A Middle Eastern Studies Assistant Professor accredited the momentum of the Egyptian Revolution to the works of Facebook, Twitter and Google on Tuesday night at a public panel presented by the University of Texas Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Around 100 curious crowd members attended the public panel and discussion, called “People Power in Egypt: Early Thoughts on the Egyptian Revolution” in the Texas Union on Tuesday. Jason Brownlee, an Associate Professor in the Department of Government, Yoav Di-Capua, Associate Professor in the Department of History, and Tarek El-Ariss, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, presented their thoughts to the onlookers and answered questions for two hours.
El-Ariss, the third speaker to take the stage, believes we need to be thinking about new forms of activism after witnessing mass mobilization and political activism through forms of media that have previously been used for social purposes.
“I think it’s fair to say that Facebook has never gotten more publicity than from Egypt,” El-Ariss said. “I think that Facebook and Twitter and Google have become reluctant heroes of this revolution.”
El-Ariss also credited the Internet, social media, and television with what he called the new “culture of transparency”, or a culture of exposing corruption and injustice in order to hold those in power accountable. And with a government that relies on secret arrests, El-Arris said, this new technologically advanced environment caused the entire system to crash. One critical example was Wael Abbas, who tweeted his arrest as he was being transported to jail, only to find hundreds of protestors already waiting for him outside the police station.
“We have new technology of videos on cell phones able to capture violations and put them online and circulate them at such an intense rate that it made Satellite television really kind of an old technology almost overnight,” he said.
Brownlee, meanwhile, expressed the amazement felt all over the world when a collective movement tipped the balance of repression from the largest, most suppressive Arab Democracy in the Middle East. However, the Egyptians had been suffering under an autocratic government for decades, Brownlee said, so why now? Why 2011?
A perfect combination of economic deprivation, growing repression and violence against the public, contempt of leadership, and drastic forms of protest combined together to create a movement void of previous attitudes of apathy seen from both sides of the Atlantic, he said. There were also four crucial figures to the revolution: Mohammad Al Burda, whose efforts energized youth to get involved in Egyptian politics, Khaled Saeed, whose battered and bloody body circulated the Internet after he was beaten by police for refusing to pay them a bribe, Asma Mahfouz, whose video urging Egyptians to call for accountability of the police caused thousands to surge into a protest on Jan. 25, and Mohamed Bouazizi, who protested the repressive regime in Tunisia by pouring gasoline over his head and lighting himself on fire before a government building.
Fadi Hamdi, a UT alumnus as of last year, questioned the panelists on the role of the United States in supporting the autocratic regimes. El-Arris said it was disturbing to learn that the U.S. has been supporting repressive forces, such as Omar Suleiman, the Vice President of Egypt, who has been accused of overseeing the systematic use of torture in Egypt.
“I felt [none of the other panels] mentioned the role the United States played in supporting these territories and looking over all the atrocities they have committed,” Hamdi said after the panel, “just because they were willing to have the relationship with Israel that the United States wanted to have, even thought it was against the willing of their own people.”
Lauren Williams, an Arabic Middle Eastern Studies and Linguistics major, spent the last summer in Egypt with the Flagship program, and has been following the news throughout the revolution.
“I had a lot of friends there, and now that they’re having to rebuild their society, I think it’s fascinating, so I’m trying to get as much information as I can from experts,” she said.
Katherine Nora, also a UT undergrad, was interested in the revolution but hadn’t been following the news, attended the event in order to get a better understanding of the situation.
“I came in with a blank slate, just knowing generally what was going on, but without very many details,” she said.
The panelists discussed whether Egypt could shine as an example of democracy achieved through non-violent organizing and resistance, and wondered what will happen next in terms of the military’s power and the issue of succession.
“The army is not going to simply disappear, return to the barracks, and hand the structure to the political parties,” said Di-Capua, from the Department of History.
“It’s an open question about whether the military will be ready to really relinquish the substantial holdings they have in the economy or instead just seek new partners, post Mubarak, post Egypt,” El-Arris said.
