Some social science of the presidential elections

I have usually avoided writing on this blog when not in Egypt, because its value, if any, lies in the proximity to events, moods, and everyday encounters as the stuff for some preliminary anthropological theory of the revolutionary process. With the presidential elections, I now feel compelled to make an exception and try to offer some analysis from the distanced vantage point of a cozy coffee house in Europe. The election results not only determine the political future of Egypt: they also provide an amazing wealth of sociological data that could be telling about the general social dynamics in Egypt of which the revolution in Egypt is a part. In consequence, this post is more sociological than ethnographic, trying to look at some interesting societal tendencies on the basis of the statistical evidence provided by the election results.

The result, to start with, it is nothing short of a disaster in terms of Egypt's immediate political future. The second round of the elections on 16 and 17 June will see a face-off of Mohammed Morsy (25% of the vote in the first round)) of the Muslim brotherhood and Ahmad Shafiq (24,3%), Mubarak's last minister of interior. This result wasn't foreseen by most observers - I myself gave a completely mistaken prediction in an interview on Finnish radio on Wednesday, anticipating a lead of Amr Moussa (11,4%) and Abouel Fotouh (17,3%) who, however, ended up 5^th and 4^th, beaten by the socialist Sabbahi who with an amazing campaign and with very little money managed to gain the biggest part of the revolutionary vote, reaching a completely unexpected third place with 21% of the vote. Unexpected as it was for many, the result appears to be a largely genuine expression of the voters' will, even if it does have a margin of error due to minor rigging here and there (which unfortunately also means that we will never know with certainty whether Ahmad Shafiq really got more votes than Hamdeen Sabbahi). There is still the tiny chance that the outcome of a large number of polling stations can be contested because of irregularities and rigging – but Shafiq is 764,000 votes ahead of Sabbahi, and it is probably too large a gap to overcome by legal means.

As far as it comes to presidential elections, the revolution is now over, and we enter the age of battles of power between two powerful blocks that are fundamentally not committed to democracy. Whoever of the two wins, there is every reason to expect the worst from his rule. (The best of scenarios is an ongoing and undecided power struggle between the Brotherhood and the Military that will allow the revolutionary movement to gain ground because neither of the two powers is strong enough to eliminate political opposition.)

The elections might have had a different outcome. Much of the result was due to quite specific circumstances. The disqualification of former vice president Omar Suleyman and the Salafi preacher Hazem Salah ended up reducing the fragmentation of the pro-system and Islamist votes, which worked to the advantage of Morsy and Shafiq. At the same time, the competition between the two revolutionary candidates Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh fragmented the revolutionary vote, with tragic consequences (although neither one of them would have actually been able to unite all the votes of the two – their ideological agendas are too far apart for that). The decision of major Salafi groups to back Abouel Fotouh alienated a big part of his leftist and liberal supporters, which in turn turned into Sabbahi's advantage – but not to a sufficient degree. In the end, the result is what it is, but these elections certainly have been one of those visible moments of contingency in history where it is very clear that things might have just as well gone differently. But now back to the facts:

The data from the election tells that there are interesting things going on in Egypt. Some of them, more slowly and less dramatically, are working to the advantage of the revolutionary current, and give every reason to expect that things will remain in movement in Egypt for years to come.

1. On the basis of the election results, three political and electoral blocks of roughly equal size emerge: 1) the old system (represented by Ahmad Shafiq and Amr Moussa), promising cautious transformation, and standing in the tradition of Mubarak's authoritarian neoliberalism; 2) the Islamists (represented by Ahmad Morsy and a part of Abouel Fotouh's voters – AF was backed by a part of the Salafis which ended up costing him a lot of support in leftist and liberal circles), promising a religious-moral turn but essentially committed to Mubarak's neoliberal policies; and 3) - partly overlapping with the Islamists - the revolutionaries (represented by the Nasserist socialist Hamdeen Sabbahi and the liberal Islamist Abouel Fotouh), demanding a fundamental overhaul of the political and economical system, and representing a variety of ideological positions, including liberal, Nasserist, socialist, and Islamist). So in terms of popular support, no groups is clearly superior to the others.

(No, I do not count the Muslim Brotherhood to the revolutionaries. They have proven to be highly opportunistic politicians committed to winning the political game but not committed to fundamental systemic change. They have ridden the wave of the revolution when it suited them, and sold the revolution when it served their interests. There are Islamists who are with the revolution, but the Brotherhood is not among them.)

2. Although the immediate outcome of the elections is a defeat for the revolutionaries, the overall support of the revolutionary fraction has grown. In the constitutional referendum, the „No“ vote was 23%, which until now has been the best indication we had about the overall support of a demand for a fundamental change of the political system. In the parliamentary elections, the vote of liberal, leftist, and revolutionary Islamist groups together was in the same order of magnitude as the „no“ vote. In the presidential elections, in contrast, the two revolutionary candidates Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh gained together nearly 40% of the vote. Partly this is due to a part of the Salafis shifting towards the revolutionary spectrum lately, but there is more to it: Both Abouel Fotouh and Sabbahi were able to address people at a large scale beyond the immediate circles of revolutionary enthusiasts. While the revolutionary block has lost the presidential race, with Hamdeen Sabbahi it has also gained a leader who is able to gather mass support without making concessions either to the Islamists or to those afraid of change – a feat that seemed to be impossible to realise after the constitutional referendum and the parliamentary elections. Sabbahi may still become the president of Egypt - in five or ten years' time.

3. - The election was decided in favour of Shafiq and Morsy in the countryside and in small and medium-sized towns where Sabbahi and Abouel Fotouh were not able to reach people on an individual level through family and other networks the way Morsy and Shafiq were. Especially the Muslim Brotherhood has proven itself as a veritable election machine capable of bringing people from their homes to the polling stations, and campaigning even inside the polling stations to persuade the undecided. However, and this very important, they are not having their greatest success in those milieus where they have their strongest social basis – that is, in the cities of northern Egypt – but mainly in the countryside and in southern Egypt. Like with Shafiq, their success in the elections relies to a significant degree on people who vote not on the basis of established ideological positions but of personal and clientelist relations (who knows whom, who can help whom) and expect solutions to immediate local or personal problems. For Shafiq, this is perfectly in line with established NDP practice, but for the Muslim Brotherhood, it is a contradiction of sorts, and shows that while their power in rural areas is great, in their original milieus they are in trouble.

Shafiq, in contrast to Morsy, also did well in Cairo which, with its proximity to the centre of power, interestingly has lots of both revolutionaries as well as hardcore supporters of the old system: Sabbahi 28,7%; Shafiq 27 %; Morsy 17%; Abouel Fotouh 16%; Moussa 11,3%.

4. - Both Morsy and Shafiq were totally defeated in Alexandria, Egypt's second largest city that until now was thought to be an Islamist stronghold. This is the official result for Alexandria:

Sabbahi 34%; Abouel Fotouh 22%; Moussa 16%; Morsy 15%; Shafiq 12% (and others 1%)

This was not entirely a surprise, because already in the constitutional referendum in March 2011 Alexandria had some of the highest „no“ votes in all Egypt, close to 35% (both supporters of the old system as well as the Muslim Brotherhood rallied for a „yes“ vote). Rather than being an Islamist stronghold, Alexandria now has the revolutionary liberal/left as its most prominent political current (in terms of ideological position and public opinion, that is, not in terms of organisational power. In the latter regard the Islamists are vastly superior). This does not mean that the depiction of Alexandria as an Islamist stronghold is false – I think that in the past, it was true. Alexandria's position as a rapidly growing city of 4 or 5 millions somewhat out of the focus of the government's sight makes it a structurally oppositional city that suffers from neither the conservative inertia of the rural regions nor the vested interests and proximity to political power of the capital. This made it the perfect site for Islamist groups to develop and prove their political and social power in the past decades, and it has also made it the place where Sabbahi's revolutionary message with Nasserist undertones and populist appeal („One of us“ was his election slogan) would be most successful. Alexandria is a vanguard city when it comes to social and political dynamics in Egypt. It is worth keeping an eye on it.

5. - The support of the revolutionary fraction is heavily concentrated to cities, but not necessarily to the middle classes. Both in Cairo as well as in Alexandria, Sabbahi also gained a lot of votes in working-class areas. Structurally speaking, there seems to be a relationship between urbanisation and progressive politics that goes beyond the middle-class theory of democratisation. This puts the future government of either Morsy or Shafiq in front of a dilemma: To maintain power, they rely on a constituency that is often rural and poor. If the future government's economical and social policies are successful, this will lead to the growth of milieus that structurally favour progressive, anti-system politics, and sooner or later the future government will face new unrest – and stronger opposition. If its policies are unsuccesful, however, it will face new unrest much sooner.

6. - The revolutionary candidates were generally very weak in in rural areas, with one very interesting exception: Kafr El Sheikh, a largely rural province in the northern Nile Delta. Otherwise, the Nile Delta region was generally dominated by Shafiq (mostly first) and Morsy (mostly second), except in provinces with high degree of urbanisation like Daqahliya (which has two big cities, Mahalla and Mansoura) where Sabbahi came second behind Shafiq with a very narrow margin. In Kafr El Sheikh, however, he gained an overwhelming victory with a stunning 62% of the vote. Kafr El Sheikh is Sabbahi's home region, which is one reason for his success but not the whole story – Morsy did not win in his home region, and Abouel Fotouh was positively defeated in his. More importantly, Kafr El Sheikh has a history of leftist activism in the 1970's and 80's and although the old socialist networks had become inactive in the past two decades, they still could be reactivated for Sabbahi's campaign. In the village in northeastern Kafr El Sheikh where I do much of my fieldwork, those networks made it possible that in late April, the village was suddenly plastered by Sabbahi posters. At first, this was thanks to just six Nasserist families, but the spark soon spread also to the non-Nasserist village revolutionaries (who had formed themselves in spring of 2011 but had little practical success and played no role in the parliamentary elections), and many of them joined the Sabbahi campaign. The same happened in villages and towns throughout the province, with quite some effect as the results from Kafr El Sheikh show:

Sabbahi 62%; Morsy 17%; Abouel Fotouh 9 %; Shafiq 8%; Moussa 4%

Morsy and Shafiq won because their campaigns were able to link into family and clientelistic networks. The revolutionary candidates were successful either in cities where people are more likely to vote on the basis of ideology than networks, or in places where they could rely on pre-existing networks. While voting on the basis of ideology is likely to increase in the coming years (on the condition that there are free elections, that is), the revolutionary current can only reach majorities if it can rely on both ideology and networks. This means that if the revolutionary current does not want to wait for demographic change to solve the issue in their favour in 10 to 20 years, their most formidable task is to build those networks, and I'm not sure whether they are up to it.

7. - Yesterday evening the story started to spread that the Christian vote, influenced by the Coptic Orthodox Church that is very close to the old system, was instrumental for Shafiq making it to the second place. However, the most important base for Shafiq's succcess were not the Upper (i.e. southern) Egyptian provinces with their large Christian populations. Shafiq did well there but Morsy was the winner in most of Upper Egypt, and Shafiq got his most votes (in terms of absolute numbers) in the Nile Delta, most overwhelmingly so in the central Delta province of Sharqiya that has no remarkable Christian population: Shafiq 33,5%; Morsy 27,5%; Moussa 16 %; Sabbahi 12 %; Abouel Fotouh 11 %).

(the source of these calculations is this: http://tab3.me/Inside#.T7_4V8XvpUY )

To conclude, my expectation is that both Shafiq or Morsy will be really bad for Egypt, but that they may not be able to be quite as bad as they would like to. Shafiq will mean the consolidation of the military rule that has wrecked Egypt. Morsy is now trying to mobilise the revolutionary vote for him, and some (like the novelist Alaa El Aswany) are going along with that. But everything that the Brotherhood has done in the past year and so indicates that as soon as they gain power, they will drop, marginalise, and - if necessary - recklessly repress their former allies. However, the social and political landscape of Egypt as the outcome of the election shows it, indicates that no new leader will be able to gain the hegemonic and unquestioned position which Mubarak once had (before his authority began to crumble around 2005). Especially in the major cities, the future president will face a largely oppositional population, and it will be a tough job to govern Egypt in the coming years.

At the same time, there is no question that these elections have been the most serious and most irreversible defeat for the revolution since it began. There may not be another chance for the revolutionaries to gain power in free elections – I see no reason why either Shafiq or Morsy would have any interest to ever have free elections again unless they are forced to. The path of a peaceful revolution has come to a temporary end, and wrestling power back from either Morsy or Shafiq will likely require more than good campaigning.

Nevertheless, both Alexandria and Kafr El Sheikh (and Port Said, by the way, where Sabbahi also was first) provide crucial lections of how the revolutionaries can do it right. The path to power may begin in protests on the squares, but it must pass through the networks of people's ordinary lives and worlds. In at least three provinces in Egypt, the supporters of the revolution have found solutions to this problem. They offer lessons to be studied and learned from that may help to turn this defeat into future victories.

The presidential theatre

(Addition, 15 April in the morning: Oh the pleasure of getting it all wrong again. Just hours after I wrote this note, the supreme electoral council excluded Omar Suleyman, Khairat al-Shater and Abu Ismail from running for presidency. Unless some of them will be able to successfully appeal the decision, it looks like the main electoral battle is going to be Abu el-Futuh against Amr Musa - which already sounds a bit better than what I expected in the afternoon. - But then again, there is good reason to expect that dirty game by the Military Council was involved, and will be involved again...

But premature as my political analysis was once again, I think this note still has something to say about the mood of these days. And I still do think that the revolution has failed in an important, deeper sense even if things, against all odds, go well.)

***

For weeks, there has been essentially one topic of political discussion in Egypt: The presidential elections. It has been quite a theatre, with lots of political game, lawsuits, and last-minute surprises. Now the list of candidates stands - although some changes still can happen because of pending lawsuits - and the contours of the political battle around presidency are taking shape. And it is a dark and frightening shape, giving much reason to fear that the presidential elections will mark the definite point of failure of the 25 January revolution.

Just when Egypt’s revolutionaries had learned to fear the populist power of the Salafi presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail (whose enthusiastic supporters have plastered the country with posters showing his bearded face and who almost got kicked out of the race because his mother may have held American citizenship), the very last day of registrations for presidential candidates taught them that there are worse things to fear: the former head of secret service and Mubarak’s short-time vice president Omar Suleyman, the shared menace of all opponents of the Mubarak system. Omar Suleyman had denied that he would be running just a day before, and then suddenly handed in his registration, and collected more than 40,000 signatures in his support in just one day. After the controversial candidacy of Khairat al-Shater by the Muslim brotherhood just a few days earlier, this was the second and more significant surprise.

In a matter of days, Omar Suleyman has completely changed the nature of the presidential game, and according to a representative survey by the daily Al Masry Al Youm that was published today, he is now the most popular candidate, followed by Abdel Mun‘im Abu al-Futuh (the only revolutionary candidate who has any chances to win) and Hazem Abu Ismail. However, 38,1 % of those who answered to the survey did not yet know whom they would vote, and their vote will be decisive. However, the survey gives some interesting statistical information that is telling also about those who have not yet made up their mind. Omar Suleyman is especially popular among people with low education and income in rural areas - the same constituencies that also have the highest number of undecided voters. These were the voters who have been most disconnected from the revolutionary movement, most exposed to state media, and who in the Parliamentary elections mostly put their hope in the Islamist parties - parties that after few months of parliamentary work have already lost much of their aura of piety and moral integrity. Omar Suleyman is also very popular among those members of the urban middle classes who from the beginning on experienced the revolution as a chaotic threat to the orderly way of life and who now see in the former vice president an experienced and reliable politician who is able to steer the country back to the right course.

No matter how much antagonism there is between the radical revolutionary camp that has insisted on an ongoing confrontation with the Military Council, and the more opportunistic Islamist groups that dominate the parliament and who since the parliamentary elections have been opposed to demonstrations (until changing their mind last week), Omar Suleyman has given them a new shared enemy. On the suburban train three days ago, I overheard a group of middle aged men with Salafi beards discussing the elections, and one of them saying: “If Omar Suleyman becomes the president, then the prisons will be full again, with Islamists, liberals, socialists - we will be all together again.”

But a shared enemy has not brought back the unity of the early days of the revolution. Yesterday, the Muslim Brotherhood and a number of Salafi groups called for demonstrations against military rule and the candidature of Omar Suleyman, which was met with ridicule by the supporters of ongoing revolution who had learned to know the Muslim Brotherhood in particular as an extremely opportunistic group that takes whatever position suits their momentaneous interest. In Alexandria, a large group of protesters gathered at al-Qa’id Ibrahim mosque at the time of Friday prayer, but the revolutionary block was as good as absent, except for a small group of people who were holding up signs provocatively asking where the Muslim Brothers had been when the revolutionaries were being killed in Muhammad Mahmoud and Qasr al-‘Ayni streets, and what the parliament has done for the sake of change. These signs caused quite some debate and commotion. I didn’t stay to see how the debate and the demonstration continued, for I was on my way to meet friends in Kafr al-Zayyat, an industrial town in the Nile Delta to see friends - and found everybody talking about the president as well.

Kafr al-Zayyat happens to be the home region of Abou al-Futuh, and his posters cover the walls of the city and surrounding villages. But the inhabitants of the city and its surrounding villages are far from united. On the minibus on the countryside, the driver, sporting a Salafi beard, showed him as an enthusiastic supported of Abu Ismail, and very happy about the recent court decision that the sheikh’s mother was Egyptian after all. Discussing with a passenger on the front seat, he argued that if only Egypt gets a president who applies the Law of God in full, all the economical and moral problems will be solved, graduates will get work, corruption will end, and the economical situation will improve in just two years’ time. The passenger, a civil servant by his looks, agreed about the urgency of the problems of labour market, corruption and economy, but argued that he would cast his vote for Abu al-Futuh whom he described as “wasati” representing a religious and modern middle way.

In a café in the centre of the city, I was present at a more heated debate about the presidential candidate with two young men, one of them running a private business, and a determined supporter of the revolution, and the other an army officer. D., the army officer, argued that he would vote for Omar Suleyman whom he described as the “best among the bad” because he is an experienced statesman able to run the affairs of the country - and added that basically everybody in the military circles support him. For D., the choice was one between the Salafi populist Abu Ismail and the experienced and responsible Suleyman - a binary that is also presented by parts of the state media and that, by ignoring Abu al-Futuh, reduces the choice to one between fundamentalism and security. M, the revolutionary, countered that while he was against Abu Ismail, Omar Suleyman certainly would be the worst of choices, a leading member of the clique responsible for wrecking the country before and after the revolution, and choosing him would be equal to choosing Mubarak. More than that, he argued, Abu Ismail maybe bad, but Omar Suleyman is not only bad. More than that, he is a traitor who sold Egypt’s interests for the sake of security cooperation with the USA and Israel.

Unsurprisingly, the debate remained inconclusive, and neither of the two would change his mind. In any case, the elections will be decided by those who do not yet know whom to vote. And Egypt’s voters have proved to take their decision in the last minute, often even while standing in line for the polling station. But in all likelihood (unless the law just passed by the parliament banning high functionaries of the old system from running for presidency is not overruled by the constitutional court) the second round of elections will see Omar Suleyman against one of the three Islamist candidates: The Salafi Abu Ismail, the revolutionary Abu al-Futuh, or the Muslim Brother Khairat al-Shater. This on the assumption of more or less fair elections. However, the way in which Omar Suleyman, clearly with the backing of the military and secret service establishments, entered the competition in one day, gives every reason to assume that he is the Military Council’s man for presidency, and that the military will do everything they can to facilitate his victory. Add to that the marginalisation of the radical revolutionary camp along with the gradual loss of credibility of the large Islamist parties, and it looks very likely that the presidential elections will be the final nail to the coffin of the 25 January revolution.

If this will be the case - and I will be happy to be proven wrong - the question arises: Why did the January 25 revolution fail?

Of course, the revolution has been successful on many fronts. It brought down Mubarak and his family. It has created a powerful culture of discontent and creative thinking about new ways to live and to organise society. After long years of struggle, it has brought Islamist groups to new power. But politically, it has already failed, and only a (rather unlikely) election victory of Abu al-Futuh can still turn it into a political success. The original demand spoken out by the protesters on Tahrir and other squares during the first days of the revolution was not only to remove Hosni Mubarak, but to change the ways in which the country was being governed. However, one year after the beginning of the revolution, those who are serious about changing the ways the country is being governed have proven themselves as unable to seize power, and those able to seize power have proven themselves as unwilling to change the ways in which the country is being governed.

The record of the radical revolutionary camp is poor in terms of both organisation and popular mobilisation, but then this seems to be often the destiny of the crazy few who start revolutions - their power, if any, will be a cultural and social one of nurturing a new generation of highly educated and highly critical people in key social positions. The problem, however, is that the young revolutionaries are often very unaware of the struggles of the past, and ill-equipped to avoid repeating past defeats, a problem articulated by an older professor at a literary salon attended by young, largely bourgeois audience in Alexandria. While the organisers of the salon, most of them between 20 and 30, were full of enthusiasm about the break with a de-politicized past, the older professor argued: “I see you making the same demands I made fifty years ago, and I’m very afraid that after fifty years of struggle and imprisonment, you in turn will find another young guy at the podium, making the same demands.”

As for those able to seize the power: The army should have never been trusted in the first place, and those people - including myself - who for few weeks were optimistic about the positive role of the military have been taught a bitter lesson, a lesson that has cost hundreds of lives. Most bitter, however, is the record of the Muslim brotherhood that in the course of just one year has step by step sold the cause of revolution for the sake of political power, so much as to gradually discredit itself before even gaining power. They still do have enough credit to exert power from the parliament and the cabinet (and who knows, maybe Shater still has a chance in the presidential game after all), but they are already on their way of transforming from an religious-political oppositional organisation into an opportunistic ruling party along the lines of Mubarak’s NDP, and by now many of the most respectable and trustworthy cadres of Brotherhood have either left it, or have been kicked out. With their more populistic approach, the Salafis may be able to profit from the problems the Brotherhood faces, but they, too, are intimately embedded in the clientelist politics of family alliances, favouritism, only with the pious vision of doing all that “without violating the Law of God.”

On 10 February 2011, I wrote in this blog that whatever happens, whether there will democracy in Egypt, or an authoritarian rule reconsolidating its hold, the uprising is already a success because it has given birth to a significant - and socially and culturally powerful - part of the population who can no longer be governed the way they once were. By now, it seems that the more pessimistic of the two scenarios of relative success is the more likely one: a reconsolidation of military and secret service authoritarianism, or alternatively the consolidation of an Islamist-led rule that builds on the old structures rather than changing them. As said, this does not change the fact that the new powers-to-be will face a social and political opposition of a kind Mubarak only faced (and failed to address) for less than three weeks. It is something, a little victory that hopefully will pave the way for new struggles and greater victories to come. But it is so much less than might have been possible.

However, there is also a deeper problematic that is not so much related to the ways Egypt in particular is governed, but with conditions of living in the contemporary world as a whole. On a deeper level, the Arab revolution were not directed so much against the governments of Ben Ali, Mubarak, Asad, or Saleh, but were an expression of a deeper discontent about a sense of existence that deprives one of one’s dignity, humanity, and freedom while at the same time promising their fulfilment.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 are perhaps best understood as a prelude for something that is yet to come, something that emerged under particularly sharp and oppressive conditions of frustrated promises of consumer capitalism and oppressive authoritarianism in the Arab world. By aiming their anger at the presidents and their cliques, however, the revolutionary movements have failed to name the original discontent. There are some leftists also in Egypt who are pointing at neoliberal capitalism as the core cause of the problem, but their analysis, too, may fall short of the problematic. And in any case, their analysis has not been translated into an instinctively convincing common sense of discontent and demand.

Whoever will rule in Egypt in the years to come will continue the neoliberal policies of the past decades, and will further intensify the existential discontent of living in a high capitalist world under the continuous pressure of growth and consumption, a world were precisely those things that offer temporary satisfaction - buying things, material comfort, revivalist religiosity, expectation of social ascendancy - are the same things that also increase the sense of pressure, alienation, and demoralising competitiveness that people experience. It is a problem not limited to Egypt or the Arab world - it shared also by people living in more privileged conditions as shown by the way the revolutionary spirit was taken over by the Occupy movement and others (with even less success, eventually). However, by the very real power of consumption to actually provide material comfort and to thus carry the promise of existential comfort, it remains very difficult for those people who most suffer from the condition of the world as it is to stand up in protest to change it.

In short, both the early success and the eventual failure of the January 25 revolution have to do with the problem that there is something wrong with the way the whole world is working. But unable to name the discontent as we are (as said, I think the socialists only have a partial name for it), we are still far from actually solving it.

Amshir

Today is the last day of the Coptic month of Amshir, a month that is known for stormy and unpredictable weather, bringing cold weather in one day and heat in another, rain in the morning and sun in the afternoon. (For practical purposes, the Coptic solar calendar has since long been replaced by the Gregorian calendar in Egypt, but agricultural calendar and common wisdom about weather changes stick to the Coptic months.) If we want to use a seasonal metaphor for Egypt after the January 25 Revolution, Amshir is certainly more appropriate than the awful “Arab spring” that was invented by western media and has also been appropriated in Arabic usage.

I returned to Egypt in mid-February, or early Amshir, entering a season of unpredictable and bad weather, as well as bad nerves and general worry, and most importantly a sense of disorientation. People far from political activism have lost much of their early enthusiasm and express fear of crime and insecurity - not without a reason, for violent crime has sensibly increased in the past months. Revolutionaries sense that the revolution has been stolen or lost. Protesters shortly filled the squares in great numbers in a new show of strength on 25 January 2012, but soon thereafter the massacre at the football stadium in Port Said and an ongoing campaign against NGOs and anti-military public media figures has shown that the situation has become rather worse than better. The two Islamist parties that gained an overwhelming majority of the parliament have quickly began to lose their aura of piety in the ordinary business of politics. The military council continues to rule the country with much brutality, and yet it has lost most of the credibility and authority it once had also in the eyes of those who do not support the revolutionary movement.

There is a shakiness of everything, a nervous disorientation and expectation of things to come, with shifting moods between hope and a sense of impending doom - underlined by the rapid changes of weather, days of beautiful sunshine and others of pouring rain and cold wind that compel people to stay home and wrap themselves with blankets for the lack of heating.

The inhabitants of Alexandria say that they love the rain and storms of the city. Rainy weather clears the air and gives it a fresh, pleasant taste. Empty lots of land otherwise bare are covered by a thick growth of weeds and flowers. Wet streets glimmer, and there is a sort of magic in the air. But when one tries to meet somebody in Alexandria on a rainy day, people cancel their appointments and tell that they are not going out as long as it rains.

Looking back at things I have written on this blog since the beginning of the revolution, I notice that over and again I have stated that things are contradictory, that some things are getting better and others worse, and many things are getting better and worse at once. Success and failure go hand in hand, as do frustration and action. This shifting, contradictory nature of things and emotions is indeed a characteristic feature of the entire revolutionary period that began in January 2011, a season of emotional, political, and societal Amshir. And just like the ways in which the Alexandrine deal with stormy weather are contradictory, so are the ways in which Egyptians relate to their revolutionary experience.

The sense of freedom that overwhelmed the country since January 2011, the now proverbial “breaking the knot of fear”, has in practice meant an emboldenment that has made life both better and worse. It has opened paths for open expression of political discontent, for a flourishing cultural life, for the rise of Islamist movements to political power, for rapid construction of houses on the scarce agricultural land, for a crime wave, and for good business opportunities for those who have the nerves and wits to seize the day.

F., a man around thirty from a provincial town in the Nile Delta, returned from Sharm el-Sheikh some months ago where he worked as a sales representative for safaris. The Bedouins, the original inhabitants of the Sinai who have profited very little from tourism, have made themselves increasingly independent first from the state, and eventually even from their own tribal leaders. There have been shootouts and kidnappings that have seriously affected tourism. F. had never considered tourism a job with a future, and with a friend he invested his savings to open the first up-market coffee shop in his home town, in style similar to those where the affluent of Cairo and Alexandria gather - only with much cheaper prices. F. doesn’t hold much of the revolution. He says: “People want to have everything at once, as if it that was possible. They don’t realise that things change step by step, and one has to work for it. The customers in the coffeeshop hang around there telling: ‘Down with military rule!’ until early morning but do nothing. They don’t search for work or try to build a future.” F. holds the military council for responsible for all the disasters and massacres that Egypt has gone through in the past months but sees little point in open resistance against them. He argues that the military leadership is corrupt and rich and determined to fight with all brutality to hold it, but picking a fight with them will make it only worse. But while critical of the revolutionaries, he is very well aware that the revolution is a golden chance to make a lucky break. Many people don’t want to invest at the moment, and prefer to wait and see. But F. argues that in a revolutionary time, those who can seize the moment win, and those who wait lose. And business is in fact going very well. While everybody talks these days about the difficult economical situation, F. says that people are actually very happy to consume, and his coffee shop is full every night. While F. is critical of the revolution, and suspicious of Egyptians being capable of democracy and freedom, he seems to be one of the winners, one of those who knew to seize the day.

One of truly tangible successes of the revolution has been a tremendous wave of cultural and artistic activity. Theatres, lectures, concerts, and exhibitions are crowded, and the past year and so has brought new styles of music and art into wider circulation. Y, listening to a new political song on his mobile phone, commented to me in this regard: “The two, and only two accomplishments of the revolution are in music, and in arts. There is so much music, good music, different music these days. And there is all the art in the streets.” There is the art of the revolutionary graffiti, most prominently produced by people from the artist scene on the walls of Tahrir Square and Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo, but much more widely produced by football ultras around the country. There are the many singers and bands like Rami Essam, Cairokee, Iskenderella and many others who have connected revolutionary attitude with the sound of the guitar, with rap, or with a revival of the 1970's style of protest songs in a way that has significantly expanded the musical taste of many people in Egypt. At the same time, however, this explosive flourishing of arts and music has become a distinctive marker of a revolutionary attitude, and as such also a problem.

AA., one of the young leftist revolutionaries from the village in the Nile Delta who organised a cleanup campaign and a meeting with the village mayor in February and March last year, confronted me yesterday with a self-critique of the revolutionaries’s isolation and inability to reach out to the wider majority of people. “We are so good at arguing, and understand the situation and can analyse it well, but why are we not able to convince ordinary people although they otherwise seem so easily influenced?” The campaign in the village eventually failed, he says, because the activists were not able to gain a popular base that would extend beyond a group of mostly young men, most of them with higher education and living most of the year outside the village. AA., too, lives in Alexandria and only comes to the village on weekends. Relating to the downtown cultural scene of Alexandria which we both frequent, he wonders why it is that a leftist political attitude so often also comes along with a style: guys with beard and long hair, girls smoking imported rolling tobacco, and people wearing Palestinian kufiyas when going to a demonstration. “What do long hair, rolling tobacco, and kufiyas have to do with being revolutionary? And yet I, too, put on a kufiya when I go to a demonstration.” AA. thinks that the development of a revolutionary attitude hand in hand with a revolutionary style and jargon has the detrimental effect of making it in fact more difficult for the left wing revolutionaries to reach out to the people. The spread of a revolutionary habitus in the shape of music, kufiyas, etc. certainly has reached people across class and educational backgrounds, creating a space for creative expressions of a politically and socially critical attitude. But at the same time it has become a distinctive marker of that attitude (very much in the sense of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, taste, and distinction), and as such it is by nature exclusive. The pop rock of Cairokee has become the sound of a revolutionary attitude among many who did not have a liking for such sound (or such attitude) before, but it is not the music that one would ever hear in a minibus, in a toktok, or in a popular wedding.

(10 March: An important correction regarding this point: Jakob Lindfors just wrote to me and says that most of the music I mention in this note is very commercial and close to establishment, and that I have completely ignored the politically uncontrollable and quite anti-system wave of popular music called Mahragan which is not played on the tv channels or included in the official soundscape of the revolution. Songs about Port Said, about burning police stations on 28 Feb. etc. It is the sound of the popular youth, the music one does hear in a toktok or in a popular wedding. So I think I was wrong about this. There is no lack of serious revolutionary music on the street level, but there is a lack of awareness and appreciation of it even in many of the revolutionary cicrles. Great music, too, btw.)

The biggest contradictions and uncertainties concern the very issue of revolution itself. Was it a good or bad thing? Was it successful or did it fail? Was it really a revolution? Yesterday evening, some of the village revolutionaries gathered again in S’s guest room in his home in the village. In this circle, much as in circles of leftist and liberal revolutionaries in Alexandria, there was a sense of failure, even impending doom. There is good reason for that sense. A number of public media figures are facing charges for incitements against the state and the military at a military court. Egyptian employees of NGO’s are still facing charges in court after foreign citizens accused in the case were allowed to leave the country following a diplomatic deal that has become a major justice scandal in Egypt. Revolutionaries are facing insults and accusations of being foreign agents, traitors, and infidels. H. is one of the handful of village revolutionaries who lives full-time in the village, working for very little pay in a call shop. His key revolutionary experience was his participation in the street battles of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in November. Frustrated about how little the village revolutionaries were capable of accomplishing, he wonders: “Was the revolution successful, or did it fail? The problem is that it was neither successful nor did it fail. Was there a revolution in the first place? If there was one, it was stolen.” He is contradicted by M.A., an older Marxist teacher, who argues: “Revolutions are not to be measured by their success and failure, because a revolution is an explosive event, and as such fundamentally unpredictable. The very fact that we are sitting here and talking about revolution is proof that there was one. And the attacks that we face are also sign of our success. There can be no revolution without enmity and struggle.” The others in the circle are not so keen to share M.A.’s positive assessment of the situation; they have expected more tangible successes.

Both have a valid point. On short term, the revolution has brought a very brutal and incompetent military government into power, and on middle term, it is bringing the much more competent but fundamentally authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood into power. At the same time, the revolutionary movement has most likely successfully prevented the consolidation of military rule, which seemed quite keen on taking a more permanent hold of power by last summer, but has become dramatically discredited since then. The military rule over Egypt that began in 1952 is causing terrible havoc on its final metres, but it is effectively coming to an end (although that end is likely to take several years to complete). What comes after the stormy changes of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary turns during a year and half of emotional Amshir, is a different question. It may or may not be better. The revolutionary faction will not rule the country for the next few years the come, and it probably never will, except at the cost of selling out its own principles. However, if they are able to even partly overcome their social limitations, and if they are able to defend themselves against violent suppression, they will be a crucial oppositional and critical power that will rule indirectly by compelling those in power to reckon with them.

E., a cultural activist from Alexandria’s leftist intellectual scene, says that this has in fact already taken effect. “The people in Egypt now curse the revolutionaries and the revolution, because Egyptians always curse those in power. By cursing the revolution, they recognise it as in fact being in charge.”

Writing anthropology of and for the revolution

Exactly one year after the I began writing this blog, here a more self-reflective essay about my experience of engaged anthropology, written after returning to Berlin and the academic everyday.

(Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar kindly motivated me to write it for a thematic section of Cultural Anthropology, where a more polished version can be read: http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/485.)

In the revolutionary year 2011, blogs and other online media have become sites where engaged researchers try to understand events as they evolve; researchers have themselves been engaged supporters of or activists in the uprisings. In my own case, engaged ethnography and analysis of events as they evolve has become a kind of anthropological theory in its own right. Throughout 2011, I have been writing a blog about the Egyptian revolution. Sometime in the spring of 2011, a colleague congratulated me for my blog and said that he was really looking forward to read my research output. I didn’t know how to answer because I then realised that the blog had become the research output. An academic article might never be able to convey what I think the blog did convey.

For me it started on January 28, 2011. On that day, still unaware of the terrible death toll that had resulted from the government’s attempt to violently suppress what probably were and still are the largest protests in the history of Egypt, I decided I had to go there. Having conducted research about the aspirations and frustrations of Egyptians for many years, and hearing friends in Egypt tell me that I really should be there, that “this day would have needed you”, I felt that going to Egypt was a kind of moral obligation. I could not remain a spectator. I was hesitant, however, knowing that the situation was unsafe. My partner Daniela Swarowsky said that if I really wanted to go, I shouldn’t do it just for myself. I should write about it, let the world know what I see. This I did, with the help of Daniela and my colleague Nazan Maksudian who regularly updated the blog during the first days. In the course of three subsequent trips to Egypt (two short ones in the spring, and a long one in the autumn), I have continued updating the blog and, thanks to the efforts of the translator Amr Khairy and the publisher Muhammad Sarhan, the part covering the first two trips was published in Arabic as a book last November (http://elshaab.org/thread.php?ID=9927).

My timing was often bad. On my first trip, I arrived in Egypt just days after 28 January. I left just days before 11 February when Mubarak stepped down. On my second trip, I returned one day before the constitutional referendum of 19 March - doing justice to the title of the blog “You’ll be late for the revolution” (I’m indebted for the phrase to the then five years old son of my friend M. who hosted me in Cairo). But covering dramatic events was never my intention in the first place. Rather, I tried to listen to different voices and look at various events that evolved in the revolutionary square as well as outside it. Most of the time, the blog follows very closely the format of my fieldwork diary, combining observations and discussions of the day with some preliminary analytical considerations. And judging by readers’ comments the blog’s value, if any, lies in this combination of ethnographic attention to detail along with the attempt to theorise events as they unfold.

What kind of theory is it, then? First of all, it is a very unsteady theory, changing from day to day. Times of revolutionary transformation are not good for high theory. In a time when one wakes up in the morning not knowing what the evening will bring, and when every day has a different mood and dynamics, one needs a situated theory that makes sense of the moment without making pretensions of explaining it all. Anything that I and other engaged academics have written during 2011 bears the mark of the historical moment - not just of the year, but of the day, even the hour - and is valuable not in spite of but because of its inherent historicity.

This also means that one shouldn’t be afraid of getting it wrong. I still think that one of the best essays in my blog is that written on 6 February, a very incoherent attempt to think through the accomplishments of the revolution while it was still happening (http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/2011/02/now-its-gonna-be-long-one-some-first.html). In that essay, I quite mistakenly assume that the then vice president Omar Suleyman was consolidating his grip on the country and that the revolutionaries were facing a long struggle. While wrong on a number of key points, that essay also conveys the sensibility of that moment, during two or three calm days in which the sit-in in Tahrir was fairly small and it was very unclear how events would evolve. Those less dramatic days were later overshadowed by the cathartic climax of 11 February, but looking back now, I think they offer more insights about the complexity of what was going on than the celebratory moment of victory. And interestingly, while I was wrong about the firm grip of Omar Suleyman on power, I was right about the long struggle ahead.

Second, it was always clear for me that I was writing not just about the revolution but for the revolution. The same writing was intended both as anthropological analysis as well as revolutionary propaganda (directed mainly at a Western readership oscillating between enthusiasm and scepticism about the events). This is a tricky thing. Scientific research is obliged to an ethos of truth, while revolutionary action requires a tactical relationship with truth. At the same time, I also believe that a revolutionary uprising is one of those situations where one cannot speak truthfully about the events without choosing sides. When people are shot dead, there is no neutral ground for disengaged analysis. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it were otherwise.

Curiously, however, Egyptian readers of my blog see things differently. Amr Khairy, who translated the blog into Arabic, told me that he found it valuable exactly because of its neutrality and objectivity. I heard the same comment from others who complimented me for drawing a complex and nuanced picture of different voices and stances that they themselves would be neither willing or able to produce in the currently highly polarised political atmosphere. Perhaps this is something that anthropology in particular is good at: taking seriously and doing justice to people with whom one disagrees.

Finally, the concept of revolution itself is an engaged one. From the beginning, sceptical voices have cautioned against revolutionary euphoria, arguing that the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere only counted as such if they are successful in fundamentally changing the system of government and economy against which the uprisings originally were directed. By such measures, the Egyptian uprising hardly qualifies as a revolution so far. But there is another, more experiential and moral aspect to using the concept revolution. My friend M., who works in one of Egypt’s leading independent newspapers, tells that a few days after January 25, an editorial decision was made to use the word “revolution” in the headlines. This was a political decision, a conscious act of propaganda to push forward a sense that what was going on was not just a protest for the sake of reform, but a revolution to overthrow the system. Thus when I write about the Egyptian revolution, it is not only to say there was a revolution, but also that there needs to be one, that the uprising that began on January 25, 2011, must end in victory.

Fantasy, action and the possible in 2011

This essay is about Lenin, Tahrir, Islamists, poetry, choice and destiny in an attempt to provide some sort of theoretical synthesis of a confusing experience. It is the very slightly modified transcript of a lecture I gave at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on 6 December 2011.

First of all, thank you very much everybody for coming here. I had no way to expect if I would get an audience of two or twenty, and it turned out to be more than twenty. I’m very happy about that. Thank you very much to Joyce Dalsheim and Gregg Starrett for inviting me here. And thank you to the University of North Carolina, and the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global, International and Area Studies. This is a wonderful occasion to try to make some general sense of something which is very confusing: anthropological fieldwork in times of political and social transition. I have been writing a blog, and in every blog entry I have been presenting a different theory that has contradicted the previous day. It is very difficult to make any general kind of theory these days, but I’ll try to take the challenge offered to me in the shape of this presentation, and do some of that.

I’ll start with a little jump to history, because I think that the question which I try to tackle, which is that of the possible - the question: What is to be done? What can one do? Can what I do make a difference? Do I have a choice, and what kind of choices do I have? - is a question that was perhaps theoretically developed in relation to the revolutions more than hundred years ago by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the to-be leader of the Russian revolution, who in 1901 wrote his very influential pamphlet What is to be done? It is an interesting book to read for various reasons, and I want to open up with it, because he really poses the revolutionary question about the possible in a sense that deals with the tactics, and the conditions one must be able to create to change the paths of action.

Lenin’s book is basically a critique of the social democratic movement, it’s all about polemics against other socialists, and as such it is not very interesting for readers of our times. But it becomes interesting when he argues why the social democratic movement needs a vanguard of professional revolutionaries - because that is Lenin’s answer to the question about hat is to be done: In order to have socialism one must be able to create a vanguard of professional revolutionaries who are able to spread propaganda to all sorts of classes, and when the breaking point of the system comes, they are there, ready to take over. But Lenin also says is that this is a dream. This is a wildly unrealistic, fantastic kind of expectation: to have an all-Russian socialist newspaper, and a secret party apparatus that is there everywhere. But he says: It is a dream, and a revolutionary movement must be able to dream. If it doesn’t, it will become the victim of its own caution.

Lenin’s pamphlet is worth reading also in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, for various reasons. One reason is that he was successful. His plan actually worked out. And second, because his success was a terrible one. Lenin offers us a key question: What is to be done? - and a key clue, which is dreaming, fantasy. But he also offers us the historical case of a successful revolution that resulted in a devastating civil war, and, less than twenty years later, in the mass terror by Stalin that killed tens of millions of people. So it is also a very good reminder not to be too romantic about revolutions.

There are moments when revolutions are necessary, and in the Middle East it has come to this point. But even when they are necessary and justified, they are terrible. Things get destroyed, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. This has happened in Egypt. The economy is at a standstill. At least a thousand people have been killed. And there seems to be no immediate end to the violence as long as the country is ruled by a military dictatorship that is very brutal in the ways it deals with protests. And it looks like Egypt will be governed for the next couple of years by an uneasy alliance of military rule and Islamist parties. All in all it would look like one should make a sceptical assessment of the current state of the revolution. At the same time, I must add that as a researcher I am a very decided supporter of the Egyptian uprising - so much that in my own work this year it has become very difficult to distinguish between ethnographic analysis and revolutionary propaganda. But I do not support the idea of the Egyptian revolution or the Arab uprisings for their own sake. There is nothing in revolutions that would be valuable for their own sake. They are valuable only insofar they open spaces that didn’t exist before: space to think, to say, to pursue things, to realise things that were inconceivable, or at least unlikely or frustrating just a year ago. And this has definitely changed.

This year in Egypt has been a time of transition when all kinds of people have been struggling with this question, which in Arabic is actually a proverbial question: eh il-‘amal? What is to be done? It is a vast field but I will take us through three concrete case studies which I run through quite hastily: One is revolutionary action; the other one is the dream of the Islamic state; and the third one is literary fantasy. They are all related in quite interesting ways.

Revolutionary action

Revolutionary action is the one which you probably all are better informed about, because it has been very present in the media in the shape of Tahrir Square, in the shape of witty revolutionary activists who speak good English and very capable of conveying their message to the world audience - an important role! It has now become fetishised, it has become copied by various kinds of social protest, it has become a tourist product. The American University in Cairo Press is selling not less than three different glossy coffee table books about the revolution. But it is important to remember that when it originally happened, its power was in its surprising nature. It took everybody by surprise. It took the government by surprise, it took ordinary people by surprise, it took - and this is the most interesting thing - the revolutionaries themselves by surprise.

People went out on the streets not knowing what would happen, not expecting what they could possibly accomplish (inspired and hopeful, however, by the example already set by the Tunisian revolution), but simply angry and frustrated about years and years of social experience that offered them over and over again great expectations of good life and over and over again had disappointed these expectations. People were combining an extreme sense of anger and frustration with a very simple step to occupy the streets that had not been possible in Egypt before. The moment it became possible, the entire picture changed. It required very little in material terms. It required simply the possibility of enough people to occupy streets and to hold out against the police - which had been impossible since 1977, when there was the last uprising in Egypt, which failed. This very moment created a completely new situation, so much that it has become a sort of fantastic, utopian, almost religious moment. Ever since the protesters were able to occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and other squares across the country, this moment of standing in the square has developed into something that now is an essential part of any idea of changing the country by means of revolution.

When I talk about revolution, I refer specifically to a group of people whom I describe as radical revolutionaries, those people who expect the country to fundamentally change, the people to change, the way the country is governed to change. It is not necessarily related to a political agenda. Most people who feature as radical revolutionaries would in Egyptian terms be liberal or left, but there are also Islamists among them who believe in religious government but don’t believe in the established Islamist parties. This radical revolutionary group, which is a small minority - I think the active core is maybe tens of thousands in a country of 80 million people, and its wider supporters may be about a quarter of the population - has turned this moment of standing in the square into a dynamic continuously surprising momentum that has at the same time amazing powers and deep limits.

Its primary power lies in its spontaneous and surprising nature. We saw this in the 18 days of the revolution in January and February when this ongoing pressure from the street made any attempt to strike a nice neat deal between the government and the opposition impossible, because there was nobody to speak to. There was no revolutionary leadership that could sell the revolution. The movement could not be betrayed by its leaders because it did not have any. This has repeatedly happened, most recently in the events this November, when very brutal violence by the Military Police did not crush the revolutionary movement. Instead of running away and being scared, people flocked into the square. There was again a spontaneous reaction. This has created a form of spontaneous resistance that is able to thwart any attempt of authoritarian restauration, over and again.

However, we should be very careful not to glorify this standing on the square too much. When I speak with people there, there is sometimes this idea that this square is what it’s all about. In order to change the country we need to have revolution, we need to have more revolution. It becomes limiting. When we go back to one year ago, nobody could really even dream of this moment. Now that it has become not only possible but material, it has gained such power over the radical revolutionaries’ imagination, that it has become difficult for them to think of any other way of changing this country.

This has become very evident in the elections where the revolutionary fraction received a fraction of the vote that is actually less than their already small numbers. Most of the revolutionaries failed (or refused) to participate in any kind of election campaigning because they were distrustful of the parties, considering all the parties corrupt and interested in sharing the cake of power and not interested in what the people need - which is all true. If you distrust the Islamist parties in Egypt you should see who is running Egypt’s liberal party: Egypt’s second richest man. There is not much to be expected from that side either. But this distrust also means that there is an incapability of taking to the streets outside the square. It is related to the difficulty of organisation, it is related to lack of funds - for example, certain groups have huge amounts of money. Other groups don’t. When it comes to spreading leaflets, you need to print them and you need to pay money for that. It becomes quite a concrete problem.

Occupying the square is a very ambiguous form of social protest and of changing the country. This was very much seen in the events of the end of November when at first, a new uprising took surprised everybody. Friday 18th of November witnessed big demonstrations which were lead by Islamist parties who were using these demonstrations in order to strike a better power sharing deal with the military, in which they seemed successful. These were cautious demonstrations, and the supporters of the Islamist parties were not making any chants aimed directly against military rule, only against certain ministers. That evening, I was in Alexandria, and some of the young leftists - who had also been in the demonstration but had left it early because they found that the Salafis, the radical Islamists, were dominating it - were very pessimistic. Their sensibility was that the revolution had now really lost. Next day, one hundred and fifty people staged a sit-in in Tahrir Square. The police came to break the sit-in with force, but these one hundred and fifty people were enough to create a momentum where thousands of angry people flocked into Tahrir Square, entered a days-long fight with the police whereby more than forty, possibly one hundred protesters were killed, and forced the Military Council to change the cabinet (even if that of course means nothing). There was a huge breakup of the situation, everybody was shaking - end then the elections came.

This time, the protesters were surprised. They had surprised themselves, surprised the government, surprised the Muslim Brothers who had become very defensive. They had seized the momentum, they had once again half a million people on the square, then came election day. The revolutionaries had thought that the elections will fail, that the Military Council doesn’t want to let them go through anyway, that they will sink in a wave of violence, that the elections are pointless. The elections were successful. There was a 62% voting turnout in the first round, which in Egypt is a historical record - usually the voting turnout been more like 6,2%. It broke the neck of the new uprising because people were suddenly happy. They were happy that they could vote. And in order to have an uprising you need people to be angry.

So again, there was a new surprising moment which showed that the way to the square lacked the capacity, the imagination to go other ways. The revolutionaries standing in the square at that moment actually lacked the fantasy to realise what the elections could possibly mean for Egyptians.

Islamic state

The elections are now bringing a landslide victory of Islamic religious parties. I was just reading the results of the first round - we don’t have the final results because the elections take place in three rounds, different provinces voting at different times (the electoral law requires every polling station to be supervised by a judge and there are not enough judges in the country). One third of Egypt’s provinces have voted now. The results show that about sixty per cent of the vote of the party lists go to two Islamist party alliances, one of them the Muslim Brotherhood who are conservative, and one of them the Salafis who are badass fundamentalists. This has completely surprised some people, but anybody who has actually been following the situation in the streets has not been surprised at all. Actually the Muslim Brotherhood got less votes than one would think. With 36% of the vote, they actually did badly. They should have gotten 50%.

In a country that just had a revolutionary uprising against a corrupt system that was not an uprising in religious terms but one in terms of social justice, or freedom, or human dignity, why did people vote for Islamic parties? One of them, the Muslim Brotherhood, supported the revolution (but sided with the Army very soon afterwards), the other, the Salafis, were actually supporting Mubarak. Why did people vote for them?

The first thing to remember is of course, again, that the revolutionaries are actually a minority in Egypt. The majority of people were never quite that enthusiastic about the revolution. They were enthusiastic once it was successful, but as long as it was still happening they were rather afraid. But there is more to it than that. It is important to realise that this sort of revolutionary enthusiasm and action was not the only thing that has been going on in Egyptian society. Lots of other things have been happening.

One of the things that have been happening for decades is a sense of a moral crisis. Of course, moral crisis is nothing special. People who study morality say that they have never encountered any society that does not have a moral crisis of some sort. Describing things as being in a crisis seems to be essential to moral imagination. But I would say that there has been a serious moral crisis that has to do with the fact that traditional Egyptian conservative, very family-oriented, very much relying on patriarchal alliances, clear hierarchies of age and gender, has become more and more destabilised, first by Arab socialism in the 50's and 60's, and then in a more subtle way by consumer capitalism since the 1970's. It has made people to live more individualised lives, and it has made people’s livelihood in most cases immoral, illegal, and against Islamic principles: stealing, taking bribes, cheating, all kinds of questionable stuff. This is a society where there has emerged an enormous expectation for something that is morally sound. And Islamists can offer that promise. They offer a God-fearing government, a government that is morally sound and does not steal from its citizens.

This is another great dream, one that has not been so much the dream of the people who went out to the streets against Mubarak, but the dream of a much vaster part of the population: Can’t we just have a leadership that is good? Can’t we have a pious, decent person running this country? This is a different kind of dream as compared to the revolutionary dream of transforming the ways in which the country is governed (one focussing on the process and practice of government, the other on the characters of the people in the government), and it leads to different consequences. One of the major consequences is that Egyptians who would not be Islamist radicals in any proper sense, who would think about life in very pragmatic terms, who would be sometimes more conservative and sometimes more liberal, would nevertheless in doubt cast their vote for a religious candidate because they think: We want to give them a try.

The Islamist parties have played their cards very well. The revolutionary fraction, including also breakaway Islamists, has huge problems to compete with these large organisations that have huge amounts of money, that have social welfare projects, and that speak to the people. How do we actually struggle with this? This struggle has so far brought a very important lesson: If you don’t want to just change the government but if you actually want to change the way society works and the way people think about society, if you want to win elections, if you want to have majorities behind you, it is necessary to have something which people cannot disagree about.

This is the power of the Islamist movements in Egypt. Most people think of them as politicians. They don’t actually have full trust in them. As said, their support of an Islamic government is a conditional one. They know that politicians lie. Islamist politicians lie, too. There is no question about that. Many think that they are too extremist, too uptight, but they cannot disagree that these are pious people and that they speak the word of truth. They speak about Islam, and that is true. I don’t like you, but what you say is true. This seems to be crucial when we once again ask Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done? A crucial answers to that question is to be able to develop an ideological standpoint that stands beyond critique in a specific social setting.

The revolutionaries actually have a couple of these. One is the hatred towards all kinds of governmental oppression. This is something on which they rely all the time. One is the promise of dignity and freedom. Right now the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to rally on this promise. It depends on their ability to deliver whether the more radical fraction will be able to reclaim it from them. One in particular has tremendous power: The blood of the martyrs of the revolution is an enormously important asset for the radicals.

We have learned to think of Egypt’s revolution as a peaceful one. It was peaceful because the protesters didn’t carry weapons. But it was not peaceful in the sense that nobody would have gotten killed. A thousand people got killed, and the fact that a thousand people got killed has become the primary power and asset of any radical revolutionary action. Whatever there comes a tactical politician or a Salafi, the radicals can say: Where were you when the martyrs got killed? This is very consciously employed now by the radical fraction which last Friday staged a symbolic funeral for the people who had been killed most recently. And this is once again a reminder not to romanticise revolutions. It is easy to romanticise revolutions, and it is even easier to romanticise peaceful revolutions. But peaceful revolutions, too, need people getting killed.

The question that remains now is: Why could the Islamists in particular seize the day in the elections, and why could the radical revolutionaries not? Why could they, in turn, seize the day and surprise everybody on 20th of November but then lose the momentum? This is a question about what kind of actions are conceivable, and how one can actually change the scope of conceivable actions. What kind of actions have people learned to be good at, and how can people in such transitional state try to learn different kind of actions?

Literary Fantasy

I take quite a detour and turn to literary fantasy. The revolutionary year of 2011 is a year that constantly runs ahead of fantasy. Things happen, and people keep getting surprised, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s fantastic. It is interesting to go after the issue of fantasy itself, because literature has a lot to do with this uprising.

The ground has been prepared, especially for the more educated parts of the population, by a growing wave of socially critical writing. Blogging has been studied most intensively but actually blogs are just one part of a big scene of people exchanging facebook posts, publishing books, reading poetry in cafes. I recently saw some friends of mine sitting in Tahrir square - they were protesters camping there since a week - and reading from a poetry collection by Amal Dunqul who at the moment has become one of Egypt’s most famous poets. He wasn’t quite that famous before last year. Amal Dunqul (1940–1983) was a communist poet who in the 60's and 70's wrote extremely pessimistic and critical poetry. He was against everything. He was against the Camp David Agreements two years before they were signed. He was against any kind of concession to power. He the was the personified refusal. He had one of these famous lines opening one his poems: “Glory to Satan who said no in face of those who said yes.” (Last Words of Spartacus, 1962) In a very religious society like Egypt this is a dramatic way of thinking. Now, people frequently cite this verse.

I had a meeting with a group of teachers in a poor neighbourhood of Alexandria who were writing poetry, and we started talking about this. - This is actually my new fieldwork, which is not about revolution, it’s about writing. I hop I can get rid of this revolution stuff and back to the issue of writing... - We started talking about Amal Dunqul. What did this verse (and others) by Amal Dunqul do, what did it accomplish? There emerged two competing theories. Of course, I lean for the other, but it is important to cite both theories.

One of the two theories was argued for by the poet and teacher Hamdi Musa who said: Literature changes nothing. Look, Hamdi says: Every other cafe in Egypt has Qur’an recitation running on all the time, but the people sitting in the cafe are not getting any more pious from it. If the word of God doesn’t do it, how could my writing change anything? He says that literature is only about immediate personal pleasure. If it is transformative in any way it is transformative to myself. But then others argued: No, that’s not true. Literature changes one’s outlook at the world. It offers something to think about. In the first theory, literature changes nothing, and we are now in Egypt reading Amal Dunqul because something happened and he gives a voice to something that was happening anyway. The other theory says: Because we have been reading Amal Dunqul we think about the world differently, we value protest, which we wouldn’t do if we hadn’t read Amal Dunqul.

My good friend and research assistant Mukhtar Shehata turned the second theory into a dialectical model of fantasy, dreams, and decisions. ( http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=284111558280237) Fantasy, he says, is a space of freedom, completely free from any need to realise it. It depends on what we know and our material conditions; it is not free in the sense we could imagine anything. But it is a space of freedom where we can think up something and we don’t have to worry whether it can happen or not. Fantasy, Mukhtar says, is the ground from which we develop dreams (ahlam in Arabic), in the sense of aspirations. A dream is something that calls to be realised: It is my dream to marry, it is my dream to become a university professor, it is my dream that the world will be a peaceful place - it is all something that calls for realisation. Dreams, then, become something that guide people’s actions. Because they guide people’s actions they make people find themselves in situations where they have to make decisions.

His example is private tutoring. In Egypt, private tutoring is the main income of teachers who are very badly paid. So for everybody who goes to school, the actual studying takes place in the evening in private tutoring, which costs a lot of money. He gave up private tutoring after the revolution. On one occasion, he was speaking with another teacher about it, and his point was that you first have to think, imagine that there could be something else than private tutoring. That is the first step. Second, you have to start to desire it: If only I could live without private tutoring! The third step is that of decisions, of it leading you to moments where you can actually say: No, I’m not going to do it. I do something else. - And this, then, changes the material ground of reality because you make certain choices, and these choices bring you new experiences, and these new experiences create new grounds of fantasy, and the circle goes on.

This could, of course, be easily put into the shape of a liberal or neoliberal idea where everything is about choices, decisions, character, building my capacities, etc.
This calls for caution. When we talk about decisions and choices, we also have to talk about the inevitable. You cannot study the possible without thinking about the inevitable. In Egypt, when you talk about choice, people start talking about destiny (nasib). It’s not in my hand, it’s in God’s hand: I want to marry this girl but in the end I marry somebody else and I accept it. In Egypt, the inevitable usually takes religious shape as the will of God. But no matter what theoretical shape we give to the inevitable, be it the will of God or if it is the material conditions of production in a Marxist theory, the fact is that any sort of choices and decisions have to reckon with the inevitable. We live in a world where our character is cultivated and our choices made under specific conditions that direct and encourage what we can do. But the trick is that our own fantasy is one of these material conditions. Fantasy is not something that is fundamentally different from the ground I am standing on. It is part of these conditions that direct what I can do.

This leads us back to the question about why some people could seize the day in certain moments, and not in other moments.

We are talking here about choice and freedom as limited freedom. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist philosopher argued in the 1940's that Human freedom exists only within limitations. Limits are not against freedom. Freedom is only there because there are limits against which we experience our freedom. In Egyptian Arabic this is described with the verb yitsarraf, which means to manage in circumstances that are not of your own making. This is the condition of any answer we give to the question of what is to be done.

Any specific answer, any specific trajectory relies on its own material means and possibilities - the Islamists having vastly more money, for example, and the radical revolutionaries being very well connected to the international media. You have different material advantages that make it possible to do something. But it is also fundamentally related to having learned to anticipate certain kind of situations and to master them well. In a very short time the radical revolutionaries have learned to occupy Tahrir. They have learned to do it so well that in this November they just mastered it. It is a most amazing example of self-organisation. Without any leadership, actually even prohibiting parties and speakers’ stages, they managed to make a much better organised uprising than they did in January. But at the same time, it means that they are really bad at anything else. If you look at the Muslim Brotherhood, they have for decades mastered tactical manoeuvring between an authoritarian government and citizens who want to have a good religious government and society. They have been so good at this manoeuvring that when these elections came and they seemed to win with 36% of the vote but actually lost because they should have gotten 50%, this was because of their mastery of tactical manoeuvring. For the radical revolutionaries, even of Islamist leanings, they became unelectable because they showed absolutely no backbone. A big part of people with Islamist leanings in Egypt who really wanted to have a religious government didn’t vote for the Brotherhood because they thought: We really don’t know what these guys are going to do. (This was a reason for many to vote for the more radical Salafis instead, whose stance and programme are quite clear) Their particular knowledge and imagination of what could be done got them a very strong popular support but also brought specific limitations.

The really interesting question, then, is: How and when can people adapt their knowledge and imagination? My conclusion, a very short one, is that the really revolutionary task is to accomplish a shift in the way people look at the world and understand the scope of what they can do, which leads them to act in a different way. This shift requires fantasy. It requires a kind of active fantasy: not just the kind of passive fantasy of imagining whatever one already was used to, but rather a continuous engagement of going beyond the limits. This is why the Egyptian revolution was possible in the first place: because this shift happened. But its future will very much depend on how different actors in the scene will come to develop their expectations of what is possible (and what inevitable), that is, come up with new answers to Lenin’s question about what is to be done.

Thank you.

Jakob Lindfors writing: Continuous Elections – Until Victory!

The following note about the first day of parliamentary elections in Egypt was written by Jakob Lindfors who was friendly enough to allow me to publish it on this blog. This is the link to the original:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/jakob-lindfors/29-nov-am-continuous-elections-until-victory/10150425195439228

The first day of the loooong Egyptian Parliamentary vote has ended. And this long vote is only the beginning of an even longer Continuous Election season that would, according to the plan laid down by the (Transitional?) Military Council, take us through, after the Parliamentary vote (over 1 month), elections for the Shoura Council (another month), then Constitutional Referendum (again!), and eventually Presidential Elections (promised by the Militaries to be finished by those magic six months (again!) from now…

My conclusion of this first day of Election season brings some bad news. But also much good news. In fact, at the end of the day, Good seems be taking a democratic lead.

Let’s start with a piece of good:

The general voting atmosphere is positive. In the first elections after the January 28th revolutionary burning of the headquarters of Hosny Mubarak’s civil organisation – The National Democratic Party, counterpart in supporting his version of Military rule– the behaviour of the different campaigning entities, parties and individuals, has been close to exemplary!!

Yes, there are reports on infringements on behalf of several campaigners. Unlawful campaigning tactics outside and inside polling stations, providing transport for people to the places as long as they vote “right”, buying votes, and fighting in some places with white weapons and cut bottles, etc. But this is nothing!

The general voting conditions are much improved in comparison to Mubarak days: now when the campaigning entities have entered a healthier field of true and relatively transparent competition, they have proved to be pretty well behaved.

This is a victory of the Revolutionary movement. Before, when there was no real competition, the level of violence in elections was horrendous. On the one hand against opposition, they were simply not accepted. But also between the corrupt criminal elements of the System itself: “maslaha” (partisan interest) vying for a piece of the cleptocracy cake.

(Of course, the above judgement decent behaviour might be premature, and I could be proven to be terribly wrong at any time! There is still more than a month to go, and many things can either go wrong by situation. Or go wrong by intentional sabotage…Ma3 3aleina)

Actually, something I take as good news too: it seems that in the present more democratic set-up, the elements that are most guilty of infringements of regulations are the parties that have most appetite to now cut new pieces of advantages in the New Parliamentary power play. And such partisan interests behaviour will be taken a lot less lightly by big numbers of voters who feel empowered to have the right of institutional, law-based, government.

Yes. To be governed by law and by credible and efficient institutions, this IS really an issue at this point. The story that started today is the beginning of a long election season. Sure. And the week that passed before it was a very long week. As it happened, still early in it and it feels like ages ago, (on Sunday as it was, less than 24 hours into the bloody battle against the Ministry of Interior, just hours before the ferocious combined Interior Ministry forces and the Military attack on Tahrir happened, which ended in big numbers of people getting killed, injured and other arrested and subsequently abused) I had to make a trip to the deeper neighbourhoods of the Pyramids area, al-Talbiya district. I went with companion Shaker to check up on some places we had previously contacted to set up the Community Theatre Play called “Going to the Neighbours House”, which talks about the situation of Refugees from several African countries and from Iraq who live in Cairo.

During our trip in the neighbourhood of al-Talbiya – an extremely dense informal area of unpaved streets, high-rise housing built breaking all terms of urban regulations, and extreme high-piched everyday human interactions – at one point we took a run-down microbus to get out to Pyramids street (asphalted of course: after all it carries international tourists towards the Heritage site of the famous Giza Pyramids). We jumped into the microbus and found three other persons sitting in the front coach. They were all men, looking around 40 or 50 years old, but they might as likely have been just around 30. As it turned out, these men belonged to the society of the extreme poor in Egypt. They were recent immigrants from the Upper Egyptian town of al-Minya. Day-workers, which means people who sit out in the street each morning, waiting for any “patron” to come and pick them up to do a day of labour (most commonly in construction). And concerning the age that appeared reasonable from looking at their faces, I have since long given up trying make a clear guess: 45 or 30 … Real poverty carves life experience into the faces of who carries it far too quickly.

In the bus, Shaker asks me what is going on Down Town (we had coincidentally been together with other companions of that same Refugee play at the by-now-famous-Mohammed Mahmoud-street the afternoon before, Saturday 19th, as we were supposed to have a rehearsal for it in the American University campus, at the very moment (early afternoon) when all hell broke loose there, and we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in the area doing anything else but constructive theatre work). I answered that the “all hell” continued. At this point, one of the day-worker passengers turned and looked at us. “Really” he says “the fighting goes on?” I answered positively to the question, but tried to do it in a diplomatic way, not showing any particular attachment to the event in one way or the other, being conscious of the possibly “foreign” looking aspect of my face and dialect, and more conscious even, of being close to “camel” neighbourhood (yeah – this was my prejudice!)

The man turned back to his friends, and was silent for a while. Then he turned back to me and he said: “Well, but don’t you think it is our right to fight them?” Again I was non-committal in my answer. But the man was fully committed in his solidarity with the boys fighting the Police. Then my companion Shaker asked “But then why are you not there fighting with them?” They answered they would have liked to, but how, since they spend some 14 hours out working each day just looking to take care of their families.

Shaker then asks about the elections, will they go back to al-Minya to vote? The same man answers “No. Why would I go to vote? The people who present themselves to elections only do it to advance their own interests (maslaha) – I vote for this guy, and all he’ll do when he wins is to put the son of his cousin in this position, and some uncle in another… No, I don’t care for that. What I want is a government that rules by law and gives to each citizen his rights. When I feel this is what I vote for, I will vote”.

And between himself and his friends, and us, we broke into a conversation about social justice, workers rights, a social insurance system that protects families from individual accidents of providers, etc… Until we reached the paved Pyramid Street and all of us went different directions.

And this type of consciousness of what the issues are really about will not only be found among these three men in the Talbiya microbus. It is a lot more widespread than that.

Then, what is Bad News?

Well, the whole day has been bad news somehow. The absurd theatre play of the Institutions of “Security” – the Military and the Police of the Ministry of Interior – guaranteeing peaceful and orderly elections, only days after the same two institutions were responsible for the murder of over 40 young men, most under 20 years of age. It is totally absurd! It is over 40 people! It must be an issue. And the deepest absurdity and the deepest feeling of sadness arise when the whole country somehow accepts to play in this charade. What more striking image of total corruption? Not only institutional corruption, we know that one, and expect it. But the corruption of society itself…

This was a sad feeling today.

But then again, I really doubt that this “social” corruption IS that deep any more. I have felt in so many encounters lately that the past ten months of upheaval is really challenging people to question the past political experience. If people in February were only talking about 30 years of injustice, and people who tried to give another discourse were silenced, now it is a wholly new field. After a period when people were very tired of the “instability of revolution”, they are now also realising that it is a question of being ruled by an entity that does not have nor the qualification nor the legitimacy of ruling a nation. Someone – not at all a Tahrir revolutionary, but a common 14 hour/day working family father – explained to me recently, actually as recent as during the last days of intense fire in front of the Ministry of Interior: “I want the military. Sure, I want them: on our borders. I am happy if they protect us there. But if some of them are going to come also to the capital and tell us how we are going to run the country, well, then let them leave their uniforms and weapons there on the border. And they come and discuss with us here in the city, them like us, no difference. It’s been 60 years now. Naser, then Sadat, and Mubarak. Does this al-Mushir (Field Marshal (Tantawi)) want to try it too? No way.”

A companion of mine, Diana, who teaches at the University of Minya – as she frames it, after all a second rate public university combining youth from all Egypt, from Alexandria to Aswan, all from middle class or lower class backgrounds and representative of a “silent majority” – feels very clearly how the consciousness among students has changed from November a year ago until today.

And finally, in Port Saiid last night, on the eve of elections, friends I have, all over 60 years old and common people, workers in the declining harbour business of the city, were spreading the word of a “blank vote” alternative, wanting to dis-own all participating political forces, Islamic, Old-guard, or “Liberal”… Their intention to just give a revolutionary statement that nothing of what is presented in the political theatre at this point responds to their true aspirations and intentions.

People today however went to vote. And in the greater picture I think they had good reasons to. First of all, many were hoping to bring peace to the country, feeling understandably tired and fed up with the deaths of young people. Many hoped to participate for the first time, in any election at all (people in Egypt did simply NOT vote before). And many were hoping to give a vote that would count in an empowering way. Many were totally lost anyways, not having clear alternatives (here is also a failure of “new” political forces). Many have stated that they would give their votes to the Muslim Brotherhood, just because they seemed to be the only force they could recognize, more so than necessarily for a true ideological commitment to the group. And the Muslim Brotherhood – partisan interest (maslaha) apart – have to be given a big credit for the basic organisational and mobilising work they actually manage: it is a path for any serious political movement to follow (in the essential sense, discarding only the old-style election dodging ways of old-System players that they are also guilty of…) Many voters were even that lost that they were on the streets looking for their balloting place just out of worry about the 500 LE fine the Military Government has threatened to impose on anyone who does not vote (great Stalinist democratic election standards).

But now, let’s get back to some really good news again. The real “infringements” on elections. It seems these were caused by pure incompetence of the present authorities. The elections, Field Marshal Tantawi had promised, would be ensured by SCAF and the Ministry of Interior. Good. Through the day no major eruption of violence happened. But as I claim above, it is not really due to the institutional backup of military and police, but to the contrary: that the competition is done between more independent, more accountable and therefore more responsible political forces now.

The only really serious election problems today have been caused by purely institutional failure. The incompetence of these mentioned institutions to guarantee the very infrastructure of the vote is what has produced all major instances of disturbances. Some polling stations did not open in 7 hours because of one or another missing ingredient (no boxes; boxes without a lock on it; not enough ballots; unstamped ballots; no ink that voters should dip their fingers in; no presence or late arrival of supervising judges, etc.) This type of failures has led to real public order problems: angry voters invading polling stations, some cases of supervising judges being kidnapped (!).

This chaos is likely to continue. This will be contrary to the hoped for gaining of good-will of the military government. Framed in a PR stunt as the elections for “Revolution Parliament” and being elections people really had hopes in, actually it might very well happen that they contribute to an even deeper popular resentment of the situation, when people experience the continued institutional management failure of the SCAF government. This would further undermine the crumbling popular and always officially manipulated idea that “the Military is the only capable institution of the country”.

It can backfire in a situation where more and more people are realising that military training might not be the best qualification to sound state management skills.

And then, the results… Well, the Muslim Brotherhood will without doubt be the greater beneficiary of the parliamentary game. And for sure, there is no doubt that their capacity for institutional management is highly superior to the past and present military governed system. However, the only thing we can actually be sure of is that these elections will create yet another political force that has a say and a stake in the turmoil. But nothing more than that. The Brotherhood might, ideally, have capacity to really improve everyday life conditions of many citizens. But then, what practical capacity will they have when the actually ruling institution might not be supportive of such positive change, but could instead be countering it?

The struggle is unpredictable, and prone to constant change. The Revolutionaries do not change much. Nor the military. But the other forces will be swinging in and out of “Tahrir”. Depending on how well they present their cases, they will or will not be welcome to pass the checkpoints of the Square.

There will still be many developments to the ongoing Continuous Revolution – Until Victory.