Zeynep Tufekci speaking at TEDGlobal 2014. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED
In 2011, a single email launched what became a worldwide movement calling out wealth inequality. Yet three years on, Occupy hasn’t delivered on its utopian promises. Why? In opening Session 2 at TEDGlobal 2014, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci talks about the shortcomings of social movements galvanized by social media.
To be sure, online networks have had a profound impact on social movements. Says Tufekci, both tear gas and Twitter were everywhere in Tahrir and Gezi. With mainstream media outlets censored by the government, as “editors sat in their newsrooms and waited for the government to tell them what to do,” citizens started to collect online, snapping photos of police brutality and government hypocrisy and posting them on Twitter. Watching subsequent movements in Ukraine, Hong Kong, Bahrain and Tunisia, social change itself seems to be going viral.
Yet for all these new tools for scaling social movements, actual political change isn’t happening at nearly the same rate as the speed of Twitter. “For these movements, achievements are not proportional to the size and energy they inspired,” Tufekci says. “Their hopes are misaligned with what they are able to achieve.”
Tufekci’s insight: “The way technology empowers social movements can paradoxically weaken them.” Consider the American civil rights movements. When Rosa Parks was arrested, people got the word out by working all night, mimeographing 52,000 leaflets and distributing them by hand. The protest was organized by having its members do something we can’t fathom today – meeting face to face to get things done. And through that, says Tufekci, “They created the kind of organization that could think together, create consensus, innovate, keep going together through differences.” She asks: “Are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard way?”
She shows a slide of Martin Luther King Jr., addressing the massive crowd on the National Mall in Washington, DC, during the March on Washington, and says: “When you look at the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, you don’t just see the speech, not just the march itself — you see the kind of painstaking organization and capacity signaled by that march.” Compare this to the equally moving crowd movement at Zuccotti Park: “With Occupy, you see a lot of discontent, but you don’t really see teeth that can bite over the long term.”
The problem with social movements today, says Tufekci, is not that their participants lack heart or that they fail to forge true bonds among themselves, as some have argued. Like startups that grow too quickly, she says, movements need to learn to scale beyond the fast participation that’s made possible from online networks. “All these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by themselves are not going to be enough,” says Tufekci.
“Changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics over the long term.”
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Keren Elazari. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
In 2010, the late security researcher — or as cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari would like you to call him, the late hacker — Barnaby Jack found a security flaw in two different models of automated teller machines (ATMs). Onstage at a tech security conference, he publicly demonstrated his ability to make these machines spit out paper money, Elazari says at TED2014. “Barnaby Jack could have easily turned to a career criminal,” she says, “but he chose to show the world his research instead. Sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution.”
How we think about people like Jack is immensely complicated, Elazari says. Hackers scare us and fascinate us at once, and our reasons for these feelings are valid, she says, but we shouldn’t let fear get the best of us. “They scare us, but the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all,” Elazari says.
Yes, there are hackers doing things like stealing identities, leaking false information, and taking money that is not theirs, she says, but there are also hackers like Jack pointing out vulnerabilities in the devices we use to live, and doing things like fighting against government corruption and advocating for equal rights to privacy, security, and information. If we see hackers as only the bad guys, we are doing our society a disservice: risking ostracizing all those doing great things in the world, working to help us
Growing up idolizing hackers, with a special affinity for Angelina Jolie as Acid Burn in the movie Hackers, as a teenager Elazari ached to execute her own hacks. After her first break-in to a password-protected website, she felt a rush of power, she says, “like I had discovered limitless potential in my fingertips.” And that potential is the great and terrifying thing about hackers — their power for good or bad: “It’s geeks just like me discovering that they have access to a superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect.”
Like superheroes or supervillains, Elazari says, with hackers’ great power comes great responsibility (though not necessarily radioactive spiders.) “We all like to think that if we had such powers we’d only use them for good,” she says, “[but] what if you could read your ex’s emails, or add a couple of zeros to your bank account?” she asks. Would you do it? Hackers have to face that choice every day, and though several of them choose to do malicious things with their power, many instead work to do hard things that benefit the greater good.
One such hacker is Kyle Lovett — who in June 2013 discovered “a gaping vulnerability in wireless routers you might have in your home or office,” Elazari says, a vulnerability that allowed hackers to easily access users’ files and passwords. Choosing not to use this leak for his own advantage, Lovett reported the vulnerability to the manufacturer. Eight months later, the manufacturer still had not repaired the bug, so Lovett used the leaky routers to send a message directly to their users, letting them know just how vulnerable they are to hacks, and encouraging them to ask the manufacturer to fix the flaw.
Another hacker — Khalil Shreateh — found a security bug in Facebook’s system that allowed him to post on any users’ wall, despite whether or not he was the user’s “friend,” Elazari says. Shreateh reported this bug to Facebook via their bug bounty program, an initiative that invites hackers to report all vulnerabilities in exchange for a “bounty” that starts at $500 USD. When Facebook mishandled Shreateh’s report, he used the vulnerability to post on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook wall, Elazari says. He was denied the bounty because he hadn’t reported through proper channels — so hackers all around the world came together to raise over $10,000 USD as a reward.
This shows that — whether we want them to or not — hackers will discover the things that are broken in our world, Elazari says, and either report them or exploit them. If companies as progressive as Facebook — companies “founded by hackers,” Elazari says — still have a complicated relationship with hackers, how will more conservative organizations fare when dealing with hacker culture? This is something we need to address, Elazari asserts, because — more and more — in a changing world, with a growing dependence on technology, hackers are key players. “It’s worth the effort,” she says, “because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against a power you can’t control.”
The power of a creative, intelligent, engaged and curious hacker is immense, Elazari says, and not just regulated to Facebook accounts or local ATMs. “Hackers can do a lot more than break things,” she says. Hackers were key players in the Egyptian revolution, she explains, noting how the group Telecomix worked to provide Egyptians with dial-up access to the Internet — asking two European ISPs to switch old phone-line modems back on — after Mubarak shut down all Egyptian ISPs, “This worked so well one guy used it to download an episode of How I Met Your Mother,” she laughs, “… and when the same thing happened in Syria, Telecomix were ready.”
But there are two sides to every issue, Elazari says, noting: “One man’s hero can be another villain.” Not all people will agree with Telecomix’s actions, or the actions of many other big hacker groups, like the Syrian Electronic Army, who in the same country “have taken down multiple high-profile targets over the years, including the Associated Press’s Twitter account.”
The power hackers yield is great and is one of information, Elazari says, and right now, in the digital age, “access to information is a critical currency of power.” Hackers are shaping our future whether we like it or not, Elazari explains, and it’s up to us whether we want to help them make it better … or believe they will make it worse.
But the most fundamental characteristic of a hacker, according to Elazari? “They can’t just see something broken in the world and leave it be.” So, she says, “I think we need them to do just that, for after all, it’s not just information that wants to be free. It’s us.”
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Jehane Noujaim. Photo: James Duncan Davidson
In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won a TED Prize with her wish to bring the world together for one day of film. Today during Session 4: Wish, she talks about her latest film, The Square. The Oscar-nominated documentary follows the lives of a group of protestors during the Egyptian Revolution. Their mantra: “We will no longer live in the story that has been written for us.”
Now three years on, with Egypt still leaderless, is the revolution a failure? No, says Noujaim; success or failure is not only determined by the recent political outcomes. “Democracy,” she says, “is a journey, not a destination.” The real revolution is palpable in the streets, explains Noujaim. When an innocent victim is killed, their face spreads across the city. As she says, “The truth may not always be shown on television, but it is being painted on the walls, tweeted, shared.”
Meanwhile The Square is spreading across the world. It’s available in 50 countries on Netflix and has been translated and shown in Kiev, Moscow and Caracas. “Truth and courage,” says Noujaim, “are contagious.” Her film may not have won the Oscar, but in the streets of Cairo graffiti artists have awarded Noujaim the Oscar of the Street. And that, she says, is the best award she could have imagined.
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Probably the most famous pyramids in the world… those at Giza, near Cairo, shown here in a high resolution satellite image. By studying such images, archaeologists can be very precise about on-the-ground research, saving both time and money.
Strange as it may seem, archaeologists often look to the sky to discover sites buried deep beneath the earth. Space archaeology, as it’s called, refers to the use of high-resolution satellite imaging and lasers to map and model everything from hidden Mayan ruins in Central America to specific features on the ancient Silk Road trade route in Central Asia. The process saves research teams years it would have taken to do the same work using ground-based survey techniques.
Archaeologist, Egyptologist, University of Alabama at Birmingham professor and TED Fellow Sarah Parcak makes extensive use of this technology in her work, and she has done much to popularize space archaeology. She wrote the world’s first overview book on the subject, and gave a riveting talk at TED2012 to explain how borrowing the tools of space exploration helped her identify an ancient Egyptian city that had been hidden for thousands of years. Here, she tells the TED Blog more about how it all works — and how she applies it to her on-the-ground explorations.
How long has space archaeology been around? Who figured out that this could work?
Archaeologists have used aerial photographs to map archaeological sites since the 1920s, while the use of infrared photography started in the 1960s, and satellite imagery was first used in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until a seminal conference held at NASA in 1984 by my friend Dr. Tom Sever, whom I call the father of space archaeology, that we started to see more peer-reviewed papers on the topic. Tom introduced the field to a number of influential archaeologists — and then things really started developing when those archaeologists trained their graduate students, and those students started getting positions ten years ago.
Today, space archaeology is fairly standard practice. Conventional excavation and survey are crucial to confirm any satellite imagery findings, but analyzing the images saves time and money and allows projects to focus on specific locations at archaeological sites.
How do these technologies help to identify objects buried in the ground?
The only technology that can “see” beneath the ground is radar imagery. But satellite imagery also allows scientists to map short- and long-term changes to the Earth’s surface. Buried archaeological remains affect the overlying vegetation, soils and even water in different ways, depending on the landscapes you’re examining. So, for example, buried features in desert environments appear different from buried features in floodplains. When a wall is slowly covered over by earth, the materials it’s made from decay and become part of the soils around and above it, sometimes causing vegetation above and next to the wall to grow faster or slower. Satellite imagery helps archaeologists to pick up these subtle changes.
If you find a series of linear shapes in the same alignment as known archaeological features, and they match excavated examples, you still need to excavate to confirm, but you can be fairly sure that the imagery is accurate. Often discrepancies are much more readily apparent in the infrared part of the light spectrum, since vegetation and other changes to soils appear more strongly in infrared.
This image shows the New Kingdom town of el-Gurob, two hours of south of Cairo. Space archaeologists use these types of processed infrared high resolution images to spot important details about a potential dig site. In this case, they’re looking at an entire town, built in around 1800 BC.
You’ve been working in Egypt recently. How does the process of using satellite imaging work in practice? Do you get satellite maps sent to Alabama, from where you plan excavations?
We do extensive background research on what is known or has already been excavated or surveyed in each area to create a comparative dataset. We then look at previous work (if we have not done any) to determine what season might be best for ordering imagery. Seasonality is a huge factor, as some sites appear in rainy seasons and are invisible during dry seasons, and vice versa.
We then check databases from NASA and DigitalGlobe, which is the largest provider of high-resolution satellite imagery in the world (hopefully they have data from the right location at the right time of year!). We use the data to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) — a layered database for all of our imagery and archaeological data. Then, and only then, do we begin to process the data. Once we’ve analyzed the satellite imagery, we look at the potential sites and features we’ve discovered, and begin to plan our fieldwork.
Why is satellite archaeology especially useful in Egypt?
The state of preservation beneath the sand is excellent, and the soil and geological makeup of archaeological sites in the floodplain are conducive to satellite remote sensing. The imagery can detect entire sites or features — many of which can be hidden by cultivation or partial urbanization. We were able to map the entire city of Tanis using high-resolution satellite imagery, and we are beginning to map other sites as well.
What’s been your most spectacular find using this technology?
I don’t think there is one single thing I’ve found that I consider spectacular. But what I do think is amazing is that the imagery analysis has shown us that we only know about a tiny fraction of sites and features in ancient Egypt. Think about all of the huge questions we have not been able to ask due to a dearth of data: about the rise and collapse of ancient Egypt or how and why the Nile River changed over time. Our entire picture of ancient Egypt will be totally different in 25 years.
Have the two industries “borrowed” from one another? In other words, have any aspects of archaeology made their way back into space or satellite technology?
I think we are small potatoes compared to the military needs for satellites. I will say this, though: without archaeologists taking aerial photos of sites during military reconnaissance in WWI, the field of remote sensing wouldn’t have developed as quickly. Archaeologists gave the military the idea to use aerial photographs for spying and field survey. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology.
Why is the combination of space and archaeology so very seductive?
I think it appeals to two basic interests nearly everyone has: space exploration and archaeology. Put them together and people’s minds start to wander — in a good way! I also think people are already so captivated with ancient Egypt that the idea that only a fraction of its sites have been discovered from space is just mind-blowing.
This image shows the legendary archaeological site of Tanis. As Sarah Parcak puts it drily, “everyone knows this one from the Bible and Indiana Jones.” While it’s difficult to see anything on the ground, the filtered and processed satellite image shows incredible details of digs to be dug.
“Questions Worth Asking” is a new TED editorial series; this week we asked the question, “Can I borrow that?” to dig into themes of cross-disciplinary innovation and idea-sharing. See also Seth Godin’s op ed, “Why I want you to steal my ideas,” a story about SkyBox Imaging, a company using unexpected technology to build a new type of satellite, and an interview with Suzanne Lee, who’s mixing science, fashion and kombucha to extraordinary effect.
Cairo Kitchen. “I love this new start-up, and I’m really proud of the Egyptian entrepreneurs behind it. They’re very young, and they’re serving really good Egyptian food at affordable prices in a nice setting. It’s something we’ve never had. Before, if you wanted to eat Egyptian food, you ate it off the street from a dirty cart from a man who smells.” Cairo Kitchen, 118 26 July, Zamalek, Cairo. See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Street art on Mohammed Mahmoud Street in downtown Cairo. “This is brilliant, like an open-air museum. It’s refreshing. It’s energetic. Every time I go, it’s better than being in any museum, ever. The walls are covered with paintings, and it’s just beautiful to see all this energy on the streets. I don’t care if some of them have stupid messages or bad style of drawings. It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re there.” See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Market: Khan el Khalili. “This is the best place to go and bargain your head off. If you want a crash course in bargaining, I’ll take you there. I bargain as a sport. You can buy anything— just think of your classic, cliched concept of a bazaar, and it’s there. Scarves, veils, statues, gems, silver. All sorts of crap. It’s amazing.” Khan el Khalili market, 5 Khan Al Khalili, Al Gamaleyah, Cairo. See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Tahrir Square. “This is where the revolution was born. How do I show a man on the street Tahrir? How do I explain Tahrir to somebody who has never been there? I don’t think it’s just about physically being on the street, I think it’s also about feeling the power of the crowd. After 30 years of living under a dictatorship, under a very brutal regime, the most important thing that happened in Tahrir is a mental shift for us from a herd mentality to a free mentality. From obeying orders, from saying yes, from bending over, from kneeling, from being slaves to being free people.” See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Rare books library at American University in Cairo. “I studied there for four years getting my masters, so this has a special place in my heart. Most of them are rare books that you can’t find anywhere else, and I feel very privileged to have access to them in a very clean, beautiful place.” See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Textile stores: Tanis and Alef. “These are two textile shops that exist in Mohammed Anis street in Zamalek, a very posh area in Cairo. Alef is a gallery but their textile collection is just beautiful. Tanis sells only textiles. I guess I like these stores because they are also working on the theme of revival of local traditions, a topic very linked to my research and work.” Tanis and Alef, 9 and 14 Mohammed Anis Street, Zamalek, Cairo. See them on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
The Egyptian Museum. “The Egyptian Museum is literally a time capsule. You can find everything Pharaonic there from shoes to beds to wigs, it is very easy to imagine how they lived. Their sense of aesthetics was so stunningly advanced that it becomes impossible for you to believe that this work was done thousands of years ago. Some pieces are so contemporary, you can easily imagine they were designed in modern-day Tokyo or Milan.” The Egyptian Museum, Meret Basha, Qasr an Nile, Cairo. See it on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
The pyramids. “I have family and friends coming to visit two to three times a year, so I think in the past 10 years I’ve been to the pyramids 30 or 40 times. They’re mesmerizing. We have some problems right now, because really bad people have taken control of the plateau. My last visit this summer was a very aggressive one—people jumping over my car, harassing me for money, and some of them had guns, and some of them had knives. So just driving up to the pyramids was exhausting—it was a fight to get there.” The pyramids, Al Haram, Giza. See them on a map.
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
Felucca Ride on the Nile. “It’s the most calming, peaceful, beautiful thing you can do in your life, because there’s no motor — it’s just the wind. Sometimes you go and they’ll say, ‘Sorry, we can’t go, there’s no wind.’ You can have nice conversations over the River Nile. Usually I take my daughters — we buy our lunch and have it on the felucca. It’s a nice outing for the kids. If you go at night, it’s beautiful, and there are all of these colorful motorboats with neon lights blinking and loud Arabic music. People are dancing and singing. It’s very festive.”
Below, all these places, located on a handy map:
Read the profile of Bahia Shehab and her life in Cairo »
To see a whole host of other city-related content, go to TED’s Cities topic page »
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Cairo is, in some ways, a layer cake of spray paint. In 2011, TED Fellow Bahia Shehab sprayed this wall with her series “A thousand times no.” Soon after, the work was covered by another artist. At which point, Shehab returned to the same spot and painted over that work with images of schoolchildren. Photo: Bahia Shehab
Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women.
Bahia Shehab: A thousand times no
It’s a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only a beautiful work of street art — it was also a way for Shehab to speak out against social and political injustice in her long-troubled adopted city.
That night, just before she’d left home, she’d packed up her backpack (“It used to be my breastfeeding backpack,” she says with a laugh) with the essentials: cans of spray paint, stencils, her keys, and a small wallet containing nothing but her ID and a bit of money. “I bring enough so that if I’m pestered I can give them money and they leave me alone.”
As she sprayed the wall, a car with black tinted windows rolled up. “Suddenly there was this guy, a snitch, who was working with the local intelligence agency, called the Mukhabarat. He drives up to me and says, ‘Why are you painting this? Who are you?’ And suddenly he wants to take me for interrogation.”
Instead of getting into the car, Shehab stood her ground. “I start arguing with him: ‘Am I doing anything wrong? I’m just spraying a campaign to tell men not to harass me on the street. Would you like this to happen to your mother? Your sister? Do you have a daughter? Would you like men harassing them on the street? It’s shameful!’ I started giving him a lesson, and finally he said, ‘Okay, okay, you can keep doing what you’re doing,’ and drove off.”
It wasn’t the first time Shehab was harassed for her brave street art (the process of creating it is risky, considering the violence that has been taking place on Cairo’s streets) and it also wasn’t the last. Another time, three civilian men chased her down. “One man took my cans and vandalized my work the minute I sprayed it, and another man tried to snatch my stencils from me,” she says. “I’ve had several encounters with people who were very aggressive and brutal. I work at 4 in the morning because [regular] people are sometimes more dangerous than the police. I always make sure my stencils can be sprayed quickly and that my car is very close so I can get away.”
Shehab sprayed her first stencil in 2011, “when the military was very brutal” and the revolution had been sweeping through Cairo for nine months. Although she wasn’t in Tahrir Square at the beginning of the revolution, she was inspired by an image, which she describes in her TED Talk, of dead bodies on the street. “It was specifically that image,” she says. “All the virginity tests, the beating up, the gassing of people on the street, the sniping. I felt like I needed to go down to the street to work.”
Another view of spray paint in Cairo. See more of Shehab’s favorite spaces in Cairo in this photoessay shot by Ohoud Saad.
After creating her first piece of street art, she was hooked. “It was in Tahrir, and the feeling was amazing,” she says. “I can’t describe how beautiful it was. I felt free. I felt like I was screaming. I felt like all of the stress of the whole year that had been building up, was all released through that spray can. It was very liberating.”
Born and raised in Beirut, Shehab has been interested in art since she was a young girl. Her father owned a factory that manufactured heating systems, and her mother was a full-time mom, raising Shehab and her five brothers and sisters. (Only one brother remains in Beirut; the rest of her siblings are scattered around the world.) In 1999, she graduated from the American University in Beirut with a degree in graphic design, and she worked as creative director with several advertising agencies in Beirut and Dubai, where she lived for five years. Today, she is a creative director with the advertising agency Mi7-Cairo, and also a professor at the American University in Cairo, where she developed a four-year graphic design program focusing on the discipline in the Arab world.
Shehab’s husband, Tarek Montasser, also works at Mi7, which formed in 2008, and is a multi-disciplined artist in his own right. “He’s working on his first feature film, and he’s a very good painter — and I’m not just saying that because he’s my husband.” They met while she was living in Dubai, and they have two daughters, ages 9 and 6.
When they first moved to Montasser’s native Cairo in 2004, the couple lived in the city, but the next year, they moved to the suburb called the 6th of October City, named after the day in 1973 when the Egyptian Army pushed across the Suez Canal and dislodged the Israelis who had been occupying the Sinai Peninsula since 1967. (A lot of bridges, cities and factories are named after that date, she explains.) Their home is a much-needed respite from Egypt’s capital city, the largest in the country.
To see Bahia Shehab’s favorite places in Cairo, check out this gallery of photographs »
“I’m living in a very quiet area,” she says. “I couldn’t live in the heart of Cairo. When I first moved here, I stayed in town for three months and it was too much — there’s so much noise. I couldn’t sleep. They won a football match and beeped their car horns until 3 in the morning. I couldn’t understand why! So I moved out of town, but what’s beautiful is that it’s very close.”
It’s an understatement to say that getting around Cairo on a daily basis is laborious. “It’s the most — I don’t want to say aggressive, but I will say difficult city to exist in,” she says. “There are a lot of traffic jams. But eventually you learn how to work around it, and it grows on you.”
To deal with the traffic, Shehab uses a crowdsourcing app, Bey2ollak, which helps residents keep track of the status of all major roads. “There’s no system for us to know, otherwise,” she says. “And it’s written in a funny way, like, ‘The road is hopeless.’” The app also includes another aspect that speaks directly to Cairo’s violence: “After the revolution, they added another feature that tells you if there’s a shooting, if the roads are blocked or if there are demonstrations. People tell each other, ‘Don’t go there. It’s too dangerous now.’” Users can also crowdsource convoys, because cars, especially ones being driven alone, are sometimes stolen by armed men. “I might say, ‘I’m leaving for Marina, and I need three cars to move with me.’ It’s safer that way.”
Military checkpoints have become a fact of everyday life, as is a curfew that restricts people from being outside after midnight on weeknights and after 7 p.m. on Fridays. “They’re very brutal,” she says. “They ask for your papers, and they can make you wait for hours, and if they suspect something, they can take you into custody.”
“Men don’t feel [the danger on the streets],” she continues. “Even my husband sometimes does not believe how bad it is. And I fear for my two daughters. I wouldn’t like them to be on the street in a country that is so aggressive towards women. Muslims who were trying to take over politically started planting the idea that if a woman was covered, then she was chaste and she wouldn’t be harassed. And so women started covering and covering until they were wearing black tents with nothing but their eyes showing. But they were still getting harassed!”
The derogatory term, often used on the streets of Cairo, is “awra,” and Shehab has been hearing it since she was a young girl. “If I wear a sleeveless shirt, men pinch me and say abusive statements, that I’m a whore or a bitch or I should be covered up. But it’s not my body that should be covered. It’s your brain that’s [messed] up.”
The curfew has taken a toll on her painting; since she usually works so early in the morning, she hasn’t been out since June. “It’s because of the military, but also because I feel like I need to be quiet right now. I need to wait and see what’s going to happen. I don’t want to condemn the military or the new government before I see what they do next.”
So would she ever move out of Cairo? The short answer is no. “My daughters belong here. They are both Egyptians, and I would like them to grow up in their own country, to learn their own language and have a sense of identity and belonging.”
Plus, she says, the revolution is far from over. “In the near future, I hope we can all agree on a solid constitution so we can build our rights on it. I hope we can elect a good party — people who are not thieves, murderers, capitalist bastards or religious freaks. I hope we can find somebody who really cares and loves this country as much as we do, and who hopes to genuinely improve it.”
She’s feeling optimistic. “Give us time. Things don’t happen overnight. When I was at a conference earlier this year in Berlin, a man said to me, ‘So how do you feel now that your revolution failed?’ And I was like, ‘Excuse me? We haven’t even started, sir.’”
The Pyramids in the distance: a view Bahia Shehab absolutely loves. See more places Shehab adores in Cairo in this photoessay shot by Ohoud Saad.
To see Bahia Shehab’s favorite places in Cairo, check out this gallery of photographs »
You can also see more on this annotated map (click the pins to view details of her chosen spots):
After last summer’s democratic elections in Egypt, I thought that I would never have to take to the streets of Cairo to spraypaint messages again. But Mursi lost the sympathy and support of the Egyptian people in November of 2012, although the rest of the world unfortunately did not notice. A flawed constitution and a series of dictatorship declarations by the president inspired millions of Egyptians to take to the streets on December 7, 2012. His actions made me go down again to Tahrir to paint the following message on the road leading up to the square: “We are back. No to a new Pharaoh, No to Mursi.”
What happened this week in Egypt is not a surprise to the believers in the revolution in this country. Tamarod is a grassroots movement that has been collecting signatures of people who did not support the Muslim Brotherhood regime for the past two months. Twenty two million people signed the petition. Thirty three million people are estimated to have protested on June 30 and July 1 all over Egypt.
This time around, I decided to finish my work on the street before the rallies. I was sure the squares would be full and I just wanted to enjoy the euphoria of the revolution — I did not want to spray. So I went to work on June 7, aiming to feminize the act of rebellion with my art. “Tamaradi ya Outta” or “Rebel Cat” was a call to women to join the revolution. I feminized the verb “to rebel,” so more women could relate to it, and I added the word “cat,” a howl that men sometimes call to women on the street. I painted the cat with a halo in many colors along with the slogan.
We Egyptians are not naïve enough to believe that things will become better overnight, the minute we elect a new president. We all agree that we are in a constant state of learning. Everyone learned a lesson in the past two years. The army came to understand that they are not fit to rule over civil society. The police learned that they need the support of the people. The people learned that those who buy their voices in the ballots for a bag of sugar or a bottle of oil will not necessarily have the best interests of the country in mind, and that religion should never be used in political agendas. But the most important lesson of all was clearly laid out for any future president of Egypt. Anyone who is going to sit on that chair knows now for certain that the real power is with the people. The Egyptian people will never leave the squares again.
One of the reasons I decided to target my work at women this time is the aggressive, organized, and targeted sexual harassment campaigns that were employed by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood to intimidate the women of Egypt from going down to protest in the squares. They tried to intimidate half the population to keep them away from the street. But the women of Egypt are the heart of the revolution. On June 30, 2013, women went down with their children to the squares in their millions and, after seeing that, I knew we couldn’t lose. The most beautiful scene from Tahrir this time is the women’s zone that is surrounded by men to protect them from any harassment. The most beautiful chants came ringing from this section, from the voices of these women who know that they are the core of the revolution.
On June 7, I sprayed another message, a message to the men who want to silence and intimidate the women of Egypt. A message to the men who claim that the voice, the hair, the body and the face of a woman is an “awra”, a shameful thing that should be covered. I sprayed a big brain composed of naked women body parts with the message “Mokhak Awra.” “Your brain is shameful and it should be covered.”
Freedom is addictive. After the events of the past three days, I am sure that no one will stop going down to the streets again to express dissatisfaction. Keep an eye out for Egypt in the near future. The land of the pharaohs will not produce another dictator. The time has come for the land of the Nile to produce a new breed of pharaohs; pharaohs of democracy, pharaohs of culture and pharaohs of knowledge.
German speakers may be interested in watching this documentary about Shehab’s latest campaigns »
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Photo: James Duncan Davidson
Dina El Wedidi is a traditional Egyptian singer — but with a global twist. While her powerful chant draws from Egyptian folk songs, her lyrics speak to a generation of young Egyptians estranged from their government and looking for connection. Meanwhile, her band members play the guitar, the accordion and even the Irish violin.
Photo: James Duncan Davidson
At TEDGlobal 2013, El Wedidi plays two songs. First, “Al-Haram” which El Wedidi translates as “The Forbidden.” She says, “[It’s about the] idea of prejudging, and the misuse of religion to forbid love, art and so on.”
Next, El Wedidi plays “Hozn El-Ganoub (The Sorrow of the South).” She explains, “The south of Egypt very important — it’s the source of the Nile and the source of life.”
El Wedidi has gained popularity in Egypt since the uprisings of 2011, thanks to her thoughtful lyrics that pack political punch and her call for self-realization. As she sings in “Al-Haram”:
“What’s forbidden is not to sing / What’s forbidden are words, half of which are lies.”
]]>Egyptian filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize in 2006 with a wish to bring the world together for one day using the power of film. Her most recent work, The Square, saw her heading back to Cairo to track events in Tahrir Square as the Hosni Mubarak regime fell. While there, she filmed a group of local revolutionaries who had also been drawn to the tumultuous events, including the actor Khalid Abdalla and Aida El-Kashef, a cofounder of Mosireen, a media center dedicated to creating citizen journalism during the revolution. The documentary tracks the charismatic group of individuals through their time at the height of the revolution, and continues to tell their stories even after many of the other revolutionaries had moved on from Tahrir Square.
The Square won the Sundance Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category earlier this year, and Noujaim and her team are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the post-production of the film, including editing and further filming. After all, this is a story that is far from over.
I caught up with Noujaim and the film’s producer, Karim Amer, to talk about the film, the achievements of the revolution, and what’s still to come in this newborn democracy.
What are you hoping to achieve with the film?
Jehane Noujaim: I hope people see this is not only a story about Egypt. This is a story about struggle and about fighting for your beliefs and putting everything on the line to fight for what you believe in. That story is interesting when the big news cameras cover it, when you have the entire country behind you — but when the cameras go away and most of the country and state television are calling you prostitutes and thugs and are not behind you, that can be some of the most interesting footage. It really shows what has to be sacrificed.
Are you hopeful for the revolution?
JN: Definitely. But this is a very difficult time right now, and it’s going to be a long process. I don’t think that we’re going to see some of the results for 5, 10, 15 years. This was a fairytale, to expect that in 18 days or two weeks, people in a square were going to be able to bring down a dictator and his entire regime. In a way, by bringing down Mubarak, a lot of the people that were fighting lost the symbol of what the revolution was fighting for. So it became even more difficult after Mubarak stepped down. But what they’re fighting against is the removal of a regime, and that means changing the system. That means dealing a major blow to the entrenched systems that are in place, and that includes the army, the police state, the former regime, and the Muslim Brotherhood … not because of religious reasons, but because what the Brotherhood tried to do when they got into power was a massive power grab, and so it’s really been a fight against another dictatorship.
You first started working on the film in 2011. In The Square it’s apparent that since then there’s been a change in morale among the revolutionaries. Can you talk a little about that?
JN: The revolution goes in waves. There are times in the film when our characters are completely depressed. There are wins and then there are many times when they feel like the battle’s been lost, and they have to keep reminding themselves that it’s a long struggle. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.
Karim Amer: I think a lot of people we’ve spoken to from Western media outlets are kind of gloomy on the revolution’s outlook, but when we talked to our characters … it took over 30 years to make people realize what Mubarak’s regime was doing and to galvanize enough of a movement to get him out of power. It took over a year and a half to do that with the military. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood’s in power with the first freely elected president, and less than 6 months later, people are back in the streets. Our characters see it, and we see it, as progress. People are starting to react much more quickly to acts of injustice. That’s the new Egypt that many of the people in this movement and in our film are shaping and paving.
So uprising and violence are actually signs that things are improving?
KA: We’re not saying that violence is a sign that things are improving. What I’m saying is that reactions to injustice leading to massive action of people showing their power…
JN: Ideally nonviolent.
KA: …is an act of improvement. You’re going to try to jam the constitution through illegally? Well, we’re not going to stand for that. The action-to-reaction time is improving.
JN: Before Mubarak stepped down, when a massive injustice took place, if you tried to have a conversation with somebody in the street, with a taxi driver, anybody, people would not even speak about it. People were afraid to give their opinions even though they knew that there were massive injustices happening. And even after he stepped down it took a year [for conversations to start happening.] You see in the film, the army was torturing people in the Egyptian museum, but it still took people about 8 months to stand in the street and to say to their army that they would not stand for this any more. And then when Morsi did his power grab, it took them, what, two weeks? Two weeks to go down into the streets. That is a massive change from the Egypt I grew up in.
KA: It is a complete paradigm shift in terms of the mentality of the people. People are no longer living in a culture of fear.
How have things in Egypt changed since you were young?
JN: Probably the biggest change is really seeing people realize that the government is supposed to work for them, rather than them having to be victims of whatever the government decides to do.
KA: Egypt is an epicenter of centralized states. Egypt is the land of the Pharaohs. We’ve been living under a Pharaonic-type of society for 5,000 years. What changed was a huge shift in people’s expectations of their leadership and their expectations of the future they want to live. That’s why we know that regardless of the short term outcome, the revolution has been successful.
Clearly not everyone from the revolution is pleased with Morsi. Do you think he’ll stay in power?
JN: Right now there aren’t the checks and balances that are in place in the United States or other democracies, so the people gathering in protest around the palace are Morsi’s checks and balances. My hope is that people will continue to express themselves and educate the rest of the country on their rights. But I don’t think that Morsi is about to be ousted anytime soon.
KA: The goal isn’t, like, the continual ousting of people. We’re trying to create a system. Right now a new social contract is being formed. The goal is that any attempts for Morsi to become a dictator are curbed, and that he recognizes the power of the people. If he fails to do that, then I think, yeah, he will not last. But I think that the outpouring of pressure against him is really making him check this again, especially because the Muslim Brotherhood is losing so much support from their own people, who are very disappointed.
JN: In the film, one of our characters starts something called Mosireen, which means “adamant,” and basically it gets cameras out to people to film injustices. One very powerful piece that they filmed later was at a protest at the presidential palace when Morsi did his power grab. A number of Brotherhood supporters trashed the tents in front of the palace, took people, and tortured them. Somebody managed to videotape it. In these torture videos, the Brotherhood supporters were saying, “Who’s paid you to be here? You’re a thug.” That was Mubarak’s exact playbook.
As we watch this happen again, the feeling you get is not that Morsi himself is going to be the savior and change things, but that people are going to keep fighting against the dictatorship and against this kind of rule.
Jehane, I know you spent some time in jail during the filming. What were some other personal challenges that you both faced in making the film?
KA: Of course, Jehane was arrested 3 times throughout the process.
JN: Everybody on the team has been arrested, shot at, or chased by soldiers or police.
KA: Cameras confiscated I don’t know how many times.
JN: We’ve had many cameras confiscated, a lot of footage taken, so that’s probably the most obvious, but we still managed to get all of the footage out of the country and to put a film together.
KA: When you’re documenting something that’s so close to home, what’s at stake for everyone in the film, the whole team, is your country. Your country is being reshaped and redefined, and you have the ability, hopefully, to make some kind of impression of that through the film. So there’s a lot at stake, and there’s a lot of emotion. One of the characters, Ahmed, told us that this film to him is the truth that must be preserved. He said, our generation and our parents’ generation grew up in a country where history was written by whomever was in power, and they could write and say whatever they wanted. This film is our ability to show an alternative version, to preserve the truth of what happened in this square, and he said, if this film succeeds, then our kids will live in a country that’s free.
And I’m like … okay … that’s a lot to put on the film. [Laughs] I mean, we’re happy it means so much, but that’s a huge burden.
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Bahia Shehab’s latest work on the streets of Cairo memorialize 51 children killed in a school bus crash. In this image, three brothers have a conversation. Child 1: “They still didn’t get the lesson.” Child 2: “NO.” Child 3: “It’s OK, repetition is the best teacher.”
On November 17, 2012, in a village in Assuit-Egypt, a train crashed into a school bus killing 51 children. These kinds of accidents have always been brushed aside as random acts of chance. The minister of transportation resigned as a result, and the families of the children were compensated financially. There was a huge public outcry … but eventually these children were forgotten.
But the details of this accident that circulated on social networks were still very vivid in my mind. A video of a regretful father who, when asked the last thing he said to his son before he got on the bus, cried bitterly and said that he hit his son so that he would not miss the bus. Another video showed a girl, only nine years of age — one of the survivors — saying calmly on TV to the government, “You are all dogs.” A note circulated commenting on the price paid by the government to each family and comparing it to other more expensive items, like an iPhone or the front light of a Mercedes Benz. The image of the children wrapped in their shrouds. The cries of the mothers who lost 2 or 3 or 4 children in that accident — one of them has been admitted to a psychiatric ward. And finally a list of the dead children’s names.
In this image, the girl says: “I went to heaven and they are all going to hell.” It’s on the burnt building of the ex-ruling National Party in Downtown Cairo.
All the other details were very painful to me, but the list of names just locked the deal in my head. I wanted to paint these children. To me these children were killed by a corrupt system of governance. We started a revolution so that accidents like this would not happen again. I wanted to bring the children back to life.
I collected the names of the children and grouped them into boys, girls and families. I wanted to paint the sisters and brothers who died together — so that they could come to life again on the streets of Cairo, together. I painted each child walking on a train railway. They are painted in black but their wishes and dreams are painted in color.
This girl says: “I wish I grew up to be a princess.” The green plate reads: “Land owned by Princess Nora al-Saud, Giza-Cairo.”
On the 25th of January, 2013, I started painting the children of Assuit on the walls of Cairo. Some of them appear alone to ask a question, like “ I wish I grew up to be a princess” or “ I could have grown up to be a policeman or a scientist.” A sister calms her brother with a lullaby near a bus stop. The lullaby reads, “Mother is on the way” and her brother asks her, “Soon?” A little girl states that she has died and gone to heaven but they (meaning the responsible ones) are all going to hell. But my favorite is on a barrier wall in downtown Cairo. I painted 8 children playing hide and seek.
Child 1: Khalawees (Are you done? Did you hide?)
Child 2: Not yet.
Child 3: Has the revolution succeeded?
Child 4: Not yet.
Child 5: Did we get the rights of the martyrs?
Child 6: Not yet.
Child 7: Has Egypt become heaven on Earth?
Child 8: Not yet.
The first wall Shehab sprayed in front of the Ministry of Interior, with her series “A thousand times No.”
This barrier wall has a very special story for me. It was the first wall I ever covered with my “A thousand times No” series on February 15, 2012. Another group of artists came on March 15 and painted the street perspective with a very special character, Hanzala, added to the wall as part of a campaign called “There are no walls.” The artists painted the street and pretended that there was no wall — they danced and they sang.
This same wall, painted by other artists to look as if it weren’t there.
When I came back on January 25, even though artists pretended that there was no wall, the walls were still there. So I decided to add the children with Hanzala, with their questions and their dreams.
The children of Assuit will keep appearing on the streets of Cairo, as the conscience of an ongoing revolution, so that we all remember why we went down to the streets and why are we still going down to the streets until today.
In dialogue with the other artists, who put only Hanzala on the street, Shehab painted eight children on the wall.
Two years ago, Lebanese-Egyptian artist and historian Bahia Shehab was invited to join an exhibit commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The catch: she had to use Arabic script in her work.
“As an artist, a woman, an Arab and a human being living in the year 2010, I only had one thing to say—I wanted to say no,” Shehab says in this powerful talk from TEDGlobal 2012. “In Arabic, we say ‘No and a thousand times no.’”
Shehab decided to focus on the Arabic script for “no.” She collected a thousand different visual representations of the word “no” printed, stitched, molded, engraved and cast over the past 1,400 years on vases, tombstones and walls, in locations as far-flung as Spain and the border of China. She called the installation A Thousand Times No.
A year later, a revolution began in Egypt. “Life stopped for 18 days,” says Shehab. “On the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo believing that the revolution had succeeded.”
Months later, as the reaction to the revolution turned violent and the country braced itself for a much longer battle, Shehab began to see a connection between A Thousand Times No and her country’s situation. She took to the streets, spray-painting “no” on walls throughout Cairo.
“I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street,” Shehab said, describing her first image, which read “no to military rule” in a script taken from a tombstone. “A series of ‘no’s came out of the book like ammunition.”
Some of the “no”s that followed: No to a new pharaoh. No to violence. No to killing men of religion. No to burning books. No to the stripping of veiled women.
To hear more about Shehab’s art, and the specific meaning of these “no”s, watch her beautiful talk and read the TED Blog’s Q&A with her. Below, read about two new projects Shehab has been creating in Cairo.
Shehab tells the TED Blog:
This is a campaign that I sprayed before the presidential elections, in May and June of 2012. The mass sentiment was very low and there were a lot of anti-revolution feelings in the air, even by people who were strong supporters of the revolution. I did this campaign to remind people of the aims of the revolutions and the sacrifices that people made for us to get to where we are. It is called “There are people” and the five stencils read:
There are people who have had their head put to the ground so that you can raise your head up high.
There are people who have been stripped naked so you can live decently.
There are people who have lost their eyes so you can see.
There are people who have been imprisoned so you can live freely.
There are people who have died so you can live.
The authorities erased this campaign three days after I sprayed it, which proved to me one thing—the faster they erase, the stronger the message. So I sprayed it again a month later, this time with bigger images and clearer text.
Two weeks after that, somebody took a photo of it and the campaign went viral. Three weeks later, it was featured on the third page of one of the leading local newspapers, right under the image of Mubarak. The message has surpassed the medium and I was very proud.
This is a campaign I did on speed bumps in August of 2012. I took a street that leads out of Tahrir Square, and I painted a message before the speed bump: “Beware of Speed Bumps.” After the bump, I painted: “Long live the revolution.”
To the taxi drivers — who were thanking me for highlighting the problem at 4 in the morning of a Ramadan day — I was doing a socially responsible act. I was doing the work the government should do to keep them from harm by highlighting a speed bump on a busy street. But to someone with more insight, they will understand that I am highlighting the fact that for us as people leaving Tahrir Square and heading towards a new phase of the revolution, we should be aware of speed bumps and we should keep the main aims of the revolution very clear in our minds.
