Speaking the Unspeakable: Personal blogs in Egypt
Issue 3, Fall 2007
About 15 years ago I was totally convinced that there are no shades of black and white. Black is just black, white can only be white. It happened some time within those last 15 years that I’ve noticed that some black pants for example don’t actually have the exact same shade of black as my black shirt!... Nothing is all black or all white. Nothing is one color. How can it be if this one color has all those different shades in it? No one is all good or all bad. No one is flawless but no one is all devilish either.
A dramatic, rallying cry for the blog’s favorite visitors, the post read like the proclamation of a young Egyptian woman demanding not to be judged at face value. “Don’t come up to me and tell me you know me,” she continued, “unless you’ve heard me talk for hours, seen me crying, heard me laughing from the heart, seen me talking to myself…” It was almost an invitation.
The post elicited many responses, not least from a less-familiar blogger to the site, mitar2a3, who commented:
The pharse or the 'FACT' that i really liked is "No one is just ONE! You’ one person with the one you love, another with those you hate, another with strangers, … and a whole other with your children.” adding 'another with those reading ur posts' LOL
Ever the honest blogger, Maat came clean, admitting to the latest stranger to visit her site that under her pseudonym of an ancient Egyptian goddess she could give her readers privileged access to her life:
Mitar2a3,
glad u liked the post :D
as for being someone else with those reading the post.. hehe... true... in that case i'm exposing more of what i think than i do in real life!
Two Pairs of Eyes is one of a plethora of what I will term ‘personal’ blogs that have emerged in Egypt, and across the Arab World, in recent years. These blogs give an unprecedented view into the social life the region’s globally-minded young people. But the overwhelming interest of Western researchers to date has been on the Middle East’s ‘political’ blogs, despite the fact that most Arab blogs are not political in the strict sense of tackling issues related to government, state or international relations. Though the impact of ‘political’ blogging is surely worthy of close scrutiny, there is another—perhaps much wider—perspective on blogging in the Arab World which needs to be studied. This perspective is the growth of ‘personal’ blogs which are run by individuals for a close-knit group of friends and peer bloggers. These blogs relate not to grand and gritty politics, but to events in individuals’ direct experience, thoughts they may be having, or problems they are facing. They are interesting because they have repercussions for how the young people who use them think of themselves.
In analyzing the life of one blog I hope to move away from much of current writing on blogging which tends to focus on charting the ‘blogosphere’. Here I hope instead to give insight to the mechanics of one blog, to look at how it is used and the arguments it displays, arguments and practices which I believe would not be sustainable elsewhere. To do this demands a number of caveats. Although Two Pairs of Eyes is in many ways socially liberal and feminist, I do not want to claim that this blog is representative of all Egyptian blogs, or that it is evidence for how blogging necessarily promotes liberal views. There are many blogs which advocate traditional views, just as in any other medium, and there are many web users with traditional views who use other blogs to expound their worldview. But I do want to claim that blogs have the potential for users to create in-group identities founded on common principles which may provide a significant challenge to dominant discourses in society. For young Egyptian women, this can mean challenging publicly the patriarchal values which regulate their social lives.[1] Mounting such a challenge publicly elsewhere would induce very serious social costs for women, and may be equated with rejection of community or religious identity. Two Pairs of Eyes, I will argue, provides an outlet for the emergence of a new kind of conversation, central to which is a fundamental questioning of the status quo.
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Email this article[1] Suad Joseph (1994) suggests that patriarchy regulates social relations across household types and social class in a Beirut camp. See “Brother/Sister Relationships: Connectivity, Love, and Power in the Reproduction of Patriarchy in Lebanon.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 21, No. 1
[4] Omnia Shakry. 1998. “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt.” In Lila Abu-Lughod (ed). Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press; See also in Abu-Lughod (ed) 1998, Afsaneh Najmabadi. “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran.”
[5] Maat is not un-used to this experience. She says her family has tried to set her up with a future husband on at least four occasions.
[9] “Laken enty fy elmokabel 7'serty la2enek 7akamty 3ala 7ad mn 3'er ma te3rafeeh w ma3andekeesh logic reasons, ah howa laga2 le taree2a takleedeya laken 3ala el2a2al howa 7ab yeegy mn elbab msh mn elshobak.” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/04/el-tamatem.html#comment-7790105068975360796
[10] “W 3ala de elmafroud enoh ma yethaza2sh kda aw teb2a el comments sarcastic belshakl dah. Fakary masalan enty lnahardah 3andek 22 bokra el3omr yegry w gih 3aliky yom fakarty fy 7ayatek ely fatet, w elforas ely kanet 2odamek w enek rafadty w robama daya3ty sha7's kowayes mn edek…Nasee7a a7'aweya ma tes7'areesh mn elnas fy elmawadee3 de” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/04/el-tamatem.html#comment-7790105068975360796
[12] “Mayenfa3sh aslak teshoof wa7da mashya fel share3 t2ool khalas ana hakalem 2ahlaha bokra!!” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/04/el-tamatem.html#comment-5597011516147647214
[14] My partner and I were constantly reminded of this while living in Egypt. Taxi drivers, shop-keepers and waiters would invariably ask my partner if we had children. The expectation that marriage should produce children extends to the higher classes too.
[16] It is also interesting that it was hard for Nephthys to admit to having written this post on our first meeting
[17] Nephthys’ faith comes through in the words, “only God, will judge my deeds, thoughts, words”
[18] “could u plz use a word count in ur posts and replies coz when they are tooooooooo long they are IRRITATING AND BORING” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/05/baaaad-world.html#comment-4722754265029815938
[19] “*excuse the anglo-arab.... i know it's annoying but there was no way i'd be able to write all that in arabic letters... if i wanted to post it within this month that is.” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/04/el-tamatem.html
[21] Hisham Sharabi. 1988. Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Values in Arab Society (Oxford University Press): p18
[22] To produce a culture which explicitly seeks to undo cultural norms without alluding to what is authentic is likely to be tagged as Western. A remarkable1957 Abdel Halim Hafez film demonstrates this point very well, and shows that these debates are not just about taboos and red lines but questions of authenticity. In the film, Abdel Halim Hafez’s character, Khaled, falls in love with Salwa, the daughter of a well-respected doctor. But because his best friend Fathi also loves her, he asks Salwa’s sister, Negwa, to marry him instead. Negwa and Khaled find out that in fact they are not suited, largely because Negwa’s friend, Buthayna, is a bad influence who teaches her to dance and encourages her to value material wealth. Buthayna is also footloose and dangerously free, ultimately eloping with Fathi against Khaled’s wishes. This is the ultimate sign of her leaving the community and rejecting outright its values. In the end Khaled opts to marry Salwa, not only his true love but also a woman who is in touch with her Egyptian-ness as much as her modernity. It is left to her father, the doctor, to bring Negwa back into line and remind her that freedom also involves responsibilities to family (and therefore to the nation). The film ties respect for patriarchy to authenticity, presenting unfettered freedom as a sell-out to the West. But most interestingly, the title—Modern Girls (Banat El Yom)—implies the movie is a treatise on how to succeed at being a modern woman and a good Egyptian. That the model female character in the film is glamorous, unveiled, and educated suggests that what is at stake is not so much about avoiding taboos as authenticating modern behavior.
[23] Salamandra, Christa. 2004. A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; Lila Abu-Lughod. 2004. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.; Walter Armbrust. 1996. Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. Cambridge University Press.
[24] Ultra-modern coffee shops in the Arab World modeled on the star of Starbucks often proclaim a local distinctiveness—my masters research took me to Inhouse Coffee, a Syrian chain styled on Starbucks down to the iconography, colour-scheme, comfy sofas, and sleek furnishings which was, as its manager insisted, distinctively Syrian (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emetheses/WeymanThesis.htm ). The same is true of the Egyptian chain Cilantros. A recent series of hugely popular free concerts for ‘invited’ middle class youth in Cairo—SOS concerts as they are called—promote local bands who blend the best of Egyptian music with world pop and rock themes. Hijab fashion, now so popular in Egypt, combines elements of a global fashion industry with interpretations of acceptable wear in a patriarchal Islamic society.
[25] Maat opens the post with an imaginary skit between her and her father in which he checks where she is going, what time she’ll be back, and refuses to let her use the car in certain circumstances.
[28] http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2006/09/no-religion-for-me-please.html#comment-115795099931141406
http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2006/09/no-religion-for-me-please.html#comment-115795712027028199
[31] Lucie Ryzova (University of Oxford): “‘My notepad is my friend’ Efendis and the act of
writing in Modern Egypt.” A research paper presented at “The Formation of National Culture in Egypt:
Social, Cultural and Ideological Trajectories” conference, the University of Oxford, January 2007
[32] Armbrust, Walter. 2006. “When the lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as Global Crossroads and Space of Playful Resistance.” in Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (eds.) Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Middle East American University in Cairo Press.
[33] Armbrust, Walter. 2006. “When the lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as Global Crossroads and Space of Playful Resistance.” in Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (eds.) Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Middle East American University in Cairo Press.
[34] Maat and Nephthys studied at the more Arabic leaning Cairo University, not the English-language American University in Cairo.
[35] It is widely thought that the government sponsored Al Ahram Weekly can defy government censorship to a greater extent than its Arabic language cousin because it is in English. Similarly, the Arabic-language and English-language websites of Asharq Alawsat show noticeable differences of tone—columnist Mona Eltahawy even found whole sections of her articles being erased in the Arabic version of the site. In research I conducted for my M.Phil thesis, I found that the Syrian version of a youth magazine, Star, preserved the most paparazzi sections of its Lebanese cousin because they were in English and related to foreign stars. The provocative Arabic language paparazzi sections were removed from the Syrian magazine.
[36] “*excuse the anglo-arab.... i know it's annoying but there was no way i'd be able to write all that in arabic letters... if i wanted to post it within this month that is.” http://nepeyes.blogspot.com/2007/04/el-tamatem.html
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