Blogging the New Arab Public: Arab Blogs’ Political Influence Will Grow
Marc Lynch | 10 Apr 2007
World Politics Watch
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a paper that first appeared in Arab Media and Society, an online journal published by the American University in Cairo’s Center for Electronic Journalism.
Arab political blogging is changing and becoming more politically relevant. Arab blogs remain a very small, if rapidly growing, phenomenon — there are perhaps a few thousand political blogs across the region. Still, Internet use and blogging are growing fast, and Internet access seems nearly universal among politically mobilized youth in certain Arab countries.
Blogging the New Arab Public: Arab Blogs’ Political Influence Will Grow
Marc Lynch | 10 Apr 2007
World Politics Watch
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a paper that first appeared in Arab Media and Society, an online journal published by the American University in Cairo’s Center for Electronic Journalism.
Arab political blogging is changing and becoming more politically relevant. Arab blogs remain a very small, if rapidly growing, phenomenon — there are perhaps a few thousand political blogs across the region. Still, Internet use and blogging are growing fast, and Internet access seems nearly universal among politically mobilized youth in certain Arab countries.
Even if expectations that a few courageous blogs could shatter the wall of fear sustaining brittle Arab states have been overblown, blogs increasingly do matter. They allow ordinary Arabs to re-engage with politics, and escape the red lines that limit even the most independent of Arab media. National blogospheres create a space in which citizens are able to engage in sustained, focused political argument, and perhaps even hold national leaders to account. In addition, the dialogues and interactions on blogs may contribute to the rebuilding of transnational Arab identity by creating “warm” relationships among otherwise distant Arab youth — or even build such relationships across the Arab-Western divide. Finally, blogs are chipping away at the encrusted structures of the Arab punditocracy, bringing in new voices that previously had no outlet, and challenging the norms and expectations governing Arab public political discourse. Even if Arab political blogs are unlikely to lead a revolution, they hold out the prospect of a new kind of Arab public sphere that could reshape the texture of politics in the decades to come.
The relatively small number of blog readers and participants might suggest a built-in ceiling for the political impact of Arab blogs. But volume might not be necessary for political influence. Since much of the new energy in Arab politics comes from relatively small groups of activists, a technology that empowers their efforts could have a disproportionate impact. Arab blogs are read by political activists, journalists, and politically influential elites (as well as foreign scholars and governments), and independent Arab newspapers increasingly cite blogs as sources for their stories. Thus, even a handful of creative, engaged, and effective political bloggers can make a dramatic difference.
One key reason for this lies in the changing political demographics of Arab bloggers. The first wave of Arab blogging was dominated by young, technologically oriented, and politically unengaged bloggers, often writing in English. A second wave of more politically engaged bloggers, often writing in Arabic, has appeared — more organically embedded in the political realm and representing a much wider segment of Arab public opinion. More well-known figures also have begun blogging, from journalists and academics to famous dissidents.
Some blog enthusiasts seem to explicitly or implicitly expect that blogs will primarily empower pro-American voices. Spirit of America, a conservative American NGO, developed an Arabic-language blog platform in order to “give voices to those working for freedom and democracy in the Arab world . . . and [enable] them to easily connect and share ideas with their peers.” But there is no reason to assume that blogs will favor any particular political agenda. In the United States, both conservative and liberal activists have found innovative ways to harness blogs for their political ends.In the Arab world, Islamist movements have long been early and effective adopters of new media technologies, from satellite television to online forums. In 2007, a number of Egyptian Muslim Brothers began blogging, with an online campaign for the liberty of arrested Brotherhood leaders and students directly imitating the “Free Alaa” and “Free Kareem” (http://www.freekareem.org) campaigns — including custom-made banners, link-exchanges, online petitions, personal testimonies, high resolution photos of protests, and embedded videos.
But political blogging can be deeply risky in the Middle East. As Wael Abbas puts it, “becoming a blogger can be a life-changing decision attracting phone taps, official harassment or even arrest.” The arrest and torture of some Egyptian bloggers sent a chilling message throughout the Arab blogosphere, particularly the recent sentencing of anti-Islamist blogger Abd al-Kareem Nabil Suleiman to four years in prison for views expressed on his blog. And while Alaa Abd El Fattah received considerable international attention and support after his arrest during the Egyptian judge’s crisis of 2005 (including a statement of support from the United States government and Human Rights Watch), this did not keep him out of jail, and other less well-known bloggers languished in prison without a spotlight. Bahraini bloggers have also faced interrogations and intimidation from security services, with several spending weeks in jail for online remarks critical of the regime.
Currently there is less of an “Arab blogosphere” than a series of national blogospheres loosely linked at key nodes in each. Most aggregators (such as Saudi Blogs, Jordan Planet, Kuwait’s Safat, and Bahrain Blogs) adopt the national mode, as does Global Voices Online. Some newer aggregators, like iToot (“we find the best and freshest voices from across Arabia and around the world”) and Dwenn (“the forum of Arab bloggers”) try to break this down and select blogs from around the Arab world. Aggregators face a core problem: either they include everything, which becomes overwhelming; or they select what to include, which builds new resentments among those excluded. Administrators of these aggregators also worry about their own liability for republishing material that comes under attack, making some of them rather sensitive about aggressive political blogging.
Three Types of Political Blogging
Arab political bloggers engage in three principle types of activity: activism; bridge-blogging; and public sphere engagement. These categories are not mutually exclusive, of course, and many individuals move fluidly across boundaries. But distinguishing these modes of action can help to make sense of the different ways in which Arab bloggers might influence politics in the region.
Activists use their blogs for political organization and campaigns, using blogs to mobilize for contentious politics. In countries such as Bahrain, Egypt, and Kuwait, blogs have played an important role in historically unprecedented bouts of political activism in recent years. Other Arab blogospheres, such as in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, remain more on the political sidelines, although they have increasingly taken note of the exploits of their activist peers.
This politically engaged “activist blogging” stands in sharp contrast with what Ethan Zuckerman has termed “bridge-bloggers”: Arabs writing in English as interpreters of their communities, less engaged in local politics than in building bridges to Western audiences. These bridge-bloggers have often received disproportionate attention from Western journalists. Such bridge-blogging depends heavily on links from American “hub blogs,” widely trafficked blogs that serve as focal points for like-minded blogospheres. This translates into a politicized kind of gate-keeping, in which partisan hub-bloggers lavish attention and hits on Arab blogs that tell them what their own readers wanted to hear. Conservative hub-bloggers, for instance, promoted the pro-American Iraq the Model (and later hired its proprietors Omar and Mohammed Fadil as the regional editors for the conservative blog consortium Pajamas Media), while liberal bloggers lavished attention on the more critical Riverbend. The temptations for would-be bridge-bloggers to play to a partisan audience threatened to transform them from bridges into mirrors. Western observers clearly need to be very wary of drawing inferences about public opinion from such blogs. Some of the most prominent English-language bloggers are, for all their other virtues, highly unrepresentative of public opinion in their countries. Their divergence from mainstream opinion often makes them interesting to read, but as dissidents rather than as barometers of local opinion. Indeed, their novelty may be precisely the reason why they receive greater media attention. Someone who relied on some of the more prominent English-language Iraqi blogs would have a very unbalanced sense of Iraqi politics.
Finally, “Public-sphere” blogs are deeply engaged in arguments about politics, culture and society. Baheyya, the pseudonymous blog of an Egyptian woman, offers a premiere example. With biting wit and an intimate knowledge of the contentious politics about which she wrote, Baheyya quickly became a lodestone not only for Western readers but for Egyptians themselves; no less an authority than Mohammed Hasanayn Haykal dubbed Baheyya “the best source of political analysis on Egypt.” Some Tunisian bloggers argue that even without the kind of activism seen in Egypt, blogging in Tunisia is “an alternative to the national press . . . filling the vacuum that the mainstream media have created.” Even self-declared dissidents such as the Syrian Ammar Abdulhamid are more engaged in public-sphere activity than actual political organization given Syrian realities. This new blog-based public sphere challenges the “punditocracy” directly, as entrenched elites lose some of their power to dictate the terms of debate and frames of reference. Today’s public-sphere bloggers offer the tip of an iceberg of politically savvy, engaged, young citizens determined to argue in public about the things that matter to them.
The Real-World Effects of Blogs
How has all of this played out in the real world? Take Egypt. Kefaya began as a petition of some 300 intellectuals in the summer of 2004, and developed an Internet presence with a popular Web site in the fall of 2004. Blogs began to play a key role over the course of 2005, providing coverage and attention at times when the mass media paid little attention, and contributed both to publicity and to organization. Bloggers worked with protest organizers to ensure that photographs and narratives of the protests were quickly disseminated online — offering a valuable resource to journalists, international NGOs and to Egyptian citizens alike. For all the innovative activism of Kefaya and associated bloggers, however, the movement would have achieved little political impact without the temporary opening created by a constitutional referendum, presidential elections, and parliamentary elections — along with the appearance of several new like-minded independent newspapers and the increased Western scrutiny of Egyptian democracy due to the Bush administration’s reform rhetoric.
In Bahrain, bloggers and online forums played a direct role in a human-rights campaign that infuriated the regime and generated great public controversy. By 2005, some 60 Bahraini blogs were energetically focusing on local politics in both English and Arabic, many under pseudonyms. Those bloggers helped to organize and publicize a number of protests over issues such as the arrest of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (in December 2004) and constitutional reforms. In response, the Bahraini authorities arrested some of the most active bloggers, such as Ali Abdulemam, and demanded that Internet sites register with the authorities in an attempt to break down the anonymity protecting some of the most outspoken voices. More recently, Bahraini bloggers have been intensely following “Bandar Gate,” a scandal driven by revelations of regime plans to fix the 2006 parliamentary elections, and have produced a map of the country using Google Earth revealing vast appropriations for the royal family. These instances of online activism led the Bahraini government to briefly ban the Mahmood’s Den blog within the country.
Kuwaiti bloggers took advantage of several windows of opportunity over the course of 2006. After gaining an audience with their coverage of the succession crisis following the death of the Emir in January 2006, many of these blogs picked up a campaign to reduce the number of electoral districts from 25 to 5 in order to cut back on notoriously corrupt electoral practices. When the Emir called early Parliamentary elections, blogs jumped into the fray with a vengeance, highlighting corruption and driving the debate (with blog postings often showing up in newspapers). The Kuwaiti case is particularly interesting since prior to 2006, most observers had seen the Kuwaiti blogosphere as relatively disengaged from politics and marginal to the public realm.
In all three cases, activist bloggers took advantage of a political opening by turning it into something more than ruling elites had intended: Kefaya turned what could have been ritual, sham elections into a tense drama; the Bahraini bloggers turned a routinely repressive shutdown of a human-rights organization into a political cause; and Kuwaiti bloggers helped push for an early election in which they could then engage. It only took a few activists to tip the balance from a relatively passive and marginal blogosphere into much more active political engagement. Other countries that have many bloggers but few activists may simply lack the necessary political openings: Jordan lacks any significant political parties other than the Islamic Action Front and has been steadily de-liberalizing over recent years; Tunisian bloggers have not been able to escape the intensely repressive state policing of the media; and Saudi bloggers face the same extreme censorship and personal fear that dominates offline Saudi public life. But should political openings appear — parliamentary elections in Jordan scheduled for later this year for instance — they could create an opportunity for activist blogging.
Activist bloggers likely will learn from such successful uses of the Internet. In each of those cases, it only took a few early innovators to trigger a cascade of activist blogging — which suggests that other Arab countries could be more ripe for blog activism than they currently appear. I expect to see more cases of blogs identifying and pursuing scandals the state-dominated media chooses to ignore, as in the Kuwaiti vote-buying episode, Bahrain’s Bandar Gate, or Egyptian bloggers posting disturbing clips of the torture and mistreatment of ordinary citizens at police stations. Bridge-blogging will likely play an ever more important role in shaping how Western media cover the region as Western journalists increasingly seek out bloggers as interlocutors and draw on their reporting to frame their own stories. The attention to Israeli and Lebanese blogs during their 2006 war shows how they can influence media coverage. In an age of dwindling overseas media coverage, such English-language blogs serve as a kind of volunteer press service. The greatest impact of blogs, however, likely will be in their contribution to revitalizing and transforming Arab public spheres.
States will not take increased blog power lying down. Internet filtering is already common, and a number of prominent bloggers have already struggled with their Web sites being blocked in their home country. As blogs gain political relevance, bloggers will attract the attention of the repressive state security services, reinforcing self-censorship and leading others to avoid political commentary. Regimes could manipulate the blogosphere by flooding it with pro-regime blogs or by seeding it with deliberately provocative blogs (insulting Islam, for instance, or provoking ethnic tensions), which could justify a crackdown.
More optimistically, Arab regimes could recognize the value of blogs in contributing to a more engaged public sphere and learn to tolerate online political criticism. Since blogs reach small audiences, they could be seen as an unusually safe way to allow publics to let off steam and to serve as “early warning” indicators of trouble.
On balance, it seems likely that blogs will increase in political significance. Because the Internet is central to the kind of economic development desired by most Arab regimes, access to the Internet will only increase. Whether through direct activism, bridge-blogging, or public sphere argument, the ability of blogs to frame stories and to funnel information into the public sphere will grow.
Marc Lynch is associate professor of political science at Williams College. His second book, “Voices of a New Arab Public: Iraq, al Jazeera, and a Changing Middle East,” is published by Columbia University. He blogs at http://abuaardvark.typepad.com.
Photo: Egyptian blogger Abd al-Kareem Nabil Suleiman in jail in Egypt.
