16
February 2007
Arab blogs give youth venting
space
Mona Eltahawy
To
appreciate the power of blogs in the Arab
world, ponder for a moment a recent
triple whammy--or hat
trick, to use soccer parlance--scored
by Egyptian blogs:
One:
the exposure by blogs of sexual assaults on women in downtown Cairo by gangs of men during a religious
holiday in Cairo in October 2006. Bloggers forced the issue onto the national agenda, turning it into headlines from satellite television channels to the Associated Press.
Two: the detention in December 2006 of a police officer
accused of sexually assaulting a prisoner. A month earlier, Egyptian blogs had circulated a video showing the
prisoner, Imad el-Kabir, with hands bound behind his
back and his legs held in the air, being sodomized with a stick as those around him taunted
him.
Three: the ongoing trial
of 22-year-old blogger Abdul-Kareem
Nabil, also known as Kareem Amer, after posting articles critical of
Islam on his blog. He is charged,
among other things, with insulting
the president.
When the security
services of President Hosni Mubarak,
in power for a quarter of a century, arrest and put on trial a blogger, then surely
the phrase "David and
Goliath" cannot even begin to explain it. So what is
it about the bloggers that can
so threaten a regime?
It is the power of youth and their
new-found ability to communicate after years of being ignored. Al-Jazeera and its ilk
might have pulled the rug out from
under state-owned media,
but it was one old man challenging another. The bloggers
are mostly the young and the
excluded and it matters little
to them who stands on that rug and
who pulls it. One young Egyptian told me he started a blog
because he felt he was going
to explode if he didn't tell the world how he felt.
In
June 2005, there were around 280 blogs in Egypt. By the end of 2006, that number had
more than tripled to 1,000.
Egyptian blogs were the epicenter
of a little earthquake I first felt a couple of time zones
to the east at the start
of 2005. Bahraini and Saudi blogs were
my first heady introductions into the world of online agitprop. The Saudi blogs
were particularly sweet for me personally because
of six miserable years spent as a teenager in Jeddah.
One, simply called Saudigirl, felt like the grown-up
version of my latent teen-angst
from those years.
At a conference on Arab
media at the National Press Club in Washington DC in 2005, I quoted
Saudigirl describing herself as "young. Saudi chick. unveiled,
unconservatized" who had never voted
but who hoped one day "to walk in on a ballot
box in jeans, t-shirt, and flip-flops
so that everyone
can see my
pretty toes while I express my freedom." I lost track of her blog
for a while until, on a whim, I googled her earlier this
year to see how Saudigirl was doing.
And to my shock it turned
out "she" had
been a "he" all along. It
was a case of "rhetorical
transvestism" confessed
Ali K, the man who invented and maintained
Alia K.
What a bittersweet twist on the
gender play of those writers of yore, those George Sands, George Eliots and others who
adopted male names, persona
and wardrobes to splinter taboos. Here was a
Saudi man pretending to be a woman.
According to a recent Washington Post story on Saudi blogs, young
women make up half the bloggers
in that kingdom today. There are around 2,000 blogs in Saudi Arabia. Saudigirl
has left the blogosphere in good hands.
Bahraini bloggers didn't coopt gender politics
so much as the politics of fear that had
given birth to the color-coded alert system in place in the US that uses color to describe the "national threat level". When the Bahraini
authorities arrested three internet forum moderators in 2005, bloggers launched an appeal on their behalf, posted
the times and locations of demonstrations calling for their release and maintained an alert system that used color to describe
how close to freedom the men were.
To
appreciate such subversity is to appreciate the wonder of blogs.
No
words on blogs and no discussion of how effective they
are must ever take place without remembering the proto-blogger and cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui who died at
the young age of 36 in
March 2005. Back in July 2001, Zouhair founded the website
TUNeZINE using the pseudonym "Ettounsi," which means Tunisian in Arabic. He used
the online newspaper not just to write about Tunisia's dismal human rights record but also posted opposition statements on the site.
After his arrest in an internet cafe in 2002, he was sentenced
to two years in prison, and actually served
16 months, for "disseminating
inaccurate news"--a police state's
euphemism for the truth. It is
not difficult to imagine that
his early demise was precipitated
by the torture he was subjected to during interrogation.
Again, one man plus one website equals
one very angry dictator.
No
matter how many eyes and ears
the blogs have, who can doubt
the power of the internet?- Published 15/2/2007 ©
bitterlemons-international.org
Mona Eltahawy is a New York-based commentator and international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.
http://www.bitterlemons-international.org/inside.php?id=688