by Bruce Feiler
The back-and-forth between these two sides was unusually fierce and personal, unfolding over a hyperquick tit-for-tat of articles, blog posts, retorts, and name-calling. In the West, at least, the cyber-utopian side seemed to be winning. But as is typical for these kinds of arguments, one thing was missing from the debate: the view of the people on the ground. So what do the activists themselves think of this debate? Quite a lot, actually, and not at all what you might expect. Every single person I met in Egypt thought the influence of technology has been overplayed in the West, and many were openly offended by the idea, considering it a conspiracy by outsiders to downplay Arabs’ sophistication and give the West credit where it didn’t belong.
“The Internet was just a tool,” said Noor Ayman Nour. “Facebook helped to organize people; Twitter to give people live updates. They complemented each other. But if they weren’t there, the revolution would still have happened. The perfect example was when Mubarak cut off the Internet for four days beginning the night of January twenty-seventh. The strongest demonstrations were on days when there was no Internet.”
Gigi Ibrahim, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, concurred. “I really disagree with the whole sentiment of Revolution 2.0,” she said. With her spiked hair, ubiquitous tweets, and heavily eyelined, oversized eyes, Ibrahim became one of the more visible members of the revolution’s leadership. “It really undermines the history of mobilization that started with the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000,” she said. “This came after a decade in which people didn’t go into the streets. The movement continued with protests over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and really escalated in Egypt in 2006. Anybody who was watching in the last few years could see we were heading to this threshold.
“The Internet played a role,” she continued, “but so did the fax in Tiananmen Square and the telegraph back in Russia. Many credit smuggled audiotapes of Ayatollah Khomeini with building support for the Iranian Revolution in 1979. But nobody called those the Fax Revolution or the Telegraph Revolution.”
Perhaps the most persuasive critique I heard came from Ahmed Maher, who did as much as anyone to insert social networking into the heart of the revolt. “I personally reject the title the Facebook Revolution,” he told me. “January twenty-fifth was the result of an accumulation of effort, fear, and a desire for change that had been growing since 2005.” Why does he think the label has stuck? “I’ve heard a million explanations,” he said, “including that the American government was complicit in supporting the Mubarak regime, so they wanted to credit American technology with bringing him down. I would say this was a purely Egyptian revolution.”
To be sure, the technological innovation of Egyptian technogeeks was brilliant, a model for the world. In January 2007, for example, a young Egyptian initiated a campaign called “President Mubarak, you’ve got mail,” in which he solicited users to post hostile, obnoxious, or amusing messages to a website. Whenever someone typed “Mubarak” into a search engine anywhere in the world, they would get mini Google ads made from these converted posts. In another instance, when the Internet was cut off in the midst of the revolution, some young Egyptian programmers jerry-rigged a system in which protestors could call a landline on three continents—in the United States, Italy, and Bahrain—and leave short messages, which others could then dial in to hear or (if they were elsewhere and still had access to the Web) read by visiting speak2tweet on Twitter.
The point is, technology did play a role in the youth uprisings, but not because of the innovation of the technology itself. Rather, it was because of the innovation of its users. That savvy is a hallmark of Generation Freedom and has ramifications far beyond Tahrir Square.
Proactive. This generation’s final quality is the least remarked upon but may be the most significant. They took matters into their own hands. They responded to decades of sclerosis, stasis, and stultification and overnight decided, “We’ve had enough! We’re going to act!” In the process, they created something that had been almost entirely dormant in the Middle East in the last forty years: political activism.
“I think what distinguished my generation is a sense of social responsibility that didn’t exist before,” said Ethar El-Katatney. A twenty-three-year-old multiplatform megastar, El-Katatney embodies all the whiz-bang mash-ups of Generation Freedom. She was raised in a privileged, private-school environment where her schooling was entirely in English and Islam was an afterthought. But she made the choice to become a learned, devout Muslim and wear a veil, and had just become engaged to a traditional man, a car salesman. She also tweets more than anyone I know, has written two books (one about Yemen, the other about Islam in China), is an anchor on Egyptian state television, is getting two master’s degrees, and was on an Arab reality show called The Renewers, a knock-off of The Apprentice, in which the host was a charismatic Muslim televangelist and sixteen contestants from nine different Arab countries competed in volunteer programs to see who could be more charitable. She came in third. (A week after we met, she announced by tweet that her engagement had broken off.)
“We had the French and the British here, then a succession of military rulers,” El-Katatney said. “Everyone just kind of atrophied. In the last thirty years in particular, the Egyptian population had become like a child, where you feed it, you clothe it, but you don’t ask it to think or make any decisions. ‘Oh, Hosni, you’re just like a father to us.’ ”
Organized Islamists across the region were the one group willing to offer an alternative to the stagnation and political infantilizing, she noted. Fundamentalism became a fallback. In a land with no political parties, no dissent, and no free expression, the mosque became the only place to discuss politics. Religion became the language of opposition. As the Egyptian-born scholar Fouad Ajami wrote, “The fundamentalist call has resonated because it invited men to participate . . . [in] contrast to a political culture that reduces citizens to spectators and asks them to leave things to their rulers,” Ahmed Maher told me that growing up he found it hard to find friends who would talk about politics. Most just wanted to keep their heads down and study.
“But it just became too difficult to be an ostrich with your head in the sand,” said El-Katatney. “If I would use one word to capture the conversations of my community, it would be awakening. We would have these tweet-ups, where we sat around and chatted on Twitter, and the feeling you had was a mixture of passion and hope. For me, the biggest surprise of this awakening is that people realized, We don’t simply have to always submit. We have to stand up for our rights. We have to stand up for ourselves.
“So many of us have traveled and been exposed to other cultures,” she continued. “You see what it can be like. What our country could be like. What our personal lives can be like. To me, that’s what characterizes my generation. We have that spark to improve things. And if you look around the region today, that’s exactly what we’re doing. The dinosaurs are finally becoming extinct. There’s a new way of living.”
These Four P’s—plentiful, pinched, plugged in, proactive—capture the fundamentals of who this generation is. But what about their religion? This was the second question I hoped to answer. What are their beliefs? And what will their uprising mean for the future of faith?
To help answer that question, I went to see one of the savvier young people I met. His name is Hossam Bahgat, and he is his own mash-up of unlikely qualities. Thirty-one years old, with closely cropped hair, trendy, dark-rimmed glasses, and a trim, almost lithe frame, he wore a fashionable white shirt unbuttoned just so. He brought a relentless, analytic intensity to a subject more often given to emotion and fear—sectarian violence. He is the founder and executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and one of the most decorated human rights activists in Cairo.
“Had you asked me about the religious beliefs of young people before the revolution,” he said, “my answer would have been completely different. Egypt the last few years was a ticking time bomb, where sectarian violence wa
s getting much worse. But now, as a result of this young generation, we are seeing an entirely different situation and, for the first time in a long time, a real opportunity for change.”
Trying to make sense of the innermost beliefs of a billion people across multiple continents is obviously a dangerous, foolish errand. Religion is deeply connected with national history and political circumstance. Sunnis and Shias are locked in mortal combat within certain countries, for example, yet cooperate within borders (and across borders) in others. Christians ostracize Muslims in many countries north of the Mediterranean, while being ostracized by Muslims south of the Mediterranean. Jews lived for centuries under Muslim rule in the Middle East more freely than they did under Christian rule in Europe, but are now almost nil in the region outside of Israel. Religion is also connected to quality of life. As the economic, education, and health-care gap between the Muslim world and the West has widened in recent decades, Islamic groups have rushed in to fill the gap and salve the pain. Religion is also connected to information. Much of the Arab world has been trapped behind a veil of ignorance for sixty years, the most explosive period in the history of knowledge. The true impact of the Internet on faith—specifically, what unlimited access to rival points of view might do to religious orthodoxy—is just beginning to be felt.
But drawing some conclusions is possible, even necessary. First, Islam may be the one religion of Abraham that has grown stronger in the last half a century. The Pew Global Attitudes Project does annual surveys on religious identity, and the willingness of Middle Easterners, including young people, to embrace Islam is much higher than how Western populations embrace their faiths. The number of Muslims who said Islam should play a “large role” in politics was 95 percent in Egypt and Indonesia, 88 percent in Pakistan and Nigeria, and more than 50 percent in Lebanon and Jordan. A poll taken after the revolution in Egypt found that two-thirds of Egyptians thought laws should “strictly follow” the Qur’an and another quarter thought they should follow the “values and principles” of the Qur’an. While these numbers may strike many in the West as uncomfortably high, we simply have to get used to the fact that even a more youth-oriented, free Middle East will continue to have a strong Islamic identity.
But Islamic doesn’t necessarily mean “Islamist.” The second characteristic of Islam today is that violent extremism is on the defensive. Even before the death of Osama bin Laden further eroded the credibility (and functionality) of the world’s leading extremist organization, when Muslims were asked which side they identify with in the struggle between modernizers and fundamentalists, 84 percent in Lebanon said the modernists, along with 74 percent of Turks, 61 percent of Pakistanis, and 54 percent of Indonesians. In Egypt, the modernist camp is so strong, 80 percent don’t even recognize a struggle. Eight in ten Muslims, meanwhile, say suicide bombing and other acts of violence against civilians to defend Islam are never justified; majorities in Turkey (77 percent), Indonesia (61 percent), and Jordan (54 percent) agree.
Third, a washed-out, nondoctrinal, Islam-in-name-only is on the rise. In his landmark 1950s study Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Will Herberg wrote that true religion in the West was being replaced by what he called a watered-down “faith-for-faith’s-sake” attitude, where “familiar words are retained, but the old meaning is voided.” This is the religion of Christians who attend church only on Christmas and Easter, and Jews who go only to High Holiday services and a Passover Seder. A half-century later, a similar brand of Islam seems to be taking root in the Middle East, especially among young Muslims. As Ayman Nour described himself, “I am a Muslim. I might not practice as efficiently as I should, according to many people. But I do identify myself as a Muslim.” He then went off arm in arm with a woman to rehearsal for one of his four bands. Feel-good Muslims even have their own gurus, a group of “satellite sheiks” who pedal their liberal, modernist philosophy on popular television shows and social media. The most prominent of these is Amr Khaled, the “Dr. Phil of Islam,” who favors Hugo Boss shirts and coexistence with the West and made vocal attacks on Osama bin Laden. He was the host of the show on which Ethar El-Katatney was a semifinalist.
In recent years, this greater emphasis on Islam, however it’s practiced, has been detrimental for interreligious relations. That’s exactly what Hossam Bahgat found in Egypt. Beginning in 2007, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights began an unprecedented series of quarterly reports of Muslim-Christian sectarian incidents. For the first two years, they found an average of two incidents a month, a situation that only worsened in subsequent years. “It got so bad we were starting to doubt our ability to live together in peace,” Bahgat said.
But then came the revolution, and an unimaginable breakthrough.
“Suddenly the moral threshold shifted, and Egyptians were no longer tolerant of intolerance,” Bahgat said. “Suddenly everyone, including the Muslim Brotherhood, was saying, ‘Of course, Egypt is for all Egyptians. Of course, there should never be discrimination. Of course, we are all Egyptians first then Muslims or Christians second.’ ” A poll taken after Mubarak stepped down showed that 84 percent of Egyptians thought it was important that Copts and other religious minorities be able to practice their religion freely.
“Now this could be discursive or the heat of the moment,” he said, “but the fact that the public discourse was cleansed of bigotry, and that anyone who was an advocate of a more isolationist, alarmist discourse became too embarrassed to voice this view in public, was a complete reversal of what I personally have been studying for five years.”
Where did this attitude come from?
“It’s hard to say. It wasn’t exactly nationalism, and it wasn’t exactly patriotism. I felt kinship in Tahrir Square. It was as if everyone had been members of the same organization for many years and had been attending meetings and strategizing for this moment. And not only did they start working together, but they cared for one another in genuine, emotional ways. You had the locking of arms to protect others in prayer. You had a Christian woman carrying a big cross pouring water for Muslims doing their ablutions.
“On January twenty-ninth,” he continued, “tanks entered the square. It took us about two minutes for Egyptians to get used them. Then we jumped on top of them and wrote anti-Mubarak graffiti. I remember standing in the middle of the square, watching this tank with about thirty young men on it, moving around the square, with everyone chanting, ‘Muslims or Christians, we are all Egyptian!’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wait a second. Where am I?’ There was no reason for them to choose this chant, but they did.”
“And how did you feel at that moment?”
“I teared up. I felt we could have spent many years working against sectarianism, and it wouldn’t have shown the impact I saw right in front of me.”
“So you’ve seen the worst,” I said. “You’ve seen this period of idyllic fantasy. Which will prevail?”
He took a long time before answering my question.
“We’re going to become a normal country,” he said.
“All this for that modest result!?”
“No, that’s the best-case scenario,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Take America. We’re going to have a crazy preacher announcing a Qur’an burning one day, and we’re going to have a social outrage against it. We’re going to have people who are for the Ground Zero mosque and those who are against it. We’re going to have reactive and regressive forces competing against progressive and equality voices. Some battles we’re going to win. Some battles we’re going to lose. But we’re not going to be the first country on the planet that has zero bigotry. That country doesn’t exist, and we’re not going to be it.”
“And if you succeed, what will the impact be?”
“It will change the world. Not just the region, the entire world.” I asked him to elaborate. “We will serve as a moral model,” he said. “We will be a counter to the influence of the Wahhabis and other extremists. We will become an advoc
ate for freedom of religion and other rights-based policies on the global scene. And we will be a final nail in the coffin of the clash of civilizations and those who believe Muslims cannot handle tolerance.”
“And you believe this will happen?”
“It could go either way,” he said. “First it has to be imagined, and that’s what happened during the revolution. Now it has to be constructed and defended. Just like the opposite philosophy. But I am one who believes that with a lot of hard work, perseverance, and constant nurturing, good can prevail over evil.”
On my last day in Egypt, I drove two hours east of Cairo to Ismailia, the administrative headquarters of the Suez Canal and a resort town on the shores of Lake Timsah, which many believe is the likeliest candidate for the Sea of Reeds, the body of water the Israelites are said to have crossed on their way out of Egypt 3,200 years ago. This episode represents the moment of freedom in the Bible, the liminal gap between the children of Abraham’s oppressive past and their liberated future. In other words, it is the moment for self-congratulation, second-guessing, successful planning, or severe missteps—exactly where the Arab Spring was right now. Were there any lessons to be learned from the first time this place went through this kind of transition?
Ismailia, like other places in Egypt, still seemed in shock from the abruptness of the change. A number of people had died in clashes with riot police in this small city. The office building of the old ruling party was a burned carcass, a mirror of the party headquarters alongside Qasr al-Nil Bridge that was also a scarred shell. The fish shacks and rental boat outfits along the water were starving for business. Few people seemed in the mood for a holiday.