The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World review: Bodies in revolt

Understanding the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria

December 23, 2017 08:33 pm | Updated 08:33 pm IST

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World
Marwan M. Kraidy
Harvard University Press
₹799

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World Marwan M. Kraidy Harvard University Press ₹799

“What on earth is it that can set off in an individual the desire, the capacity, and the possibility of an absolute sacrifice without our being able to recognise or suspect the slightest ambition or desire for power of profit?”

This is the arresting question that opens The Naked Blogger of Cairo , in which the author Marwan M. Kraidy evolves a schema for understanding the congeries of motivations, strategies, tactics, vulnerabilities, and politics of the people whose activism was instrumental in bringing about the series of pan-Arab mobilisations in 2010-13 that is now referred to as the Arab Spring.

Kraidy, a professor of media, politics and culture in the U.S., operates with a wide, though not an exhaustive, canvas. His book covers the people’s movements in three countries — in Tunisia, where it all started; Egypt, where it suffered a sharp split between secular-liberal and Islamist camps; and Syria, where it has devolved into a brutal civil war.

In his theorisation of these people’s rebellions, Kraidy’s primary category of understanding is what he calls “creative insurgency”. Though the term ‘creative’ denotes a certain aesthetic objective, Kraidy means it more broadly: “Is using lemon juice to mitigate the pain of tear gas not creative?”

He doesn’t like the term ‘revolution’ to describe these uprisings since in most cases the regimes survived and the “overall system of political, economic and cultural repression endures”. But ‘insurgency’, which means “rising in active revolt” is more accurate. ‘Creative insurgency’, thus describes a “wilful, planned and deliberate” action.

Kraidy discusses several instances of creative insurgency, in all of which the body had a major role to play.

From the Burning Man of Tunisia (the fruit vendor who set himself on fire), to the Sprayman of Egypt (a fictional graffiti artist who inspires real life parallels), and Syria’s Top Goon, an online finger-puppet show that mocked the president Bashar al-Assad, each is a moving story of people using their bodies in protest.

Arguably, the most radical of these insurgencies was that of the eponymous ‘naked blogger of Cairo’, a 20-year-old Egyptian girl named Aliaa al-Mahdy who, in October 2011, tweeted a link to her blog that contained nude art featuring herself.

The response, from across the Arab world, was as spectacular as it was unequivocal: al-Mahdy was not only abused and shamed by Islamists, she was also swiftly disowned by liberals.

Facing rape threats and imprisonment, she had to seek asylum in Sweden, while the Egyptians’ struggle against tyranny continues.

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World ; Marwan M. Kraidy, Harvard University Press, ₹799.

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