Music is “haram” but we cannot give it up

During a group discussion with 11th grade female students, they wanted to discuss managing their time and what they called time wasters:

Noha: Listening to music wastes my time. I spend a lot of time listening to music. I love all kinds of music.

Khadija (in a very restraining tone): Listening to music is “haram” (forbidden). On the Day of Judgment a heated stick will be pushed into the ears of all those who used their ears to listen to music”.

MF (addressing other students): What do you think of what Khadija has just said?

Khadija (before other students have the chance to talk): This matter is not subject to disagreement because it comes from Almighty GOD. That’s what was said by both the Sheikh on the TV and the Sheikh at the mosque. Listening to music is a distraction to ibada (practices of piety) and makes people think about bad issues.

The rest of the students were speechless and left with no choices other than to agree that listening to songs and music is haram (forbidden).

MF: So all forms of music are considered haram? What about some music genres such as religious music? Is that considered appropriate?

Khadija: no music at all. That means no TV, no radio, no cinema. One should stop paying attention to music played in the street while passing by. I trained myself to close my ears when and where music is played so that I don’t hear it.

Fatma: I listen to music and songs. It may be wrong. But I am not religious enough to stop loving and listening to music. (A number of girls nodded, agreeing with Fatma)

Listening to music, particularly modern Egyptian pop music, is a major element of the everyday life practices of young people. They store their favourite music on their cell phones, computers and MP3 players. Noha, Fatma and the other girls could not

deny their desire for the fun of listening to music. According to TV and mosque preachers quoted by Khadija, however, the committed and God fearing Muslimness does not fit with listening to music that is considered a distraction to ibada. Faced with Khadija’s concerns, the female students had no other choice but to admit their ambiguous position that despite the fact that it may be “haram” they could not give it up.

6.5 Conclusion

I have argued in this chapter that young people, while navigating forms of patriarchy and subordination of their wider everyday life, were deploying “tactics of the weak or powerless” (De Certeau 1980: 8). Through deploying these tactics, young people were either confirming their gendered agency causing cracks within systems of subordination, or surviving times of pressures and tension. In certain cases, young people’s navigation showed ambivalence and somehow ambiguity about the direction in which they wanted to head, while navigating forms of subordination. Both the Al-kofar group and Amro had deployed unruly tactics in handling schooling and familial subordination. Despite the Alkofar and Amro’s lack of power, the value of their unruly tactics derived from their skilful use of the available opportunities and circumstances to shake “the foundations of power” (De Certeau 1984:39). Amro, through his political agency, had gone beyond De Certeau’s tactic of the weak and powerless by confirming that he was not religious and that he was against an Islamist regime. However the “Sheikh Turbo” young men and some female students had shown ambiguity in handling the forceful religious discourse when those discourses intersected with their individual desires. The two cases in the last section of this chapter have shown that while young people wanted to abide to religious preaching, even the most conservative preaching, they sought ways out when such preaching went against their desires for fun and enjoyment.

Young women showed ambivalence and somehow ambiguity in navigating forms of patriarchy. Hadia was ambivalent as to whether to submit or subvert familial and schooling pressures, and Noura was somehow ambiguous between abiding by the Islamist rules of the good Muslim girl and her very individual choices. In the middle of their ambivalent and ambiguous positions, both Hadia and Noura had produced survival tactics that I have argued were a confirmation of their gendered agency and at the same time considered as cracks in the very foundations of patriarchy. Hadia’s action to leave the private lesson she hated was a moment of victory. Noura’s decision not to wear a hijab and her obsession with romantic relations were not consistent with the Islamist discourses of the mosque movement and poses questions about the effectiveness of such movements to mobilize young people.

CHAPTER 7

Tahrir narratives: renegotiating age, gender, and the city spaces

7.1 Introduction

On 24th February 2011, a small group of thanaweya-aama students established a Facebook page40 under the title “thawret tolab thanaweya-aama” (Thanaweya-aama Students' Revolution) and wrote:

Dear thanaweya-aama colleagues: we have established this page following our great revolution in order to demand changes in the education system for a better future for all Egyptian young people. Please share this page with all your friends and colleagues both boys and girls. We want to have thousands of members so that we can prepare for our first street actions. A post was added on 24th February calling for an event on Monday 28th February 2011 at 10 am for a march from Tahrir Square to occupy the headquarters of the MOE that day. Several posts followed, calling for increasing membership of the page, discussing their demands as thanaweya-aama students, and making preparation for the first street actions by students after Mubarak’s removal.

From 25th January 2011, young Egyptians of high school and university age, and young graduates, took the lead in what had been described as one of the pivotal historical moments in Egypt's modern history. Egyptians from different social segments on an unthinkable scale joined the young people's waves of protests and sit-in that forced the removal of ex-President Hosni Mubarak (Herrera 2012, Schielke 2011, Hirschkind 2011).

I finished my field work in Cairo between November 2010 and January 2011, and was preparing to work on the data analysis and start writing my thesis. However, with the 25th January protests and then the occupation of Tahrir Square, the downfall of Mubarak, and the incidents that followed, I had to go back to fieldwork for the whole year of 2011, but only in and around Tahrir Square. Despite not seeing the familiar faces of the young people of the Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam schools, thus

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causing the discontinuity in persons between this and preceding chapters, there were other young faces within the square whose voices have also appeared in the previous chapters. During that period, schools were closed for the mid-year break and the MOE extended the schools' closure through April 2011 until it was somehow safer to reopen schools for a very short period before they were closed again in May 2011. During that period, the whole of Cairo was for most of the time under curfew rules imposed by the army forces that turned Cairo from the Friday of rage (27 January 2011) into a huge military facility. The curfew rules and the insecure situation in many areas around Cairo, including the Al-Basatin and Dar-elsalam area, made it impossible to go back to my informants in the three secondary schools. As will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, Tahrir Square was one possible route which the emerging oppositional consciousness could take. In order to understand Tahrir Square, the insights of the previous chapters are crucial. I argue in this chapter that young people, through calling for and engaging in the Tahrir riots and occupational actions were claiming a “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996). The demands that were made in Tahrir Square through young people’s acclamations, “iesh, horia, adalaa igtimaaia, karama insania” (“prosperity, freedom, social justice and human dignity”) were, following Lefebvre, a call for “a radical restructuring of social, political, and economic relations, both in the city and beyond” (Lefebvre 1996: 34), manifesting their emerging political consciousness. I further argue that young people’s engagement in the Tahrir actions contributed significantly to redefining the meaning of the city’s “abstract spaces” (Lefebvre 1991).

According to Ahmad Abdalla (1985), the prominent leader of the Egyptian university students' movement in the early 1970s, Egyptian students' engagement with anti- colonial and protest actions go back to the early 20th century. As discussed in some detail in Chapter 2 of this thesis, the 1967 - 1973 students' movement was “a socio- political force that acted principally as an element of pressure on the ruling power” (Abdalla 1985: 218). According to Abdalla, students played a pioneering role in stimulating other social forces, especially the middle class (1985: 219). Yet about

forty years later, youth were seen as “burdened with authoritarian states, corruption and nepotism that circumscribe their life chances” (Swedenburg 2007:8).

I will first explore in this chapter how young Egyptians’ sense of hopelessness and their desires for change acted as a real ground, among others, that gave birth to the events in Tahrir. I will then explore the narratives of three young people (Amro, Mona and Karim) through which they recall their memories of being engaged in the Tahrir actions from 25th January 2011 and the Tahrir occupation to the Mohamed Mahmoud battle in November 2011. In exploring the three young people’s narratives, my intention is to understand what Tahrir gave to young people in return and what their engagement in the Tahrir actions meant in relation to their sense of hopelessness and future aspirations.