2. Martyrs and Youth: Notes on Egypt after 25 January 2011 Suman Gupta, The Open University UK (Suman.Gupta@open.ac.

uk) October 2013 After Mohamed Bouazizi, in Egypt After Mohamed Bouazizi died by self-immolation and became officially a martyr shahid others followed his example, but most didnt quite make it to recognition as martyrs. Reportedly, in 2011 over a hundred compatriots of Bouazizi made or attempted to make similar gestures. More immediately after Bouazizis death on 4 January 2011, selfimmolation as a way of registering political protest spread beyond Tunisia. Between 12 and 25 January 2011 fourteen persons set themselves on fire in different public spaces in Algeria, and twelve in Egypt. Attempted or successful self-immolations were also reported from Mauritania, Syria, Morocco, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Eventually such incidents spread to financial-crisis-ridden Europe: in September 2011 Apostolos Polyzonis set himself on fire in Greece (and Dimitris Christoulos shot himself publicly in April 2012); in February-March 2013 six persons did the same in Bulgaria. Many of these were ordinary individuals expressing discontent, but their ordinary individuality failed to become collectivised in the way Bouazizis had, let alone formally consecrated as martyrdom. They were all immediately dubbed copy-cat suicides in the news media, and all were seen as would-be Bouazizis. Their suicides actually redounded to Bouazizis credit and mainly served to confirm his status as shahid. The rest became shadows of Bouazizi, and Bouazizi ever-more emphatically shahid. To seal the diminishing returns of self-immolation as protest after Bouazizi, such suicides in Egypt (mainly in Cairo and Alexandria) up to 25 January 2011 flowed into something momentous that would effectively wipe those gestures away. The so-called Revolution of 25 January 2011 replaced Bouazizis kind of martyr-making with a somewhat different sort of martyr-making. The ordinary individual as shahid was overtaken and erased by the collectivised revolutionary youth who died as shuhada. In the image of Khaled Said and the slogan We are all Khaled Said there was already a precursor for these shuhada in Egypt, pre-dating Bouazizis gesture. Khaled Said was a 28 year old who was beaten to death by plainclothes policemen outside a cybercaf on 10 June 2010. He was an avid Facebook networker, and his death inspired the Facebook movement We are all Khaled Said, moderated by Wael Ghonim. Ghonim, it turned out (mainly through his book

Revolution 2.01, 2012, detailing his own central role in everything), was a Google executive in Dubai when he coordinated the We are all Khalid Said network and the 25 January protests before being detained. These details are now well-ensconced in received narratives of how this Egyptian revolution was spurred by the youth (shabab) generally, and especially youth using social networking services like Facebook (shabab al-Facebook, the Arabic phrase which appeared often in English-language accounts as a marker of authentic insider knowledge). For a brief period in January 2011 the martyr discourses surrounding Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Said seemed to resonate with each other. In this period, the Tunisian uprising appeared to flow into a burgeoning Egyptian effervescence, marked immediately by the self-immolators in Egypt. But January 2011 was also a period of many distractions in Egypt, and the self-immolators were only small bubbles in the effervescence. The middleclass youth in different politically active (often virtual) networks, later to claim and be allocated the impetus for ousting Hosni Mubaraks regime, were also relatively minor undercurrents in the effervescence of the time. The self-immolations were overshadowed even as they occurred by numerous small-scale and visible collective protests by factory workers and office workers. 2011 had dawned in Egypt with the New Years Day bombing of Saint Mark and Pope Peter Church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. Much of January 2011 was absorbed by soul-searching about the religious schisms thus revealed, by the botched-up investigation that followed, and by gestures of inter-faith solidarity. The speed with which the protests of 25 January were organised is outlined is Wael Ghonims book. At the time, it appeared that information about the planned protests started circulating on internet forums around 19 January (for instance, Zeinab blogged about it that day on her Egyptian Chronicles site) and made the news media around 21 January. In the news it was seen as inspired by events in Tunisia, and much of the reportage was about how some opposition alignments were supporting it (April 6 Youth Movement, Youth for Justice and Freedom, Kefaya, National Association for Change, Public Front for Peaceful Change, El-Baradei Public Campaign, El-Ghad and the Democratic Front parties), and how others (including the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Wafd and Al-Tagammu parties) were undecided or awaiting developments. The participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 25 January 2011 protests remained unclear till the protests started, and later, of course, the protests were embraced enthusiastically by the Brotherhood. To come back to my point: it was a bubbling month, a blur of various ambiguous signals and gestures. In the timid and mostly hidden undercurrents
1

Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012).

where discussions of regime-change similar to Tunisias were unfolding, resonances between Mohamed Bouazizis kind of martyrdom and Khaled Saids kind might have seemed obvious. Nevertheless, even then the resonance was inevitably undercut by the differences of the two kinds of witnessing in question, and the two modes of death-dealing involved. After 11 February, when Mubarak resigned, the self-immolators emulation of shahid Bouazizi was put aside in favour of the growing presence and registering of Egypts youthful revolutionary shuhada, along lines where the image of Khaled Said was much more significantly a precursor than that of Mohamed Bouazizi. This essay is about the political implications of putting the youthful Egyptian shuhada of the so-called 25 January 2011 Revolution centre-stage, as an erasing counterpoint to Bouazizi and other subsequent self-immolators. The associated ways in which the socalled revolutionary Egyptian shabab of 25 January were positioned and perceived through 2011-2012 are also examined. The bearing of those constructions of shuhada and shabab on the coup dtat of 3 July 2013 and its immediate aftermath are taken up in the final section. Shuhada and Shabab after 25 January 2011 In terms of Arabic usage, there is a distinction that should be made here between shahid within the realm of ordinary lives and tragic deaths (of life cut short unexpectedly) and the revolutionary and national shahid who become embodiments of ideological causes and whose deaths regarded as acts of commitment. According to a well-known clarification in the Hadith (Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, passage 83): Five are regarded as martyrs: They are those who die because of plague, abdominal disease, drowning or a falling building etc., and the martyrs in Allah's Cause. In a loose way, the former groupings are shahid in the way of blameless lives and premature deaths while the latter are shahid for a cause and as a matter of commitment, apt to become a revolutionary shahid in formal narratives. The latter is where the contemporary dominant nuances of martyr (e.g. in English) merge with shahid, and it is to this notion of the revolutionary shahid that the following observations are addressed. Sahih Bukhari put considerably stronger emphasis on the latter than the former sense. But it is worth noting that the former sense continues to have a strong purchase in modern Arabic: the witnessing (al-shahad) that the shahid bring could be in testifying to any wound or any conflict for Allah or for people generally from the position of being believers or faithful which is the same as being just or righteous (how narrowly or broadly being a believer, and thus being just, is understood depends on interpretations of, for instance, Sura 3 Ali Imran, verse 140, of the Quran).
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The revolutionary shahid status that Bouazizi gradually acquired suppressed the generality of his down-to-earth experiences and frustration before suicide, the drift of his erasure and dispersal among numerous anonymous ordinary people after suicide (the crowd), and fitted the act into the ritualistic and formalized narratives of extraordinary life and heroic death in defence of a cause. That is, a singular persons heroic death to uphold his commitments. To some extent that could be read as a tactic to avert any opprobrium about committing suicide. At any rate, revolutionary martyr narratives captured and fixed Bouazizi. Halverson, Ruston and Tretheweys 2013 paper2 discusses the precedent narrative structures of such martyr stories (from Islamic, Coptic and secular traditions), and manner in which both Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Said were accommodated amidst them. The paper demonstrates that both of-the-moment revolutionary shuhada were dealt with similarly in terms of inherited martyr-making narratives, and are similarly illustrative of how received martyr-making rhetoric is applied. Nevertheless, as revolutionary shuhada, the juxtaposition of Bouazizi and Said is as indicative in terms of the differences between the two as the similarities. The testimonies of their lives, and particularly their deaths, signify differently. Said lived in a middle-class suburb, was computer-literate and connected to the world (a wider virtual world than Egypt), and wasnt especially concerned with earning a livelihood; Bouazizi was of the working class, knew want, and was a harassed breadwinner for his family. Where ordinariness (as in that common phrase the mass of ordinary people) evokes ground-level populations, acted-upon and dominated, Bouazizi was more likely to be regarded as such across a wider spectrum of social classes than Said. Bouazizis death by self-immolation accentuated that ordinariness, both as an act of defiance and of victimization. Saids death by other hands foregrounded mainly the culmination of passive victimization and the pervasiveness of oppression. Oppression, it seemed, took him despite his middleclass background and in a middle-class neighbourhood in Alexandria, so that his neighbour Amro Ali (who wrote influential articles on Said) observed: It was not just the manner of Khaleds death that had disturbed me, but the deep reach of President Hosni Mubaraks repressive police state into a neighborhood where I had grown up and idealized as a beacon of harmony. Up until then, I naively thought that such things happened to other people, in the slums, Islamist strongholds, in prisons, on

Jeffrey R. Halverson, Scott W. Ruston, and Angela Trethewey, Mediated Martyrs of the Arab Spring: New Media, Civil Religion, and Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt. Journal of Communication 63 (2013), 312-332.

the news, Alexandrias rural outskirts, or any other area. My area became that other area.3 This much Said shared with Bouazizi: again in Amro Alis words, the absence of any obvious ideological bent in his background enabled many to claim ownership of Khaled as their everyday Egyptian. Between the ground level of working-class ordinary people and the everydayness of the middle-class Internet citizens there is a narrow area of overlap, and both Bouazizi and Said fell within that overlap. This is the overlapping area where individual convictions are neither owned nor ascribable. Bouazizis and Saids deaths signified differently, but they shared their immediate emptiness of ideological commitments and openness to multiple ascriptions. They didnt get fitted into revolutionary shahid narratives because they preferred death to compromising their commitments; they were fitted thus because they suffered from injustice. Bouazizi protested against injustice within the limits of his own helpless ordinariness, and Said succumbed to injustice amidst the precincts of his everyday security. Neither explicitly championed any broader cause or ideological vision, but that lack of explicit commitment meant that they could be recruited to exemplify all sorts of causes and visions whereby injustice can be articulated, however contrarily and contradictorily recruited as revolutionary martyrs, as instruments of mobilizing protest. The revolutionary martyrdom that can be conferred because of a lack of explicit commitments is a peculiar sort of revolutionary martyrdom. But the different significances of Bouazizis and Saids deaths cannot really be elided. If the mechanics and narratives of martyr-making are disregarded, Bouazizis suicidal gesture putatively but forcefully connects this ordinary individual with the protesting crowds in his wake. That connection is there to be apprehended, at odds with the revolutionary martyrmaking which tends to diminish the connection. Saids death which is not a gesture matters only insofar as revolutionary martyr-making follows. In contemplating Saids death the mechanics of martyr-making cannot be disregarded; it is all that is there to fill Saids killing with significance. Saids is an essentialized case of the martyrdom that is conferred because of the shahids lack of explicit commitments, because such commitments can be attributed from the outside to make sense of this shahids suffering. Said is this kind of revolutionary martyr and little more. Bouazizi could be (has been) conferred that kind of revolutionary martyrdom too; but if one refuses such conferment, he is actually something
3

Amro Ali, Saeeds of Revolution: De-Mythologizing Khaled Saeed, Jadaliyya 5 June 2012, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5845/saeeds-of-revolution_demythologizing-khaled-saeed

more. He is then an ordinary individual whose defiant death connected immediately with protesting crowds, because that defiance was underscored by his ordinary life -- which is much like the ordinary lives that agglomerate in the extraordinary protesting crowd. To make a revolutionary martyr of Bouazizi is an act of bad faith. It countermands that potency of his suicide as an ordinary person. To make a martyr of Said is not an act of bad faith: this is itself the free-play that asserts something memorable against the violent and unjust erasure of a human being, the overbearing attempt to flick him away from memory. The gesture here is in the revolutionary martyr-making, not in what happened to Said itself but in the martyr-making possibilities that followed. Wael Ghonims 2012 account of building the We are all Khaled Said Facebook network is an eloquent testament to the autonomous process of martyr-making in itself. Ghonims calculations were all about the mechanics of the networking medium itself, about the mores of successful publicity and advertising, drawing the line of political tactfulness or hitting a moralistic apolitical stance that enables maximum inclusion the maximum number of hits, the clearest line of consensus. The image of Khaled Said, and the spare details of his death, served that series of media- and publicity-centred calculations because they were minimal enough not to interfere with most calculations. Saids death was usefully empty of explicit commitment, and thus accommodative of Ghonims strategies. Unsurprisingly, Saids slow posthumous recuperation as a revolutionary martyr was measured and successful. But it remains difficult to unpack and disaggregate the process clearly. The character of such martyr-making is obscured by the very thickness of its success. The thinness of the implicit significance of his murder is padded by a superfluity of explicitly thick descriptions brought to bear retrospectively. The thickness packs trivialities from all directions, whether in a reverential and sentimental register (the embodiment of dissatisfied youth, global netizen, Egypts future in chains, youthful vitality itself) or in irreverent and conservative dismissal (was he a womanizer? did he indulge in drug abuse? did he cohort with anti-social elements?). The rationale of such revolutionary martyr-making is perhaps more obvious where there are fewer descriptions and the narrative is spare and sparing, where the martyr-making gesture has been similar but hasnt stuck to an individual, where martyrdom has been transient for the individual. Such examples are naturally difficult to pin down and yet potentially numerous and I pick up one below. In the eighteen days of protests leading to the ousting of Mubarak 846 persons were killed, according to the 19 April 2011 Report of the Fact-Finding National Commission about the 25 January Revolution. They were all officially declared shahid, with compensation due
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to all the shuhadas families, by Mohamed Morsi on being elected President in June 2012. Others were added to the tally of revolutionary martyrs thereafter. Legal battles and protests to get justice for those killed occupied numerous pages of broadsheets prior to and during Morsis year in office. Each anniversary of 25 January has been marked by public memorializations of the revolutionary shuhada; their images proliferated in numerous publications, as reliquary objects, on walls, in songs and poetry, and so on. The plethora of revolutionary shuhada appeared to be individually marked and fixed in records, traced diligently by historians and archivists; but actually the collective plethora washed over discrete individualities individual lives and deaths merged into a blurred face of collectivized revolutionary martyrdom. Collective martyr-making naturally leaves little space for checking commitments and assessing particular gestures, and nor do the nuances of commitments and gestures matter any longer. In this formalized conferment of collective revolutionary martyrdom, it is the confirmation of new solidarities that is emphasised they are made martyrs in the name of such solidarities (in the name of nation, freedom, democracy, the oppressed, etc.). These solidarities then, variously, become a test for the legitimacy of emerging state alignments. This process has been replicated in every revolution (religious, nationalist, socialist) that has led to the formation of a new state order. Such collective revolutionary martyrs continue to exist as long as the legitimacy of that state is referred to their moral weight. Insofar as the individuals who feature within collective martyrmaking go, they are sustained by descriptions so thin that these are hardly visible; their individualities are crowded into oblivion by collective martyr-making. The 846 Egyptian revolutionary shuhada thus became a collective expression of the Khaled Said kind of martyrdom, replicating and multiplying it. Their deaths did not redound to the credit of Said in the way that subsequent self-immolations by protesters redounded to Bouazizis credit, emphasising his individual revolutionary shahid status at their expense. Rather, the 25 January 2011 Revolution shuhada all did become Khalid Saids of sorts, in a collective way, open to thick strategic resignifications and ascriptions of commitment-free individuality en masse. As individuals they thinned into oblivion beside the public- and media-savvy thickness of the individual name and portrait of Khaled Said; as a collective they became as thickly connotative in public and media discourses as the individual image and name of Khaled Said. The 25 January 2011 Revolution shuhada and the 10 June 2010 shahid Khalid Said were subjected to a similar mechanics of martyr-making These shuhada too were so because their lives and deaths had been emptied of specific commitments and particular gestures -- but collectively emptied. Individually they might have held
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commitments to socialist transformation, trade union solidarity, neo-liberal minimal government, national resurgence, the Islamist ummah or the City of God, or whatever, or perhaps no particular commitment at all. But none were declared martyrs for holding those commitments and championing them. They were all fitted to the collective commitment which could be attributed to the protesting crowds from 25 January 2011 onwards by an emerging order, as a consensual national memory and state-regulated form. That is another way of saying that all the individual lives and deaths in question were emptied of their commitments, or even their lack of commitments, rather like Khaled Said. The rationale of such revolutionary martyr-making (wherein the martyrs lack of explicit commitments is filled from without) is perhaps clearest in the initial phase of being constructed. At this initial phase, sometimes, individuals flicker and make transient appearances as martyrs before being paradoxically almost immediately forgotten and relegated to the collective of martyrs. Contemplating such brief appearances of individuals in the initial phase of collective martyr-making reveals much about the raison dtre of and contextual interests that are vested in that process. So, consider the case of such a transient individual martyr, Mohamed Ramadan. Three days after the 25 January protests, the scale and scope of the movement widened after Friday prayers on 28 January. On that day police snipers shot dead two young men in Alexandria. They became two of the 846 revolutionary martyrs who died in that period. A memorializing obituary about one of them appeared in the Egypt Independent (the English version of Al-Masry Al-Youm) on 15 March 2011, well before the revolutionary shuhada could be accounted with any degree of certainty -- but presciently pointing in their direction. It read as follows:
Fallen faces of the uprising: Mohamed Ramadan Mohamed Ramadan, 16-years old, enjoyed playing soccer like many boys his age. The morning of 28 January, the so-called Friday of Anger, was the last time he would play. The Alexandria district of Abo Qeer was where a police officer killed him and his friend Karim while the boys waited together in the local mosque watching the pro-democracy protests pass by. According to Mohamed's father, a retired navy officer named Ramadan Ahmed Abdo, Mohamed went out with Karim on Friday to play soccer. When protesters marched past, the boys went into the mosque, thinking they would be protected. As they watched the protests, witnesses say they saw a sniper on top of a building shoot Karim in the stomach. Mohamed bent over to look at his friend and was shot in the head. Karim died instantly and Mohamed died on 3 February in hospital.

Abdo said witnesses in the neighborhood know the sniper by name, and he is currently under investigation. Mohamed was not keen on school, saying education was useless since he wouldnt be able to get a job anyway. He had a Facebook account and had many friends from other countries, his father said. Mohamed was never into politics. He was a regular boy with hobbies and curiosity, according to his father. He is, however, one of the many whose deaths changed history. 4

Mohamed Ramadans murder naturally had the afterlife that the revolutionary shuhada of the co-called 25 January Revolution in Egypt had. He was named, and his image appended (as alongside the above article), on numerous shuhada lists on websites and archival documents. Many had been killed in similar circumstances in Alexandria and other cities on 28 January (in that period 96 died and 490 were injured in Alexandria alone). Mohameds father Ramadan Ahmed, like numerous other parents, entered the long quest for justice. He voted for Mohamed Morsi in the elections, and on one occasion met the president and gave him a picture of his dead son. On 19 January 2013 Alexandrias former security director Mohamed Ibrahim and five other police officers were brought for trial to the Alexandria courthouse. Ramadan Ahmed was interviewed on that occasion and expressed doubt about the possibility of getting justice; he felt the judiciary and security forces continued with loyalties and corrupt practices formed under the Mubarak regime. Others evidently felt so too. Protests broke out at the courthouse, clashes followed and riot police used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Many were arrested, and the trial was adjourned. On 21 January several activists and lawyers of Alexandria went to the Manshiya Prosecutors office to enquire after the whereabouts of those detained. One of the activists, Hassan Mostafa, was arrested following an altercation with the prosecutor later Amnesty was to take up his case. The trial of the policemen resumed on 19 March, and again scuffles broke out between the victims families and police. On 20 March the trial was adjourned indefinitely. The Egypt Independent account quoted above is a spare and transient narrative of martyr-making which focuses on one of the faces of the many revolutionary martyrs, a moment in which the rationale of martyr-making becomes clear as if hit by a scanning spotlight. It occurs understandably before the revolutionary martyrs are formally collectivized in martyr-making discourse, and it gestures towards the direction of that collectivization and seems on the threshold thereof. The focus on Mohamed Ramadan, the selective information
4

http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/fallen-faces-uprising-mohamed-ramadan

about him and his killing given, seem revealing in retrospect. It seems relevant that Mohamed is chosen because he was not in the protest, but outside it a bystander who actually retreated from it towards a mosque. The observation that he was never into politics accentuates that distance; Ramadan is foregrounded because of his lack of connection with the protests, because there could be no question of his being culpable in any way, of owning any sort of cause or commitment. And yet, this very absence of culpability and political incognizance becomes, by the highlighting of it, the politics of this Revolution a confirmation for the need of the protest that he is outside of. His martyrdom is in that paradox of political innocence and extrinsic signification of political resonance. That paradox plays out in other ways. His disinterest in studies and interest in pleasure and play seem to become symptomatic of youthful hopelessness (unlikely to get a job). Even as he is described drawing back from the protest, this narrative establishes lines of connection with the protesters with the foregrounded agents of the 25 January revolutionary. He was young like the youth (the shabab) who were regarded as the backbone of the protests; he had a Facebook account and friends from other countries, like the shabab al-Facebook who had ostensibly started the protests. He wasnt in the protest, but in a way there were numerous half-suggested lines of connection with those who most ostensibly were instrumental for these protests. The narrativizing of Mohamed Ramadans murder is obviously associated -- more by a nod than directly, but certainly theres the nod with the martyr-making of Khalid Said. However, Mohamed Ramadan was killed within the revolutionary moment, amidst a melee of protest and death-dealing he was plucked out at this narrativizing juncture, but only to sink into collective martyr-making in a way that Khalid Said wont and didnt. Nevertheless, he was plucked out, all the more trenchantly because his fellow victim, shot dead by the same killer the moment before him at the same spot, was not his friend Karim. As firmly as Mohamed Ramadin is foregrounded, Karim is pushed firmly into the background in this narrative. He is there, but only as Mohameds friend, the shadowy sidekick. Not even his full name is given; judging from lists of shuhada produced much later, perhaps this was Karim Mohamed, 15 years old, who is recorded as shot dead on 28 January in Alexandria. The curious may ponder the logic of foregrounding and neglect, and each question and hypothesis that can be posed nudges towards sharpening the rationale of transient individual to collective martyr-making. Was Karim not foregrounded as Mohamed Ramadan was because he died instantly, and Mohamed took a few days, i.e. there is more putative suffering involved, and therefore more affective possibilities? Was it perhaps because Karims guardians didnt wish to be in the public gaze? Did Karim come from a background that is less amenable for this kind of
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martyr-making narrative (perhaps a different class, a different sort of family)? That Mohamed Ramadans father is a retired naval officer may have something to do with the choice: not only was Mohamed blameless, his father could be associated with the loyalty to country and state that military persons sometimes are. The point I am getting at is that the rationale of martyr-making doesnt care about who Mohamed Ramadan really was (he was a regular boy, like the everyday Egyptian or the ordinary individual, apolitical and without explicit commitments), but how well he fits the necessary and expedient narrative of martyr-making. The rationale of martyr-making is invested in the choices made, the inflections given, the associations suggested, and so on of the quoted narrative. And the culmination of the martyr-making, the conferment of martydom, is performed by narration. The narrative takes upon itself the declaration of Mohamed Ramadan as revolutionary shahid in the last sentence; that eloquent however there means that the narrative (generously and boldly, against all opposition and doubt) takes responsibility for it. There is a further little twist in this narrative construction: it is in English, though put out from a media source based in Egypt and rooted in Arabic. Most Egyptian Independent articles were translated or adapted from the Arabic language stories of Al-Masry Al-Youm. This appears not to be available in Arabic. Perhaps it was written in English for a selective audience in Egypt (around 35% of the population were estimated as speaking English in 2011) and the Arabophone world, and more pertinently for a wider audience beyond. The rationale of martyr-making involved here the conferment of revolutionary shahid status where explicit commitments are not attributable does not necessarily fit the conventional (Islamic, Coptic, secular) shahid hagiography that Halverson, Ruston and Tretheweys (2013) paper laid out. This is a distinctive sort of rationale. It extends strands and slippages from Mohamed Bouazizi and Khalid Said to the momentary focus on Mohamed Ramadin (glossing over Karim) and towards the collective shuhada of the 25 January revolution in Egypt in a distinctive and yet consistent way. A melancholy shadow is cast over the whole business by this process. To me this seems a larger shadow than simply of grief at loss of lives and unjust suffering. The shadow extends to and darkens and permeates the dominant and wider narratives about the role of youth (shabab) generally and the Facebook networking youth (shabab al-Facebook) particularly in the 25 January Revolution. In a curious way, the rationale of martyr-making seems to clarify that larger narrative. To my mind, this shadow has to do with the prefiguration of failure in the revolution and the ineffectiveness of the ostensible revolutionary agents before the history of the time was even accounted. The melancholy that
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pervades the above kind of martyr-making is really in the predetermined helplessness of the revolutionary shuhada: they seem to be involuntarily and reluctantly drawn into the forcefield of revolution, and their instrumental part seems only to be traceable at the expense of rather than the acceptance of any explicit avowal on their part. In a way, they appear to be doubly martyred, first in being killed and second in the process of being emptied of their selves through martyr-making. There is a metaphoric aptness in the image of shahid Mohamed Ramadan getting killed at the boundary of the protests, at the edge of the politics he apparently wasnt interested in, a bystander. That resonates more with the kind of martyrmaking in question here, more akin to the collectivised generalization of revolutionary shuhada, than any similar narrative of a similarly murdered person within the protesting crowd with known convictions say Salafist or socialist or neo-liberal -- might have been. As a collective revolutionary shuhada they have to be venerated as slightly adrift from political investment, slightly aside from ideological drives, bystanders who were drawn or self-driven into the enormity of a moment of social confirmation. To put that another way, this way of constructing revolutionary shuhada was implicitly designed to build a consensus. Here consensus is not a matter of ideological programme or political agenda or coherent social vision; on the contrary, consensus-building was premised on the understanding that any particular ideology or specific agenda could work against consensus. Here consensus is its own justification and flaunts its own possibility and transient moment of achievement. The consensus is consumed by its own grandeur. The consensus is the revolution arising from its hitherto perceived impossibility. But such a consensus is also the precondition of the failure of revolution (perhaps not a revolution to begin with then) because it offers nothing beyond its self-consumption and transience. It is disinvested from convictions. In being made shuhada, the shuhada are mandatorily rendered acceptable to every alignment and formation -- they have to be everybodys shuhada and are therefore nobodys. It is this conundrum of consensus-absorbed activism that casts a melancholy shadow on the revolutionary shuhada of 25 January 2011. The vacuity of consensus that goes in revolutionary martyr-making is coextensive with the constructions through which principal agents the revolutionary youth, the shabab and their principal means revolution-mobilizing social networking have been foregrounded. These too are consensus agents and consensus-making means, disinvested from commitment. In retrospect, the revolutionary shabab of the 25 January revolution have the same fuzzy tones as the revolutionary shuhada, and seem gathered in the same shadow with their mobile phones and laptops and tablets. In constructing the revolutionary shuhada the revolutionary shabab were
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being both recognised and laid to rest, so that real political machinery could function in their name and despite them. The responsibility for this outcome can be laid at the door of the shabab: they didnt offer very much more than a rallying voice and consensus presence; they eschewed any identifiable ideology or understandable political commitment to any programme. The Egyptian youth who most ostensibly made the 25 January Revolution seemed possessed of a minimal political language. Some of their self-appointed or pragmatically grouped spokespersons used this language, and it played in the banners and chants of the protest: it featured an associated series of pregnant terms democracy (particularly), free and fair elections, freedom of expression, respect for human rights, right to protest, freedom from corruption, love of country and people, economic development. These were consensus terms which are employed and claimed by numerous contrary political alignments, fluid and adaptable; more importantly, these terms articulate what is opposed more effectively than what is sought. They shabab used these terms to gesture towards an ideological core that didnt call for or invite interrogation, and the terms seemed meaningful and affective enough for mobilization vaguely liberal and always morally acceptable. Perhaps more damagingly, the terms were taken up and chanted with equally uncritical moral fervour by the adult and established public intellectuals and moral figureheads of the revolutionary shabab: i.e. those who dominated the authentic liberal Voice of Egypt for international media, such as Mohamed El-Baradei, Alaa Al Aswany, Ahdaf Soueif. They also collaborated with Mohamed Morsis/ Muslim Brotherhoods/ Freedom and Justice Partys political alignment to lay revolutionary shabab to rest by confirming and formalising the collective revolutionary shuhada without commitments and ideology, available to repossession and fluid resignification from all directions and for all ends. The efforts of the revolutionary shabab were perpetually dimmed by a failure of intellectuals, within themselves and representing them. On all sides, the term youth shabab was itself decontextualized, depoliticised and de-socialised in a way that rendered it a purely abstract and sentimental referent. In the bind of associative terminology, revolutionary shuhada and revolutionary shabab became not only free of commitment and ideology, but were released from class interests, religious affiliations, urban/rural divides, and other grids of material and intellectual life. They became just our revolutionary youth, of proven mettle because so many of them had sacrificed themselves and become revolutionary shuhada, the embodiment of our future and our hopes and symbols of our suffering under tyrannical repression, tinged with tragedy and longing.
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Contradictions and Conservative Revolutionary Tendencies It was, of course, a specific middle-class, educated, urban, media-savvy fraction of the revolutionary shabab which attempted to find an audible voice amidst the protests from 25 January 2011, and struggled to do so after Hosni Mubaraks departure. That is generally the case at all levels of modern society: the educated, urban, middle class has a near monopoly on public voice, and is habituated to speaking on behalf of all and voicing others. It is no different for the younger generations. The voice of the generalised and decontextualized revolutionary shabab, insofar as it was at all audible, was actually the voice of this particular constituency. While they were being recognised as agents of change and at the same time being laid to rest by the construction of revolutionary shuhada, they did, to be honest, struggle to find something like a politically and ideologically distinct voice. Wael Ghonims Revolution 2.0 and Paulo Gerbaudos Tweets and the Streets (2012)5, among other accounts, speak of self-awareness among the revolutionary shabab of their middle-class alienation from poor and working classes, and their floundering attempts to establish some kind of communication. They didnt manage it. They merely managed to foreground enough flexible consensus terms and consensus publicity so that political formations which did have such rapport with the poor and working classes, and with people in provinces and the countryside, saw an opportunity and mobilised. The Muslim Brotherhood was key to this effort, and the shabab al-Facebook knew it all along; they might have been sceptical of the Brotherhoods abrasive, obviously exclusionary, Islamist ideology, but at that moment they did everything to ensure that the Brotherhood could be brought in. This wasnt difficult: the Muslim Brotherhood has a middle-class, media-savvy, educated, youth membership too. At the time it was, and it remains, very difficult to gauge what youth in villages and provinces were thinking or doing: a rare account of developments at the time in a village in Upper Egypt by Lila Abu-Lughod (2012)6 gives some insights. It shows that the village youth also had a cyberspace social presence, but a localised one; and it is obvious that unless an ethnographer from Columbia University wrote about them that presence would drown into oblivion. Anyway, the middle-class voices and public spokesperson for what was received as the revolutionary shabab not only failed to get out of their class precincts, they failed to articulate
5

Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto, 2012).
6

Lila Abu-Lughod, Living the revolution in an Egyptian Village: Moral Action in a National Space. American Ethnologist 63:1 (February 2012), 21-25.

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anything beyond vaguely liberal and moral consensus terms failed to articulate a discernible political ideology and agenda. And the more they dithered and waffled on that front, the more firmly focused the commitment-less and depoliticised revolutionary shuhada became as a calling card for all kinds of political alignments. The middle-class revolutionary youth floundered and grumbled and faded away slowly over the subsequent year while the all-too-adult and wily political actors stepped through them into the forefront, talking loudly in their name and venerating the shuhada. The process of resistant fading away is traced variously. Ahadaf Souiefs Cairo (2012) describes a meeting of some these revolutionary shabab with adult political opposition figures on 30 January 2011 which seemed to set the tone of their political future:
MH has turned his office into a revolutionary headquarters and this is a meeting of some of the older figures of what you would call the establishment opposition to the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Most are over sixty-five. [] They talk above each other and only listen long enough to pick up a line and go with it themselves. An unkind thought crosses my mind: this is the political leadership that failed. [] But our host has promised us a visit from some of the young leadership of the revolution; when they come in an energy comes in with them. Six young men, all in their twenties. Theyre like a football team; they huddle and confer quickly, they pass to each other with a nod or a look. Theyre concise and self-deprecating, firm and courteous. [] They wont give information on how they operate but they want to put it on record that, were it not for all the protests and writings and activism of the older leadership, they would not have been able to do what theyre doing now: Weve learned from you, they tell the room, and were building on what youve accomplished. Theres a silence, then one of the older people says simply: whatever you want us to do, well do. 7

The coordinating revolutionary youth body formed shortly after that on 1 February 2011, the 25 January Revolution Youth Coalition which included members from April 6 Youth Movement, ElBaradei Public Campaign, Muslim Brotherhood was dissolved in a press conference of 7 July 2012, a few days after Mohamed Morsi assumed office as president. In the final report presented at the youth conference, it was evident that on every front it had been divided and felt thwarted during the reign of interim governments under the premiership of first Essam Sharaf and then Kamal Ganzouri. Early discussions with the all-powerful army had been unsatisfactory. Participation in the parliamentary elections of 2011-12 had been vitiated by internal divisions, and the presidential elections of 2012 did not offer any candidate who could be unequivocally supported. With regard to the shuhada and victims of the January-February 2011 protests, the report was bitter:
A number of Coalition youth also participated in the council responsible for the fund for martyrs and injured persons at a time when the idea had not yet been implemented. All of the
7

Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp.47-48.

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participating youth members thereafter definitively refrained from attending the two councils after a number of sessions ended without achieving any of the desired or anticipated goals. 8

In fact, this had already turned into a hot political football by the time of the report. In November 2011 a sit-in by victims of the 25 January Revolution and families of the shuhada, joined by Islamists as well as left and liberal organizations, to protest about inadequate support was forcefully broken up by the police leaving 41 dead and over 1000 injured. It ended Sharafs premiership. Rumblings of discontent on that front continued. The revolutionary shuhada remained in the foreground, the banner for all parties; insofar as associated with them, the revolutionary shabab were being laid to rest. On 17 February 2011, youth from left and left-wing liberal political alignments announced a collective front, Union of the Youth Revolution, to forge a more identifiable political position and agenda than the extant consensus terms had allowed. Members of the Progressive National Unionist Party, New Wafd Party, Tomorrow Party, Egyptian Communist Party, and New Left Party were among them. This remained active in a low-key way through 2011. Interviews with two of the leaders, Abdallah Helmy and Ehsan Yahia on 9 October 20119 give a sense of what they were at then evidently the project of political articulation and definition was unresolved and seemed likely to remain so. The consensus terms of political mobilization on and immediately after 25 January 2011 remained much as they were, and as they had been for all other inclusive youth organizations before and after 25 January 2011. Those terms continued to be centred in protests from, particularly, November 2012 onwards as Mohamed Morsi and the Freedom and Justice Party sought to concentrate extraordinary presidential powers, render the Constituent Assembly and Shura Council free of legal challenge, and bring in a constitution which sought to protect Islamist values and maintain space for Sharia law. And out of that irresolution in the consensus terms of oppositional mobilization there arose the morass of contradictions in political principle and practice that led both to the ousting of Mohamed Morsi and to the consequent fracturing of the happy recognition and laying to rest of sentimentally embraced revolutionary shabab and veneration for depoliticized and commitment-less revolutionary shuhada. At the culmination of the protests and the ousting of Morsi announced by Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, supreme commander of Egypts armed forces, on 3 July 2013, the only
8

http://arabist.net/blog/2012/7/18/in-translation-the-revolutionary-youth-coalitions-finalrepo.html
9

http://yearincairo.com/tag/revolutionary-youth-union-egypt/

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perceivably youth organization which came to be centred was Tamarod. All the others, so often named as the fronts for revolutionary shabab after 25 January 2011, seemed to recede into the background, into white noise. Tamarod, formed in April 2013 to undertake a signature campaign against Morsis regime (and eventually claiming to have gathered more than 22 million signatures), was visibly represented by young people. And yet they were not really associated with the revolutionary shabab. They had emerged from the older Kefaya movement (Egyptian Movement for Change, which started in 2004), which played a low-key role in the 25 January 2011 protests. The only representative of a youth organization who shared the podium with Mohamed El-Baradei, moderate Sunni cleric Al Azhar Ahmed ElTayeb, Coptic Pope Tawadros II, Salafi Islamist Al-Nour Party chairman Younes Mokhyoun, and others, when El-Sisi announced Morsis removal from office and suspension of the constitution, was Tamarod spokesperson Mahmoud Badr. Reportedly, in a meeting before the announcement, when El-Sisi had suggested that Morsis presidency should be put to a referendum Badr had responded: "I tell you, sir, you may be the general commander of the Egyptian army but the Egyptian people are your supreme commander, and they are immediately ordering you to side with their will and call an early presidential election."10 This is a revealingly demagogic statement. It confidently takes the onus of speaking for the people; more importantly, it puts a direct wedge between procedural democracy (a referendum, or for that matter an elective process of the sort that brought Morsi to power) and the democracy claimed by protesting congregations and unregulated campaigns of the protesting crowd as demos, the people on the streets. At this point the normative and loose use of that particularly effective consensus term, democracy along with those other consensus terms at the heart of the 25 January 2011 Revolution and the revolutionary shabab (freedom, human rights, etc.) were refracted as through a prism and resolved into conceptually unsolvable contradictions. As events unfolded into growing polarization and conflict between pro- and anti-Morsi alignments after 3 July, that conceptual schism was exacerbated. With El-Sisis 24 July call for a mandate to deal with pro-Morsi protests by asking the people to congregate in the street, just as the pro-Morsi protesters were expressing their mandate as the people, that schism took a life of its own. In a way, the legitimacy that the demos as protesting crowd acquired after Bouazizis self-immolation in Tunisia in December 2010 seemed to reach a logical
10

Interview: The Egyptian rebel who 'owns' Tahrir Square - Ahram Online Al-Ahram Online 7 July 2013, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/75978/Egypt/Politics-/Interview-TheEgyptian-rebel-who-owns-Tahrir-Squar.aspx

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conclusion: it became a sort of legitimacy that could contend against, even overthrow, the standard manifestation of the demos through the ballot box. Where the usual conceptual subscription has been that the demos as protesting crowd has legitimacy only if the formal and regulated procedures for the demos as electorate are unavailable or corrupted, here it appeared that these are both valid modes of claiming democratic legitimacy which are at odds with each other. The possibility of mediating between these by constitutional provision itself became a regressive consideration, returning to the question: how can the demos be manifested so as to legitimise any constitution to begin with? As events unfolded and the Tamarod shabab stood firmly behind the coup and the nominated interim government, all the equations made tacitly in the consensus terminology of the revolutionary shabab of 25 January 2011 fell apart. The emptiness of rhetorically announced revolutions became ever more apparent. That Revolution seemed to recede into the past with all sides claiming its inheritance, and thereby its weight was nullified. It seemed obvious that there had been no revolution in an understandable sense, only the exposure of the impossibility of revolution on a consensus basis. As it happened, in Tunisia also the revolution was receding in the background, and similar schismatic irresolutions becoming apparent at the same time. It became evident that instead of a revolution having happened, two tendencies towards the establishment of new regimes were at loggerheads, either of which could come to be touted as revolutions depending on who claims victory. Both tendencies are conservative, but in different ways. On the one side, there is the exclusionary theocratic revolutionary tendency of Islamism, which ultimately aims to establish the superiority and suzerainty of one religio-cultural group over all others, and seeks the elimination of non-believers. On the other side, theres the tendency that is not its opposite (neither secularism nor non-belief) but its other alignment with the dominant global capitalist order which is inclusive in religious and sectarian terms but extends mechanisms of economic exclusion and class/territorial exploitation. Insofar as the latter can be characterised from statements made by the post-coup government and Tamarod spokespersons, it could be thought of as a technocratic bourgeois revolutionary tendency. Something is missing from the middle: a non-conservative revolutionary tendency. That the consensus terms broke down and fractured into unresolved and contradictory conceptual positions in Egypt in July 2013 ultimately universalises the situation there. That these two conservative revolutionary tendencies become crystallised in Egypt in July 2013 universalises the relevance of this moment in that content. The situation in Egypt then

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becomes a field of study a sort of laboratory for testing political precepts of the present that are relevant anywhere. Meanwhile the momentary integrity of the decontextualized and depoliticised revolutionary shabab of Egypt has fractured along the lines of divided shabab like a divided population generally fighting each other to uphold the contrary conservative revolutionary tendencies. And the collectivised and commitment-less and ideology-free revolutionary shuhada are also fractured. There emerged another constituency for collectivised martyr-making with the clearing of the pro-Morsi sit-ins on 14 July 2013: another weighty revolutionary shuhada which is neither ideology-free nor commitment-less, not identified with the decontextualized shabab but with the undemocratic faithful who have received the legitimacy of procedural democracy.

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