It Could Happen Here Weekly 249

Robert Evans (0:03)

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here, and one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Dana Al-Kurd (0:29)

Hello everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana Al-Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics, and today I'm joined by Hossam Al-Hamalawi. Hossam is a journalist and socialist from Cairo, who was among the organizers of the 2011 protest. He's been involved in the labor movement and the fight against police brutality in Egypt for many years, and holds a PhD in political science from the Free University of Berlin.

He publishes a weekly newsletter on Egyptian politics, which I'll be linking in the show notes, and is author of the new book, Counterrevolution in Egypt, CC's New Republic. Hossam, thanks for joining us.

Hossam Al-Hamalawi (1:02)

Thank you, Diana, for having me.

Dana Al-Kurd (1:04)

So let me start off by talking about the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book, you talk about your own abduction and torture by state security in 2000 And then you were an organizer, as I said, of the 2011 uprising. So how did living through this repression on a personal level shape the way that you studied the repression? And what can a participant see that maybe an outside scholar might miss?

Hossam Al-Hamalawi (1:32)

There was like a long running tradition in academia and in journalism, which fortunately is being challenged over the past couple of decades at least, whereby this tradition tended to regard the scholar or the journalist as someone who's completely separate from whatever they are studying or reporting on.

They should be between quotes neutral, between quotes objective.

Any form of attachment or passion for any cause would be considered a conflict of interest, more or less. But I mean, a great chunk of my career, and this is also expressed in this book, I've been trying to challenge that.

I consider myself a scholar activist, not just a scholar. I was also an activist journalist, not just a journalist. And in that regards, in answer to your question, my experience when it comes to state repression has definitely shaped not just my intellectual trajectory, but my own personal life. After all, I'm doing this interview with you from Berlin, not from my home in Cairo, which I had to leave in 2015 and can't go back as long as this regime exists. My repression, which included the repeated arrests, torture, continuous threats to me and my family, exclusion from jobs, and the list is too long, have planted in me a curiosity and also an existential reason to study who's repressing me actually. I mean, we tend to talk about the state or the security apparatus. And I was very much interested in putting faces and names to these kinds of entities. Who's doing what when it comes to repression? Who's doing the monitoring and who's doing the arrest? What's the profile of the officers who conduct these missions? Where do they come from? What's their background? What's their life trajectories? How do they justify for themselves their actions? What's their worldview? And in so many ways, this curiosity has took me on a very long journey to study this apparatus also with the declared aim of dismantling it one day when we are victorious in the coming revolution.

Dana Al-Kurd (4:15)

Yeah. So you really opened up the black box of the security apparatus and disentangled, I think, the ways in which maybe outside scholars gloss over or lump different things together. And everything you're saying really resonates with me as a Palestinian studying Palestine, like this endless suspicion of your own perspective. I'm glad that, as you said, there has been a pushback from our region and from scholars and activists in other places. But on this question of like actually doing the research, it must have been challenging because this regime wants to obfuscate. It wants to hide its doers.

So it must have been challenging to find sources. How did you find that information? What was your methodology for the book?

Hossam Al-Hamalawi (4:56)

That's a very good question. From the outside, Egypt looks like a very opaque country for very reasonable causes at the end of the day. This is a repressive regime. It's allergic to the flow of information and freedom of expression in general. Egypt is not a researcher-friendly country at all. Once you mention Egypt in academia, people are always reminded with Giulio Regini, the Italian PhD scholar who was brutally tortured and murdered in Egypt.