest as futile, insignificant and/or dangerous. It’s easy to see how this can devolve into a shouting match or the worst sort of cocktail party political chatter, since it’s impossible to predict when or precisely how a regime collapses except after the fact. In the meantime, all the important but unsexy issues are ignored, such as how protestors articulate their claims, how authorities respond, whether (and what kind of) a compromise is worked out, and whether (and how) protest spreads to more societal sectors. Assessing protest exclusively by its impact on regime stability is the favoured activity of intelligence agencies and “political risk” firms (whatever those are), but is not a serious way to understand any political phenomenon.

2. The government allows protest as a safety valve. A position shared by both pro- and anti-government activists, this common dismissal was routine in 2005 when Kifaya was holding demonstrations nearly every week. When it’s explicitly articulated (and it rarely is), the reasoning goes something like this: Mubarak tolerates limited forms of protest either to stave off greater unrest or to deflect international pressure or as a barometer to gauge societal discontent. All of these are cogent reasons, and there’s no doubt that tolerating certain forms of protest is useful for the Mubarak regime. But the notion that the current protest wave is somehow part of a coherent plan by the regime and has been “allowed” to continue is bizarre. It grants a mythical amount of omniscience and omnipotence to rulers, ignores their repression of the vast majority of protests, and conceals a very important political development during Mubarak’s tenure: the routinised management and policing of protest.

The well-worn image of Central Security Forces and trucks encircling every public gathering has become so normalised that we forget how Mubarak’s police officials have worked to devise an elaborate and standardised set of procedures to deal with protest, from master plans sealing off greater Cairo in expectation of unusually large gatherings (as during the funeral of the Ikhwan Murshid Ma’moun al-Hodeiby in early 2004) to street-level tactics like the horrific corralling and then squashing of demonstrators by CSF recruits. Anyone who’s been at a demo has observed the intricacies of protest management, how police commanders and amn al-dawla officers work the crowd, consulting with their superiors via walkie-talkie, negotiating and bantering with the demonstration’s organisers, coordinating with the hired plainclothes thugs, and giving orders to recruits to attack (or refrain from attacking) protestors. It’s not unusual for the Interior Ministry’s all-important Cairo security chief to go into the field and supervise crowd management himself: recall Nabil al-Ezabi’s frequent shouting matches with Kifaya leaders in 2005 (he was later rewarded with the governorship of Assiut), and Ismail al-Shaer’s hands-on management of the pro-judges’ protests in spring 2006 and the 6 April general strike this year.

I don’t pretend to know the details of protest policing strategies hatched in Mubarak’s fortress-like Interior Ministry, but I know that they exist and are bankrolled by vast sums in the state budget. I would guess that they’re a combination of staple tactics inherited from the 1940s, recent innovations emanating from field experiences, and perhaps even the protest policing procedures of other Arab autocracies (the annual Arab Interior Ministers’ conference must be a fun, fun gathering). I’d also conjecture that techniques differ depending on not just the size and location of a protest event but the kind of participants (worker protests are policed differently than elite pro-democracy protests or student demos), the broader political context (the regime’s assessment of risk and threat levels), and the Interior Ministry’s internal bureaucratic politics (I’d give an arm and a leg to be a fly on the wall during their meetings). If we take the protests of 2005 alone, differences between pre-emptive and reactive police repression is immediately clear. Mubarak’s regime doesn’t “allow” protest then, but it does seek to contain, manage, and defuse it, ironically routinising this form of collective action.

3. Social protest is not about politics, it’s about survival. This idea is repeated over and over again as protest spreads to social groups who don’t routinely engage in it and have good reasons for avoiding it, such as the homeless of Qal’at al-Kabsh, Tebbeen, and Qursaya, or the fishermen and farmers in Kafr al-Shaykh and Gharbiyya protesting water scarcity last summer, or the Mahalla youths last month. A sister notion holds that the recent string of protests by doctors, industrial workers, farmers, and tax collectors embody “parochial” demands about wages and working conditions and therefore can’t be classified as important political events.

This is the one of the oldest canards about ordinary people’s collective action, a hoary myth that refuses to die. Not only is it incredibly condescending toward the human striving for a dignified life, but it basically believes that ordinary people are incapable of sustained political thought. It also involves quite a strange conception of politics.

Who said that politics only includes national structures of political power? Politics has always been about local constellations of power, and bread-and-water issues of survival. Politics is involved in any act that makes demands on the rulers and their agents. When homeless poor people amass in front of a municipal building or parliament to demand housing, or when Borollos villagers block a highway for 12 hours to compel their governor to supply them with potable water, or when Qursaya islanders cling to the soil to resist eviction by the army, they’re not “just” fighting for survival. As is obvious to anyone who pays attention, they’re making concrete demands on state officials, regardless of the specific issues at play. If that’s not political, I really don’t know what is. When workers strike to demand increased wages and food allowances, they’re making demands on management, yes, but they’re also demanding that the state either step in and force management to make concessions or enforce a breached compact or regulate exploitative work conditions. Demanding fair wages and defending other “parochial” interests is just as political as establishing a political party or insisting that Hosni Mubarak step down.

A final thought: I’m not convinced by the oft-made, strained argument that economic protests somehow “spill over” into political protests through some vague process of osmosis or something. Economic claims are already political by virtue of targeting government officials, policies, and interests in some fashion or another.

4. Protest will lead to democracy. Let me confess right away that I have a soft spot for this myth and constantly catch myself revelling in it. The reasoning is that more protest leads to more people voicing demands, which leads to more opportunities for powerholders to be subjected to popular consultation, which constrains their power and therefore promotes democracy.

This is most likely right, but only half the time. The other and probably more common outcome is greater repression and a contraction rather than expansion of democratisation. The key flaw with the more protest equals more democracy thesis is that it wrongly equates protestors’ claims with protest outcomes. However, claims are one thing, consequences are something else. We can’t judge protests by their claims, but by their indirect effects. For example, Kifaya and allied social movements demand that Mubarak step down, refrain from handing power to his son, and convoke competitive, free and fair elections. This has not happened. Do we then judge Kifaya’s impact by its failure to oust Mubarak and install democracy? That would be ludicrous, but it would also be wrong to assume that since Kifaya was a pro-democracy movement, it automatically added an increment of democracy to Egyptian politics. The fact is that the consequences of Kifaya’s protests are two-pronged: on one hand, they effectively set the agenda of public discourse for at least a year and acted as a counterweight to the Ikhwan. One the other, and contrary to movement members’ intentions, Kifaya’s protests increased the regime’s repression of democracy-seeking coalitions and may have improved the government’s capacity to throttle future such coalitions in their cradle. It’s not clear yet which of Kifaya’s effects will prevail, the point is that pro-democracy claims do not unambiguously result in pro-democracy consequences.

It also works the other way round: anti-democracy protest claims may paradoxically result in more democratization, if they spur counter-movements to mobilise, thus bringing more participants into the political space and routinising protest as a form of collective pressure on public authorities. The example of Egypt in the inter-war period comes to mind here, with its diverse set of political-ideological groups all taking to the streets and forming coalitions with parliamentary factions, competing with each other for political standing and influence: Ikhwan, Misr al-Fatah, the congeries of socialists and communists, the Wafd and its factions, and endless splinter groups and underground societies. Some were avowedly pro-democracy and others were vocally anti-democracy, but their combined effect on politics was democratising by increasing the numbers of politically active citizens and forcing government accountability through periodic elections.

Ultimately, the consequences of protest on democratisation is very difficult to gauge, precisely because protest has the dual effects of on one hand expanding political participation and subjecting rulers to popular consultation and on the other provoking popular fear of ‘chaos’ and inviting greater state repression. However, we can see the connection more clearly if we don’t confuse protest claims with protest effects. Important mediating factors always step in, confounding intentions.

A Good Idea

So now that I’ve so arrogantly proclaimed some ideas to be so bad, what, pray, are the good ideas?! For starters, the current protest wave needs to be carefully documented; constructing a comprehensive catalogue of protest events is fortunately now feasible, given extensive media coverage and various research and human rights groups’ tracking of protest incidents for some years now. Once we have the information, we can begin the analysis, looking for salient patterns, identifying the likely causes of protest, tracking changes in its morphology, explaining how it diffuses, and understanding government containment strategies. Regarding causes, we know that privatization has triggered the frequent labour strikes, so we can conjecture that government and/or business resource-grabs such as increased taxation and land appropriation are propelling citizens to protest; think of the remarkable Dumyat mobilisation against the planned Agrium facility, or Qursaya islanders’ mobilisation last year, the Dahab and Warraq islanders’ protests in 2001, or traders’ protest against the sales tax in 2001.

Morphological analysis might include constructing typologies of protest claims, protest targets, and protest locations. It ought to examine innovation and diffusion in specific protest techniques, such as my favourite tactic: the increasing resort to protests in front of parliament. There’s also the spread of the internationally resonant candlelight protest, or the intriguing sash phenomenon, which the judges first started in spring 2006, then the Ikhwan MPs mimicked it in their protests against the Lebanon war in August 2006, then it was diffused to opposition MPs protesting the constitutional amendments in March 2007, then Giza lawyers picked it up when they protested lack of courtroom space last autumn, and who knows who’ll borrow it next?

There are so many ways to describe and interpret Egypt’s protest wave, isn’t it a great shame to keep invoking the same reductive, anaemic ideas, ignoring all the rich empirical information right under our noses? In other times and places, sustained protest waves illuminated the intersection between politics and everyday life, tracked momentous changes in political structures and economic organisation, and midwifed new ways of doing politics. Above all, protest waves always transformed relations between citizens and government agents. Beyond their momentous effects, protest waves are intrinsically fascinating. The phenomena of ordinary people struggling to preserve their honour and dignity, organising to make forceful demands on those who control their fates and livelihoods, activating their citizenship, this is an awesome thing to behold.

*To the memory of CT, with love and grief.

Photos from al-Badeel, al-Karama, Associated Press.

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Sorrow

Mahmoud Mokhtar, al-Huzn
Basalt, 1927

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"We Want a Living Wage"

A broad coalition of blue- and white-collar national forces has called a general strike for tomorrow 6 April to demand decent living conditions and protest all the man-made ills afflicting our society: corruption, nepotism, inflation, torture, poverty, police brutality. The plan is to stay home and not report to work or school, or alternatively to join others in street processions converging on main city squares.

The general strike is the brainchild of the Ghazl a-Mahalla workers, later joined by Kafr al-Dawwar labourers. Kifaya, al-Wasat, al-Karama, the 9 March Movement for University Autonomy and a slew of other collectives have also signed on. The Muslim Brothers have been wholly consumed with the battle to register for municipal elections scheduled for 8 April, but a few days ago they felt compelled to issue a lukewarm statement of support for the general strike.

This latest attempt at civil disobedience emerges from the recent wave of wage revolts sweeping all sectors of Egyptian society, and perhaps for this reason it has received far more attention than last summer’s maiden endeavour. Of course, the government and all its institutions have been mobilising for days to obstruct and ridicule the very notion of a strike. Today, the ever-informative Al-Ahram quoted a judge who reminded citizens that Article 124 of the Penal Code punishes all those who shirk their work obligations with a prison sentence of 3 months to one year, and double that for all those who incite others to strike. Civil servants, teachers, police officers and many others have been given strict instructions to report for work tomorrow, and amn al-dawla has been busy alternately threatening and cajoling workers to abandon or abort the strike effort.

Egypt’s slow-motion socio-political transformation is proceeding beautifully.

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Spring

Salah Yousri, "Spring" (1954)

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The Organiser

Like many others, I’ve been riveted by the Real Estate Tax Collectors’ strike and sit-in. How did these civil servants manage to launch such bold and sustained collective action over a period of months? And if indeed their grievances have been festering since 1974, why was it only now that they took action? Most puzzling of all is how they managed to garner sympathetic media coverage and drum up public support. After all, the Egyptian civil servant is not exactly a beloved figure. Who hasn’t had a bad experience with some obstructionist, misanthropic muwazzaf? (Yes, I’ve been stung a few times). The tax collector especially is richly reviled, perceived as a thief in official garb, extracting revenues for a state that has long ceased to provide protection and services. How is it that tax collectors all of a sudden became sympathetic figures with a just cause? With all of these questions and more, I went in search of an unusual tax collector, a lifelong political activist, and a very endearing man with a wicked sense of humor: the remarkable Kamal Abu Eita.


First I wanted to know how Abu Eita became a real estate tax collector, so we started at the beginning. Kamal Muhammad al-Rifa’i Abu Eita was born on March 1, 1953, one of eight children of a minaret-maker in Bulaq al-Dakrur who went on to establish a contracting business. Kamal enrolled at Cairo University in fall 1972, and like generations of Egyptians before and after him, received a first-rate political education at this storied institution. He became active in campus politics and was a founding member of the Nasserist Thought Club (Nadi al-Fikr al-Nasiri), the student initiative that midwifed the contemporary Nasserist movement. After college, Abu Eita joined the Tagammu’ party until the formation of the Nasserist party in 1992, which he joined but then left for the neo-Nasserist Karama movement in 1999.

Throughout his political career, Abu Eita combined partisan commitment with para-partisan advocacy on behalf of a wide range of causes, from peasants to prisoners of conscience to public sector workers. For his efforts, he has been imprisoned a whopping 19 times. “I’ve been a guest at all of Bulaq’s police stations and nearly all of the country’s prisons!” he chuckles. Especially significant for the December sit-in is Abu Eita’s capacity to enrich his organising with his politics while at the same time not imposing his politics on his fellow tax collectors.

Abu Eita’s unlikely career as a civil servant began immediately after college. Right after graduating in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy, he applied for a teaching position with the Ministry of Education but was turned down for security reasons. He spent six months as a clerk in the Giza governorate and was then transferred to the Giza Traffic administration, but the office responsible for the security of the Israeli embassy was located there and Abu Eita was deemed a threat (!), so he was transferred back to the Giza governorate and stayed there until 1979, when a friend casually let him know that the Real Estate Tax Authority was hiring with decent salaries. So Abu Eita applied and became a tax official.

Next, the conversation turned to Abu Eita’s tenure in the Authority from 1979 to the present. In 1982, he was instrumental in establishing the first union for Real Estate Tax officials, but did not become a member for fear that his superiors would crush the fledgling experience. Four years later, when the initiative had gathered steam, Abu Eita ran for union elections and became vice president. He continued to contest union elections, winning the highest number of votes in every election and becoming president until 2006, when the government weighed in with all forms of administrative interference and intimidation to ensure pliant unions led by cooperative henchmen. As with the parliamentary elections, the labour and civil servants’ union elections in 2006 witnessed meddling at the vote-counting stage by poll workers, and Abu Eita lost. He now laughs when remembering this: “And I kept bringing them sandwiches and tea all day, those sons of bitches! But it’s ironic, losing the elections actually gave me freedom of manoeuvre to manage this strike.”

So how does one organize government clerks to coordinate a strike and sit-in, and why now? As usual with such collective action, there are important but forgotten precedents and equally important but also forgotten triggers. Abu Eita reminds that the precedent was set in March 1999, when property tax collectors gathered in Tahrir Square to demand benefit raises, then staged a sit-in in front of parliament and the office of the Minister of Finance. Their demands were met, though less than 10% of tax collectors participated in the sit-in. “The government agreed to our demands in 1999 because the economic reform and privatization programs were not as far along and the state’s fiscal crisis wasn’t as severe,” Abu Eita explains, arguing that today the government is more strapped than ever, rendering ministers extremely reluctant to concede to wage increases of the sort tax collectors are demanding.

If tax collectors had the 1999 precedent to go on, they were also prodded to action by a more proximate trigger. In 2005 as is well known, the government issued a new law attaching sanitation fees to the electricity bill and entrusting the Electricity Authority to collect the fees. What is less well known is that before the new law, property tax collectors were the ones tasked with collecting sanitation fees, earning a minuscule commission that was nevertheless important given their hardscrabble lives. Added to the persistent corruption and mismanagement of the municipal governments that supervise tax collectors, the new sanitation law was the last straw that galvanised the civil servants to action.

“First, my comrades and I talked to fellow collectors all over the country and found that they were all on our side, not allied with the administration as many were in 1999. When I suggested a one-day protest, they said, ‘Why only a day, why not a sit-in?’ So we tried a sit-in on 2 May, the day after Labour Day. Then we added more actions gradually. On 10 September, we gathered in front of the government complex in Giza for a full day and held up signs that read “My salary equals 2 kilos of meat,” and “My salary is worth one pair of shoes.” The Daqahliyya local picked up the thread and began their own sit-in. All the while, we were constantly sending letters to officials, with no response. In the meantime, collectors in 15 out of the 27 governorates were holding their own sit-ins, and a new motto began to emerge, “And we won’t collect!” Remember that the peak season for property tax collection is October, November, and December. Because of our action, the state lost 80% of its revenues from real estate this year.”

“On 21 October, we headed to the Ministry of Finance in Nasr City and called out to the Minister, “Come down from your ivory tower!” but of course he didn’t because he was busy in America. We then walked in a huge procession to the Cabinet building, but security prevented us from entering to negotiate. On 13 and 14 November, we held our sit-in at the Egyptian Trade Union Federation on Gala’ Street; they locked all the bathrooms and meeting rooms, leaving us only the pavement of the entrance. Then and there we decided to hold another sit-in but didn’t publicise the location until the last minute, and that was the Hussein Higazy sit-in that started on 3 December.” It was at that final sit-in where Abu Eita could be seen carried aloft on the shoulders of his colleagues, innovating catchy, eloquent slogans and waving the keys to the offices and file cabinets that he and his colleagues had abandoned in their walkout.

There was something about the December sit-in that captured the public imagination in a way that surpassed even the massive Mahalla strikes of December 2006 and September 2007. The reasons for this are complex and will not be fully apparent until some time has passed and we gain some distance to analyse, but there’s no doubt that the tax officials’ collective leadership and deft tactics succeeded in making the lowly tax collector a stand-in for the hardworking, downtrodden everyman and woman, ravaged by high prices and hovering on the brink of poverty. Significantly, the civil servants courted both regime figures and anonymous members of the public. Their slogans were careful to appeal to the president and invoke his sense of fairness and to praise the Interior Minister for the discipline of his forces. Their conduct of the sit-in respected the residents of Hussein Higazy Street and sought to minimise disruption to their lives (no bullhorns or slogans after 10 pm, for instance).

The residents were won over. Abu Eita recalls the details of their supportive acts. “They made their bathrooms available to the women and children in the sit-in; they removed the rugs from their living rooms and threw them down to us to cushion the freezing pavement; one resident sent his wife and children to his in-laws and offered up his apartment for the protestors to sleep in.” Opposition papers reported that street residents also refused to file complaints against the sit-in with the city government.

After 11 days of the sit-in, Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali, acting on orders from Hosni Mubarak, informed the collectors that their core demands for affiliation with the Ministry and wage parity with general tax collectors would be fulfilled; that they would receive bonuses equivalent to four months’ pay; and that no tax collector would be punished for participating in the sit-in. This agreement was finalised yesterday, the last day of the year.

So concludes this remarkable episode of the last quarter of 2007, the first time since 1924 that civil servants staged a work stoppage to ameliorate their conditions. As we usher in 2008, I can’t help wondering what comes next in Egypt’s extraordinary cycle of protest.


*Photos courtesy of Hamada Abu Ghali

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Scenes from a Sit-in

Since Monday, thousands of tax collectors from the Real Estate Tax Authority have made a downtown street their home. They've converged on Cairo from all over the country to stage a massive sit-in in front of the Cabinet building. Their demands: wage parity with their better-paid colleagues in the General Tax and Sales Tax Authorities, and transferring their affiliation from the corruption-ridden municipal governments to the Finance Ministry (a demand they've made since 1976). Real estate tax collectors in the provinces are refraining from all revenue collection until their demands are met.

al-Karama's talented Peter Alfred has kindly shared these photos of the strike and sit-in. Peter has beautifully captured the determination, the humour, and the solidarity of these humble public functionaries, their refusal to cave in to the entreaties and threats of amn al-dawla and various nervous official emissaries.



As with the second Mahalla strike in Ramadan, hundreds of women civil servants are out in full force, braving the cold winter air and shattering tired stereotypes; they're camping out day and night alongside their male co-workers. What do state feminists, "women's empowerment" do-gooders, and assorted ladies who lunch have to say about that? Oh that's right, nobody cares what they think.

Also out in full force is the indefatigable Kamal Abu Eita, citizen-activist extraordinaire. Like Kamal Khalil, Abu Eita is a fixture at nearly every street protest in Egypt in the past 10 years. But he does have a day job, and it is in fact as a tax collector for the Real Estate Tax Authority, so this protest hits very close to home. Abu Eita is a walking treasure trove of information and insight about this most unusual and most significant of public protests.

Why is it significant? Because it's probably the largest and most coordinated strike action by functionaries of the Egyptian state in modern times. Because it opens a fascinating window onto the mysterious workings of a mammoth bureaucracy. Because it has the potential to cripple the state's lifeline (no revenue, no state). And because it's part of a grand wave of social protest that has been sweeping the country for nearly a decade.

Stay tuned.

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The Death of Deference

Thursday’s sentencing and fining of four independent newspaper editors is not particularly new or surprising. And neither is the impending trial of Ibrahim Eissa for allegedly spreading rumours about Mubarak’s health. First, the editors have all been hauled off to court before and have either been fined, sentenced, or had their cases settled out of court. Second, the two incidents do not herald an impending crackdown on the press, for the simple reason that Mubarak’s regime has been continuously cracking down on and intimidating independent journalists, from at least the early 1990s to the present. So I would caution against spinning these cases as unprecedented curbs on the freedom of the press. What’s more interesting to me about these recent events is what they reveal about the development of an adversarial press in Egypt.

Last year, I argued that one domestic effect of Israel’s assault on Lebanon was the further emboldening of the independent press in its campaign of diminishing the president through rubbishing his foreign policy. The suit against the four editors which was filed last year was one response to the seemingly unstoppable irreverence and vitality of the independent press. Another was the activation of the government Supreme Press Council to issue critical reports of independent newspapers for allegedly violating the journalistic code of ethics with their trenchant criticism of the president. A third was behind-the-scenes lobbying and pressure to remove Abdel Halim Qandil from the editorship of al-Karama. When that failed, government officials succeeded in drying up ad funds to the newspaper, leading to staff cuts, reduced salaries, and a general sense of besiegement. This compelled Qandil to leave the newspaper this summer, to ensure its survival.

With Qandil finally robbed of a platform, the authorities have now turned their attention to that other dogged muckraker, Ibrahim Eissa, the one-man journalistic phenomenon who has been enlivening Egyptian journalism since 1995 with al-Dustour (and a brief stint on Dream TV before being chased out of that venue). And for good measure, the government is also going after the post-Qandil Karama and the new leftist daily al-Badeel, edited by Dr. Mohamed El-Sayed Said. Last week, the Supreme Press Council fingered al-Dustour, al-Karama, and al-Badeel for alleged violations of journalistic ethics in their coverage of the Mubarak health rumours, and has called on their editors to appear before an investigative committee.


The Changing Print Media Market

To put today’s developments in context, it makes sense to review the press scene in the Mubarak years. The Egyptian press does have a rich tradition of challenging and lampooning public officials, especially during the 1920s (I’m thinking of al-Kashkul), 1948-1954, and the final years of Sadat’s tenure. But in none of these eras was the press as systematically aggressive as it is today, nor as diverse. And if we look at just the Mubarak years, there’s a marked shift in the character of the independent print media at the beginning and at the end of Mubarak’s tenure. Compare the style and content of the leading opposition paper in the early years of Mubarak’s rule (al-Ahali under the editorship of Hussein Abdel Razeq) to today’s al-Dustour and al-Karama. Today’s papers are not only stylistically bolder, using more explicit, even hostile prose and directly targeting the president and his family rather than his cronies and appointees, but the range of issues on which they castigate the president is far broader, encompassing domestic policies, foreign policies, and the open discussion of the regime’s own survival strategies, most especially succession. What caused this dramatic shift?

A slew of factors are at work. First are the eclipse of opposition parties and the partisan press. The decline of opposition parties in the 1990s also meant the decline of their mouthpieces, as the dysfunctional internal workings of these parties inevitably infected their newspaper teams; who reads al-Ahali now or even al-Wafd beyond a core group of partisans? Two prominent exceptions are al-Araby and al-Sha’b, both outlets that managed to carve out a space between party dynamics and the management of the newspaper, until the government shut down al-Sha’b and the Labour party in 2000-01. The decline of opposition parties and their mouthpieces left the field open to a new brand of journalism.

A second cause is structural shifts in how newspapers are produced. The broader economic trend of privatisation has influenced the press, where enterprising independent businessmen and journalists sought to enter the print market, using foreign licenses while still being subject to the state censor (the Cyprus press). This is how journalists like Ibrahim Eissa made their mark with al-Dustour (est. 1995), but the private press also includes shadier characters who produce sensationalist rags such as al-Naba’ and al-Khamis, and assorted businessmen who publish vanity newspapers to promote their wares and undermine their rivals.

A third cause is generational and stylistic: the tone of Egyptian journalism is more biting today than at any time since the 1920s because a new generation of journalists is at the helm. There’s no uniformity among these journalists and they come from starkly different schools and backgrounds, but together they’re a different breed from both the tame fare offered up by the old opposition press and the agitprop of the government newspapers. The new boldness in style is maintained by the mimicry and competition among the new papers: competition for readers, competition for ads, and competition for the social prestige that comes with being a bold regime critic and a good wordsmith.

The dense field of print media now includes a whole range of actors motivated by varying interests. There are high-end government outlets such as al-Qahira, ostensibly independent weeklies with informal ties to state agencies such as al-Usbu, liberal dailies such as Nahdet Masr, independent weeklies of indeterminate political ideology such as al-Fagr and Sawt al-Umma, partisan weeklies such as al-Karama, al-Ghad, and al-Araby, the independent non-partisan daily al-Masry al-Yawm (which deserves a separate study examining how it managed to supplant al-Ahram as the daily newspaper of record), and the most recent addition of al-Badeel, a leftist daily that aspires to buck the sensationalist trend by offering readers concrete policy alternatives and quality investigative reporting.

It’s important to remember that the current government has not “allowed” this press diversity so much as tried to alternately contain and control it. It has done this by making sure that administrative regulations to establish newspapers are as cumbersome as possible, that penal provisions jailing journalists and shutting down newspapers remain on the books, and by attempting to enter the lively print media market with newspapers of its own, such as the NDP’s new al-Watany al-Yawm and the Rose al-Yusuf newspaper (it’s interesting how this latter rag has appropriated the name of the doyen of contentious journalism in Egyptian history). When the tenor of criticisms against Mubarak reached a fever pitch last summer, the government activated the Supreme Press Council to assert its claim as the standard-setter for journalistic ethics and professionalism, accusing independent newspapers of violating professional codes with their criticism of the president. Last but not least, the government also resorts to threats and brute force with particularly intrepid journalists, as when Abdel Halim Qandil was kidnapped in November 2004, beaten and stripped naked, and warned to stop writing about his “masters.”

The Architects of the Adversarial Press


The two editors who more than any of their peers have created and promoted the contemporary adversarial model of Egyptian journalism are Abdel Halim Qandil and Ibrahim Eissa (though I must also recall the pioneering role of Magdi and Adil Hussein in the early 1990s). Both are consciously engaged in a systematic project of accusing, belittling, and criticising public officials, from the most hapless minister to the most powerful public official, the normally untouchable president. In light of the weakness of parliament and the fragmentation of citizen watchdog groups, both see journalism as a useful tool to extract a modicum of responsiveness from an unaccountable, unchecked imperial presidency. And both aspire to make a profound impact on the wider political culture, replacing existing norms of deference and decorum when addressing the powerful with a style marked by irreverence, profound scepticism, and a blunt, salty style. But though they’re fellow travellers in many ways, Eissa and Qandil come from very different backgrounds and are motivated by different impulses.

Ibrahim Eissa is a consummate newspaperman raised on the plucky, lively style of the Rose al-Yusuf school. Read his articles in that magazine from the early 1990s and you’ll recognise the pungency of his prose, the trademark brash style, and an aimless critical thrust that would be harnessed to much better use years later. Apprenticed by Adel Hammouda, Eissa soon outshone his mentor: he is sharper, more daring, and more adept at successfully managing a newspaper team. Journalism is his passion and life’s work. In 1995, at the age of 30, he launched al-Dustour, an entirely new experiment that proved wildly popular and successful, achieving a circulation of 150,000 and creating a new genre of journalism that spawned many knockoffs and imitators. Shut down by the government in February 1998, the newspaper resumed publication in 2005 and then went daily earlier this year.

Eissa’s success is a potent combination of writerly skill, political commitment, and strategic vision. He may be the first editor to put in newsprint how ordinary people talk and gripe about politics. His own writing is warm, playful, and conversational, drawing in the reader and eliciting hearty chuckles. His personal political commitment to social democracy is supplemented by truly catholic tastes that have earned him the admiration and respect of every ideological camp in the country, and have opened the pages of al-Dustour to writers of every conceivable persuasion. And he’s driven by the long-term goal of transforming the press from a passive chronicler to an active participant in the political development of the country. Eissa’s methodical, unrelenting pursuit of the president in print has done nothing less than create a new genre in Egyptian journalism that is likely to outlive its creator.

Abdel Halim Qandil is an old-timer (and hardliner) in Nasserist circles but a newcomer to the world of journalism. A physician by training, he became a household name when he and Abdallah al-Sennawi assumed joint editorship of the Nasserist party’s moribund al-Araby in the early 2000s. Their principled opposition to Mubarak energised the editorial team and transformed al-Araby from a pallid partisan rag to a must-read and sold-out item every Sunday. Unlike Eissa’s folksy writing style, Qandil’s prose is shorn and clinical, composed of short, dagger-like sentences that aim straight for the highest echelons of political power. And though it lacks the humour that leavens Eissa’s writing, Qandil’s prose more than makes up for it with a sense of purpose and precision that for me is a joy to read.

Qandil’s salty columns at al-Araby vilifying Mubarak, his policies, his family, and his foreign patrons (collated in the book Against the President and reviewed here) earned him the admiration of many readers and fellow activists and the undying hatred of the powers that be, hence the 2004 kidnapping and the pressure to eject him from al-Karama. But many were also put off by Qandil’s columns, calling them repetitive, shrill, insolent, and extreme. They turn up their noses in distaste at the violation of norms of decorum. I don’t share this view. I find Qandil’s targeted anger and relentless dressing down of the president (both the person of Mubarak and the office of the presidency) to be a refreshing, healthy alternative to the stultifying deference and enforced politesse of our political discourse, especially when it comes to public officials. In an authoritarian system like ours where public officials lord it over citizens, loot public resources, and muzzle those who dare protest, it is nothing short of indispensable to bring them down to size, embarrass them, perturb them, and compel them to justify their actions in the court of public opinion. If this is done in a shrill, repetitive manner, then so be it.


The Impact of the Adversarial Press


Eissa and Qandil set out to demystify and demythologize powerholders, and judging by the responses of the latter, they have succeeded marvellously. I find this photograph of Hosni Mubarak making a public appearance on 4 September quite revealing for his handlers’ attempt to assert presidential health and power in the face of an increasingly sceptical and irreverent public. See also Suzanne Mubarak’s recent interview in Egypt Today, where she elaborates on her hostility to what she calls “the media” and gushes about her pet projects. The interview is a stunning exemplar of stomach-churning deference; the interviewer shares with readers his opinion that Suzanne Mubarak is “the woman Princess Diana might have resembled in her autumnal years had God granted her the chance.” Quite. And last but not least, read Mufid Fawzi’s paean to the president in Saturday’s al-Ahram; in its desperate attempt to salvage the president’s “stature” and rubbish the new breed of adversarial journalists, it is the best indication of just how influential and effective this new genre has become.

A final word about what the new adversarial journalism and its architects have not achieved. They have not made an appreciable contribution to raising the quality of newsgathering and transmission. They have not worked to create a tradition of solid and hard-hitting investigative reporting, an urgent task that still eludes virtually all Egyptian newspapers. And they have not devoted any space or time to sensitive human interest stories, stories that would illuminate some of the many untapped dimensions of the contemporary Egyptian condition. But I don’t see these as fatal failures. An antagonistic press that disturbs the sleep of venal public officials is a considerable achievement and a real public service. It’s a very risky, overtime job that people like Eissa and Qandil have turned into a calling. I hope it is an enduring achievement, and I’m happy to wait for the other genres to follow suit.

Read On

Alley in Cairo

Hasan Sulayman (b. 1928), Alley in Cairo (1955)

Read On

Remembrance of Readings Past

I was a bookish child, and spent endless hours immersed in fantastic stories, tales peopled with strange and wonderful characters getting themselves into all sorts of ill-advised but oh-so-exciting adventures. On my eighth birthday, Baba bought me a stack of stories from Dar al-Maa’ref’s venerable Awladna series, a collection that has shaped untold generations of young readers. Books in the series include translations of world classics such as Ivanhoe, Don Quixote, and Tom Sawyer; abridged Arabic classics; and generic stories of indeterminate origin such as ‘Am Ni’na’ (Uncle Mint), a charming homily about a beloved neighbourhood stationer-cum-wise man whose shop turns into an agora for the local children to mingle and learn the values of truth, honest hard work, and good citizenship.

Now, riffling through my Awladna books after so many years, I’m struck by the unmistakable Platonic thrust of the series’ founding statement, issued in March 1947: “It is no secret that the life of the mind is the firmest pillar of happiness. Our love for our children compels us to pave for them the paths to this happiness by endearing them to the good book, so that they can seek it out as youngsters and become attached to it as adults, thus building the bonds of a firm friendship that sharpens their sentiments and emotions, refines their tastes, develops their talents, and endows them with a loftiness of soul.” The project of building young minds through stories was entrusted to none other than leading Egyptian pedagogue Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid (1893-1967), Dean of the Education Institute in Cairo and himself a prolific author of historical novels and translator of major works of world literature into Arabic.

I consumed the Awladna stories in quiet corners of my parents’ and grandparents’ apartments, while the rest of the family children played and ignored me. There was one particular story that riveted me entirely, that I read over and over again to revel in its menagerie of wondrous characters and the irrepressible insouciance of its lead protagonist. Pinocchio was like nothing I’d ever read before. It had movement, suspense, and more emotional drama than I could handle. I was enthralled by the story’s talking crickets, chicks, goats, and birds, by Pinocchio’s cap made of dough, and most of all by the kindly and trusting Geppetto. I teared up at all the pain he suffered on account of his errant, ungrateful little tyke. I couldn’t understand how Pinocchio could so blithely hurt his poor old father like that.

I open the book now and the same sense of palpable foreboding washes over me, the constant sense of dread at Pinocchio’s errant ways, from the first minute when he detours from school to see the Marionette Theatre to his ignominious metamorphosis into a donkey to his being swallowed up by the asthmatic shark. But then I remember that the story has a sweet, happy ending. Pinocchio learns his lesson and changes his ways, landing gainful employment and succeeding in the studies he had neglected. As a reward, he turns into a real boy and Geppetto grows younger and returns to his craft of wood carving. And all is well with the world.

For a brief spell, school reading nourished my imagination. Like so many of my contemporaries, I grew up on the two didactic props of the Ministry of Education: the smug Omar and his silly little sister Amal. Amal struck me as pathetic and annoying, imitating everything that her older brother did.

Omar was an insufferable know-it-all who inexplicably wore a skirt to school. I didn’t like how he knew everything and she was the buffoonish tag-along; it offended my sensibility as a serious girl (quite). Still, I was fascinated by their world, and still remember quirky things from the book: their friend’s name “Nargis”, a girl’s name I’d never heard before; their class visit to the consumer cooperative, which I envied because I heard adults talking about buying this or that from al-gam’iyya, but I didn’t know what a gam’iyya was; and their trip to the village, where Omar’s equally smug friend Ashraf informs us that the white egret is “the fellah’s friend” because he eats up all the worms in the fields.

Though the Awladna stories formed the core of my reading, I had catholic tastes. I read anything I could get my hands on to fill the hours of summer ennui, including snippets of newsprint and I consumed the frilly stories of al-Maktaba al-Khadra, but the fairy tales full of princesses and princes dressed up in fussy outfits eventually bored me. I read slim volumes of scriptural stories made for children that supplied the narrative details missing in the Qur’an’s elliptical exposition. I still remember the feeling of horror at the bloodshed in the story of Qabil and Habil; the evocative detail of the notable ladies of the city distractedly slicing their hands instead of the fruit as they sat transfixed by Yusuf’s breathtaking beauty (I kept trying to imagine what he looked like); and the story of Yunus being swallowed up by the whale, which terrified me. I kept wondering how he could breathe in there.

Kamel al-Kilani’s (1897-1959) stories were fun, especially the ones adapted from Alf Layla. I didn’t know anything about the author, except that my father grew up on his stories. I didn’t know that Kilani was a lifelong clerk in the Awqaf Ministry and an avid lover of literature, and that he is now considered the pioneer of Arabic children’s literature. I just liked the alliteration in his name, and the fact that all his books contained diacritical marks, so I could pronounce the words properly. I remember the whimsical, humorous tale of the hapless ‘Umara, a story that unfolds over seven days. ‘Umara is a lazy ne’er-do-well of unbelievable stupidity. He gets kicked out of school, and then his mother threatens to kick him out of the house if he doesn’t secure gainful employment. On his quest, ‘Umara quite accidentally brings laughter to a depressed sultan’s daughter; the sultan of course rewards him handsomely, and ‘Umara marries the princess and eventually assumes the throne, “and he ruled the land with justice.”

I gradually moved on to more contemporary fare, and distinctly remember one summer being entirely taken up with detective stories. My favourite were the five adventurers, a monthly series whose utterly ridiculous premise did not in the least faze me: five upper-class kids from Maadi helping to solve knotty and dangerous crime cases, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the local police station, no less. I obsessively collected their books, visiting the newspaper stand every month to get the latest. Those of a certain age will remember that the quintet consisted of Takhtakh, the portly but really smart ringleader who had superior deductive powers; the siblings Atef and Loza and the twins Noosa and Moheb, and the beloved dog Zangar. In an utterly self-flattering manner, I identified strongly with Loza, the youngest member of the crew and the smartest after Takhtakh. She was energetic, cute, and such an excellent sleuth. Plus, she was brave. When she was kidnapped by some ruthless criminals, she weathered the experience with grit and aplomb.

This was all very attractive and convincing to me, apparently, and I whiled away the hours consuming the fast-paced, thrilling adventures of the fabulous five. They spent their summer vacations pursuing dangerous criminals and sophisticated organised gangs (gasp!), while I spent summer vacations filled with crushing boredom. They put themselves in real danger, going undercover as street children and thugs to consort with the shadowy figures of the Maadi underworld. And they amassed valuable clues simply by engaging in systematic, logical thinking (the unsubtle moral of all the stories). In their downtime, the sleuths had a love-hate relationship with the grouchy Shaweesh Ali, who found them annoying (who wouldn’t?), but they enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Inspector Sami, an influential detective who always wore dark glasses and said things like “What I admire about you is that you are bold adventurers and diligent students at the same time.” Not only that, but Takhtakh had unmediated access to Inspector Sami, often phoning him on his direct line to offer clever advice and tips.

I flip through the books of my childhood, and find that they still grip, delight, and stimulate me. They taught me the beauty of words, the magic of imagination, the virtues of concentration, and the love of all that is quirky, unlikely, astonishing.

Read On

The Art of Ibrahim Aslan

Since he emerged on the literary scene in the mid-1960s with his elliptical, allusive, deceptively simple short stories that deeply impressed culture mavens Naguib Mahfouz, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Salah Abdel Sabbour, Ibrahim Aslan has been elaborating and perfecting a genre all his own. Mixing fiction with autobiography, short story conventions with novelistic forms, poetic economy with dramaturgical composition, Aslan’s art is a precious, wondrous creation. He has the poet’s ear for language, the painter’s feel for texture, the composer’s sense of movement, the layperson’s love of humour, and the photographer’s knack for finding the magic in the mundane.


Aslan’s latest work, Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (Something like That), is a collection of the author’s terse and evocative columns in al-Ahram and al-Karama written in the past two years. Reading them once a week among the grim fare of news and opinion was like a breath of fresh air, a momentary flash of mystery and beauty amidst mind-numbing ugliness. But reading them in succession in a single volume is a more intense, absorbing experience, inviting contemplation of just what it is that makes Aslan’s writing perennially fresh, profound, and pleasurable.

Aslan is by far my favourite writer among his contemporaries. While very readable, Sonallah Ibrahim’s work is highly cerebral and lacks beauty (with the exception of his latest oeuvre). Baha’ Taher has become too transparently didactic and self-conscious in his writing, Khairy Shalabi’s storytelling is exuberant but unrestrainedly verbose and showy, Gamal al-Ghitani’s prose is too opaque and impenetrable, and reading Edwar al-Kharrat is grim work, what with all of his avant-garde philosophising. Mohamed El-Bisatie’s writing comes closest to Aslan’s poetic power and economical style, but his fixation on village life over-relies on predictable themes and characters.

Like his contemporaries, Aslan conceives of writing as a medium to communicate with and prod the reader, but unlike many of them, his writing has a very light, ethereal touch while still making a profound impression. He does not moralise or philosophise, nor does he use writing simply to experiment with technique or engage in word play. He doesn’t write to shock or condemn or complain. He writes for the same reason a painter puts brush to canvas or a composer puts pencil to music paper: to give form to some inchoate thought or inspiration and to share it with others. From his first published collection of short stories Buhayrat al-Misa’ (Evening Lake, 1971) to his present collection of vignettes, Aslan’s sources of inspiration have been Melete and Mneme, the muses of meditation and memory.

As with his vignettes in Khulwat al-Ghalban (Poor Man’s Hermitage, 2003), the 34 meditations in Shay’un Min Hadha al-Qabil (the title comes from an obiter dictum on p. 63) draw on Aslan’s memories from childhood and his early working life, as well as his quotidian interactions with peers, acquaintances, and neighbours. There are sketches of cultural figures Yahya Haqqi, Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammad Auda, and George Bahgoury, visits to St. Petersburg and Dostoevsky’s house, and everyday encounters with neighbours, Aslan’s car mechanic, a loquacious taxi driver, an exhausted old man, a besotted young newspaper seller, the author’s third grade English teacher, and a rural migrant to the city who’s written a real letter to God that Aslan surreptitiously filched from the undeliverable mail bin back when he worked at the postal service. None of these scenes are more than 2-3 short pages long, and the first five in the book are particularly revelatory of Aslan’s graceful melding of memory and meditation.

Of course, Imbaba serves as a sort of hidden motif. As is well known, the neighbourhood where Aslan was born and has lived all his life has featured centrally in his two novels, Malek al-Hazin (The Heron, 1983) and Asafir al-Nil (Nile Sparrows, 1999), and his short story collection Hikayat min Fadlallah Uthman (Stories from Fadlallah Uthman, 2003). But here, evocations of his beloved natal quarter have a special poignancy. As the author mentions, he has moved from Imbaba to a new domicile in Moqattam, an experience whose logistical and psychological dimensions are most beautifully explored in these etudes.

In small, precise gestures, this collection reveals much about Aslan’s life and art. We learn that one of his inspirations for becoming a writer was reading Anton Chekhov’s “The Death of a Government Clerk.” We learn that he wrote his first novel “out of pure coincidence.” That it troubles him that he can never remember his dreams. That reading every day is a reflex and compulsion of quasi-religious significance. That melancholy and humour commingle in his writing as they do in life. We learn the art of noticing, of living as fully sentient beings, in perpetual contemplation.

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To Drink, Perchance to Live

Talented photographer Amr Abdallah at al-Masry al-Yawm has kindly shared his photos of citizens' daily struggle for water, here in Giza. I'm in no mood for comment. What's there to say? Who isn't outraged by this suffering and deprivation, and who isn't enraged by the responses of Gamal Mubarak's ministers and his father's governors?

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The Civil Disobedience Project

On Monday, 23 July, stay at home and raise Egypt’s flag.

That’s the initiative adopted by Kifaya and a half dozen other groups to inaugurate a long term, incremental, and very patient civil disobedience campaign to signal public disgust with Hosni Mubarak, his son, their government, and its policies. The idea is not to stage a symbolic, one-time performance but to begin working seriously and creatively to transform widespread disaffection with the Mubarak regime into concrete, coordinated, relatively risk-free acts that strip the regime of any residual vestiges of legitimacy.

The notion of organising a national civil disobedience campaign has been percolating for some years now, pre-dating the current spectacular wave of protests. In fall 2004, it gained the valuable intellectual and moral imprimatur of retired judge and historian Tariq al-Bishri, who wrote a lucid defence of non-violent resistance as the only feasible and effective method of engaging the increasingly violent and personalised rule of Hosni Mubarak. Reading it again, I’m struck by how much has changed since al-Bishri penned his words. The fragmentation and dearth of collective action that he lamented three years ago are unrecognisable today, replaced by incessant societal movement, to wit: the electoral mobilisation of 2005, the pro-judges’ protests of 2006, the innovative campus organising of 2005 and 2006, the workers’ uprising of 2006-07, and the more recent spate of ordinary people’s street action.

By civil disobedience, al-Bishri meant precisely the kind of street-based collective demand-making and reclaiming of rights that is now sweeping the country, spearheaded by labour unions, craft guilds, professional associations, student unions, and ordinary people. Kifaya et al’s recent initiative goes well beyond this mode. It ventures into the most challenging, the most difficult terrain: seeking to activate societal sectors unused to expressing opposition of any kind, whether street protest or dissent in salons and political parties or writing letters to newspapers or joining a block association or any of the myriad other ways that politically aware citizens air their views.

The stay at home initiative targets those who cringe from making any sort of visible statement about public affairs but are by no means indifferent about current events. It seeks to tap into the intense and ambient sense of anger at the authorities that has settled over the entire country like a thick, low-hanging cloud, the subject of every household conversation and office chatter. It attempts to normalise dissent by weaving into the rhythm of everyday life, whittling it down to a simple, doable, and above-all risk-free act of staying at home (what we all love to do anyway) and hanging the flag from a window or balcony, an eminently respectable and patriotic gesture tweaked just enough to make a bold but non-threatening statement.

It’s no surprise that the idea has generated heated, entertaining discussion on the Internet, independent and opposition newspapers, and satellite television programs. Reactions run the gamut from enthusiastic support to puzzlement to derision. Som