Advice from Muhammad Yunus to Young People Everywhere: Take Responsibility, and Take Over

To the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the Arab Spring was an expression of frustration by young people in the region of how little change was happening in their societies. He tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton his advice to young demonstrators in the Arab world, and elsewhere, is to take responsibility for seeing that change happen.

“Young people see solutions are possible, they see a new life is possible. The old generation is still looking at the traditional way of handling everything. And that is the mismatch that will cause more problems. In 20 years from now the world will be completely different, because of that wave of technology, because of that wave of regeneration coming in.

“Just go ahead, take responsibility and make it happen. They will appreciate you for it. They’re not your enemies. Simply they don’t feel you are mature enough to handle that. Show them you are. It’s like any parent and their kids; they’ll treat them that way even if they are grown up. Not only have you grown up, you have much more experience and ideas than they do, in this short time, because your speed is much faster than theirs.”

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Regimes Will Not Control Egypt Again: Journalist Randa Fouad

An entire generation of Egyptians grew up under strongman Hosni Mubarak, and few could ever see an alternative to his rule, often quietly joking he was the ‘pharaoh for life.’ Journalist Randa Fouad says she was among the skeptics when protestors first gathered at Tahrir Square.

But the swift end to Mubarak’s military regime, she says, emboldened her countrymen to rethink Egypt’s future. Despite the country’s ongoing political and social turmoil, Fouad is optimistic, telling Arabic Knowledge@Wharton that whatever develops, “Egypt belongs to the Egyptians now. It does not belong to any regime.”

Read the full interview here: http://t.co/kusukHKz

Watch What You Type: Social Media a Tool for Revolutionaries, and Increasingly, for Security Agencies

Most likely your social media accounts are already under scrutiny, even in the United States. The news is replete with headlines of just how closely authorities are monitoring social media sites. Security agencies say data analysis of social media is important, providing them with another tool to identify potential terror threats and criminal activity. But advocacy groups are concerned such surveillance goes far beyond that scope, and that often social media is monitored in countries to abuse human rights and thwart political opposition with the assistance of Western-developed technology.

“If protests are seen as a crime by some governments, and they are considered as solidarity or free expression by the public, it is a difference between public and strictly legal analyses,” says  Andrea M. Matwyshyn, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton Business School.

Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/z0DauW

A Year Later, Egypt’s Wael Ghonim Talks About ‘Revolution 2.0’

Wael Ghonim almost sounds apologetic about his central role in helping plot Egypt’s future. But a year after helping topple the government of President Hosni Mubarak his words continue to resonate beyond the Tahrir Square protests.

Ghonim, 31, was the moderator of the Facebook page, Kullena Khaled Said (“We Are All Khaled Said”), which some credit for providing the spark for the Egyptian revolution. Ghonim was imprisoned and became the revolution’s public face after his release. He might be better suited to help inspire a budding entrepreneur community throughout Egypt, but circumstances have thrust him into the political forefront where messaging and branding can carry the day. In some ways he’s an Egyptian Forest Gump, an accidental leader who never aspired to command such attention.

But it’s clear Ghonim is an important figure domestically and internationally as Egyptians navigate the maze of democracy. The former Google marketing executive has utilized his enterprising spirit in the political realm to bring factions together for a common cause.

“The revolution is a process and not an event,” he said at Stanford University on the first anniversary of his release from jail for his role in sparking the protests. “I personally (took) to the streets not to replace a dictator with another one. I took to the streets because I believe Egyptians have been denied the right to choose whoever governs them.”

Ghonim realized during the celebrations after Mubarak’s departure that Egypt was at the beginning of a long struggle. A majority of the Egyptians know nothing other than dictatorship and military rule, leading to confusion and chaos during the embryonic stages of democracy. “The fact is we kind of opened a can of worms,” he said. “It’s not going to happen in a few months.”

Ghonim regrets the lack of foresight in those intoxicating days after Mubarak abandoned power Feb. 11 last year and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces filled the void as the interim government. But it seems as if the self-criticism is too harsh. Egyptians such as Ghonim now have a sense of urgency about creating a new democratically elected government to benefit everyone.

Egypt, after all, has reached a tipping point: Its citizens must quickly figure out how to move away from military rule that controlled society for the past 60 years. “We need to have one goal, as we had for the 18 days,” Ghonim said of the protests that began Jan 25, 2011. “At the current stage we don’t discuss anything but the transition of power. This is our only priority.”

Ghonim recently visited the United States on a whirlwind book tour that included a panel discussion at Stanford sponsored by the Muslim Student Awareness Network and Islamic Society of Stanford University, and TechWadi, a Silicon Valley non-profit that promotes entrepreneurship and cross-border partnerships with the Arab world.

The tour was highlighted by an interview with Terry Gross, host of WHYY’s popular show “Fresh Air.”  The bulk of the radio interview focused on Ghonim’s memoir Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People Is Greater Than the People in Power. Proceeds from the book will go to a technology-based NGO the author is starting in Egypt to fight poverty and provide education.

At Stanford, Ghonim focused mostly on Egypt’s future instead of his 11 days of incarceration during the battles in Tahrir Square. (TechWadi chairman Ossama Hassanein, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and Joel Beinin, a Stanford professor of Middle East history, joined Ghonim as featured speakers).

“It’s not a Facebook Revolution,” Ghonim said. “It was the people’s revolution.”

He continued: “If this revolution did anything it brought dignity back to the Egyptians. It’s very hard to think that in a few months people are going to go back home and accept the dictatorship again. It’s not going to work.”

Ghonim described himself and his colleagues as politically naïve but he showed incredible prescience when explaining how citizens emerged from the shadows to protest because they thought change would help solve their problems. “The more they are feeling that it is creating additional problems the more they will be reluctant to continue to support it,” Ghonim said.

It’s a lesson almost all politicians understand. The citizenry becomes anxious during times of economic downturns. In Egypt, the economy is stagnating at the worst possible moment but there’s little Egyptians can do about it until creating a civilian government.

“Any elected government that comes into power and starts solving problems other than this problem will be solving the wrong problems and people will go after them,” Ghonim said. “It is very critical at the moment to bring trust back into the country. There are lots of opportunities ahead of us. The challenge now is how can we make sure the next few months Egypt is going to survive its economical problems?”

Egyptians such as Ghonim are struggling to strike a balance between getting the political situation right while stopping the economy from collapsing.

“Yet is very hard to assume the economy is going to rise during the transitional period because most of the foreign investments are not going to come in a country where people don’t know what is going to happen in the next few months.” he said. “We want to see the new Egypt, which is going through a transition that probably will last for years. We’re not going to see democracy tomorrow. It’s going to take time. It’s going to be hard. We have to be patient.”

The difficulties were underscored during Ghonim’s visit when 74 Egyptians died in soccer riots in Port Said. Some in the West also fear a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a possibility. Ghonim said he would respect whomever Egyptians decide should lead them. “Now everyone is in the field, everyone is included,” he added. “It is time to solve the real problems of this country and stop the idealistic views.”

Ghonim said Egyptians can no longer sit on the sideline and complain about corruption and economic woes without participating in solutions. The country cannot expect a singular leader to rise from the rubble to save it. “We’re not in need of another Abdel Nasser and we don’t need any more faces,” Ghonim said. “People have managed to collaborate and work together without having a single leader or group of leaders who would say what should happen now. I call on every Egyptian to do something, to think of something.”

Arab Arts Renaissance Emerges in the Wake of the Arab Spring

The surge of artistic output by contemporary amateur and professional Arab artists since the Arab Spring fall into what Jeremy Johns, an Islamic art history professor at Oxford University, considers an “extraordinary Arab cultural renaissance at the beginning of the 21st century.”

“No time in history has it been possible to listen to as much Arab music, to see as much Arab architecture, to read as much Arabic literature as is in the case today,” Johns said during the recent Festival of Thinkers conference in Abu Dhabi. “The renaissance that’s happening in the Arab world is fundamentally…changing the whole world.”

Even so, Johns said that as an art historian, he also cautions that this could be as a “dangerous moment,” wherein the continuum with a rich cultural past could fray. He said studying art could bridge the gap, helping link traditional arts and current aesthetics, which emerging artists are adopting.

“There are many artists working in the Arab world today, many architects, many writers, many musicians, who are drawing upon their classical traditional Arab-(identified) heritage, building upon it in an immensely exciting way,” Johns said. “Embrace the new, exciting, globalized culture, but for heaven’s sake, don’t lose track with tradition because that’s where you’re grounded, that’s where you come from.”

Read the story here: http://bit.ly/udY8RL

Wharton’s Stuart Diamond: Arab Spring has provided little value for people

When protestors first took to the streets across the Middle East early this year, the world watched as thousands of Arabs demanded an end to governments that were corrupt and self-serving. Dubbed the Arab Spring, it was a movement propelled by technology, imbued with optimism for change, and aiming to create a more equitable economy.

After the initial blush with relatively peaceful demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, the social revolution has led to strife rather than reform, as Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt have all witnessed bloody protests, while Syria and Libya have been plunged into all-out civil war. Much of this violent turn of events, says Wharton’s Stuart Diamond, is because of dashed expectations.

“Entrepreneurs know that the idea is just the start; without building out an enterprise, no value is created,” says Diamond, who teaches negotiation courses at Wharton, and is a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of Getting More: How To Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World. “This is the problem with the Arab Spring. Now that many have more power, they actually have to do the hard work to build out a different sort of economy.”

Another failing of the movement is the emphasis on past grievances — putting Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak on trial, Diamond says, is the wrong way to start rebuilding Egypt. “Negotiate with him on what he and others in his circle will provide,” he suggests. “Leave them with something to get them to agree. Now that would better help in building a new Egypt than a trial of a sick old man.”

For those challenging leadership, such as protestors in Syria, the best thing would be to avoid confrontation, he adds. “If Syrian protestors stop the violence, all the negative focus will be on the existing government, which will not be able to withstand the continuing criticism. The goal of the protestors now should be to document everything and keep telling the world.”

Diamond adds that the situation in Libya, “is perhaps the best example today of the stupidity of not negotiating … Libya will never be able to provide a better life for its citizens until the war stops. And the quickest way to do that is negotiate with Qaddafi.”

Read the story here on Arabic Knowledge@Wharton

Previously:  Stuart Diamond on Middle East Reform: Organize, Start Small, Replicate and Negotiate