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I came of age in the era when writers filed stories using Tandys - hand-held word processors that were sold on high streets for £100. I transmitted my stories not by Bluetooth, but by dictating words from the dull green screen into a satellite telephone at a cost of $50 a minute. And in the Middle East, where I did much of my early work, I came across news not via an RSS feed or Twitter channel, but by word of mouth.
Of course, I had expected to find things changed when I returned to Egypt for Wired to report on the local internet explosion and in particular on the work of the country's political bloggers. But what I found amazed me. Here, the internet is not (just) the domain of cheap "generic drugs" and phishing emails but a force for political change that the government may have accidentally unleashed upon itself and which it may now be powerless to stop.
My first big story was in the late 80s, at the time of the first Palestinian intifada ("uprising"). In those days, telephones were dangerous - they could be monitored. Besides, people in refugee camps did not have landlines and, of course, mobiles did not exist.
Instead, young Palestinian activists - known as the
al-shabbab - photocopied leaflets and distributed them during Friday prayers at mosques. They were big risk-takers and moved from village to village on foot, after the nightly curfew, carrying their leaflets in plastic bags. Communication took place through personal contact - you knocked on a door and spoke to a human being, face-to-face.
Globalisation, and the second Palestinian intifada, which erupted in 2000, changed the way the internet was viewed in the Middle East for ever. The intifada, which started after Israeli Likud leader Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, became the region's first internet-fuelled conflict. Online activists called for solidarity with the Palestinians through Yahoo Groups, forums and email exchanges. As had happened in the US in the 60s, universities became hotbeds of activism. But, instead of being run by stoner hippies, this revolution was engineered by a new generation of technologically literate computer kids - very smart coders who would be perfectly at home in Silicon Valley.
Since then, the liberalising effects of the internet have been felt across the Middle East - Iran's recent wave of citizen journalism was more informative about its elections than al-Jazeera or the BBC. But it is Egypt, the region's business leader and its most populous country, that is at the forefront of the explosion.
Egyptian bloggers are using online tools to escape censorship and political repression, as well as to spread news. They blog about regional politics and about local issues: workers' rights; women's rights; when president Hosni Mubarak might finally step down; how to prevent his son, Gamal, from stepping into his father's shoes...
And they are being heard.
Internet campaigns have a habit of transforming themselves in a way that even their authors cannot predict. And sometimes those transformations are groundbreaking. When Israel went into the West Bank as part of Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, there were violent demonstrations in Egypt, the details of which were passed on via the internet. But soon they had a more local agenda. "[The protests] started out as pro-Palestinian and ended up anti-Mubarak," says Hossam el-Hamalawy, one of Egypt's most prominent bloggers and activists.
El-Hamalawy's blog The Arabist gets 3,000 hits a day and is one of the most widely read in the country. As a child of the computer era, he is also a social historian of Egypt's role in Middle Eastern online social activism.
One friend in Cairo describes him as "probably the most influential blogger in Egypt today". But his fame has not come without a price and his relaxed manner is in some ways a façade: like many of the young activists I spoke to in Egypt, he has been arrested multiple times, has had his cameras smashed, cannot get press credentials and is banned from covering government events.
El-Hamalawy remembers that magical online moment when the news shifted from pan-Middle Eastern events towards local news, and the Egyptian blogosphere was born: "Back in 2002, at the Operation Defensive Shield demos, I heard anti-Mubarak chanting for the first time," he says when we meet in one of the thousands of Wi-Fi cafés in Cairo. "The internet brought us room to manoeuvre on local issues." The March 2003 invasion of Iraq also triggered spontaneous anti-war protest, which then blossomed into a two-day mass demonstration against the Mubarak regime. "When the Islamists launched an insurrection here in 1992," he says, "there was heavy censorship, even though people were being shot in the street. If a whole village had been wiped out then, no one would have known, because our newspapers are government-controlled. But that could not happen now," he smiles, "because now we have Twitter." In fact, the next day el-Hamalawy is at a demonstration five hours from Cairo. The police arrive and detain the Wired photographer. In a flash, el-Hamalawy puts the news up on Twitter.
On my first day in Cairo, a Friday and the start of the Muslim weekend, a young journalist called Laila drives me to meet el-Hamalawy. The bumper sticker on her car reads: "Stop bitching - start a revolution!" She yaps on her mobile and blasts out The White Stripes and beur (Arabic-French) rap music as we head for an air-conditioned and Wi-Fi-enabled Costa Coffee on Abbas el Akkad Street in Nasr City. This is a depressing part of Cairo: modern, with ugly furniture stores selling plastic-covered sofas, and fluorescent juice bars. "East Cairo... once the cradle of civilisation," Laila sighs. Inside, we order lattes. When el-Hamalawy arrives, he breaks out his pack of cigarettes and starts puffing. I express surprise at how young he is. "I am 32," he says. "But I'm actually old - I'm second-generation."
A devout Marxist (though some blogs call him a Trotskyite) who spends his time promoting the workers' movement, el-Hamalawy is a product of the intellectual classes. His late father was a professor and his mother an artist. He grew up in a large bohemian household, speaks English with an American accent, and was educated at the prestigious (and expensive) American University in Cairo.
Most importantly he is a graduate of CompuCamps - educational programmes set up in the mid-80s by a group of high-flying Middle Eastern businessmen to introduce Arab children to computing. El-
Hamalawy was nine when he attended his first camp, in 1986. "You won't meet anyone here in my age group in the IT world who did not pass through those camps," he says. "It was a beautiful scheme."
With the romanticism of someone recalling an old love rather than the early days of computing, he speaks of emails as SMTPs, and about when it took 20 minutes to dial up a network.
El-Hamalawy calls himself a "pure" Marxist. He spends long hours driving cross-country on "Death Road", as the motorway outside Cairo is known, going to demonstrations and factory strikes, trying to give a voice to those who have none. For this he has been regularly harassed, but he shrugs that off as fate, or
maktoub ("it is written"). "The government dug their own grave in 1992," he says, "in establishing the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology." When the cyber-market opened up, the ministry made it its policy to keep the internet open to encourage business investment. This contrasts with, for example, Tunisia and Syria, says el-Hamalawy, "which blocked everything". This commitment to openness, el-Hamalawy feels, was "an ambitious attempt to make Egypt the next India". People will not do business if your internet is restricted, he says. "And, while we are censored, this is not China." (That said, Wired's repeated attempts to interview the minister of communications are refused, particularly once his assistant learns that we are speaking to bloggers.)
By 2003, says el-Hamalawy, an embryonic blogosphere was forming.
In 2004, after the Kefaya ("enough") movement - a coalition of secular activists against Mubarak - launched, its concerns switched from the pan-Arabic to the Egyptian. But the real push within the blogosphere came after the events of Black Wednesday on May 25, 2005, when pro-Mubarak thugs attacked young activists protesting against him, and female journalists were sexually harassed. One of these was Nora Younis, a press photographer and one of 30 women picked from the protesters and penned into a garage, where, witnesses said, members of the Egyptian police force beat and sexually assaulted them. When the women were released, many had been stripped and were left half-naked and sobbing. Younis submitted a CD of photographs as part of a lawsuit against the police. When the state declined to press charges, Younis went online and became a fixture in the protest movement and on its associated websites, known across the country as the curly-haired girl holding up photographs of the interior minister, Habib El-
Adly, and the police commander accused of responsibility for the assaults, emblazoned with calls for their imprisonment. "Many of those present were bloggers," says el-Hamalawy. "They were horrified at what they saw. That was the point at which they became radicalised. They went home and called on fellow bloggers to speak out."
Ultimately, the goal of most Middle Eastern political bloggers is to spread the internet to the masses, along the lines of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child ideology. "This opens up the world to everyone, rich or poor," says el-Hamalawy. And it looks as if Egypt is beginning to get there. Every Cairo corner seems to have a café where you can get online if you buy a latte.
When you ask Egyptians what they most want to change, you hear the same answer: "We would like a new government." Hosni Mubarak has governed under emergency rule since 1981. This legalises repression and gives the Ministry of Interior extensive powers to suspend basic rights - prohibiting demonstrations, censoring newspapers, monitoring communications, detaining people indefinitely without charge. Egypt's human-rights record is often criticised by NGOs. Yet, although it receives the occasional lashing from the US or Europe, that is never enough to rattle the authorities. Mubarak is important to the US, an ally in the "war on terror" in a troubled region (it is no coincidence that Cairo is where Barack Obama gave his grand Middle Eastern speech).
But now that power is clamping down on internet activists, as I discover on a stifling afternoon, when I climb four floors of a Cairo building to the offices of Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and a lawyer. His speciality is those who have been abused or detained by the security forces for exercising freedom of speech.
One of Eid's clients is Kareem Amer, a former law student at al-Azhar University who used his blog to write about the gap between Christianity and Islam, and to criticise what he saw as archaic laws in Islam and its repression of women. He paid a huge price. "Kareem turned 24 last week in prison," Eid says, sitting under a giant poster of Che Guevara, and snapping closed his (rather old) laptop. "I saw him. His spirits are OK. But can you imagine being 24 and locked up for writing on the internet what you feel?" In February 2007, Amer received a three-year sentence for "spreading information disruptive of public order" and "incitement to hate Islam" among other charges.
Eid pulls out a pile of letters and cards from the US, Holland, Italy and the UK -all written in support of Amer. The case has prompted international protest, with Amnesty International calling for his release. "[The authorities are] aggressive and smart at the same time," says Eid. "They don't censor sites like they do in Syria or Tunisia. They don't have firewalls for porn. But they are aggressive against activists using the internet."
The supposed watchdog of the internet in Egypt is the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. But, in fact, Eid explains, the de facto ruler of the internet is the interior ministry, which runs the official and secret police. "They have become the real enemy," Eid says. "They kidnap, torture, detain without warrants and control internet cafés." He opens his computer and produces a document. It's an online form which most internet cafés require individuals to fill out before they get their Wi-Fi.
It asks for detailed information, which is collected by the café.
Anyone suspicious - for instance, anyone opening an Islamist website - gets reported to the police.
Later that day, I meet an Islamist blogger in an Arabic bookstore-cum-café. This is no modern, western- style Starbucks.
The interior is dusty, there is no Wi-Fi, and, instead of young well-off couples, a few bearded men browse through bookshelves filled with used tomes. Sitting in one corner is Dr Mostafa al-Nagger, a dentist by profession and a moderate, blogging member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that the Egyptian government probably fears more than al-Qaeda.
Al-Nagger started blogging back in 2007 and his blog Waves in the Sea of Change is highly controversial, because he speaks out on radical Islam from a surprisingly liberal point of view. His posts tend to have the impact of a homosexual Catholic priest coming out on a website that promotes gay marriage in church.
The threat al-Nagger poses to the regime comes not from the fact that his site deals with Islam. (There are plenty of these, from pages run by would-be suicide bombers and fundamentalists who aim to whip their followers into a frenzy, to those that simply feature advice columns for perplexed believers.) It is because he presents a softer, less fundamentalist view of the religion and threatens the state's attempts to portray the Muslim Brotherhood as radical terrorists.
Although a religious man, al-Nagger has begun to revise his views on his faith. He says he uses his blog to dispel "negative views on Islam. I think al-Qaeda, for instance, uses cyberspace to tarnish the image of Islam. I want to promote a moderate version of Islam," he says. I expected a bearded man in a long robe but he is round-faced and clean shaven and wears black jeans. (His mobile ringtone, however, is the muezzin's call to prayer.) "I think that we should have dialogue and self-criticism - internal criticism. The internet has become a window for change in the Islamic movement." Al-Nagger has often written, for instance, about the status of women within the Muslim Brotherhood. "Should women be elected politically within the Muslim Brotherhood?" he asks. "This is the kind of question I throw out, and see how people respond."
For expressing these progressive views, al-Nagger has made two kinds of enemy. The first is the state which, as he puts it, "doesn't like bloggers to start with, but a moderate Islamic? This is terrible for them. It's important for them to tell the West we're radical fundamentalists! A moderate Muslim is not what they need right now." The second comes from the more radical ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whom see him as a traitor. He is often harassed and has had to, in his words, "take care of himself".
One person who certainly is watched as a potential enemy of the state is Ahmed Maher, although when I meet him in a café in Cairo's Nasr City district, the 28-year-old civil engineer's neat hair and gloomy manner are more reminiscent of a philosophy student preparing to write a paper on Kant than a dangerous radical. Maher is the leader of the 6 April Youth Movement, a group he started on Facebook in March 2008, which has grown to 70,000 members. Maher is something of a local legend. Arrested last year, detained and, he says, tortured, he has become a symbol of the government's crackdown and of the paranoia that the regime has about the power of the bloggers and citizen journalists. "People started taking to the streets in 2005, thanks to the Yahoo Groups," he says. "Looking back, I wasn't really interested in blogging, as it stopped me doing what I felt I should be - getting out in the street." In 2006, getting out in the street as part of a group called Youth For Change (a splinter group of Kefaya) resulted in his being detained for two months - during which he was beaten, given electric shocks, hung by his arms and deprived of sleep, he says.
He got out of jail and started blogging. By 2007, he was inciting workers at a large factory in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla El-Kobra to go on strike. They did, for six days. Maher's next move was to call for a general strike across Egypt on April 6, and he turned to Facebook for help. "The idea of organising a strike across all of Egypt came at a time when Facebook was just getting big," he says. He was arrested again and says he was subjected to two days of beatings. When he was released, he was depressed and listless. "I wondered - should I go on?" he says. He did, "mainly because there were too many people involved - we were all connected through Facebook... I had to continue."
In July 2008, he was appointed the official leader of the 6 April Youth Movement. He was in Alexandria, his home town, leading a small protest on the beach when the police caught him again. His memories of being handcuffed to a wall, blindfolded, stripped and brutally assaulted have not faded. But this time foreign journalists got news of his detention, and he was released. "The more media attention the Egyptian bloggers get," he says, "the less they can hurt us."
Maher began blogging when he was a student of civil engineering, but many others talk about the CompuCamps as their inspiration. In the leafy neighbourhood of Zamalek, Ranwa Yehia is now running the second generation of CompuCamps.
Yehia is a half-Iraqi, half-Lebanese former journalist who grew up in Nigeria. The daughter of a pharmacist (who now works in northern Iraq) and a businessman, she worked for years on the
Daily Star, Lebanon's main English-language paper, covering topics such as women's rights and political affairs. Her husband, Ali Shaath, was one of the original CompuCamp kids.
Yehia's vision for the CompuCamps (now called the Arab Digital Expression Camps) is to empower Arab children, aged six to 16, by teaching them how to use new technologies to free themselves from poverty and marginalisation. "Otherwise, their only language on the street is that of fighting," Children attend the training camps for several weeks, where they are taught by teachers who come from all over the Middle East - many of those trainers former CompuCamps kids themselves. "So far, we've had 42 camps in ten years," she says, "and the few weeks they spend at camp have amazing effects on their lives." The camps cost $1,000 per child. "It's not a lot," she says, "considering it changes their lives."
A few days later, I see Yehia with a couple of her friends, a young couple called Alaa Abd el-Fatah and Manal Hassan. Their parents were radicals together back in the 60s and el-Fatah's aunt is the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, who organised last year's successful Palestinian literary festival. "We come from good activist stock," el-Fatah says. Their blog is called "Alaa and Manal's Bit Bucket - free speech from the bletches [a fingers-down-throat gesture]". El-Fatah believes in free expression, and understands its limits in the Middle East: when he was a child his father, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, was imprisoned for five years for communist activities. His mother, a professor, kept the family together - and did not keep secrets from her children. "So I knew early on what a political prisoner was."
He got into computers early: "My grandfather bought one in 1980 - it was older than me." His dad came home when he was nine and the following year he went to CompuCamp. El-Fatah and Hassan grew up together and married when they were 21. They live in Pretoria now, but come home often to Cairo: he designs software, she teaches computing and designs websites, but their real link is activism. "Both of us see our real work," says el-Fatah, "as linking new technologies and positive social change."
The corporate internet is still relatively undeveloped here - but now Google sees the Arab world as its next territory, ripe for expansion. Google Arabic was launched last September and the company has signed a $10 million deal with the Egyptian government to promote the country online.
Not all bloggers welcomed the move. "Yeah, we all think that Google are these cool good guys who live in San Francisco and are hip and young - but look at what they are doing in China," one points out. "Look how Sergey Brin went to Israel to meet the government."
At 44, Wael Fakharany, the head of Google in the Middle East, is a little older than the bloggers, but he also came of age at a time when computers were first appearing in homes. He remembers the first one his father brought home - a massive 80s word processor.
We meet in Heliopolis, a wealthy suburb of Cairo. Wahel is handsome and cool, and speaks perfect English. He is pleasant and forward-thinking about the Google-enhanced Arabic content online: "From a mission point of view, it's sheer mission accomplished."
Unlike many bloggers, Fakharany talks positively about the interior minister, Habib el-Adly - a man who has brought thousands of internet clubs to rural Egypt and is promoting the One Laptop per Child initiative. "Now you see kids online at Starbucks, with five laptops," he says, "and they are not just privileged kids. You can buy a laptop in this country for 45 Egyptian pounds [£5] a month - if you show student ID, you get an instalment plan."
And he believes that the Google plan is in some way recession-busting. "This government is progressive," he says, "and this is a chance to put Egypt on the map of the world. In tough times, at least there is a good story to be told. Hundreds of men and women sitting in their pyjamas can advertise to the world." He is heading next to Saudi Arabia - to test the entrepreneurial spirit in that country.
Will the internet transform the region? In Egypt, at least, teenagers are now plugging into Skype. They get on Twitter to read about what's happening on the streets of Tehran. They Facebook Ahmed Maher and find out when his next demonstration is going to be. If they're religious, they can ask the imam if they can go to a film or have sex before marriage.
On the downside, they can visit a jihad site and find out how to build a bomb. But the difference - and what separates them from the previous generation - is that they can all get connected.
Janine di Giovanni is an award-winning foreign correspondent and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
