Martyrs and the Egyptian Revolutionary Process

Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square for eighteen days between the 25th of January and the 11th of February 2011, when president Mubarak finally abdicated, ending three decades of rule. Following the army’s tactical siding with the protesters in a bid to save its privileges, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) assumed power over what became known as the “transitional period.”Footnote ¹⁴ While often presented through a focus on peaceful, politically articulate, and social media-savvy middle-class activists, the Egyptian revolution rested on a momentous alliance of different social forces, each of which brought their own repertoire of contentious political action. Violence was an integral part of the revolutionary experience, overwhelmingly committed by the regime’s security forces. The very idea of the Tahrir encampment was born out of violence, when peaceful demonstrators were beaten by security forces first on the 25th of January and then again on a much larger scale on the 28th, also known as the Friday of Anger. Hundreds of people died on that day, becoming the revolution’s first martyrs.Footnote ¹⁵ Protesters in Tahrir Square remained under constant threat of attack by Mubarak’s police and hired thugs. Out of this direct experience of death and injury, the breakdown of fear, and sudden heroism, a revolutionary situation was born. The regime’s brutal repression of peaceful protests engendered a situational dynamic in which people’s demands and their horizon of expectations were utterly changed within a few short hours.

There emerged a utopian community, sometimes referred to by observers as “the Republic of Tahrir.”Footnote ¹⁶ The Tahrir encampment symbolically established a liberated space where normative social boundaries of class, gender, and ideology were temporarily dissolved.Footnote ¹⁷ The Republic of Tahrir brought together social groups who normally avoided or feared each other: Islamists and liberals, unrelated men and women, the rich and the poor, and Egypt’s diverse middle classes. Located on Cairo’s central square, the encampment symbolically disrupted normative social order and in fact was a direct reversal of it. The norm in Mubarak’s Egypt meant corruption, structural oppression and police brutality, social inequality and segregation, and injustice of multiple kinds (though different people were affected differently). Tahrir Square represented the exact opposite: freedom, justice, equality, and above all dignity. The experience of an organic, utopian community born amid violence was cathartic. People who were there felt as if they had become entirely new beings: they had been changed forever and there was no going back. The experience was existential rather than merely political.

While conventionally associated with the eighteen days of the Tahrir sit-in, this utopian state endured to greater or lesser degrees through much of the two and half years of the revolutionary process. A revolutionary atmosphere engulfed diverse spaces, from schools and workplaces to metro carriages and taxis, all of which were sites of intense discussions about what kind of collective future was about to emerge. “Future” itself, it seemed, was a newly discovered concept, a positive horizon imbued with anticipation and joy. Yet, as months went by, the transitional regime’s unwillingness to carry out outstanding revolutionary demands became more obvious. Violence against protesters intensified.

First came brutal crackdowns on smaller groups of revolutionaries who insisted on continuing their protests in Tahrir Square beyond the moment of Mubarak’s resignation, most famously (but not exclusively) on the 8th of March and the 9th of April, and again in July. The Maspero Massacre of a Coptic demonstration on the 9th of October, in which at least twenty-eight protesters were mowed down by automatic weapons and run over by military vehicles, brought the role of the army as the transitional ruler to the forefront of the revolutionary agenda. By the fall of 2011, outstanding revolutionary demands came to concentrate on one core goal: an end to military rule. November 2011 also saw the largest mobilization since January, with a renewed occupation of Tahrir Square and a now-legendary urban battle in the nearby Muhammad Mahmud Street that raged for five days and nights.Footnote ¹⁸ The November mobilization posed an unprecedented threat to the very foundation of Egypt’s regime. More violence was soon to follow: the brutal dispersal of the Cabinet sit-in that December, and the following February the Port Said Massacre of seventy-two Ultras Ahli soccer fans at the hands of thugs in a premeditated setup thinly veiled as a football tragedy. Each of these events added to the growing pantheon of martyrs.

One ink drawing of Gika’s face (figure 4) builds on the earlier, minimalist stencil of it, but it is here entirely composed of calligraphed names of other martyrs, each of whom indexes a particular revolutionary event. His hair on the left side carries the names of Mina Daniel, killed in the Maspero massacre, and Sheikh ‘Imad ‘Iffat and ‘Alaa ‘Abd al-Hadi, both felled by sniper bullets during the Cabinet Clashes. The right side of his hair names Muhammad al-Gundi, murdered under torture under the transitional rule of the army, and Kristi, shot by police during clashes in front of the Presidential Palace in December 2012 (known as the Ittihadiyya Clashes); the number 74 refers to the number of martyrs killed during the Port Said Massacre, of whom the youngest victim, Anas (aged fifteen) forms Gika’s nose. The chanting mouth is reserved for a martyr of honor, Khaled Said, whose death by brutal beating in the summer of 2010 is widely believed to have inspired revolutionary mobilization six month later in January 2011. The image of Gika’s face was thus not only an icon in and of itself, but was also part of a wider system of revolutionary indexes that included faces, names, and even numbers. Together, all of these indexes built a revolutionary temporality, as time itself became apprehended (and later, remembered) as being paced through these events.

Figure 4. Drawing of Gika’s face composed of calligraphed names of other martyrs of the revolution. Facebook, December 2014.

The two and a half years of the revolutionary process represented a liminal period—a temporal limbo, a “time out of time”—in which the older order of the world had been shattered and a new one, a new “normal,” was yet to crystallize. During this liminal time, formal political channels were suspended and power was literally in the street. Extreme violence and extreme utopia represented everyday occurrences—they were, in effect, contingently “normal.” This was not only a political battle over what kind of institutional order would emerge, or who would become the new dominant power-holder; it was also an existential state of being in which social identities became fluid and porous and social relationships were redefined. Time itself flew differently. It could slow down or quicken, or meander and bend in on itself. Conventional social boundaries melted or became unstable, including the boundary between the living and the dead.

Loving a Martyr at a Distance

Photographs of martyrs became ubiquitous in Tahrir Square immediately after the first martyrs fell on the 28th of January. Some were printed on large plastic banners hanging above the crowds or carried by friends and relatives (figures 5 and 17); others were framed and put in carefully arranged makeshift sanctuaries (figure 6).

Figure 5. Posters with photographs of the earliest martyrs of the revolution hung in Tahrir Square. Photograph by Walter Armbrust, 9 February 2011, used with permission.

Figure 6. A makeshift martyrs’ sanctuary in Tahrir Square. Photograph by Walter Armbrust, 9 February 2011, used with permission.

A peculiar practice emerged in which young people almost obsessively drew the faces of slain peers whom they had never known, copying photographs circulated online or lifted from the deceased’s Facebook page. Such amateur drawings were widely shared on social media and also hung physically in makeshift exhibitions in metro stations or school yards. Sometimes martyrs’ faces were drawn on the city walls. All such material iterations were photographed and recirculated online (figure 7).

Figure 7. Exhibition of drawings of martyr’s faces by the Fraternity of Revolution Artists (Rabita fannani al-thawra) titled “Exhibition of Living and Dead.” Facebook, March 2011.

While the stenciled face of Gika (among many others) became an icon, a symbol for revolutionary loyalties especially among the younger generation of revolutionaries, these acts of drawing need to be understood differently. They represented a much more intimate way of relating to the martyrs, an expression of a direct, personal relationship mediated by photographs. The martyrs were first and foremost ordinary men, and in lesser numbers women, who lost their lives at the hands of the regime during one or another revolutionary event.Footnote ¹⁹ It was their ordinariness as well as the injustice and arbitrariness of their deaths that made them feel particularly close to their audiences. Most were young; Gika was only seventeen (though some accounts say sixteen) and it was his tender age that provided much of the affective appeal that his fate came to generate among audiences. As a young female Egyptian blogger put it: “In November 2012 I got so attached to a guy who was injured by the police forces in a big protest in Tahrir Square in Cairo. His name was Gaber Jika, and his age was only seventeen, exactly my age back then.… He led protests demanding justice in Egypt. He was young, but braver than any other old man.” The blogger continues: “I never met Jika in person. I never talked to him. I never read anything [by] him. When it was announced he was severely injured and was clinically dead, I spent day and night praying for him to wake up. I sneaked out of my classes to check if there were any news. He didn’t make it. And as I read the news of his death, my hands clutched at my phone and my fingers were on fire. Blood drained to my cheeks, burning, killing my nerves as tears blurred my vision.”Footnote ²⁰

Her mother, seeing her in this state, responded with what the blogger identifies as the classic victim-blaming response characteristic of the older de-politicized generation—“Oh honey, but why did he go there?”—and the author sees that attitude as the key problem behind young people’s alienation and the older generation’s apathy, which eventually leads them to applaud authoritarian regimes in the name of “stability.” In a blog entry titled “The power of loving a martyr whom you’ve never met,” the young author explains the reason behind her attachment to and admiration for Gika, and other young martyrs she does not name: they taught her “the meaning of values, principles and persistence,” things that she insists cannot be found among the older generation.Footnote ²¹ The fractured relationship between her generation and that of her authority-worshipping parents and grandparents is the driving theme of her blog. Clearly, the affective bond between (young) martyrs and their (young) audiences was understood in deeply generational terms; but this translated into political positions that helped people to make sense of revolutionary turmoil. It was also clearly mediated by photographs that crossed spaces online and off.

This young blogger’s attachment to Gika, “the martyr whom [she has] never met,” takes us closer to understanding the widespread phenomenon of drawing martyrs’ faces. She had put into words what most of my interlocutors could not, insisting that it was just the natural thing to do.Footnote ²² While many of these drawings eventually ended up snapped with mobile phones and circulated on social media, the image as a displayed product was less the point than the actual (and often obsessive) practice or act of drawing. In other words, the act of drawing was a relationship of communion between the martyr and the person drawing him.Footnote ²³ This intersubjective relationship was primarily tactile or haptic. The act of drawing another’s face (or, in other contexts, of reading, writing, or reciting the person’s name) represents a liminal zone when the boundaries of personhood become porous and the two persons, the drawer and their subject, flow into each other. As the drawing hand literally touches the face being drawn, for a moment these two persons become one. At the same time, drawing a person’s face, or uttering their name, conjures up the absent person’s presence.

The blogger never indicates if she ever took part in any revolutionary event. While her text is clearly driven by her loyalty to the revolutionary project, understood, in her case, through a deeply affective generational lens, there is no sense of space in her text. This would be highly unusual had she actually attended any of the revolutions’ many events, all of which always had a very strong spatial dimension.Footnote ²⁴ Being somewhere, witnessing one event or another, is how people usually referred to the revolutionary process in retrospect. She does not, and her text points us to a whole generation of young people who observed the revolution from afar, often by no fault of their own. Growing up in Cairo’s many pericentral urban areas, built over the past three decades ostensibly to minimize elite Egyptians’ exposure to the dirt and pollution of the inner city (but really to avoid the poor), these young and relatively privileged Egyptians witnessed the revolution as predominantly a mediated event.Footnote ²⁵ As the blogger’s passionate embrace of the revolutionary cause and her convincing explanation of her infatuation with Gika demonstrates, this physical distance did not diminish their loyalty to the revolutionary project, and indeed may have fueled it. This spatial dimension is important for my argument. The young woman’s loyalty was to a large degree made possible, realized, and performed by the intense remediation of martyrs’ faces across social media and the internet, whereby these photos had the capacity to collapse space and generate deeply personal effects among faraway audiences, and cultivate revolutionary subjecthood at a distance.Footnote ²⁶ Some people achieved communion with their newfound heroes—whose death suddenly imbued their lives with meaning, values, and a new sense of future—through drawing their faces; she did so through writing her blog. We do not know whether she ever attempted to draw Gika’s face, but she achieved similar effects by describing her emotions for him and by re-posting the iconic photograph of him being carried on his peers’ shoulders on her blog. The photo was not the “original” photograph (figure 1), but a retouched version in which only the figure of Gika retains its original color while the surrounding crowds are turned into sepia, receding into the background (figure 8). This intervention accentuates the focus on Gika and resonates with the deeply personal connection between the young martyr and his audience (or alter-ego?), the blogger. Through these practices of writing, drawing, and remediating, people like this blogger fashioned themselves as revolutionary subjects in a quasi-mystical idiom reminiscent of the relationship between a young murid (initiand) and their worshipped saint, the superstar martyr who serves as a guiding light, imbuing their individual struggles with a broader collective and political meaning. Young charismatic martyrs like Gika were thus fundamental to the cultivation of revolutionary subjecthood among audiences who may have had limited exposure to events on the ground, but for whom Gika’s fate made perfect sense in the context of their own personal histories.

Figure 8. Cropped and modified photograph of Gika (see figure 1), Menna Elnaka’s blog, June 2014.

Martyrs as Masters of Ceremony

As the impossibility of victory grew ever more obvious throughout the revolution’s second year, justice for the martyrs came to overshadow all other revolutionary demands. Martyrs, in fact, became the revolution’s “leaders” of sorts, for two reasons: First, the Egyptian revolution was famously self-consciously leaderless. Some activists argued that a leadership would make it easy for the regime to decapitate the movement and fragment it. More broadly, the rejection of vertical hierarchy in favor of a web-like horizontal structure of like-minded groups and movements is typical of contemporary social movements around the world that insist on being radically democratic (a prime example being the Occupy Wall Street movement, itself partly inspired by the Tahrir Square sit-in).Footnote ²⁷ This choice reflects the rejection of an older style of politics represented by hierarchical party structures and leaders, whether of the Left or the Right, which is seen as compromised. The conscious rejection of a leader was key to the revolution’s strategy.

The second reason martyrs became like “leaders” was that, as the revolutionary process stalled, the original utopian community of Tahrir Square began to splinter into warring factions. Such fragmentation is characteristic of revolutionary situations whereby the old order’s collapse triggers a barrage of claim-making in which diverse and often incompatible demands are put forward.Footnote ²⁸ In the Egyptian case, the key fissure pitched secular revolutionary forces against Islamists, but secular forces themselves were far from united and fought over key issues of strategy. Such disputes were in turn exploited by counter-revolutionary forces.

In the absence of revolutionary political leaders, then, martyrs gradually assumed a symbolic political role.Footnote ²⁹ The deployment of their images in diverse, contentious performances—online and off, but especially in Tahrir Square, the revolution’s symbolic epicenter—indexed the cause in its broadest terms. Whereas textually and verbally the demand for “justice for the martyrs” (slogans such as haqq al-shahid or al-qasas) remained salient across the revolutionary public sphere, the visual presence of the photographs of martyrs was even more eloquent. Captions of the photographs in figures 5, 6, and 7 simply state their names, age, and the time (i.e., event) of their death. For instance, the caption of figure 6 reads, “By [a police] bullet on the Friday of Anger.” These faces act as a political compass to remind everyone of the fundamentals: “This is why we are here.” These people died, and, like Gika, scores more died throughout the rest of 2011 and 2012, even long after Mubarak’s resignation supposedly ushered in a democratic transition. Thus, as the political landscape became more conflicted, the martyrs provided the light that showed everyone the right path. They were masters of ceremonies who guided the initiands—the revolutionaries—through the uncertain and murky waters of a temporal limbo toward a safe shore: an anticipated future of justice and dignity.Footnote ³⁰

Take the often-reproduced mural of martyrs in Muhammad Mahmud Street in the fall of 2012 (figure 9). Mina Daniel and Sheikh ‘Imad ‘Iffat tower over a pantheon of other martyrs (middle row), each of whom references a specific revolutionary event, again pacing a distinct revolutionary temporality. On the bottom, a mass of protesters depicted as mere black shadows stands for the utopian Tahrir community; they are the reborn ones who are both guided and protected by the martyrs. The choice of the two towering figures reiterates the revolutionary call to national unity between Copts and Muslims and the refusal of sectarian identifications. Mina was a Christian killed in a specifically Christian demonstration (though secular revolutionaries also attended) which was critical of the church hierarchy, seen as corrupt. ‘Imad ‘Iffat was an Azhari sheikh who put his loyalty to the revolution ahead of that to his (equally corrupt) institution.Footnote ³¹ Their violent deaths by sniper bullets were a clear indication of the risks borne by all who dared to step outside of their respective conservative, patriarchal institutional structures.

Figure 9. Mina Daniel and Sheikh ‘Imad ‘Iffat; graffiti in Muhammad Mahmoud Street, November 2012. Author’s photo.

Visual iterations of martyrs’ faces throughout 2011 and 2012 were increasingly assigned this urgency, such as in one caption that became common: “Beware forgetting why I died” (iw'a tensa ana mutt leh). Or take the calligraphic text written over a mural with multiple images of Gika’s face in Muhammad Mahmud Street in early 2013: “Me and the one who drew me have elected the one who killed me (ana wa elli rasamni intakhabna elli qatalni),” meaning Muhammad Mursi. This text realized the same kind of communion (or flowing into one) between the slain young martyr and the calligrapher that I described earlier regarding people drawing unknown martyrs’ faces.

Here the etymology of the word “martyr” in Arabic is instructive: the verbal root sh-h-d means to witness, hence a martyr is the one who bears witness to a major truth. Throughout 2012 this fundamental truth was that the regime had not really fallen but had merely changed its head. To those exposed to the security forces’ violence against protesters, and the impunity they enjoyed, the progression from Mubarak, through the transitional period under the SCAF, and to the democratically elected president Mursi, came to look like a mere cosmetic change.Footnote ³² The regime remained the same so long as justice for the martyrs was deferred and their killers remained at large, and, indeed, so long as young people like Gika continue to die, twenty-one months after the old regime’s supposed fall. Or, put differently, so long as the martyrs remained un-dead, carried in the liminal space of Tahrir Square, the revolution would continue.

It is no wonder, then, that the martyrs often assumed metaphysical attributes. They were certainly considered larger than life, or super-human: multiple drawings and graffiti of Gika appear with a “G” on his chest in place of the “S” (“Superman”) on the shirt he wore in the photograph. Photographs of martyrs—the masters of ceremonies, the leaders, the bearers of light—were at times deployed by the revolutionary camp as protective amulets. One instance comes from the highly mediated trial of president Mubarak in June 2011 (figure 10). Photographs of martyrs were laid on the ground like a charm to protect the revolution’s turf from the nearby security forces clad in full riot gear. Needless to say, the crowd of Mubarak’s supporters nervously standing nearby would have been carrying their own counter-charm in the form of photographs of the deposed president. More famous still among young revolutionaries was the flag of the Christian activist Mina Daniel, shot down by the army at age twenty during the October 2011 Maspero Massacre (Mina is the towering figure on the left on figure 9). A flag with Mina’s stenciled face became a legendary prop in urban battles between protesters and security forces in Downtown Cairo, most famously the Muhammad Mahmud Street battle in November 2011 (the one commemorated, and replayed, a year later during the events that led to Gika’s killing). In the months that followed, legends accumulated around this flag, which was believed to be imbued with magical powers: it protected its bearer from bullets and dictated the pace of the battle to both sides.Footnote ³³ These modern-day photographic icons based on technologies of remediation are analogous to holy icons of earlier times that were carried into battle to protect the faithful soldiers. In all of these cases, the martyrs have truth on their side; theirs is the party of truth and justice.

Figure 10. Photographs of martyrs laid on the ground during the trial of former president Mubarak, 1 June 2012. Photograph by Mosa’ab Elshamy, reproduced with permission.

Funerary Portraits that Refuse to Die

There is a long-established tradition in the Arab Middle East of displaying photographs of the deceased in homes and in family shops, workshops, and other businesses. Formal portraits are enlarged, framed, and hung on a living room wall, usually above eye level and near other visual and textual objects that convey social or religious authority, notably sacred texts or images.Footnote ³⁴ As a number of scholars have pointed out, placement matters greatly to the kind of social work demanded of such photographs: they must be “in the right place, in the right company,” and “treated well.”Footnote ³⁵ Andrew Shryock describes three types of temporal authority that these photographs and associated objects commonly embody in Jordanian homes: God, the king (in Egypt or Syria this would be the president), and the family patriarch.Footnote ³⁶ Such displays assert the dead person’s continuous presence as an ancestor; they are less about mourning or commemoration, but rather mark the family as a unit that transcends worldly time and place. Young people usually appear in this pantheon through images of weddings and graduations, temporal markers of achievement that, again, define the family as a trans-temporal unit. When a young person dies, though, an enlarged portrait of them may overshadow the otherwise patriarchal (or senior-authority centered) mise-en-scène. The premature death of a young family member imbues him or her with posthumous authority and heightened importance, as the temporality of the family is pierced by an untimely death.

Egyptians assign special importance to choosing which portrait to frame for such posthumous displays. It is typically a frontal shot, ideally—though not exclusively—a formal work by a studio photographer (see figure 11).Footnote ³⁷ People explained to me that a deceased loved one should be remembered in the nicest possible way, and their portrait should always be dignified. The funerary portraitFootnote ³⁸ is said to allude to the place where the loved one currently resides: paradise, a place of tranquility and peace, so ideally the photograph should suggest that the person is happy.Footnote ³⁹ In this way, such a photograph typically presents a timeless, picture-perfect likeness of the deceased, and it will avoid any reference to the event of their death, especially if it was unnatural or violent.Footnote ⁴⁰ A common way of coping with the loss of a young, unmarried person is to imagine them as a bride or a groom in heaven. Other than that, there is a considerable flexibility in the way the funerary portrait is done, and of course digital technologies greatly enhance the range of possibilities. Some families opt for pious backgrounds, most notably through the addition of religious themes such as Mecca (see images below). Others opt for a neutral heaven-like light blue background. Such visual choices form part of what Farha Ghannam aptly calls “technologies of immortality,” or practices and rituals surrounding death that produce tangible effects, offering comfort to the living while seeking to ensure the status of the deceased in the afterlife.Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 11. A “funerary” portrait of a martyr in his home. Photograph by Denis Dailleux, reproduced with permission.

The young martyr in figure 12 has the coat of arms of his favorite football team, al-Ahly, for a background.Footnote ⁴² On the surface, this background is meant to make him happy, since he really loved this team. However, it also subtly indexes the moment of his death: he died in the Port Said Massacre in February 2012, when 74 al-Ahly team fans were slaughtered by thugs posing as fans of the opposite team.Footnote ⁴³ The massacre was orchestrated by the transitional regime under the stewardship of the SCAF, and carried out literally under the eyes of the police. Egypt’s Ultras soccer fans had played a prominent role during the revolution’s many urban battles with police as intrepid front line fighters, defending the peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square.Footnote ⁴⁴ By unleashing hired thugs on unsuspecting fans, hundreds of whom had traveled from Cairo for the match, the regime took revenge on rebellious young males for their role in earlier revolutionary events as well as for the emergence of the Ultras as a political force in the winter of 2011. Such visual references speak to the changes in the genre in times of revolution, when novel demands are placed on photographs and new visual conventions emerge.

Figure 12. Framed portrait of Osama Mostafa, who died at age eighteen in the Port Said stadium massacre in February 2012. From “The Port Said Massacre: A Photo Essay,” by Jonatan Rashad (Atlantic Council blog, 31 January 2014).

Still, there is something terminal about a dead person’s wall portrait. The person has now assumed a place in the visual pantheon of otherworldly authority. By enlarging, framing, and hanging the portrait in a prominent place in their home, the family performs a closure. But during the Egyptian revolution this changed: the revolutionary temporal limbo inspired various novel conventions and improvisation, but most importantly, it led many people to markedly refuse to accept closure.

Such a refusal is evident in figure 13, which illustrates the fluidity between the supposedly private (and terminal) funerary wall portrait and the open, public space of the street. It shows a makeshift installation, a sanctuary of sorts, in the room of a young working-class man, ‘Adel Imam, killed during the Muhammad Mahmud Street battle in November 2011. The framed photograph on the left appears ready to be hung on the wall; significantly, it is not actually hanging, but rather poised temporarily on the bed next to the same picture printed on a plastic poster. I do not know who took these photographs—I snapped them from social media in the midst of events long before I started thinking about this essay—but they strongly suggest a refusal to hang the framed funerary portrait on the wall and thus to realize a closure. Instead, the photograph rests on the bed where the young man should be. It resonates directly with photographs carried, and literally “worn,” on the body of the father in my subsequent examples. When tracing the social lives of martyr photographs in a revolutionary situation, one should not focus on locations where they are conventionally placed: it is in the street where they are to be found, un-dead.

Figure 13. The bedroom of martyr ‘Adel Imam, circulated on Facebook, November 2012.

Ibrahim Sa‘adun was killed on the Friday of Anger, 28 January 2011, with a bullet to his heart. His portrait was carried by his friends in November 2011 during a major protest against military rule that led to the battle of Muhammad Mahmud Street (figure 14). The image in figure 15, taken from a Facebook page, shows his father carrying the same banner on another occasion, and the original ID photograph from which his posthumous portrait was created before the Grand Mosque of Mecca was added as background with Photoshop.

Figure 14. Plastic poster with the photograph of Ibrahim Samir Sa‘adun carried in Tahrir Square in November 2011. Facebook, late 2011.

Figure 15. The original ID photograph of Ibrahim Samir Sa‘adun as it was posted on Facebook shortly after his death, and the same portrait used as a plastic poster carried in a major demonstration in Tahrir Square. Facebook, late 2011.

Let us focus on the plastic banner in figure 14. There are a number of tensions in it that speak directly to what is at stake in the process of making a martyr, as well as the kind of demands that are placed on photographs in this context. The mosque background, which places the photograph within the funerary genre, distances the photograph from the realm of the living and pulls the face up, vertically, to the eternal realm. But a very unusual caption has been added at the bottom. It addresses the martyr directly, saying “fi qulubna ya shaqawa: in our hearts [you remain], you brave, naughty boy.” The expression “ya shaqawa” is highly informal. It belongs to a particular linguistic register, a playful street language of class-inflected masculinity. It is a caption that only his friends could write. So, if the mosque background distances the portrait from the realm of the living, then the caption with its informal streetwise language does exactly the opposite: it keeps him on Earth and anchors him firmly among his friends. The pious background also makes the photograph rather terminal, like the wall portraits of the deceased. But the act of carrying it in the street during protests makes it very un-terminal, indisputably active and agentive among the living. But which living, we can ask? The portrait’s presence during a major protest declares him univocally as a martyr (other photographs of martyrs are visible on the right), all standing together for the revolutionary cause. The caption, however, suggests that his friends resist his being turned into one nameless martyr among many, and instead imprints his individual personhood (as their naughty friend) for a little longer, or perhaps for as long as it takes to bring justice.

Shihab Hasan Shihab was also shot to death in January 2011, and his photograph was one of many carried by family members in Tahrir Square throughout 2011. The photograph the father literally “wears” is made of two different portraits of Shihab, printed on a plastic banner (figure 16). Also here the choice of the photograph of the deceased is odd; instead of a frontal shot or portrait, this is a holiday snapshot on the beach. More formal, high quality studio portraits of Shihab were available, circulated on Facebook; his father, however, chose this unusual (or “un-funerary”) beach shot. The father’s odd choice again testifies to a refusal to produce his son as departed, now enjoying eternity in heaven. He may also be refusing to produce him too obviously as a martyr, which would carry the risk of de-individuating him and diluting him into a cause.Footnote ⁴⁵ The beach shot ties the son to the world of the living; it refuses closure as it simultaneously accuses and places demands. The choice of Shihab’s portrait underscores the injustice of his untimely death, a young life wasted. Justice for those killed since January was by November 2011 emerging as the principal demand of the stalling revolutionary process; the one demand that united all the splintering factions, since it reminded everyone of the basic truth that, as long as the dead had not taken their justice, as long as their killers remained at large (or, as in Gika’s case a full year later, as long as young people kept being killed) the revolution remained ongoing. The father does not deny the son’s martyrdom, as indeed that is the reason why they are both there; but rather the father’s choice of image refuses the terminal peacefulness and formalism of the funerary wall portrait, thus rejecting closure. Such photographs of young people who had been killed but remain un-dead make perfect sense in the context of Tahrir Square, which was then a liminal zone: a place out of place and a time out of time, with all the connotations of anti-structure, utopia, and communitas, a place where the dead mingled with the living;Footnote ⁴⁶ in short, in the context of the liminal temporality of the revolution. As long as justice has not been met, Shihab and his peers remain un-dead. They remained in a photographic limbo circling the liminal space of Tahrir Square.

Figure 16. Photographs of Shihab Hasan Shihab, shot to death in January 2011, carried by his father during most sit-ins through Summer and Fall of 2011 in Tahrir Square. Facebook, June and November 2011.

The Un-dead

Graffiti was another vehicle via which photographs of martyrs spread through the revolutionary city. The Egyptian graffiti movement emerged spontaneously from experiences of radical utopia and personal and collective liberation, manifested through an outburst of creativity. Faces of martyrs first appeared painted on city walls in the form of naïve photo-realism, or as stencils, both based on portrait photographs that were rapidly becoming iconic through social media.

In the spring of 2011, a number of trained artists joined the spontaneous graffiti movement and developed a distinct range of aesthetic styles. In their hands, photographs of martyrs that had been circulated online became sublimated into an artistic form. Especially important was ‘Ammar Abu Bakr, a young art professor from Upper Egypt familiar with the local tradition of wall painting, who made painting martyrs’ faces his personal revolutionary mission through 2011 and 2012.Footnote ⁴⁷ Streetwise and with a flair for popular piety (especially its carnivalesque, liminal manifestations in saints’ festivals and popular mysticism), ‘Ammar was supremely responsive to the almost metaphysical role that martyrs were taking on as the guiding lights of the otherwise fragmenting and stalling revolutionary process. His intuition and resulting artistic choices resonated powerfully with the pulse of the street and were thus partly responsible for cultivating the iconography of martyrs at a time when this was directly productive for the revolutionary cause.

The distinct style of ‘Ammar’s martyrs played on a combination of indexical (photographic) and painterly (symbolic) elements, the former based on the actual photographs, the latter partly inspired by local Upper Egyptian aesthetics.Footnote ⁴⁸ The most salient of these “folkloric” elements was the addition of wings as a marker of innocence and otherworldliness. Figures with wings (most commonly martyrs but also young fighters engaging the police in asymmetrical revolutionary violence) became a signature trait of ‘Ammar’s work; but they became widely used by many other anonymous and amateur artists, and came to characterize a distinct revolutionary iconography.Footnote ⁴⁹

Some of ‘Ammar’s most iconic works directly referenced their original photographic referent. His largest and most ambitious was a mural that spanned several dozen meters and showed the faces of martyrs killed in the Port Said Massacre of al-Ahly fans in February 2012 (figure 17). ‘Ammar (alongside his colleague ‘Ala’a ‘Awad who painted the wall from the other side, in a very different style) set to work almost immediately after the event, as major clashes between the Ultras football fans and the police were still raging in the vicinity of the Ministry of Interior.Footnote ⁵⁰ These faces were not only based on photographs, but explicitly depicted a framed photographic object, with ‘Ammar’s signature wings added.

Figure 17. ‘Ammar Abu Bakr’s wall of martyrs with wings, Muhammad Mahmoud Street, February 2012. Author’s photo.

‘Ammar and other artists over subsequent months kept adding to and elaborating on this mural. They temporarily transformed Muhammad Mahmud and surrounding streets into a sanctuary akin to those in private homes with portraits of the deceased hung on walls. People brought flowers and placed them on the pavement beneath the portraits.Footnote ⁵¹ These martyrs’ murals generated further photographic engagements. Between 2011 and 2014 (when the new regime’s grip over public life solidified and most of the graffiti in Muhammad Mahmud Street had disappeared), the street became a favorite place for young working class men to stroll and to photograph themselves in front of the murals (figure 18).

Figure 18. Young men posing in front of a mural on Muhammad Mahmoud Street, opposite ‘Ammar’s work. The face is that of Muhammad al-Gundi, killed by torture under Army rule. A crowd entirely made of Gika’s faces is on the right. Author’s photo, June 2013.

This particular street, directly adjacent to Tahrir Square, was the epicenter of the revolution and the site of some of the most memorable, bloody, and euphoric revolutionary events. The martyrs’ faces marked the turf of the revolution, as they were also building on a recent tradition of this space being the martyrs’ sanctuary (as in figure 6), a liminal space where the dead and the living mingled. In this liminal time, normally stable boundaries became unstable and porous. Categories of “inside” and “outside,” or “private” and “public,” could be reversed as the home and the street switched places or flowed into each other. The usually home-bound funerary photographs of the dead were denied their finality, their closure, and moved instead into the street, un-dead. The most sacralized wall of a house with photographs of the dead—which is primarily about authority, hierarchy, and a “proper place”—moved outside or was worn by relatives in public places. The murals in Muhammad Mahmud Street, with their painted framed photographs, transformed that major thoroughfare into a kind of public “home” mourning sanctuary. Unlike a mere deceased person, being a martyr is primarily a performative role, which requires an audience, as Walter Armbrust observes.Footnote ⁵² This was just one of the momentous instances of reversal that took place during the revolutionary process. On 6 June 2011, the first anniversary of the brutal death of Khaled Said, the nearby wall of the Ministry of Interior similarly became an improvised mourning sanctuary, covered with faces of martyrs (figure 19). (The Ministry of Interior, I should stress, represented a Mount Doom of sorts, as the nerve-center of the network of torturers who kept the Mubarak regime in power.) In this momentous act of victory, protesters sprayed stencils of Said’s face—based on his by then iconic photograph—on the very walls of the ministry’s compound. For a brief moment (a few hours) they even hung a framed portrait of another martyr on the Ministry’s gate.

Figure 19. The Ministry of Interior covered with faces of martyrs during a major demonstration on 6 June 2011. Flickr and Facebook, June 2011.

Time is crucial to all these performances. Liminal, revolutionary time when old structures had been shattered and power became fragmented and contested was a time when things that were unthinkable before (and again later, once counter-revolutionary forces started regrouping and even more so after the military coup of 2013) became momentarily possible. It is in such times that we can see photographs of martyrs who refuse to die, carried as un-dead in Tahrir Square. It is in such a time that the walls of the killers’ headquarters can become, for a moment, a mourning sanctuary for those they have killed.Footnote ⁵³

A later elaboration of ‘Ammar Abu Bakr’s Muhammad Mahmud Street mural of the martyrs was painted in November 2012, with the addition of several figures of grieving mothers, stretching out their hands holding ID photographs of their slain sons toward the viewer. These grieving mothers were painted over the iconic Wall of Martyrs (figure 17) in a bold gesture to underscore the unfinished nature of the revolutionary process and the absence of justice for these slain martyrs. To the artist, the Wall of Martyrs in Muhammad Mahmoud Street, with its (painted) framed photographs, was in fact too reminiscent of home funerary portraits, and therefore misleadingly suggested a closure. It was precisely this false sense of peace that the artist wanted to protest.Footnote ⁵⁴ Around the mothers gravely brandishing their sons’ photographs were added empty frames, as if to ask “Who will be the next martyr?”

Several families of martyrs came forth to ask the artist to have the face of their slain son added. Other families held vigil under the murals, prominently displaying actual photographs of their sons. These images, and the performances of grief and claim-making they inspired, again blur the boundary between a material photographic object, its representation on the wall (‘Ammar’s mural), the physical space of the street, and the virtual space online. Figure 20 encapsulates the cyclical process of remediation: a mother holding a photograph of her son under the wall of martyrs, posing for a photograph, will soon become a mother painted on the very same wall, and will become a photograph again.

Figure 20. Ammar Abu Bakr’s grieving mother mural in Muhammad Mahmud Street: the real mother (left) and the painted mother (right), both holding a photograph, and both photographed. ‘Ammar Abu Bakr’s archive, used with permission.

But there was a more sinister process of blurring the boundary between the photographs of the dead and of the living, a cycle of enfolding subject and object, a person and a photograph, or person-photograph-drawing, both online and off. Some of the drawings of Gika’s face shown earlier were drawn by Hisham Rizq. Equally young and enthused by the revolutionary project, Hisham painted many martyrs’ faces throughout 2011. Then he was himself killed in June 2014 under unclear circumstances. It was his turn to have his face drawn by both friends and complete strangers.Footnote ⁵⁵ The large mural in figure 21, again painted by ‘Ammar Abu Bakr and inspired by the juxtaposition of two photographs of Hisham, was for a long time the last surviving revolutionary mural in Muhammad Mahmud Street, until it was torn down in the fall of 2015 during a refurbishment of the American University in Cairo (figure 21).

Figure 21. Hisham Rizq as the painter of martyrs (left); and Hisham Rizq as the martyr (right). Mural by ‘Ammar Abu Bakr, creative synthesis of two photographs (inserted above, right). Facebook 2014–2015.

More grieving mothers appeared on the walls of Downtown Cairo. One such notable mural covered the wall of the Orthodox Church in Sabry Abu ‘Alam Street (figure 22). The work of an artist named al-Moshir, this mural again explores the theme of a mother holding a framed portrait of her slain son. Martyr’s mothers are the quintessential grieving subject, observes Amira Mittermeier, capable of mobilizing communities of viewers by turning their sons into potent political forces sustaining revolutionary time and energy.Footnote ⁵⁶ The mother of Emmett Till lynched in Jim Crow Mississippi or the Argentinian Mothers of Plaza de Mayo refusing to accept the disappearance of their sons and daughters are two immediately relevant historical examples.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the Egyptian case, the acknowledgment of the photograph as a material object across these artworks is salient. Just as a mural erases the “objectness” of a photographic portrait on which it is based, the artists in fact insist on stressing this materiality by painting martyrs not just as human faces but rather as framed photographs. This strategy accentuates the affective currency of the photographic portrait as an object held in the family. As in my earlier examples of photographs carried around in Tahrir Square, here too the portrayal of the martyr as a family photograph privatizes the martyr and resists his being turned into an icon. The reference to the ongoing pain of the mother also keeps him in some ways un-dead. Importantly, in all these iterations of the grieving mother theme, the framed photograph is held or carried around; like in my earlier examples, the martyrs’ photographs refuse to hang on the wall at home. To paraphrase Armbrust, they refuse to cross the passage and become merely deceased family members. Such a visual strategy is, again, an effect of the limbo of revolutionary time; both product and symptom of the unfinished nature of the revolutionary project.

Figure 22. Grieving mother holding a framed photograph of her slain son, graffiti by Al-Moshir on the wall in Sabri Abu ‘Alam Street, Downtown Cairo, late June 2013. Author’s photo.

While visual representations of martyrs proliferated between 2011 and 2013, ‘Ammar’s work was remarkable for its daring experimentation against convention. His continued elaboration of the mural of martyrs in Muhammad Mahmud Street eventually entailed the breaking of all taboos relating to how the dead should be represented. We have seen that such conventions dictate the portrayal of the deceased as always dignified, enjoying eternity in the embrace of God, especially so if the death was tragic or unnatural. It is commonly understood that evoking such a death again by depicting it means that the artist (or the picture) “participates in the murder,” or “murders [the person] a second time.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet, that is exactly what ‘Ammar’s subsequent murals did. He painted a handful of by-then-iconic martyrs as disfigured as they were the moment they died, bearing the marks of the fatal injury either by torture or weapons (figure 23). What is remarkable is not the paintings themselves, which one might dismiss as a revolutionary act by a single artist rebelling against the prevailing visual conventions of a genre, but the reactions of passers-by as well as the martyrs’ families that ‘Ammar encountered. Only one family protested such undignified representation; others appreciated it and, again, some whose sons were not included in the artwork asked him to add them, in this way. Footnote ⁵⁹ The social acceptance of picturing the dead as a disfigured corpse was utterly anti-normative; it not only broke established conventions of the genre but also transgressed upon beliefs surrounding death and piety that most Egyptians held, the kind of technologies of immortality evocatively described by Ghannam. But such choices were also reminiscent of similarly radical positions taken by the mothers of Emmet Till or Siphiwo Mtimkulu (tortured and slain by the apartheid regime in South Africa), who likewise insisted on showing their slain sons as “bodies at risk, not at rest” (to paraphrase Harold and DeLuca’s expression); keeping their sons’ bodies “un-burried,” they turned them into indexes of state violence and offered them as tools to hold the state accountable, as Amira Mittermeier observed.Footnote ⁶⁰ In all of these cases, the contrapunctual temporalities mediated by the “odd” choice of the photograph disrupt, and reject, the normative flow of time as closure (time after death, time of commemoration); and instead assert and extend what can variously be labeled revolutionary time, transitional time, or political time.

Figure 23. Disfigured faces of martyrs, mural by ‘Ammar Abu Bakr based on photographs taken immediately after death, Muhammad Mahmoud Street, November 2012. ‘Ammar’s archive, used with permission.

While the regime whitewashed most revolutionary art at various stages during the two and a half years of the revolutionary process, the Wall of Martyrs in Muhammad Mahmud Street was destroyed by the artists themselves, in the fall of 2013. They painted over it with pink camouflage, a choice that referenced, and mocked, the growing popularity of the army strongman ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi (figure 24). The artist, his crew, and the broader (if diminishing) community of revolutionary youths who had made Downtown Cairo their turf felt that they had failed the martyrs. The martyrs’ eyes had to be covered to prevent them from seeing that their deaths had been in vain. The logic of covering the martyr’s faces was informed by their understanding that these were not mere representations to be commemorated. Rather, as ‘Ammar and members of his crew repeatedly insisted, the martyrs were alive; they were “present” and “watching.” The return of military rule represented an insult to their deaths and their souls. To paraphrase, “They were our friends,” the artists insisted, “our comrades in struggle, and we can’t bear to let them see what is happening in Egypt today. Nor are we worthy of looking into their faces. We, the living, have failed the dead.” Some of my interlocutors went so far as to observe, in the grim atmosphere of 2014, when the defeat of the revolutionary project was all but obvious, that, in fact, the martyrs were alive and “we” are the ones who are dead. How can the dead commemorate the living?

Figure 24. Pink camouflage painted over the martyr’s wall in Muhammad Mahmud Street, by ‘Ammar and crew, November 2013. Author’s photo.

*****

The practices discussed in this essay were limited in time, bracketed off by the two and a half years of the revolutionary process. The military coup of the summer of 2013 was followed by an unprecedented crackdown, first on the Muslim Brotherhood and soon on all other forms of opposition, and the gradual but by now complete stifling of all political activity in Egypt. Military rule became normalized, traces of the revolution in public spaces erased. The only place where one can still encounter photographs of martyrs is in their homes, framed on the wall, privatized and silenced. Such images now perform the kind of temporal closure and occasional remembrance that is typically associated with the genre.

But there is one category of beings whose role remains reminiscent of that formerly played by the martyrs: the incarcerated, the disappeared, Egypt’s countless political prisoners. Like the martyrs, prisoners find themselves in a liminal state of betwixt and between, not only because prison is by its very nature akin to a state of limbo, but also because of the perversion of justice whereby detainees are often held in pretrial detention almost indefinitely, with no end in sight.Footnote ⁶¹ Young people disappear in broad daylight, only to emerge weeks later in one police station or another.

During the rigged parliamentary elections in the fall of 2015, remaining revolutionary forces mounted a visual counter-campaign on social media called “[Electoral] List: Free Egypt’s Detainees!” (Qaima ifragu ‘an Masr). Instead of endorsing one or another puppet candidate, they used photographs of political prisoners to boycott and subvert the farcical electoral process and to draw public attention to the fate of the wrongfully incarcerated. Martyrs also made a comeback, briefly—probably their last public comeback of note on social media—when a similar campaign called “[Electoral] List: Glory to the Martyrs” (Qaima al-magd li-l-shuhada’) proposed for election the “old” revolutionary pantheon of martyrs (figure 25). Broadly speaking, however, the sharing of photographs of, and news about, Egypt’s many political prisoners has long overshadowed the sharing of photographs of martyrs. This is not a widespread practice, but rather one that singles out those who still care, who refuse to be intimidated by the tightening censorship of social media and who resist manifold acts of personal and public forgetting. Like the martyrs before them, the photographs of detainees today perform the work of witnessing to the fundamental truth of the blatant injustice and the devaluation of human life in Egypt. But rather than indicating the path forward toward a hopeful future, their fading light disrupts the all-pervasive darkness of normalization like a few lone stars in a dark, moonless sky.

Figure 25. “Vote for the Martyr” campaign, October 2015, at the occasion of parliamentary elections. Upper right is Mina Daniel, lower right is Sheikh ‘Imad ‘Iffat, both central figures of the mural in figure 9. Facebook, October 2015.