Well, it's been a crazy few days. There I was last Tuesday, safely esconced in rural Middle Egypt, when the American institutions sponsoring our fieldwork overreacted to events in Cairo, many miles (and a political culture) away, compelling us to evacuate on Thursday. Following a 50+ hour trek from Egypt back home, and having now attempted over the weekend to digest some of the MSM "reporting" and "analysis" (I am throwing up a little ascribing such lofty words to the ignorant spin proferred by our media outlets), I feel the need to scribble some preliminary thoughts on my curtailed excursion to Egypt and on a few aspects of the events in Egypt which have not, in my opinion, been adequately addressed.
And for any of you who may have been transiting through airports on Thursday or Friday and noticed an ill-kempt "traveler" staring angrily at the CNN monitors or reading the IHT and muttering to himself, perhaps inappropriately loudly, please accept my apologies for any discomfort I may have instilled...
I arrived in Egypt, specifically in Cairo, on Friday 14 January as a member of a foreign mission embarking on a planned six-week season of fieldwork. The first sign that all was not "as normal"--and I've been working and living in Egypt off-and-on since 1997--was the cordon of police and military security around the Tunisian Embassy on Zamalek, a forceful authoritarian statement clearly intended to forestall the ability of Cairenes to express sympathy with the protests in Tunisia, on the day on which Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. Elsewhere in Cairo, however, the political and security situation felt little different than in previous years. Once we departed Cairo for rural Middle Egypt on 17 January, any notion that this season of fieldwork would be impacted by extraordinary political events quickly evaporated as we eased ourselves back into familiar, if Draconian, security arrangements of the Egyptian police-state.
Word of self-immolations in Alexandria and Cairo came across our collective radar between 18 January and 20 January. This was, I'll admit, the first gut-check "uh-oh" moment for me personally as I contemplated my position as a member of a foreign mission in Egypt in the midst of potential political upheavals. To the extent that such acts of protest were limited to the major urban centers of the north, and were not provoking similar protests in the cities of Middle Egypt (the territory along the Nile roughly from Beni Suef in the north to Luxor in the south), our own situation nevertheless remained stable. Indeed, for reasons which I will attempt to articulate below, the relative political stability of Middle Egypt is a principal reason in my own mind for my pessimism regarding the long-term success of the "revolution" as represented by the protesters in Tahrir.
When the protesters took to Tahrir in significant numbers beginning on 25 January, on National Police Day, the demographic contours of the protest were clear. This was, and remains, an expression of political dissent within a fairly narrow stratum of Egyptian society: young, urban and educated members of an aspiring middle class for whom the perennial Egyptian administrative promise of "total employment" was a demonstrable sham. In no way should my comments be taken to minimize their grievances, but the interests of the protesters in Tahrir coincide only very loosely with the interests of the majority of Egyptians who exist outside of that restricted demographic.
Wednesday 26 January was the day on which we began intermittently to lose access to the Internet and to mobile-phone service. Information continued to flow, however, via Egyptian newspapers and BBC Radio. Again, in spite of the violence surrounding protests in Alexandria and Cairo, and in the Sinai (rooted, in my opinion, in issues dissimilar to those in the major urban centers), Middle Egypt remained relatively undisturbed.
Mubarak's speech to the nation on Friday 28 January was, in my mind, the potential flashpoint for altering our own security situation. His speech was, in a word, "slick." The concessions he offered in that speech, and in his subsequent decisions, effectively exposed the rifts between the interests represented by the protesters in Tahrir on the one hand, and the interests of the much larger mass of Egyptians for whom the promise that the detested heir-apparent Gamal Mubarak not seek the presidency, and the hinted-at reevaluation of the even more despised "State of Emergency" in effect since 1981 were broadly sufficient to entertain a Mubarak administration through the elections scheduled for September 2011.
To a word, I stand by my assessment of the situation in Egypt, penned in my journal on 30 January:
Cairo is one thing, and I wouldn't go anywhere near Cairo right now; Middle Egypt is something else entirely, to a high degree because there is no emergent middle class here, and this is quite clearly a middle-class revolt. The only conditions which I see which would be problematic enough for us to hightail it to an airport would be if this drags on long enough that the fundamentalist groups, who thus far are not part of the protests / riots, are given space to join in and redefine the issues, which could then include the lower-class rural populations.
On Tuesday 1 February, we received word that the institutions sponsoring our fieldwork were, under the influence of their perception of events in Cairo rather than a realistic assessment of the actual situation in the rest of the country, compelling us to evacuate. We left Egypt late on Thursday 3 February.
Within Egypt broadly, anti-governmental sentiment is tied most explicitly to two issues: first, the culture of corruption at the highest levels which has concentrated wealth within the hands of a small number of elites, typified by Gamal Mubarak and the Mubarak real-estate empire; second, the Draconian "State of Emergency" in effect since 1981 within which a culture of semi-official corruption has emerged in the form of bribery to secure limited freedom of movement within the apparatus of the police-state. As I noted above, by promising to make concessions on these two points of contention, effectively appeasing the mass of the Egyptian population, Mubarak has likely secured his administration's survival through the September 2011 elections. "Slick," indeed...
The more explicitly class-based and age-cohort-based interests of the Tahrir protesters are in my opinion unlikely to gain wide traction among the Egyptian population outside of the aspiring middle class in Cairo and Alexandria. Paradoxical as it may sound, my lack of concern for personal safety while in Middle Egypt, the traditional epicenter of broad-based Egyptian protests and religious conservatism, suggests to me that the "revolution" represented by the youthful protesters in Tahrir will not result in a fundamental transformation of Egyptian politics or society, but rather in a gradual easement of the strictures upon personal freedoms sufficient to appease the greatest percentage of the Egyptian population. A pessimistic assessment, no doubt, but there it is...