The Subaltern of Your Dreams, and Mine: Egyptian Women in Tahrir Square

Over on facebook, Leil Zahra-Mortada has collected an album of photographs of women protesting in Cairo over the past weeks. Here are a few particularly striking ones:

My first impulse, after I broke out in tears, was to think about theories of subjectivity and the challenge of Berkeley anthropologist Saba Mahmood to feminist notions of agency in her book Politics of Piety. Mahmood had studied women who participated in the Islamic revivalist mosque movement in Egypt and focused on how they ethically "trained" their bodies and sensibilities to meet the demands of Islamic norms. In so doing, and building on the work of Talal Asad, she questioned the understanding of "agency" as a reflection of a subject's conscious will and desire. Instead, it was possible for women to express agency even in the very act of following norms that Western feminism would deem oppressive and patriarchal. This, of course, set her on a collision path with those feminists who allied themselves with neo-conservative imperialism in order to "liberate" the women of Afghanistan, Iran and the wider Middle East. In a 2008 essay entitled "Feminism, Democracy and Empire," Mahmood refuses to allow Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azar Nafisi and Irshad Manji to serve as spokeswomen for all Muslim women. Why not listen, instead, to the myriad women's movements and organisations, across the political and religious spectrum, in the Muslim world?

The Revolution in Egypt, and especially the photographs above, have shown to whoever cared to listen that Muslim women can make their voices heard alongside with men, demand those same political and social rights that supposedly belong to the Western "liberal" tradition, and scream, cry, bleed and die for them. Of course, Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't care to listen. In a recent op-ed, written while Mubarak's security apparatus was still beating people to a pulp in the streets of Cairo, she worried about the Muslim Brotherhood's hypothetical takeover. Bemoaning the supposed weakness of the "secular democratic forces," she paints a dark scenario based, it appears, on some turgid autobiographical stories from when she was 15. It is assumed throughout, based on her previous books, that one of the bad things about the coming reign of Sharia will be women's oppression.

And then it hit me: what all these critics, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Glenn Beck to French legislators banning the veil, have done is to effectively de-humanise the majority of Muslim women. Any woman who wears a scarf and/or niqab, who bears the outward signs of the patriarchal oppression that lies beneath, cannot be heard in her own voice. Look again at those photos. Those women, caught in a snapshot of anger or passion, are not calculating their own future status under the Muslim Brotherhood, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali does for them while safely ensconced in the US. They are not theorizing how conservative or liberal they are, or how much agency they get. They stand side by side with women in jeans, T-shirts and fashionable scarves. Because what they're wearing doesn't matter, even their being women qua women ceases to matter for the moment. They are demanding Mubarak leave and the country see free elections. Subalterns do speak, and when they do they may not be the subaltern of your dreams, or mine. They don't say, "Freedom, but as long as what comes next isn't too Islamic, in which case we should just stay put." They say, "Freedom. Now."
So these are not Ayaan Hirsi Ali's subalterns. But they aren't Saba Mahmood's either. At this moment, they're not out in the streets to challenge Western norms from an Islamic perspective. They're not questioning Western secularism or ethically training themselves for modesty. They want to topple the dictator, vote in elections, and live a better life. Egyptian women, Muslim women, Arab women, all different kinds of women, do not belong to theories and models, even those put forth by women in the West like Saba Mahmood or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They belong to themselves, and all we can do is try and listen.

To her credit, Hirsi Ali (unlike Beck, for example) does seem to support the Revolution and is more concerned with the future. Rightly so, it must be said. But it still begs the question why she is writing against a hypothetical oppression and not against a real one that has gone on for 30 years. Why has she not worked tirelessly against the Mubarak regime and other corrupt Middle Eastern dictatorships, and written books about the struggle of women's organisations in Egypt instead of shock-value memoirs about general Islamic oppression? What better example for her promotion of "Enlightenment values" to the Islamic world than women standing up for the right to vote? The hollowness of this kind of politics is here revealed. Because when the Revolution is made by women wearing niqabs and Muslim Brothers as well as by Western youths, it's something to worry about and not celebrate.

It's become sadly the norm to say that Egypt and other Arab countries aren't ready for democracy because of their backwardness (including their "treatment of women"). Even the writer of this article, which otherwise highlights the role of women as active participants in the protests, is most impressed by the fact that she wasn't groped! All the men were, you see, too busy making a Revolution.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/