The apartment blocks on my street in downtown Cairo have accommodated many cycles of Egypt’s political tumult in the past 18 months.
A stone’s throw from Tahrir Square, they have been enveloped in teargas, pockmarked by Molotov cocktails, pressed into use as urban barricades, and provided the backdrop for some of the post-Mubarak military generals’ most violent assaults on the citizens they swore to protect.
This month, my buildings’ latest revolutionary iteration was unveiled — two billboards sporting mugshots of Ahmad Shafiq: former Mubarak-era prime minister, current presidential candidate and felul (regime remnant) figurehead par excellence. The last batch of polls suggests Shafiq could emerge triumphant, sounding what many would describe as the final death knell to the ‘liberal revolutionaries’ of Tahrir.
If Shafiq fails to win, the argument goes, then the similarly tainted former foreign minister Amr Mousa may squeak over the line, or the victor may emerge from one of the two Islamist camps. Any of the above options are said to be a sad body-blow to the spirit of Tahrir, but the very existence of a democratic electoral process is itself trumpeted as a conclusive success for the revolution.
Two misapprehensions underpin much of the discussion about the revolution. The first is that the metric of revolutionary success lies solely in the formal arena of institutional politics, and the development of democratic mechanisms within it. The second is that Tahrir, along with the ludicrously titled ‘Facebook youth’ who populated the square last year, is the only alternative space in which pressure on the formal arena is thrashed out.
This is a narrative that suits many elite — both domestic and international — because it contains the energy of the revolution. If revolutionary progress can be measured along a linear scale with the authoritarianism of Arab autocracy at one end and the holy grail of western liberal democracy at the other, then the Arab uprisings can be squeezed neatly into existing global power dynamics, reinforcing them in the process.
And it’s that energy, that those who benefit from the status quo really fear. Little wonder that there has been a rush by the world’s most powerful entities —from Hillary Clinton and David Cameron to Morgan Chase and General Electric — to simultaneously venerate Tahrir (as long as the demands voiced within it don’t overstep the mark), echo the generals’ calls for “stability” (shutting down broader discourses of dissent in the process) and form links with the largely neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood (whose policies, despite anguished op-eds in Washington think-tank journals, pose little threat to American interests, and indeed offer up many opportunities).
The Islamist/secularist divide gets all the attention - but it’s also only one faultline among many. As long as the basic tenets of Egypt’s Chicago-school economic orthodoxy remain stable, men with beards v women with no headscarves is a political divide that western policymakers and Egyptian elites are happy to contend with.
What they’re less keen to acknowledge — because it carries the revolution out of its sheltered borders — are the other trenches that are increasingly being etched at the margins of Egyptian society, dividing those who have reaped pharaonic-esque riches as a result of 20-odd years of “structural adjustment” from those left behind in zones of neoliberal exclusion.
You don’t have to move far from Tahrir to find these social cleavages. They aren’t packaged for primetime but remain deep, growing and fuelled by grievances that none of the presidential candidates know how to resolve. Islands of informal settlements dot the Nile whose residents battle security forces to avoid eviction - a government-orchestrated community clear-out to make way for holiday resorts.
Travel northeast up the river to Damietta, and you’ll find Egyptians who have been blocking ports and facing down tanks in protest at the pollution of a nearby foreign-owned chemical factory. You can sail south to Qena, where locals have occupied railway lines and threatened to sever the electricity supply running from the Aswan dam to the north.
From those employed directly by the state — like the central security force conscripts who mutinied a fortnight ago — to those locked stubbornly outside it, such as the Bedouins of Dabaa who recently stormed a government nuclear plant to demonstrate against the illegal appropriation of their land, Egyptians are asserting control over their communities, their livelihoods and their future.
Forget Shafiq’s advertising hoardings — the revolution is everywhere and it is potent. It encompasses the educated middle-classes as well as the urban and rural poor, and while subalterns may make contingent and strategic alliances with a wide variety of political forces, in the long term the inability of those forces to even articulate a language of genuine change, means that rapid mobilisation of protests on the street is always only a single moment away.
Egypt has been a nucleus of radical dissent throughout its history, and certainly long before the anti-Mubarak uprising exploded. Just ask the residents of Kafr el-Dawwar, site of a barely reported insurgency in 1984, or the farmers of Sarandu, who in 2005 fought riot police attempting to seize their plots in accordance with Mubarak’s new “liberalising” land law. The difference now is that those agitating for transformation know that the winds of revolution are behind them, transforming what could otherwise be purely ‘local’ or ‘parochial’ concerns into a sustained and collective assault on the status quo.
As the sociologist Asef Bayat has argued, actions that appear to be individualistic strategies for survival and not explicitly political attempts to bring down elites can become unstoppable channels of mass rejection, a struggle for real agency in an era of globalised corporate cosmopolitanism that strives to deny it to so many. This is Egypt’s revolution, one that intersects with grassroots struggles from Athens to Madrid, Sanaa to Santiago, and it is the revolution that existing elites are scared of the most.
The Egyptian revolutionary Ala’a Abd Al Fatah was once asked whether he’d like to see the revolution establish a British (parliamentary) or American (presidential) system of liberal democracy. “Neither,” he replied. “We want something better than both.”
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jack Shenker reported on Egypt’s revolution for the Guardian.
