Women, Culture, and the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution

Dalia Mostafa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317211105
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book comes at a time when the Egyptian nation is facing deep divisions about the notion and definition of 'revolution'. The articles here aim to look at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the central role of women within it from a critical perspective. Our objective is not to glorify the revolution or inflate the role of Egyptian women within its parameters, but to analyse and critique both the achievements and setbacks of this revolution and the contributions of various strata of women to the revolutionary process, which is still unfolding. Women's participation is part of a broader picture and needs to be considered as an essential element of the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice, not in isolation of it. The reader will soon realise that the authors in this book, perhaps, agree on one profound aspect of the 2011 Revolution: the struggle is ongoing, and the revolutionary process is still being shaped and recreated. The story of the Egyptian Revolution still resists any kind of closure despite the ascendance of the military regime once again to power. The years to come will no doubt witness an expansion of the political and cultural archive of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings, accompanied by much academic work on their impact and significance. Women's roles and contributions need to occupy a central position in these academic analyses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Action, imagination, institution, natality, revolution

Ziad Elmarsafy

Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, Heslington, UK

The article reinforces an evaluation of the 25 January 2011 revolution as opposed to conservative and traditional forces in Egyptian society and among the ruling elite. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the article argues that a revolution cannot be imagined and enacted without women’s political action at its centre. Action, here, is envisaged as a challenge to the morbidity of moralising discourses which attempt to contain women/revolution. Here, natality, novelty and revolution go together; and natality provides the ontological ground for action. By looking at two early accounts written on the first 18 days of the revolution, Ahdaf Soueif’s Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, and Mona Prince’s Ismi Thawra (My Name is Revolution), the article highlights the linkage between women’s action and their imagination in configuring and expressing the revolutionary nature of the events which started on 25 January. Popular culture (the mulid) is also tapped for a reading that stresses the natality motif. Arendt’s natality is thus conceived as enabling newness and opening up possibilities previously unimagined. This is the substance of revolution; that is what makes it radical, unpredictable, creative and imaginative, as the article illustrates by unpacking the selected passages.

For Blue-Bra Woman

Readers of Ahdaf Soueif’s account of Cairo and the revolution, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), will remember the curious events of 2 February 2011. During the night following Mubarak’s second speech wherein he reiterated his intention to stay on as president of Egypt, Soueif finds herself missing her mother. At this point, the reader might have expected another meditation on the Mubarak regime, on the refusal of Egyptian presidents to relinquish power or on the hopelessly corrupt nature of Egyptian politics. Instead, Soueif gives us this:

I want my mother. I am cold and shivery and I. Want. My. Mother. I cannot tell you how many people in the Midan [i.e. Midan al-Tahrir, Tahrir Square] have said to me, can you imagine if your mother were alive today? How she would have enjoyed this? I want to ring the doorbell, find her in the living room surrounded by newspapers with the television on loud. I’ll turn it down, get some food from the kitchen and sit beside her and tell her everything that’s happened. I want her to be astonished and amazed and indignant and tickled. I want her to interrupt and interject and laugh and question. I want to talk to her and I want to see her face.

[…]

I used to be unable to gaze full on at that image of her laughing and repeating choice phrases [from Pope and Byron – Soueif’s mother was a professor of English at Cairo University]. These days I see her constantly, looking surprised, looking delighted, looking up every time one of us walks into the room: What’s the news? Fein el-shabab? Where are the young people? What are they doing? And I tell her: Mama, you would be so proud of them; of your grandchildren, and of your students and the children of your students. Of all our young people. They are out there: and they are so many. (Soueif, 2012, pp. 124–127)

The movement of this passage (much abbreviated here), from physical sensation to social intercourse to a very deep nostalgia, leads the curious reader to ask: What is the revolutionary’s mother doing here, on this cold night in revolutionary downtown Cairo? The short answer is that it is a miserable night, that Ahdaf Soueif has been in Tahrir for a very long time at that point, and like anyone who suffers that sort of exhaustion she thinks of her mother as a source of comfort. We might also add that Soueif’s mother – indeed her entire family – have a long and distinguished history of committed political activism, having paid (and, in some cases, continue to pay) a heavy personal price for their efforts to build a better Egypt. So, of course, Soueif would say something like, ‘If only you could see them now …’

There is, however, more at work in Soueif’s text. It might be useful for us to think of Soueif’s vision of her mother, in the middle of Tahrir Square, at 2 am on 2 February 2011, as something like an intelligent dream or an intelligent vision, designed to fulfil a wish. But what is the wish? What does it mean to desire one’s mother in the middle of a revolution?

Part of the answer lies not with the mother, real or imagined, but what she stands for. One of the things that she stands for is what Hannah Arendt called natality, the quality or faculty that makes political action possible. It is also, within the framework that Arendt builds in The Human Condition, the defining characteristic of being human. Arendt uses natality in opposition to mortality, which for her is the one value that has held sway over metaphysics and political philosophy. Over against this tradition, Arendt invokes the concept of natality, first as a response to mortality – if we’re all going to die, it is because we are alive now, and we were once born – and as a key idea through which she understands political action: ‘The new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 9). Later, in The Human Condition, she describes natality as the miracle that saves the world from its natural, normal ruin:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ [according to the ancient world-view] ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their glad tidings: ‘A child has been born unto us’. (Arendt, 1998, p. 247)

The power of this statement is that it foregrounds the revolutionary reality, as opposed to mere potential, of natality. Natality, novelty and revolution go together. Natality provides the ontological ground for action: without it action cannot be. Let us note in passing Arendt’s sophisticated reappropriation of the notion of action from its vulgarisation by the right. She also takes great pains to distinguish between political action and other forms of doing or making, such as labour (taking action to support one’s biological needs) or work (taking action within the economic arena). Even though she readily admits that all three are somehow related to natality, action, she says, ‘has the closest connection with the human condition of natality’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 9). Arendt insists on the autonomy of the political register, and within that register, on the importance of natality as the only faculty that lives up to the vast expanse of the art of the possible known as politics.

Among the many facets of action in Arendt’s scheme, I would like to call attention to its immediacy, and the way in which it throws us together into a living plurality:

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life. […] Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behaviour, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live. (Arendt, 1998, pp. 7–8, my emphasis)

Arendt’s stress on immediacy teaches us a key aspect of action: that in order for action to count as specifically political action it cannot be something for which one is paid, for example, or in exchange for which one receives a service or compensation of any kind. Consider, then, that very early insult thrown in the face of the Egyptian revolutionaries: that they are wakhdin felus; ‘they took money’ or ‘they were paid’; that some sinister conspiratorial force somewhere had paid thousands of people to risk their lives and well-being and gather in Tahrir Square. This has been the standard rejoinder of dictators and tyrants to revolutionary action for a very long time indeed, as witness Creon’s rants about the use of money to corrupt the citizens of Thebes in Antigone (Sophocles, 1994, pp. 295–303). Former Egyptian president Morsi did the same when he accused those who opposed the sweeping powers that he arrogated to himself in November 2012, as being ‘paid thugs’. Quite apart from the fairly easy retort one might make to these absurd claims, what is interesting about them is that they take aim at the very thing that makes political action political; namely its immediacy: the fact that nothing comes between the revolutionaries and revolutionary action except other revolutionaries. The forces of reaction always attempt to de-politicise what Arendt calls action; for if the revolutionaries had indeed received payment, then their behaviour would thereby be magically transformed from political action to paid work. No matter how elaborate or creative conspiracy theories might be, they are invariably anti-political, anti-action and anti-natality, which is why they usually fail.

Another accusation that was made during and after the 2011 revolution, and continues to be made to this day, is that the revolutionaries are immoral. Needless to say, this tends to be the accusation aimed at women who take action. We are probably all familiar with the story of the anonymous general who told CNN, on the occasion of Samira Ibrahim’s brave stand against the army’s use of virginity tests in March 2011, that ‘these girls aren’t like your daughter or mine’, because they camped out in Tahrir Square in the presence of men who were not their husbands (Amin, 2011). What is patent in these accusations against the morals of revolutionary women is that the accusation is itself a denial of the specifically political dimension of their activity. Calling revolutionary women sex workers – the standard insult – degrades not only their person, but also their activity: it is no longer political action that they are undertaking in Tahrir Square, it is just work. This is, therefore, another variation on the accusation that ‘they were paid’.

Abandoning the language of politics in favour of moralism is, as Wendy Brown wrote over a decade ago in a different context, a form of anti-political behaviour symptomatic of something far worse; namely, a failure of the imagination. The rage of those who employ moralising discourses to discredit political action, she contends, is indicative only of their political impotence, even as they attempt desperately to score political points (Brown, 2001, pp. 21–22). This extends to the tendency among the general public to blame the victims of violence by the authorities as a way of neutralising the political dimension of the issues at hand: one hears the refrains ‘hiyya eih illi waddaha hinak?’ (‘What did she go there for?’) and ‘women should not mingle with men’ with nauseating regularity whenever women participate actively in politics, as if to imply that the many women who were beaten, raped, humiliated and tortured during the revolution and its aftermath, up to and including the 30 June 2013 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Egyptian women, revolution, and protest culture
• 1. Action, imagination, institution, natality, revolution
• 2. Egypt’s revolution, our revolution: revolutionary women and the transnational avant-garde
• 3. Inserting women’s rights in the Egyptian constitution: personal reflections
• 4. Egyptian women, revolution and the making of a visual public sphere
• 5. A multimodal analysis of selected Cairokee songs of the Egyptian revolution and their representation of women
• 6. Gender and Tahrir Square: contesting the state and imagining a new nation
• 7. To write/to revolt: Egyptian women novelists writing the revolution
• 8. ‘Giving memory a future’: women, writing, revolution
• Index