An Egyptian American’s Viral Video
One of the interesting stories of the globalization of the Egyptian uprising is Tamer Shaaban’s viral video.
Tamer Shaaban is an American college student of Egyptian origin, with family living in Egypt. When the uprisings occurred, his imagination was captured by the images he was seeing. He cobbled together those he saw as most powerful, and posted the result. It went viral, rapidly accumulating over one million hits, being blogged about and Tweeted. It was clearly one of the crucial pieces of media that helped frame the uprisings as positive, as a people-led democratic movement, rather than the chaotic riots presupposed in many other versions (that of Glenn Beck, for example).
Shaaban went on to make a handful of other, similar videos encouraging a positive, democratic interpretive frame for understanding the rebellion against Hosni Mubarak.
Here’s the original video
This video offers an early example of what came to be the prorevolution interpretive framework widely circulated throughout the world. Note how the images emphasize:
- The power differential between unarmed civilians (sometimes throwing rocks) and the machine-based power of the state (body armor, tear gas, riot trucks with fire hoses, etc.)
- Young people demanding their rights
- Older people fighting for a better future for their children
- Participation of women
- Muslims and Copts protesting together
- The large numbers of marchers and protesters
- The exuberance of the protesters
- The suffering of the protesters at the hands of agents of the state
And, of course, it ends with a quotation from John F. Kennedy.
Hhere’s an interview on US national television with Tamer Shaaban about his YouTube videos:
And here he is on another, local show:
Egypt Guest of Honor at Cannes
For the first time in its history, the Cannes Film Festival 11-22 May offered a tribute to a guest country–Egypt.
Egypt is both the film capitol of the Arab world and undergoing dramatic, revolutionary, people-led political reforms, and the combination was apparently irresistible to the directors of the festival.
There was a film festival, a party, and on May 18, the screening of a new film, Tamantasher Yom (18 Days), in which ten directors offer ten short films inspired by the events of Jan. 25-Feb. 11.
Doha Film Institute has a video of the Canne tribute here.
And there’s a descriptive review of the film “18 Days” in Variety, and an AFP review here.
And here’s the new film’s trailer:
Tahrir Redux?
Al Masry Al Youm photo by Tahseen Bakr.
Many of the original leaders of the youth movement that planned the Jan. 25th uprising remain unhappy with the new regime. Its call for May 27th protests in Tahrir are a significant piece of political communication, seeking to demonstrate that the protest movement still has significant political muscle.
The tens of thousands who gathered should certainly serve as a significant message. But it is likely to stop short of persuading the military to revise its actions on constitutional reform or replace itself with a civilian council. Indeed, although promoted by some of the protest movement leaders, its not clear these ideas have much traction even with all the varied branches of the protest movement.
A week ago a “National Dialogue Conference” that was supposed to bring together the revolutionaries, on the one hand, and the supreme council of the armed forces and the government of Doctor Issam Sharaf on the other, failed to do so. In part, it was because many of the main concerns of the revolutionary movement–constitutional reform, elections, and rules governing the forming of political parties and public protest–have already been decided, mostly in an arbitrary manner, by the two governing institutions.
“[W]hat could we be talking about after the important laws have already been ratified [without any dialogue]?” asked Khalid al-Sayyed, a spokesman for the Coalition of the Revolution Youth in an interview with Al-Hayat. “These conferences are being used to improve the image of the current government and the ruling military council after they have both failed to manage the situation during the transitory period.”
And so we have today’s protests, the Day to Revive the Revolution called for by (among others) the April 6 Youth Movement, the Youth of the Revolution Coalition, the Kafeya Movement for Change, the Baradei campaign, the National Association for Change, the Democratic Front Party, the Free Egyptians Party, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party. Tens of thousands turned out, Copts and Muslims took turns praying, an attempt at violence against the protesters by unknown assailants in cars was repelled, and the military pointedly stayed away.
Although an earlier statement (May 16) agreed with many of the complaints uttered by the youth movement spokesman, the Muslim Brotherhood announced on its web site May 25 that it would not participate officially in the demonstrations because “the revolution of the Egyptian people is proceeding despite all the obstacles placed by the counterrevolutionaries to block the change.”
The statement said that the Brotherhood “recognizes the delay affecting the accomplishment of many important and vital issues and that the performance of the military council and the transitional government are not as perfect as it is wished by the people” but prefers to seek solutions “through assistance and correction, and not through confrontations, accusations of treason or attempts to lead to clashes between the people and their national army which supported the success of their revolution.”
Many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s young leadership cadres outspokenly disagreed with the official stance, but it’s not clear how many took to the streets today. But several well known sheikhs and other public figures were present.
Outgoing ambassador Margaret Scobey speaks with the Egyptian media May 21. Photo by Ahram Online.
The US thinks Egypt should avoid a return to the nationalism, as some labor movements and intellectuals are advocating.
That’s the (not very surprising) position of the Obama administration as articulated by outgoing US Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey as reported in an Ahram Online story by Salma el-Wardani.
“A return to nationalization will be a huge disincentive to investment,” the United States ambassador to Egypt said in a media roundtable held at the US embassy on Saturday. “I think Egypt has to make its choice and find an economic policy that would solve its prompt problems; to create jobs and social justice.” .
and
“Yet I think the public sector cannot [solve its problems],” she said. “History proves privatization has been very healthy, helpful and successful in helping many countries transform to democracy. … People want decent jobs… social justice, and I think it’s unlikely that public sector having the upper hand can be a way forward,” she said. “On the contrary, the free market and the private sector provide people with innovative ways to work.”
The classic model for thinking about the Egyptian political economy involves an (incomplete) transition from a Soviet style system of state-owned manufacturing to a liberal economy that brought in foreign investment and global consumer goods. That’s true as far as it goes.
But it doesn’t go all that far.
The Nasserist system bankrupted the country, saddling it with huge debts, a labyrinthine bureaucracy, corruption and autocracy.
But it also built schools, roads, parks, and the Aswan dam , created jobs (especially for the new educated middle classes) and seized control of the country’s lucrative Suez Canal from the British. Rent controls and food subsidies on bread, beans and cooking oil meant that most families could afford someplace to live and even the poorest family could always afford to eat.
When middle and working class Egyptians look around for the benefits of economic liberalization, they don’t see much.
Cairo’s urban spaces have been dramatically transformed by skyscrapers, shopping malls, planned cities and gated communities, but these benefit mostly people in the top six percent of the nation’s wealth distribution. Schools and public hospitals are crumbling, costs of living are rising far faster than wages, and job creation does not keep pace with population growth, or even with university graduation rates.
Nor did liberalization reduce bureaucracy and corruption, especially at the highest levels.
Scobey is absolutely right about one thing, though: Egypt needs to deal with immediate economic problems and social justice. Any elected administration that fails to produce some sort of tangible change affecting millions of families–a national minimum wage, for example–is almost certainly not going to get re-elected.
And the Untied States–borrowing money to pay for foreign wars while slashing money for education, infrastructure-building,and regulation, and seeking to delimit collective bargaining–is not a country Egypt will want to turn to for models of how to go forward.
An Egyptian colleague yesterday posted to Facebook a story from Al-Jazeera about the continuing arrest of protesters by the military in Egypt.
What’s happening? one of her friends outside Egypt commented.
Ambiguities everywhere… my colleague responded.
“Ambiguities Everywhere” could be an alternative title for the recent set of articles “The new Egypt: 100 days on” in the Guardian which offers a snapshot of post-Mubarak Egypt. The theme is best stated by activist Noor Ayman Nour, who says
People call us the chained dog – a dog tied up for many, many years whose only desire is to break free of the chain, but when he does he just runs round and round and doesn’t know what to do.
May 19th marked 100 days since Mubarak was ousted as Egypt’s authoritarian leader through popular revolt. Since then, a military junta has sought to maintain order with limited resources and less experience and no oversight; the economy has struggled with the virtual collapse of the stock market and the tourist trade; the constitution was amended to strip future presidents of many of the autocratic powers that made Mubarak a dictator but fell short of reinventing the Egyptian governmental system; labor and minority groups continue to demand rights and reforms, trying to maintain a public presence while the country lurches haltingly toward planned free and fair elections in September.
The series in the Guardian offers fourteen stories that capture the ambiguities everywhere as Egypt seeks to cope with the aftermath of its uprising, and as revolution and counterrevolution struggle within a political and economic structure that lacks predictability.
The first story, and the only one published 18 May, is Egypt in flux: sober realities and optimism 100 days after Mubarak’s fall, by Middle East correspondent Ian Black, which uses brief quotations from interviews with four Egyptians–an engineer, an entrepreneur, a columnist and an office worker–to explore some of the struggles to find a new political direction for the country in the wake of the Tahrir Square uprisings. Longer visions of these interviews are offered in a video.
Ian Black also penned The two swift changes in foreign policy that signal a new Egypt, which explores the steps the new government has taken to improve relations with Iran and change its approach to Palestine.
Efforts to remove Mubarak’s name from public institutions and civic works is the topic of Egyptians expunge Mubarak’s legacy, one metro map at a time by Jack Shenker. He argues that much of the power of Egypt’s former president was symbolic and psychological, and changing this may take more time and effort than did forcing his resignation.
Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef describes the exent to which Torture and imprisonment of Egypt protesters still rife.
Best-selling author Alaa al-Aswany echoes the voices of many intellectuals when Egyptian novelist hails revolution as a ‘great human achievement’ but discusses his fears of a counterrevolution that uses peoples fears of disorder and ambiguity to try to shift the country back toward authoritarianism and anarchy.
For many, the protests in Tahrir Square were about a technologically savvy middle class youth movement supporting the struggles of Egypt’s working class. Journalist, activist and blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy presents this view in Now overthrow the workplace Mubaraks, urges labour activist.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood poised to prosper in post-Mubarak new era describes some of the changes freedom has brought to this Islamist movement, which was banned under Mubarak’s regime but will compete in the forthcoming parliamentary and presidential elections. But more radical groups are also gaining political ground in Egypt’s newfound freedom.
In the face of Egypt’s current ambiguity and disorder, we hear again and again people insisting on the need for “strong leaders.” The essay ‘In Egypt we need strong leadership. At the moment that’s the generals’ by Dr. Dina Omar, who returned to Egypt from Lebanon to treat the wounded in Tahrir Square during the anti-Mubarak uprising assert the essential paradox that progress toward democracy requires order, but order requires strong leaders. It is, of course, only a step from this position to a wholly predictable nostalgia for the good old days of Hosni Mubarak. This position is presented in Facebook protester: ‘A lot of people love Mubarak and want to defend him’ by 19-year old Alaa Abdul Nabi [he is said to be one of the administrators of Ana Asif ya Rais (“I’m sorry, Mr President’), a Facebook page that co-ordinates pro-Mubarak protests.
I’ve already blogged elsewhere about Jack Shenker’s Egypt’s man from the past who insists he has a future portraying Zahi Hawass, appointed by Hosni Mubarak to oversee Egypt’s cultural riches, as the great survivor of the revolution
Al-Jazeera’s Egyptian correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, named by Time magazine one of the most influential people of 2011 writes Egyptian uprising’s reporter: ‘Two Egypts have emerged’ in which he argues that there are two Egypts now:
One is revolutionary Egypt, driven by ideals and demanding reform and institutional change. And then there is the other Egypt, in which the military tries to maintain law and order. In certain areas, those two Egypts conflict; in other areas, they converge. Right now, they are torn apart and heading in very different directions.
Egyptian political activist Noor Ayman Nour recognizes that one of the primary motivations for the uprisings was people fed up with corruption
Not corruption in the sense of embezzling money, but rather the corruption of our political, social and cultural values that has sadly been instilled in all of us over the past half century.
In ‘Corruption will be difficult to end’ she articulates her doubts and worries, but remains optimistic.
Finally, in Egypt’s uprising brings DIY spirit out on to the streets, Jack Shenker explores some of the continuing explosion of creative energy in the alternative arts in the hundred days since Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
Zahi Hawass as Egypt’s Ultimate Political Survivor
There’s a nice piece by Jack Shenker in the Guardian 19 May that supplements my post on Zahi Hawass.
100 days into the new Egypt, Hawass is portrayed as the ultimate survivor, a guy who can move from a Mubarak cabinet to a post-Mubarak cabinet, overcome a pro-Mubarak speech, ignore the accusations of corruption and arbitrariness that still cling to him, and avoid the consequences of a court judgment against him.
One of a handful of globally recognizable Egyptians, Hawass told Egyptians last February that the country needed Mubarak to avoid chaos. Now he has a different take on the uprising:
“This is one of the most significant episodes in Egypt’s history,” says Hawass, who resigned his cabinet position three weeks after Mubarak’s downfall, only to be reappointed a month later. “For the past 5,000 years we have been ruled by pharaohs, and on January 25 [the day the revolution erupted] we finally broke that chain.”
Members of the archaeological community, who have always resented Hawass’s high-handed ways, have been surprised by his successful adaptability:
“A few months ago I would never have thought he could survive this wave of scandals, his connections with the previous regime, all the claims of corruption that have dogged him for the past nine years,” said an Egyptian archaeologist who preferred to remain anonymous.
“And yet the interim government has reinstated him and the whole Egyptology community was shocked. Zahi thinks there is no one else who can do his job. Our former president said exactly the same thing. It’s the sort of claim we’ve come to expect from a mini-Mubarak like Hawass.”
Hawass himself is as self-confident as ever:
From Hawass’s perspective his position is unshakeable. “Things change, but I am the only one who understands this country’s history, who can truly see the past,” he sighs.
Shenker’s key point is the last paragraph, which strikes to the heart of why Hawass is important as a symbol of the old political elite trying to remake itself in contemporary Egypt:
“We have always needed a strongman; without one you have chaos. Look at what’s happening at the moment. Times are troubled but I’m optimistic that the unpleasantness will end and success is around the corner.” Whether he is referring to Egypt or himself is not clear.
Further Satire in Egypt’s Public Sphere: El Koshary Today is Egypt’s Answer to The Onion
I first encountered El Koshary Today when an Egyptian friend posted to Facebook a story about a new ‘ahwa only for women. I write a great deal about gendering in coffeehouses–traditional and modern (but equally contemporary)–in Connected in Cairo, so I was pretty excited until I scrolled down the comments and saw one that said, “I’m so sorry, but Shakshouka is fictional, … and the Koshery Today newspaper for that matter.”
The name itself is a clue that this is parody. Koshary is the tastiest of Egypt’s indigenous fast foods, an unlikely mix of lentils, chickpeas, rice, and pasta topped with a spiced tomato sauce and fried onions, and accompanied by two kinds of hot sauces. As odd a name for a newspaper as, say, The Onion.
El Koshary parodies many of the excesses of the uprisings with such headlines as “El Baradei Reveals He is a Trained Jedi Master“, parodying the claims made by (and for) Muhammed El Baradei as a contender for high Egyptian public office; How to Become a Political Activist, skewering the pretensions of those who came late to the revolution but are among its most vocal supporters; and Egypt’s Elite Declare Independence From Egypt.
The faux newspaper also offers many satires of religious conservatives with stories like Salafis demand Hindus and Buddhists who were Muslims in a previous life to reconvert and Muslim Brotherhood launches online dating site.
And in addition to the story that snagged my friend, there are many stories laughing at the foibles of everyday life in Egypt, including Men who sexually harass women admit to having “small balls”, and Egypt’s gay community “homophobic”.
In case you should miss the point, El Koshary Today offers on its home page brief framing statement, labeled “Seriously Though”:
In case you haven’t noticed, El Koshary Today is not a “real” news site. Our philosophy here is to use sarcasm and imagination to raise awareness of some of the serious (and not so serious) issues plaguing our nation. It is not intended to relay any factual information or credible circumstances, though where possible readers will find news links to the actual issues being satirized herein.
My friend should not be embarrassed, though (and she doesn’t seem to be–she responded “lol!!!!!!!!!”). As Colleen Cotter pointed out recently, the power of parody news depends on how mimetic its structure and style are with mainstream news (2011). Former Onion editor-in-chief Rob Seigel has said that the journalistic form is “the vessel.…It has to look like real journalism to create the comedic tension between what is being said and how it is presented” (Wenner, 2002).
Dominick Boyer and Alexei Yurchak (2010) go further, arguing that part of the power of discourses that “imitate and inhabit the formal features of authoritative discourses” is their very ambiguity, so that ” it [is] often difficult to tell whether it [is] a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two.” The humor of parody news derives from this tension between genuine and spurious .
But why?
News discourses provide contemporary societies with some of the functions played by myths: they offer authoritative accounts in a formalized language that symbolically dramatize breaches of normative social order (Arno 2009). The cultural order encoded in these myths in turn supports the broader social order. News satires expose the mythological function of news by making explicit the social values expressed implicitly in news stories.
This has a significant political dimension. “By employing irony these news satires provide a social critique of people and institutional power” (McCue 2009). These kinds of politically significant parodies of authoritative discourses are particularly likely to emerge when changing ideological conditions and social, economic and political tensions produce situations of “hypernormalization” (Boyer and Yurchak 2010) in which public discourse becomes increasingly polarized around narrow definitions of acceptable social, economic and political action. Under these conditions, print and online news parody can surmount the rhetorical chill that falls over public culture, and serve as a site for developing new meta-discourses (Achter 2008).
But one could easily make the argument that such “hypernormalization” has existed for twenty years or more in Egypt. Part of the reason no one saw the revolution coming is that Egyptian public discourse had settled into a kind of predictable complacency, even though private discourse remained quite critical, and irony abounded. Public parodic discourses were contained by Egypt’s broad but sporadically enforced censorship rules, and by a longstanding speech tradition of according increasing respect to people in increasingly hierarchical positions.
So why Egypt? And why now?
The emergence of news parody, both in El Koshary and Bassem Youssef‘s show is part of Egypt’s experimental moment. They represent a shift of political parody and ironic humor from the private realm of interpersonal intaractivity to the public sphere. They offer a continuation of the anti-structural elements that began in Tahrir Square and offer a carnivalesque experience that exposes and inverts traditional hierarchies.
In general, if sustained, this would appear to be a good thing. Hariman argues that news parody is an important resources for creating and sustaining democratic public culture. “[B]y exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the ‘immense novel’ of the public address system,” parody creates a kind of laughter “which is the shock of delighted dislocation when mediation is revealed” (Hariman 2008).
And Reilly (2011) suggests that as parody news becomes institutionalized it creates the possibility of emerging as part of a Fifth Estate, a watchdog on the news media, who are supposed to be the watchdog on government and corporate intrusions into people’s liberty, but too often become their voices.
In a sense, social media has already emerged to a significant extent as a space for critical metacommentary on the media. But given the traditional structures of Egypt’s media as voices of the regime, the emergence of such a fifth estate could become an important factor in the new Egyptian polity.
Resources
Inskeep, Steve (2012). “And Now For The Lighter Side Of Egypt’s Revolution”. National Public Radio.
Amer, Pakinam (2009). “El Koshary Today: Egypt’s online “fake news” paper”. Egypt Independent.
“El Koshary Today Team “. Midan Masr.
References
Achter, Paul. 2008. Comedy in Unfunny Times: News Parody and Carnival After 9/11. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 25(3):274-303. < http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/15295030802192038 >. (accessed 20 May 2011).
Boyer, Dominick. and Yurchak, Alexei. 2010. American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West. Cultural Anthropology 25: 179–221.
Colleen Cotter. 2011. Diversity awareness and the role of language in cultural representations in news stories. Journal of Pragmatics 43(7): 1890-1899.
Hariman, Robert. 2008. Political Parody and Public Culture. Quarterly Journal of Speech. 94(3):247-272.
McCue, Daniel Brandon. 2009. When news breaks, “The Daily Show” fixes it: Exposing social values through satire. Unpublished M.A. Thesis. University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 95 pages; AAT 1456354.
Reilly, Ian. 2011. Satirical fake news and the politics of the fifth estate Unpublished PhD Dissertation. University of Guelph. 300 pages. NR71829
Wenner, Kathryn. 2002. Peeling the Onion. American Journalism Review http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2618 [accessed May 20, 2011]
Enter the baltigiyya: On Feb. 2, camel drivers apparently paid by members of the regime were directed to attack protesters responsible for the tourist slump that has cut off their income.
After each act of violence one hears that baltagiyya (“hired thugs”) are to blame. Usually they are said to have been hired by “counterrevolutionary elements,” or by the government, or more recently by Salafis, or the Muslim Brotherhood, or by the Copts themselves.
The word derives from baltagy (“an axe wielder”) with a vernacular suffix. It has been used since the Ottoman period in Egypt to refer to members of criminal gangs who can be hired as enforcers, agents provocateur and for other activities in which someone inside the law needs people to act as their agents outside the law.
An extremely intelligent column on the symbolic role the baltagiyya are playing in Egypt by Adel Iskander appeared in Al-Masry Al-Youm 16 May.
Baltagiyya, he points out,
has become what linguists call a “floating signifier,” a word that doesn’t point to any actual or agreed upon meaning. The term itself undermines any other identity since it does not communicate any sociological, political, cultural, economic, ideological, or religious meaning. The only common usage for the term suggests absolute opportunism outside of any basic humanitarian principles, values or ethics. Yet it is precisely this absence of a denotative meaning that makes the term most dangerous.
In the absence of a fixed referential meaning, anyone can simply accuse any opponents of being baltagiyya–including the state:
The new authority in Egypt today and only institution above the law, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF), has appropriated [the term] to critique and sentence anyone it sees fit. Extrajudicial military court sentences have been handed down for blogging, public expressions and calls to demonstrate and strike. Today, the newly-activated “Law of Baltaga” can be used in a manner akin to the Emergency Law and the Penal code against anyone who might be perceived as a threat to the security of the state even in the cases of so-called “online baltaga!”
This is not to say that there aren’t real baltigiyya, tough, underprivileged pragmatists who put getting by for a few more weeks ahead of political and social ideals. These real baltagiyya (who are unlikely to ever be prosecuted under the state’s new law)
are a product of the failing neoliberal economic project and its polarization of the rich and poor. They are those who were forced into a life of commissioned crime by the disappearance of the middle class and the state’s need to maintain order despite the drastic disequilibrium. Furthermore, the NDP had effectively institutionalized them to facilitate the conditions necessary for its consolidation of power — from intimidation of opposition election candidates to maintaining conformity in Cairo’s combustible and underprivileged slums, to protecting the physical assets of the powerful and wealthy, to instilling a general state of fear. Take the infamous “Battle of the Camel” where poor, desperate and misinformed camel and horse riders were transformed into baltageya with food, money and the instructions to attack what they were told was a demonstration responsible for the tourism slump that cost them their livelihoods. This goes to the core of the baltageya phenomenon. Rather than being seen as natural-born criminals whose intent and conviction is for violence, they must be viewed as tools not perpetrators, the product of a socioeconomic catastrophe.
Understanding Egypt’s Emerging “Martyr Pop”
When Egyptian youth went to Tahrir Square for 18 days beginning January 25, most of their pop stars did not join them. Amr Diab, arguably the most popular Arabic singing star, loaded his family aboard his private jet and bolted for London to ride out the uprisings. Mohamed Fouad, who has released 20 successful albums and starred in six movies, issued a sycophantic statement supporting Hosni Mubarak. Rising star Tamer Hosny went to Tahrir Square and tried to convince protesters to go home (He later told television interviewers he had tried to go back and admit his mistake and assure them he supported the uprising but was booed off the stage).
Now, these stars are releasing songs within a new genre of “Martyr Pop”–music videos that celebrate the revolution and mourn those who died resisting efforts to put down the uprisings.
Anthropologist Dan Gilman, an expert on Egyptian popular culture, describes this emerging movement in a post on the Norient blog, an on-line magazine in German and English that explores global and local soundscapes. The article embeds six music videos illustrating points Gilman makes in his text.
“Martyr Pop – Made in Egypt” is an initial exploration of this “emergence of a subgenre of popular music videos dedicated the memory of the people killed during the the eighteen days of protesting that brought down Hosni Mubarak’s government.”
What is interesting about Martyr Pop, he notes, is that it is so overtly political in subject matter:
This is a notable change of pace from the mass-media Arabic-language music industry’s usual stock in trade, schmaltzy songs of chaste romance, for several reasons. First, songs that aired as music video clips via satellite channels in Egypt during the Mubarak era were generally devoid of domestic politics, except for nationalist pablum that either avoided politics entirely or portrayed Mubarak as the legitimate leader of his people. Second, the visual imagery was usually carefully storyboarded and filmed: pretty people in pretty places is the norm in the world of Arabic video clips.
Martyr Pop is obviously quite different:
The video clips that memorialize the martyrs differ on both counts, in that simply referring to the revolution in mass media is itself a political act, albeit not necessarily a very clear one. And, in sharp contrast to the elaborate, soap opera-like mise en scène that dominates the field, the ‘martyr pop’ videos tend to eschew studio visuals in favor of news footage. Above all, there is a powerful emphasis on photographs of the martyrs. (For those unfamiliar with the Arabic usage, the term ‘martyr’ (shahid in Arabic) is often used in a secular context to denote people considered to have died in the name of a national cause.)
Gilman overtly ties the production of martyr pop to the political faux pas of the performers, who are obviously eager to restore themselves to sympathy with their audiences. But he points out that the music is political in general but not in specifics:
[d]espite the inherently political nature of singing about the revolution, most of the singers actually appear to seek a middle path in which their political sympathies are not truly disclosed.
It’s difficult to determine how the uprising will affect these individual pop stars over the long run. Some people have reacted furiously to singers they now see as having taken counterrevolutionary stances. “It’s painful for me to listen to Tamer Hosny for more than a few seconds” one of my Egyptian friends told me. “When he is on the radio I turn the sound down.”He told me that he has friends who call the radio to complain every time Hosny or Diab is played.
But other fans have rallied around their favorite singers. The author of the section of the Wikipedia article on Tamer Hosny dealing with the Tahrir Square contremps certainly appears to be written by a fan, since it minimizes what happened and emphasizes his explanations and the video clip of him weeping that was posted to YouTube (but seems to have come down now). [Note: I accessed Wikipedia to get Hosny’s discography May 16. I make no promises some editor hasn’t changed the entry by the time you read it].
But the most important thing this indicates to me is the emergence of new musical styles that recognize changing political realities.
Of course, this is not the first time Egyptian pop musicians have tried to improve their popular standing by linking themselves to popular political positions without being so specifically political that they get in trouble with the regime. Elliott Colla has an excellent article on Palestinian intifada solidarity music and videons in Egypt, and I have written about the political music of Sha’aban in Chapter Six of Connected in Cairo.
Egypt is the pop cultural hub of the Arab world, producing most of the movies, music, television (including being the center of the Arabic dubbing industry) and other stuff that fills the theaters and airwaves of the Arabic-speaking world. Are the current transformations part of Egypt’s current experimental moment only, after which Egyptian pop will return to its schmaltzy fantasies, or will these new genres evolve and grow in ways that become part of Arabic pop?
References
Colla, Elliott. Sentimentality and redemption: The rhetoric of Egyptian pop culture Intifada solidarity. In Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture. Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg, eds. Pp. 338-363.
Trump: Why let a little thing like facticity get in the way of making a point about the Middle East?
There is a major leadership crisis in the US, Donald Trump told a group of supporters in Las Vegas April 28. The Middle East is out of control as can be clearly seen by the recent vote in which Egyptians voted 99 percent to end the peace treaty with Israel.
What, you missed it? Maybe because it…um…didn’t happen.
“I don’t know if you saw the vote,” he said. “There was a vote in Egypt the other day. Ninety-nine percent of the people want to break the peace treaty with Israel. Did you see that? Did anybody see that? Ninety-nine percent! So, we have problems. We have weak, pathetic leadership.”
Donald Trump has problems. Nobody in his audience saw it (not even the guys who shouted “Yeah!” when he asked), because there was no such vote. There have been no votes since the referendum on the Egyptian constitution. And so far the military has maintained normative relations with Israel, at least pending the outcome of the new elections in September.
Best spin one can put on this is that he mistook a PPew Research Center’s Global Attitudes survey for a vote. And even then got the numbers wrong, because what the survey actually said, according to an April 25 press release is that “[b]y a 54%-to-36% margin, Egyptians want the peace treaty with that country [Israel] annulled.”
Survey, vote…like a president needs to know the difference. And 54 % versus 99%…it’s not like presidents or big businessmen need to know anything about numbers, right?
You can see a clip of Trump making the claim on FactCheck.org:
Trump+100+Percent+Wrong+on+Egyptian+%26%238216%3BVote%26%238217%3B.
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