U.S. fallout: what does ‘change’ mean in Egypt?

It seems to me that the path to change is so hazardous and the cost so high that revolution is often the inevitable outcome.

Many young Egyptians, marginalized by the current state of the economy and disappointed with the political process, are finding solace in social media and joining groups that focus on utopian visions of the Muslim ummah, or community. The state has taught them to despise Egypt and romanticize the diaspora. They seek change.

More than two years ago, I blogged about Obama’s candidacy and expectations in the Egyptian streets about his message of change. Nearly two years into his presidency, nothing had changed for Amm Haqib, one of the many homeless Egyptians who I encountered daily as director of the DukeEngage program in Cairo. He still sat on his wooden chair at the corner store of the dilapidated building in Garden City, once Cairo’s most prestigious enclave. Each day he asked if I had spare change for his breakfast. By then he had stopped calling me “Obama.” When I inquired why, his response was ready, “mafish taghyir”—there is no change.

This was vastly different from summer 2008, when Obama meant change and hope to Amm Haqib. That was the same summer Duke students were invited to Cairo University for a roundtable discussion on “the coming of Obama.” Everyone in attendance wondered what that change would bring to their daily life. The mood was jubilant, and people were enthusiastic about Obama’s change. But just two years later, Egyptian Obama admirers, like Amm Haqib, avoid talk of change. Obama’s speech in Cairo, in which he talked about relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world without rebuking Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, left many cold.

Haqib is right: There has been no change in Egyptian politics. The regime still uses the concept of Muslim extremism as a bogeyman in order to stifle meaningful reform. Mubarak’s party eradicated the last hope of political culture in the 2005 election, when brutality marked the government’s relationship with the opposition.

Haqib is also wrong. There are tremendous changes underway outside the formal political space. There were more than half a billion users of Facebook last year, and nearly 15 million of them were from the Middle East and North Africa, mostly looking for alternative socio-political space. The Egyptian diaspora has established satellite networks to call for Coptic, or Christian-Egyptian, rights. Egypt’s three leading Internet service providers are now accessible to many students in Egypt’s nearly 40 universities. Likewise, Al-Jazeera’s coverage on satellite TV has shifted from covering proponents of al Qaeda’s anarchism to promoting diversity, tolerance and the opposing views among its constituency.

The change is not all good, as the class divide in Egypt has deepened. Cairo’s metropolitan area was built for fewer than three million people, but it now houses almost 20 million people; most of them are the working poor. Among them are tens of thousands who make the cemeteries in the City of the Dead their permanent home. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the rich, who started establishing gated communities. They are mostly top government civil servants, military officers and members of the business class.

The Muslim Brotherhood, and non-religious parties such as Nassirites, the Wafd and the al-Ghad were further marginalized in the 2010 election, as Mubarak’s party claimed 81 percent of the seats. Ala al-Aswani, Egypt’s most renowned novelist and a member of Kifayah, a secular group, told me that “waiting for help from the U.S. is no longer an option for the Egyptians.” And Kifaya’ ideas of proactive protest were adopted by the April 6 Youth Movement that gathered more than 100,000 users in their social network. Since then, the two groups have been the outlets for most anti-government protest.