I spent several Ramadan nights during August 2010 in the informal settlements of the Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam neighbourhoods. I walked along the streets and narrow lanes; I met familiar faces from the three schools and the educational district office, and joined gatherings in coffee houses with groups of young teachers and parents. The following is from my field notes:
I crossed the bridge above the metro railway and jumped into one of those small motorised carts called a “toktok” on my way to Al-Basatin. The small and very tight toktok was riding along the unpaved narrow streets of the informal neighbourhood. There were about 8 of us packed inside it and banging into each other every time it jumped or turned in the middle of the very crowded narrow lanes. All the buildings on both sides of these lanes had turned their ground floors into small shops for selling goods. Streets, buildings, mosques and shops were beautifully decorated with colourful Ramadan decorations. Shops were packed with different types of food needed for Iftar (Ramadan breakfast) and Sohor (Ramadan last daily meal before fasting).
Street vendors were all over the place selling fruits, vegetables, homemade food and even clothes. The buildings were mostly small and very close to each other except for a couple of main streets where there were tall buildings with a few smart cars parked in front of them. There was one of “mawa’d el rahman” (charity meal) which was almost empty after the Ramadan Iftar meal where either well-off families, businessmen or parliamentary election candidates arrange every day during Ramadan for the provision of Iftar meals for the poor who cannot afford expensive Ramadan food.
Every street we passed had a number of small and medium-sized mosques and several coffee shops. Men who had just left the mosques after the long taraweh prayers as part of the Ramadan daily prayers were gathered around cups of tea, shisha and their favourite backgammon games. Many young men were also in cafés watching a football match, chatting, laughing, also smoking shisha, and looking at girls passing by. Young women with mothers and/or elder sisters were walking around until late at night, and even after midnight, buying food for Sohor and for next day’s Ramadan’s Iftar. Almost all the conversations in the café gatherings were about the coming biggest Egyptian parliamentary election in a month's time, and the most controversial Egyptian presidential elections expected in 2011. These have made the holy month of Ramadan different this year, with all the tensions and politics of elections.
The street noise was an amazing mix of Quran reciting coming from mosques and some shops, modern Egyptian pop singing, famous TV shows, young people yelling while watching a match, and political debates between men over the upcoming heated elections. In the middle of all that was going on, groups of students could be seen leaving the private tutoring centres located in the neighbourhood. They were the thanaweya-aama students preparing for the upcoming school year that would start soon after Ramadan and they had already started their private tutoring lessons.
It was an image of the Cairo urban “informality” (Bayat 2009) alliance created from the marginals and the working class during decades of dramatic expansion of impoverished urban settlements amidst an excluding state’s privatising economy. Beneath the surface of the Ramadan cultural rituals in the crowded narrow lanes and coffee houses, unemployment, street children, deprivation of basic rights, and other features of exclusion and informalisation existed side by side with luxurious upper class neighbourhoods.
Cyberactivism and blogging about politics by Egyptian young people – particularly young journalists, photographers, lawyers, and computer programmers – goes back to 2004. Since then, cyberactivists and bloggers have been focusing on documenting and reporting incidents of torture and anti-human rights practices by the regime, and about street actions organised by political activists demanding change. The road for cyberactivism was paved by the coordination between both the leftist and Islamist forces from late 1990 onwards, that resulted in the establishment of the "Kefaya – The Egyptian Movement for Change” in 2004. Kefaya (enough) was formed by Egyptian political activists from different generations and backgrounds who for the first time mobilised successful street protests calling for an end to the Mubarak regime and rejecting Mubarak's son as his successor for the presidency (Hirschkind 2011). In 2008, the 6th April Movement was born from within Kefaya in support of protests and strikes by workers in the industrial town of Mahala El-Kobra:
When 6th April arrived, Egypt witnessed its most dramatic political mobilization in decades, an event that brought together people across the political spectrum, from Muslim Brotherhood members to Revolutionary Socialists (Hirschkind 2011: 15).
In the early summer of 2010, a brutal case of torture and killing by the Egyptian police in the large coastal city of Alexandria was uncovered by media and cyberactivists. Khaled Said, a young man from a middle class family in Alexandria, had been dragged out of an Internet café and beaten to death by two policemen. The case of Khaled Said triggered a considerable amount of rage among young people and students, particularly in Alexandria, Cairo and other large cities. Several youth movements, particularly the “6th April Movement” and “Youth for Change”41, arranged streets events and demonstrations against such brutal government practices. A Facebook page was created by some young people called “We are all Khaled Said”. The page was created, as explained by its creators, to express the collective stance of many Egyptians who were fed up with practices against human rights and government corruption. Surprisingly, in a few days, followers of the page
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reached about half a million members, and in a few weeks, members subscribing to the page reached one million. Herrera maintained in an interview on 28 February 2011 that the case of Khaled Said broke the fear barrier:
Suddenly the youth were saying “We’re not afraid anymore,” “We’re fed up,” “Enough is enough!” They were getting bolder and bolder on Facebook, insulting the president and political figures, spreading photos of corruption and torture. When I asked one of them, “Aren’t you afraid to do this?”, she replied, “What are they going to do, arrest millions of us? Millions of us are doing this.” So this became a moment when collectively, a generation crossed the fear threshold (Chamberlain 2011: online).
In fact, young people’s engagement in protest actions against the Mubarak regime was not really a sudden phenomenon. In addition to the several groups of activists that emerged from the Kefaya movement starting from 2004 such as “Students for Change”, and “6th April Movement”, there were also several Ultras groups that attracted thousands of young men of high school and university age who were fans of famous football teams. Amro’s (the thanaweya-aama student encountered in Chapters 5 and 6) engagement with street action went back, as he said, to when he was 16, when he joined Ultras:
Amro: My engagement (fel syasa) with politics started when I joined the Ultras Ahlawy group (the Al-Ahly football team fan group) in the neighbourhood in 2009 through my friends. There was an Al-Ahly match in summer 2010 at the same time as the incident and death of Khaled Said. We decided to arrange a “cortege42” for him as part of the Ultras activities and It was the first time the song was chanted, “khafe mena ya hokoma” “Fear us, cops”.
MF: Do you remember the lyrics of the song? Amro: Of course.
“khafe mena ya hokoma” (Fear us, cops)
“Gayeen el-lela nawyeen” (We came tonight for a purpose)
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“Ultras have always taken positive initiatives to attempt to outdo the cheering activities of the opposing team's supporters. From here came the term “cortege” which was adapted from the street war terminology of Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. It means going out in demonstrations as a show of power in the opponents’ areas of influence, away from the stadium. Cortege sometimes leads to violence” (El-Sherif 2012).
"Gomhor Al-Ahly walaaoha" (Al-Ahly fans have lit the fire) "**om elzabet aal amin" (fuck the officer and the sergeant) Alle alle holy gans alle Alle alle holy gans alle
Alle alle holy gans alle Alle alle holy gans alle
"**om elzabet aal amin" (fuck the officer and the sergeant) This song has always sent the cops crazy. We were thousands chanting it in the stadium and it was like an earthquake. At the end of 2010, during the match of Al-Ahly, the Police Central Security Forces (CSF) beat us and threw tear gas at us. Another match was a few days before the event of 25th January. The instructions were: Ultras are not allowed to chant or raise any banners. It turned into harsh clashes with the CSF.
On 24th January, the day before the revolution, I was standing close to my school. By chance there was a demonstration in the street. A police officer asked me what I was doing there; I replied “I'm playing”. The police officer slapped me in the face and called me bad names and told me to leave. I will never forget the feeling when I was slapped. Every time I was in anti- police demonstrations I remembered the slap on my face and that horrible feeling of humiliation.
As an Ultras member, Amro experienced the brutality of the CSF when he was a young football fan travelling after his team. During those events, Amro usually became engaged in clashes with the CSF, which always feared such wild gatherings of the young football fans. Ultras’ gatherings and marches, chants, banners and fireworks were attempts by the young football fans to make their own “claims to the city” in the spaces of main streets, stadiums and football courts. Through this process, young people subverted the authority of the state by controlling their everyday sports gatherings; through it, too, they experienced “an unmediated and unobstructed fulfilment” (Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011: 87) of their subversive desires. Ultras’ clashes with the CSF around the football pitches also showed “how competition over the production of space operates” (Molotch 1993: 889) between
the state’s brutalities to produce spaces of domination versus the young people who strove to produce spaces for subversion. That is exactly why the site of actions is important and why we should be concerned with spatial legacies (Vradis and Dalakoglou 2011: 87).
Amro also suffered other street experiences of humiliation and disgrace from the police. Narrating his first encounter with streets actions by his Ultras group, he repeatedly called it “mosharkety fel syasa” (engagement in politics). For Amro, engagement in politics meant opposing the CSF brutality. However, it should be noted that his path prior to the revolution was different from that of many of his peers, like Mona, who had never been into a police station before other than for the issue of her national ID.
I met Mona following her arrest by the CSF during the Mohammed Mahmoud battle, which I will address in detail in a later section of this chapter. We met through a revolutionary friend after she was released and she narrated the story of her link with Tahrir. Mona (at the time) was a 23-year-old university student from a middle class family. She was studying at the college of languages. However, she said: “I don't really care about the university studies; my main interest is my work, which is shooting and directing movies.” Mona lived with a room-mate in a small flat close to down-town Cairo so as to be near her work:
I was struggling to live my life, like any normal Egyptian girl. Before the revolution I was living a normal life, doing my job, and was not interested in any politics. In fact, I avoided it because I thought only about making movies, which is the thing I love doing. I never talked about politics. I always thought that politicians were a bunch of rich people who were good for nothing. There was no hope at all that anything might change in this country, so I said: "I'll try and do something here, and if I fail, I'll leave the country and live abroad." Life was monotonous; even the works that tackled politics were shallow. I used to say: "What are you talking about! Nothing will change that way. I even didn’t know who the Prime Minister was. I'd heard that those who tried to talk about politics were tortured and put in jail.
Mona's position and aspirations before the revolution were not too far from those of many of the young people I had known during my field work in the three schools. She aspired to success either in Egypt or abroad, and as she mentioned, her aspirations did not include any involvement in politics. While Amro had chosen to engage in street actions, Mona sounded hopeless about the whole situation. Despite their different positions, however, the views of both Amro and Mona correlated in terms of the meaning of involvement in politics and acts of resistance. Such correlation confirmed that young people had reached a point where politics practised through negotiations and compromises had become rotten and corrupt, and did not convince them anymore. That was confirmed later on in many instances during the Tahrir occupation and beyond, when young people in particular completely refused to negotiate or compromise unless their demands were met.