Anyhow, looking for mentions of “Egypt” proved to be really funny.  The first item is the string that I found, and the second is the number of times it appeared.

ahanna@hadoop1 [~/project/jan25] grep -P "^(e|E)gypt" jan25_tweets-wordcount.txt | head -31
Egypt 2068994
Egypts 9
Egypt! 56275
Egypt!! 6254
Egypt!!! 7506
Egypt!!!! 1034
Egypt!!!!! 392
Egypt!!!!!! 211
Egypt!!!!!!! 64
Egypt!!!!!!!! 43
Egypt!!!!!!!!! 27
Egypt!!!!!!!!!! 22
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!! 15
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!! 18
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1
Egypt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1

Anyhow more on this as my analysis gets more sophisticated.

Update (2012-04-25): Foreign Policy has posted several more responses to the original article. And there are many more in the works, from what I’ve seen.

Although the substance of the debate itself is highly engaging, I was particularly taken by the polarization and how it quickly emerged. And it wasn’t all against one – my Twitter timeline was clearly marked by those who were siding with Eltahawy and those resolutely against her.  There wasn’t exactly a rhyme or reason to the division. Some quipped that most American and Western readers lauded the article, while Arabs were critical. But there were some important exceptions.

I wondered if network analysis could highlight some of these divisions, so I queried aloud if Marc Smith (@marc_smith), creator of the network analysis tool NodeXL, could help me out.  He quickly produced the network visualizations below, the first based on Eltahawy’s Twitter handle (monaeltahawy) and the second on the original link to the Foreign Policy piece (www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us).  The following network visualizations emerged.

This is the visualization around monaeltahawy from about 12:21 UTC to 15:33 UTC, April 24, 2012. Nodes are Twitter users, edges are follow relationships (NodeXL only collects the first couple thousand of each user) and user mentions.

The first thing that emerges with this graph is the clear polarization between two clear groups, G1 and G2. G1 contains 435 nodes and 2402 unique edges. At the center of G1, as ranked by betweenness centrality, is Eltahawy and, curiously, @ShadiHamid, Director of Research at Brookings Doha Center.  Shadi commands a strong following and tweeted only a handful of times but had strong reach, e.g. the tweet below. Around them fan many users who do not seem connected to each other.

Interesting that most US tweeps on my timeline seem to really like @monaeltahawy‘s piece. Most Arab tweeps (incl. women) do not.

— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) April 24, 2012

The second group is G2, 250 nodes strong with 3047 edges. At the center are @Dima_Khatib (mentioned above for her critique) and @Zeinobia, a long-time Egyptian blogger, and @HossamBahgat, Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, who criticized Eltahawy in a long series of tweets. Although from the metrics I have on edges it’s difficult to tell how dense each group is within clusters, it looks as though G2 is has denser subgraph and has many more smaller but prominent actors.

This next visualization focuses on the original link itself in its full form, collected from 18:02 UTC, April 23 to 20:21 UTC, April 24. Same edges, except edges that involve Eltahawy are in red.

The most noticeable thing about this graph is its diffuseness — there are 169 separate groups. Three emerge are the largest — G1, G2, and G5, all which are about the same size. Eltahawy is at the center of G1, and this cluster connects to G2 and G5.  However, there’s also a surprising amount of linkage between G2 and G5.  Look at the most central actors in each, in G1 are, oddly enough, both @monaeltahawy and @Zeinobia, as well as @RuwaydaMustafah, a female writer who speaks on Kurdish Rights. In G2, @AllisonKilkenny, @ShelbyKnox, and @NatlNOW — Allison Kilkenny, a writer on mass mobilizations like Occupy, Shelby Knox, a writer of a feminist blog, and the account for the National March for the War on Women, respectively. And in G5, @FP_Magazine, the account for Foreign Policy magazine, and @jricole, Juan Cole, blogger and specialist on Middle East issues.

I sort of expected the clear polarization on the first graph, but I was blown away with the second one. These groups virtually divided between those who are very involved with the Egyptian Twitterverse, American female journalists and feminist groups, and more academic/researcher types.

So what can it tell us about polarization on Twitter? Well, for one, it can illuminate who lines up on each side and give clues on how they engage with each other. There’s no sentiment analysis involved here, so we can’t tell who is spitting vitriol at whom. But there are clear patterns of mentioning and replying that indicate a bit where conversations are happening.  Furthermore, as the second graph indicates, there are some rather obvious divisions on who sees what commentary.  From I’ve read of their tweets, Zeinobia and Dima Khatib were largely critical, while Allison Kilkenny was not (note I’m inferring this from my own timeline so you are more than welcome to call bull on me if it’s not true). This lends some credence that the idea these structural links largely bound the opinions we see of a topic, the so-called “echo chamber” theory of the web. But there’s also a non-trivial number of connections between groups, so the categorization is certainly not absolute. And there’s definitely more work that needs to occur that allows us to consider content as well as structure.

By Alex Hanna and Mike Amato

Ever since February 11, 2011, all eyes have been on Wisconsin as ground zero in the battle ground of the working class versus monied interests and their populist tea party manifestations. The culmination of this, along with the mass of popular support for public employees and galvanization of labor, is the recall of  Governor Scott Walker. The Wall Street Journal has called the recall the “most important non-presidential election of the decade.” With over a million signatures gathered and the participation of thousands of Wisconsinites in the process, it’s easy to see why. With the primary set for May 5, we need to rally around a candidate that will take on Walker and stand for our values in the state house.

That candidate is Kathleen Falk.

First and foremost, Falk has made a pledge to veto any budget that doesn’t include collective bargaining, and has been the only candidate, both declared and not declared, to do so. In pure procedural terms, this is the only way for Wisconsin public employees to regain those rights that Walker stripped away in the near future. No legislative act will restore collective bargaining as long as extremist Republicans hold control over the legislature. Even if Senate is flipped in the recalls, Republicans will still control the Assembly.  And a “special session” of the legislature – the strategy espoused by other contenders – does not even necessarily bind legislators to attend, much less vote. Falk proudly repeats that she will not accept a budget that does not include collective bargaining, most openly writing an op-ed in The Cap Times.

Collective bargaining was the linchpin issue that brought hundreds of thousands to the Capitol last winter, and it should be given the same stature in the recall election. That Falk has made restoring collective bargaining one of the mantle pieces of her campaign makes our support of her a no-brainer. And this, after last summer’s election, when those running in recall races shied away from the issue.  This was a bold move for Falk, who took flak from both Republicans and Democrats.

It’s not just her unwavering support of labor that makes Falk the strongest candidate. Her strong record on environmental and women’s issues have earned the support of Clean Wisconsin Action Fund and EMILY’s List. Falk shows a strong record of transparency, cooperation, and executive initiative in her 14 years as executive of Dane County.  She has made a commitment of openness and honesty, and has laid out a plan to restore transparency to state government. This is a breath of fresh air after Walker’s repeated attempts to stifle civic participation by restricting citizen access to the Capitol, reducing voting rights, and violating open meetings laws. Furthermore, this is a violation that County Executive Falk sued over in March 2011, fighting Walker in court while our union was fighting alongside thousands of occupiers in the Capitol. John Nichols has applauded Falk’s push for transparency and made the point that Walker’s lack of transparency and attack on collective bargaining rights are closely related, something that Falk makes clear in her push for both.

Falk has come out swinging, declaring her candidacy shortly after the recall signatures had been submitted. She’s come for a fight, hiring experienced and committed campaign staff. It’s going to take that kind of enthusiasm to challenge Walker’s Koch-backed defense.

What about the concessions she got out of county workers in 2010?

Criticism of Falk from the Left has focused around the concessions that county workers in Dane County gave in order to balance the budget. While Falk speaks in the strongest terms about the need for collective bargaining, she likes to talk about how she was able to generate nearly $10 million in savings by negotiating with these workers. A budget shortfall is a difficult task for any executive, at any level of government. In Wisconsin, counties are required to balance budgets every time one is created. For 14 years, Falk had been able to do this without relying on tax hikes that exceeded CPI, a restriction that she set on herself and the county board. Only in the 2010 budget didshe raise taxes, which resulted in a 7.9% tax levy, about a $38 increase on the average Madison home.

The other part of closing Dane County’s budget shortfall was to negotiate with county workers and gain concessions from them in the 2010 budget. A recent Politifact article outlines in detail what was cut and what workers got in exchange. In addition to compensation and time off, the 2010 contract also included specific language making it much more difficult for the county to privatize services, a major priority of Dane County unions. The bottom line is that she negotiated with these workers during the worst recession in decades, negotiating benefits in exchange for the sacrifices and binding them only to pay decreases within that particular budget cycle. Unlike Walker, she met frequently with union negotiators and took workers’ concerns seriously.

But she’s a Madison liberal! No one will vote for her outside of Madison.

As more and more polling is done, that argument loses strength. In the last PPP poll, Falk led Walker 49-48 in a head-to-head race, an 8 percent increase from PPP’s previous poll. When asked how she would fair outside of Madison, Falk responds: “It’s a Republican talking point because the Republicans are worried that a Dane County Democrat can win… We elect more statewide leaders from Dane County than anywhere.”

What about other candidates?  We hear good things about …

Tom Barrett
Barrett still hasn’t officially declared, but commands a lot of name recognition from his 2010 run against Walker. He’s able to bide his time because he’s still sitting on a bit of cash from that campaign.  Even though this may position him to be more “electable,” other facts about him give us pause.

Barrett’s relationship with labor has been strained at best. According a Milwaukee union leader, he’s engendered little trust from the labor community and has sided with monied interests rather the city’s workers. He’s done little to combat unemployment or to stimulate Milwaukee’s economy, a crisis that has disproportionately affected the black population. Milwaukee stands as the 4th poorest city in the country under his tenure. Days after the Budget Repair Bill was proposed by Walker, Barrett actually criticized the Budget Repair Bill for not going far enough by not cutting the “Cadillac” (his words) plans of Milwaukee police and fire fighters.

Doug LaFollette
LaFollette has been tepid to his approach to the gubernatorial race. In an interview with Dane101, he hesitantly claims that he threw his hat in so that his name would be in the polls. But he admits he would rather yield to someone like US Senator Herb Kohl, a moderate liberal. LaFollette plays the populist position without taking any political stands or making commitments, especially regarding collective bargaining. Furthermore, he’s got no staff and hasn’t been serious about fundraising. With the primary about a month away and Walker gathering millions from out of state, this cautious approach to campaigning is worrisome.

Kathleen Vinehout 
The only other person who has officially declared, Vinehout, a State Senator from northern Wisconsin, has taken strong stances on environment issues and health care. However, she’s refrained from making a pledge to veto any budget that doesn’t include collective bargaining, instead suggesting that those rights could be reinstituted through the Senate. But that’s simply not possible with a Republican-controlled Assembly.

Vinehout has also taken heat with her position on women’s right to choose. In her amendment to a 2008 bill, Vinehout would have allowed pharmacists to refrain from providing contraceptives based on moral grounds.  She later backpedaled on this and now claims to have supported reproductive rights. A NARAL press release shows how her actions contradict her rhetoric:

“In 2008, while serving on the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, SB 398 was allowed to die in committee after Vinehout indicated she was opposed to the bill. Had it reached a vote, Vinehout had indicated that she would have cast the deciding vote against the bill. SB 398 which would have repealed Wisconsin’s unconstitutional criminal abortion ban and removed criminal penalties for women who seek an abortion.”

This controversy highlights the questionable positions that Vinehout has staked out with regard to these  issues. Furthermore, it highlights a certain opacity to claims that she has made about her legislative record. Last and not least, the Senator has not had the kind of executive experience one needs to be able lead Wisconsin.

Peter Barca
Although Peter Barca, the minority leader who hails from Kenosha, has refrained from declaring his candidacy, his name has been bandied about by some notable progressive activists. Barca has made himself more visible recently, making speeches at a Wisconsin Wave-organized rally in February and speaking out against Walker in reaction to the recent jobs report that shows the state as having the nation’s worst job growth.

Barca has spoken admirably against the degradation of the environment and for a return to transparency to Wisconsin state government. However, like Vinehout, he has refrained from making a pledge to veto a budget that doesn’t include collective bargaining.  He too would attempt to run bills through the legislature to regain bargaining rights, but he would not be able to get past the Republican-controlled Assembly. The Minority Leader must surely know that. And also like Vinehout, Barca has only legislative experience and has never been an executive.

A final question that we have surrounding a Barca candidacy is this: why has he taken so long to announce? Running a successful campaign is going to take a lot of work; we know and appreciate that he has been fighting the good fight in the Assembly, but a serious campaign needs infrastructure, staff, and volunteers.  Barca has yet to establish any of these, and declined an invitation to be interviewed by the AFT-W COPE. We think Falk has put it best: “You can’t wait until March 19 for the GAB to say the election date is six weeks from now.”

For all of these reasons, we support Kathleen Falk for governor.

Alex Hanna is the Co-President of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA), AFT #3220 and Mike Amato is Chair of the Political Education Committee of the TAA. Disclaimer: This op-ed reflects only the opinions of its authors and not of any organization.

Anyhow, here’s my fork of tweepy, which lets you use gzip compression with easy and fixes a bug with potentially freezing and being thrown into an infinite loop: https://github.com/raynach/tweepy

In a similar gesture, I’m going to release the status and user IDs of the dataset I collected from January 25, 2011 to March 1, 2011.  This collection centered around Egypt and focused on Egyptian hashtags, but became a larger Arab Spring dataset as I progressively added keywords.  For comparison’s sake, I compared the status IDs my dataset contains with Deen’s and found significant overlap with a number of countries (most obviously Egypt) but not too much with others.  I’ve bolded the ones with over 50% overlap.

UPDATE: 2012-02-28 — There were a small percentage of duplicates in the dataset, so I’ve updated the numbers with the de-duped totals.

algeria:
53792 of 85169 matched, 63.159131%

bahrain:
9060 of 361579 matched, 2.505676%

egypt:
1674707 of 2339787 matched, 71.575190%

#feb14:
36355 of 48024 matched, 75.701732%

#feb17:
61293 of 885846 matched, 6.919148%

#jan25:
601008 of 665167 matched, 90.354452%

libya:
205567 of 2679617 matched, 7.671507%

morocco:
10607 of 84458 matched, 12.558905%

sidibouzid:
20116 of 78823 matched, 25.520470%

yemen:
111470 of 475078 matched, 23.463515%

I had one main collection going so they weren’t broken down into different datasets.  I may post the numbers on which hashtags were most used in the future.

For collection I used some handrolled Perl scripts that connected to Twitter’s Streaming API.  However, in my current collections I’ve been using tweepy, which works reasonably well with very little package installing. There’s a small patch that has yet to be incorporated into the trunk, so if you’re going to use this, make sure you make the change yourself.

Anyhow, without further adieu, here’s the list of 12,264,248 status IDs and their corresponding user IDs.

Works in Chrome, not sure about other browsers. To use it, just create a new bookmark and paste the following in.

The image of UC Davis officer John Pike holding high the can and giving peaceful Occupy Davis protesters a mouthful of orange pepper spray has, like so many other images, become part of the growing Occupy iconography surrounding police brutality. These attacks are surely disproportionate and appalling; that people peacefully occupying space should incur such violence is incredibly disconcerting.

At the same time, the fact that these responses have become a sort of cause célèbre for occupy is also worrying. Whether the assessment is that police intervention proves the success of occupy actions, or that it has somehow disrupted the current symbolic orderin some manner, the focus on direct actions that take aim at police raises the critical question: what does provoking police actually accomplish towards the ends ofOccupy?

What I want to do here is approach the question at hand through a number of specific cases of policing organizations and institutions, particularly that of Egypt (specifically in Cairo) and Wisconsin’s own 2011 February-March occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol.

Although I’m just able to sketch the outline of this problem here, the basic point I want to get at is that as long as police are “close” to federal state power, and that power seems illegitimate, then the battle with police makes more sense politically. Otherwise the fight has a great risk at being ineffective and seen as such.

Egypt

If you’re familiar with the Egyptian blogosphere, you’re familiar with Wael Abbas. Wael started blogging in 2004 or 2005 at his blog Misr Digital. He was one of the first bloggers who began to document the systematic abuses of Egyptian police – against people temporarily detained at police stations and tortured underground in the bases of the Ministry of the Interior. Some of the initial videos of torture at police stations appeared on his site – grainy cellphone videos of screaming victims hogtied and abused, or a victim showing the fresh welts on his back.

Prior to the revolution, the liberal and reform blogosphere, along with the Kefaya and April 6 movements, focused on police brutality and surveillance, amongst issues of economic justice and government corruption. This work came to a head when, in June 2010, 28-year old Khaled Said was beaten to death in front of an Internet café in the port city of Alexandria. As the official police story goes, he was questioned about possessing drugs in said café and swallowed them to evade detection. The already suspicious story was dashed to bits once images of Said’s distorted face, torn skin and broken teeth, surfaced. The story now is well-worn – the creation of the Facebook group bearing his name “We Are All Khaled Said”, the Google executive Wael Ghonim acting as one of several co-administrators, the emergence of the January 25 Facebook event to coincide with the national “Police Day” holiday, all as factors that culminated in revolutionary activity and the unseating of Hosni Mubarak.

Although it’s important to talk about how discourses of police brutality emerge and help to shape how we view these institutions, what I want to try to draw a line through here is more of the character of the institution itself. I am drawing on information and testimonial from Human Rights Watch reports and my own conversations with protesters and activists from Egypt. Like any kind of organization or body of organizations, the police in Egypt are far from homogeneous. The Central Security Forces (the ‘amn markazy) act as a riot police were quite successful at repelling protesters until January 25. These are the guys clad in all black that you’ve inevitably seen in the pictures coming from Cairo. More behind the scenes are the State Security Investigations (SSI, ‘amn al-dawla, or the mukhabarat), which acts as an intelligence organization. SSI (now conveniently called “National Security” after the revolution) is notorious for detaining dissidents on their way into the country, at their homes, and paying plain clothes informants to watch known activists, and acting as agentprovocateursin protests.

Although there’s a bit of heterogeneity here, the basic ministry that oversees all of these agencies is the Ministry of the Interior (dakhalia). The important thing to note is that it’s a ministry at the national level. It’s controlled by someone who is institutionally close to the Prime Minister and the ruling regime. When the initial calls for the January 25 protest went out, it wasn’t just Mubarak’s head they asked for. It was him and his former Interior Minister, Habib El-Adly. El-Adly is now on trial to be held accountable for the deaths of the revolution’s martyrs.

This kind of proximity from the police to the regime is why it makes sense to put pressure on police. In the midst of the November and December clashes in Tahrir, with protesters demanding the end of military rule, Prime Minister Essem Sharaf resigned in disgrace, although only to be replaced by a Mubarak-era fossil in the form of Kamal Ganzouri. Although it may have been a matter of replacing a good man who didn’t want part of this regime (many protesters would consider Sharaf at least trying to do what he could with severe constraints) with a more pliable one, the basic point is that confronting the police caused some kind of movement within state structures.

The second part of this story is legitimacy. The police force in Egypt is reviled for its self-serving incompetence and corruption. A friend of mine recounted a story about how once a former cleaning woman had stolen some of her jewelry. She told the police about it, and even after she had given them the woman’s address, they had done nothing. Almost all the people I’ve spoken to have talked about the police mentality – the Egyptian people were serving them, and not vice versa. This is what made the notion of a revolution on “Police Day” so appealing; on this day that the police were supposed to be celebrated, fighting them in the streets had more appeal.

Wisconsin

Policing in the US is a bit of a different matter. Policing agencies that protesters interact with are defined mostly at the local and state levels, notwithstanding the recent debate on agency coordination between Naomi Wolf and Joshua Holland. And for the most part, or rather in dominant discourses, police are seen as legitimate and serving the public interest.

What I can say is as a protester and occupier during the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol during February and March of 2011, the police that we dealt with were first mostly the Capitol police with backup from many different local policing agencies. In those first days, the Capitol police took a rather hands-off approach to policing – engaging protesters instead of using force, using words instead of batons. A few nights into the occupation, when police started taking down posters and stirred up a huge outcry from those protesters who were still awake, a group of occupiers met daily with Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs to discuss safety, public health, and whatever concerns both groups had.

This kind of tack is known as “negotiated management” in the policing literature – using as little force as possible in crowd control, with force reserved in the absolute last resort. It’s a smart maneuver on the part of police agencies. First, for the most part, protesters don’t engage in direct action that challenges the boundaries of police authority. Last year, in Wisconsin, protesters pushed back very little, the most extreme event being the brief sit-in in front of the vestibule leading to the Assembly chambers. Protesters were carried out by state troopers but not charged (more on state troopers in a second). It also puts legitimacy strongly on the side of police. Protesters look obstinate in the face of a negotiated and orderly policing operation. And the newspapers don’t get that above-the-fold image of an officer striking – or spraying – a peaceful protester in the face.

On the brief sit-in: the state troopers in Wisconsin were seen in a more precarious and less legitimate position by protesters. State troopers are under the state’s Department of Transportation, but by protesters, were seen to be under the direction of the Governor-controlled Department of Administration. My sense is that the Secretary of Administration, Mike Huebsch – a crony of Governor Scott Walker who another unionist referred to disdainfully as “the twerp” – was able to exercise more control over the state troopers than the Capitol police, although the Capitol police are directly under the supervision of his agency. Compare this to Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, who, when Walker put the Capitol under pseudo-lockdown, remarkedthat “[his] deputies will not be palace guards.” I venture that this wasn’t out of any solidarity with the protesters, even though Madison cops came out to march with them. Instead, Mahoney and Tubbs knew that Walker was putting them in a situation in which negotiated management would break down, and would create a situation that could easily escalate. Moreover, this kind of autonomy between policing organizations means that putting on pressure on one doesn’t necessarily put pressure on the others. They’ve got different hierarchies and different people to report to.

Occupy’s Police Problem

The problem with casting a battle against police is that police can be highly differentiated organizations. It matters where you are and how they’re set up. They can be the most ruthless, corrupt organizations, but they can be on our side. In the US, trying to battle them is often going to blow up in our faces.

To put it crudely, it’s a matter of tactics, whether we choose to chant “Join us!” at police or face them black bloc-style. But the reality is facing US police with homemade shields and black bandanas tied around our mouths probably is not going to shake any foundations of any structures – political or economic. If anything, it further delegitimizes police only for those already most harmed by them, like minorities in Oakland and New York. That may be a worthy goal – after all, the success of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer was predicated on getting hundreds of mostly white, idealist college students to “dramatize” (Doug McAdam’sword) the starkness of denial civil rights abuses in the South.

But if the goal is to put pressure on the state and its corporate clients vis-a-vis the institutions of policing, I don’t see the same thing playing well in Peoria. Or Madison, for that matter.

In any case, so much was running through my mind on January 24, 2011 and the weeks thereafter, all of which culminated in my own journey to the revolution.  I wanted to share a part of it.

–

Chapter 1 – Winter

I was six in 1991 and remember very little about the trip aside from what photo albums and dusty souvenirs could aid in excavating from my memory.  Heavy metal replicas of the pyramids, made of iron but colored a cheap, pale bronze and inked to create divisions between the bricks.  Our family room coffee table and the polished alabaster eggs.  Photos of my sisters adorned with Mickey Mouse t-shirts, scüncis and feathered bangs.  I do remember a few things without those mental signposts stored in my family’s house in Ohio.  The crystal water from a beach city close to Alexandria.  In the distance, the dreamlike blue stopped abruptly and gave way to endless ocean.  Sand in my pizza.  A hole in the wall of a natural stone formation they called “Cleopatra’s Bath” filled with water every time a wave crashed in from the Mediterranean.  Some distant relative suggested that one of my sisters sit near the hole, which obviously soaked her over-sized tee of her latest hair-band crush.  I most likely watched on petrified, given the tubes in my ears and my own difficulty handling waterlogged situations.

I remember running around with a cousin (one of what seemed like several hundred) who was a few years my senior. yelling “Good Morning America!” off an Alexandrian balcony around twilight and cracking walnuts in the stone stairwell of my uncle’s flat.  I also remember dropping a clot of dried dirt and stone from the roof, narrowly missing a man on a bicycle who was waiting on the sidewalk below.  He turned around to see what had fallen, and in retrospect I wonder if that man had any idea how close he had been to a major head injury.

My memories of 2008 were much more vivid.  Most of it was lived like a tourist, visiting the pyramids, Luxor, and Sharm al-Sheikh.  Although pleasant, it must have been horribly out of touch.  The barest moment was when I sat alone in Luxor and a street child, a young boy with scratches on his face, begged me for money.  I gave him 10 Egyptian pounds, about $2, and he kissed my cheek.  Word caught on and soon I was surrounded by children and women, begging and asking for anything.  I didn’t know how to deal with the crushing poverty and want, so I hid in a fast food restaurant.  There were much happier and meaningful moments, like those spent with my family in Alexandria, meeting a small fraction of what still seems like thousands of relatives and trying my hand at speaking Arabic.  One of my male cousins and I went out for pizza and we almost had a full conversation in the language.  He would later say over and over again “Leave him with us for a month and he’ll have it perfected!”

One day, my mother and her sister left for the afternoon to visit some of the Coptic monasteries around the outskirts of Alexandria.  I sat around my uncle’s flat with him and his grand kids, the children of my cousin.  Egyptians have an odd obsession with professional wrestling.  I have memories of my grandmother, who lived with us in the US and did not speak a word of English, watching Wrestlemania.  These kids were no different.  One showed me a movie he had downloaded, starring some wrestler, in some role in which he was tasked with killing Arabs.  The irony seemed lost on this cousin, once-removed.

Less ironic company was found in my uncle Samir, husband to my father’s sister.  Gray and bald, with a characteristically Egyptian mustache and a paltry assortment of teeth remaining, he was representative of the average man from Upper Egypt, the saeed, the Egyptian equivalent of the rural backwoods archetype and, similarly, the butt of many jokes.  We went through the Arabic alphabet in one of my many vain attempts to learn the written language before actually enrolling in a class.  Afterward, he cursed the language under his breath, calling it as the language of the oppressor.  I thought it incredible that 1600 years after the Arab conquest, one could still harbor hatred towards the language of the conqueror.  But this is a staple of Coptic discourse on the matter.

We left Alexandria after only two days, under darkness of night, to catch a very late flight back through Amsterdam and on to the States.  Goodbyes were hurried, promises to return at some undetermined date were made, and we rushed through the narrow alley where my relatives live to the microbus that would start us on our journey back to America.  The alley was decorated for a wedding celebration – ornate hanging tapestries and multicolored Ramadan lights.  Lighthearted women danced and undulated their tongues in joy.

* * *

Egypt has stayed on my mind since that trip, becoming the focus of my academic research.  Around the time of January 25, 2011, religious sectarianism was on my mind as well, in particular because of the attacks on the Qadeseen (Two Saints) Church in Alexandria on New Years’ Eve.  Minutes after midnight in Egypt, a bomb went off in front of the church.  I was in Strongsville, a suburb of Cleveland, with my family, home for the winter break.  We had just returned from eating at a subpar Italian restaurant where I had eaten some dish with sea scallops and creamy risotto.  Shopping must have occurred at some point because plastic grocery bags were strewn on the floor and lay against the kitchen counter.  I checked Twitter when I got in and saw the reports about the bombing, people tagging it with the hashtag #alexplosion, a macabre but witty portmanteau.  I told my family and got on Facebook and Skype to try to get in contact with my cousin and her family in Alexandria.  Luckily we caught her online.  The conversation with her family was front-loaded with formalities but eventually the topic was broached.  Those relatives sounded well, although thoroughly shaken and worried about their own friends who had gone to that church.

Later my family played Monopoly while drinking cheap wine, something that’s become somewhat of a family tradition as we counted down towards midnight.

The break ended (or rather the presence of being with family had worn my nerves thin) and I returned to Madison.  Before I left, my mother was constantly in my ear about the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, and the continual persecution of Christians.  Although I was annoyed by her constant harping, I knew her worrying contained more than a few kernels of truth.  The consistent sectarian tensions were (and still are) often ignored, despite the fact that events like this flare up from time to time.  In Shoubra, a heavily Christian and working-class neighborhood of Cairo, a ten thousand strong funeral procession carried the 25 dead from the attack, with people yelling “with our blood, we will avenge the Cross.”  Protests in the area, attended by Muslims and Copts, demanded more protection for churches from the government.  They were met with overwhelming numbers of Central Security Forces (CSF, or ‘amn markazy), riot police clad in black padding and helmets.  They easily overwhelmed the protesters by cordoning them in the middle of the streets. The protests died down, but the same cannot be said of the rage.

I didn’t see the viral video posted by Asmaa Mahfouz, the young female activist pushing for other youth to take the streets on January 25 until afterwards, but I did see the video of Khaled Said’s mother.  Khaled Said was a 28-year-old man who was beaten to death by police in June 2010.  The two officers, who beat him in a cyber café, claimed that he had swallowed a bag of drugs and choked on them.  But pictures of his disfigured corpse appeared on the Internet days later – broken teeth and skin, green from decay, ripped from his mouth to his chin.  His case had become a rallying point against police brutality.  On the eve of the revolution, his mother called for people to take to the streets.  This older woman, dressed in all black and veiling her hair, like a universal matriarch, encouraged her audience not to be afraid.  She said, what did they have to lose?  They should go get their rights.  The calls for protests filled social media channels.  A Facebook group named “We Are All Khaled Said” called for people to go out and demand the end of police brutality, corruption, torture, and repression.

Khaled Said was to Egypt what Mohammed Bouzazi was to Tunisia.  Bouzazi, the fruit vendor who set himself on fire to protest the government revoking his vendor license, set in motion the protests in Sidi Bouzid and consequently the rest of Tunisia.  The Arab social media sphere was similarly alight with the developments there, following the protests, the confrontations between people and police, and finally the ouster of the dictator Ben Ali.  What came out of Tunisia seemed to be a sense of solidarity and of fascination with the fact that group of people could genuinely and organically set into motion the developments that would topple a dictator.

After seeing the calls for the January 25 protest, I thought that it would be like many of the other protests that emanate from the Internet: the usual suspects would gather on the streets, yelling at the ‘amn markazy but eventually being overwhelmed by them.  I tracked the #jan25 hashtag on Twitter by hand, seeing how many people were using it.  Because of my research, I had previously written a tool to collect all tweets that contained a particular word or hashtag.  There seemed to be a terribly small number of people using it, though, so I didn’t bother with using the tracking tool until January 24, 9 PM, Central Daylight Savings Time, 4 AM Egyptian Time.  It was no skin off my nose to do so.

It was a Monday night.  As tends to happen in Madison, the weather was frigid and there was a threat of heavy snowfall.  I stayed up till some ungodly hour, trying to assess when the protests would begin in Cairo.  I didn’t know where and when they would begin, although there was some chatter about 10 AM or noon.  I remained glued to my computer, in the corner of my living room, till about 3 AM.  Nothing in particular was happening, so I lay on my lumpy futon for four hours of sleep, in front of my apartment’s gas stove, Elvis the Wonder Cat curling up next to my legs.

I awoke dry-mouthed and exhausted, which is what usually happens when I sleep on that futon.  I expected the same citizen journalism that accompanies poorly attended protests: choppy videos taken with mobile phones, play-by-play reports by bloggers of protests happening in front of the parliament buildings, protesters being overwhelmed by police and tweeting “fucking pigs!” and “a7a”, the regional equivalent of “what the fuck!”  Instead, the world had turned onto its head.  CSF and police lines could not hold the people throwing rocks as they charged, line after line, throwing tear gas canisters back to their sources.  They couldn’t use the riot shields to repel people coming out in droves, or the courage of those going alone.  The videos I was glued to throughout the day astounded me, one after another.  The man who clapped three times, then pushed with all his might against a line of CSF troops armed with riot shields.  The people running through the streets, the knocking over of barricades.  The famous video of the single man, in a Tiananmen-style moment, who stood up to a water cannon truck while others filmed from a roof and yelled gada’a! (Bravo!).  The battles for the bridges, like the one with protesters pushing forward to take over the 6 October bridge, knocking tear gas canisters into the Nile and rolling a large barrel as a protective cover for their progress.  On the bus to campus, I kept checking my phone for tweets.  Before my early morning Arabic class, I watched with intent the coverage on Al-Jazeera.  Sitting in my office, one cubicle in the bullpen reserved for teaching assistants, I did little but watch tweets, YouTube, and Al-Jazeera, from a country half a world away while I sat indoors, wrapped in thick wool with a poorly calibrated heating system blowing on my back and leaving me sweaty.  I didn’t expect this at all.  I came to find out later, nor did the revolutionaries.

And it continued.  Every new day brought new developments.  First it was those people who had started camping in Tahrir Square the night of the 25th.  I thought to myself that they didn’t have a chance of staying there without some force attempting to drive them out. And they were, very late and with tear gas.  But they came back with renewed vigor and determination.  Then the Internet went out, but it was no matter by then, since all of the world was watching.  Even without people tweeting from within Egypt, the words “Egypt”, “Tahrir” and “Mubarak” were some of the top trending items on Twitter.  The next turning point was that Friday, the so-called Day of Rage.  The call was made to gather in Tahrir after prayers, and hundreds of thousands came out.  This was a thing that was qualitatively different from anything that most Egyptians had ever seen.

February 2, class had been canceled because of a blizzard, which was great because I hadn’t gotten any decent sleep since the uprising had began.  If I could have, I would have set my clocks – computer and internal –  to GMT +0200 and slept on an Egyptian schedule.  I tried at one point to use two computers to keep track of all the new information, an attempt that failed badly given that thousands of tweets would scroll by every minute.  My body was in Wisconsin but my mind was in Egypt.  I tried teaching a class about culture to my introduction to sociology class by showing videos of January 25, which was admittedly not my best teaching moment.  I didn’t make much progress in my coursework.  Most of the examples I wrote for Arabic class consisted of snarky comments about the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Somewhere in the haze that came from not sleeping, too many days on the futon directly in front of the gas stove, and the blizzard conditions outside yellowed by incandescent street lights, there arose some remote possibility of going to Egypt.  I saw others saying that they were going back, ex-pats and those working overseas.  They went for numerous reasons: checking in on their families and joining the popular committees that had formed to defend neighborhoods in the absence of police and with the release of criminals from prison.  One of the more amusing tales that came from the lack of security was the surprise of how many Egyptians owned swords, exemplified by a widely-circulated picture of an middle-aged man dressed like a ninja, carrying throwing stars and a mock samurai sword.  In one of the more sober aspects, one tweeter, @Elazul, spent his time at the height of the breakdown of security calling around to people he knew in the different neighborhoods of Cairo, reporting the safety of those areas and sometimes the unsettling accounts of looting and violence.

And of course there were those who came to join the revolution.  One activist, Alaa Abd El Fattah, stuck out in my head.  Alaa was living in South Africa and comes from an activist family – he and his sister are bloggers, and his father is a founder of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, an NGO that focuses on human rights.  On the first of February, he put out a call, to which I responded:

@alaa 

to all egyptians in the diaspora (and those egyptians at heart), if you can make it head to egypt ASAP, now is the time #Jan25

@alexhanna 

@alaa Pretty sure my parents would kill me before I got there.

@alaa

@alexhanna u can revolt against mubarak but not agains ur parents?

@alexhanna 

@alaa Umi [my mother] is probably better with shib shib than Mubarak. [shib shib meaning  sandals, a favorite weapon of angry Egyptian parents]

@alaa 

@alexhanna we should have her as minister of defence then

It made sense for Alaa to go, I thought.  He had much more invested in the country.  He had more immediate family there, had an activist history, and would actually live there if it weren’t for his job.  But on many levels, I didn’t really have a dog in this fight, at least one that would impact me directly.  Sure, I was concerned about my family in Alexandria.  The little bit of contact I did have with one of my cousins was concerning, to say the least.  She reported a lot of movement by what she said were Muslim Brothers.  But if I were there, I couldn’t do much for them.  It might be the last thing they would need, in the midst of the heightened government propaganda campaign, which “exposed” the American-Zionist ploy to destroy the country and infiltrate it with spies.

My strongest case for going was the research aspect.  I study social movements and social media in Egypt and was doing work on the 6 April Youth Movement prior to the revolution.  6 April itself was formed out of a Facebook group and is now a very visible presence in Egyptian politics. Their support and promotion of the January 25 action, along with that of the Khaled Said group, lends strong credence to the hypothesis that social media played a pivotal role in the revolution.  Of course, this hypothesis had been played and overplayed in Western media.  Going to Cairo would mean assessing it for myself.

But there was something much more visceral about my going, much I do enjoy my research.  It was something of a hope, for the first time after years of stagnation, of pessimism.  When in Ohio, I had remarked to my sister and mother that Egypt would change.  They scoffed “Yeah right”, and although I didn’t want to, I had no choice but to agree.  Going there had something to do with partaking in a new hope of what Egypt could become, of at least imagining something else and something better.

At the risk of sounding too nationalistic, I must say that I do feel a connection to Egypt, that I do belong to it on some level.  Despite not living there for any substantial stretch of my life, aside from a research trip in the summer of 2011, it is and has remained a salient part of my own cultural identity.  It’s the broken Egyptian Arabic that I speak with my parents, the falafel I make for my friends with my mom’s recipe and the ful (fava beans) I make for breakfast on the weekends, the Abdel Halim and the Um Kulthum I listen to while smoking sheesha on my porch.  Cheering for the Egyptian national team in any sport.  The galabeyya I wear around the house on laundry days or when the air is cool enough that it doesn’t make me swelter.  The bald spot I got when I was 19 and the curly beard I can’t wear too long without getting the stink-eye in the rural Midwest.  I can’t, in good faith, claim to be “as Egyptian” as someone born and raised there, but I do a reasonable Egyptian-American impression.