Selim H. Shahine / ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY

My friends and I always used to complain that we were living during one of the most marginal times in our country’s history. In the future, we used to say, historians will describe the times we lived in as an ‘intermediate’ or ‘transitional’ period – a sort of Middle Ages – during which nothing much of any significance happened in Egypt.
Well, not anymore. Today, groups of ‘internet youth’ have changed all that. And, by identifying themselves as members of a new generation of Egyptians resolved to liberate Egypt from dictatorship, they have provoked other Egyptians to reflect on their own place among the generations.
Members of my generation were born in the 1960s, towards the end of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military rule. Unlike our parents and grandparents, we did not experience Egypt as a monarchy, nor did we live through the revolutionary period of Nasser’s regime or witness the profound transformations his ideology of pan-Arab nationalism brought to Egypt, to our region, and, indeed, to the entire Third World. Like little soldiers, I and other children of my social background went to our public and quasi-public schools every day in our drab uniforms with white-collared shirts, ugly ties and tacky black shoes. Each morning, we would salute the flag before marching in single file to austere classrooms, many of which were housed in the now-rundown houses and palaces of the ancien-régime elite.
When we were small, Nasser’s state socialism held sway. We were not brought up on cereal and white toast. We did not have any toy stores. But then, during our early school years, things changed. Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat came to power. And suddenly, things started looking up, especially for those of us who could be considered part of the so-called ‘middle class’, and who saw the world through (Western) bourgeois eyes. Sadat’s policy of infitah, or economic ‘opening up’, meant that almost everywhere in our cities, supermarkets full of imported goods started popping up. Trendy five-star hotels were built. People at the better-off end of society started travelling more, bringing back clothes and music cassettes from abroad. Some of us moved into nicer houses. Others got bigger family cars. And throughout the 1970s, we children mostly sat in front of our new colour television sets, mesmerized by the advertisements for powdered milk, laundry detergents, and Toyota pickup trucks.
Then, when we were teenagers in 1981, Sadat was assassinated during a military parade. His assassins were members of a militant anti-government organization known as the Islamic Jihad Group. The group was a splinter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-regime organization that, like many other political parties and opposition groups from communists to feminists, had been outlawed for decades.
In the years leading up to his assassination, Sadat’s regime had come under increasing attack. The most notable protests were the massive ‘bread riots’ of 1977 that took place in response to the government’s termination of subsidies on basic commodities. Under Sadat, dramatic economic disparities had emerged between Egyptians, as some groups in society accumulated enormous amounts of wealth through the private sector, while the majority of the population made meagre livings.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which had originally fought against the British occupation during the time of the monarchy, criticized the Sadat regime for failing to address the country’s problems, from education to housing to transport. It pointed to the lives of hard work and economic struggle lived by ordinary Egyptian citizens as they grappled with skyrocketing food and clothing costs while the elite lived in luxury. It blamed the state for social injustice and inequality, and attacked it for failing to fully democratize (Ibrahim 1996: 39-42). The Brotherhood also condemned Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and the country’s general alignment with the West, calling for the establishment of an alternative political order based on Islamic sharia law.
But we had no real understanding of any of this at the time. We just saw Khomeini’s angry face and knew that we didn’t want that. And Mubarak swiftly replaced Sadat and ‘stability’ – the prevalent shorthand for the regime’s combination of economic liberalization and authoritarian politics – quickly resumed. Pizza Hut eventually opened in Cairo to a frenzied crowd and, a few years later, McDonald’s followed suit.
When we were in our twenties in the 1980s, our opportunities seemed limitless. In college, business administration was the most popular degree among members of my social class. After college, most of us got jobs as sales and marketing reps in Egyptian private companies, foreign and Egyptian joint ventures, local and foreign banks, and multinational corporations like Procter & Gamble, Xerox and Unilever. The most talented of us were picked up for positions abroad, in London, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere in the Gulf. The sky was the limit for us.
Economic liberalization, westernization and peaceful relations with our neighbours were what ‘stability’ meant to us. And yet, as we entered the workforce in the 1990s, and some of us got married and started having children, we could sense that something in Egypt was just not right.
Real estate was being developed, motorways and megashopping malls were being built and lavish resorts were going up along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, but at the same time, poverty was increasing, government services were either inadequate or non-existent, our state bureaucracy was stifling, and wealth and opportunities were monopolized by the very few.
In the business hub of Cairo, inequality became palpable, despite the state’s attempts to hide the existence of the poor behind the city’s modern façade. Expensive cars stood next to donkey-drawn carts in the stalled traffic, while slums sprung up in the middle of the city. Our elites began to flee the cities, with their swelling populations, their filth, and their choking pollution. They closed themselves off on our cities’ edges, in private ‘fortified enclaves’ (Caldeira 1996). And, finally, the rest of the world also started closing its doors on those of us seeking a better future abroad.

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At the turn of the twenty-first century, our epoch of ‘stability’ was becoming a Dark Ages. Religious fundamentalism was on the rise. Intellectuals were being persecuted. The police were cracking down on anyone who challenged the status quo. There was nothing we could do – the whole system needed to change, but that was impossible. At least we thought so.

Then along came the urban, middle-class youth of Egypt. On 25 January 2011, they said to the rest of us: ‘Yes, we can, too!’1 And in 18 days, these technologically savvy twentysomethings mobilized what seemed like the entire world, and brought down the whole system and the 60-year-old regime that underpinned it. Unbelievable! How? We were stunned.
In trying to make sense of the political awakening and activism of this new generation of secular Egyptians, I draw on the work of sociologist Karl Mannheim (1959: 291-301) who, long ago, emphasized the importance of the nexus between the individual life cycle and rapidly changing historical conditions to understanding generational shifts in the formation of political consciousness.
Asmaa Mahfouz, Ahmed Maher, Wael Ghoneim and the other young men and women who led the 2011 popular uprising were children in the 1990s when neo-liberal economic policies were being implemented in Egypt. Unlike my generation, they came of age during the last decade, when the consequences of privatization and economic deregulation were coming into full view, and when the effects of the austerity measures of IMF and World Bank structural-adjustment programmes configured to accommodate Egypt’s foreign donors and creditors were being felt. Real wages were going down. Income disparities were increasing. The middle class was being squeezed. And nearly half the population was living below the poverty line, in deplorable conditions.
At the same time as all this, they also witnessed the formation of a new coalition of government officials, businessmen and politicians that emerged on the back of deregulation and privatization. This formidable grouping controlled wealth and power in society, running the country like its own private estate and subjecting the population to a system of incredible repression administered by the secret service and the police.
For this generation, then, ‘stability’ signified something very different from the comforts and opportunities it had connoted for me and my contemporaries. It meant no prospects for the future. And when it became clear that the president’s son was being groomed to succeed his father, the prospect of another 30 or 40 years of such ‘stability’ became intolerable. Egypt’s young people had nothing to live for anymore, as so many of them said.
This generation also grew up in the age of the internet. Almost from childhood, they had been plugged in to myriad information and communication sources. Online, they took part in a world that was very different from the one they were living in. They experienced the freedom to express their views, and to associate with whoever they chose. In web chats, blogs and tweets, engaged young people discussed police brutality, nepotism, the corrupt marriage of business and politics. They quoted Žižek, Gandhi, John Lennon and JFK. And, with other global activists, they spoke of social justice and equality, learning the language of human rights, freedom and democracy.
So it was that, in the shadow of their paternalistic and vengeful state, today’s Egyptian youth came to understand what it might mean to be a citizen in a proper sense. On social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, young activists attracted large numbers of followers, and called on Egyptians to join in a revolution against the tyranny of their corrupt regime. And finally, heeding the cries of freedom emanating from nearby Tunisia, they planned and coordinated their uprising, bringing together hundreds of thousands of people in Tahrir Square to protest peacefully and demand their civil and political rights.

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During this critical period in the nation’s history, ‘generation talk’ began to be heard in everyday conversations in Cairo, and was soon reproduced in media commentary, intellectual and political debates, and army communications. In this discourse, Egyptians of all ages express their admiration for the  shabab (youth) and their revolt, and define themselves in relation to that youth. While generation talk often takes a rather simplistic and stereotyping form – ‘our’ generation versus ‘theirs’, the ‘fearful’ generation versus the ‘courageous’ one – it is also an indicator that for many Egyptians of all backgrounds, the traditional social divisions are taking a back seat, as people experience a new sense of connectedness along the lines of age and generation. In this way, this discourse has, for the moment at least, brought together a population usually divided by class, gender, religion and ethnicity, as people begin to view themselves more as members of different age groups sharing in the same historical conditions; as different generations within a single family’s line of descent.

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A sense of national solidarity has emerged among Egyptians, indeed among citizens of the Arab world, out of their common struggle against oppression; against the ‘states of exception’ decreed by their rulers that had become part of their daily lives; against the humiliation of poverty. From Morocco to Jordan to Yemen to Bahrain, Arabs of different backgrounds and political persuasions have risen up against absolutism, against dynastic rule both monarchical and republican, and against their various rulers: the old, the young, and the mad.
‘They were listening!’ a fellow anthropologist exclaimed as we watched the events of January 2011 unfold. She was referring to the late Edward Said’s call to the Arab people to renounce their passivity and take action to transform their social and political worlds (Hafez 2011; cf. Said 2003). But have scholars been listening well enough to them? More specifically regarding our own discipline, did the popular movements now sweeping the region take anthropologists of the Middle East and North Africa by surprise?
As an Egyptian anthropologist whose research has focused on elites, I am well aware of the challenges and ethical dilemmas facing anthropologists who work under dictatorships. And I confess to having tried – by studying deposed royals – to orient my own research towards politically more ‘safe’ topics, and to having on occasion deferred publication for fear of the consequences my work could have for my informants, my family, or myself. But, while I do not exempt myself from criticism, I am concerned about the discipline and the approach of its practitioners. It seems to me that, for the most part, the privileged zones of theoretical enquiry in this region are still the ones Lila Abu-Lughod (1989) delineated over two decades ago: ‘tribe’, ‘women’ and ‘Islam’.
What is going to happen next is not clear. What is certain is that change has come to Egypt and to the Arab world. Protesters have called into question the ‘stability’ of the political systems, sustained by Arab regimes, Western leaders and global capital, that for decades have violated fundamental human rights in this region. Now is the time for anthropologists to start asking new research questions and to engage in the dialogue that their Arab interlocutors have so articulately begun.

Guest editorial by Selim H. Shahine @ ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 2, APRIL 2011
Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00792.x/pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00792.x/abstract

“This editorial is based on a paper I presented to the ‘Speaking out on Egypt’ panel organized by the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, on 17 February 2011. I dedicate it to those who lost their lives or were wounded in Egypt’s 25 January revolution. I thank Victoria Bernal and ANTHROPOLOGY TODAYfor comments on earlier drafts of this editorial, and I am grateful to Tom Boellstorff and Karen Leonard for their encouragement. 1. Banners held by some protesters in Tahrir Square carried this slogan, referencing the ‘Yes, we can!’ of Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign.”