MOUNA SAMET

MAA / 00481

THURSDAY 23/06, 17:00 – 19:00

PANEL 47: ART DISSENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN PUBLIC
SPACE AFTER THE UPRISINGS

SHEREEN ABOU EL NAGA, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITTERATURE AT THE

Professor Abou El Naga started her speech saying that her panel is probably the most boring one compared
to those of her other colleagues. She won’t be talking about interisting things like art or music but about
teaching and writing which are “very boring victorian professions”.

Social Media and Internet have given us valuable access to the life in Egypt and to the daily struggles of the
Egyptian people. Actually, we are somehow very well informed about what’s going.

Going back between 2011 and 2014, right after the fall of the Hosni Mubarak’s regime, there were two
entities that successfully hijacked the revolution / uprising, two entities struggling to reach power, two
entities trying to rule just for rule’s sake: we are talking about Nationalism and Islamism in all its forms
especially the Muslim Brotherhood.

Actually both powers belong to the right wing and they have the same, if not similar / identical views about
culture, women and subjectivity, subjectivity being a form of promiscuity.

Both powers wanted to control the public sphere and shared the same techniques of cracking down on
human rights and freedoms. People are facing an increased repression of their rights: public spaces are
being controlled and/or closed, public meetings are banned and freedom of speech is becoming extremely
limited. In other words, any attempt to dissent or to deviate from the state mindset is agressively fought
and criminalised.

Just for information, in 2019, right before the pandemic, all the public and private media outlets were
state-controlled and Internet was already under strict surveillance.

The word activism became almost a charge, an accusation or even so a conviction since it implies treachury
and refusal to conform. So it’s enough to say someome is an “activist” to get him / her arrested.

A well known case is that of Alaa Abdel Fattah, a blogger and indeed a leading pro democracy political
“activist” who was arrested several times since 2011 and is actually serving a five-year sentence after he
was falsely convicted in 2019 of “spreading fake news undermining national security”, such a serious
charge.

It’s important to understand what’s happening politically and socially. However it’s also essential to read or
rather to try to decipher the coping and survival mecanisms from the bottom, from the base of the society
as Asef Bayat, an iranian-american scholar, said in his “Life as Politics”, published in 2010.

Prior to 2011, popular imagination, in the West, perceived the Muslim Middle East as unchanging or rather
unchangeable, frozen in its own traditions and history. In “Life as Politics”, Bayat argues that such
presumptions fail to recognize the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful
change through their everyday actions.
In 2021, Bayat issued another book called “Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring” were he
said that both the revolution and the daily practises complement each other and introduced a new
concept: “Refolution”, which means a revolution that engenders reform rather than radical change.

Bayat had the opportunity to visit Egypt in 2015 and to meet with different activists from different
backgrounds and he realised that any social engagement would indeed demand a creative fusion of the old
and the new ways of doing politics.

During his visit, he said:” “These are uncharted political moments loaded with indefinite possibilities, in
which meaningful social engagement would demand a creative fusion of the old and new ways of doing
politics.”

Fast forward to 2022, this is actually what activists are doing , mixing old and new ways of doing politics.

Now-a-days, public sphere is co-opted, and culture, cultural practises and cultural productions who have
always been the last resort / the best means for activists to express themselves, are not anymore a safe
haven as they once were. They are now state controlled too.

For example, in 2019, Khalid Lotfy, founder of Cairo’s Tanmia Bookshop and Publishing, was sentenced to
five years in prison on charges of divulging military secrets and spreading false rumours / fake news, for
having simple distributed an Arabic translation of a book “The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel”,
by Israeli writer Uri Bar-Joseph.

If public spaces and cultural productions are coopted, then, activists must revisit their strategies, renavigate
their options and calculate their actions. They have to reshape their opinions and calculate their actions.
The only option that seems to be left is through creative fusion of the old and the new ways of doing
politics.

The first step was to delink from any space of surveillance: street art, graffiti, theatre, film making, and
book clubs.

The second step was to re-inhabit the old traditional spaces not to simply revive the past but rather to
invest in the old forms through infiltrating new content and vision.

Talking about opression and resistance are so overrated now-a-days. However, one must not
underestimate the power of the fear.

Fear, a concept discussed by Lina Abdallah on the first day of the SESAMO Conference (Round Table: On-
the-Ground Reporting: Independent Journalism in the Middle East and North Africa), is very important.

It’s fear that helps you push the boundries. It’s fear that helps you survive and overcome your struggles.
But one must be very intelligent and sometimes even cunning to manoeuvre this fear as well as the regime.

And that’s where teaching and writing come. Both feminin victorian professions, that, to survive had to
evolve, to change their nature and adapt to new Locales, as Edward Said said in his “Travelling Theory”,
published in 1983.

At least for now they both are safe hubs for activists in Egypt and elsewhere.

It’s important indeed to note the emergence, the rise of teaching gender and fiction writing as means of
knowledge, dissemination and production.

So not only are we revolutionizing what used to be docile and contained, but we are also politicizing it too.

Writing and teaching are now marks of dissent.

It’s important here to look closely into 2 examples:

 The first one is Ganoubia Horra / A Southern Free Woman for Developpment, an NGO founded by a
group of Aswani women, in the middle of 2012. It started as a gender school in Aswan, in the far
south of Egypt, near Luxor, a very touristic place, yet ironically, completly ignored by the
government in sense of development. Aswan is very conservative and tribal as well.
This group of young women, aware of how masculinity and patriarchy controlled the public sphere,
were trying to seek gender equality and fight sexual harrassment and all forms of discrimination
and violence against women and kids.
They found the strengh, the grit and the will to challenge taken for granted concepts, authorities
and life courses.
They have very progressive projects and no subject is considered taboo. They talk about everything,
even about homosexuality and being queer in the South of Egypt.
There are lots of other groups similar to Ganoubia Horra like Markaz Onsa “Female Center” and
Harakat Bin al-Nil “The Daughter of the Nile Movement” in al-Beheira, Dorik “Your Role” in Qena
and Radio Banat Ouf Layn “Girls Offline Radio” in Ismaelia.

https://ganoubia-hora.com/

 The second example is fiction writing. It’s about Rasha Azab’s Qalb Maleh. Sasha is a writer and a
jouralist who collaborates with MADA MASR, the blog that Lina Abdallah is heading.
Rasha is also an activist who has been part of the 2011 Revolution / Uprising. She has very
progressive and liberal views and as a result has been arrested several times. She’s still having a lot
of problems as she is on trial for her outspoken support for survivors of sexual violence.
She is on trial on charges of “insult,” defamation” and “deliberately disturbing [the plaintiff]”, in
relation to Tweets in which she expressed solidarity with survivors of sexual violence who
published anonymous testimonies accusing film director Islam Azazi of committing sexual assaults
and used curse words to express her dismay at the impunity he enjoys.
Rasha published her first novel called Qalb MalIh / Heart of Salt about the revolution from the
bottom, or better yet she’s talking about the lives of the people that made the January 25th
revolution, not the revolution itself, producing a counter-narrative, different to that of the State.
In other words, the novel “Heart of Salt” follows its unique characters, and reveals to us what
happened to them after they participated in the exceptional uprising of January 25th, following
them in their lives in Cairo, Alexandria, Italy and other countries, after that historical moment.”

https://diwanegypt.com/product/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8-%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD/