Egypt: a new kind of revolution!

How the War of Words Was Won in Cairo

By Ben Zimmer, NY Times, February 12, 2011
How do you tell a dictator to get lost?

The answer, in Egypt, was with poetry, tech lingo, hieroglyphics and more.

For weeks, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, demonstrators were telling President Hosni Mubarak to leave, playfully using a variety of dialects and languages to get the idea across.

And on Friday, Mr. Mubarak finally got the message and resigned.

In countries under authoritarian rule, “speaking truth to power” typically takes the form of highly colorful and creative modes of expression. Playing with language is often one of the few ways to challenge an oppressive political system, and the pointed humor behind the linguistic ingenuity can create strong bonds of solidarity.

Indeed, there are strong parallels in the fall of Ceausescu in Romania or Suharto in Indonesia. Indonesian activists in the 1990s, for instance, turned their president’s name into a snarky acronym: “sudah harus tobat” (“should have repented by now”).

On their own protest signs, Egyptian wordsmiths transliterated “irhal,” the standard Arabic imperative for “depart,” into Egyptian hieroglyphics so that “the pharaoh” would understand. And a popular rhyming chant on Tahrir Square played with high and low forms of Arabic, explaining to Mr. Mubarak that “irhal” means “imshi,” a colloquial Egyptian word that might be best rendered in English as “beat it.”

Unsurprisingly, English was the favored foreign protest language. Niloofar Haeri, an anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University who has studied Egypt’s language and politics, said the use of English was a way to “assert that the country is modern and its citizens know the global language,” combating Western stereotypes of Egypt as “backward and traditional.”

The English-language signs often made use of technological metaphors, as befits a revolution galvanized by social networking and roused by the story of Wael Ghonim, the Google executive detained for 10 days after he helped jump-start the demonstrations by setting up a popular Facebook group. Especially in the early days, when tech-savvy middle-class youths dominated the protests, computer themes showed up again and again, with signs reading “Mubarak is offline,” “Mubarak Fail” and “Delete Mubarak”—complete with an image of a computer desktop’s Recycle Bin icon.

“The use of new media is part of the revolution’s identity,” said Walter Armbrust, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Oxford currently conducting research in Cairo. “Youth have mastered a medium in a way that their elders can’t fully understand.”

Old Mubarak jokes were dusted off for the occasion. One sign played on a longstanding spoof of Mubarak as the Laughing Cow, a cartoon image from the French processed-cheese brand La Vache Qui Rit (a familiar sight across the Middle East). The president’s perceived resemblance to the cow, with its placid smile, square jaw and homely looks, were driven home by his name being transformed into “MuuhBarak.”

It was a joke that anyone, in any language, could understand, and its blunt simplicity drove home just what Egyptians thought of their president.