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WORK TITLE: Generation Revolution
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1980
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Egypt
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/rachel-aspden/1071962/ * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/14/generation-revolution-egypt-arab-spring-rachel-aspden-review
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1980 in London, England.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Served as literary editor of the New Statesman.
AWARDS:
Winston Churchill fellowship, 2010.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Guardian (London, England), New Statesman, and Prospect.
SIDELIGHTS
London-born Rachel Aspden moved to Cairo, Egypt, in 2003 to study Arabic and work as a trainee journalist. Over the next several years, Aspen traveled across the Middle East writing about Islam and politics, especially in Yemen and Pakistan. She eventually received a Winston Churchill fellowship to study Islamic education while crossing the Sudan in northern India. Aspden returned to live in Egypt in 2011.
In her first book, Generation Revolution: On the Front Line between Tradition and Change in the Middle East, Aspden follows the stories of young Egyptians as a series of protests and demonstrations occurred across the Middle East and North Africa, beginning in Tunisia and spreading quickly to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. Aspden takes up their stories on the eve of the “Arab Spring” and follows them on through the aftermath of the protests for government reforms.
Aspden begins with the story of Amal, a girl who defies her family and community by escaping from the familial strictures placed on young women, leaving her village and living alone in Cairo and attending a language school in Beijing, China. Amr, an atheist who is studying software engineering, becomes a political activist after witnesses see police brutally beat to death a young man named Khaled Said in the summer of 2010. Said’s death helped incite the Egyptian Revolution.
Another Egyptian followed by Aspden is Ayman, who grew up in a westernized family in Cairo but became for a time a religious extremist who followed the teachers of Salafi, an extremely conservative reform movement within Sunni Islam. Mazen, who also grew up in a middle-class family who made him study dentistry, is a an avid follower of an activist Muslim television preacher named Amr Khaled. “Ayman and Mazen provide an intriguing window into the Egyptian youth movement,” wrote Washington Post contributor Ilana Masad, who noted that both had “politically moderate parents.” According to Masad, both could be seen to represent a phrase often repeated to Aspen, “Egyptians are religious by nature.” Masad observed: “Those words helped reinforce faith as a communal identity rather than a private matter between a person and their god (or lack thereof).”
Aspden details how these and other young people thought the revolution in Egypt that began in January 2011 would change their worlds. However, the revolution became increasingly violent, and the Egyptian economy ended up collapsing. Initially, most people seemed united in their intention to rid Egypt of its president/dictator, Hosni Mubarak. Eventually, however, as Mubarak was deposed, the once-united front against him devolved into sectarianism. Egypt underwent a violent military coup in 2013, which led to loss of life and left the country worse off than before as people faced increased repression and worsening crime. Instead of a new life, the Egyptian people were living a life of discontent and fear.
“Aspden has a clear eye for its marvellous and maddening details, from the kindness of strangers to its ever ready conspiracy theories,” wrote Guardian Online (London, England) contributor Shereen El Feki, who added: “She also does a good job of painting the big picture, be it the gap between appearance and reality and the crushing pressure to conform that characterises so much of Egyptian life, or the twists and turns of domestic politics over the past few decades.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Generation Revolution “an earnest eyewitness account of a nation in turmoil.” Aspden, however, closes her book with a somewhat tempered but optimistic view of Egypt’s future. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that, even though Aspden’s conclusion describes a country where many of its people feel hopeless and demoralized, “she holds out hope that Egypt’s young people will again see a path to freedom.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2016, review of Generation Revolution: On the Front Line between Tradition and Change in the Middle East.
Publishers Weekly, September 26, 2016, review of Generation Revolution, p. 75.
Washington Post, March 6, 2017, Ilana Masad, “Book World: Witnesses to a Revolution’s Hope and Failure,” review of Generation Revolution.
ONLINE
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 14, 2016), Shereen El Feki, “Generation Revolution Review—after the Arab Spring.”
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com/ (February 6, 2017), Thanassis Cambanis, “Generation Revolution: Why Youth Was Not Enough in Egypt.”
Rachel Aspden was born in London in 1980. She moved to Cairo to study Arabic and work as a trainee journalist in 2003 and spent the next several years travelling and writing about Islam and politics in Yemen, Pakistan and across the Middle East. After a period as the literary editor of the New Statesman, in 2010 she was awarded a Winston Churchill fellowship to research Islamic education while crossing Sudan and north India. Following the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, she moved back to Egypt. She has written for the Guardian, New Statesman and Prospect magazine.
Aspden, Rachel: GENERATION REVOLUTION
(Dec. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Aspden, Rachel GENERATION REVOLUTION Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-59051-855-7
A bleak view of young Egyptian lives as they joined the revolution and then fell back, disillusioned.London-based journalist Aspden first came to Egypt as a young graduate in 2003 to study Arabic, and she met many of the people whom she would subsequently pursue through the Arab Spring and beyond. She characterizes her choices of protagonists as people who, "in twenty or thirty years...would be leading their country, and I wanted to see where they would take it." Repeatedly, the author came up against the bias against foreigners--specifically, blonde, young women like herself--in a conservative, middle-class culture where students were still largely segregated by sex and people prayed several times a day. Aspden begins with Amal, a young, rebellious woman who managed an escape from her stifling familial strictures in Cairo by attending a language school in Beijing. The author's next subject is Nayera, one of "Cairo's twenty-first-century twenty-somethings [who] still inhabited a world of arranged marriages, dowries, virginity, filial obedience, and religious obligation." Having to suppress her sexual frustrations was making Nayera and her generation "crazy," as the author notes, but many were largely unwilling to "pay the price of challenging power." Amr, a restless, bored computer-science student originally from Alexandria, got caught up in "the internet, atheism, political activism, the blogs and the free spaces of downtown Cairo" and was spurred to action by the brutal police killing of Khaled Said in the summer of 2010. Ayman, a disenchanted youth from a westernized family in Cairo, gravitated toward the piety of Salafi teachers, while Mazen, forced to study dentistry by his family, was seized by illusory dreams of revolution. Amid the tumult of victory, there was widespread confusion regarding the role of the military, sexual assaults of women, and torture of prisoners. Aspden dutifully and sympathetically records how the young people withdrew or hastened to leave the country, but the book often reads like a long newspaper report. An earnest eyewitness account of a nation in tumult.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Aspden, Rachel: GENERATION REVOLUTION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471901833&it=r&asid=3242a081e3f7ef7a41f8ca65c0c71a77. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471901833
Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East
263.39 (Sept. 26, 2016): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East
Rachel Aspden. Other Press, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 9784-59051-855-7
British journalist Aspden, who lived in Cairo from 2003 to 2004 and from 2011 until 2015, shows Egypt's recent revolution through the eyes of the young people who demanded it, fought for it, and suffered most from its eventual failure. Weaving in dramatic moments of Egypt's recent past with vivid depictions of its contemporary culture, Aspden uses her subjects' candid narratives to reveal how the pressures of a corrupt state, a stagnating economy, a restless and disenfranchised youth, the repression of women, and the infiltration of Western innovations such as the Internet led Egyptians to erupt into revolt. Using the same gritty narrative technique, she draws a horrifying picture of the consequences of the 2011 revolution, notably the military coup of 2013 that led to tragic loss of life and plunged the country into worse crime, repression, discontent, and fear. Her insights into trends such as the groundswell of religious conservatism are sound yet concise. Despite the hopelessness and demoralization that prevail in her conclusion, she holds out hope that Egypt's young people will again see a path to freedom. The book offers a sobering but necessary education in "the intractable suffering in the region" that Western countries can no longer afford to ignore. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East." Publishers Weekly, 26 Sept. 2016, p. 75. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465558233&it=r&asid=43d395e3836c2115b2a31777162d567c. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465558233
Book World: Witnesses to a revolution's hope and failure
Ilana Masad
(Mar. 6, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Ilana Masad
Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East
By Rachel Aspden
Other. 262 pp. $24.95
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In 2011, all eyes were on the youth of Egypt. Their mobilization efforts - both online and off - helped bring down the oppressive, nearly 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak. But the revolution ultimately has been seen as a failure. The years since have been marked by violence, political upheaval and crackdowns on dissent, leaving Egyptians in a state of perpetual uncertainty. Rachel Aspden's "Generation Revolution" offers sharp insight into how the youth movement came together and why it fell apart.
"Beyond the turmoil of parties, factions and elections that followed Mubarak's overthrow, I wanted to know about the personal beliefs and choices that would shape Egypt directly, but less surely," Aspden writes. "I wanted to understand why a woman with three degrees might wear a face veil and conceal her hands with black gloves; why a start-up entrepreneur might demand his bride-to-be was a certified virgin; why a nightclub-going, hash-smoking student might despise the idea of democracy." Chronicling the experiences of four young Egyptians, the book provides fascinating detail but no easy answers.
Aspden was an outsider to Egypt, a journalist of the ever-suspicious West, which she thankfully acknowledges. Throughout the book, she shares her own perspective sparingly but enough to remind readers that she, too, is unable to grasp some ideas that are taken for granted in Egyptian society. If there's one thing that's missing, it's how Aspden managed to earn the trust of those she writes about, young men like Ayman, who became a Salafi (a member of a strictly orthodox Sunni Muslim sect) when he was 16, or Mazen, a fanboy of the TV preacher Amr Khaled.
The book begins in the last years before Mubarak's downfall, as Egypt became ripe for change. Khaled was a key part of this charged environment - his TV program created the youth movement Life Makers, which trained people to be politically active. In addition, the conservative values that had tightened around Egyptians - often as holdovers from expats returning from stricter gulf states - were frustrating to young people watching cosmopolitan first lady Suzanne Mubarak and other elites dress in Western fashions and espouse Western ideas. Egypt was a country full of contradictions: The rise of conservative Islam was spurred by the liberal, wealthy administration and its web of military favoritism. The imbalance of power and money, mixed messages, politically active young people, and the introduction of the Internet fostered unrest.
Ayman and Mazen provide an intriguing window into the Egyptian youth movement. Both were middle class with politically moderate parents. Both were versions of a similar phenomenon, embodied by a phrase Aspden heard over and over: "Egyptians are religious by nature." Those words helped reinforce faith as a communal identity rather than a private matter between a person and their god (or lack thereof). Ayman, who saw hypocrisy in popular organized religion, turned to Salafism, while Mazen devoutly followed the action-oriented Amr Khaled.
Aspden paints her subjects not as revolutionaries who were itching for a fight but as regular people, Egyptians of varying upbringings and socioeconomic status. That they ended up being part of the movement against Mubarak was as much a result of luck, timing and the force of a collective as it was a matter of individual readiness.
Aspden goes on to examine the protests that sparked Egypt's uprising. In June 2010, 28-year-old Khaled Said was beaten to death by police. Soon after, protests in Tunisia began. Swiftly, the head of the Tunisian regime was ousted, and Egyptians on social media called for protests of their own. These demonstrations were meant at first to be reactions to police brutality. Instead, Tahrir Square in Cairo filled with thousands speaking out against the militarized Mubarak regime. On Jan. 28, "the Friday of Anger," tens of thousands were in the streets. Police began retreating, and military forces arrived, providing hope for the protesters who saw them as saviors, knowing that without military support, Mubarak wouldn't be able to stay in power.
Aspden deftly captures small details about the protesters: She describes how Mazen saw men taking bottles of Pepsi from an abandoned store (the fizzy drink is effective in combating tear gas) and leaving money on the counter for the owner. The protesters had no interest in anarchy; they wanted safety and to see their country evolve.
Another of Aspden's subjects, Amr, a software engineer, thought Mubarak "was a dinosaur" who had shut down the Internet and "sent camels and horses to do battle in the middle of Cairo." But even then, some expressed concerns about what would happen if and when Mubarak was ousted; some of Amr's friends feared that if "Mubarak goes, the Islamists will take power."
After Mubarak stepped down, the internal conflict in Egypt began in earnest. Activists who once came together for change began to disagree about what the change should look like. Aspden explains the various reasons her contacts voted for the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Mohamed Morsi: They thought he would "clean up politics," they were disgusted by everything his rival stood for, or, as the most cynical believed, it was necessary to see the Brotherhood in power in order to expose its true "evil and stupid" identity.
During Morsi's brief time as president, there were demonstrations for and against him - for him because of his religion but also because he was elected by a democratic process; against, because people disliked an Islam-tinged government, despite being "religious by nature." The latter were eventually aided by the army, which was forming a coup to overthrow Morsi.
Returning to a militarized regime left Aspden's contacts disheartened, angry and hopeless. Former revolutionaries looked on, aghast and exhausted, as military scientists lied on TV and power went off at even the most prosperous shopping malls. Software engineer Amr's activist streak had long ago burned out. Amal, a woman who fled her family's strict rules, told Aspden that in 2011 she thought things might change for women, but no more: "All this stupid stuff, obsessing about sex, about covering women's hair, is because of the vacuum we live in."
Amr and Amal were among the few who had the opportunity to leave Egypt. Most people, like Ayman, had to keep working to support themselves and their families. Mazen, who paid off government officials to smooth the way through red tape and move forward with a venture - selling sparkly cellphone cases bought on the cheap from abroad - "looked years older" when Aspden saw him for the last time in 2014. "His face was set in disillusioned lines and his voice had an unhappy, cynical tone," she writes. The "new-old regime was stifling everyone."
Still, Aspden ends on a note of cautious optimism. "Things in Egypt would never be the same again. An awareness that things could be different had been planted and at some point it would bear fruit." The Egyptian activists may have lost this battle, but the war for freedom is far from over.
---
Masad is an Israeli American book critic and fiction writer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Masad, Ilana. "Book World: Witnesses to a revolution's hope and failure." Washington Post, 6 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484198232&it=r&asid=5b16b57a7f85e0fc00edac5069f20251. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484198232
Generation Revolution review – after the Arab spring
Rachel Aspden’s collection of intimate stories about the dilemmas faced by Egypt’s youth is both compelling and sobering
Young members of Egypt’s Black Bloc group, who model themselves on western anarchists, in Cairo, February 2013.
Young members of Egypt’s Black Bloc group, who model themselves on western anarchists, in Cairo, February 2013. Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
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Shereen El Feki
Tuesday 14 June 2016 07.30 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 18.46 BST
In the heady days of the 2011 uprising, it seemed as if Egypt’s youth, mobilising on social media and marching on Tahrir Square, had finally come into their own. When President Mubarak stepped down, I turned to my seventysomething Egyptian father, who had been on the barricades of the 1952 revolution, for words of wisdom on the future of the country.
“The army will be back in power within a year,” my father said. “But Dad, look at democracy in action, look at what the young people have achieved,” I protested, pompously quoting Wordsworth on the bliss of being alive and the very heaven of being young in such revolutionary times. “What about them?” “Ah, yes,” my father replied, without missing a beat. “They’ll be in prison.”
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Now my father is a surgeon, not a soothsayer, but he understood what I and so many other observers failed to fully grasp: the essential Egyptian craving for stability at almost any cost. How is it that a people who fought to overthrow dictatorship now support an even more iron hand? How did young Egyptians go from activism to apathy so fast? And how does a new generation reconcile temptation with salvation? These are among the many questions that Rachel Aspden’s Generation Revolution explores through the intimate stories of a dozen or so urban Egyptians before, during and after the tumult of 2011. The Arab spring has yielded a bumper crop of books about youth across the region, and Generation Revolution is among its more fruitful reads.
Having lived on and off in Cairo for more than a decade, Aspden has a clear eye for its marvellous and maddening details, from the kindness of strangers to its ever ready conspiracy theories. She also does a good job of painting the big picture, be it the gap between appearance and reality and the crushing pressure to conform that characterises so much of Egyptian life, or the twists and turns of domestic politics over the past few decades. Although Aspden’s narrative style is at times puzzling, blurring the line between what she saw and what she was told, her stories are always compelling.
While many similar books have focused on women, Generation Revolution is particularly interesting for its nuanced portraits of young Egyptian men. We see the rigours of the marriage market through the eyes of Abdel Rahman, a photographer from Upper Egypt, and his growing disillusion with the “Camp David negotiations” over money that accompany many a marriage proposal. Amr, a software engineer from Alexandria, struggles with that quintessential masculine rite of passage, military service, and the pressures to istirgal or “man up”, which underpin the patriarchy, from the father of the family to the father of the nation.
With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of Isis-affiliated violence, there is a tendency, particularly within Egypt, to homogenise and demonise all shades of Islamism. Generation Revolution is a welcome prism, separating the spectrum of political Islam through the coming of age of its characters. Sixteen-year-old Ayman, for instance, embraces Salafism, whose fierce austerity at first gives meaning to a world awash in consumerism and corruption, but which eventually leaves him high and dry.
How did young Egyptians go from activism to apathy so fast? How does a generation reconcile temptation with salvation?
His friend Mazen gravitates towards a more moderate, media-savvy form of Islamic revival, but one which ultimately disappoints him as well. Ruqayah and Sara, on the other hand, remain defiant, trenchantly maintaining their allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood through detention, death and destruction. The faith of these young men and women takes different forms, but as Aspden discovers to her surprise, “for them, religion was far from a restriction or burden – it was a means of liberation”.
While Aspden gamely looks for glimmers of hope in the promise of 2011, Egypt’s foreseeable future is far from rosy. Amr, on his way to a new life overseas like so many of the book’s leading lights, sums it up: “Infrastructure, electricity, economy, terrorism, repression, corruption, mob rape, population explosion, the list goes on. This ship is sinking and I have to jump.” Generation Revolution is the story of a wheel come full circle, and a sobering tale for anyone with an interest in Egypt’s future.
Generation Revolution is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). Click here to order it for £12.99
‘Generation Revolution’: Why Youth Was Not Enough in Egypt
By THANASSIS CAMBANISFEB. 6, 2017
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Posting video from Tahrir Square, February 2011. Credit Ed Ou for The New York Times
GENERATION REVOLUTION
On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East
By Rachel Aspden
262 pp. Other Press. $24.95.
What happened to Egypt’s revolution?
After January 2011, Tahrir Square became a byword for hope, defiance and the unpredictability of history. The Egyptian people’s unexpected revolt baffled political scientists and other experts. Equally puzzling was the alacrity with which so many of the same Egyptians welcomed a new strongman a few short years later.
Egypt’s volte-face forces important questions about what kind of change is possible in the Arab world, and more universally, about the indiscriminate and violent nature of both revolutionary and authoritarian politics. Why were so many Egyptians willing to risk everything in 2011, and why, just two years later in July 2013, were so many willing to make another devil’s bargain with a despot?
“Generation Revolution” is a whodunit that seeks to resolve these twin mysteries of geopolitics and human nature. Its author, Rachel Aspden, first moved to Egypt from England in 2003, diving into a culture that she clearly loved on first sight. She studied the language, worked as a journalist and tried her best to understand the worldview of her fellow 20-somethings. Through her long-running friendships Aspden is able to see the frustrations that have driven events in Egypt. The life stories of her characters come into focus long before Tahrir Square in 2011. In this way, Aspden does important work establishing context for Egypt’s stifling period of decay, and the improbable revolution and authoritarian backlash that followed. This is a chronicle of politics by other means.
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Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East Rachel Aspden
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Aspden clearly loves her characters, but she unflinchingly recounts their flaws too. One of the most surprising is Amal, a woman who breaks all taboos to leave her family and village to live on her own in Cairo. Amal finds that political activists and male peers aren’t interested in her kind of struggle for freedom. Her story exposes the sordid mechanics of control and the individual cost of rebellion. At one point Amal, who is Muslim, receives help from a Christian church congregation and is detained by authorities, who suspect her of converting. Back in her village, her family locks her up to stop her from making an independent career as a teacher. She manages to run away and assuages her relatives by sharing some of the money she earns. Ultimately, she marries a foreigner and prepares to emigrate.
Other young Egyptians invite Aspden to meetings of “Life Makers,” a self-improvement group founded by a charismatic Islamic televangelist. They are touchingly earnest and ambitious, perplexed by their secular peers but open-minded enough to nurture friendships with non-Muslims like Aspden.
Still, most of Aspden’s friends are willing to entertain change only in limited areas, like the man who sleeps around in a coastal resort but hopes to marry a virgin. She presents the sometimes distasteful choices of her characters with empathy. Mazen, a wealthy Muslim secularist with some enlightened ideas, unexpectedly oozes bigotry and intolerance for Christians.
Aspden’s reporting is always fascinating, if not always artfully or lyrically delivered. She cheerfully and honestly confronts her own outsider status and newcomer’s naïveté (as when she enjoys a respite from Cairo’s endemic sexual harassment at a cafe that turns out to be a rendezvous spot for prostitutes). Yet her prose can also be frustratingly chatty. In order to profile a wide cross-section of Egyptians over an extended period of time, Aspden has sacrificed depth and focus. Some characters flit in and out, disappearing for years on end. In her tableau, Tahrir Square is but a single inflection point in a long history of national atrophy (the 18 days of the revolt are awkwardly inserted mid-narrative in dated journal-entry format). It’s nice putting the uprising in context, but there’s not quite enough of it.
“Generation Revolution” is at its strongest when describing the thicket of its characters’ personal struggles — with faith, family, friendships and sex. The author introduces us to conversations about existential subjects that reveal character, like Islam, virginity and romantic dreams about marriage. For instance, we catch a rare if fleeting glimpse of atheism, a crime in Egypt, in the person of the young doctor Abu el-Hassan, a critical thinker who begins as a religious fundamentalist and ends up rejecting religion.
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Aspden’s Egyptians are evolving people trying to balance faith, family, ambition and personal happiness against the broader imperatives of authoritarian leaders (at home, in the mosque or church, in the government and military). A diet of hypernationalism, propaganda about foreign conspirators and security paranoia imposes limits even on freethinkers, who often end up mirroring official intolerance in their own lives.
One of the saddest elements of the July 2013 coup that abruptly ended Egypt’s experiment with democracy and civilian rule was the popular acclaim that ushered Abdel Fattah el-Sisi from army intelligence to the presidency. A great swath of the public was actively complicit in the new dictatorship that killed the revolution it had unleashed in the first place. Aspden brings to her reporting enough insight to make sense of the public’s conflicting attitudes, and enough critical distance to acknowledge how Egyptians contributed to their country’s sad fate.
“Generation Revolution” is billed as a book about youth, or, as the subtitle puts it, the “front line between tradition and change in the Middle East.” In Aspden’s telling, the young, not yet ground into submission, have posed the greatest challenge to Egypt’s intolerable yet adaptive state. But the young can sustain resistance for only so long. The Tahrir Generation of 2011, she writes, may already be over the hill, though a new crop of restive Egyptians are reaching a boiling point, and they may not submit in the same way their grandparents did when the first military strongman took power in 1952. Nonetheless, Aspden notes, an empowered populace armed with education, modern communication tools and high expectations can repeatedly be dominated by an equally modern coercive state. Her conclusion is dispiriting, but she backs it with evidence. Youth alone, it seems, does not suffice to change tradition.
As Aspden demonstrates, all the well-intended characters in her book planted some of the seeds of their own downfall. Amal joined a popular protest movement unaware that it was being manipulated by intelligence agencies to bring Sisi to power. Islamists may have been willing to die opposing the coup, but they were uninterested in the fate of secular dissidents or democracy in general. Part-time revolutionaries mindlessly parroted state propaganda or the bigotry of Egypt’s religious establishment. Almost none were willing to defy their families for very long.
“Generation Revolution” is an excellent social history of Egypt’s persistent pathologies, as well as a universal story about the difficulty of changing deeply ingrained societal attitudes. The ambivalent Egyptians who struggle between radical modern aspirations and conservative community mores bear a more than passing resemblance to their American counterparts trying to reconcile Donald Trump’s vision for their country with Barack Obama’s, and no explanation for any of this can be complete without the kind of social history Aspden provides. The cumulative choices of millions, whether in protest, in voting or in docile compliance, are the indispensable ingredient.
So what did happen to Egypt’s revolution? Aspden, like most of its chroniclers, was rooting for it to succeed. Yet it failed, she says, not only because the police state adapted so efficaciously but also because the people who sparked the revolt ultimately remained faithful to too many reactionary ideas.
The character studies of “Generation Revolution” point to a single conclusion: Revolutionary Egyptians sought radical change only in the narrow lane of their relationship to the government and police. They did not reject the profoundly conservative mores of family, village, neighborhood and religious hierarchy, whose webs of control emerged relatively unscathed from the revolutionary period. Lasting change, however, cannot occur in isolation. Egyptians have proven remarkably inventive and good-humored at finding ways to circumvent or adapt to the state’s abuses, but less so at finding ways to stop them.
Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at the Century Foundation and the author, most recently, of “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story.”