A Region in Transition: “Tidy up your room, then you can go out on the street”
Upheaval in the Arab world: Protesters on Tahrir Square (Photo: Jonathan Rashad)
31 March 2011
First it was Tunisia, then Egypt, now Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and so forth ... an entire region is in a state of upheaval. What does the “Arab Spring” mean for society in these nations? And for the young people living there? A blog offers some information.
“All my life, I didn’t understand much about politics. I loved reading the newspapers or a few articles and listening to the news,” writes 24-year old Martina Ashraf in Cairo, “but I never even considered reading the Constitution. And I never watched a parliamentary session. That was in the days when they were broadcast on television and then were banned for fear that the MPs’ snoring might disturb the viewers. I do not have a voter permit. So, like many, I thought that even if I should entrust the government with my vote, they would fill the ballot boxes with forged votes just the same. (...) Plus, I was afraid to go and vote and get clubbed on the head – just so. And I’ve never gone to a demonstration.”
Then the year 2011 arrived, first with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, then the fall of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. Martina Ashraf writes, “I look at myself and see that I am suddenly talking politics, I’m excited and cheering things along. (...) I wanted to go down on the street to do my bit, perhaps by cleaning the streets and collecting rubbish. But my mother retorted in a gentle voice, ‘As soon as you have tidied up your room and your closet, then you can go out and clean up the street.’ Oh, well ...”
Martina Ashraf is one of the writers of the blog Transit, where she describes in a humorous and sometimes sentimental way how she experienced the past weeks in Cairo. Transit is a blog about the young generation in Egypt, in the Middle East and in North Africa that Li-lak, the German-Arabic website for encounters and young journalism, employed to react to the most recent developments. The Transit editorial office is located at the Goethe-Institut Cairo – a city that has become a “large-scale construction site of the determined will for reforms,” as Günther Hasenkamp, head of cultural programme work at the Goethe-Institut there describes it, “for it is nothing less than the task of building an entirely new society.”
You can read about how young people are experiencing – and taking part in – this new society here.
