The Great Arab Mutation: A Front Seat to History

Last spring, I chose to relocate my family from Cambridge, Mass. to Cairo rather than to Beirut mainly due to its stability. Ironically, I began writing these words as we evacuated Cairo’s upheaval. During my short stay in Egypt, I have born witness to the first instance of a “genetic mutation” inspired by social media. Fear has dominated “the Arab genome,” a metaphor I used in a class I taught this past year to stress the depth to which the oppression of governments had become a personal, rather than cultural, facet of Arab life. This fear gave way to a thirst for freedom within a span of an hour on Friday, Jan. 28th. I observed the early seeds of this transformation right in my own classroom.

In the second week of January, I started a lecture at the American University in Cairo on the history of the Middle East’s economic development with the provocative title: “Freedom: The Missing Arab Gene?” We were discussing The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, which ranked Egypt at number 138 overall. The remainder of the Arab world fared equally miserably. “This all will change on Jan. 25th,” Omar, one of my students, challenged me. He shared with the class a Facebook page that called for popular protests on that day to demand basic freedoms, democracy, and social justice. “We will mutate the Arab genome on that day,” he boldly stated. I enjoyed his and his fellow students’ naïve optimism and pitied their inevitable disappointment. Within a few days, that page had a million followers.

I stood corrected on Jan. 25th, one of the happiest days of my life.

Social media enabled large masses to coordinate their action. In doing so, it broke the government’s monopoly on orchestrating the actions of large groups of people. In the context of the Arab world’s infamous mukhabarat—its internal secret intelligence services—this shattered its ability to crush opposition swiftly. I witnessed the pathetic attempts of Egypt’s ruthless security forces to crush the endless flood of protesters only to fuel them in the end.

The Egyptian regime responded to people’s demands for freedom in the only way it knew how—trying to terrify its own people. Within the span of half an hour on the evening of Jan. 28th, not a single policeman could be seen on the streets of Cairo. In a city of 20 million people, this means chaos. This was further exacerbated as regime-backed thugs looted and terrorized people, and the regime facilitated a mass escape from prisons. As my family returned home after scrambling to get some food and finding an ATM that had not yet been depleted, we found our female neighbors screaming and our male ones gathering weapons. They were fearful of fast approaching thugs whom they were told had looted and raped nearby communities. An old neighbor walked up to me, and in his shaking hand he held a pistol. He handed me a rusty sword to defend my family and neighborhood. I stayed up with the neighbors till daybreak wielding my car’s steering-wheel club to prevent outsiders from entering our neighborhood. Similar groups sprung up throughout the community, with mosque minaret calls providing reinforcements for any group coming under attack.

We had to stand for hours to get few loaves of bread. Supermarket shelves were emptied, gas stations closed, Internet shut down, TV news media scrambled, cell phone communications blocked, curfews enforced, but nothing stopped the people’s march for freedom. As I came back to Egypt right after Mubarak’s removal, I found myself in a new Egypt, one where ordinary citizens take it upon themselves to clean the streets and paint public property. I even saw Egyptian soldiers share their meager food rations with street kids. On Feb. 18, I joined millions of Egyptians in Tahrir Square as they celebrated not merely the removal of a dictator but the newfound and almost palpable sense of freedom, pride, empowerment and hope that engulfed the country.

I did not hear a single protestor shout against America or Israel; they shouted for their right to self-determination. This transformation is 100 percent Arab, absent of foreign instigation and, sadly, tangible support. As the rest of the Arab world erupts in yearning for freedom, America’s best foreign policy now is to be on its side, on the right side of freedom and history rather than the dark side of despotism. The current U.S. stand is nothing short of a total lack of effective and long-sighted foreign policy. The U.S. should not alienate millions of young Arabs who believed in President Obama’s global cry of “Yes, we can!” The idea that the U.S. must choose between stability or democracy in the Middle East is inherently fallacious. After all, al-Qaeda and extremism were not prevented by Arab dictatorships—it fed off of them.

My wife and I relocated to the region in a large part to expose our two children to their Arab and Islamic cultural heritage in a resigned recognition that their destiny lies outside its stagnant and despotic realm.  This revolution might, happily, prove me wrong yet again.

Dr. Mohamad Al-Ississ ’00, MA ’00, MPAID ’07, PhD ’10 is an Assistant Professor of economics at the Business School, the American University in Cairo. He served as a resident tutor at Quincy House 2007-2010.