Egyptian Revolution: First Impressions From the Field

by Mohammed Bamyeh
Feb 11 2011
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/561/the-egyptian-revolution_first-impressions-from-the-field_updated

Al-Qahira, The City Victorious, February 11, 2011

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 struggled for two more weeks,
practically little government existed during that
period. 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. On his last day
in office, February 10, he outraged almost everyone in
the country when, rather than resigning as everyone had
been expecting, he simply delegated his powers
temporarily to his now equally hated vice president.
Enormous crowds converged on the streets and reached
the presidential palace on February 11, and the whole
country appeared now determined to extract vengeance on
a man so out of touch with such an unmistakably obvious
popular will.

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.
What he said on February 1 would also have resolved the
crisis, had he said it on January 28. And what he said
on February 10 meant that there would no longer be an
honorable exit to the man who just a couple weeks
before appeared to be the strongest man in the Middle
Eas.

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.

___________________________________________

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