ARMANDO SALVATORE

BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’:

FROM CONNECTEDNESS TO MOBILIZATION
IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Old and new media in the ‘Arab Spring’

T he ‘Arab Spring,’ which started in Tunisia at the end of 2010 but fully
erupted through the Egyptian revolutionary events of January and Febru-
ary 2011, has had the merit of triggering a set of interrogations not only con-
cerning the role of ‘new’ media in the revolutions, but also and more broadly on
the key question of how to transform the connectedness built among people
through communication forums and media into a sustained political mobiliza-
tion.
No doubt the role of new media in the uprisings immediately struck actors
and observers alike, at the evident risk of overestimating their impact. The revo-
lution has been dubbed the revolution of the ‘street’, but also the revolution of
šab…b al-feisbuk (‘the youth of Facebook’), and, not least, the revolution of al-
Jazeera. Neither should we neglect the role of literature, movies and TV serials.
The Yacubian Building, originally a novel by bestselling author Alaa al-Aswani,
and which made a splash in all three genres (the film was the most expensive one
ever produced in Egypt), depicted a few years ago in dramatic tones the corrup-
tion of several layers of Egyptian society and especially of a crucial component of
the Egyptian bourgeoisie centered on the nouveaux riches, famously dubbed ‘the
fat cats’ after Sadat’s launch of infit…| (economic opening) in the mid-1970s.
They came to dominate the ruling party by building a sort of compensation
chamber of corrupted crony-capitalism supported by a diffuse state thuggery,
and were in more recent years epitomized by nobody less than the son of Hosni
Mubarak, Gamal, who became a candidate to his father’s succession as Egypt’s
president: an issue which the Egyptian public crudely but correctly dubbed
tawr†Å (inheriting). Not surprisingly Gamal Mubarak became one of the first
and favorite targets of revolutionary anger.
As reminded by Enrico De Angelis in his contribution to this collection, a
similar situation triggered off the revolt in Syria, whose initial spark was ignited
by the simple fact that some children copied on a wall a revolutionary slogan
that they saw on al-Jazeera, likely taken from an Egyptian graffiti: al-ša¼b ya¡na¼u
Åawratahu: ‘the people stages its revolution’. Clearly the image of the Middle
East surging to the attention of a global audience was this time substantially dif-
ferent from the familiar stereotypes retrieved by serial headlines on events usu-

Oriente Moderno, XCI, 2011, 1, p. 5-12

© Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino – Roma
6 ARMANDO SALVATORE

ally privileging extremism and repression, thus telling stories of political violence
without political progress. As stressed by Eugenia Siapera in this volume, while
official media and public intellectuals in the West have historically failed in con-
veying a dynamic view of the region, web activists and bloggers (particularly the
‘bridge bloggers’ interfacing, also culturally and linguistically, between the re-
gion and the wider world) have shown during the last few years a capacity to
perform better in creating and disseminating plausible narrations about the con-
cerns of people, and particularly of the youth, in the Middle East. Such recent
developments have increasingly shown that activism and coverage are strictly in-
tertwined to determine the success or failure of a public sphere. Not by chance
the so-called social web (blogs and social networks) has become the best incarna-
tion of the ‘foreign elements’ evoked by besieged dictators as the agents sowing
discord and subversion in a purportedly healthy and docile social body: an accu-
sation that does not (or no longer) hold even just as a caricature. Evidently the
role of new media and particularly of the social web in the revolutionary out-
break should be carefully weighed by looking at the growing importance of these
media in the everyday life of several social and political groups in North Africa
and in the Middle East.
On the other hand, one should shun the impression of the blogosphere and
of social networks as the agents of a sudden surge of virtuous public sphere dy-
namics. Unlike countries ruled by other authoritarian regimes, in Egypt a public
sphere of connectedness and discussion has been in the making particularly since
after the 1990s. In this decade the media arena became more plural than in the
1980s, i.e. during the first decade of Mubarak’s era, when state-owned TV sta-
tions and state-controlled newspapers held the monopoly on information and
tiredly chewed on government paroles. It is important to remind that this devel-
opment occurred in the long decade of the 1990s, only interrupted by 9/11,
when the ‘civil society’ wave spilled over from Eastern Europe to the Muslim
world and furthered hopes for democratization in face of the perpetuation of
various types of autocratic regimes, variably associated with the ongoing neolib-
eral globalization and then with the ‘War on Terror’.
The early enthusiasm for civil society as a panacea against corruption and au-
thoritarianism was clearly misplaced, not least because many of the same West-
ern governments and donors that were ostensibly supportive of the ideal where
in fact undermining it through the continued support of authoritarian regimes
or via aid policies that weakened rather than strengthened associative bonds of
basically spontaneous cooperation (Salvatore 2011a). Yet while the role of civil
society, soon to be identified with Western-certified NGOs, became less obvi-
ous, the classic kernel of the public sphere showed a capacity to revitalize itself.
Several newspapers saw the light especially in the late 1990s, mainly published
by young journalists. The watershed of the launch of Al-Jazeera in 1996 cannot
be overestimated: the new TV channel started to broadcast all the news which
state-owned TV did not give and, most critically, to frame them via the public
perception of the fading legitimacy of their governments. They did so also
through such innovations like online polls and call-in programs where the audi-
 BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 7

ence could debate with the TV guests. Satellite TV impacted over time tremen-
dously on the entire spectrum of old and new media, also affecting internet and
the booming blogosphere from its beginning.
By the mid-2000, also pushed by the Iranian experience, some bloggers in
Egypt started to play the role of citizens ready to mobilize fellow citizens on
matters of common concern. They partly followed the lead of Al-Jazeera in de-
vising new forms of connectedness and participation, often culminating in what
has been named ‘citizen journalism’ (Onodera 2011). In so doing they often re-
sorted to different registers of colloquial forms of speech, sometimes paired with
a ‘global-ecumenical’ type of English, thus marking, as stressed by Charles
Hirschkind in this volume, a sharp distance from the language of all official ac-
tors in the public arena, a disconnection from ‘the system’ (al-ni©…m) as a whole.
It is worth stressing that also many young supporters of the Muslim Brother-
hood or of other Islamist groups showed their appreciation for this type of com-
munication. As a result, the divide between a secular and an Islamist camp,
which had been earlier shrewdly exploited by the Mubarak regime, started to
show an increasing porosity. As evidenced by Hirschkind, it was less a matter of
rallying the two main blocks of the opposition on a common program than the
even more significant move towards finding an overlapping language expressing
common resistance to the abuse and violence of the regime.
Seeds for a new transversal public reason were sown ever since, which were
to provide the basis of a common resistance by a ‘disfigured social body’. Blogs
became icons of this disfigurement. Footage on abuse of the population by secu-
rity forces projected visually the new tunes of a vernacular language often bor-
dering on registers of vulgarity, which however, far from scandalizing even the
most pious components of their audiences, were considered an adequate reflec-
tion of collective injury. Words regained their mighty sense as sounds of vio-
lence. At the same time, bloggers firmly kept the bar of their activities on a con-
ception of the ‘common good’ (ma¡la|ah ¼ammah) that resonates well with the
Islamic discursive traditions.

From everyday communication to political revolution

The question of the relation between everyday communication and political revo-
lution is not entirely new, but the coincidence between the eruption of the ‘Arab
Spring’ and the final stage of the parallel research projects that are bundled in
this issue of Oriente Moderno pushed us to raise the question of connectedness
and mobilization with sharper eyes and perhaps also with a new confidence in
the transformative capacities of socio-political actors in the region. By reviewing
at the beginning of this collection the increasing significance of media studies re-
lated to Islamic studies and the Arab world through the lenses of autobiographi-
cal materials, Dale F. Eickelman, a pioneer in conducting and promoting re-
search about new media in the Middle East, provides us the necessary historical
depth in discussing what between the 1960s and the 1990s began to be identi-
fied as ‘new’ media (from audiotapes to videotapes up to satellite TV and cell-
phones) and how people skillfully learned how to appropriate and use them even
8 ARMANDO SALVATORE

in spite of diffuse and enduring authoritarian rule. Eickelman reminds us how

he, a leading anthropologist of Islam and the Middle East, got drawn into new
media and public sphere issues and encouraged a discussion of the different ways
in which media studies and Islamic studies might weigh off and interpret the
impact of novel modes of communication on the inherited structures of religious
and political authority in the region. More broadly, this research trend has
helped reformulate the crucial question of how a public sphere can emerge and
take form even before the onset of any deep transformation of the political sys-
tem. In parallel, this is also the issue, on the scholarly side, of how individual re-
search trajectories and targeted institutional investments may affect the capacity
of sociology, anthropology and Islamic studies to capture and convey the mean-
ing of the ongoing transformations. Yet not all research can be promoted and
planned. Scholars should also learn how not to be caught by surprise.
To Eickelman’s deeper background and experience I wish here to add my
own, more recent, field-related incidents and insights. In one of my latest stays
in Egypt I was asked by a friend and fellow sociologist, Ahmad Zayed, at the
time Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, to give a presentation on
nothing less than the ‘public sphere’. This happened at the presence of col-
leagues and students on a sunny Christmas day, at the end of 2007. After lazily
pushing a few powerpoint slides showing commonalities and differences be-
tween public sphere dynamics in the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ (with the inevitable
glimpse on paintings of coffee houses from London to Istanbul), I concluded
with a few remarks on the potentially positive role of the social web, including
social networks like Facebook, a website I had just stumbled into and become
member of, mainly for idle curiosity.
My mentioning of blogs and social networks was met by my Egyptian col-
leagues, mainly fellow sociologists, with a sense of disarray, or even with an ill-
concealed outrage. My remark was taken by them as a further proof of the van-
ity of the latest Western justification of the idea of the public sphere as an arena
of democratization, based on the assumption that through a sheer cumulative
discussion and critique of authoritarianism and corruption key socio-political
changes can be affected. The most obvious and legitimate critique leveled at my
conclusion was: what is the merit of ‘chatting’ and so connecting powerless pri-
vate rooms if the public space par excellence, the street, is inaccessible for politi-
cal protest? Indeed what both Western and Arab media had started years earlier
to dub the ‘Arab street’ was ever more painfully away to be under the control of
citizens willing to manifest their grievances. Under the state of emergency exist-
ing since 1981 it was prohibited that more than five people publicly gather with-
out prior authorization. The security apparatus of the Mubarak regime appeared
at the time of my presentation as efficient as ever. After the lecture I was asked
by some other Cairo University colleagues, this time political scientists, to give
some seminars to further deepen the issue, but I declined since I felt that it
might be a losing enterprise: repression, torture and a tight security control, in-
ternationally legitimized by the fact that the Mubarak regime postured as a re-
gional bulwark against terrorism (and his regime equated almost every form of
 BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 9

opposition to it), was evidently drying up the terrain itself on which a public
sphere could thrive, by turning connectedness and discussion into tangible mo-
bilization.
Yet then, just a few weeks after my delusional performance on the potential
role of social networks in the public sphere at Cairo University, the ‘Facebook
girl’ took the center stage. As also mentioned by Albrecht Hofheinz in this vol-
ume, on March 2008 Esraa Abdel Fattah, a quite inexperienced activist, decided
to support a strike in a textile factory by launching a Facebook group that rap-
idly gained tens of thousands supporters among the mainly young Egyptian
members of this social network, who thus far had appeared to be busier with the
more futile applications available on it rather than with mobilizing people under
a common political banner. A feedback effect was induced among the most mili-
tant component of the internet activist and blogger community, who eagerly
joined the initiative. Good last, a broad coalition of oppositional groups and par-
ties cutting through the leftist-secular/Islamist divide jumped on the wagon and
on the key day, April 6, 2008, declared their support for the initiative. Going
much beyond the original intent, the mobilization on that day targeted the cor-
ruption of the regime and the deteriorating economic conditions of the vast ma-
jority of the Egyptian population. Not surprisingly, in the immediate aftermath
of the protest day the girl was arrested and the official press accused Facebook of
harboring an anti-national conspiracy. Nonetheless, the 6th of April group was to
become a crucial symbolic rallying point of all oppositional initiatives well into the
2011 revolution.
That the ‘street’ could not be conquered by the activities of social networks
alone was confirmed the following year in the Iranian case, with the unsuccessful
protests that followed the contested presidential elections of June 2009. Yet in
Egypt the balance was turned around in the mobilization that followed the bru-
tal murder of Khaled Said which occurred in Alexandria on June 6, 2010, at the
hands of two members of the Egyptian security forces. The event triggered off
an unprecedented momentum of popular mobilization especially among the
youth, the biggest and best covered one prior to the ‘Arab Spring’. Khaled Said
was a computer programmer who, on an early summer day, was working on the
second floor of an internet café in his home neighborhood in Alexandria. Two
officers from the Sidi Gaber police station entered the premises and brutally beat
him to death, also by knocking his body against the stairs of the building while
he was pushed outside to their car. Apparently he was killed for having posted
on internet sensitive footage showing those officers intent on sharing the booty
from a drug seizure.
After the death of what soon became the single most famous young šah†d of
the internet era in Egypt, his martyrized face was adopted as a profile picture by
a growing number of Facebook members. Numerous testimonies were collected
on various websites and blogs, which added to and magnified the impact of the
uninterrupted flow of denunciations of the previous years against the brutal ac-
tions of police and security forces. Now the circle between the web and the
‘street’ was finally about to close. Several public events were convened in various
10 ARMANDO SALVATORE

Egyptian cities, where long lines of young men and women, standing at a dis-
tance of several meters from each other (so as not to constitute a ‘gathering’ un-
der the Egyptian emergency law), lined up along the banks of the Nile or the
Mediterranean, in order to remember Khaled and his brutal murder, by simply
taking with them and reading a book of their choice. Mostly dressed in black, as
documented by a number of videos uploaded on internet, some took with them
a Koran, other many other books. Visibly girls with headscarf intermingled with
unveiled ones. It was an impressive demonstration of transversal solidarity and
common resistance.

New actors, fresh strategies

The effectiveness of the protest, despite numerous arrests, led Mona Eltahawy (a
journalist and activist of Egyptian origin writing from the US, who was on her
way to become a global spokesperson of the rebellion of the Arab youth against
their corrupt and violent regimes), to publish on August 7, 2010 an article in the
Washington Post in which she proclaimed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter
had become the new means of manifestation of political protest in the Arab
world. Eltahawy attacked those critics who dubbed such media platforms as
mere outlets for venting out the frustrations of young people in those countries.
She was sanguine in seeing in such dismissive criticism no more than the latest
version of an orientalist and ultimately racist image of ‘apathetic’ Arab masses, as
ever at the mercy of regimes that, while clearly anachronistic in terms of global
standards of democracy and governance, were considered as aligned with the
purportedly backward cultures of the majority of their populations. She stressed
that the silent yet massive protests against the brutal murder of Khaled Said
proved exactly the opposite trend, namely that the web activists were finally
able, after many of them had been fighting hopeless struggles and paying a high
price in blood, to conquer real public space (Eltahawi 2010).
At this juncture another character took possession of the scene, soon des-
tined to become one of the main personalities of the revolution of January 25,
2011. Wael Ghonim, a thirty year old computer engineer, since January 2010
head of the marketing division for Google Middle East and North Africa (and
therefore a young rich professional), in the wake of the June 2010 events moved
rapidly towards becoming one of the most popular web activists in Egypt while
working from his home in Dubai. After the assassination of Khaled Said he
launched a blog and a twin Facebook page, each with a double name: El Shaheed
(‘the martyr’), and We are all Khaled Said/kullun… ³…lid Sa¼†d.This page gath-
ered evidence on assassinations and other violence and abuses perpetrated by se-
curity forces (as well as protests against them), and it did so also by aggregating
pre-existing materials found on scattered blogs. Wael Ghonim returned to Egypt
to participate in the mounting protests during the month of January 2011 with
the excuse to take a vacation from his work for Google in Dubai. He was among
the several dozens of web activists that the Egyptian security forces arrested in
the night between January 27 and 28, on the eve of the ‘Friday of rage’ in which
the protest swept through the streets of Egyptian urban centers and the security
 BEFORE (AND AFTER) THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ 11

forces killed hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young people. Detained for 11

days at an undisclosed location, in a subsequent interview after his release he
stated that the January 25 revolution was developing as Wikipedia, since each
participant contributed content, while the names of the contributors remained
unknown. For this reason he dubbed it ‘Revolution 2.0’. He concluded by
claiming not to be a hero, for the simple reason that no one can be the hero of a
similar revolution.
Such statements, which he made in the 60 Minutes TV show with Harry
Smith (see the article of Hofheinz in this volume), followed a quite dramatic in-
terview on a popular private Egyptian satellite TV channel (Dream TV): such
appearances reveal a singular combination of intellectual ingenuousness and po-
litical ingenuity by a fine knower of the technical, rather than political potential
of social media who happened to be, almost in spite of himself, a revolutionary
activist. No surprise that his role in the revolution was quickly wrapped in a
thick curtain of conspiracy theory, this time spun less by Egyptian authorities
than among global media scholars and activists. The event, the protagonist and
the responses speak new meaning to established patterns of representing intellec-
tual authority in the region. This is reflected by the way the probably most fa-
mous (self-appointed or otherwise) speaker for ‘European Muslims’ whom the
University of Oxford in 2009 called to a chair endowed by media-savvy Qatari
institutions, Tariq Ramadan, reacted to the event. Whether he was thinking of
Wael Ghonim or not, in a key-note speech he gave at the American University
of Beirut in early April 2011 Ramadan espoused the thesis that the revolution
had been steered by social media manipulated from outside Egypt. One was in-
evitably reminded of the allegations, during the days of the uprising in Egypt, of
former head of intelligence and, for just a few days, vice-president Omar Sulay-
man, who stated that ‘foreign elements’ were behind the revolt: a weak yet famil-
iar pattern of official propaganda variably staged, in the following weeks and
months, by the rulers of such countries like Libya and Syria.
Yet apart from the inevitable focus on (and initial puzzle with) the ‘Arab
Spring’ and the much too easy rhetoric on the ‘Revolution 2.0’, the longer se-
quence of events shows that in just two years, between April 6, 2008 and June 6,
2010, on the hard ground of politics occurred what my Egyptian colleagues and
I could neither predict nor hope for in December 2007: virtual and public
spaces came into a mutual synergy and produced a formidable potential for mo-
bilizing a broad variety of actors; a mobilization that, though costing a certain
loss in terms of the kind of ‘political subjectivity’ that was typical of earlier revo-
lutions of the modern and contemporary eras (Salvatore 2011b), seems to fulfill
in unexpected ways the promises the public sphere (Salvatore 2007). The imme-
diate sparks of revolution, namely socio-economic grievances, are certainly not to
be associated with the web, but the preparatory work and the ability to transform
a rather passive connectedness into active mobilization are the outcome of a cu-
mulative activity in which no single activist can easily exercise a formal leader-
ship. This phenomenon also concerns those spheres where intense blogging has
12 ARMANDO SALVATORE

not (or not yet) been matched by revolutionary outbursts, as shown by the con-
tributions of Maha Taki and Sarah Jurkiewicz in this volume.
From the raw language and violence-exposing footage of the blogosphere run
by enthusiastic activists and targeting the crimes of the security forces (well doc-
umented by the contribution of Charles Hirschkind in this volume) to the more
subdued yet also ritualized and often carnivalesque atmosphere of Facebook (Ra-
himi 2011), creating connectivity between young people whose participatory ac-
tivism is rather latent, a new public sphere with an unexpected revolutionary po-
tential has emerged to world attention and has become the epicenter of a new
internationalism. An important collateral effect in the short term and on the
global level has been a growing solidarity between the young activists of the ‘Ar-
ab Spring’ and several young scholars around the world who have voiced and
echoed worldwide the protest slogans in the decisive days of the revolution, dur-
ing which access to the internet had been blocked by the Egyptian regime. This
has been a living example of ‘critical networking’, now providing a precious crit-
ical window to area studies and Islamic studies (Chambers 2011).

References
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litical Transformations”, paper presented to the workshop Between Everyday
Life and Political Revolution: The Social Web in the Middle East, Naples, 21
March.
Eltahawy, M. (2010) “In Egypt, Twitter Trumps Torture”, Washington Post, 7
August, p. A13
Manoukian, S. (2010) “Where Is This Place? Crowds, Audio-vision, and Poetry
in Postelection Iran”, Public Culture, 22, 2, p. 237-263.
Onodera, H. (2011) “Raise Your Head High, You’re an Egyptian! Youth, Politics,
and Citizen Journalism in Egypt”, Sociologica, 5, 3.
Rahimi, B. (2011) “Facebook Iran: The Carnivalesque Politics of Online Social
Networking”, Sociologica, 5, 3.
Salvatore, A. (2007) The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam,
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––– (2011a) “Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal
Connectedness”, Third World Quarterly, 32, 5, p. 807-825.
––– (2011b) “The Elusive Subject of Revolution”, The Immanent Frame, 16
February (available online at http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/16/the-elusive-
subject-of-revolution/).