This paper examines the ambiguous political work of revolutionary archives in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Following Mubarak's exit in February 2011 there immediately emerged multiple efforts--affiliated variously with universities, the state, activist groups, and others-- to amass documentation of the revolution in the form of oral histories, photographs, paraphernalia and material debris, broadsheets, underground newspapers, online communication ("tweets," etc.), and other media. What are we to make of the appearance of this widespread and instantaneous will to archive? Three questions seem central. First, what do these kinds of memory practices suggest about the perceived temporality of the revolution and its relation to a future politics? Second, what contesting visions of the political and of a public sphere are apparent in the diversity of archival projects, and in particular, in those various ways in which "the revolutionary" is therein classified, delimited, and performed? Finally, what do such archival projects posit about the workings of memory and its claims on revolutionary subjects and/or post-Mubarak citizens? In exploring these and other questions, this paper draws on ethnographic and textual material gathered in Cairo between January and December 2011, as well as on theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bowker, and Ann Stoler.

Like many other keywords of the most recent Egyptian revolution, “patience” or “forbearance” (al-sabr) is a term shot through with various resonances, laden with both positive and negative connotations. On the one hand, patience is extolled as one of the highest virtues in Islam, figuring prominently in many Qur’anic stories and aphorisms as the key to overcoming worldly adversity. Indeed, it is from these Qur’anic passages that Egyptian colloquial Arabic has derived its many aphorisms regarding patience, including: “Patience is good” (al-sabr tayyib), “Patience is beautiful” (al-sabr jamil), and “Patience is the key to deliverance” (al-sabr miftah al-farag). On the other hand, even Umm Kulthum (via ‘Abd al-Wahhab) informs us that “patience has limits” (li-l-sabr hudud), and for several decades, Egyptian colloquial poets (particularly the generation following the 1967 Naksa) have decried “al-sabr” as a tool of state oppression, a call from the ruling class (al-hukkam) for submission from the masses (al-mahkumin ‘alayhim) in the guise of an invitation to practice religious virtue. Drawing from the archive of materials at TahrirDocuments.org, this paper focuses on the alternative print media which proliferated after Mubarak’s departure (as opposed to the discourses which circulated during the eighteen days generally circumscribed as “the revolution”) to examine how the Arabic term sabr (patience, forbearance) became a kind of disputed semantic territory in the months following February 11, 2011, from the pages of state-sanctioned newspapers such as al-Ahram to those of Revolutionary Egypt (Misr al-Thawriyya), a weekly publication issued by the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (al-Lijan al-Sha'biyya li-l-Dif'ah 'an al-Thawra). Through close readings of two articles in particular, I show how the state press apparatus mobilized the simultaneously colloquial and religious valence of sabr to discourage demonstrations and encourage trust in (and submission to) the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, while Revolutionary Egypt exposed this call to forbearance as a “tool of the counter-revolution,” insisting that no revolution is complete without a total overhaul of the modes of production. In this analysis, I hope not only to open a larger discussion on sabr as a signifier with multiple and often conflicting resonances in Egyptian society, but also to turn the spotlight on this very interesting group and their excellent publications, which offer some of the most cogent and eloquent prose on the Tahrir Documents website.

This paper explores the connection of the bodies and spirits of the Egyptian revolutionaries to Tahrir Square, how the symbolic power this space gained through their presence was developed in literary discourse, and how military government, along with its civilian lackeys, tried to co-opt this power in the interests of legitimating its rule. The analysis is based on materials found in the archive of paper texts hosted by www.tahrirdocuments.org. Following the January 25th Egyptian Revolution, there has been a continued struggle between the Egyptian revolutionaries and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the ruling military junta. The SCAF oversaw the recycling of the rumuz (“symbols”, or, as Tahrir Documents translators have rendered it, “figureheads”) of the Mubarak regime into new positions in civilian government. These men were indeed direct representatives, symbols, of the old order, and immediately became the targets of the continuing revolution. The rumuz, along with the SCAF, the police, and the forces of the Interior Ministry, sought to control the symbolic power of Tahrir Square through various means, such as curfews, violence, and the continuation of the emergency law. At times, elites from this (re)new(ed) establishment entered the square in attempts to wrest revolutionary legitimacy away from the assembled masses—whose presence itself empowered the revolutionary status of the Square. During frequent clashes, the physical representations of despotism’s persistence under military rule appeared: bloodied heads, blinded eyes, crushed limbs, and corpses. The dima' [the plural form of blood] and arwah [souls] of the martyrs, which played a central role in the literary discourse of the early days of the revolution against Husni Mubarak, persisted in the prose and poetry of the revolutionaries in order to assert their revolutionary legitimacy in the face of military rule. Here, conceptions of martyrdom are taken up by the investigation as one of the most frequent claims of the Egyptian revolutionaries to revolutionary legitimacy. By analyzing the central role of the revolutionarily empowered symbol of Tahrir Square and the multiple claims to it by competing post-revolutionary forces in Egypt, this paper attempts to explain the ways in which space functions as a legitimating authority.

From January 2012, protests in Egypt turned Tahrir Square into a sit-in of remarkable size and persistence. Accordingly, activists, businessmen, politicians, and provocateurs sought to appeal to this ready audience through pamphlets, newsletters, fliers, signs, and other documents posted or distributed in and around Tahrir Square. My paper will look at the range of accusations, blame, and rumors that circulated in the various documents collected, translated, and published on the Web site www.TahrirDocuments.org. This is productive in two respects. First, looking at such expressions offers an alternative approach to tracing notions of justice in the ongoing Egyptian revolution. Although many documents put forward political programs (often linked to organized political parties and coalitions or individuals), the articulations of a just political future for Egypt tended to harden around several demands (some shared by the majority of political actors, others disputed among them) that came to be repeated over and over again. By looking at accusations and rumors, however, I hope to excavate different articulations of justice, which remained open while material coded as “political” became fixed and closed. And while political demands operated, for the most part, on a national level—making demands and proposing solutions for Egypt and Egyptians—I believe that looking at accusations, blame, and rumors can help to tease out the local, national, regional, and international concerns that were often subsumed by the national (Egyptian Revolution) and the regional (Arab Spring). While attention was often focused on the fall of Egyptian president Husni Mubarak, accusations of corruption leveled at an individual policeman in a local station (to choose just one example) can shed light on how the revolution—and by extension, concepts of justice—might have been envisioned on a smaller scale. Second, looking at a phenomenon such as rumors can also help to illuminate certain anxieties among the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square and Egyptian society more broadly during a period of unrest and uncertainty. Again, looking at this material can help expand our understanding of the concerns of groups and individuals beyond that material which voiced explicitly political concerns (regarding military rule, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on). Thus, accusation, blame, and rumors make up a field of discussion that includes the explicitly political but expands beyond it, allowing us to better understand the range of Egyptian hopes and anxieties over the past year.