Egypt's April 6th Movement Leaders Visit AU

It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to meet individuals that played a significant role in shaping history. However, this October, students had the opportunity to have a conversation with Ahmad Maher and Waleed Rashid, co-founders of Egypt’s April 6th Movement.

The march to Tahrir Square began several years before the now familiar images of the Egyptian Revolution were beamed around the world. As Ahmad and Waleed described to a standing room only audience in the Abrams Family Founder’s Room, the April 6th Movement was and remains a work in progress. While here at AU they detailed the evolution, strategies and tools their movement employed in engineering the removal of Hosni Mubarak. Moderated and organized by Prof. Loubna Skalli-Hanna, the format of the program was entirely question and answer, giving students, faculty and community members the opportunity to raise a wide range of issues with the pair.

In response to the audience’s questions, the young activists emphasized a number of themes that parallel subjects addressed in our courses here in the IC program. The guest speakers presented a mini-seminar on how to create a revolution, they noted that the first step in your planning is to know the mentality and culture of your people. Once you have carefully examined these aspects, only then can you craft an effective strategy for collective action. As Maher explained, the movement studied non-violent struggles around the world, but could not just take what other groups did and apply it in Egypt. Instead, the first step was to change the mentality of Egyptians to overcome their fear and realize it was not Mubarak’s country, but their country.
 
In order to achieve this change of mentality, the organizers and their fellow activists used tools such as Facebook, Twitter and cell phones, as well as sustained demonstrations, to pursue their specific goal of removing Mubarak from power. However, they would not call their movement a ‘Facebook Revolution’; instead, they characterized it as a people’s movement that used Facebook. As Rashid argued, you have to become a salesperson for your ideas and present them in a way that makes sense for your audience, including using social media.
 
Besides these techniques, the movement also used creative social institutions to spread their message, such as taxi drivers. While convincing a taxi driver to join the revolution directly would not be an effective tool for this movement, the co-founders devised a method of promoting their events in a culturally innovative way. The organizers would talk on their cell phones and describe upcoming events so that the drivers could overhear their conversation. The “human tape recorder in the next seat” would then spread the word around to the next passenger and the next and so on. The end result being that the drivers would relay information about upcoming events because they are "incapable of remaining silent” while driving. As Waleed told the story, within a few days, he got back in a taxi only to be informed about a demonstration they were organizing from the taxi driver.
 
Using these and other strategies, Maher, Rashid and their numerous collaborators built a movement that deposed a dictator. But, they could not have done it without the help of….Hosni Mubarak. The two credited the imprisoned former leader with tactical errors that precipitated his downfall, and each predicted similar fates for other regimes in the region, including the Assad regime in Syria. However, they also noted that their revolution was far from over. In fact, according to the movement’s co-founders, getting rid of Mubarak was only phase one in long road that will take many more years. How their movement adapts and continues to evolve will be one force at work in the changing dynamics of contemporary Egypt.