On February 12, 2016, over 10,000 Egyptian doctors turned out at the extraordinary general meeting of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate (EMS). The doctors filled all the meeting halls and thousands overflowed into the street chanting against the “thuggery” of the Ministry of Interior and holding signs demanding dignity for Egyptian doctors and citizens. Hundreds of activists and representatives of political parties and NGOs turned out to show their support for the doctors. The general meeting, dubbed the “Day of Dignity,” was called by the EMS executive board to discuss the measures to be taken in response to the recurrent police assaults on medical personnel. The meeting-cum-protest was seen by many in Egypt, a country that has witnessed a consolidation of authoritarianism, as a symbol of the doctors’ years-long mobilization not only for their professional demands but also on behalf of Egyptian citizens. Despite, or perhaps because of the Syndicate’s insistence on the “professional” nature of their demands, the day symbolized how doctors appealed to a professional, medical ethos to rally around causes seen by many citizens as just. For the past few years, groups of doctors have mobilized on many platforms: against police impunity and attacks on hospitals, for the right of prisoners and detainees to healthcare, against corruption in the Ministry of Health, for improving the wages and working conditions of doctors, for increasing public spending on health, for universal healthcare coverage, for enshrining the right to health in the constitution and against the exploitation of the suffering of the sick and poor for the political gains of those in power. By focusing on the case of the doctors’ mobilization in the post-Mubarak era, this paper investigates how socio-professional mobilizations are carving out a novel space for action in a foreclosed and polarized political sphere. The paper also traces how the category of so-called factional demands (Maṭālib fiʾawiyyah) was stripped by the ruling elites of its positive connotations since the early days of the revolution and turned into a negative category that is portrayed as pushing selfish demands at the expense of national interests. The paper examines, however, how socio-professional mobilizations, especially in authoritarian settings with little to no room for overt political action, remain viable and potent options to not only represent the demands of their respective groups, but also to extend an ethos of justice to the entire society.

This paper addresses the political struggles and institutional changes that have occurred in Egypt’s health care sector in the context of the country’s political upheavals since 2011. I discuss changes that have been taking place at both the local and the national levels. At the national level the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood hospitals after the removal of Muhammad Morsi from power has received the most attention by outside observers. While I discuss this development and its significance, I argue that this focus has obscured other important developments in the politics of health care and health care reform, which have developed along particular trajectory shaped by the events and aftermath of the 2011 revolution. These include the controversial new health insurance reform initiative, and political struggles between the doctors and the national security apparatus. On the local level this paper will discuss political struggles and institutional change at the level of the hospital. Previous discussion of the activist roles of doctors has been largely limited to their role during the mass popular mobilizations of 2011 and after. However, I will discuss cases in which the revolutionary moment provided opportunities for activist medics to challenge the old guard inside public hospitals to make sweeping reforms or even what they view as revolutionary changes in the organization of the facility. Some of these changes have been surprisingly persistent even following the restoration of a military-backed political system in 2013. The paper concludes by weighing up the continuities and changes in relation to the pre-2011 health sector, and the prospects for further health care reform in contemporary Egypt. I consider how institutional change and continuity in the health care sector can help us theorize continuity and change in other areas of post-Mubarak Egyptian politics and society. Evidence is drawn from sources gathered over one year of field research, including numerous in-depth interviews with doctors, patients, policy experts and officials, observations inside clinical facilities, and print and media archives in Arabic and English.

After voting in the elections at the Engineers’ Syndicate in November 2011, Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat al-Shater announced to the press that the elections in the professional union were among ‘the fruits’ of the January 25th Revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood expanded its role in Engineers’ syndicate, but in other professional syndicates, notably the Doctors’, Journalists’ and Lawyers’ Syndicates, candidates with allegiances other than the Brotherhood did well. This apparent split in the political orientation of the professional syndicates led to much discussion in the Egyptian media. At various moments in history scholars have also looked to the professional syndicates sites of politics in Egypt. In the 1970s and 1980s they were discussed as the last bastion for leftist politics after Sadat shifted the Egyptian economic toward the outside world. In the 1990s and 2000s scholars looked to see the ways in which Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood was penetrating these the syndicates found ways to give voice to the many in society who supported the organization. This paper seeks to unify the various discussions of Egypt’s professional syndicates. Looking at syndicates as institutions captured by groups with ideological opposition to the regime at a given moment downplays their broader, historical implications. Instead, Egypt’s professional syndicates channel and amplify dominant political leanings of educated, white-collar middle-class Egyptians. This paper traces the political role of professional syndicates in Egypt, starting with the Lawyers’ Syndicate which was established in 1912, by engaging with primary and secondary sources in Arabic and English. In doing so, it provides a scaffolding that unites previous scholarship on syndicates, the journalistic coverage of syndicates in the post-Mubarak period.

The concept of “statistical awareness” appears frequently in official statistical publications and strategic planning by Egyptian statistical officials. Indeed “spreading statistical awareness” (Arabic: nashr al-wa’i al-ihsa`i) among the general population is a legally required task of the Egyptian statistical agency. This paper traces the history of “statistical awareness” as a policy target of Egyptian and international officials, arguing that this term’s changing meaning over time reveals changes in the political economy of statistical production and the relationship between the citizen and the state. Using official and expert documents gathered during field research in Egypt, in Arabic and English, I show that in the mid-20th century “statistical awareness” emerged to mean the degree of familiarity of respondents with survey techniques, and figured in efforts to avoid nonresponse bias and coding errors in official surveys. It concerned the degree to which measured populations can perform as reliable objects of statistical measurement in the rapidly expanding statistical activities of the state in the (ostensibly) planned economy. I then show that the term has subsequently shifted in meaning to include the degree of familiarity of the non-expert population with the official data itself and the extent to which official data has become part of daily life. “Statistically aware” citizens are now expected not only to be able to complete surveys reliably, but also to cite statistical data and to reason with such figures in their relations with others in society and with the state. The evolution of “statistical awareness” in Egypt and internationally thus marks a shift from the official conception of the population as objects of statistical measurement to a population which is also interpellated as subjects of statistical reasoning. I argue that changes in the meaning of this term reveal deeper changes in the relationship between official statistical agencies and populations in the context of the evolving political economy of statistical production. Through an examination of the different uses of this term by various factions within the Egyptian official statistical apparatus, I specifically argue that this change is related to the Egyptian – and broader global - shift from centralized economic policy based on planning and public-sector industry, to an economy oriented toward private investment and market mechanisms. The paper will provide insight into the role of Egypt in the development of the international statistical discourse, as well as into the changing qualitative social relationship with quantitative information.