Author: Amro Ali

Transcript of my speech presented at the University of Western Australia
click here for details of the event UWA Panel

Abstract: The presentation will seek to argue that while Osama Bin Laden and Egyptian society shared two similar key goals: end to oppressive dictatorship and US meddling in the region. It was Bin Laden who lost considerable legitimacy on Egypt’s streets prior to and, more significantly, as a result of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Mubarak’s Egypt was central to Bin Laden’s narrative of repression and political revolution in the Arab world, ideologically underpinned by his deputy, Egyptian physician, Ayman Al Zawahiri. Three main dynamics came into play to sideline an already waning Al-Qaida narrative: the opening of an alternative route of political and social dissent; the growing Al-Qaida-Egyptian Islamist divide as well as the latter’s political maturation; and, critically, societal perception shifts vis-à-vis the burden of responsibility in the ruler-ruled paradigm.

Continue reading “The Tahrir Square that Eclipsed the Terror Scare: Reframing Osama Bin Laden in Revolutionary Egypt”

When Henry Kissinger once queried the Chinese Premier Zhou En Lai in 1971 for his views on the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou famously respond, “It is too early to tell”. In other words, 180 years notwithstanding, Zhou’s point was that the consequences of social revolutions do not crystallise until much later.

Academics who specialise in revolutions and Middle East studies are often fond of quoting the Zhou lesson yet are quick to omit social media from the discourse explaining the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Since January, I have attended countless academic seminars discussing the uprisings where specialists are downplaying social media to such an extent as to make it inconsequential. You know you are in for the long haul when a speaker remarks smugly that Facebook did as much for Egypt as the fax machine did for the fall of the Berlin wall.

The line goes something like this: “The revolutions of the French, the Russians, the Iranians, are proof that you do not need social media”. This argument has been repeated to me ad nauseum. Moreover, the critics are engaged in the logical fallacy they often warn against: argumentum ad antiquitatem, “appeal to tradition”, that is to say, because it happened in this manner in the past, it has to be correct. Continue reading “The War of Academia on Social Media”