The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East

324 Pages·2014·3.04 MB·English

by  Juan Cole

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Contents
Preface
1.
The Arab Millennials
2.
The Republican Monarchs
3.
“Giants of Meat and Steel: I Come to You from Cyberspace!”
4.
The New Left
5.
From Bouazizi to Tahrir
6.
Tunisia: “Leave My Creators Alone!”
7.
Egypt: From April 6 to Rebellion
8.
Libya’s Youth Rebels
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About Juan Cole
Notes
Index
Preface
W
hile my family and I were paying our respects to the boy pharaoh
Tutankhamen and his gold-plated sarcophagus in a side room at the Cairo
Museum, one of the guards abruptly forced us out of the room and then out of
the building. Soon I learned that what I took for rudeness was desperation:
something bad was coming.
That morning, August 1, 2011, my wife, my son, and I had finally found a
free moment to visit the venerable museum, a scandalous jumble of poorly
labeled precious antiquities less on display than randomly dumped here and
there. The building is around the corner from Tahrir Square, where thousands of
youth had assembled to push for the trial of deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak and
of policemen who had killed demonstrators during the revolution earlier that
year. Forty-five minutes before closing time, the guards had begun herding us
out, declaring that the museum was closing early for the fasting month of
Ramadan. It was a well-intentioned lie.
When we exited the building into the blinding daylight showering Tahrir
Square, we discovered shirtless soccer fanatics, called “Ultras,” frantically
pounding on the metal barricades with plastic bottles and other instruments.
They were clearly sending a warning signal, and we did not have to look far to
see the reason. Armored vehicles were pulling up on side streets with what
looked like ninja police pouring out of them, armed with batons. Now we
understood the panic of the museum guards: they had not wanted the tourists to
get caught in the middle of the coming melee.
We half-ran, half-walked toward Talaat Harb Square a few blocks away,
where we caught a taxi. I told the driver what was going on and that we wanted
him to take us away from the scene as quickly as possible. There had been
stories of foreigners arrested at Tahrir Square or having their cameras broken by
overzealous police, and I imagined all the photos and videos I had taken that
summer of the demonstrations, posters, banners, and graffiti being crushed
beneath the heel of one of those black boots.
As is frequently the case with Cairo cabbies, he completely disregarded my
request. Instead, he circled around and drove us as fast as he could back toward
Tahrir Square. Then we got caught in Cairo’s notorious traffic, right next to the
armored vehicles and the security police, who occasionally peered suspiciously
into the taxi. I was petrified that they were going to demand our passports and
accuse us of being spies or saboteurs. My camera would have contained all the
evidence they needed. They would not have wanted foreign witnesses to what
they were about to do.
The taxi inched its tortuous way forward. We could still hear the anxious
drumming of the self-appointed guardians of the square, which was festooned
with tents, banners, and posters demanding change. The police methodically
tapped their open palms with their batons. Two approached our car from the
front and I froze. They looked in at us with curiosity. But they were just crossing
the street.
After an eternity, the taxi reached the square and turned right, toward the Nile
island of Zamalek, and made its way down a highway lined with more armored
vehicles, beside which masses of police and soldiers stood. Every inquisitive
glance was a threat.
Finally, we were away. I exhaled in relief as we crossed the October 6 Bridge
over the languorous Nile. Not long after, we heard that all the protesters had
been chased away, all the tents pulled down, and all the banners and posters
trampled. Some of the banners had demanded the resignation of the military
government, and the military had given its reply.
• • •
Young people are the key to the rapid political and social change in the Arab
countries that have been in turmoil since 2011.1 Activist youth returned to Tahrir
Square again and again in 2011 to 2013 despite the attempts of the military and
various postrevolutionary governments to repress them. In spring–summer 2013,
the youth Rebellion Movement against the Muslim Brotherhood managed to
unseat its president. The military this time posed as an ally of the youth and
made a coup on the backs of the millions of young people who came to the
streets. Thereafter, the officers went back to jailing young activists in a
continued quest to put the genie back in the bottle. My focus in this book is not
on the politics of the presidents, generals, and prime ministers of what some call
the “Arab Spring” but rather the networked movements of young people that
played such an important role in these events. Not all cohorts of teenagers and
twenty-somethings produce movements centered on their identity as youth, with
a set of organizations, symbols, repertoires of social action, and demands rooted
at least partly in the distinctive problems besetting people of their age. The Arab
millennials did, and they forever changed their societies.2 While they were by no
means the only important social actors, youth associations played an outsized
role in provoking and shaping these upheavals.3 This effective activism was all
the more remarkable given the patriarchal and regimented character of Arab
society. A young Egyptian from the Suez Canal port of Ismailia said after the
revolution, “We have made this revolution. Our families were used to keeping
quiet. We didn’t keep quiet. We went out to get our dream.”4
The massive crowds that gathered in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo in
January and February 2011 pushed the long-ruling dictator Hosni Mubarak out
of power and brought down one of the Middle East’s most powerful
governments. The protesters in Cairo had taken their inspiration from similar
events in Tunisia in December and January. In turn, youthful crowds challenged
their rulers in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Smaller movements produced
hurried cosmetic changes in Jordan, Morocco, and Oman. Attempts by the
erratic dictator Muammar Gaddafi to crush Libya’s protest movement with tanks
and artillery led to a United Nations Security Council plea for outside
intervention—answered in sometimes problematic ways by NATO and the Arab
League—and evolved into civil war. In June and July 2013 millions of Egyptian
youth came out for an encore performance, driving from office their first elected
president, the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, and signaling that
Arab youth were not done fashioning their future. The networked youth
movements protested the idea of presidents for life being succeeded by their sons
in a kind of dynastic succession. They rejected censorship, arbitrary arrest,
police brutality, and torture. They developed a concept of personal freedom
emphasizing the dignity and autonomy of citizens with regard to their bodies,
convictions, and lifestyles (an entire Egyptian nongovernmental organization
was formed around this notion). It is unsurprising that they had only partial
success in pressing for the implementation of their ideals in the three years after
the fall of the dictators. What is surprising is that in societies dominated by
police states for decades, these millennials made new social and media spaces in
which their demands could be voiced and small steps could be taken toward
achieving them.
The most consequential organizations for the overthrow of long-serving
dictators in the region’s republics were made up of left-liberal youth living in
towns and cities, and so they are my primary focus.5 They were distinguished by
their preference for a horizontal model of organization instead of a hierarchy, so
that leadership tended not to be centralized. They had years of experience in
dissidence, beginning in the early twenty-first century, and in avoiding political
taboos. That is, their predecessors had often identified political groups with
whom they refused to work, whereas the engaged youth often had wider
horizons and were more pragmatic, possibly because their preference for
interactive networks and horizontal organization made an inclusive approach
easy and a sectarian one difficult.
My travels in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have given me a good sense of the
issues on the ground. Not only was I able to interview and talk to a wide range of
participants in these dramatic events, but I was able to collect rare pamphlets and
books and to photograph posters, placards, graffiti, and other visual sources for
attitudes and political demands. In Tunisia I found secular middle-class activists
firmly confronting militant fundamentalists who were deploying violence to
protest film showings and art exhibits, defending the right to be unreligious and
warning that the Muslim al-Nahda (Renaissance) Party wanted to turn Tunisia
into another Iran. In Egypt I was present on several occasions when the famed
Tahrir Square erupted in large protests, in what many youth clearly felt was an
unfinished revolution. Tensions between the relatively secular youth movements
and the Muslim Brotherhood were palpable and would come to a head in 2013.
In Libya I visited a hastily erected war museum in Misrata and Benghazi’s
symbol of revolt, the city’s courthouse, haunted by a generation of the
“disappeared,” those made political prisoners and done away with by the
Gaddafi regime.
Since my concern in this book is with organized youth movements that led to
fairly extensive changes in national politics, I will concentrate on Egypt, Tunisia,
and Libya. For the same reason I will slight Yemen and Syria. In Yemen the
president stepped down in favor of his vice president but remained the leader of
the ruling party, which shared some of its power but was not overthrown. Young
demonstrators played a key role in these changes in Sanaa, but so too did
political parties, tribal groups, and religious and regional movements. In Syria
youth played a central role in the March 2011 demonstrations that kicked off a
long, grinding political struggle. When the ruling Baath regime deployed armor
and the air force to repress those rallies in small towns and cities in the center of
the country, the youth turned to military struggle and the country was plunged
into years of civil war that is, as of this writing, still unresolved. As the
sociologist Manuel Castells observed, “Civil wars not only kill people, they also
kill social movements and their ideals of peace, democracy and justice.”6 There
was no preexisting youth movement in one-party Syria of the sort I recount in