It must have been the Saturday after Ben ‘Ali stepped down in Tunisia, because Mike had just returned from taking his students on a tour of Islamic Cairo. I was in the kitchen, doing the dishes, and he walked in to get a snack. He asked me if I had been following the news in Tunisia, and what my thoughts were.
We have a lot of conversations like these while one or both of us is doing the dishes. In Cairo I live with a couple -- Mike, a history professor at the American University in Cairo, and his wife Marty. They are like parent-friends to me, an ideal combination that makes living in their home the experience of community that is not quite biological family, but something very close to it. Given this setting, the mundane events of the day -- like doing the dishes -- often become the context for some of my most engaging conversations in Cairo.
What sticks out to me about this particular day was that Mike had talked to his students about the events in Tunisia, and told me that one of them quickly commented that he hoped the same thing would happen in Egypt. Mike and I were both skeptical. Could the same thing happen in our midst? After all, Tunisia had a smaller population, a proportionately larger middle class, and a general populace that was far more educated. If they had the ‘right’ ingredients for a revolution, it seemed Egypt had the deck stacked against it -- a populace bursting at the seems, massive disparity of wealth, and embarrassingly bad educational standards. So many westerners (to his credit, Mike has never been among them), claim that if real democracy were allowed in Egypt, the country would only have it once -- and then descend into an Islamist regime.
We were wrong about so many things. Why didn’t we realize that there were millions standing between Mubarak and another form of authoritarian rule? Whatever the outcome of the events going on in Egypt today, we cannot forget that the people demonstrating have stood for a peaceful transition of power, for a constitutional government, for their basic human rights. While Muslims have kneeled together to pray each day, Christians have stood guard around them.
That student’s comment speaks to all of this, however unexpectedly. AUC is a school for Egypt’s wealthiest. I’ve talked to study abroad students who don’t describe the student body there so much as Egyptian, but as a cosmopolitan blend. It would seem that their upper-class identity far removes them from the concerns faced by their fellow-nationals, and that while foreigners might identify them all as ‘Egyptian’ -- the class differences are so rigid, that they do not actually share a cohesive sense of nationalism. I certainly was among the ranks of skeptical outsiders who did not perceive a common thread that moved across Egypt.
I think, however, that I neglected to realize how the shared oppression under Mubarak’s ongoing and invasive gaze, and the violent reach of the state’s arm would shape a camaraderie that could overcome the barriers of class, confessional, ethnic, and even gender difference. Perhaps Tunisia sparked something -- it instilled a hope, shed light on that shared experience, and gave Egyptians something to respond to together, as a nation.
Around this same time -- in those days just after Ben ‘Ali stepped down, I had a conversation with someone who said that even if Egyptians were inspired by the events in Tunisia, they weren’t ‘ready’ for that kind of change. I think I probably nodded my head in cautious agreement when I heard that. But was does ‘ready’ mean? Is anyone ever ‘ready’ for a revolution?
Looking back on it, I think there was plenty of cultural evidence that Egypt was more ready than we imagined. Art, films, literature have all been subtly resisting censors for years. In December I went to the Cairo Film Festival’s showing of Microphone, a film about Alexandrian musicians who fought to perform their music for the greater public. Through jazz, rap, and even a curious female band that masked their eyes, rather than their hair and faces, they resisted the state’s demands that their voices go unheard. I left the theater with a sense of hope, quite inspired by the whole thing. Part of the film was about needing to stay in Egypt and perform, because that was the only way to affect change.
That kind of palpable commitment to Egypt was more widespread than I had realized. Certainly that commitment to democracy and freedom for Egypt lived and breathed in Cairo University, and among the students who spearheaded the initial demonstrations. Their activity spoke across society, and continues to. They continue to emphasize peaceful resistance, knowing that a violent reaction is just the excuse Mubarak is looking for, and that they need the international community’s ongoing support. All of them know Mubarak’s language, they have all lived with the same anxieties -- and it seems to have provided the basis for reacting together. Hopefully it will go a step further, and the basis for a transformed state in Egypt.
In part, I suppose I’m trying to answer a question that keeps repeating in my mind -- how did we not see this all coming? I keep thinking of 1956, where in the fallout from the Suez Canal Crisis, Gamal Abdel Nasser forced all British and French residents of Egypt to repatriate. This deeply impacted Ma’adi, which had then, as today, a large population of foreigners. Despite the anti-colonial tenor of the period, Nasser’s order appears to have taken everyone (foreigners and Egyptians) by surprise. Egypt had been demanding independence from the British for more than 30 years at that point -- did the Britons there really never think they could be sent home?
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