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In the spring of 2005, Egyptian blogs began to attract international attention, as they served as a platform for coordinated protests against a proposed Constitutional

amendment (Radsch 2008). However, perhaps the defining moment of Egyptian blogging took place in October of 2006, during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. Downtown Cairo witnessed a string of mob-like sexual assaults on women – assaults that initially went unreported in the Egyptian press. By coincidence, two of Egypt’s more well-known SMN activists, Wael Abbas and Malek Mustafa, happened to be on the scene at the time. A clearly horrified Malek (who blogs as Malcolm-X), detailed the assaults in all their grotesque gratuity on his blog. Amira al-Husseini of Global Voices provided this translation of Malek’s initial report:

We saw a large number of men whistling and running in the direction of Adly Street. We went with them to see what was happening. I was surprised to see a girl in her early 20s falling on the ground and a mob of men gathering around her, feeling up her body and tearing her clothes off her. I didn't understand or rather I couldn't comprehend what was happening. The girl got up and ran into a restaurant and hid inside. Some boys surrounded the restaurant and wouldn't leave until one of them shouted that there was another one coming. All of them ran towards Talaat Street again and there I saw a girl who was completely surrounded by a mob of hundreds of men trying to touch her body and take off her clothes. This girl was rescued by a taxi driver, who pulled her into his taxi. But the boys would not allow the taxi through and formed a circle around the car,” he said.25

Despite the presence of bloggers and the pictures and videos circulating on the Internet, the press remained completely silent for days. However, the first penetration of the official silence came via a report on Dream TV on October 28th_{, with talk show}

host Mona El Shazly and other reporters confirming the allegations with other

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witnesses and shopkeepers (Al-Malky 2007). Then with a series of press articles, the official silence began to crack. The first paper to run a report was Al-Fagr, by the

journalist Wael Abdel Fattah. Other outlets of the independent press soon followed suit, including Al-Masry Al-Youm and the still-weekly Al-Dustur. The November 1st

issue of Al-Dustur, “borrowing” pictures straight from Abbas’s blog, ran no less than 8 articles directly or indirectly addressing the incident.26 Articles and criticism followed in all the major independent and party newspapers, eventually trickling into the official press. The regime denied that anything untoward happened downtown, while the official press was largely silent. Typically when that silence was broken, it initially took the form of attacking Abbas himself, a pattern that would become sadly familiar in the years to come.27 However, the protests, coordinated by bloggers such as The Sandmonkey, forced a debate that eventually reached even the government press. Activists called for the resignation of Interior Minister Habib El-Adly, which of course did not happen. However, the more details leaked out about the case, the more it appeared that sexual harassment on Eid enjoyed the official or unofficial support of elements of the regime, particularly security forces who either participated in the assaults or tolerated them.28

With both video and photos, taken on cell phones, the event was difficult, if not impossible, to credibly deny. What made the story even more poignant were the first- hand accounts from women that day, some of whom were apparently inspired to begin

26 _{See for instance “al-Dakhiliya ankarat ‘adat al-taharrush fi-l-Qahira wa qalat inna kullu shay’ tamam ya}

fandim!” (The Interior Ministry denied the return of harassment in Cairo and said “Everything is fine, Effendim!”) Mohamed Khayr. Al-Dustur Weekly, November 1st, 2006.

27 _{El-Hamalawy, Hossam. “Rosa Al-Youssef hits new rock bottom”.}

3arabawy. October 31st, 2006. 28 _{This aspect of the case remains, unfortunately, very murky.}

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blogging by what happened that day. The short-lived blog Wounded Female From Cairo provided the following account:

We, girls, had our butts, breasts, and every inch of our bodies grabbed. I end up slipping into a car that was parking on the road side when I tried to catch one of the [profanity omitted] who insisted and never gave up on grabbing my butt. So, I end up with a deep cut in my right hand palm and another one on my thumb of the same hand as I slipped into the car's headlight that broke and cut my hand. 6 stitches on my hand palm cut and 3 on my thumb--still my anger is pretty fresh in the deep inside of me that makes want me to put all Egyptian men on fire right now for what they have caused...Don't you have sisters who can also face the same thing as we did?29

The story was another instance of SMN’s providing undeniable evidence of a social or political trend that many people may have preferred to ignore. Blog entries like

Wounded Girl FromCairo also provided indispensible platforms for the coordinated

protests that followed (including protests on November 9th and November 14th, 2006), a subject that will be returned to in Chapter 4. While of course many Egyptians were aware of the prevalence of sexual harassment, most were untouched by it or had never

witnessed it first-hand. The videos and pictures that made it out of the Eid harassment story forced individuals to confront the reality of sexual harassment, much like the torture scandal in 2007 – also propelled into the press from the blogosphere – forced Egyptians to confront another unpleasant aspect of their government. While the two incidents may not have led to a regime change or substantial legal revisions, they did change the context of the relationship between the regime and its people.

tml

29 _{Girl4Cairo. “LOOK AT ME.”}

Wounded Girl From Cairo. Thursday, November 9th,

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Several factors propelled the sexual harassment story out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream discourse. First, the assaults exposed the prominence of sexual harassment in Egypt, and deeply embarrassed the regime. Second the assaults appeared to dovetail with two major social problems in Egypt – the continuing delay in the age of marriage and the mounting sexual frustration of the country’s young men (and women, although of course discourse focused on the former). Third, elements of the emerging SMN sphere contributed to the viral effectiveness of the story, such as the existence of digital videos which could be passed around through email and hyperlinks, and the ubiquity of pictures and first-hand accounts that the regime was unable to quash despite a total press blackout for the first week following the events. In short, blogs, mobile videos and the Internet made possible a staying power for this story that, while not impossible in the past, would have been phenomenally unlikely. Finally, the story was almost instantly picked up by international observers and organizations like Global Voices, which

provided further extensive coverage and amplification of the events, and drove the shaming of the Egyptian government for its total inaction, particularly when it appeared that sexual harassment might interfere with the booming Egyptian tourism industry. This was a story that the activists refused to allow to die.

Crucially, however, the online writing and dissent moved into the real-world, with protests that were organized in part by the Sandmonkey.30 And when the independent press started covering the story, they did so with vigor, forcing the government finally to acknowledge that something was at stake. That press attention culminated in a series of protests and a still-ongoing campaign against sexual harassment, spread across the

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blogosphere and a number of human rights organizations. Blogs had officially become a force to be reckoned with. Wael Abbas, who witnessed the events and wrote about them on his blog, argues,

Now with flocks of young people harassing and molesting girls, in groups, in a religious feast, in downtown cairo, or in the absence of the police or the police were there but didn’t interfere, it brought to light the issue of sexual harassment in

general in workplaces and families, and it made it to be discussed in TV talk shows, even in the official newspapers they couldn’t ignore it. The only thing that pissed them off was that we exposed that the police were negligent for what was going on.31

The jump to international outlets was an acute embarrassment for the Egyptian

government and society, which relies so heavily on tourist receipts – not from the United States, but from elsewhere in the West and the Middle East. For Egypt to develop a reputation as a place that is unsafe for women to travel would be devastating for the tourism industry. Still the state-run press dismissed the story, smeared the people

propagating it, and denied any official culpability. As Ehab El-Zalaky, Deputy Editor of

Al-Masry Al-Youm in 2008, says:

it was a big shock for the whole society for that matter. You know that it happens Eid al-Fitr after the holy month of Ramadan ...so it was an explosive story for the blogs for two or three days, the first things came after that period of silence, it was being circulated as a story, and many were talking about what was happening, people in all of Egypt were talking about it, and there was pure silence from the mainstream media, and there was a statement from the interior ministry that no such thing happened at all. The first thing was published in Al-

Ahram and denied what happened, and talking about things on their sites from

their imaginations, some of the independent newspapers started to write about the issue, at the same time – blogs were trying to back each other, so some of the blogs published some blurry pictures taken with mobile phones, so it wasn’t very clear what was happening, after about a week, one of the Egyptians who was living in the States sent Wael Abbas a video shot taken a year before that,

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which detailed another mass sexual harassment in Cairo streets, he take the shots and took it back to the States and never thought about publishing it.32

El-Zalaky’s last point makes it clear that this sexual harassment during Eid was not something new in 2006, but rather something that had happened in the past but that remained an undocumented rumor.33 _{The tools of SMN’s made it possible for distant}

contacts to pass videos through enhanced social networks, and the credibility of the bloggers in the streets allowed them to establish the veracity of the events in question. The way that the story went from rumor to full-blown media event in a matter of days calls to mind the kind of informational cascades discussed in Chapter 2. And the way it called attention to previously subordinated events recalls both El-Zalaky’s claim that blogs provide “a voice for the voiceless” and serves as evidence for the efficacy of SMN’s breaking news.

The linkages between SMN activists and independent journalists continued to give the story increasingly wide play. Al-Dustur ran a series of hard-hitting articles that

December, not just about that particular incident, but about sexual harassment in general. The number of articles about sexual harassment in the Egyptian press– hardly a new issue in Egyptian politics – jumped from 33 stories in 2004 to 173 in 2006 and 171 in 2007. Other Arab print outlets picked up on the story, as did regional papers and outlets like Al- Jazeera. The Egyptian Center For Women’s Rights launched a campaign against

harassment in Egypt that continues to this day, in coordination with grassroots organizations like The Street Is Ours. The point is not that harassment has been

32 _{Interview with Ehab El-Zalaky, Cairo, Egypt, April 8th, 2008}

33 _{Research through the Middle East Monitor (formerly Zad) confirms the absence of any coverage of these}

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eliminated, for such a deeply-rooted phenomenon is difficult to change in such a short period of time, and after all women are harassed not just in Egypt but all over the West and elsewhere in the Global North. The point is that a cross-political coalition was forged, with the work of SMN activists, to contest the issue of sexual harassment in Egypt. In fact, Eid harassment has continued. In the Fall of 2008, there was a very similar incident that took place downtown – however in contrast to the 2006 incident, when security services did finally arrive, the harassers were arrested. As the Egyptian Center For Women’s Rights argues, while it is unfortunate that such incidents still take place, a climate in which the perpetrators are punished does at least represent progress.34 As Gamal Eid notes, “There are some official coalitions between some groups, but when these cases are finished, every group will be on its own.”35 El-Zalaky believes that this was the moment that bloggers gained domestic credibility: “This is one of the major hits and major turns of the blogs to be known by ordinary people and I think after this incident blogs gained a huge amount of credibility.”36