One of the curious manifestations of Americanism is to try to bring control of every dynamic into its own circuit. The Tunisians and Egyptians rose up, and the establishment media in the United States wanted to give the glory to Facebook or Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech or the handbook by philosopher Gene Sharp—not to the ordinary people of North Africa themselves. In Cairo, Obama said, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” During the Tahrir Square standoff, protestors chanted, “we have extended our hand, why have you clenched your fist?” Their words came as they foisted in the air tear gas canisters that read Made in the USA. They fully grasped the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism. Facebook certainly allowed for some creative organizational work amongst the literate, but it was not significant.
On January 28, Mubarak, along the grain of this kind of Americanism, hastily cut Internet and cellphone service. It had little impact on the protests. As Navid Hassanpour shows in a paper presented to the American Political Science Association meeting in 2011, “The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th exacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways. It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much harder to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.” In fact, the closing down of Facebook provided new opportunities to reach new constituencies and to broaden the movement. It would be a surprise to the workers of Suez or the cadre of the Muslim Brotherhood or even the students of Cairo’s universities that they were unwitting pawns of someone else’s dreams. This was an Egyptian Revolution. It did not seek permission from elsewhere.
The Arab revolt that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and onwards seemed on the surface like a “1968” for the Arab World. Sixty percent of the Arab population is under the age of thirty (seventy percent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small percentage of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world: Tunisia’s literacy rate is seventy-five percent, Egypt’s just over seventy percent and Libya’s at ninety percent. The educated lower middle class and middle class youth have not been able to find decent jobs. The concatenation of humiliations disgust these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being second class citizens on the world stage (the suppression of the Palestinians and the crushing of Iraq are indices of the Arab gloom; it was the solidarity committees for the second intifada of the Palestinians and of the anti-war rally of March 20, 2003 that formed Kefaya and the March 20 Movement): all this was overwhelming. The chants on the streets of Tunisia and Egypt were about this combination of dignity, justice and jobs.
III. God
The Muslim Brotherhood came onto the Cairene streets. It set its own ideology to mute. Its spokesperson, Gamal Nasser, said that they are only a small part of the protests in Tahrir Square. This is a protest about Egypt, he said, not Islam. Much the same kind of statement came from the mullahs in Iran during the massive protests of 1978–79, the precursor of the creation of the Islamic Republic. Organized into a panoply of organizations, the Egyptian people filled their squares and refused to leave. When the camel-riding thugs of the Mubarak regime entered the square on February 2, the organized and disciplined Brotherhood gathered in formation to defend the square. As Dyab Abou Jahjah pointed out on his blog on that day, “Today the revolution needs structured organizations to form a fighting machine, and the Brotherhood has experience, resources, and the will to play that role. And they are doing it for the movement without claiming it.” That evening the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi spoke to al-Jazeera from his Qatar exile, “The Egyptians know that their peaceful democratic revolution, their remarkably responsible and intelligent mass movement, is being crushed by America and Israel as much as by Mubarak’s dictatorship. I will make a prediction: if this revolution fails, America will face an unprecedented wave of Arab anger, and Egypt will be plagued by violence from now on. The Muslim Brothers who have escaped from prison, for instance, know that their fate in the coming weeks is to be rearrested and tortured to death. They will fight.”
Much the same sort of attitude was struck in Tunisia. The no. 2 in the Islamist Nahda Party, Abdelfattah Mourou told al-Jazeera on March 10 that his party was out on Avenue Habib Bourguiba for the sake of all of Tunisia. He used the term sha’b, the people, not Islam or Muslims. “When asked about Nahda’s position toward partisan politics, often considered to contradict Islamists’ ideal of unity,” Nadia Marzouki points out at the Middle East Report, “Mourou insisted on ‘the right of the people to its self’ (haqq al-sha’b li-nafsihi).” “The people may have different feelings,” Mourou conceded, “but the only parties that will win will be those chosen by the people.” The deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy is underlined.
We tend to exaggerate the authority of the clerics, or at least to treat it as natural, as eternal. Al-Qaradawi came to Tahrir Square in late February, once Mubarak went to the seaside at Sharm al-Sheikh for his enforced retirement (and where he would later be brought before a court, in his gurney). Rather than offer himself as an Islamic leader alone, he first asked for blessings from the youth (a reversal itself) and then greeted the Christians and others, saying, “In this Square, sectarianism died.” These were brave words, but also frayed at the edges since some sectarian attacks had already begun and others would follow (it had become commonplace to blame these on remnants of the Mubarak regime, eager to sow suspicion and fear). “The revolution isn’t over. It has just started to build Egypt,” announced the cleric, “guard your revolution.” Raymond Baker and Karen Aboul Kheir were right to point out at ZNET that al-Qaradawi’s son is a supporter of the liberal political figure Mohamed ElBaradei, and his granddaughter had joined the brigades busy with the cleaning of the square. They had secular affiliations.
Since the 1970s, clericalism in the Arab World and in Iran has had the upper hand in oppositional struggles. This has everything to do with the calcification of the secular regimes of the national liberation era (the new states formed out of the export of Nasserism: from Egypt to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and into Libya by 1969), the deterioration of the Third World Project (especially the fractures in the oil cartel OPEC that opened up in the summer of 1990 and fed into the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait), and the promotion and funding of the advance guard of Islamism through the World Muslim League by the Saudis from Chechnya to Pakistan and Indonesia, with its greatest impact through small Salafist bands across North Africa and the Middle East.
If you go back and look at the period when Nasserism and the Third World Project were dominant, what you will find are the clerical intellectuals in the midst of ideological battles against radical nationalism and Marxism, all the while borrowing from Bolshevik techniques of party building to amass their own organizational strength. For example, in Iraq, it was the Communist Party that dominated the working-class regions of Baghdad. Unable to fully confront this political force, the clerics of working-class Shi’ism, such as the al-Sadr family, had to evoke a politics through and against the Communists. Baqir al-Sadr’s intellectual work took on Marxism (his Iqtisaduna was a critique of Capital, vol. 1) and his organizational work (through the al-Da’wah al-Islamiyah) was modeled on the Iraqi Communist Party. Clericalism, on the back-foot, had to engage with the dominant tendency, which was radical nationalism and Marxism. If you go farther East you would run into Haji Misbach, an Indonesian cleric, also known as Red Haji, who confronted the dynamic Indonesian Communist Party with his own brand of Islamic Communism