Political Humor in Egyptian Popular Music
Continuing to think about the role of humor in Egypt’s ongoing revolution, I’m intrigued by some of the funnier mahragan (“festival”) music that directly mocks or comments on politics. A great example is “Morsico Systems” by Ahmed Samih.
I learned of this piece from Ted Swedenburg, who writes:
[M]ahragan artists are also more than willing to aim their barbs at figures of authority, including Egypt’s post-revolution, popularly elected president, Muhammed Mursi. “Morsico Systems” from mahragan artist Ahmad Samih sets a presidential speech to a sha‘bi beat, and splices Mursi’s sonorous message together with autotuned, impertinent commentary. To Mursi’s claim that “there is support for that,” meaning for his regime’s “organization,” the singer replies, “There is an elephant.” The recording goes on to repeat and counterpose the words of Mursi and the singer, “support” and “elephant,” several times, reducing the president’s intonations to nonsense.
Bibliography of the Egyptian Revolution Updated
The Bibliography resource has been updated. The bibliography now includes over 325 references.
Updates include writing from the International Review of Information Ethics, Middle East Report, and many others
Understanding the Music of Revolt
Although Western journalists love to remake the Arab world in a Euro-American image, in Cairo, the rising music of the underclass is mahragan (“festival”) music, not rap, writes Ted Swedenburg.
Egypt’s popular music remains filled with calls for both national unity and social justice, writes Ted Swedenburg in an article titled “Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha” in a recent edition of Middle East Report, but its role in the revolution is not quite the way Western media has tended to portray it. The article is available free on-line.
- By privileging hip-hop and rap to the virtual exclusion of every other kind of nationalist and protest music sung by musicians and crowds during the 18 days of the original Tahrir Square occupation, as though Arab youth, through the use of imported “Western” musical traditions, is overthrowing an older, passé generation’s traditional and puritanical culture, in order to usher in a more tolerant, modern and US-friendly order.
- In describing protest music as the “soundtrack” of the uprisings–a favorite media metaphor–the media frames the role of music in the uprisings “as if the tunes were a playlist on protesters’ iPods while they battled security forces or a live broadcast over a sound system behind the barricades” rather than “something integrally tied to and embedded within the social movement.”
Swedenburg writes:
Musicians on the square for the most part performed a repertoire that the crowds could sing along with, a body of songs that connected the artists and their audience to a history of struggle. Or they composed ditties on the spot, in the heat of events. The purpose of musical performance at Tahrir was to move the crowds (and the musicians themselves) into a sentimental or affective state, such as anger, mourning, nostalgia or patience, or to unify the crowds in a state that Durkheim has called “collective effervescence.” A song’s meanings therefore were not just already inherent in the lyrics and melody or in the associated memories and resonances, but they also forged in performance, at charged political moments.
Take, for example, the band El Tanbura, a collective of musicians from the city of Port Said on the Suez Canal reviving a local genre of music known as suhbagiyya, which was evolved from songs invented by laborers digging the Suez canal, and is especially known for the presence of an instrument called a simsimiyya (lyre). Swedenburg writes that El Tanbura was on Tahrir Square every day of the January-February 2011 occupation, performing “Patriotic Port Said” and other nationalist songs multiple times from the various stages.
The song initially refers to the 1956 war over the Suez, when Israel, France and Great Britain attacked Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal. The residents of Port Said who battled against the invaders were hailed as champions of Egypt’s anti-imperialist struggle. The song was revived in the wake of the June 1967 war, when Port Said’s residents were evacuated and settled in refugee camps until Egypt regained the Eastern side of the Canal after the 1973 war.
Whatever Happened to Egypt’s “Popular Committees”?
During the uprisings, citizens took it on themselves to manage the essential affairs once the responsibility of the state. Photo Credit: Daveness_98 via Compfight cc
Remember the popular committees? Those ad-hoc groups of citizens that started as neighborhood watch teams and maintained security and organized neighborhood life when the state stopped services?
In “Egypt’s Popular Committees: From Moments of Madness to NGO Dilemmas,” Asya El-Mahy describes how some of them have evolved into social service providers with complex ties to the state.
According to El-Mahy:
Some of the popular committees disbanded after Mubarak fell and police slowly reappeared. The end of Mubarak’s rule ushered in tighter state controls over civil society organizations, as well as a near monopoly for Islamist parties over formal political institutions. Nonetheless, many popular committees remained independent and active, holding their first national conference in April 2011.
In popular discourse,
The Struggle For the Walls of Cairo
Mural of the martyr Jika in downtown Cairo. Photo: Jessica Winegar.
“Whoever has something to say in Egypt these days can write it on a wall,” begins a recent photo-essay by Samuli Schielke and Jessica Winegar.
Titled “The Writing on the Walls of Egypt,” it appears in a recent issue of Middle East Report and is available on-line as a public access article.
After emphasizing that wall-writing as a form of art and political expression predates the current revolution, the authors focus on post-Mubarak efforts to control what appears on the walls of Cairo.
While generals, presidents, judges and other powerful leaders jockey for control, street art reminds us that street politics continues to have relevance, and that the art and poetry of slogans, graffiti and murals gives concrete form to “anti-hegemony” sentiments (Shokr 2012) but also to the sentiments of those supporting the SCAF, or the government of President Morsi.
Indeed, street art not only expresses differences of political opinion, it can itself be a battleground:
Anti-Hegemony in Contemporary Egypt
“Anti-hegemony” is the sense that there is no leadership that is not corrupt and no legitimate institutions a that do not mask the special interests of elites. Photo Credit: Jonathan Rashad via Compfight cc
The Muslim Brotherhood coalition that currently rules Egypt offers an example of a “political groups that seize power on a wave of mass mobilization, only to revert to a politics of pragmatism under the mantle of revolutionary ideals” writes Ahmed Shokr.He’s writing in an article entitled “Reflections on Two Revolutions” published in a special issue of Middle East Report and available for free on-line.
In their effort to maintain a facade of idealism while pursuing a pragmatic course of action, Shokr writes, the MB is not unlike the Free Officers who seized power after the revolution of 1952.
How the emergent order in Egypt will eventually look, and how much of the past it will retain or abandon, are matters that remain to be worked out. Since coming to power, the Muslim Brothers have engaged in a delicate balancing act: maintaining enough continuity to win international acceptance and protect their ruling coalition, while projecting enough change to give credence to their promise of a new Egypt. The result is an emerging leadership of reluctant revolutionaries: They tread carefully, keeping stability a top priority and steering clear of dramatic policy changes, while boasting of being Egypt’s first democratically elected rulers.
But there are also important differences.
The Egyptian Uprising Two Years On: Open Access Articles
A special issue of MERIP on the Egyptian revolution includes four open-access articles
As the dramatic social changes in Egypt continue, every anniversary there is a call for reflections on how Egypt got to where it is, and where it is going. Last year, for example, I took part in a workshop at Oxford University entitled “The Egyptian Revolution: One Year On.” Now the winter 2012 issue of Middle East Report offers reflections on “Egypt: The Uprising Two Years On.”
Many of the articles are available through free on-line access. These include:
Reflections on Two Revolutions by Ahmad Shokr,
The Writing on the Walls of Egypt by Samuli Schielke and Jessica Winegar,
Egypt’s Popular Committees: From Moments of Madness to NGO Dilemmas by Asya El-Meehy, and
Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha by Ted Swedenburg.
There are also a number of articles you must buy the issue to get. These include:
