Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean [1st ed.] 9783030454487, 9783030454494

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MIDDLE EAST TODAY

Laura Galián

Middle East Today

Series Editors Fawaz A. Gerges Department of International Relations London School of Economics London, UK Nader Hashemi Josef Korbel School of International Studies, Center for Middle East Studies University of Denver Denver, CO, USA

The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East. The Arab Spring uprisings have complicated this picture. This series puts forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship that reflects the current political and social realities of the region, focusing on original research about contentious politics and social movements; political institutions; the role played by nongovernmental organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Other themes of interest include Iran and Turkey as emerging pre-eminent powers in the region, the former an ‘Islamic Republic’ and the latter an emerging democracy currently governed by a party with Islamic roots; the Gulf monarchies, their petrol economies and regional ambitions; potential problems of nuclear proliferation in the region; and the challenges confronting the United States, Europe, and the United Nations in the greater Middle East. The focus of the series is on general topics such as social turmoil, war and revolution, international relations, occupation, radicalism, democracy, human rights, and Islam as a political force in the context of the modern Middle East.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14803

Laura Galián

Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean

Laura Galián University of Granada Granada, Granada, Spain

Middle East Today ISBN 978-3-030-45448-7 ISBN 978-3-030-45449-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Mikadun/shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Sameh Said Abud (1956–2018), To my family

Acknowledgments

This book owes a huge debt to Luz Gómez, to whom I am immensely grateful. Her generosity of spirit, attention to detail and critical verve have been invaluable throughout my adult life, intellectually and personally. This book has benefited enormously from the input of Elena Arigita. Her advice, insights and ongoing support and friendship helped me throughout. I am indebted to Carlos Cañete, whose conversations on power, embodiment and colonization have pushed me to delve deeper into things that I had hastily touched upon. The research of this book was supported by the public funding received: Pre-doctoral Scholarship for Research Staff Training (FPIUAM), Erasmus Mundus Ibn Battuta, RETOPEA’s postdoctoral fellowship and Juan de la Cierva’s fellowship program, which I gratefully acknowledge. I am thankful to my colleagues at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid as well as my current colleagues at the Department of Semitic Studies at Universidad de Granada. The professionals I have the pleasure to work closely with in the research projects and groups: “Islam 2.0: cultural markers and religious markers of the Mediterranean societies in transformation” (ALAM 2.0, FFI2014-54667-R), “Religious Toleration and Peace Project (RETOPEA)” of the program Horizon 2020 and “Representations of Islam in the Glocal Mediterranean: Conceptual Cartography and History” (REISCONCEP) (FEDER-MICINN: RTI2018-098892-B-100), Grupo

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de Investigación en Estudios Árabes Contemporáneos (HUM 108) and Ideologías y Expresiones Culturales Árabes Contemporáneas (F-219) have been of inevaluable help, personally and professionally. The input from the anonymous reviewers for Palgrave Macmillan further improve this project along. I am grateful to the editors Mary Fata, Rachel Moore and Alina Yurova, for their feedback and constant help. I am indebted to Kirstin Turner, Nicholas Callaway, Nathaniel Miller and Iona Feldman for proofreading and editing parts of the earlier drafts of this project. Some chapters of this book have been already published, in a shorter version, in different languages. All of them are part of my Ph.D. Thesis: “El anarquismo descolonizado: una historia de las experiencias antiautoritarias en Egipto (1860–2016)” (2017). Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The arguments and debates have been further developed and restructured for this book’s purpose. Some ideas of Chapter 4 appeared in “From Marxism to Anti-Authoritarianism: Egypt’s New Left”. In Communist Parties in the Middle East. 100 Years of History, eds. Laura Feliu and Ferrán Izquierdo Brichs. London: Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 268–281. Some ideas of Chapter 5 appeared in “New Modes of Collective Actions: The Reemergence of Anarchism in Egypt”. In Contentious Politics in the Middle East. Popular Resistance and Marginalized Activism beyond the Arab Uprisings, ed. Fawaz Gerges. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 351–372 and “Squares, Occupy Movements and the Arab Revolutions”. In The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, eds. Carl Levy and Matthew Adams. London, Loughborough: Palgrave Macmillan, 715–732. All these texts have been rethought, expanded and rewritten in order to be included in the present book. They have a new dimension and are absent from their original form. I would like to acknowledge Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo for permission to include original material in Chapter 5 of this book from my previously published article, “El anarquismo truncado: Los trabajadores italianos ante los privilegios epistémicos de la colonización”. In Islam y Desposesión. Resignificar La Pertenencia, ed. Luz Gómez García. Madrid: Ediciones de Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 261–276, as well as the financial support of “Representations of Islam in the Glocal Mediterranean: Conceptual Cartography and History” (REISCONCEP) (FEDER-MICINN: RTI2018-098892-B-100) for the proofreading of Chapter 4.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I am very fortunate to have an amazing family and group of friends, who I immensely love. I am grateful to them for always understanding my prolonged absences and having always been supportive. I wish I could thank everyone (family, friends, colleagues and students) who have encouraged and inspired me over the years. I hope you all know who you are. I am beholden to all of you. I can never be thankful enough to Yasir Abdallah for his love and support, without whom this book would not exist.

A Note on Transliteration and Translation The frequent Arabic names—people, places, movements, journals or groups- had lead me after much hesitation to apply a system of transliterating Arabic into English. Following the Encyclopedia of Islam in its Third Edition, I decided to apply its system without the diacritics except the ‘ayn- as a convenience to nonspecialists. Students of Arabic and Middle East studies should need no guidance to go through out them. If names already had an equivalent and appear as cited in particular works in Western languages, they have been kept in the same way. Translations are all my own unless otherwise stated.

Contents

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Toward a History of Southern Mediterranean Anarchism Why Anarchism in South of the Mediterranean? What We Talk About When We Talk About Anarchism? Main Debates Within the Anarchist Tradition Where Does This Work Stand? Goals and Positionality On Transnational History Chapter’s Content References

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Decolonizing Anarchism Coloniality and Modernity Anarchist Criticism of Coloniality/Modernity Universalism and Anarchism Nationalism and Anarchism The Anarchist Myth: The Question of Race The Imperative of Decolonizing Anarchism Studying Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean References

27 27 32 34 35 39 41 48 51

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CONTENTS

Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting: The Unresolved Postcolonial Question Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM) Canonical History of Anarchism The Ongoing Postcolonial Debate Anarchism and Eurocentrism Anarchism and Anti-colonialism Anarchism and Islam: An Unrecognized Encounter On Anarcho-Orientalism On Anarcho-Ijtihad References Al-Anarkiyya bel ‘Arabiyya: Arabic from Theory to Practice as the Language of Anarchism A Conceptual History of Anarchism in Arabic Al-Anarkiyya bel-Arabiyya On Conceptual Change Translation as Direct Action: On Arabic as Translation Theory as Practice, Practice as Theory: The Failure of Arab Socialism and the Search for Political Alternatives “Anarchism Is the Solution”: Theory as Practice Surrealism, Anarchism and Counter-Culture in Egypt: Practice as Theory The Formation of an Eclectic Libertarian School of Thought Art and Liberty’s Writings and Exhibitions Concluding Remarks References Mapping the South of the Mediterranean From the End of the Ottoman Empire to the Unfinished Decolonization Lebanon and Syria: Fragmentation and Local Organizing Palestine and Jordan: ‘Citizenship’, Nationalism and Decolonization Transnational Networks of Dissent: Migration and Colonialism in Egyptian Anarchism Coloniality and Subalternity of European Anarchists

55 55 60 67 67 70 73 76 78 85

91 91 91 95 100 105 110 114 120 124 127 130 135 136 136 147 152 152

CONTENTS

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Internationalism in the Face of Colonialism: The Civilizing Work of the European Left The New Egyptian Anarchists Political Exiles and Decolonial Anarchism in the Maghreb From Hosting European Political Exiles To the Creation of Decolonial Projects Against Millenarism References

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Conclusions: Anarchism Is Still Pertinent References

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Index

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Abbreviations

CGATA CGT CGT-SR CLA CNT DIT DLM FA FAI LA LC LCP LSM MAM NDP RASH RB UAR UDC UGET

Confédération Générale Autonome des Travailleurs en Algérie (General Autnomous Confederation of Algerian Workers) Confederación General del Trabajo Confederation général du travail- Socialiste Revolutionaire (Revolutionary Syndicalist General Labor Confederation) Conceils des Lyceès d’Algérie (High Schools Council of Algeria) Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confeederation of Labour) Do it yourself Democratic Left Movement Fédération Anarchiste Féderation Anarchiste International (International Anarchist Federation) Libertarian Alternative Libertarian Commune Lebanese Comunist Party Libertarian Socialist Movement Mediterranean Anarchist Meeating National Democratic Party Red and Anarchist Skinhead Radical Beirut Union of Artists of the Revolution Union des Diplômés Chômeurs (Union of Unemployed Graduates) Union Génerale des étudiants de Tunisie (Tunisian Student General Union)

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ABBREVIATIONS

UGTT WSF

Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (Tunisian General Labour Union) World Social Forum

List of Figures

Image 4.1

Image 5.1 Image 5.2 Image 5.3

Logo of the anarchist group al-anarkiyya al-misriyya (Egyptian Anarchism) on Facebook (Photo credit by gharbeia) Street in Downtown Cairo (Photo credit: Luz Gómez) Mohammed Mahmud Street in Downtown Cairo (Photo credit: Francesco Schiro) Downtown Tunis (Photo credit: Laura Galián)

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Toward a History of Southern Mediterranean Anarchism

Why Anarchism in South of the Mediterranean? In November 2019, a recently founded anarchist movement Kafeh! (Fight!) issued a manifesto where it declared its total support for the Lebanese revolution. According to its manifesto, the group is an anarchist movement whose goal is to achieve a decentralized and non-authoritarian society and considers that the ongoing Lebanese revolution represents the philosophy of anarchism: it exercised direct decision making, it is decentralized, non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian. It rejects sectarianism, racism and bureaucracy. It is against the “authoritarian and patriarchal system in Lebanon and the existing dominant organization” (Kafeh 2019) and supports absolute freedom. According to its writing and manifesto, Kafeh! sees itself to be at the forefront of the revolution, a revolution that is considered to represent the same anarchists ideals that they uphold. The emergence of Kafeh! and its anarchist ideology and discourse on the ongoing Lebanese revolution should not come as a surprise. Since the spark of the social uprisings in the South of the Mediterranean in 2011, anarchists from the South of the Mediterranean have continuously assured the anarchist hallmarks of these revolutions and their experience of anarchism through them. Seven years ago on the Second Anniversary of the 25th January revolution in Egypt a group of hooded youth who identified themselves as the Egyptian Black Bloc emerged in the country. The appearance, © The Author(s) 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4_1

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performance and visibility of these new identities with new repertoires of contentious politics, unseen in the region until the Arab revolutions but closely related to the political culture of anarchism of the West, attracted a lot of attention from the media and from Western anarchists and activist circles. Joshua Stephens (2013a, 2013b) wrote an interesting article entitled “Representation and the Egyptian Black Bloc: The Siren Song of Orientalism?” where he critically questioned the media coverage and activist’s interest in the West on this newly emerged tactic that reflected and repeated some of the well-known practices of the Black Block (that as a reminder appeared in Germany in the 1980s) and how some circles were already debating the existence of anarchist ideologies in the Arabicspeaking countries. It was the first time anarchism was a question on the political and ideological spectrum in the societies of the South of the Mediterranean. This newly emerged tactic posed important questions on whether their attention was due to an orientalist symptom or a real revival or reemergence of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean. There were some questions that needed to be answered: Was there an ideology as such of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean? Or as Joshua Stephens underlined, was it an “Orientalist Siren”? Was it momentum for anarchism, and if so, how was this political philosophy understood and experienced? The practice of anarchism as prefigurative politics has influenced a whole generation of young activists and has expressed the most profound libertarian desire of Southern Mediterranean societies. If the Islamist agenda or a supposed “authoritarianism”, endemic to the Arab societies, marked the sociopolitical agenda until 2011, the emergence of the Black Bloc and other anarchist groups and antiauthoritarian repertoires of collective actions from Morocco to Palestine going through Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, have changed the focus and have attracted a great deal of interest in academic, journalist and activist spheres. Despite all of that, and despite the archival evidence of the existence of anarchist movements, groups and thought in the South of the Mediterranean since the end of the nineteenth century, as well as a growing literature about this anti-authoritarian and transnational history, the voices of these forgotten activists are still missing from the main reference books on the history of ideas and the history of anarchism. Why is that the case?

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The emergence of anarchism as a political philosophy and a selfdeclared ideology and its history in the South of the Mediterranean is deeply rooted in the creation of the first capitalist economies and their relation with the economic peripheries. The first anarchists arrived in North Africa throughout the colonial project, carrying with them their emancipatory and civilizational claims. The need of specialized workers to create and develop the industrial fabric of the European colonial project attracted a great deal of Spanish, Italian, Greek and French workers to the Southern shore at the end of the nineteenth century. These workers and political exiles who were mostly but not exclusively men helped spread and disseminate anarchist and socialist propaganda from the First International. In Tunisia and Egypt, this political philosophy emerged with the settlement of activist and workers from Italy and Greece in the coastal and industrial cities (Khuri-Makdisi 2010; Gorman 2010). In Algeria, Republican Spanish political exiles in collaboration with French anarchists were instrumental in the creation of a local and anti-colonial Algerian movement (Porter 2011). In Lebanon and Syria, Arabic publications and transregional editorials echoed the importance of the events related to anarchism and libertarian thought in the Mediterranean societies and Latin America. ‘Propaganda by the deed’ was not the only repertoire used by these activists. Their propaganda mostly focused on disseminating the ‘idea’ through ‘propaganda by the word’ by founding journals, educational clubs and intuitions such as the L’Università Popolare Libera in 1901, especially important in promoting the educational program of Francisco Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna (Gorman 2005). Despite the pioneering work these activists achieved in developing anarchist political thought in the Arabic speaking countries, historians have not paid the necessary attention to this ideological and social phenomenon. An overview of anti-authoritarian literature and anarchist thought in the South of the Mediterranean shows the lack of studies that analyze and reconstruct these narratives, but moreover, the reluctance of many European activists to name them as such. Where is it possible to find the traces of this history? How can we reconstruct the history of the anti-authoritarian experiences and cultural expressions in the South of the Mediterranean? How have these anarchisms been formulated? What characteristics do they share with other libertarian experiences? Why are there hardly any studies on anarchism in non-Western contexts and, specifically, in Arab-speaking contexts, despite their trans-Mediterranean connections? Does this historiographical gap respond to exclusive historical factors?

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I ask these and other questions in this book. Its aspiration is twofold: to critically review the anti-authoritarian geographies in the South of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Palestine and to rethink the postcolonial condition of emancipatory projects such as anarchism, which is still often enunciated from a white-privilege hetero-normative epistemic position that reproduces colonial power relations. This brings us to the book’s main imperative: decolonizing anarchism. The unfinished decolonization of anarchism has led the anarchist canon to ignore non-Western anti-authoritarian and anarchist narratives, which are not always and not only enunciated as a self-declared ideology. Hence, the libertarian, anti-authoritarian and decentralized emancipation projects that arise in the Arab societies of the South of the Mediterranean have not been integrated into most histories of anarchism, despite sharing many similarities with the European political philosophy. The anti-authoritarian experiences presented in the book, that range from 1860 to 2019 are multiple, diverse in form and content and glocal , that is, they are at the same time global and local. All of them emphasize form as political praxis and in many cases have been and are the alternative to Marxism, and they are built in rhizomatic networks. These projects become political proposals to rethink the main thesis of the book: Anarchism is still pertinent but it needs to be decolonized.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anarchism? Anarchism means different things for different people. It might be defined as a body of shared ideas and experiences. Among these shared ideas and experiences is the imperative to be cognizant of our collective and individual privileges and the power relations that we establish in every aspect of our lives. Anarchism is a way of living with oneself and with others. It is, as Alfredo Bonanno stated in his famous book The Anarchist Tension (1996, p. 4) “a state we must play, day after day”. Anarchism cannot be defined for once and for all. It is not definitive and is being continuously defined by those who are part of its philosophy. What is and what is not anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist and why? These questions have been answered variously by different people along its history, sometimes with contradictory and opposite answers. Those definitions have varied along its history, the geographical and socio-political position of those who define it as well as their

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social context. It can be said that anarchism has as many interpretations as anarchists exists. “Anarchists are those who work to further the cause of anarchism” assures researcher Ruth Kina (2005, p. 4). Let’s take three definitions from anarchists from different times and geographical locations in order to see how they emphasize different aspects of anarchism: The first one, Emma Goldman (1868–1940), one of the few anarchist women who have been generally recognized as part of classical anarchist history, describes anarchism in her book Anarchism and Other Essays (1911) as: The philosophy of a new social order based of liberty unrestricted by manmade law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. (Goldman 1911, p. 56)

Then she continues: The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life, -individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases. (Goldman 1911, p. 56)

As we can see from the quotations, Goldman considers that states and governments are institutions based on the use of violence to maintain an economic order, the capitalist one. Following this analysis, Goldman proposes a “new social order”, that of anarchism, which means individual and collective liberation from the yoke of oppression. Goldman’s antistatist and anti-capitalist vision greatly differs from the North American second-generation feminist Peggy Kornegger (1975) when she declares that: The radical feminist perspective is almost pure anarchism. The basic theory postulates the nuclear family as the basis for all authoritarian systems. The lesson the child learns, from father to teacher to boss to God, is to OBEY the great anonymous voice of Authority. To graduate from childhood to adulthood is to become a full-fledged automaton, incapable of questioning or even thinking clearly. We pass into middle-America, believing everything

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we are told and numbly accepting the destruction of life all around us. (Kornegger 1975, p. 10)

Kornegger identifies a system of power and authority that goes beyond the organization of the state and penetrates the whole structure of society, from the family, to the teacher, to the chief, etc. In order to subvert this system of power, Kornegger sees the feminist struggle as a tool of emancipation that is comparable to anarchism, and that is where both traditions converge. For the author, anarchism and feminism are two sides of the same coin. Both are inseparably related since they question the system of authority by which society is structured. Kornegger’s vision also differs from the definition given by the Indian anarchist Maia Ramnath (2011). For the Indian decolonial author, there are two types of anarchism, Anarchism with a capital A, derived from the nineteenth-century European tradition, and anarchism with lowercase a, that refers to the tendencies concerned with form rather than ideology and put the emphasis on prefigurative politics rather than speech: With a small a, the word anarchism implies a set of assumptions and principles, a recurrent tendency or orientation –with the stress on movement in a direction, not a perfected condition- toward more dispersed and less concentrated power; less top-down hierarchy and more self-determination through bottom-up participation; liberty and equality see as directly rather than inversely proportional; the nurturance of individuality, mutuality, and accountability; and an expansive recognition of the various forms that power relations can take, and correspondingly, the various dimensions of emancipation. (Ramnath 2011, p. 7)

Maia Ramnath attaches special importance to ‘form’ as an essential characteristic of what anarchism—with lower case a—is, that is, anarchism that has not been recognized as part of the canonical tradition of Anarchism— with a capital A. But beyond form there is content. For the author, anarchism has to admit the different forms that power relations can take and the different aspects of emancipation. Ramnath’s understanding of anarchism is a response to anarchism with capital A, which is the one that comes from the classical-European tradition and understands anarchism as an anti-capitalist and anti-statist struggle that leaves aside other oppressions and struggles such as the feminist, the queer and the ecologist struggles to name a few.

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Despite an exhaustive and almost desperate search for a definition that can encompass such a heterogeneous corpus of ideas and practices, there is no satisfactory and minimally unified definition. In this sense, Yasir Abdallah, an Egyptian postanarchist in his article ‘Kayfa yumkin ta‘arif al-ishtirakiyya al-taharruriyya?’ (How can we define libertarian socialism?) (2011) raises the question of the impossibility of defining ‘libertarian socialism’ in a ‘libertarian’ and non-oppressive way, since defining as an act carries a degree of orthodoxy and authority in its doing: “In the end, it is not the name what is important, it is the content what is the most important” states Yasir following Wayne Price’s saying.

Main Debates Within the Anarchist Tradition In many occasions, anarchism has been defined not by what it is but by what it is not. In its dispute with Marxism, anarchism has tried at all costs to differentiate itself from this other ‘authoritarian’ socialisms. In other occasions, anarchism has tried to dissociate itself from the labels that relates it to terrorism, violence, chaos, naïve idealism or utopia with the aim of fighting for a self-managed and anti-authoritarian society. The Indian anarchist and pacifist M. P. T. Acharya (1887–1954) is a good example. Critically engaging with the ideas of Gandhi and Tolstoy on anarcho-pacifism, Acharya was also an admirer of Gandhism since he believed it helped at exposing the atrocities of British Government in India and taught the people to resist and combat it (Acharya 2019, p. 18). It is an arduous and complex task that leaves aside multiple nuances and voices to find a sufficiently broad definition that encompasses both the theories and movements of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the less orthodox formulations of this political philosophy. But there have been debates among its different tendencies and practitioners that are fundamental to understand the primary questions that guide this book: When can we speak about anarchism? And what is the relation between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in this political philosophy? One of the greatest debates revolves around the historical beginning of anarchism. The Russian geographer and thinker Peter Kropotkin (1842– 1921), one of the greatest exponents of classical anarchism, noted in his entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1905 that the best exponent of anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece was Zeno (342-267 or 270 B.C.), the founder of the Stoic school who opposed Plato’s statist utopia with the conception of a free community without government (Kropotkin

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1910, p. 915). Kropotkin, when speaking of Zenon as a great exponent of anarchist philosophy, situates the historical birth of anarchism before its own articulation, that is, he sees anarchism as a basic aspect of human nature and not as a point in history: The conception of society just sketched, and the tendency which is its dynamic the tendency expression, have always existed the mankind, in opposition to the governing hierarchic conception and tendency- now the one and now the other taking the upper hand at different periods of history. (Kropotkin 1910, p. 914)

Decades later the Canadian anarchist historian Robert Graham differentiates between ‘anarchist societies’, as those without government, and ‘anarchism’, as a doctrinal body that wishes to aspire to an ‘anarchist society’. For Graham, a society without government has always existed while the doctrine associated to it is a modern and recent development (Graham 2005, p. xi). Thus, there is a schism between the appearance of the -ism in anarchism and the analysis and existence of anarchist societies. From this premise arises the contemporary search for intrinsically anarchist characteristics in different societies throughout history, and from here the contemporary relationship between anarchism and anthropology was also developed. In 1963, in the British journal Anarchy, Australian anthropologist Kenneth Maddock argued that establishing a connection between anarchism and anthropology was not so much to understand how primitive tribal societies functioned but to give an argument of legitimacy to what “future societies” would look like (Kina 2005, p. 87). Arguments were sought in the past to legitimize the present. Ruth Kina (2005, pp. 87–88) identifies four schools of thought that she divides as follows: For Kropotkin, the lack of state was, on the one hand, a primitive condition and the basis of human evolution; and, on the other, the “primitive” life and the lack of state was a condition that had to be protected in order to aspire to an anarchist society. Harold Barclay (b. 1924), anthropologist and anarchist, is the representative of the second school. Stateless societies are examples of “functioning anarchies” and he uses anthropological evidence to demonstrate the validity of anarchist premises. American anarchist thinker Murray Boochkin (1921–2006) represents the third school. Boochkin considers that anthropological study helps acquire the ethical and ecological knowledge necessary for the organization of anarchism. The last school is represented by John Zerzan (b. 1943), an

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American primitivist anarchist, and Fredy Perlman (1934–1985). These authors review arguments about stateless societies and analyze the “natural” attitudes that have been lost with the development of “civilizations” through anthropology (Kina 2005, p. 97). All of these schools show how anarchists theories have looked at the past in order to prove how anarchism and anarchist societies have worked, currently work and might work in the future. But how anarchism became an -ism is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. The development of capitalism and the formation of nation-states gave birth to anarchism as a recognized “-ism” in most of Europe. According to Robert Graham, anarchism as a doctrine, was born at that historical moment even if “anarchist societies” have always existed and have been used for legitimation and search. For this reason, the Argentinean thinker Ángel Cappelletti (2006) differentiates between the “prehistory of anarchism” and the “history of anarchism”. With the term “prehistory”, Capelletti intends to overcome other terms such as “protoanarchism” or “paleoanarchism” coined by Victor García (1971) and Woodcock (1962), respectively. For Cappelletti “[…] this prehistory may shed some light to history, as history must lend them to theory and praxis” (Cappelletti 2006, p. 11). Unlike other forms of socialism, anarchism does not attempt to scientifically analyze social development. Instead it is characterized by the strategy it employs to achieve an anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchical society. For anarchism, the analysis of the material conditions of the present is as important as the process to follow in order to achieve its ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s terms. This process cannot reproduce the abuses of power by authority that they themselves seek to overcome and destroy. That is why, for anarchism, content—that is, the theoretical corpus that justifies its existence and practice—is as important as form, the way the struggle and the strategy is articulated. This is the starting point of Bakunin’s criticism of Marx which ended with his expulsion from the First International. In the anarchist narrative and ethos, the socialist state and the communist “dictatorship of the proletariat” would repeat the characteristics of oppression and privilege of a minority over a majority, as the liberal bourgeois state does. ‘Anarchy’ is a word derived from the Greek “anarkhia”- ¢ναρχι´α composed of the prefix ¢ν (an), which means “no” and αρχι´α -arkhiawhich comes from the term ¢ρχη´ –arkhê: “origin”, “principle”, but also “mandate”, “authority“ and “power”. Historically, the term “anarchy“ has been used to refer to societies without government and as a synonym

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of “chaos”. On the contrary for anarchists, there is nothing further from reality since “Anarchy is order” as Proudhon stated. The engine of anarchism is the denial of authority. In fact, anarchists also define themselves as non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian. The rejection of authority leads anarchists to refuse any imposed authority, whether they are governments, states, police and chiefs as well as priests, parents or teachers. Cappelletti argues that anarchists can perfectly accept the authority of a doctor or whoever they might consider, not because they have been chosen by a minority to be in that power position or they have imposed their authority by violence but because they do choose to grant them that authority. In his words: [anarchists] they can perfectly admit the intrinsic authority of the physician with regard to illness and public health in general, or of the agronomist with regard to the cultivation of the field: they cannot accept, on the other hand, that the physician or agronomist, by virtue of having been elected by universal suffrage or imposed by the force of money or arms, decide permanently on anything, substitute the will of each one, determine the destiny and life of all. (Cappelletti 2010, p. 13)

This anti-authoritarian stand means anarchism cannot be defined by any individual, iconic figure or canonical text. But there are personalities within its history that enjoy a notable weight in its articulation as a political philosophy such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Goodwin, and Goldman. The denial of any imposed authority has led anarchists to also reject parliamentary democracy. This is the starting point to their critique of representation. As Cohn asserts in his book Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation (2006), this crisis questions the relationship between the concepts and the reality they sustain. For the anarchist tradition to “represent” may seem equal to dominate; “there is no escape to representation, ergo, there is no end to domination” (Cohn 2006, p. 12). In an effort to create systems of signification (at the level of language, but also at the level of gender, canon, tradition, etc.), the systems of representation speak for the multitude and silence multiplicity, asserts Cohn in his quest to theorize anarchist literary theory. Anarchists’ critique of liberal democracy is not a critique of democracy itself, but a critique of democracy as representation. Integral to anarchism is direct democracy, where political power is exercised directly by

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the individual in assemblies or in other spaces. According to anarchists, representative democracy or liberal democracy materializes the farce of the rule of majority. In Bakunin’s words: “The representative system, far from being a guarantee for the people, propitiates and guarantees, on the contrary, the permanent existence of a governmental aristocracy that acts against the people” (as cited in Taibo 2013, p. 45). Hence from the anarchist perspective the electoral system implies the delegation of power to others, and therefore the loss of political freedom and action. Anarchism’s emphasis on political action, in its own jargon “direct action”—the action led by the individual when she or he takes part in it without the mediation of representatives, be them the leaders, governments or parties, gives the individual a substantial role in its configuration as a political subject. This is because for anarchism the human being is the element around which this political philosophy revolves. While there are great divergences among her/his theorists on the nature of “human condition” broadly speaking anarchists believe that through solidarity and mutual aid, it is possible to live without coercion and authority (Taibo 2013, p. 35). An anarchist society and the realization of its ‘utopia’ is based upon solidarity and mutual support. A utopia that we could summarize as a socialist society without classes, without authority, anti-hierarchical, decentralized, self-managed, that prioritizes both the collective action and the autonomy of the individual. Although the political theory of anarchism revolves around these great premises, anarchists have been in constant debate and dialogue about how to organize revolutionary strategy which explains the existence of different schools of thought. The currents within anarchism, as Andrej Grubacic and David Graeber (2004) assert, unlike other currents of socialism based on their founders (Leninism, Maoism, Marxism): “[…], in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on” (Grubacic and Graeber 2004, paragraph 8). Thus, among anarchists we find those who place a greatest emphasis on the individual over any other construction or social reality, that is anarchoindividualism, which advocates that personal or group relations be based on total freedom, without contracts or commitments; but also those who consider that ownership of the means of production should be social and administered collectively by the workers themselves gathered in associations, known as anarcho-collectivism. Starting from this classical division

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among anarchists different schools of thought have emerged throughout the twentieth century, especially after the 1960s. Hence we find trends such as eco-anarchism or green anarchism, which places emphasis on environmental issues, anarcho-feminism that prioritizes the struggle against patriarchy as thought to be part of the class conflict and the fight against the state, capitalism and any other form of oppression; insurrectionary anarchism, which stands as a revolutionary tool organized into ‘affinity groups’1 that emphasizes insurrection within the anarchist practice, or queer anarchism, a school that advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation. Finally for the purposes of this book, it is necessary to mention the conflictive relationship between anarchism and religion, understanding religion as the hegemonic, orthodox institutionalization of spiritual belief which colludes with political, economic and elite forces in competition. Although anarchism in the West has traditionally opposed religions because they are organized in institutionalized in hierarchical organizations, religion, as faith and spirituality has also found a place within anarchism, which have generated important disagreements among those who call themselves anarchists.2 In this way, we find anarchists who define themselves as atheists and anarchists who try to see in religion an emancipatory and libertarian potential. This is the case of Mohamed Jean Veneusse in his thesis “Anarca-Islam” (2009), where he tries to unify two of his identities: that of being an anarchist and that of being a Muslim. He demystifies the idea that anarchism is anti-religious and that Islam is authoritarian per se. The same occurs with Christianity. In his article, Christos Iliopoulos (2018) argues how these two terms come together in anarcho-christian activism in their critical, active and radical reading of the Holy Scriptures (Iliopoulos 2018, p. 177).

Where Does This Work Stand? Goals and Positionality This book is concerned with the anarchist and anti-authoritarian experiences in the South of the Mediterranean and the colonial responses of anarchisms from the Global North. Framed within the critical and decolonizing current of the traditional canon of anarchism, the study of this political philosophy and its different expressions and experiences in the South of the Mediterranean needs a theoretical and analytical body that exceeds the keys elements of understanding European emancipation and

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resistance so that it adapts to a colonial and post-colonial context such as that of societies in the South of the Mediterranean. Therefore, the main goals of this book are: to include the experiences of anarchism in the southern Mediterranean in the global history of anarchism and to criticize and deconstruct the Eurocentric, white, hetero-normative character of the anarchist canon while contributing to the construction of a new theoretical model for the study of anarchism that is decolonized and decolonizes. Why is there no history of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean? What leads anarchist historians to ignore anti-authoritarian experiences arising in the Global South? What happened to anarchism of the first globalization that came through foreign workers to the region? Why couldn’t this first wave of anarchism develop into a local, autonomous movement that lasted beyond World War I? Has the canonized history of anarchism (white and European) been able to influence the lack of studies on anarchism in the South-Mediterranean? How can we subvert this Eurocentric gaze when dealing with the study of anarchism? How does the analysis of anarchist experiences in the South of the Mediterranean help us to decolonize this political philosophy?

To solve these questions, we understand anarchism as proposed by Süriyya Turkely Evren (2012): not as a body of doctrine emerging from Europe, but as a series of ideas and practices that are expanded by a network of revolutionaries in different parts of the world at different times in history. A decentralized, fluid and rhizomatic chain: And against it, we can argue that anarchism is not an idea founded by Proudhon and then carried to other places or a movement founded by Bakunin and then carried to other places; rather anarchism is a certain set of ideas and practices formed with and through a specific network of radical reformists/revolutionaries in different parts of the world. Anarchism is multi-centered and has temporary centers; actually these temporary centers are hubs, extra functioning nodes of the network. (Evren 2012, p. 92)

In order to enhance this perspective, I also consider intersectionality to be of interest for the study of anarchism, as anarcho-feminism has already demonstrated. This is the case because as it has been widely debated the concept of ‘woman’ is not universal. It is socially constructed and depends

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on the experience of each woman. Each of these experiences is situated and located depending on race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, physical condition, etc. Although the term intersectionality has become a buzzword since its creation by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, it has challenged the notion that women are a homogenous group equally positioned in terms of power relations in what bell hooks calls the structure of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. I am not the first one calling attention to the importance of intersectionality for anarchism. I follow the work of Shannon and Rogue (2009) who have worked on the relation between these two terms inspired by feminists of color such as Patricia Hill Collins. As in the case of feminism where intersectionality has been an effective tool to analyze the different sources of oppression which have left aside and prevented marginalized women from being part of the feminist movement, the same can be applied to anarchism. An intersectional look at the history anarchism would also prevent a privileged understanding of this political philosophy, “Therefore, a non-reflective feminist movement focused on the concern of “women” tends to reflect the interests of the most privileged members of that social category” (Shannon and Rogue 2009, p. 6). Intersectionality in this sense calls for the destruction of any hierarchy created between the different forms of oppression and domination and considers that all these forms need to be recognized and subverted. Thus there is no single way of understanding anarchism, rather it is what each subject considers it to be. As intersectionality calls for positionality in order to reflect on the different kind of oppressions, I consider myself to be a cis-gender WhiteEuropean woman—sometimes read as a Southern European depending on the existing power relation with the Global North. I have conducted this research within the Spanish academy which is experiencing a backlash of the neoliberal project and its workers—professors, administrative or other personnel—with cuts in funding, precarization of its labor force, and increasingly curtailed freedom of speech. But Spanish academia has also served the purposes of its own imperial and colonial past and ongoing interests in North of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Conducting social research within the European academic colonial space contributes to the perpetuation of existing and ongoing epistemological imperialism. Social research can contribute to the construction and perpetuation of “Othering”. Research is one of the ways in which the code of imperialism and colonialism is inscribed, regulated, and embodied. It is regulated through the formal rules of individual academic

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disciplines and scientific paradigms and the institutions that support them (including the state). It is done through the representation and ideological construction of the “Other” in academia and in “popular” works, as well as in the principles that help to select and decontextualize those constructions in official histories and school curriculum (Tuhiwai Smith 2006, pp. 7–8). I have faced a series of ethical questions while researching this book that I have not always being able to completely resolve concerning my positionality as a researcher. But I have tried to overcome them in the most sincere and honest way possible, that is in a constant revision of my own privileges in spite of the ontological impossibility, and the constant tension resulting from writing in the Global North about the Global South. The active reflection of my privileges and their abuse has been present at all times when approaching my research for this book and when problematizing the possible interferences that those could have had in my investigation. One of my priorities has been to not reproduce the colonizing dynamics that I have tried to subvert, or at least to point out. Despite the self-awareness of my privileges I may have used and abused them in situations that I was not aware of. This does not exempt me from responsibility. This book is indebted to the participants and interviewees. It is through them and because of them that this book becomes meaningful. I am also indebted to philology and conceptual history. For that reason, the tension derived from the relationship between the participants and me as a researcher has varied along the years. These relationships have eventually gone from mere academic encounters to some becoming very close friends. I owe my knowledge on anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean to the networks of affection and mutual support created in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere, thanks to the participants of this book. Furthermore, it is necessary to recognize that this work does not imply the anarchist narrative in the South of the Mediterranean is closed. Rather it seeks to underline the existing gaps in its history and to open possibilities to continue answering questions and broadening the debates raised. I am trying to demonstrate that it is impossible to close its history. In that sense, I follow Hayden White’s work on historical narrative. White led the transformation in historical discipline during the 1970s when he argued that a historical text could be compared to a literary text since it is the form and not the content which matters:

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But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions. The contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. (White 1986, p. 82)

The material conditions available for conducting this research have conditioned my position as a historical subject and the way in which the events I refer to are narrated. Despite the incompleteness that I bestow to this work from the very beginning, I consider that “this is the most desirable thing” (Jenkins 2003, p. 5) in order to make history a tool for liberation, not domination. To do this, this work draws on many different sources. They are all subject to various degrees of representation and mediation through translation and interpretation. Representation therefore has presented us with an irresolvable problem. As Mitchell argues in relation to modernity, representation is more concerned with image-making than to reality: Representation does not refer here simply to the making of images or meanings. It refers to forms of social practice that set up in the social architecture and lived experience of the world what seems an absolute distinction between image (or meaning, or structure) and reality, and thus a distinctive imagination of the real. (Mitchell 2000, p. 17)

In this work, a very diverse range of primary and secondary sources have been used. Among them: consular documents, literary magazines, political manifestos and pamphlets, communiqués of different movements, associations and groups, etc. I have accessed these materials through institutional means—libraries, archives—but also throughout informal ways, which have proven to be at times the most fruitful ones. My ultimate goal is to trace and incorporate new experiences and histories into the core history of anarchism. Through these heteroclite sources, it is observed what ‘anarchism’ means to various political subjects throughout its history, how these experiences have been carried out under the concrete socio-political context, and why ‘anarchism’ has been neglected and undervalued in post-colonial contexts such as those of the South of the Mediterranean. Science is an elitist institution that can only be valued by those who belong to it and that reproduces a capitalist, hetero-patriarchal and colonial way of producing knowledge. Research in Social Sciences and

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Humanities is closer to art or artistic knowledge production. I recognize that science is an elitist institution that can only be evaluated by those who belong to it: creating and recreating a hetero-patriarchal, capitalist and colonial knowledge. Thus, following Feyerabend’s argument on his critique against the scientific method in the prologue to the Spanish edition he argues that: “both the problems and the scientific results will be assessed according to developments in the wider traditions, that is, politically” (Feyerabend 1975, p. xvi). I assume that the scientific method, as well as its evaluation and results are not out of politics and are chosen politically. Therefore this book is political and is politicized, but the knowledge it generates is no less valid. It is important to clarify how this research was conducted. Most of the fieldwork was carried out in Egypt between the years 2012 and 2014 and Tunisia between 2015 and 2016. Both countries were experiencing political turmoil after the most visible phase of the social revolutions lived and still ongoing in both countries while I was carrying out my research. Egypt was electing its first democratic president, Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed a year later by the military coup d’état; Tunisia, on the other hand, was on the edge of a counter-revolutionary backlash by the election of Nida Tunis, the conservative and liberal party connected to the personalities of Ben Ali’s regime. Both countries were experiencing counterrevolutionary processes while in both of them a generation of politicized activists still demanded social justice and reclaimed the revolutionary ethos al-thawra mustamirra (the revolution continues). My first encounter with anarchism was in Egypt in 2013. Yassir Abdallah, a friend, a colleague and a mentor, was the first person to introduce me to this political philosophy in the South of the Mediterranean. By creating affinity networks, I interviewed self-declared anarchists and other non-self-declared anarchists in Egypt who helped me understand their fight against the state, the capital and any kind of authority. Because of them that I decided to enlarge the scope of my work to other Southern Mediterranean contexts such as Morocco, Algeria, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. This has allowed me to draw a general picture of historical and contemporary anarchism and anti-authoritarian experiences in the region. I used semi-structured interviews, where structured and spontaneous questions were posed to delve deeper into the debates. Due to security reasons, many of the interviewees’ real names are not disclosed. I participated in several meetings, gatherings, workshops, seminars and informal meetings. I could identify some of the main debates, personal

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trajectories, organizational forms and group dynamics among those who expressed their affiliation to anarchism. Some other not less important debates emerged: What is the relationship between anarchism and art? Anarchism and feminism? Anarchism and religion? How do they intertwine with each other and what are their expressions in the South of the Mediterranean?

On Transnational History Transnational history seeks to subvert national boundaries in its search for historical narratives while problematizing national and cultural identities (Guardia and Pan-montojo 1998, p. 13). Transnational history departs from the idea that nations are historical constructions. Historians must look beyond nation-state borders. Interest has grown in the last decades in the transnational turn in historical studies. There has been a valuable contribution within the transnational history studies on various topics such as fascism, communism, anti-fascism and anarchism.3 In the case of anarchism, transnational history has proven to be a useful tool to study its history. Bantman and Altena (2015) defend that anarchist and syndicalist movements before World War I are a very productive field of research for transnational history. In their edited volume, they reassess the increase of interest that these cross-border connections have generated in the last decades. Bantman and Altena propose a multiplicity of views through which researchers have looked and could look at anarchist or trade unionist histories. It is interesting to see how, although stressing the internationalist level of these history very central to anarchism in the twentieth century, there is a special attention to the national level sometimes overlooked within this approach. I find especially relevant for the study of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean the following ones, which are in one way or the other being used along the pages of this book: – National or regional studies where transnational forces are deployed and participated, in many cases, due to the phenomenon of migration and colonization. Exile or labour migration are the two key factors responsible for the displacements of Italian, Spanish and French activists, political exiles and workers in the South of the Mediterranean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anarchism, as anti-fascism and other nineteenth century ideologies,

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was a “culture of exile” built upon nodes in a rhizomatic cartography (García 2016, p. 566). – Studies on transnational movements and configurations outside specific spaces. The development of a network of activists and artists with surrealism as an inspiration for personal, social, artistic and political emancipation in the 1930s and 1940s in Egypt and later developed in Paris is an example of this perspective. The anarchist activists traveled not only from the Global North to the Global South, but also otherwise. The mobility of its activists as well as their participation in different activities of the movement in Europe and other parts of the South of the Mediterranean dislocates the center of the nodes of the rhizomatic cartography of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean. – Studies at a urban level that look at global cities as ‘nodes’ or ‘nuclei’. Autonomous spaces emerged and generated in cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, Rabat, and many parts of Syria and have become nuclei of resistance and formulation of new repertoires of collective action that are especially relevant for contemporary and decolonial anarchist practices. – Biographical genre and prosopographic studies explore the life history and political trajectory of activists. Although it may seem that biographical genre and/or prosopographic study may go against what I have so far defined as transnational history, authors such as Patricia Clavin consider that prosopographic research can be very useful for the historical and personal study of anarchist networks (quoted in Bantman and Altena 2015, p. 10). Such studies connect individual circumstances (age, profession, place of residence, history of migration and political trajectory) with the study of political collectivity, the sociability of the individual (at the level of activism) and important factors of his/her generation (Bantman and Altena 2015, pp. 10–11). Transnational history offers a decentralized and anti-hierarchical formula for looking at anarchism’s history. It has been fruitful in subverting the traditional center/periphery dichotomous gaze, but on many occasions, as in the case of the compendium of articles edited by Constance Bantman and Bert Altena (2015), of great conceptual and methodological richness, transnational history suffers from a lack of analysis of the relationship between anarchism, racism and colonialism. It is

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precisely here, in the need to subvert and criticize anarchism and transnational history that I believe this political philosophy must be decolonized in order for that utopian dream of universality, which is only possible through the recognition of difference.

Chapter’s Content The book has three broad aims: (1) To underline the Eurocentric understanding of anarchism and the still existing power relationship among its activists; (2) To map the anti-authoritarian and anarchist experiences of the South of the Mediterranean; (3) To develop a set of strategic reflections in order to decolonize anarchism. This chapter Towards a History of Southern Mediterranean Anarchism tries to answer the following questions: Why it is necessary to investigate and know about anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean? It examines the absence of literature on anarchism and, in particular that of the anti-authoritarian experiences in the Arab Mediterranean societies in order to introduce the structure and the necessity of the book. It also underlies and presents the methodology used, transnational history, indebted to a non-statocentric view of history and the primary sources analyzed. Chapter 2 Decolonizing Anarchism develops a set of strategic reflections to ultimately decolonize anarchism. I propose a profound change of the epistemic place where this emancipatory project is enunciated. Drawing from the work of Maia Ramnath (2011) who distinguishes between Anarchism with a capital A (coming from the European tradition) and an anarchism with a small a (all other experiences that do not fit within the first category) and the theories of the Decolonial turn, as a theoretical approach to overcome post-colonialism bringing to light the neocolonial relations that continue forms of dependency between the countries of the North and the countries of the South, and seeks to give an epistemological turn to the transformation of power constituted by the binomial Modernity/Coloniality. I propose the necessity of decolonizing anarchism, which means: (1) Recognizing the relationship between anarchism, colonialism and Modernity; (2) Understanding anarchism broadly as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and experiences; (3) Prioritize form versus content, that is, the method over the end; and (4) Changing the locus of enunciation, that is the epistemic position in which anarchism is enunciated. The final goal is to rethink decolonization as the first premise of liberation of any emancipatory project.

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Chapter 3 Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting: The Unresolved Postcolonial Question aims at revisiting the classical history of anarchism in order to desacralize its historically built canon and presents some of the ongoing debates between South-North-South anarchists. Taking the Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting organized by the Tunisian anarchist group La Commun Libertaire in 2015 as a case study, Chapter 3 shows a growing gap in the understanding on what is and what is not anarchism among activists coming from Europe and the South of the Mediterranean. This conception has major effects in their political practices. This chapter portrays the ongoing existence of colonial power relations among the political geographies of contemporary anarchist activists as well as unrecognized alliance between Islam and anarchism. The goal is to understand and delve into the missing histories of anarchisms, above all, non-core and non-Western anarchism in order to understand how there has been a Eurocentric understanding of this political philosophy that has ultimately affected the understanding of its own history and its political practices. The lack of literature on non-core countries and non-Western anarchism underlined in this chapter demonstrates this logic, that is, anarchism has thought of itself as a purely—self-declared—European ideology. Chapter 4 Al-Anarkiyya bel ‘Arabiyya: Arabic from Theory to Practice as the Language of Anarchism draws a conceptual history of anarchism in Arabic from the end of the nineteenth century to our days. Its goal is to understand how language and translation also constitute a repertoire of contentious politics in postcolonial contexts and how they intervene in the formulation, dissemination and understanding of this political philosophy. Departing from the work of Reinhard Koselleck (1923–2006) and its conceptual history—Begriffsgeschichte—I analyze the conceptual change of anarchism in Arabic in order to understand the reception and dissemination of this ideology in Southern Mediterranean countries. I dedicate the second half of the chapter to translation as a repertoire of contentious politics taking two case studies to exemplify it: the magazine al-Tatawwur of the surrealist Art and Liberty group (al-Fann wa-l-Hurriya) (1938–1942) and the work of Samih Said Abud (1956– 2018) the father of Arabic language anarchism to whom this book is dedicated. His theoretical production of anarchist, libertarian and nonauthoritarian literature has greatly influenced the young generation of anarchists and non-authoritarian activists in the Arabic-speaking countries that participated in 2011 Revolutions from Syria to Morocco.

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In Chapter 5, Mapping the South of the Mediterranean, anarchist and anti-authoritarian histories and experiences are mapped along the coast of the Mediterranean in their historical dimension as well as in their contemporary emergence, highlighting the historical gap in the study of anarchism and its possibilities of interpretation. Dividing the analysis geographically, the first part “From the end of the Ottoman Empire to the Unfinished Decolonization” tries to map the historical and contemporary anti-authoritarian and anarchist experiences of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan and their regional as well as their transnational links and trajectories. The second part “Transnational Networks of Dissent: Migration and Colonialism in the Egyptian Anarchism” delves into the history of anarchism in Egypt from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. It analyzes the discourse and practice of Italian anarchists in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century to show the colonial logic behind the emancipatory project of European anarchists. It also delves into the reemergence of anarchism and the different anti-authoritarian expressions in Egypt in the 2011 Revolution. The third part “Political Exiles and decolonial Anarchism in the Maghreb” departs from the hidden histories of Spanish, French and Italian political exiles in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in order to draw their histories and trajectories emphasizing their contemporary developments. Chapter 6, Anarchism Is Still Pertinent, serves as a concluding chapter. Having analyzed the 2011 Arab Revolutions as experiences of anarchism, this chapter turns to 2019 social uprisings in the South of the Mediterranean to update the 2011 revolutionary motto: the revolution continues. This chapter delves into the social uprisings of Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan and Iraq and confirms that the horizontality, anti-hierarchy and pacifism of the previous revolutions are also the main characteristics of the social revolutions of 2019. In fact, other anarchist groups and movements have emerged out of this context. It is the case of Kafeh!, an anarchist group in Lebanon that sees itself at the forefront of current contentious Lebanese politics. The chapter summarizes the main ideas of the book and underlines the necessity of building up a history that is not closed yet, but is being performed and enacted in its search for freedom and social justice.

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Notes 1. The term affinity group emerged in the Spanish anarchist groups in the late nineteenth century. It was adopted as a conscious opposition to the hierarchical political culture of Marxism. However, it was not until the 1990s and 2000s of this century that it took on greater force as a concept in the practice of contemporary anarchism: “Formed out of a shared desire to accomplish a specific task, affinity groups are consensusdriven and oriented to achieving maximum effectiveness with a minimum of bureaucracy, infighting and exposure to infiltration. They tend to be small, typically consisting of 5–20 individuals” (Day 2005, pp. 34–35). 2. Anarchism and religion are increasingly getting academic attention. The number of works and studies dedicated to both of these trends and their resurgence in political life has recently attracted new interest. A recent example is the publication of the two volumes of the collected work of Anarchism and Religion, edited by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Matthew S. Adams. See Chapter 2 of this book. 3. On transnational history and anti-fascism see: García, H. (2016). Transnational History: A New Paradigm for Anti-fascist Studies? Contemporary European History, 25(4), 563–572; and communism see: Kirschenbaum, L A. (2015). International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion. International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion; and fascism see: Deutsch, S. M. (2011). Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945. Hispanic American Historical Review.

References Abdallah, Y. (2011). Kaifa Yumkin Ta’arif al-Ishtirakiyya al-Taharruriyya. alAnarkiyya bi-l-‘Arabiyya. Retrieved from: http://anarchisminarabic.blogspot. com.es/2011/10/blog-post_22.html. Acharya, M. P. T. (2019). We Are Anarchists (O. B. Laursen, Ed.). Edinburgh: AK Press. Bantman, C., & Altena, B. (2015). Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies. New York: Routledge. Bonanno, A. (1996). The Anarchist Tension (J. Weir, Ed.). Elephant Editions. Cappelletti, Á. J. (2006). Prehistoria del anarquismo. Buenos Aires: Libros de la Araucaria. Cappelletti, Á. J. (2010). La ideología anarquista. Barcelona: El grillo libertario. Cohn, J. S. (2006). Anarchism and the Crisis of Representatin: Hermaneutics, Aesthetics, Politics. Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press.

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Day, R. J. F. (2005). Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Evren, T. S. (2012). What Is Anarchism? A Reflection on the Canon and the Constructive Potential of Its Destruction (Doctoral dissertation). Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK. Retrieved from: https://repository. lboro.ac.uk/articles/What_is_anarchism_A_reflection_on_the_canon_and_ the_constructive_potential_of_its_destruction/9467060. Feyerabend, P. (1975). Tratado contra el método. Esquema de una teoría anarquista del conocimiento. Madrid: Editorial Tecnos. García, H. (2016). Transnational History: A New Paradigm for Anti-fascist Studies? Contemporary European History, 25(4), 563–572. García, V. (1971, November). El protoanarquismo. Ruta. Caracas. Goldman, E. (1911). Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association. Gorman, A. (2005). Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901). Middle Eastern Studies, 41(3), 303–320. Gorman, A. (2010). “Diverse in Race, Religion and Nationality… But United in Aspirations of Civil Progress”: The Anarchist Movement in Egypt 1860– 1940. In S. Hirsch & L. Van Der Walt (Eds.), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940 (pp. 3–31). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Graham, R. (2005). Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Montreal, New York, and London: Black Rose Books. Grubacic, A., & David, G. (2004). Anarchism, or the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-First Century. Znet. Retrieved from: https://theanarchist library.org/library/andrej-grubacic-david-graeber-anarchism-or-the-revolutio nary-movement-of-the-twenty-first-centu. Accessed September 12, 2015. Guardia, C., & Pan-montojo, J. (1998). Reflexiones sobre una historia transnacional. Studia historica. Historia contemporánea, 16, 9–31. Iliopoulos, C. (2018). Restoring Anarcho-Christian Activism: From Nietzsche’s Affirmation to Benjamin’s Violence. In A. Christoyannopoulos & M. S. Adams (Eds.), Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume II (pp. 173–195). Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. Jenkins, K. (2003). Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline. London and New York: Routledge and Taylor & Francis. Kafeh! (2019). About Us. Kafeh! Retrieved from: https://kafeh.org/about-us/. Khuri-Makdisi, I. (2010). The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kina, R. (2005). Anarchism a Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

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Kornegger, P. (1975). Anarchism: The Feminist Connection. Second Wave 4 (1). Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peggy-kornegger-ana rchism-the-feminist-connection.pdf. Kropotkin, P. (1910). Anarchism. Retrieved from The Encyclopedia Britannica. pp. 914–918. Mitchell, T. (2000). Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Porter, D. (2011). Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria. Oakland, Edinburgh, and Baltimore: AK Press. Ramnath, M. (2011). Descolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritatian History of India’s Liberation Struggle. Edinburgh: AK Press—Institute for Anarchist Studies. Shannon, D., and Rogue, J. (2009). Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality. Fordsburg: Zabalaza Books. Stephens, J. (2013a). Syrian Anarchist Challenges the Rebel/Regime Binary. Truthout. Retrieved from: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18617-syr ian-anarchist-challenges-the-rebel-regime-binary-view-of-resistance. Stephens, J. (2013b). Representation and the Egyptian Black Bloc: The Siren Song of Orientalism? Jadaliyya. Retrieved from: http://www.jadaliyya.com/ pages/index/10411/representation-and-the-egyptian-black-bloc_the-sir. Taibo, C. (2013). Repensar La Anarquía. Acción Directa, Autogestión, Autonomía. Madrid: Catarata. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2006). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (9th ed.). London: Zed Books. Veneuse, M. J. (2009). Anarca-Islam (Master thesis, Queen’s University Kingston). Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/moh amed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam%0D. White, H. (1986). Topics of Discourse. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Woodcock, G. (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 2

Decolonizing Anarchism

Coloniality and Modernity Despite the major differences between the terms ‘colonialism’, ‘colonization’ and ‘coloniality’, they have generally been used interchangeably. In general terms, ‘colonialism’ refers to the theory that leads to ‘colonization’. Colonization in that sense encompasses a system of power relationships throughout territorial expansion and economic, cultural, ideological, military and political domination of one population—the colony—of another—the metropolis—. Moreover, while colonization refers to a historical and social process, colonialism is the philosophy behind colonization. It involves in one way or another the use of violence. To that point, violence comes inevitably as an intrinsic part of colonization and the colonial project. It is the process by which the condition of the colonized is internalized as a social experience (Fanon 1963, pp. 1–62). The terms colonialism and colonization have been used uncritically to analyze historical experiences such as the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Islamic Empire or the conquest of Latin America by Spain and Portugal. However, colonialism, as a theoretical and analytical concept, can only be understood in relation to European modernity—not as opposed or complementary to it—but as an essential part of it. I follow the definition formulated by Walter Mignolo (2005) who understands colonialism as:

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[…] the geopolitical and geohistorical constitution of Western European modernity (Hegel’s conceptualization) in its two senses: the economic and political configuration of the modern world, as well as the intellectual space (from philosophy to religion, from ancient history to modern social sciences) justifying such a configuration. (Mignolo 2005, p. 2)

Understanding colonialism as part of the creation of capitalism and the World System is essential in order not to deprive the concept of its meaning and its analytical and political potential. For the majority of the authors who are part of the decolonial turn, the first modernity was born in 1492, the date of the ‘toma de Granada’ (the fall of Granada) to Christian troops during the Reconquista from the Islamic Empire that have ruled for more than seven hundred years. Furthermore, 1492 also marks the beginning of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires colonial enterprise in the Americas. At this point, world history and the universalist discourse was born. Taking Wallerstein’s thesis (1974) where he uses the metaphor ‘world-modern system’, authors such as Walter Mignolo consider that modernity begins with the “emergence of the commercial circuit of the Atlantic, in the XVI’s century” (Mignolo 2000, p. 56). In this way, and along with the contribution of Anibal Quijano in the article he published with Wallerstein in 1992, the conditions under which coloniality of power is constituted as a strategy of ‘modernity’ are outlined, since the expansion of Europe beyond the Mediterranean helped the self-definition of Europe as an inseparable part of global capitalism in the sixteenth century. From this epistemological turn, the relationship between modernity and coloniality is forged, and from it the ‘civilizing mission’ of England and France later arises. In that sense, the critique of Indian thinker Aijaz Ahmad (1995) is correct in assuring that if we grant ‘colonialism’ a state of historical continuity, it would lose its analytical capacity: It is worth remarking, though, that in periodizing our history in the triadic terms of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, the conceptual apparatus of ‘postcolonial criticism’ privileges as primary the role of colonialism as the principle of structuration in that history, so that all that came before colonialism becomes its own prehistory and whatever comes after can only be lived as infinite aftermath (Ahmad 1995, pp. 5–6)

Ahmad thus criticizes the privileged position that postcolonial studies grants to colonialism in the structuring of history, and questions the term

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itself. This criticism comes to acknowledge that colonialism functions in many historical accounts as the material source of history. While postcolonial studies try to subvert this image, it reproduces the same logic by granting colonialism such importance. On the one hand, this happens because of the positionality of those intellectuals who write about it; migrant intelligentsia of Third World origin based in the West. On the other hand, postcolonial studies shift the attention away from the facts of current neocolonial situations, considering colonialism to be safely over. The binomial colonization/colonialism continues in history through coloniality, despite the fact that the historical conditions by which they were produced have ceased to exist. The problem of coloniality is introduced by Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992) as the starting point of the Decolonial Study Group1 when they consider that coloniality exceeds the idea of colonialism in that it seeks to capture the existence and endurance of structures that perpetuate the situation of domination once the colonial situation has disappeared. For the Decolonial Study Group, coloniality is not the opposite of modernity or a state beyond it, but a constitutive part of it. Modernity and coloniality would become two sides of the same coin. Modernity has been presented as one more stage of world history—understood as a linear evolution of humanity, in the Hegelian terms of Entwicklung (development) and Begriff (concept). In this way, the relationship between the rise of modernity and colonial imperialism at the end of the fifteenth century is hindered. Peter Wagner (2008), who has developed a sociology of modernity based on the succession of modernities via collective instituting movements at moments of crisis, criticizes the concept of modernity based on the idea of progress toward a new human condition that starts in the nineteenth century. The concept of ‘modern society’ developed by hegemonic sociology has been characterized as having the goal of reconciling the historical view of modernity as the history of Europe, and later of the West, with the concept of modernity understood as the social configuration composed of a series of differentiated institutions, in what Wagner calls “modernity as an era and as set of institutions”. This gave rise to a sociologized version of the concepts of freedom, reason, autonomy, mastery, subjectivity and rationality of the Enlightenment (Wagner 2008, p. 9). Decolonial studies question the core idea of modernity that comes from European thought. For Enrique Dussel (1993), the construction of modernity is intimately linked to European expansion and forged by European intellectuals. Modernity was imposed, according to the

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author, as a hegemonic discourse of the ‘center’—World History with capital letters—as opposed to the ‘periphery’—the colony—that must go through the stages of modernity. The Spanish and Portuguese roles in the formation of the world system at the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth century led European intellectuals to the fallacy of Eurocentric thought in what Dussel calls the myth of modernity. The myth of modernity arrived at its maximum expression when Hegel delimited it on a spatiotemporal level. And later Habermas, when he commented on the key historical phenomena of the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution “as moments of implantation of modern subjectivity, reason and humanism” (Sibai 2016, p. 25). All this leads to a justification of colonial violence2 : Modernity includes a rational ‘concept’ of emancipation that we affirm and subsume. But, at the same time, it develops an irrational myth, a justification for genocidal violence. The postmodernists criticize modern reason as a reason of terror; we criticize modern reason because of the irrational myth that it conceals. (Dussel 1993, p. 66)

Dussel defines modernity in two ways. Firstly, as the last step of emancipation, that is, as the critical exercise of reason to escape from immaturity and backwardness. This was a process that, according to this normative framework, was completed in the eighteenth century in Europe through a space-time sequence ranging from the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation, the German Enlightenment and the French Revolution, although a still ongoing and unfinished project and not yet realized for Habermas. Dussel’s second definition of ‘modernity’ situates it as the center of World History, which begins in 1492 with the Spanish ‘discovery of the Americas’ (also the end of the Islamic Empire in the Iberian Peninsula) and the unfolding of the World-System. The World-System is based on the discursive framework of the myth of modernity and has important consequences. As a dispositif , in Foucault’s terms, modern civilization understands itself as more developed and superior and therefore ideologically Eurocentric. Following Dussel, this superiority creates and forces, as a moral requirement, the education and development of the most primitives and barbarians. As an educational project, it must follow the European path of development which is generally neglected and opposed by the ‘barbarians’. In order to carry out the civilizational project, the modern praxis’ use of violence is legitimized as an inevitable act and the colonial war

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appears as a just cause: “the civilizing hero invests his own victims with the character of being holocausts of a saving sacrifice (the colonized Indian, the African slave, the woman, the ecological destruction of the earth, etc.)” (Dussel 2000, p. 49). When the barbarian opposes the civilizing process, ‘guilt’ appears, allowing modernity to present itself as an emancipatory force that subsumes its victims from it. For that reason, any suffering or sacrifice of the civilizing modern project appears as a mere side effect of modernity (Dussel 2000, p. 49). For that reason, Bhambra’s (2007) and Mitchell’s (2000) criticisms of multiple modernities theory are accurate and necessary. Theorists of multiple modernities (Paramershwar Gaonkar 2001; Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998) have situated themselves in a critical relationship to the early debates on modernization that were part of the notion of a linear movement from a traditional past to a modernized future, mainly after the Cold War and the integration of the peripheral economists into the neoliberal order in what was perceived and named after the “underdeveloped world” (Bhambra 2007, p. 37). The theory of multiple modernities tries to underline the different versions, local and regional, of capitalist modernity. By doing so, these theories want to avoid two fallacies. The first is associated with the existence of just one modernity, and the second is the Eurocentrism and subsequent orientalist that follows it. However, by doing so, these theories imply the existence of a unique and singular modernity—that is the European one—that is modified by local circumstances and by different cultural forms. While read as multiple, these theories still rely on an ideal type of globalization that expands from the European core (Bhambra 2007, p. 58). What Bhambra rightly argues is that although the theories of multiple modernities are trying to overcome the modernization paradigm, the problem of Eurocentrism still remains as an integral part of this new paradigm. Authors such as Mitchell (2000) propose that modernity should not be read as one or multiple, but as a project where imperialism is the most powerful expression and the most effective method. This leads modernity to the impossibility of its realization by the oxymoron implicit in its own universalism (Mitchell 2000, p. xiii). Anarchism is an integral part of modernity. It emerges from the historical conditions that constitute it, not without frictions and contradictions. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution forge the conceptual bases of nineteenth-century anarchism and establish the principles of a theoretical body that will accompany and form part of the political, revolutionary

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practices of the early twentieth century. As a political philosophy, anarchism contains the same key elements of modernity: the rejection of tradition, the belief in freedom and equality, the centrality of the individual, and the faith in scientific, social and technological progress that leads society to a state of perfection and blind belief in reason: “Generated in response to these conditions, anarchism is part of modernity, and like the rest of modernity, partakes in the same interplay of energies” (Ramnath 2011, p. 35). The relationship between anarchism and modernity is of vital importance for the study of anarchism in postcolonial contexts. The modern character of anarchism has determined its discourses and practices throughout the twentieth century and therefore has established a difficult relationship with the non-western radical traditions (Ramnath 2011, p. 31). It goes without saying that despite its modern character, anarchism also comes with an attempt to find a balance between both traditions and a critique of reductionism in order to continuously broaden the boundaries of the positions taken by one or the other. There cannot be a history of anarchism in a rigidly established permanent state. According to Paul Goodman, it is always a continuous battle with the next situation in order to make sure that freedoms are not lost along the way (cited in Kina 2005, p. 3). A critique of modernism and thus colonialism is not a step back but an attempt, considers Maia Ramnath, “to seek a different way forward that doesn’t destroy beneficial aspects of an existing fabric, while improving on those aspects that were detrimental to the expansion of freedom and equality” (Ramnath 2011, p. 34).

Anarchist Criticism of Coloniality/Modernity This section continues with my treatment of the relationship between modernity and anarchism. A relationship arises not without contestation and contradictions. Anarchism, as modernity, as unfinished projects, has historically tried to contest its epistemological basis seeking for different and alternative ways to contest its existing fabric. This fabric has been constructed along its historizing process. The history of anarchism has been done, historically, through the analysis of the texts of anarchist authors as discussed in Chapter 3. However, which authors and which experiences are part of this ‘history’ largely depends on who selects the texts and forms the canon.

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Arguments about who should be included in the anarchist canon usually turn on assessments of the influence that writers have exercised on the movement and tend to reflect particular cultural, historical and political biases of the selector. (Kina 2005, p. 10)

Although in recent years, selectors have tended to include more names and widen their perspectives identifying new debates and key figures in the configuration of the histories of anarchism, this history, or at least that which predominates in manuals and large compilations, is and has been written mostly by cis-gendered, hetero-white-Western men. But how has the normative knowledge and understanding of anarchism been formulated, constructed and disseminated? Anarchists and researcher Süriyya Turkeli Evren answers this question by analyzing not only the ideological implications and perspectives from which the great stories of anarchism are written, but also by sheding some light on other stories on the margins of this normative history, that have, in a secondary way, been a part of these compilations. He highlights anarcho-feminism, queer activism, the relationship of anarchism with culture, sexuality, ecology, etc. By showing the different problems that exist in the dominant history of anarchism, Evren looks for alternative ways to represent the past in an anarchist way. The contributions of George Woodcock’s Anarchism, A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (1961) and Paul Eltzbacher’s Der Anarchismus (1900) have defined the academic tendencies for historicizing anarchism in the twentieth century. These works have earned, for scholars and activists, a representative status since they are considered to be the two most-read anarchist books in history (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 41). The formulation of the canon and the compilation of the history of anarchism have had a scientific objective, which in the words of Paul Eltzbacher (2004) is “to wanting to know anarchism scientifically” (quoted in Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 51). To scientify anarchism and create a defined canon has been part of the strategy followed in order to give anarchism a space within the study of ‘political ideologies’ and political science. In his study, Evren demonstrates that, in most books concerning ‘political ideologies’, authors collect, without further questioning and criticism, the thinkers and experiences of anarchism from the two great compilations mentioned above; Woodcock and Eltzbacher. In this way,

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knowledge about anarchism is reduced and undermined by the transmission of a biased and ideologically manipulated legacy. This view can be summed up as: the reduction of anarchist theory to anti-statism, the experience of the Spanish Revolution as the culmination and death of anarchism, and the internationalization of anarchism in Europe and the United States alone. From this vision arise several problems that characterize the historicization of anarchism and which can be summarized in the following points: anarchism as an isolated and finite phenomenon (“theory of the failure of anarchism” and “theory of the sporadic transition from anarchism”); anarchism as a Western phenomenon; and the existence of other anarchisms as marginal and secondary phenomena.

Universalism and Anarchism Concepts such as universalism and universality are of special importance when analyzing the circumstances that have led anarchism to forge in a colonial context. The cultural realities of postcolonial societies differ significantly from those of colonizing societies. The myth of universalism is one of the most significant strategies for imperial control (Ashcroft et al. 1995, p. 55). The assumption of universalism is a fundamental characteristic of colonial power construction since the ‘universal’ as an unfolding category is said to be a peculiarity of those who occupy a position of political dominance. Modernity, like capitalism, is defined by its claim to universalism and by its univocity. This leads both capitalism and modernity to represent the ‘end of history’ and the final form of the human condition. The assumption of universalism by anarchists has had a great impact on their analysis of the concrete circumstances of the contexts in which they act and participate. The relationship between anarchism and modernity, and in turn, with colonialism and coloniality, have led authors such as Roger White (2004), Evren Türkeli (2006, 2012) George Ciccariello-Maher (2010) and Maia Ramnath (2011) among many others, to question the universal and emancipatory character of this political philosophy. These authors are critical of three major issues within the anarchist tradition: its supposed universalism, its relationship with nationalism and anticolonial movements, and its problematic relationship with the question of race. Universalism provides anarchism and other internationalist ideologies with a conceptual framework that helps them to build a social project of transnational and trans-identitary liberation. Despite the decades of fighting against universalism, mainly after World War II, there

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are still anarchists who act and think within the Eurocentric framework of historical materialism, argues Roger White (2004). The interpretation of imperialism as an economically driven regime of capital and the view of nationalism as inherently retrograde and divisive owes a lot to the internal logic of universalism. (White 2004, p. 5)

Nationalism and Anarchism Continuing with White’s quotation, we see how universalism is part of the internal logic of imperialism. For that reason, international workers’ revolution might at times not be at the forefront of struggles of the oppressed against the Empire: If imperialism has as much to do with cultural hegemony or geo-political dominance as the capitalist market expansion and raw material exploitation of private business, then maybe an international workers revolution may not come first or be the most fundamental task before all the world’s oppressed. If nations and national liberation movements are not necessarily the statist antithesis of internationalism but represent just another social grouping of peoples with a common land, culture, and language, some of whom are willing to fight to maintain their ways of life, then maybe anarchists need to rethink their opposition to nationalism. (White 2004, p. 5)

The anarchist position on the national question has raised important debates in the history of anarchism and is still causing much debate, especially between anarchists from the Global South and core countries. For the Spanish anarchist thinker and political scientist Carlos Taibo (2013), the question of ‘nation’ within anarchism can be faced in two ways. On the one hand, in Anderson’s terms, nations can be understood as ‘imagined communities’, since this has been the form of organization by which human communities have been organized since the nineteenth century. On the other hand, ‘nation’ can be understood within the terms of the liberal bourgeois state as “artificial and interested constructions that responds to the blatant purpose of cornering the class struggle and establishing the privileges of the corresponding bourgeoisies” (Taibo 2013, p. 160). This second view, predominant in European anarchism, has defined the political practice of anarchism and undermined its position in the processes of decolonization and the struggles for national

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independence throughout the twentieth century. However, the categorical rejection of nationalism, as one of the greatest enemies of class struggle, is not a constant in the intellectual history of anarchism. Davide Turcato (2015) attempts at answering the question of whether an anarchist can harbor a sense of national identity. To this end, the author analyzes the trajectories of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Landauer and Malatesta and comes to the conclusion that anarchists, throughout history, have harbored a sense of their own national identity, or of other national identities, which have not contradicted their sense and struggle for internationalism. For anarchism, he concludes, the idea of nation does not go hand in hand with that of the state. As historians of anarchism, it is necessary to recognize that inclusive nationalism has been formulated by many activists and thinkers. Bakunin exemplifies this trend; he considered himself an anarchist and a Slavic nationalist, and he supported the processes of European self-determination. However, eventually Bakunin moved away from this position when he realized that the rise of nationalist movements in Europe inspired chauvinism and hatred (White 2004, p. 25). Since German anarchist Rudolph Rocker (1873–1958) published his famous book Nationalism and Culture (1973) where he fervently criticizes nationalism (he wrote in the context of Nazism): “non-white anarchists have been told to choose between our nation (or people) and our social philosophy” rightly argues Roger White (2004, p. 11). However, anarchists and anarchist historians of colors have experienced this binomial in a different way, since historically both anarchism and nationalism have been perceived as two mutually exclusive engines of struggles. This choice has led many activists to reject anarchism, and thus to understand it as a purely ‘white’ tool of struggle, as has traditionally been the case. From this critique, the words of Alshanti Alston are illustrative and shed some light to this question. Alston, as an anarchist and ex-member of the Black Panther Party, in his article “Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It” (1999) rejects the orthodox perspective of anarchism in its critique of nationalism. For Alston, nationalism— even if as a concept it comes from fascist and homophobic authors—has favored a struggle that was at the same time an anti-statist one, necessary for the black community of the United States in the 1960s: Anarchism and nationalism are similar in that they are both anti-statist, but what does it mean when the specific anarchist movements within a specific country are racist and dismissive of any and all nationalism, be

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it reactionary or revolutionary? For me, even the nationalism of a Louis Farrakhan is about saving my people, though it is also thoroughly sexist, capitalist, homophobic and potentially fascist. Yet, it has played an important part in keeping a certain black pride and resistance going. Their “on the ground” work is very important in keeping an anti-racist mentality going. As a black anarchist, that’s MY issue to deal with cuz they’se MY FOLKS. But it points to where anarchism and nationalism have differences: most anarchists in the U.S. have NO understanding of what it means to be BLACK in this fucked up society. We do not have the luxury of being so intellectual about this excruciating boot on our collective neck, this modern-day middle-passage into the Prison Industrial Complex and other forms of neo-slavery [sic.]. (Alston 1999)

Alston considers nationalism to be anti-statist as anarchism. Although at this point, he drives the commonalities and moves away from Marxism and other leftist ideologies. The framing of nationalism by Black activists and anarchists is on the one hand a rejection of white thinking and epistemologies and on the other a decentering of its primacy. Nationalism becomes a motto for identity construction of historical narration. While nationalism has been historically sexist and hierarchical, it can also be a category of liberation and emancipation. Maia Ramnath (2011) considers it necessary to find an emancipatory alternative to nationalism and an anarchist position on anti-colonialism while facing the difficulty of finding a solution to the position of classical anarchism and nationalism. She argues that anarchism needs to get closer to anti-colonization in order to draw a more complex version of national liberation (Ramnath 2011, p. 15). It is necessary therefore to break down the logic of nationalism which ensures that the recognition, autonomy and security of citizens is only possible with the constitution of a state: the union between the idea of nation (the spiritual) and the state (the physical): The fundamental assumption of nationalism is that in order for a people to be recognized as holders of collective rights and freedoms, it must be constituted as a nation duly manifested in a state: an exclusive institution defined by its monopoly on sanctioned force and revenue extraction. (Ramnath 2011, p. 19)

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Despite this logic, in a colonial context, where violence is exercised in terms of ethnicity and culture. For that reason, the defense of ethnic identity entitles an important warning: it is important to pay attention to who is “dictating the “correct” expression of culture and ethnicity” (Ramnath 2011, p. 21). While this argument carries its risk, ‘nationalism’ has been a necessary tool for the subversion and struggle of the colonized. In Africa, the national question is a consequence of the crisis of legitimacy and credibility of the neocolonial state. The renewed interest in anarchism in Africa can be interpreted not just as an expression of the failure of state socialism, but as a concrete reflection of the political, economic and social crises that devastate the continent. For this reason, Mbah and Igariwey consider that communalism has been and is the only solution to the crisis of the neo-colonial state. However, for many anthropologists and anarchists, there is a resistance to recognize these societies as ‘anarchist’. This is, according to Mbahand Igariwey, due to a dogmatic conception of reality and history (Mbah and Igariwey 2000, p. 14). Furthermore, he argues that the ‘national question’ in Africa is not possible within the neocolonial framework, and that communalism has historically forged bonds of mutual support and solidarity that boosted the autonomy and equality of all people (Mbah and Igariwey 2000, p. 23). Along this line of thinking, Fanon’s description of the dream of the nation of colonized people is right and necessary. While a nationalist agenda among politicians can prevent subversion, it also introduces ferments of revolution. In their speeches, the political leaders ‘name’ the nation. The demands of the colonized are thus formulated. But there is not substance, there is not political and social agenda. There is a vague form of national framework, what might be termed a minimal demand. The politicians who make the speeches, who write in the nationalist press, raise the people’s hopes. They avoid subversion but in fact stir up subversive feelings in the consciousness of their listeners or readers. Often the national or ethnic language is used. Here again, expectations are raised and the imagination is allowed to roam outside the colonial order. (Fanon 1963, p. 29)

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The Anarchist Myth: The Question of Race Anarchism, despite the widespread myth of its struggle against all kinds of oppressions, has been silent, at times, when it comes to the question of race. In many instances, anarchism has ignored in its accounts black, women, queer, and indigenous struggles, prioritizing the question of class as the main collective force against capitalism over all other oppressions. These issues have been sidelined as historical objects and therefore absent from the main textbooks of anarchism. Race, as a construct, is linked to the institution of colonial and neocolonial power. The concept of race was coined by the Count of Gabineau in his book Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853). Gabineau points to ‘race’ as the engine of history, from the Old Testament to the present day. Tracing its history from the descendants of the sons of Noah—Ham, Shem and Japhet that would have given rise to the ‘black’, ‘yellow’ and ‘white’ races, he draws a differentiation that establishes a hierarchy that eventually gave a meaning to the construction of history and justified colonization and supremacism. Gabineu’s prototypical concept of race was part of the European colonial arsenal and it has also been used to categorize the civilized and the un-civilized subjects within its own borders.3 Therefore, race constitutes at the same time a scientific ground and a social practice. Through the universal biologization of the human being and the anthropomorphic measurements, the continued exploitation of black people by white people has been justified. Consequently, social movements emerging from the South turn Gabineu’s concepts upside down and appropriate it as an engine for social change. However, as Héau-Lambert and Rajchenberg points out: “This is a re-appropriation of a discursive matric, but not of racist social practice, to make it say something different” (2013, p. 48). Under this perspective, white anarchism has believed that by privileging class; queer, women, indigenous and black struggles could benefit as well. However, by doing this, it has fallen into the same imperialist thinking that makes a concrete cultural experience universal: “as it turns out, it’s just as hard for whites to give up imperial race privilege as it is for rich people to give up class” (White 2004, p. 7). It is important to acknowledge that privilege theory is not a critique in itself, but different perspectives used by a wide range of movements from the most radical and revolutionary ones to the most liberal and reformists (Anarchist Federation 2012). By using the terms

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‘white’ and ‘black’, I do not mean to limit the problematization of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ as categories that need to be analyzed as well within the perspective of intersectionality. A decisive change came with the appearance of Antonio Gramsci’s work in the 1920s and 1930s. Gramci’s criticism of the prevalent idea on the left that omnipresent class and historical materialism are the only agents of change. Thanks to this, the left began a process that has led it to rethink the role of workers in revolutionary practice throughout the notion of ‘hegemony’ and the role of culture in it. The Gramscian concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ is key to understanding the subordination of class and at the same time a tool to subvert the hegemonic system. For the author, it is necessary to take the institutions, whether they are schools, churches, means of communication, etc. in order to subvert the established order. The shift from the economic determinism of orthodox Marxism to an identitarian pluralism of ‘cultural Marxism’ led to a greater emphasis on marginalized groups in society, who were until then excluded from struggles for emancipation, such as women, sexual and racial minorities, and migrants. Anarchists on the one hand, and decolonial theorist on the other, have tried to decolonize anarchism along these lines, considering that it is primordial to pay attention to aspects such as race and colonization and how their limitations are theoretically located in the epistemic rationalist privilege of the European Enlightenment (Ciccariello-Maher 2010, p. 21). In this way, George Ciccariello-Maher (2010) criticizes white anarchism or as he calls it ‘anarchist imperialism’, since it seeks to put class at the forefront of all oppressions, which is the result of European conditions and a Eurocentric perspective: After all class-centrism is itself Eurocentric, it speaks to specifically European conditions, and fails to grasp situations of historical social heterogeneity in which race frequently functions as a class category and the two are in many cases irretrievably intertwined. (Ciccariello-Maher 2010, pp. 22–23)

Slavery has therefore been the other side of the coin of European class structure. For that reason, it is not enough to recognize the importance of Black, queer, indigenous or feminist movements if they are subordinated to a dialectic of class predominance. Some authors have resorted to Frantz Fanon, paying special attention to the Martinican revolutionary figure and his theories, while connecting them with anarchism. Fanon

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cultivated an important feeling of blackness in national identity against inequalities institutionalized by white-supremacy and European colonial imperialism (Ciccariello-Maher 2010; Knight 2012). His opposition to the rule of the minority allows Fanon to be defined as an anti-statist and as an anti-authoritarian (Ciccariello-Maher 2010, p. 29). Along this line comes Fanon’s criticism of Sartre who even if supporting black movements, at the same time weakened them by inscribing them into the historical dialectics of rationality and Eurocentrism. The decolonial critique of Fanon makes him a key thinker in breaking with the Eurocentric logic of emancipatory struggles away from the univocal Marxist class-centrism. Hence, his decolonial critique makes him break universalism, Enlightenment thought and rationalism. Fanon’s relationship with anarchism can be established in three different aspects of his theoretical approach: the revolutionary role of the peasantry, the liberation of institutions (not their rejection), and the role of violence in the process of personal and collective liberation. Fanon’s theory is an essential part of this book’s critique of anarchism and the imperative of its decolonization.

The Imperative of Decolonizing Anarchism As I have stated previously, anarchism still needs to be decolonized. The anarchist experiences that have emerged and still can be found along the Southern shores of the Mediterranean, broaden, reformulate and ultimately decolonize the way this political philosophy has been traditionally understood. There is a still a growing number of activists and scholars that, from different spaces, positions and goals, are starting to formulate the possibility and the necessity to decolonize anarchism (Evren Türkeli 2012; Ramnath 2011; Adams 2002; Ciccariello-Maher 2010; Hassan 2013; Veneuse 2009). It is within this trend, inside anarchist studies and decolonial studies, where I believe the most productive outcomes can emerge while understanding anarchism in a postcolonial context. As we have seen previously, decolonization does not lie solely in legal independence, it encompasses a whole range of power relations in the intersection of knowledge, political economy, military state relations, etc. (Sibai 2016, p. 24). Authors such as Maia Ramnath (2011) have criticized the binomial modernity/coloniality from an anarchist perspective throughout the study of anti-colonial experiences in India. Ramnath goes further when trying not just to deconstruct but to seek out possible theoretical and practical alternatives that combine the elements of both traditions. For Ramnath,

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it is not about going backward but an attempt to seek different ways to enhance the possibilities of expanding freedom and equality without destroying any of the existing fabric. Far from being reactionary, as an orthodox Marxist teleology would deem it, anticolonial critique of modernity was not necessarily an attempt to halt progress- as if the only options were to go forward or backward along a narrow track-but rather to choose a different direction-oblique, perpendicular, or spreading in a skewed delta of potential alternatives. (Ramnath 2011, p. 34)

This goes in line with theorist Homi Bhabha (1994), who outside anarchist studies complements Ramnath’s perception of alternative possibilities. For the author, non-Western is not exactly a space outside the West, not a place of pure difference, but a continuous process of production and search in many cases throughout negation. Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different - a mutation, a hybrid. It is such a partial and double force that is more than the mimetic but less than the symbolic, that disturbs the visibility of the colonial presence and makes the recognition of its authority problematic. (Bhabha 1994, p. 111)

The hybrid, as proposed by Bhabha, gives rise to projects that problematize colonial authority. In this case, anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean might appear as hybrid while deconstructing anarchism as a product of European modernity. Cultural encounters have been given many terms in postcolonial studies: fusion, syncretism, appropriation and others. The term hybridism, as used by Bhabha, might also be an elusive and ambiguous term, and following Burke’s critique “literal and metaphorical at the same time, descriptive and explanatory” (Burke 2010, pp. 104–105). In this sense, authors such as Enrique Dussel (1999) speak of ‘transmodernity’ as overcoming the concept of postmodernity. For the author, there are cultural expressions and cultures that having coexisted and learned from European modernity, keep an alterity in respect to it. These cultures or cultural expressions are seeking new ways of development outside this framework. ‘Transmodernity’ would therefore come to

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make clear the alternative novelty of the different; assuming modernity but from a place-other, that is to say, from its own cultural experiences, different from the European-American ones. Japanese and Chinese Buddhist anarchist-clerics such as Uchiyama Gudo (1874–1911), Takagi Kenmyo (1868–1914) and Taixu (1890– 1914) theorize anarchism avant la letter, that is to say, they consider that the structures and possibilities of a libertarian struggle are found in the Buddhist tradition since pre-modern times, and therefore materialize the project of ‘transmodernity’ both in the anarchist and Buddhist traditions. This apologetic work and rhetorical movement have important consequences in how anarchism is understood, perceived and performed. It presents anarchism and libertarian socialism not at all like an imported ideology from Europe. As a logical consequence of the Buddhist way of thinking and also as a process, a continuity between the old, pre-modern, feudal elites and the new capitalist and imperialist powers, Buddhist anarchism promotes a critique of both. This part of his works underlines that libertarian ideas are present in ancient Buddhist narrative, doctrines and practices (Galván-Álvarez 2018). For Uchiyama Gudo, Takagi Kenmyo and Taixu, this anarchism avant la lettre confers on anarchism a more universal character, since it is not understood as a purely European and Western ideology, but as the “logical consequence of the Buddhist way of thinking.” Furthermore, their work awards anarchism the potentiality to criticize global-feudal capitalist and imperialist structures in the Buddhist contexts. Takagi Kenmyo, one of the most important Buddhist-anarchist Japanese activists of his time, distances himself with his anarchist theory in his work “My Socialism” not only from the European socialist and anarchist tradition, but also from the Japanese hegemonic influence. In his manifesto, he states that his understanding of socialism does not derive from Karl Marx or Tolstoy. Kenmyo tries to move away from these Western roots in a personal declaration of autonomy and freedom from the authorities and the main figures of his time (Galván-Álvarez 2018). What makes anarchism unique is its continuous fight to find its way between the modern polarities of rationalism/romanticism, modernity/anti-modernity, Enlightenment/counter-revolution, in all of which it does not recognize itself. Anarchism seeks for an equilibrium, neither a reduction or simplification, of the different traditions that it is indebted to.

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Nowhere is it a reduction to one or the other, and indeed, a quest for balance implies a critique of such a reduction at either end. True, even within the broadly drawn boundaries of anarchism, there are those who have staked out positions near to one or the other. But to argue over which pole truly represents the tradition is to hear only half the conversation. (Ramnath 2011, p. 35)

Listening to half of the conversation, as pointed out by Ramnath, has been the major mistake made by white anarchism. While doing so, it has hindered the existence of other anarchisms and thereby undermined, throughout its history, its revolutionary and emancipatory capacity. The continuous conversation, dialogue and criticism within anarchism are what makes this political philosophy prompt continuous interpretation and reinterpretation about what it is and how it is practiced and lived. However, when this conversation is captured by a single voice, which stands as universal and true, anarchism loses its revolutionary and emancipatory capacity. In this sense, this book tries to shed some light on a series of anarchist experiences in the contemporary history of the societies and contexts of the South of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Palestine, not hitherto treated as such. My aim, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is to show the analytical and theoretical possibilities for dealing with the decolonization of the history of anarchism, and in particular, the history of anarchism in the Arabic speaking contexts of the South of the Mediterranean. Ramnath (2018) recognizes two strands in the visibility of postcolonial experiences of anarchism. The first of these challenges Western ownership of anarchism by groups who identify as such in postcolonial countries and, the second, from people or groups who have used vocabularies from different traditions that demonstrate affinity with the political philosophy of anarchism and challenged it. Following her two paths for highlighting and recognizing the existence of different forms of anarchisms, I would like to open the discussion on how to decolonize the history of anarchism based on the collective learning process of this book. 1. Recognize the relationship between anarchism, colonialism and modernity. 2. Understand anarchism not as a doctrine emerging from Europe, but as a series of ideas and practices—experiences—intertwined in a network of revolutionaries living in different parts of the world

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at different times in history. A decentralized, fluid and rithomatic skein. Following Süriyya Turkeli Evren when criticizing anarchism as a purely nineteenth European category: And against it, we can argue that anarchism is not an idea founded by Proudhon and then carried to other places or a movement found by Bakunin and then carried to other places; rather anarchism is a certain set of ideas and practices formed with and through a specific network of radical reformists/revolutionaries in different parts of the world. Anarchism is multi-centred and has temporary centres; actually these temporary centres are hubs, extra functioning nodes of the network. (Evren Türkeli 2012, pp. 92–93)

3. Understand anarchism as an ‘experience’ and ‘political culture’. The need to conceptualize ‘experience’ in the study of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean is especially important for the main goal of this book. This need arises from our first contact with anarchism in Egypt in March 2013, when those who participated in the study agreed on pointing out that the 25 January Revolution was an ‘anarchist experience’ in itself. The revolution and in particular, the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, meant the certainty of the encounter between the ‘sensation’ and the ‘knowledge’ of anarchism. It is through this narration that our reflection began. These narratives gave me the clue throughout which to seek other experiences in the contemporary history of the South of the Mediterranean. The conceptualization of the ‘experience’ in the study of anarchism was of primary importance in order to overcome the problem of the reconstruction of history and the history of ideas on the one hand, and on the other, to go a step forward in the classical dichotomy that has traditionally defined anarchism, the division between theory and practice. Experience is furthermore an ‘ethical truth’, as the French anarchist collective Invisible Committee stated in the controversial publication To Our Friends (2015). According to this approach, revolutionaries today are no longer based on political ideologies, but on ethical truths: Ethical truths are therefore not truths about [sic] the world, but the truths from which we abide in it. They are truths, affirmations, enunciated or silent, which are experienced but not demonstrated. (Comité Invisible 2015, p. 48)

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According to this view, anarchism cannot be demonstrated, just experienced. On another level will be the degree of rationalization of what has been experienced, something that has not just been rejected by authors who, wanting to get out of orthodoxy, are not able to dismantle it completely. Carlos Taibo (2013) assures that: Although anarchism is, yes, a state of mind, the latter is accompanied by a body of common ideas and experiences, often with diffuse and, if necessary, contradictory profiles. (Taibo 2013, p. 17)

Although Taibo’s aim in this fragment is not to highlight the concepts of ‘idea’ and ‘experience’, but to explain the two main currents of anarchism, I believe it is important to point out the author’s use of the terms. ‘Experience’, as historical evidence, has caused a crisis for orthodox history, since it multiplies historical subjects by insisting that history is written fundamentally by irreconcilable perspectives and none completely true. The concept of ‘experience’ has changed throughout the history of philosophy. Among the two definitions identified by Ferrater Mora (1994) in his dictionary of philosophy we find: ‘Experience’ as the possibility of empirical confirmation of data, and ‘experience’ as a fact of living something given before any reflection. In the history and historiography of anarchism we find that often, authors speak of anarchism as ‘experience’. Peter Marshall, in his famous book Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (2008), understands anarchism as an integral part of the human experience, an experience that is accompanied by a collective “utopian dream” (Marshall 2008, p. 13). Anarchism is characterized by its dual character: at the same time, by being a theoretical and an analytical body, as well as to be, in addition, a ‘political culture’, that is to say, also the praxis that accompanies this unalike and heterogeneous body of ideas. Being an anarchist is a way of understanding the struggle against all forms of oppression through a praxis that aims at creating different dynamics and forms of life that do not reproduce hierarchies, power relations, and instead create decentralized and self-managed ways of life. Likewise, I consider anarchism to be a ‘political culture’ in the sense given by Uri Gordon (2008) when referring to the contemporary performance of anarchism. I

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believe that the concept of political culture is valuable when dealing with non-Western anarchism in the way that the author defines it: • A shared repertoire of political action based on direct action, building grassroots alternatives, community outreach and confrontation. • Shared forms of organizing—decentralised, horizontal and consensus-seeking. • Broader cultural expression in areas as diverse as art, music, dress and diet, often associated with prominent western subcultures. • Shared political language that emphasises resistance to capitalism, the state, patriarchy and more generally to hierarchy and domination (Gordon 2008, p. 4).

4. Prioritize ‘form’ over content or political adherence to a particular ideology. As we have already seen, anarchism, unlike other socialisms, prioritizes ‘form’ in the process of emancipation. The prefigurative politics of anarchism, that means, the ongoing establishments of relationships that ‘prefigure’ the egalitarian, nonhierarchical, decentralized and democratic society that it seeks to create, reflects that the methods have to be consistent with the end. This leads us directly to the importance given to form by anarchism. For Süriyyya Evren, ‘form’ is anarchism’s own ideology (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 189). 5. Understand that the locus of enunciation, that is, the position from which a specific subject speaks, matters. I understand by locus of enunciation the epistemic, cultural and political position in which subjects are located in the production of knowledge. The locus of enunciation is defined by who speaks and from what body and epistemic space, in relation to power. That is, who can or cannot speak and on what specific themes. This transfer of the locus of enunciation to subjects who have historically been denied the necessary competence to do so is one of the fundamental goals of this book. I do not mean to imply that I am by any means giving voice to subaltern subjects in this case, but on the contrary, that it is our role as historians to listen to those voices. Anarchist theorists and thinkers, libertarians and anti-authoritarians from the Global South have created, and continue to create, an important body of theoretical anarchist literature that is fundamental in understanding

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the development of anti-authoritarian and emancipatory movements and which academia has barely begun to echo. In this change in the locus of enunciation lies the importance of becoming at the same time a theoretical and practical corpus, that is, there are “[…] both in the place of oppositional practice in the public sphere and that of a theoretical struggle in academia” (Mignolo 2005). This duality of enunciating from the Global South, like the one we appreciated while defining anarchism, is what subverts the hegemonic order and gives the potential to be both a weapon and a space for subversion. It is where the very act of theorizing becomes a political act itself. This is why the classical dichotomy of theory and practice in which anarchism has been divided becomes obsolete in a postcolonial context. If, as we said, the act of “enunciating”—and therefore the importance of the locus of enunciation—is a political act; the act of theorizing anarchism is, depending on who does it and from which epistemic position, also the practice of anarchism.

Studying Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean These five variables that I have favored when analyzing the experiences of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean allow us to find varied and multiple expressions of anarchisms, self-declared as such or not, located in different time-spaces in its history. These experiences share resistance as a common element, as a range of adaptive subversive, redirectional and dialectical possibilities that respond to different types of oppression. Location, as a differential key element within a global capitalist system, generates alternative ways in which anarchism is experienced and practiced and by doing so, it challenges European ownership of anarchistic praxis and thinking. The expressions of anarchism analyzed along these pages respond to the acts of resistance to internal factors of the local context, and in turn, to its global effects. In this book, I do not intend to speak of the global against the local or otherwise, nor do I suggest a hierarchy of importance between the two. What I try to propose is that both, the global and the local, are interwoven in the experiences narrated along these pages. The two categories, rather than opposing each other in their way of articulating political discourses and practices, complement each

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other and as a result, “can be understood in tandem” (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 17). Due to this duality that revolves around the global and the local, the experiences analyzed in this book are connected in a rhizomatic network of affinities, activists and revolutionaries. Sometimes this happened through the transnational trajectories of some of its protagonists, perhaps the most symbolic of them being Errico Malatesta, due to his participation in the Urabi Revolution in 1882 in Egypt. Other times, through participation in international newspapers, as was the case of Georges Heinin, one of the main figures of surrealism in Egypt, who at the same time wrote in Egyptian, French and Italian publications. Or for example, through the influence of the theoretical work of Sameh Said Aboud in Arabic on the emergence of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean in the last decade. The rhizome that builds up the narration of this book has the intention to reflect the rhizome of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean itself. It is generated around several nodes, structured but in an antihierarchical way that share Arabic as their common linguistic vehicle, as well as decentralization, horizontality and the will for emancipation as their meeting point, in what is known as an egocentric network. An egocentric network has a node as its center, not higher on a scale of priorities at a hierarchical level, but a node with which other nodes are intertwined with each other. In our case, this node is the South of the Mediterranean. I understand that this category is blurred and unspecified. It has the intention to overcome other orientalist geographical ones such as the Middle East or the Arab World. The South of the Mediterranean in the way I use it is not strictly a geographical category. It has fluid and porous borders and in general terms it refers to the postcolonial Arabic-speaking contexts of the South of the Mediterranean. Understanding this space, sometimes in cultural terms, at other times in linguistic terms, can be unsettling and problematic. However, I want to subvert the juridical, geographical and epistemological conformation of modern colonial and postcolonial institutions, and to subvert states whose discourses have imposed national and colonial borders and identities. Southern Mediterranean anarchisms subvert this logic by creating transnational and interregional networks of dissent, and, at the same time, contradictorily, by sharing an ideal of an “imagined community” that it is many times articulated in the form of a nation. That is the case with Palestinian anarchists, that by problematizing the concept of ‘nation’ in

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their struggle against Zionism and settler colonialism, they emphasize the unsettling relationship of anarchism with the concept of ‘citizenship’ and the privileges it encompasses. Davide Turcato (2007) explains that, in the case of Italian anarchists, the concept of nationality is constructed by their mutual identification as Italians. This consists of more or less a shared historical narrative that is used to create a common signifier and identification through language and culture, in this case, that of Arabic. In this way, the anarchist experiences analyzed share a common political project that concerns not only the nation, but also the Southern Mediterranean as a whole, as demonstrated by the Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM) in Tunis in 2015. This is why language, in this case Arabic, among other shared historical and cultural elements, is constituted as one of the most important vehicles for the articulation of theoretical and practical antiauthoritarian ideas in the South of the Mediterranean, where translation emerges as an important repertoire of political action that aims to account for history and socio-political contexts that surround the translator. This egocentric network connects throughout the following pages with other nodes. This form of internationalism, which becomes more and less clear throughout the different chapters, emerges, among other reasons, from the need to disassociate itself from other forms of internationalism, in this case, that of the Marxist, Communist and Stalinist left, whose agenda was at times, at both the regional and global level, imposed by the prerogatives of the Soviet Union. This is the case of the Art and Liberty group analyzed in Chapter 4, whose will to distance itself from the Egyptian Communist and Marxist left, as well as its disillusionment with corrupt and still undecolonized parliamentarism, led its members it to seek alternatives in the libertarian world within the cultural and literary spheres in order to find a way out of a situation of oppression by local and global structures. It is also the case of Sameh Said Abud, whose political trajectory goes from his militancy in the Arab Socialist Union after the defeat with Israel in 1967 to the search for anti-authoritarian and anarchist alternatives in the 1980s and 1990s. All these Southern Mediterranean anarchisms, through their political practice, form and discourses, help us to decolonize the history of this political philosophy and to understand that these anarchist experiences problematize, expand and reformulate the Eurocentric, heteronormative and white anarchist canon while proposing emancipatory alternatives that are located and situated in the Southern Mediterranean contexts.

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Notes 1. Decolonial Studies Group or Modernity/Coloniality Group started after Anibal Quijano’s research on the coloniality of power. In 2005, Arturo Escobar named the project Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD), and it has become an important topic of debate beyond the borders of Latin America. There are research groups, professionals, and debate forums dedicated to this topic in Europe and the United States and the Middle East as well. 2. For Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), the process by which the condition of the colonized is internalized is a social experience that is achieved through violence. Internalizing violence turns the colonized into a passive and inferior being. In this process, the colonized externalizes violence with its own peers and through cultural rites: dances, trance and catharsis. For Fanon it was necessary to channel the former internalization of violence for revolutionary purposes in order to decolonize themselves. 3. For French anthropologists and geographers, when exploring Spain for possible conquest at the hands of Napoleon, Spain was an ‘African Peninsula’ as described by Bory de Saint Vincent. In a book he wrote for travelers to Spain and Portugal, he underlined the African character of Spain and its connection to the African continent. In fact, the expedition to Egypt and Spain was both considered in the same way and of equal importance (Cañete 2017, pp. 150–151).

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budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/the-colour-brown-de-coloni sing-anarchism-and-challenging-white-hegemony/. Héau-Lambert, C., & Rajchengerg, S. E. (2013). La reivindicación política de los conceptos de raza e indianidad en el zapatismo y neozapatismo. Cultura y representaciones sociales, 7 (14), 46–66. Khuri-Makdisi, I. (2010). The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kina, R. (2005). Anarchism a Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Knight, R. (2012). Anti-colonial Anarchism, or Anarchistic Anti-colonialism: The Similarities in the Revolutionary Theories of Frantz Fanon and Mikhail Bakunin. Theory in Action, 5(4), 82–92. Retrieved from: http://www.transf ormativestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/10.3798tia.1937-0237.12035.pdf. Marshall, P. (2008). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London, New York, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial. Mbah, S., & Igariwey, I. E. (2000). África Rebelde: Comunalismo y anarquismo en Nigeria. Tucson, AZ: Alikornio Ediciones. Mignolo, W. D. (2005). La razón postcolonial: Herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales. AdVersuS: Revista de Semiótica (4). Retrieved from: http:// www.adversus.org/indice/nro4/articulos/articulo_mingolo.htm. Mitchell, T. (2000). Questions of Modernity. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Mora, J. F. (1994). Experiencia. Diccionario de Filosofía. Tomo II: 1181–88. Barcelona: Ariel. Paramershwar Gaonkar, D. (2001). Alternative Modernities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Quijano, A., & Wallerstein, I. (1992). La Americanidad como concepto, o América en el Moderno Sistema Mundial. Revista internacional de ciencias sociales, 134, 583–591. Ramnath, M. (2011). Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle. Edinburgh: AK Press—Institute for Anarchist Studies. Ramnath, M. (2018). Non-Western Anarchism and Postcolonialism. In C. Levy & A. Matthew (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (pp. 677–696). London and Loughborough: Palgrave Macmillan. Sibai, S. A. (2016). La cárcel del feminismo. Hacia un pensamiento islámico decolonial. México D.F.: AKAL. Taibo, C. (2013). Repensar la anarquía. Acción directa, autogestión, autonomía. Madrid: Catarata. Turcato, D. (2007). Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885– 1915. International Review of Social History, 52(03), 407–444. Retrieved from: http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0020859007003057.

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Turcato, D. (2015). Nations Without Borders: Anarchists and National Identity. In C. Bantman & A. Altena (Eds.), Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies. New York: Routledge; Taylor and Francis Group. Veneuse, M. J. (2009). Anarca-Islam (Master thesis, Queen’s University Kingston). Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/moh amed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam%0D. Wagner, P. (2008). Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, 1450–1600. New York, Academic Press Inc. White, R. (2004). Post-colonial Anarchism: Essays on Race, Repression and Culture in Communities of Color 1999–2004. Oakland, CA: Jailbreak Press. Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/roger-white-post-col onial-anarchism#toc2.

CHAPTER 3

Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting: The Unresolved Postcolonial Question

Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM)1 In 2015, the World Social Forum (WSF), the biggest annual gathering of global civil society organizations, which was founded in Brazil in 2001, was held in Tunisia; it took place in the same location as it had in 2013. The WSF aimed to be a space in which to oppose neoliberalism, global capitalism and any other form of imperialism. Its goal was to change the status quo and build alternative ways of living and relating among the various communities in Tunisia. However, anarchists and other political subjectivities did not agree with the WSF perspective. Thousands of participants from all over the world attended the event, held at El Manar University, in the capital of Tunis. Participants milled among the tents, workshops and seminars, debating topical issues of social justice. By the end of the Forum, group leaders commented on the political and economic situation in Tunisia, stating it was: a country where the people contestations started, while the political transition seems near to be achieved, the economic crisis and the violence of extremist groups are serious threats against the development of a political system and of institutions which could protect the economic and social rights, as well as the freedom. (WSF 2015)

Under the WSF umbrella, contemporary anarchism in Tunisia, probably one of the most expansive and developed libertarian movements in the © The Author(s) 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4_3

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South Mediterranean at the time, found the political opportunity to follow its own path and work toward its own goals. Many difficulties had already been faced by the libertarian movement in the Arab world in 2015, including the uncompromising repression of political dissent in Egypt, the counterrevolutionary Jihadist violence which lead to the destruction of the state in Syria, Libya and Iraq, and the sectarian brutality of Bashar al-Assad or the Gulf rulers. Despite these difficulties, and despite the fact that the international community widely considered Tunisia as the only success of the ‘Arab springs’, anarchists in Tunisia were clear: althawra mustamirra (the revolution continues). The ‘revolution continues’ was the ethos used in the South Mediterranean revolutions to underline the ongoing process of self and collective emancipation that entitled the revolutions’ narrative. “The belief that the slogan and chant ‘al-thawra mustamirra’ (the revolution continues) means that it is not the time yet to say, ‘in conclusion’” (Abouelnaga 2016, p. 11). This ethos was also adopted by members of the Tunisian anarchist group La Commun Libertaire—al-Mushtarak al-Taharruri (The Libertarian Commune). During interviews and informal conversations conducted in March 2015 in Tunis with members of The Libertarian Commune, the maxim was always the same “the revolution continues until the demands of the revolution are met”. This ethos gave meaning to the very existence of the movement that had originally emerged in a moment of revolutionary activity in 2010 and now stands as a continuation of that wave and which, from their perspective, still continues. The group considers the revolution to be ongoing because, while the parliamentary system and representative democracy have considered political transition to parliamentary democracy in Tunisia to be a success, the anarchists believe that representative democracy is inscribed in a regional counterrevolutionary process, with the ultimate goal of continuing the world economic elite hegemony and guaranteeing their interests in the country (Asian 2012). Under these sociopolitical circumstances, The Libertarian Commune, with the support of the French Anarchist Federation, instigated anarchist federations and activists at the First Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM) which took place between 27 and 29 March 2015 in the city of Tunis with the goal of “creating a network of exchange of information, projects and solidarity between anarchists of the Mediterranean” (Libertarian Commune 2015b). The aim of the meeting was to “build an anarchist movement” and solidarity networks among those who faced

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similar problems (mostly consisting of problems derived from the decolonization process in the majority of Arab and Muslim societies in the South Mediterranean). Through these networks, they hoped agree on a common Mediterranean agenda. However, despite the organizational efforts involved in a meeting composed of a majority of Southern Mediterranean anarchists, the MAM was almost completely composed of European activists.2 The multiplicity of anarchisms present in the MAM became immediately evident and made any encounters more difficult and complex. The geographical, linguistic and organizational differences exacerbated by meeting management arrangements all served to undermine cohesion among the participants. According to the participants background the meeting could be divided into two groups: (i) individual anarchists, mostly English-speaking, aged between 20 and 30, who participated in autonomous collectives; (ii) Tunisian anarchists, without militancy on the basis of anarchist organizations, but with militancy in other fields and who belonged to The Libertarian Commune, the Federation of Emancipatory Forces, Union of Unemployed Graduates (UCD)3 and the Association Victoire For Rural Women.4 There were two main debates that took place during the initial encounter and that underpinned the key aspects of the dialogue between the Global North’s and Global South’s anarchisms. The first debate revolved around the objectives of the meeting and the expectations of those who participated in it. The second was solely on participation. The two groups had differing goals and expectations for the meeting: Some wanted to create an anarchist network that would continue the revolutionary process began in 2010; and those who understood the network as a “space for the exchange of experiences and information”5 ; the latter group was predominantly composed by activists from the Global North. Among the participants who understood the meeting as a continuation of an unfinished revolutionary process was the Egyptian Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM) which, in its communiqué of the meeting, understood the importance of the creation of an “anarchist network” of “revolutionary power” (LSM 2015). The Egyptian LSM as well as the Tunisian CL were the first two anarchist groups to emerge in the two countries due to the political opportunity that the Arab revolutions provided.6 Composed by different subjectivities, with wide age diversity but composed of mostly men, both groups had the intention to push the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions forward and continuing with the ethos “the revolution continues”. For the LC as well as for the LSM one

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of the main goals of the MAM was for “the union of libertarian forces in the Mediterranean to confront the policy of oppression and exploitation adopted by the majority of the states in the region against their peoples” (LC 2015b). Therefore, it would be necessary to: unite and coordinate in order to confront all forms of extremism, regardless of their religious, ethnic or other things, which could paralyze the will of peoples to liberate themselves and detach themselves from the authority of capitalism. (LC 2015a)

For LC, the anarchist Mediterranean network’s main objective was that of fighting against capitalism and all its forms of exploitation, oppression and extremism. The second of the goals set during the meeting was to create an “information and news exchange network”. While LSM saw this as an opportunity to create a “revolutionary network” and the LC saw it as a way to fight against capitalism and all its forms of oppression, other participants and groups thought the main goal of the meeting was “to discuss the situation in the region and try to create a working group to facilitate coordination and cooperation”. This cooperation would have the purpose of “exchanging analysis and information from a libertarian, nonauthoritarian point of view” (Fédération Anarchiste 2015). The majority of Global North anarchists used the forum as an opportunity to exchange anarchist experiences and mutual support for the creation of libertarian alternatives in the Mediterranean region and beyond, while the South Mediterranean anarchists, mainly represented by the LSM and the LC, desired the forum to be a first step toward the creation of a revolutionary network that would confront common problems: capitalism, racism, repression and counterrevolution, and thus continue the revolutionary process begun in 2011. In essence, the group was divided by those who wished to push the Mediterranean revolutions forward through a joined strategy, while others wanted the meetings to adopt a didactical and theoretical approach. Another point of contention, which the group hoped to resolve in the first meeting, revolved around who could participate in the Mediterranean Anarchist Network. The importance of this question revealed the differing definitions that participants had for the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchism’. For some participants, mostly within the Tunisian revolutionary movement (who had not previously held specific ideological tendencies or political party affiliation) could be considered to be more libertarian

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in their actions and political performance. This predominantly included members of the Tunisian revolutionary movement, which functioned in a horizontal and non-hierarchical manner, did not explicitly call themselves “anarchists”, but still wanted to be part of MAM. The Union of Unemployed Graduates, the most advanced and organized social movement in contemporary Tunisia, whose members participated in the MAM, had the goal to continue with a “network of struggle”. What they meant by that is that the Tunisian Revolution had seen the unification of social and political actors on the streets, however, these forces, four years after the social uprising of 2011, were no longer active in the country. The Union of Unemployed Graduates believed that calling oneself anarchist should not be a condition for the union to join the anarchist struggle, since the purpose was to advance and enhance the common revolutionary objective. It is worth mentioning that the Union of Unemployed Graduates has been and still is the protagonist of the most important social mobilizations campaigns in the country and are a fundamental part of the worker’s struggles. They represent the demands of the marginalized youth, with one of the highest rate of unemployment in the world. They have held protests since 2000 until the fall of Ben Ali and this organization is at the vanguard of any revolutionary movement. For other anarchist groups, generally those of European background, this ideological point did not need to be discussed, as they understood, all participants at the meeting shared a common denominator: a concrete common history through their self-identification as “anarchists”. As the first Mediterranean anarchist meeting, the MAM created a space for anarchists on either side of the Mediterranean to debate the main discrepancies that were key to the configuration of a common path for anarchism. These debates centered around two fundamental questions that are essential to the decolonization of anarchism: What is anarchism? What is the history of anarchism? These questions, which were ultimately left unanswered by the MAM, are central to building an activist practice, particularly in the current dialogue between different anarchists from the Global North and the Global South and also to the possible creation of a common anarchist narrative that does not reproduce the power dynamics of European libertarian thought.

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Canonical History of Anarchism The goal of Chapter 1 was to define the parameters of anarchism. In this chapter, after revisiting the Tunisian MAM meeting in 2015, my goal is to answer to an intrinsically related question: What is the history of anarchism? Is there a common history among the heterogeneous experiences of anarchism? These questions are of primary importance among activists when searching for a common ground for the anarchist movement, as the Tunisian MAM demonstrated. Adhering to or refusing a particular label can be related to how a concept’s history is perceived and to what extent one feels to be a part of that history. However, it is important to contemplate whether the history has given equal weight to anarchist and anti-authoritarian experiences in non-Western contexts: What is this canonical history?7 What might history have left behind in this context? It is important to discuss the question of representation when reviewing the constructed canonical history of anarchism. Süriyya Türkely correctly suggested that “historical representation has had and continues to have an influence on contemporary debates and politics” (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 2).8 Matthew Adams (2013) in his article on the special issue “Blasting the Canon” issued by the journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies affirms that the idea of the anarchist canon is rooted “in the disciplinary dominance of political theory in anarchist studies’ recent past” (Adams 2013, p. 38). This is how the canonical history of anarchism has been constructed. Its beginnings start with the formation of doctrinal principles in the European revolutionary momentum of 1848. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a French politician and founder of mutualism, was the first to self-identify as an “anarchist”. Before then, the word ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchy’ had only been used pejoratively by conservative factions during the French Revolution (such as the Girondins) to refer to people who opted for self-management, integral federalism and workers’ possession of labor tools and means of production (Cappelletti 1985, p. 37). From this perspective, it was unthinkable to be against both the monarchy and the republic at the time. With William Godwin’s publication of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), British Enlightenment is said to have been the precedent to anarchist thought and the first articulation of modern anarchism as an anti-hierarchical and anti-static worldview. Godwin’s book formed the basis of the English radical movement. Similarly, Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803) wrote Conjuration des Égaux (Conspiracy of the

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Equals) (1796) during the French Revolution, declaring to the people of France that the production of the land should be better divided. Sylvain Maréchal’s work opened the doors for utopian socialism that was encouraged by several different historical figures. This figures helped to define the first currents of socialism. Among them we find SaintSimonianism’s steady belief in progress through industrialization, inspired by the ideas of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon; Robert Owen’s cooperative farms (prior to cooperativism); and the pacifist communism of Étienne Cabet, a French philosopher who lead a campaign of recruitment of Icarians in the United States to establish a series of egalitarian communes. This movement comprised the ideological and theoretical first steps toward anarchism. Cappelletti’s words on utopian socialism yielded important anarchist components in its advocacy for the construction of an egalitarian and just society (1985, p. 47). However, during the First International in 1864, the anarchist school of thought split from socialism. This event gave birth to two of the most important socialist currents in history: anarchism and communism. The International Workers’ Association, created by English and French workers, was the first attempt at cohesive and joint anarchist action for the emancipation of oppressed classes. However, it was evident from the beginning of the International that there were differences in the preferred approach to such action, mainly between federalists or anti-authoritarians, disciples of Bakunin and Marx, respectively. From the anarchist perspective, the concept of ‘proletarian dictatorship’, coined by Marx, made communism yield to authoritarian socialism. Cappelletti was correct when suggesting that when in power, the workers’ class party would install the dictatorship of some proletarian or some ex-proletarian, to be precise (Cappelletti 1985, p. 48), rather than establishing a “proletarian dictatorship”. Contrary to the Marxist idea of nationalization,9 for Bakunin, revolution meant the abolition—not the transfer—of State power. After the expulsion of Bakunin from the International, anarchists, mostly comprised of Bakunin’s followers, founded the Anti-Authoritarian International or the Saint-Imier International in 1873 (this was dissolved after Bakunin’s death in 1877). The Saint-Imier Anarchist International sets its main goals as: The destruction of all political power is the duty of the proletariat and the realization of the social revolution, the proletarians of all countries must establish revolutionary action solidarity outside of bourgeoisie politics (García 2003).

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The Paris Commune is typically cited as being the first self-aware anarchist experience. While this does not indicate that there were no anarchist experiences prior, as explained in Chapter 1, but rather that this was the first after the emergence of the so-called ‘idea’. The Paris Commune was a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris for more than two months in 1871. It deeply influenced the development of the anarchist movement and theory during the beginning of the twentieth century. For many activists, this was the first instance that put anarchist experiences into practice. In the Commune, citizens chose a council formed by Jacobins, republicans and socialists. The council proclaimed the autonomy of the Commune, the membership was revocable, and required that all actions were accounted for. There were many similarities between the commune and the collective imaginary of a revolution. According to Bakunin’s theory: Revolutionary socialism has just attempted its first striking and practical demonstration in the Paris Commune. I am a supporter of the Paris Commune, which, for all the bloodletting it suffered at the hands of monarchical and clerical reaction, has nonetheless grown more enduring and more powerful in the hearts and minds of Europe’s proletariat. I am its supporter above all because it was a bold, clearly formulated negation of the State. (Dolgoff 1971, pp. 263–264)

By 1880, the first indications of divergence and ramifications within the anarchist movement began to appear: collectivists versus individualists and anarcho-communists. The collectivist current adopted a greater focus on the economy and the means of production and had more support in agrarian Spain. In fact, since 1878 the International was at the forefront of the agrarian problem in Andalusia, this included riots and field burning in the name of the Black Hand (Mano Negra), a secret anarchist organization that is thought to be responsible for a series of murders. Black Hand events were part of the long and ongoing battle between the spread of anarcho-communism and anarcho-collectivism (Nettlau 2006, p. 108). Anarcho-individualism, on the other hand, emphasized the autonomy of the individual; reflecting the thinking of authors such as William Godwin, Henry David Thoreau and Max Stirner, it had a larger following in the United States, with anarcho-communism being the school of thought with greater presence through anarcho-syndicalist action throughout Europe. ‘Propaganda by the deed’ was its motto

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mainly in Italy with Enrico Malatesta at the forth-front. The core idea of anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism’s ‘propaganda by the deed’ motto promoted various types of action to motivate and attract followers to the movement. The motto led anarchism to be described as terrorist and violent due to individual attacks that arose from this ideology, however, two prominent thinkers of the movement, Malatesta and Cafiero, thought it was important to emphasize collective order. For these two anarchists, words were not enough to motivate the group or to propel the movement. Collective action was necessary to fight for a common idea without deceiving and corrupting the masses. However, ‘propaganda by the word’ was another important manner of spreading ideological thought processes at the time, with newspapers and magazines being widely published to spread certain ‘ideas’ around the world. Despite the fact that many of the most recognized anarchist thinkers in the canonical history of anarchism were from Russia, the anarchist movement did not flourish there until the Russian Revolution in 1917. Many Ukrainian peasants joined the Black Army, an anarchist guerrilla group led by Nestor Majnó (1889–1934), a young worker who was elected president of the local Soviet of Guliaipole after being released from prison in Moscow. Together with a group of anarchists and peasants, Majnó and his followers began to distribute land and the local industries among workers in the area (Woodcock 1962, p. 416). Majnó’s experience with the Black Army in its confrontation with the Nationalist White Army and Trotsky’s Communist Red Army led him, along with other thinkers (Ida Mett, Pyotr Arshínov, Valevsky, etc.) to formulate one of the factions of anarchism known as platformism, the organizational idea that advocates for the unity of members and a tight organized anarchist group in order to avoid conflicting ideas from within the group. It was during the Russian Revolution of 1917 that the need for a general organization was felt most acutely, since it was during the course of that revolution that the anarchist movement displayed the greatest degree of fragmentation and confusion. The absence of a general organization induced many anarchist militants to defect to the ranks of the Bolsheviks. It is also the reason why many other militants find themselves today in a condition of passivity that thwarts any utilization of their often immense capacities. (Arshinov 1926)

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This extract from the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (1926) was written by a group of anarchists in France and shows the preoccupation at the time with differences in the organizational structures of various anarchist groups. The pamphlet analyzed the role that militants played in organizations before and during the revolution. This was the result, according to the pamphlet, of the failure of anarchists during the Russian Revolution. The Organizational Platform revolved around four ideological and tactical principles: unity, discipline, collective action and federalism. It was not until the Spanish Civil War in 1936 that a social revolution occurred; one most influential and documented anarchist experiences in the collective imaginary. However, this experience was far from the teachings of platformism after the Russian Revolution. The Bakunist held the majority in Spain, Italy and certain parts of France. Giuseppe Fanelli, sent by Bakunin, developed the first International Workers Association (IWA) groups in Spain, and similarly to other countries, these groups were a mixture of people from different tendencies and affiliations. As Vadillo Muñoz has suggested (2019) the Civil War triggered a revolutionary process that allowed workers to articulate self-management of economic structures as well as the collectivization of land, industries and means of production, which became a “unique experiment in the history of Spain” (Vadillo Muñoz 2019, p. 236). This seizure of power was not raised within a specific organization or union, but rather through a revolutionary army and a centralized union militia, endowed with a respected national command (Skirda 2002, p. 146). The CNT, the union of anarcho-syndicalist autonomous trade unions in Spain, took control of the anarchist movement during the Spanish social revolution which, during World War I, had more than one million members. In Barcelona, under the control of the CNT, industries were expropriated, money was replaced by coupons, and state administration authorities were completely replaced: “In Catalonia the CNT and its conscious minority, the FAI, were more powerful than the authorities, who had become mere phantoms” (Guérin 1970, p. 120). However, most studies on this period agree that the Spanish social revolution’s anarchist experiment failed after their entry into the government of Catalonia in October 1936 (Guérin 1970, p. 128). A month later, the CNT reached an agreement with the prime minister of the central government, Largo Caballero, in which they split the Defence National Council’s (Consejo Nacional de Defensa) seats. Through this,

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the anarchists accepted the portfolios of two governments: first in Catalonia and then in Madrid. The anarchists’ flirtation with the ruling and bourgeoisie class was perceived by the international anarchist movement as a betrayal that was contrary to the anarchist cause. However, despite these contradictions, the CNT thought this compromise to be necessary to the fight against both fascism and the military rebellion in Spain. This experience has been widely undervalued and slandered by authoritarian socialism, which has not properly considered the historical context and value of the decision. A theory regarding Spain’s sporadic transition to anarchism emerged after the above events took place. This theory suggested that anarchism as it was ended in 1939 with the Spanish Civil War and re-emerged with the counter-cultural movements of the New Left in 1968, known as new anarchism. In addition, the Spanish anarchist experience marked the end of what the canonical historiography has labeled as classical anarchism. According to this chronology, classical anarchism began with the formulation of the anarchist doctrine at the end of the nineteenth century and ended with the Spanish anarchist experiment. After, the world experienced a complete absence of anarchist movements; although this is a controversial chronology of anarchist history. Evren Türkeli (2012, p. 20) correctly identified classical anarchism as a fixed ideology represented through a select group of nineteenth-century anarchist authors whose ideas have been simplified to confirm a series of prejudices regarding the nature of classical anarchism (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 20). The discussion around ‘classical’ versus ‘new’ within anarchism emerged after the paradigm shift of 1968. ‘Classical’ anarchism was both opposed to and helped to put into perspective the formulation of ‘new’ anarchism. In “The New Anarchists” (2002) published in the Marxist journal New Left Review, David Graeber conceptualizes the idea of ‘new’ within anarchism in the spectrum of anarchist historiography. Graeber explains how the anti-globalization movements after the 1999 Seattle events and the emergence of the Zapatistas gave birth to a new form of activism that was decentralized, horizontal, international, anti-hierarchical and global which adopted much of anarchist ideology, although did not come directly from the anarchist movements of the nineteenth century. For Graeber, these movements focus on networks, horizontality and decentralization with the main goal of tackling capitalism and the neoliberal order (Graeber 2002, p. 70).

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Independently of David’s Graeber’s article, the term ‘new anarchism’ started to be used in activist circles (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 19) and conceptualized an epistemological turn that started in the 1960s. The Paris uprisings in May 1968 saw students and workers unite in protest, resulting in confrontations with local police authorities, as well as Situationist International ideology; these protests had a profound impact in the development of anarchism during this period. The protester’s theoretical commitments to ideas such as anti-racism, feminism, situationism led the movement in a new direction in the critique of hierarchical systems (Amster 2009, p. 4). Furthermore, the encounter of anarchism with post-structuralist theories resulted in an on-growing interest in anarchism at the theoretical and academic levels.10 Post-anarchism (Newman 2003), post-modern anarchism (Call 2002) or post-structuralist anarchism (May 1994) as it has been called, tied anarchism to a series of critical theories at the time such as feminism, black rights movements, queer and postcolonial studies, and also provided an anti-authoritarian criticism of the left. Therefore, the term ‘post’, as in other ‘post’ rejects the epistemological foundation of classical anarchism. In Post-Modern Anarchism (2002), Lewis Call defines it as follows: The project of postmodern feminism, then -much like the project of postmodern anarchism which I shall outline below – is concerned with articulating strategies for the subversion of the Law as a psychological, linguistic, and epistemological category. (Call 2002, p. 6)

Despite the various forms of anarchism that existed during the twentieth century, nationalist, liberal and left-wing historiography portrays a ‘theory of anarchism’s failure’, suggesting that anarchism was unable to achieve the desired objectives or adequately respond to social needs during its peak (first half of the twentieth century). This negative view of anarchism’s history has predominated in nationalist, liberal, Marxist and even anarchist literature. However, authors such as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (2010) have framed the “failure of anarchism” as a “historiographic failure” where partisan-centric narratives have taken over this history, particularly with regard to the leftist and anti-authoritarian experiences in the Arab context.

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The Ongoing Postcolonial Debate Anarchism and Eurocentrism In the study of anarchist history, the hierarchy of knowledge has been unidirectional: the West versus the rest of the world. The concept of the ‘West’ designates a social and political power and, at the same time, mystifies this power. The typical construct of the West is not a concrete group of states but a ‘civilization’ which is indeterminate and porous. The West can be understood not as a geographical category but as a sociopolitical and ideological construction with fluid boundaries. In postcolonial studies, the ‘West’ as a category does not have a concrete, coherent or credible reference point by which to gauge inclusion of a particular nation. Neil Lazarus states that: “It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one, just as -in the context of modern orientalist discourse- ‘Islam’ is an ideological category masquerading as a religious one” (2004, p. 44). Thus, when considering Chinese, Indian, Tunisian or Palestinian anarchism, as previously discussed by Evren Türkeli, writers typically only deal with case studies and have to demonstrate a broad understanding of Western anarchist history (mainly from Europe and the United States). However, when studying anarcho-syndicalism as a global phenomenon, Chinese, Indian, Tunisian or Palestinian anarchism is rarely taken as a global reference. This is the case because historical and geographical knowledge is eminently European and Eurocentric. Eurocentrism begins with the encounter of the Other. European identity was formed by making recourse to nations outside of Europe, mainly Asia and the Middle East. For that reason, the borders of Europe are porous and malleable. As Maria Dainotto suggests: A modern European identity, in other words, begins when the non-Europe is internalized – when the south, indeed, becomes the sufficient and indispensable internal Other: Europe, but also the negative part of it. (Dainotto 2007, p. 4)

Homogenizing the idea of Europe is as dangerous as homogenizing the idea of the Other. The rhetorical unconscious of the idea of Europe, as Dainotto calls it, has shaped the way in which Eurocentrism has operated in academia and beyond. The historians of anarchism have clearly exposed and designed main milestones within anarchist theory and the

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anarchist movement. However, to date, historians have adopted a Eurocentric perspective and reproduced already established models of world history (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 96). However, Europe also has its own internal movements that have been marginalized as being in opposition to its core identity: the Anglo-Franco-German Enlightenment and Romanticism. Europe, therefore, as an ideological structure of fluid borders creates its own Other, its own Orientals, its own marginalized groups depending of the necessities of the Empire. In his doctoral dissertation, Cañete (2009) explores how the same arguments were used by France in order to secure its colonial interests in Africa and Asia as well as for its interventionist intentions within Europe itself, in countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain. Thus, it is not only unwise to propose a homogeneous image of an Africa opposed to a civilized Europe, but it is just as limited to think of the homogeneity of Europe that at that time - and still today - was about to be created. The fact that many parts of the Old Continent -including parts of France itself- did not respond to the ideals of civilization and therefore entered into a game of identification with African territories says a lot in this sense. (Cañete 2009, p. 9)

Neither Europe nor Africa are configured chronologically or synchronically as homogenous identities. Many areas of the ancient European continent did not identify with their concept of civilization and opted instead to identify with African territories. The genealogy of Europe as an ideological concept has varied significantly through the years and has necessarily depended on European understandings of what ‘uncivilized’, ‘non-political’ and ‘non-human’ meant at any given time. The Argentinian political scientist Enrique Dussel (2000) has studied the conceptual change of ‘Europe’ as a concept alongside its history and semantic changes from the Phoenicians to the Enlightenment. Through these studies, it is demonstrated how European frontiers, which delimits the European understanding of civilized from the uncivilized, have varied throughout history, finally arriving at the concept of Europe today, where the myth of modernity emerges. Dussel explains that this myth situates ‘Modernity’ as the center of history. The Modern Civilization emerges as the most developed and superior civilization and forces peoples perceived as lesser developed (primitives, roughs, barbarians, immature societies) to

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follow its path as a moral imperative. This logic then uses violence as a necessary modern praxis to ensure the continuance and spread of the civilizational process. Violence is inevitable to fulfill the task of modernizing and saving the victims from barbarism and dystopia. In our context, Europe, as the modernizing power, presents itself as an innocent emancipatory entity that must fight against the natural ‘guilt’ of its own colonial victims (Dussel 2000, p. 49). These reasons explain why historians of anarchism in non-Western contexts have been generally excluded from the anarchist canon. Although anarchism has been concerned with the issues of domination and oppression, the concepts of race and ethnicity have not been the subject of exhaustive analysis in anarchist literature (see Chapter 2). If, on rare occasions, these non-Western anarchisms were mentioned, “… they are not mentioned as foundational elements of anarchism, but as mere expressions (of the core European anarchist ideals) in different cultures (where ‘different’ means other than European)” (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 84). Thus, when ‘the idea’ travels from Italy to Spain is considered part of the foundational core and is a natural extension of it, even if anarchism (as an ideology of the First International) was introduced in Spain by Giuseppe Fanelli, an Italian revolutionary and anarchist. On the other hand, when ‘the idea’ travels to Latin America, the Arab world or Southeast Asia, it is considered a ‘migrant’, ‘imported’ and ‘imitated’ idea (Evren Türkeli 2012, pp. 100–101). The metageographical distinction between the West and the rest of the world is particularly debilitating when married to a key metahistorical concept: the notion that the West is coincident with modernity and that the non-West can enter the modern world only to the extent that it emulates the norms established in Europe and northern North America. (Lewis and Wingen 1997, p. 7)

In this sense, the European academy and academics studying anarchism demonstrate a deeply Hegelian concept of history. In fact, the very concept of ‘classical anarchism’ itself plays an important role in the construction of Western Eurocentric anarchism. Jason Adams’ critique of the dichotomy between ‘classical’ versus ‘post’ anarchism breaks the logic of historicism applied by European historians. This logic exports European history to all other histories, of any and all origins. He considers it necessary to break from the ‘classical anarchism’ and ‘post-anarchism’

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binary when dealing with the history of anarchism. From his perspective, the notion of classical anarchism plays a fundamental role in the construction of the concept of Western anarchisms, since ‘classical’ is always used to refer to anarchisms of the West and is never applied to nonWestern anarchisms. Thus, the chronological understanding of progress within the history of anarchism and its different currents turns out to be a problematic fallacy. Jason Adams’ “Non-Western Anarchisms” (2002) is perhaps one of the first texts dealing with the historical anarchist writings and criticizing its Eurocentric approach. For Adams, the various histories of anarchism do not fully recognize the spectrum of thought that has existed globally within anarchist thought pools, nor do they recognize the connections between early and modern ideas (Adams 2002, p. 6). In his article ‘Postanarchism and the 3rd World’ (2006), Süreyyya Evren Turkeli analyzes the eminently European ideological bases of post-anarchist thinkers. Like their post-modern counterparts (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc.), the post-anarchist authors attempt to subvert the logic of European modernity and avoid the fact that the encounter with the ‘Other’ through colonization was the initial point of this theoretical paradigm. This paradigm has led some authors (Saul Newman, Todd May, Lewis Carroll) to once again obviate anarchist authors and experiences outside the European matrix and continue to feed the Eurocentric logic of their ‘classical’ predecessors. Anarchism and Anti-colonialism Modernity and colonialism are two sides of the same coin. Anarchism, as the privileged child of modernity, replicates the characteristics of what Anibal Quijano (2000) calls the coloniality of power, the coloniality of being and the coloniality of knowledge. While the coloniality of power is the device that allows for the reproduction of colonial difference with the goal being to dominate and exploit, the coloniality of knowledge refers to an epistemic mechanism that allows the continuation of coloniality of power, that is, obliterating and silencing of other forms of knowledge that are not a replication or an imitation of Western epistemology. Finally, the coloniality of being refers to colonized people’s experience with colonization (Gimeno 2012, p. 151). Under this perspective, anarchism has had, at times, a contradictory relationship with the decolonization processes and anti-colonial struggles. While there is an increasing body of literature detailing the anarchist position on colonization and anti-colonial

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struggles, in many cases, the anarchist stance toward colonialism has not adequately defined itself in this regard as one would expect from a political philosophy that a priori has the goal to fight against all kinds of oppression. Enrico Malatesta’s visits to and participation in the 1882 anti-colonial Urabi Revolution in Egypt has been well documented. In 1878, he was falsely accused of organizing the attack on Umberto I, which later led to his extradition to Syria. His return later that year allowed him to participate in the nationalist and anti-colonial revolution. His intention was to transform the nationalist revolution into a social revolution. However, the issue of colonialism was not a priority for Italian and other European anarchists in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Chapter 5). In other contexts, anarchists fought anti-colonial struggles to advance the social revolution. In India, M. P. T. Acharya’s effort to turn Indian nationalist struggle into an international anarchist one is worth mentioning in this regard. Closely working with European and Southern Mediterranean anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists comrades of the time, such as the Egyptian Rifaat (no more information in known about him), Acharya returned to India in 1935 and started to closely and tirelessly work within the international anarchist scene: “Ultimately, for Acharya the question of Indian independence was connected to greater questions about individual freedom through anarchist philosophy” (Acharya 2019, p. 33). In the same way, Corean anarchism, from the 1920s onwards, also worked closely to transnational trajectories of anarchist at the time, mainly Japanese and Chinese activists, in their common search of social justice and against Japanese imperialism of the region. Although anarchism emerged in Corea a decade later than it did in Japan or China, and mainly through the Corean students and exiles in Japan and China helped at later creating an important anarchist movement in the peninsula. Their efforts focused not so much on the national Corean independence but on the construction on a society based on anarchist principles (Hwang and MacSimon 2014, p. 17). Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anticolonial Imagination (2013) continues his legacy of Imagined Communities (1983) making an examination of anti-colonial mobilization at the end of the century in Philippines. To this end, Anderson connects the nationalist insurrections in Cuba and the Philippines through interpersonal trajectories and networks of novelists, activists and academics who

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formed a complex network of personalities, documents, global events and disputed narratives, while attempting to “map the gravitational forces of anarchism between militant nationalism and the opposing forces of the planet” (Anderson 2013, p. 19). Through this, Anderson draws the readers’ attention to the textuality of these transnational encounters in the era of initial globalization and at the same time demonstrates how anarchism participated in the anti-colonial struggles in places such as the Philippines and Cuba. However, it is important to bear in mind that some members of these transnational anti-colonial trajectories belonged to semi-colonized parts of Spain, such as the Canary Islands. The iconic figure of Cuban independence, José Martí (1853–1895), was of Canarian descent, as were numerous fighters in the Cuban Revolution. Secundino Delgado (1867– 1912) a Canarian anarchist who fought under the three flags articulated a Canarian anti-colonial project from Venezuela (1896–1898) while also participating in anti-authoritarian transatlantic networks discussed by Anderson. The experiences of Secundino Delgado and many other Spaniards not from the mainland problematize the role of Spanish anarchists in transatlantic networks during the late nineteenth century, since there was a sense of in-betweenness of their identities (Galván-Álvarez 2017a, p. 255). Further examination of the Spanish case and its Moroccan colonies yields several odd instances during which anarchists participated and even supported anti-colonial struggles and decolonization processes. This is best exemplified by the writer Ramón J. Sender (1901–1982), after his completion of mandatory military service (1922) in colonial Morocco during the Spanish-Moroccan Rif war (1921–1927). Sender gave an account of the anti-colonial process in various anarchist newspapers of the time. This included La Tierra, and El Telegrama del Rif , a former Spanish newspaper published in Melilla who defended Spain’s interests in Morocco and which, during the years of World War I, Abd el-Krim turned into an anti-French propaganda. Sender’s novel Iman (1930) illustrates his vision of the anti-colonial war in Morocco between 1921 and 1924 after the battle of Annual (1921) between the Spanish Army of Africa and Berber combatants of the Rif region. In this novel, he adopts an anti-militarist position. However, not all Spanish anarchists adopted the same position on Morocco, Moroccans or the colonial war. In fact, Martin Baxmeyer

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(2015) argued that anarchists during the Spanish Civil War adopted Francoist and fascist concepts that revolved around nationalist, essentialist and racist ideas for their discourse. This included the idea of an ‘Iberian family’ of ‘mother Spain’ (Baxmeyer 2015, p. 195). Linked by blood, these anarchists analyzed the Spanish Civil War as a second Reconquista, appropriating the collective meaning of the term that symbolized the long war against the Arabs of the Iberian Peninsula (Baxmeyer 2015, p. 196). Baxmeyer concludes that anarchist wartime literature was violent toward the ‘Moors’ and propagated racists stereotypes when describing them, similarly to the discourse of Italian anarchists in Egypt. During the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the vast majority of Spanish anarchist exiles adopted a non-interventionist position. While sympathetic to the revolt against the oppressive and colonial French regime, many Spanish exiles also expressed to FLN leaders their fear that the revolution might replace “French political and economic exploitation with that of Algerians themselves, be encumbered by the heavy conservative weight of Islam, and result in inhuman and racist terrorist attacks against non-combatant pieds-noirs ” (Porter 2011, p. 22). For many Spanish anarchists at the time, including the prominent author Miguel Martinez, there was no motivation to mobilize in solidarity with the Algerian struggle (as cited in Porter 2011, p. 22). While the Spanish experience of anarchism is one of the most discussed and remembered within the collective anarchist imagination, the relationship between revolutionaries and the question of colonization is still not entirely clear. As the anarchist academic Carlos Taibo (2018) suggested, anarchist responses to colonialism were not accompanied by anti-colonial discourse. In fact, the transnational and internationalist aspect of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century and the global spread of this ideology was parallel to the expansion of colonialism.

Anarchism and Islam: An Unrecognized Encounter In March 2015, when I attended the first Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting in Tunisia, a member of the French CNT questioned the possibility that anarchism and religion could be two driving forces in the same political space in an informal conversation we had during a break. For the French cenetist, anarchism (as if there was just one possibility to practice and experience it) could not be considered as such if mixed with religion.

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Echoing Auguste Blanqui in 1880, he believed that the political tradition of anarchism was incompatible when paired with service to any God or other master. Although there are numerous historical examples that foster the ability to form a fruitful relationship between anarchism and religion, despite their sometimes uneasy tensions, the CNT member dismissed it. This understanding of anarchism rejects throughout an authoritarian exercise over the conceptual limits of anarchism as a political philosophy any possibility of an encounter between the two. The apparent dichotomy between many religious tradition that require obedience to God (with Islam as particularly problematic as it requires complete submission), and anarchism, as a tradition contrary to all authority, when taken outside of a white perspective, can merge to encourage the formation of new strategies for emancipation. An increasing amount of scholarship has dealt with the intersection of religion and anarchism in recent years. The academic analysis of this overlap is currently attracting new interest and attention. The works of Alexandre Christoyannopoulus and Matthew Adams (2017, 2018) testify to this trend. The two books aim to open a forum for dialogue and debate on the overlap between anarchism and religion; the end goal being to not only identify the resonance between anarchist and religious believes, but also to highlight examples of joint practice and past experiences. The overlap of anarchism and religion has proven to be a fruitful space for discursive and practical formulations on models of emancipation, but also for orientalist imagination. Galván-Álvarez (2017b) interestingly demonstrates how an analysis of Shinran Shonin’s libertarian and non-authoritarian teachings (1173–1263) is necessary in order to question (orientalists and ahistorical) readings of Western Buddhist anarchist tradition, which is rooted in a non-religious, meditative and rational idea of Buddhism. In fact, Galván-Álvarez argues that Shiran’s Buddhism contributes to the deconstruction of this tradition but also to the articulation of an alternative Buddhist anarchist project. This section’s goal is to underline some of the different (discursive and performative) ways in which the intersection between anarchism and religion (specifically Islam) has been established. My intention is not to add further examples, but rather to reflect upon already established literature and examine the cultural, political and individual projects that merge the expression of these two traditions. My goal is to shed light in the corpus of subjectivities, works and debates (academic or otherwise)

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that attempted to define overlap between two traditions often considered to be contradictory. I choose to focus on Islam because it is the majority religion for populations within the Arabic-speaking contexts, which this book deals with. Of course, Islam is not the only religion in the region. In fact, it is rather interesting to see how many of the Southern Mediterranean anarchist movements that have emerged after the 2011 Revolutions articulate anarchism from a non-religious perspective (which does not necessarily mean that their adherents are all atheists or agnostics). To the contrary, many anarchists I encountered during my research were Muslims or Christians, but presented a different relationship with their faith. For the majority of these people, their religious belief was not mutually exclusive or even an interference in their political ideology. Rather, they understood religion as an individualized spiritual question. In the Western political sphere, religion is generally believed to be an institutional power at odds with the state, which religious devotees are seen as trying to abolish. In fact, the majority of formulations in which anarchism and Islam both play a role in people’s politics and subcultures have come from Western contexts, not from Southern Mediterranean ones. These formulations therefore speak to the necessities of anarchist and Muslim communities in the West rather than on the necessities of those in Southern Mediterranean contexts. However, its analysis can shed light on the emancipatory possibilities within these two traditions. Public interest in anarchism and Islam has grown rapidly in the last decade. Seen as an antagonist set of ideas, the intersection between anarchism and Islam has proven to be a productive space for contention. As one of the few researchers who has investigated the intersections between anarchism and Islam for more than a decade, Anthoni Fiscella’s article ‘Varieties of Islamic Anarchism. A Brief Introduction’11 (2014) argues that “Though the internal debates continue regarding what can really justifiably be called “anarchism”, there is, as within Islam, no central authority within the anarchist tradition that can definitively settle the debate” (Fiscella 2014, p. 7). Since there is no central authority which defines anarchism or Islam, both traditions are adaptable and can be redefined by their adherents. Fiscella’s article attempts to systematize the broad body of the existing work on the matter: identify the concepts and theoretical formulations in what he calls ‘Islamic anarchism’, in which anarchism goes from unionism to miniarchism (minimum state) to a broad discursive Islamic tradition that includes its own heresies and ‘deviations’ (Fiscella 2014, p. 12).

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On Anarcho-Orientalism The existence of individuals who, in one way or another, identify themselves as both anarchists and Muslims and who have tried to make sense of both identities dates back to the nineteenth century. To date, most of these individuals have been Europeans who, after their first contact with anarchism, converted to Islam, and ultimately moved to Arab countries to develop both identities into a form of ‘libertarian orientalism’. Orientalism typically refers to the wave of sociologists, anthropologists, academics and artists who traveled to the Middle East to study and learn the various cultures, and who were inspired by their own projections of the ‘East’ and the ‘Orient’. John Gustaf Agelii (1869–1917) represents this trend. Known also as Abdul Hadi al-Aqili, John was an militant anarchist and artist. Born in Sala, Sweden on May 29, 1869, to a family of prosperous farmers (with aristocratic connections on his mother’s side), he showed great talent from an early age and was sent to Gotland and Stockholm to foster academic pursuits. However, following his passion, he chose to become an artist at the age of 20. A friend to many famous painters of the time, including Renoir, Van Gogh and Manet, he developed his artistic talent within the European environment alongside his spiritual belief and adherence to the anarchist movement throughout of the time. In 1890, he moved to Paris in search of artistic opportunities and started learning both Arabic and Hebrew, and took up a strong interest in esotericism and metaphysics. Within a few years, in 1894, Gustaf Agelii traveled to Cairo to deepen his understanding of Islam; he converted around 1898–1899.12 Although he never wrote about anarchism and Islam together, there were occasions when he attempted to draw parallels among the two: He called Andalusian thinkers such as Ibn Arabi a ‘feminist’ (Fiscella 2014, p. 2) The trajectory of Isabelle Eberhard (1877–1904) also fits the libertarian orientalist trend of the nineteenth century.13 Born in Sweden, Isabelle was raised with a bourgeois education and learned classical Arabic. From her childhood, she preferred to dress in men’s clothing, as this helped her enjoy freedoms she did not have as a woman in Swedish society at the time. While growing up, her tutor Trophimowsky, an anarchist who was associated with Mikhail Bakunin, brought her up in this tradition. Following her brother Augustin’s transfer with the French Foreign Legion to Algeria, Isabelle’s interest in the “East” increased. After the

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death of her parents, and after cutting ties with her siblings, she re-named herself Si Mahmoud Essadi in a continuous process of queerization and began her journey in the South of the Mediterranean. Dressed as a young Tunisian scholar, she traveled from Tunis to Algeria, added Arabic dialects to her formal Arabic knowledge and quickly adopted to Algerian daily life (Eberhardt 2001, p. 10). She converted to Islam and moved to Algeria in 1897 with her mother, where she had contact with the Sufi order Qadiriyya, which had a particularly large following in Northern Africa. This tariqa—sufist order—adopts a decentralized leadership style where all followers are free to adopt their own interpretation—a practice that is particularly interesting in the context of anarchism. After the death of her mother in Algeria, she focused on helping the poor and fighting the colonial regime until her own death in 1904. She left behind interesting writings that contributed to anarchist theory, particularly as it pertains to the intersection of a de-centralized Islamic belief. In her pamphlet, On Vagancry, she calls for the right to be a vagrant and “the freedom to wander” as the essence of freedom, which The Abolition of Work by Bob Black examines: Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which open modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out! (Eberhardt 2011)

Perhaps one of the most paradigmatic cases of the so-called libertarian orientalism of the nineteenth century is that of the Italian anarchist and Sufi, Leda Rafanelli (1880–1971).14 Born in Pistoia, a small village near Livorno, on July 4, 1880. Not much is known about her childhood, family, upbringing or indeed even about her trip to Egypt with her family at the age of 20. This contradictory character in her ideological alliances found herself immersed in the anarchist Italo-Egyptian community of Alexandria and participated in the “Baracca Rossa” (the red shack) associated with Enrico Pea. Alongside Italo-Egyptian writers such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Leda converted to Islam and started learning Arabic.15 In her first encounter with anarchism, she adopted an ideology closer to anarcho-individualism, however, she grew more and more interested in libertarian socialism at the same time as she began to explore Sufism. For Leda, Islam was, above all, a critique and rebellion against

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the Western world and she therefore tended to Orientalize her persona, adopting the language and traditions of the “East” as essential, homogenous and authentic; a land where she had belonged for generations. In Memorie d’una chiromante (Memories of a fortune teller) (2010) the Italian sufi-anarchist declared that: I have Arab blood in my veins: my maternal grandfather was the natural son of a Tunisian gypsy. From an early age I have expressed the oriental tendencies of my soul: in prayer, which instead of joining hands turned them upside down, with palms facing the sky, and instinctively oriented me towards the East. In my family I was considered “extravagant”. (Rafanelli 2010, p. 9)

On Anarcho-Ijtihad There have been several attempts, from both external and internal agents, to postulate the anarchist and libertarian potentials of Islam, or the Islamizing potentiality of anarchism. This has been done by examining the commonalities of both traditions beyond rigid and stereotypical readings. Among these anarcho-Muslim subjectivities, many adhere to Sufism, finding many anti-authoritarian characteristics in this spiritual branch of Islam. In fact, Sufism, as was the case of Leda Rafanelli, has been perceived by Westerners and anarchists as a marginal, spiritual and rebellious tradition within Islam. For Ahmet T. Karamustafa (2007), early Islamic mysticism harbored “anarchist” tendencies—such as Iraq-based Sufism—continues to be assimilated as form of license and “iconoclastic social behaviour” (Karamustafa 2007, p. 177). In 2005 the account of a converted Muslim appeared in the form of Ihsan’s blog (2005) (there is not much information on the author or where this blog entry was written). The author appears to be a converted Muslim in the West; Ihsan’s account is part confession part testimony that anarchism as a political philosophy and identity and Islam as a religion and spiritual set of beliefs can coexist. And so in the Name of Allah, I testify that there is no god but God and Muhammad (aws) is God’s prophet and messenger; and in seeking to establish a peaceful and loving relationship with The One through revelation, reason and God’s signs, I hereby refuse to compromise with any form of institutional power, be it judicial, religious, social, corporate or political, insha Allah. (Ihsan 2005)

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The Spanish-Muslim activist Abdennur Prado (1967–) also exemplifies this trend although he distances himself from Sufism. In his book El islam como anarquismo místico (Islam as Mystical Anarchism) (2010) he tries to look for analogies “beyond the differences” between Islam and anarchism. For him, it is not about making a forced comparison between the two but about acknowledging their common elements (Prado 2010, p. 20). Prado uses the term ‘mystical anarchism’ to investigate the natures of both Islam and anarchism. According to Abdennur, examining both traditions helps to rethink the forms of resistance necessary to seek what both traditions yearn for: a just society. In this, he does not seek to formulate a concrete political ideology, but to reconsider both traditions in complementary ways. The goal is twofold: on the one hand, to rescue the libertarian elements of Islam, and on the other, to see the points of encounter between the two and shed light on new strategies for emancipation. … there is an anarchist background inherent in Islam. This anarchism deserves to be put in the foreground, in front of the representations set up by the repressive mass media apparatus, but also, in front of the reactionary Islamic clerics, that have transformed it into a State religion, at the service of the planetary dominion of the great financial corporations of the West. (Prado 2010, p. 22)

However, one of the most interesting and yet unknown interpretations of the overlap between anarchism and Islam is that of Canadian Muslim anarchist and decolonial scholar Mohamed Jean Veneuse’s ‘Anarca-Islam’.16 In his master’s thesis, Jean Veneuse wrote a tafsir— exegesis—and a manifesto on the post-anarchist aspects of Islam, without privileging any of its tradition. In fact, Jean Veneuse tries to identify the relation of Islam, anarchism and the capitalist-state as a critique to classical Western anarchism as a “Euro, logo, phallocentric” tradition (Veneuse 2011, pp. 62–63). In order to accomplish this task, he uses the tools of Anarchic-Ijtihad as an interpretative framework of Anarca-Islam. Deriving his arguments from the Sunnah and the Quran through shurah (consultation), ijma (consensus) and maslaha (public interest) he opens the “gates of Ijtihad” as was the goal in the classical era thought process, even if there are multiple of cases in which this mechanism have been used for legal change and it has always remained a subject of debate for Muslim scholars. In fact, for Veneuse Ijtihad is a mechanism of resistance against the notion

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that Islam is a monolithic discursive tradition. He defines Anarchic-Ijtihad as: Anarchic-Ijtihad is committed to identifying and re-interpreting, if necessary, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian principles in the Sunnah and the Koran. I use Anarchic-Ijtihad to identify these anarchic commitments in Islam, so that the interpretation I am advocating for, Anarca-Islam, resonates with anarchism. Similarly, I use Anarchic-Ijtihad to reread Islamic anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian commitments in anarchism so that they resonate with Anarca-Islam. Because Anarchic-Ijtihad is an anarchically oriented ijtihad it is not only a form of critical or discursive form of analysis. Anarchic-Ijtihad, by virtue of the very definition of ijtihad, is a method I use to make judgements in favour of Anarca-Islam. It also affords me the ability to critique interpretations of Islam that do not uphold Anarca-Islam’s anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist commitments. I regard these commitments as Islamic commitments, just as I regard them as anarchist commitments. Anarca-Islam too is the method I use to coalesce the individual anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist concepts and practices from Islam. (Veneuse 2009, p. 42)

Even while he focuses on two commitments, anti-capitalism and antiauthoritarianism, as the basis of classical anarchism, his conception of a non-authoritarian notion of Anarca-Islam constantly made anew does not limit him to these two. Rather, this interpretation allows for future expansions of the commitments that can include, but are not limited to: anti-transphobic, anti-queerphobic, anti-sexist, anti-racist commitments as well (Veneuse 2009, p. 60). Veneuse’s Anarca-Islam is probably one of the most interesting works of theory on decolonial anarchism. Unlike other authors, including myself, who see decolonization as a way of incorporating diverse narratives, mainly from non-Western contexts into the core history of anarchism, Veneuse articulates a decolonial proposal using different epistemological tools and mechanisms that consist of a real alternative to classical anarchism and the stiff post-anarchist theories of Europe. Culture, particularly music and, even more concretely punk music, as a genre and subculture, has provided another space for the encounter between Islam and anarchism. This interaction can be problematic, as the approach to both punk and Muslim expressions tend to use symbols, which can oversimplify the context of a story (Fiscella 2012, p. 256). One of the most its well-known cultural expression is The Taqwacores

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(2003), by American novelist Michael Muhammad Knight, who would later appear on the big screen. The Taqwacores depicts the Islamic-punkrock scene of the US East Coast. The title, which derives from the Islamic concept of taqwa (love and fear of Allah) and hardcore, from the subgenre of punk and rock, aims at drawing attention to a hybrid language that symbolizes the different ways in which Islam and punk culture intersect. The book follows the story of Yusef Ali, a young Pakistani-American engineering student from New York, who lives off campus in a house with a diverse group of Muslims. The house eventually turns to a space for punk Muslim parties and prayer. Yusuf describes his adherence to this subculture in the following way: I stopped trying to define Punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren’t so far removed as you’d think. Both began in tremendous burst of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way – the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drive. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing can be further from truth. (Knight 2003, p. 7)

This extract is an especially relevant manner to showcase how religion and culture are depicted in the novel. The Taqwacores challenges religious, cultural and political homogeneity and opens the door for fluid identity and belonging. The “punk Islam” however scene had started two decades before becoming a social reality, with the art-punk Italian band CCCP Fedeli Alla Linea release of a song in 1984 called “punk-Islam” and the 1940’s Chicago-based band Al-Thawra (The Revolution) experimented with noise in their music (Fiscella 2012, p. 258). With varying priorities and objectives, non-Muslims and non-anarchist scholars have searched for homogeneous “anarchizing” traits (i.e., antiauthoritarian political practices) within the history of Islam. Harold Barclay, an anarchist and anthropologist, published an article “Islam, Muslim Societies, and Anarchy” in the Anarchist Studies Journal, that contributed to this line of research and debate, increasingly prolific, about the anarchic history of Islam or the history of anarchism within Islam. On a similar topic, Princeton Professor Patricia Crone’s article “NinthCentury Anarchists” (2000), described the ninth-century Kharijites and

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Muatazilites as anarchists, since, according to her, both currents of Islam thought it was unnecessary to have a government or leader to shape their societies. The Kharijites were members of a school of thought that appeared after the death of the prophet Muhammad. They assassinated Ali, the successor of the prophet in the Battle of Siffin (657) and they have been perceived as insurrects, rebels and assassins ever since. Muatazilites, the adherents of the Muatazila school, deny the Quran as man-made and co-eternal to God. Both Muatazilites and Kharijites rejected the necessity of the imamate (or the legitimate government). In particular, Crone focuses her analysis on the Najdiyya, a Khariji branch, whose members adopted a type of egalitarianism. Comparing political theories of government both in the Western tradition and in the Muslim one, and taking the emergence of Islam as an activist religion (Crone 2000, p. 12), the author examines how the Muatazilites offered numerous arguments against the imamate, turning the government into a tyranny. Both the Muatazilites and the Najdiyyis declared the imamate unnecessary and pending to religious laws; they believe that the imamate, a human construction, had become violent and should be removed for the good of the people. By cutting the imamate’s religious links, which Islamic society rested upon, they “made anarchism possible” (Crone 2000, p. 15). At the same time, Ahmet Karamustafa, professor of history and religion studies at Washington University and St. Louis University in Missouri, wrote on this topic. His book, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Periods 1200–1550 (2006), discusses how Dervish groups repudiated the social and religious norms of the time. Many of them wore extravagant clothing (black turbans, metal chains on their necks, etc.), walked naked and rejected religious piety. In his book, Karamustafa describes them as anarchists, since they were fighting against institutional Sufism at the time (Fiscella 2009, p. 12). In their fight against authority, government and the establishment Islamism’s different branches such as Salafism and jihadism can find point of encounter with anarchism, seems to suggests Luz Gómez García (2018) when dealing with the intellectual history of Islamism. She defines the emergence of the jihad as a doctrinal reworking and a strategic vision of its application conditioned by the changing context of the postcolonial world. So can be said about anarchism which does not appear outside the material conditions of the world in which it develops and its local characteristics, that is: a decentralized, deterritorialized, dehierarchized

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and personalized. This fracture in the conception of the jihad and anarchism implies a paradigm shift that cannot be understood without the emergence of the Arab revolutions of 2011. In her own words: Salafism, anarchism and jihadism are three paths that are different and even opposed in their principles, but which have not lacked points of convergence in their subversive objectives. The frontiers between them can become blurred in their struggle against the established order, which becomes a bond over ideological and practical differences, as deep as they might be. (Gómez García 2018, p. 303)

Notes 1. The conclusions of the MAM were partially published in Galián, L. (2015). Hacia Un Estudio decolonial del anarquismo. Perspectivas comparadas de Egipto y Túnez. REIM, 18, 44–73. 2. Among the participants of the MAM, there were members of the old syndicalist organizations such as the Spanish and French National Confederation of Labor (CNT), Spanish General Confederation of Labour (CGT), French Anarchist Federation (FA) and French International Anarchist Federation (FAI), Anarchist Sicilian Federation (Italy), Kurdish Anarchist Forum (KAF), among other activists, many individualist anarchists with a political trajectory in the occupy movements, squatting, autonomist, feminism, anti-specism, No Borders Movement, etc. from Germany, Byelorussia, France and Switzerland. 3. The Union for Unemployed Graduates (UCD) is the oldest and most important organization that gathers unemployed graduates in Tunisia. It is one of the main platforms that organized and pushed for the 2011 Tunisia revolution. Its goal was to fill the gap between the UGET (L’Union Génerale des étudiants de Tunisie) and the UGTT (L’Union geénerale tunisienne du travail). 4. Association Victoire pour Femme Rurale is an association composed of women, independent of any political party and born with the will of creating a solidarity network for rural women who noticed the deterioration of their situation and deemed it necessary to regroup. Its headquarters are in Sidi Bouzid in Tunis. See http://victoirefemmerurale. e-monsite.com/ 5. Personal notes from the encounter. 6. The Libertarian Socialist Movement and the Libertarian Commune will be extensively discussed in Chapter 4. 7. The expression ‘canonical history’ is inspired by the work of Evren Türkeli, S. (2012). What Is Anarchism? A Reflection on the Canon and the

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8.

9.

10.

11.

Constructive Potential of Its Destruction (Doctoral thesis, Loughborough University). In this doctoral dissertation, the author studies the canonical representations of anarchism as a political movement and as a political philosophy in order to critically review it and propose an alternative approach. Süreyyya Evren’s doctoral research (2012) has resulted in very valuable dialogue about the canon in the history of anarchism among scholars and activists. One example is the special issue “Blasting the Canon” that dedicated the journal Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies to this question. See: Evren Türkeli, S., & Kina, R. (2013). Blasting the Canon. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 1. Retrieved from: https:// journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/17135. In 1872, the International Herald published an article by Karl Marx, entitled “The Nationalization of the Land”, which became one of the most important Marxist texts reflecting on the agrarian problem. It was used by Dupont to explain the agrarian issue to the members of the International sections in Manchester. In the text, Marx explains the “right” to property and the need of nationalization of the land as a “social need”: “The nationalization of land will revolutionize relations between labor and capital, and finally, do away with capitalist forms of production, whether industrial or rural. This will result in the disappearance of class distinctions and privileges alongside the economical basis upon which they rest. In this way, living on other people’s labor would become a thing of the past. There will no longer be any government or state power, distinct from society itself!” (Marx 1872). Anarchist studies have flourished, mainly owing to the publication of the Anarchist Studies Journal, which began in 1993. From its start, the journal tried to expand on the main goals of anarchist discourse introducing new themes and perspectives that were not previously relevant to anarchism (Call 2007, p. 100). In 1996, The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) was created as a non-profit organization whose main goal was to assist writers in developing new aspects within the anarchist movement. For more information: Call, L. (2007). A Brief History of Anarchist Studies (so Far). Anarchist Studies Journal, 15(2), 100–106. Fiscella’s article is perhaps one of the best known of its kind. The author himself declared in an email conversation that it has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, which shows current interest in the subject. His previous work ‘Imagining an Islamic Anarchism: A New Field of Study is Ploughed’ (2009) distinguishes three ways in which Islam and anarchism have been linked and have attempted to connect through the works of different authors: studies that formulate an anarchist theory, studies that look for anarchist traits in tribal Muslim societies, and finally, studies that look for anarchist structures within Islam (Fiscella 2009, p. 29).

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12. He was already familiarized with Islam, around 1891 while he was studying in Stockholm (Laude 2011, p. 134). 13. About the life and work of Isabelle Eberhardt see: Annette, K. (1989). Isabelle: The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt. New York: Aldref A. Knopf; Foster, V. A. (2008). Reinventing Isabelle Eberhardt: Rereading Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies. Connotations, 17, 109–128. Among her most famous works: Eberhardt, I. (1908). Notes de route: MarocAlgérie-Tunisie. Paris: Fasquelle; Eberhardt, I. (1920). Pages d’Islam. Paris: Fasquelle; Eberhardt, I. (1923). Amara le forcat; L’anarchiste: Nouvelles inédites. Abbeville: Frédéric Paillard. 14. On Leda Rafanelli see: Cusin, C. (1995). Anarchia e romanziera: Leda Rafanelli, Archivio Famiglia Camillo Berneri; Pakieser, A. & Rafanelli, L. (2014). I Belong Only to Myself: The Life and Writings of Leda Rafanelli. London: AK Press—Institute for Anarchist Studies. Among her most interesting work: Rafanelli, L. (1975). Una donna e Mussolini. Milano: Rizzoli; Rafanelli, L. (2010). Memorie d’una chiromante (M. M. Cappellini, Ed.). Cuneo: Nerosubianco. 15. There is no account of her conversion to Islam according to Barbara Spackman (2017, p. 155). 16. In his thesis, Mohamed Jean Veneuse explains that he chooses ‘anarca’ in its feminine form instead of ‘anarco’ as a resistance to the Euro logo phallocentricity that generally dispels the false image that Islam and Muslims are naturally anti-feminist (Veneuse 2009, p. 63).

References Abouelnaga, S. (2016). Women in Revolutionary Egypt: Gender and the New Geographics of Identity. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. Acharya, M. P. T. (2019). We Are Anarchists (O. B. Laursen, Ed.). Edinburgh: AK Press. Adams, J. (2002). Non-Western Anarchism: Rethinking the Global Context. ZABALAZA: A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism. Retrieved from: https://libcom.org/files/Adams-Non-Western_Anarchismsprint.pdf. Adams, M. (2013). The Possibilities of Anarchist History Rethinking the Canon and Writing History. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 3(1), 33–63. Amster, R. (Ed.). (2009). Contemporary Anarchist Studies, an Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy. London and New York: Routledge. Anderson, B. (2013). The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-colonial Imagination. London and New York: Verso.

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Arshinov, P. (1926). Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists. The Nestor Makhno Archive. Retrieved from: http://www.nestormak hno.info/english/newplatform/introduction.htm. Asian. (2012). Harakat Asian “I’lan al-Mabadi” (Asian Movement. Announcement of Its Principles). al-Mushtaraka al-Thawri, 1. Barclay, H. (2002). Islam, Muslim Societies, and Anarchy. Anarchist Studies, 10(2), 105–118. Baxmeyer, M. (2015). ‘Mother Spain, We Love You!’: Nationalism and Racism in Anarchist Literature During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). In C. Bantman & B. Altena (Eds.), Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies (pp. 193–209). New York: Routledge. Call, L. (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Oxford: Lexington Books. Call, L. (2007). A Brief History of Anarchist Studies (so Far). Anarchist Studies Journal, 15(2), 100–106. Cañete Jiménez, C. (2009). El Origen Africano de Los Íberos: Una Perspectiva Historiográfica (Doctoral Dissertation). Universidad de Málaga. Cappelletti, Á. J. (1985). La ideología anarquista. Barcelona: Laia. Christoyannopoulos, A., & Matthew, A. (Eds.). (2017). Essays in Anarchism and Religion (Vol. I). Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. Christoyannopoulos, A., & Matthew, A. (Eds.). (2018). Essays in Anarchism and Religion (Vol. II). Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. Crone, P. (2000). Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists. Past & Present, 167, 3–28. Dainotto, R. M. (2007). Europe (in Theory). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Dolgoff, S. (Ed.). (1971). Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the ActivistFounder of World Anarchism. New York: Vintage Books. Dussel, E. (2000). Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo. In E. Lander (Ed.), La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas (pp. 41–54). Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales CLACSO. Eberhardt, I. (2001). The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt (E. Kershaw, Ed.). Chichester: Summersdale Publishers Ltd. Eberhardt, I. (2011). On Vagrancy. spunk.org. Retrieved from: http://spunk. org/library/writers/eberhard/sp000201.txt. Evren Türkeli, S. (2006). Postanarchism and the ‘3rd World’. In 56th Annual Conference of Political Studies Association. Berkshire: University of Reading. Evren Türkeli, S. (2012). What Is Anarchism? A Reflection on the Canon and the Constructive Potential of Its Destruction (Doctoral dissertation). Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK. Retrieved from: https://dspace.lboro. ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/10266.

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Evren Türkeli, S., & Kina, R. (2013). Blasting the Canon. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 1. Retrieved from: https://journals.uvic.ca/index. php/adcs/article/view/17135. Féderation Anarchiste. (2015). Contribution au Débat [Contribution to the debate]. In Internal Document, MAM. Fiscella, A. T. (2009). Imagining an Islamic Anarchism: A New Field of Study Is Ploughed. In A. J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos (Ed.), Religious Anarchism: New Perspectives (pp. 280–317). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fiscella, A. T. (2012). From Muslim Punks to Taqwacore: An Incomplete History of Punk Islam. Contemporary Islam, 6, 255–281. Fiscella, A. T. (2014). Varieties of Islamic Anarchism. A Brief Introduction. Retrieved from: http://www.alpineanarchist.org/miscell/Islamic_Anarchism_ Zine.pdf. Galván-Álvarez, E. (2017a). Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Canarian Imagination: The Missing Flag. History Workshop Journal, 83, 253–271. Galván-Álvarez, E. (2017b). Why Anarchists Like Zen? A Libertarian Reading of Shinran. In A. Christoyannopoulus & M. S. Adams (Eds.), Essays in Anarchism and Religion (pp. 78–123). Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. García, V. (2003). La internacional obrera. Breve recuento histórico del desarrollo de la Primera Internacional. Retrieved from: http://www.antorcha.net/ biblioteca_virtual/historia/internacional/9_internacional.html. Gómez García, L. (2018). Entre la sharía y la yihad. Una historia intelectual del islamismo. Madrid: Los libros de la catarata. Gimeno, J. C. (2012). Reflexiones críticas desde los márgenes sobre la producción de conocimientos para una acción transformadora. CUHSO. CulturaHombre-Sociedad, 2(2), 137–176. Graeber, D. (2002). The New Anarchists. New Left Review, 13, 61–73. Guérin, D. (1970). Anarchism From Theory to Practice. New York: Monthly Review Press. Hwang, D., & MacSimon, A. (2014). Revolución anarquista en Corea: La Comuna de Shinmin y otros textos sobre el anarquismo coreano. Barcelona: Aldarull Edicions. Ihsan. (2005). On Becoming a Muslim Anarchist. Ihsan Blogspot. Retrieved from: http://ihsan-net.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-becoming-muslim-ana rchist.html. Karamustafa, A. T. (2006). God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Periods 1200–1550. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Karamustafa, A. T. (2007). Sufism: The Formative Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Khuri-Makdisi, I. (2010). The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Knight, M. M. (2003). The Taqwacores. Berkeley and Beirut: Telegram Books. Laude, P. (Ed.). (2011). Universal Dimensions of Islam: Studies in Comparative Religion. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. Lazarus, N. (2004). The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory. In Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, M. W., & Wingen, K. E. (1997). The Myths of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Libertarian Commune. (2015a). Nas al-Iftitah [Opening Text]. In Internal Document, MAM. Libertarian Commune. (2015b). Tunisie. Rencontres Anarchistes Méditerranéennes. Appel à Une Première Rencontre Anarchiste Méditerranéenne! International of Anarchist Federations. Retrieved from: http://i-f-a.org/ index.php/fr/article-2/625-appel-a-une-premiere-rencontre-anarchiste-med iterraneenne. Libertarian Socialist Movement. (2015). Khitab al-Haraka al-Ishtirakiyya alTaharruriyya – Misr Li-l-Multaqa al-Anarki al-Mutawasiti bi-Tunis [Speech of the Libertarian Socialist Movement—Egypt in the Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting in Tunisia]. In Internal Documento, MAM. Marx, K. (1872). La nacionalización de la tierra. International Herald. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/04/ nationalisation-land.htm. March 27, 2016. May, T. (1994). The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Nettlau, M. (2006). La Anarquía a través de los tiempos. Ediciones HL. Retrieved from: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B14Synwe1mHzLWJLb WVDSEQ1emc/edit. Newman, S. (2003). The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Porter, D. (2011). Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria. Oakland, Edinburgh, and Baltimore: AK Press. Prado, A. (2010). El Islam como anarquismo místico. Barcelona: Virus Editorial. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South, 1(3), 533–580. Rafanelli, L. (2010). Memorie d’una Chiromante (M. M. Cappellini, Ed.). Cuneo: Nerosubianco. Skirda, A. (2002). Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968. London and Berkeley: AK Press.

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Spackman, B. (2017). Muslim in Milan: The Orientalisms of Leda Rafanelli. Accidental Orientalists: Modern Italian Travelers in Ottoman Lands (pp. 154– 210). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Taibo, C. (2018). Anarquistas de ultramar. Anarquismo, indigenismo, descolonización. Madrid: Los libros de la catarata. Vadillo Muñoz, J. (2019). Historia de la CNT . Madrid: Ediciones de la Catarata. Veneuse, M. J. (2009). Anarca-Islam (Master thesis, Queen’s University Kingston). Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/moh amed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam%0D. Woodcock, G. (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company. WSF. (2015). World Social Forum-Context. Internet Archive. Retrieved from: https://web.archive.org/web/20150331050216/https://fsm2015.org/en/ dossier/2014/12/17/context.

CHAPTER 4

Al-Anarkiyya bel ‘Arabiyya: Arabic from Theory to Practice as the Language of Anarchism

A Conceptual History of Anarchism in Arabic Al-Anarkiyya bel-Arabiyya Al-anarkiyya bel-‘arabiyya (Anarchism in Arabic) is the name of a blog created in 2011 with the goal of disseminating “anarchist and nonauthoritarian thought” in Arabic. It is one of the few spaces on the Internet with the goal of spreading anarchist theory and practice in Arabic through translations of important European anarchists such as Wayne Price or Georges Fontenis, together with the work of key Arab anarchists such as Sameh Said Abud (Cairo, 1956–2018), Ahmed Zaki (Cairo, 1956), Yasir Abdallah (Cairo) and Syrian anarchist Mazen Kam al-Maz. The importance of this blog is twofold. On the one hand, it has been and continues to be used as a reference platform for the dissemination of anarchism as a political philosophy in the Southern Mediterranean, and on the other, it has contributed to the reformulation and decolonization of anarchism through translation. Translation therefore offers an important repertoire of contentious politics within the political practice of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean. Yasir Abdallah, one of the founders and translators of the blog, explains the importance of language and translation in anarchism as follows: Like any translation, translation is important as a cognitive tool. For anarchist texts it is important to identify revolutionary experiences from all over © The Author(s) 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4_4

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the world in order not isolate the revolution and not to repeat mistakes. In Egypt, there was an isolationist desire that invaded the official media and the non-ideological bourgeois activists – as they described themselves – and a desire to learn […]. There were those who learned about anarchism in other languages, especially English, and adopted it in terms of intellectual fashion and class transcendence. Because English in Egypt is a class privilege it was important to present anarchism in the language of the country. (Yasir Abdallah, personal communication, 2019)

Translation is not just a tool for democratization—in this case of anarchism—but also a tool to decolonize it from its European core. “Translation helps to liberate anarchism from its European centrality and the theory that emerges from its core. However, the translation must be radical and critical”, continues Yasir. Translators reclaim their agency and transmit their subjectivity through translation. In translation, ideology plays a significant role in the transmission of knowledge and for that reason the act of translating becomes a political act: Translators select what to add, what to leave out, which words to choose and how to replace them with others. Therefore, translation, as a repertoire of political action, reveals the history and the sociopolitical context surrounding the translator and gives them an entity of their own as a political actor (Shojaei 2012, p. 2535). In keeping with the work of Joseph Massad, I understand translation as an epistemology (2015, p. 40). For Massad, translation is entwined with power contexts that determine the act of translating. Since languages are unequal in a colonial world, the accessibility to Arabic epistemology and language is also unequal. The act of translating is therefore always ideological and depends on power dynamics. The role of translation is especially important within the repertoires of contentious politics of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean. It has helped this political philosophy to adapt to the sociocultural elements of the societies of the Southern Mediterranean and therefore to decolonize its deeply rooted European epistemological basis. Anarchism emerged as a political philosophy during the First International in London in 1864 as a consequence of the tensions between Marx and Bakunin. The term itself is derived from the Greek particle an- (“no”) and the word arkhos (“order, principle, mandate”) and has been understood to mean “without authority” or “without power”, entering the Arabic language in three different forms: anarkiyya, fawdawiyya and la-sultawiyya.

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The process by which the term “anarchism” has been incorporated, translated and disseminated into Arabic is rooted in a particular process of globalization, transnational history and conceptual change. Stetkevych’s work (1970), which deals with the different methodologies for creating neologisms in Arabic, can help elucidate the formation of the terms anarkiyya, fawdawiyya and la-sultawiyya, the three most common terms to refer to the political philosophy of anarchism in today’s political language in Arabic. Their use and dissemination have had a great impact on the reception of this political philosophy in the twentieth century in the Arabic-speaking world and the recent emergence of non-authoritarian and anarchist practices during the Southern Mediterranean revolutions of 2011. This section has two aims: on the one hand, to understand how the term “anarchism” has been translated and disseminated in Arabic, within the broader process of creating neologisms in Modern Standard Arabic in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. On the other, I intend to connect the emergence of translation (mainly but not exclusively in Egypt) and the Nahda or modern “Arab Renaissance”, with the reception of this political philosophy in Southern Mediterranean contexts, mainly due to the arrival of Italian and Greek political activists and workers (see Chapter 5). The questions asked are: How has “anarchism” been received and translated into Arabic? What consequences has this translation had in the configuration of a political ideology and its practices in Southern Mediterranean contexts? And, to what extend can the conceptual history of anarchism in Arab Mediterranean societies allow us to decolonize the history of anarchism globally? The so-called modernization of the Arabic language was accomplished mostly through the classical system of derivation (ishtiqaq) from Arabic roots, in turn based on various principles, in particular analogy (qiyas ). Although Arabic has incorporated neologisms and adapted new vocabulary from other cultural contexts since as far back as the Greek influence on the School of Basra in the eighth century, it was during the Nahda that the creation of neologisms, mostly through the method of qiyas , acquired a more significant role. The terms anarkiyya, la-sultawiyya and fawdawiyya have gone through the same process of adding the nominal suffix -iyya, in order to create abstract nouns denoting non-material concepts. These words, which refer to idea of things as distinguished from concrete things themselves, correspond to English nouns ending in -ism, -ity or -ness. Prior

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to the Nahda, however, this suffix had hardly been used for abstract expressions (Mehdi Ali 1987, p. 32). The process of lexical borrowing from other languages was important in both medieval and Modern Standard Arabic for the creation of new scientific and technological vocabulary. This long-standing practice in Arabic consists of modifying a foreign borrowing according to the morphological structures of the Arabic language (Mehdi Ali 1987, p. 33). If we examine in detail each of the terms in Arabic used to refer to anarchism, we find that they have all undergone a different derivation process, each one adding different nuances to the concept. The term anarkiyya, for instance, has undergone the same process of lexical borrowing from Greek as in English or other European languages, which we can also find in the case of other words of Greek origin such as istratijiyya (strategy). La-sultawiyya (not authority) has been derived through the prefixation of the negative particle la (no) followed by the noun sulta (authority), which can be translated as “no to authority”. This neologism would correspond to the direct translation of the Greek word ‘anarkhia’. In fact, the construction of this type of structures has been widely discussed and is due to the direct influence of linguistic constructions from Greek, English and other languages (Mehdi Ali 1987, pp. 32–33). Perhaps the most interesting case of ishtiqaq applied to the term “anarchism” is its adaptation as fawdawiyya. This term comes from the semantic extension of the noun fawda (commonly translated as ‘chaos’ or ‘disaster’), to which the suffix -iyya has been added in order to make it an abstract noun. However, unlike anarkiyya, the root and basis of this derivation is anarchism’s pejorative connotation as “absence of government”. However, anarchists themselves would counter that ‘anarchism’ is not a synonym of chaos but the contrary. It has been widely assumed and accepted in the hegemonic political imaginary that human beings cannot survive without government or authority, upon which backdrop ‘anarchism’, or rather ‘anarchy’, has been understood as a synonym of disorder, chaos and disorganization. This is perhaps the reason why the first known Arabic source to refer to anarchism uses the term fawdawiyya. With the emergence of the press, Arabic readers in Egypt began to encounter articles on socialism and anarchism (translated as al-ishtirakiyya, from a root meaning “collaboration”, and al-fawdawiyya, respectively) among the pages of the two most important newspapers of the time: al-Muqtataf (Beirut, 1876–1883; Cairo, 1884–1952); and al-Hilal (Cairo, 1892–). Both newspapers, based in

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Cairo and run by Syrian migrants, published more than fifty articles on socialism, anarchism and workers’ movements, many of them devoted exclusively to anarchism (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 35). In the 1890s, the newspaper al-Muqtataf emerged as an ardent proponent of capitalism. In order to expose its readers to the classical premises of economic theory, al-Muqtataf e spoused the idea of competition as the natural system on which human relations were based. Human competition—and by extension capitalism—was explained as inevitable, necessary, and at the very heart of civilization. Al-Hilal also published several articles about socialism, but adopted a less combative tone. Socialism was perceived as an unnatural process predestined to fail, based on the contention that there was no precedent in human nature for the postulate of the equal distribution of wealth. Their ideological sympathies were clear and both newspapers supported the period’s rapid expansion of global capitalism. Both newspapers described socialism before World War I as connected with the idea of reform, which was better accepted than the prospect of revolution. However, socialism and anarchism were two terms at times used interchangeably within discourses and tropes with which Nahda-period readers were either familiar or quickly began to familiarize themselves. These signifiers were related to the vocabulary imposed by Coloniality/Modernity, such as civilization, natural science, natural laws, progress and Darwinism (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 41). On Conceptual Change If we take the dissemination of the term fawdawiyya in the liberal newspapers of the Nahda as a starting point for our analysis of the linguistic and conceptual change in the political philosophy of anarchism in Arabic, we could categorize this process in the four dimensions of conceptual change formulated by Reinhart Koselleck in his discussion of “conceptual history”. But first, it is important to define exactly what a concept is and what we mean by “conceptual history”. Not every word is a concept, but every concept has a word to name it. Therefore, when does a word become a concept? According to Koselleck, the sign of a concept emerging is that a word comes to express the whole experience of a sociopolitical context and no longer has an identifiable author. Concepts have a plurality of meanings and “can no longer be defined but interpreted” (Fernández Barbudo 2018, p. 37). The multiplicity of experiences and meanings of a concept is what fixes its relationship with

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a word. In fact, eventually new meanings and conceptualizations can be expressed with the same word, which accumulates different levels of meanings at different moments (Fernández Barbudo 2018, p. 37). It is this change in meaning—how it is repeated, resignified, modified and reinterpreted—that defines the object of study in the history of concepts, i.e., conceptual history. Whenever a concept is used it mobilizes its past meanings through accumulation, progressively adapting to a changing reality (Koselleck 2004, p. 37). In fact, according to Koselleck it was the shift in the meaning of social concepts—Sattelzeit —that marked the onset of modernity (Marchart 2007, p. 53). Concepts shift and form in the “temporalization of the experience”, that is, the epistemological problem of historical temporalities, and are constituted as a “horizon of expectations”. What this means is that in the process of shifting, concepts, which are always political, adapt to different contexts and undergo a continuous process of abstraction. Concepts become less and less concrete and eventually move from naming specific situations to referencing abstract or future ones (horizon of expectations). In his 2007 study of Koselleck, Joaquín Abellán singles out a four-stage process in the German historian’s “history of concepts”, namely: ‘democratization’, ‘politicization’, ‘ideologization’ and ‘temporalization’. ‘Democratization’ occurs when the political and social vocabulary expands to encompass a range of contexts. ‘Politicization’ occurs when a concept becomes available to a wider sector of society and more people use it. Once this takes place, its meaning becomes more abstract (ideologization). In this process, concepts take on meanings and experiences, and start to refer to future possibilities (temporalization) (Abellán 2007, p. 13). This allows conceptual history to describe phenomena as processes rather than as permanent states. Thus, when translating anarchism into Arabic, the term ‘anarchism’ acquires the social meaning and the linguistic and historical experiences of the culture into which it has been translated, in this case, the shared regional and local history of the Arabs. To give a concrete example, in 1901 al-Hilal published an article entitled “al-Fawdawiyya fil-Islam” (Anarchism in Islam), in which the author acknowledges that the experiences of anarchism in Islamic societies are different than in Europe, and looks for examples in the history of Islam (including in the Kharijites and Isma‘ilis) in order to provide evidence for the existence of anarchism as a political practice that is against leaders, governments and authority. “Anarchism does not appear in Islam

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as it does in Europe. It appears with another form similar to today’s anarchism in many ways” (al-Fawdawiyya fi-l-Islam 1901). This chapter exemplifies anarchism’s process of conceptual change, and its contextualization within the cultural history and concrete local experience of Islam. Given that concepts eventually move further away from the elites and the aristocracy—the social classes that are first able to access written knowledge—the democratization of concepts occurs once they become available to a wider sector of society. This implies that the field where these concepts are applied broadens alongside the political language, which produces a “horizon of expectations” (i.e., to speak in the present about the future) (Marchart 2007, p. 53). The number of literate people in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century who had access to large national newspapers was very limited; however, “[i]n the late nineteenth century periodicals in the Eastern Mediterranean were often read communally, as they were expensive and full literacy was confined to a select few” (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 36). This suggests that knowledge was able to spread, and that the recipients of this information or “new ideas” were not confined/limited to a small literate elite, but rather extended into other less privileged sectors of the population who progressively appropriated them. This is probably the reason why the only term I have found in the different sources talking about anarchism throughout much of the twentieth century is fawdawiyya, across different political currents spanning from the Marxist left to Islamism. For instance, the socialist newspaper Ruh al-‘ Asar (The Spirit of the Time) (Cairo, 1930) published several articles clarifying the differences between the different currents within socialism. The article makes clear to the audience that anarchism and socialism, although they have similar horizons of expectations, differ in the methods and strategies employed to arrive there (al-Fawdawiyyawa al-Shuyu‘iyyalaisatmin al-Ishtirakiyya 1930). On the other hand, the Syrian Islamist reformer Abdel Rahman alKawakibi (1854–1902), in discussing the causes of the tyranny of capital in his book Taba‘i al-Istibdad (The Nature of Despotism), describes in detail the characteristics of tyrannical regimes and declares that “in the case of Europe, civilization is under threat from the anarchists, whose desperate conditions have pushed them to resist their financial bondage” (al Kawakibi 2011, p. 61). If we fast-forward to 2011 and Egypt’s 25 January Revolution, when the first openly anarchist groups were founded, participants and counterrevolutionary forces alike began to incorporate the terms anarkiyya,

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la-sultawiyya and fawdawiyya into the political language of this revolutionary context with greater frequency. The contemporary uses of anarchism in Arabic exemplify the last dimension of Koselleck’s theory of conceptual change: politicization. According to this theory, politicization occurs when broader sectors of society can understand and use this political concept inside their own realities and subjectivities, widening the sphere of mobilization (Marchart 2007, p. 53). Of these terms, those most widely used in the press at the time were anarkiyya and fawdawiyya. Newspapers and TV stations referred to anarchists as fawdawiyyun and anarkiyyun,implying a desire to eliminate the government and the state in order to return to chaos and barbarism. Private television stations began to debate the entrance onto the political stage of groups such as the Black Bloc, the film V for Vendetta and other anarchist organizations of the time, such as the Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM). Private Egyptian TV channel CBC’s popular show bi-Huduuu’ (“Calmdooown!”), founded in 2011, dedicated a whole program to anarchism entitled “What is anarchism?” (CBC Egypt 2013), hosted by Emad Adeeb in collaboration with novelist Rasha Samir. They discussed anarchism as one of the new political currents that had emerged in Egypt after the 2011 Revolution, without making a distinction between the different identities that emerged at the time. The hosts cast disparate groups and subjectivities like emo, Black Bloc or the Ultras as symptoms of Egyptian youth’s search for an identity. These “new identities” were depicted as “foreign” to Egypt’s erstwhile strong, monolithic identity. Arguing that identities are not political, the presenters made the case that Egyptian society was unaccustomed to the exercise of democracy. Basing their arguments on the subject of violence, the hosts denounced anarchists’ tactics as contrary to the tenets of Western democracies, where people must apply for permits in order to demonstrate in the streets. By connecting anarchism with foreign ideologies and identities, disorganization, violence, nihilism (‘adamiyya), criminal practices (mumarasat igramiyya) and lack of democracy, the TV show demonized anarchism and the political currents that emerged with the 25 January Revolution, based on a liberal understanding of what democracy should be in a future post-revolutionary Egypt. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, on their Web site Ikhwan Wiki (their online encyclopedia), dedicated an entry to anarchism in 2012 and used the terms anarkiyya, fawdawiyya, al-ishtirkiyya al-thawriyya (revolutionary socialism) and fawdawiyyat al-dawla (state anarchism)

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interchangeably. This conceptual hodge-podge, however, helped insert these terms into the political vocabulary of the time (Ikhwan Wiki 2012). Even political scientist and Cairo University professor Heba Raouf Ezzat, in discussing the translation of the term ‘anarchism’, prefers ‘fawdawiyya’, although she acknowledges that it suggests this school of thought leads to “chaos”. Indeed, Raouf Ezzat opens her article on anarchism by stating that the “[t]ranslation is unfair to the concept”, its history and its postulates, thus acknowledging a problem that we have faced from the beginning of this book: What are the ideological implications of language when defining ideologies? To what extent does language transform and reframe concepts? In the same line as Yasir Abdallah, Raouf Ezzat considers that anarchism is one of the most difficult concepts to define, and that it is not always easy to reach a direct and explicit definition since it is “full of contradictions” (Raouf Ezzat 2001). During semi-informal interviews that I conducted with members of anarchist groups in Egypt and Tunisia, the majority of participants (most of whom belonged to self-declared anarchist groups) did not define themselves as ‘anarchists’ (anarkiyyin), but as ‘anti-authoritarians’ (lasultawiyyin) or ‘libertarians’ (taharruriyyin). However, there were also differences based on age and prior political experience. Most of the participants who had had political experiences before 2011—for the most part in Marxist organizations—preferred to be identified as ‘anti-authoritarian’ (la-sultawi) and in some cases rejected the term ‘anarchist’ (anarki) because it is understood as a political philosophy deeply rooted in the European experience, which most of them do not identify with. Although most anarchist activists recognize the European roots of anarchism, they prefer the term la-sultawi, which is a broader, more diverse concept associated with prefigurative politics rather than a political ideology and discourse. On the other hand, the younger generations, most of them politicized during the events of the 2011–2012 revolutions of the Southern Mediterranean, preferred to be identified as ‘anarchists’ rather than ‘anti-authoritarian’ (Image 4.1). At times, although less common, the term fawdawiyya, as a derivation of the word ‘chaos’, has been used to subvert the negative connotations of anarchism, in a process comparable to the LGBT community’s appropriation of the originally pejorative term “queer”. In the first edition of the book Difa‘an ‘an al-fawdawiyya: al-Anarkiyya, al-madrasa althawriyyaallatilam ya‘rifha al-sharq (In Defense of Anarchism: Anarchism, the Revolutionary School Unknown in the East) (2007) author

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Image 4.1 Logo of the anarchist group al-anarkiyya al-misriyya (Egyptian Anarchism) on Facebook (Photo credit by gharbeia)

Ahmed Zaki chose the term fawdawiyya in order to subvert its negative meaning by redirecting it toward activism. For all these reasons, as we will continue to see throughout this book, the reception of anarchism and the term’s translation into Arabic has undergone semiological changes (i.e., the history of its meaning), onomasiological changes (i.e., the history of its name) and referential changes (i.e., the expression of experiences) through the process of conceptual change. Translation as Direct Action: On Arabic as Translation Translation, as a political practice of anarchism, has helped to digress from the canon and decenter its knowledge and knowledge production. Indian scholar Homi Bhabha (1994) considers translation as a practice that breaks the logic of colonial authority, blurring the language of the colonizer. The process of translation is the opening up of another contentious political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation. Here the word of divine authority is deeply flawed by the assertion of the indigenous sign,

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and in the very practice of domination the language of the master becomes hybrid – neither the one thing nor the other. (Bhabha 1994, p. 33)

Translation and conceptual change through the processes of temporalization, ideologization, democratization and politicization have helped to expand and reformulate the theory and practice of anarchism in non-Western contexts, and specifically in the Southern Mediterranean. The members of the Egyptian LSM used the production and translation of anarchist books into Arabic as another part of their direct action, and as a way to break down the barriers of language and distance. Among the activities aimed at raising awareness and learning—fundamental pillars of anarchist political culture—from 2012 to 2013 the LSM held a reading group with the aim of discussing and analyzing anarchist books. The discussions in the reading group, which progressed chapter by chapter, required prior translation, either by the members themselves or by using the multiple translations available on the Internet. All of these texts had an informative and propagandistic function. On the one hand, they summarized and translated the main ideas and experiences of classical anarchists into Arabic for a non-specialized audience; on the other, they contributed to the propagation of libertarian alternatives in the countries of the Southern Mediterranean. There has been an extensive production not only of translations into Arabic, but also of anarchist theory written directly in Arabic. One of the many examples is the aforementioned book by Ahmed Zaki, Dif‘an ‘an al-fawdawiyya (2007), where he summarizes the theory and history of anarchism through the work of classical anarchist theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin, Nestor Makhno and David Graeber, and surveys the most important milestones in the practice and experience of anarchism, such as the Paris Commune, the Spanish Revolution or the “New Anarchists” in Graeber’s terms, and the major differences with Marxism. Zaki’s book, though written in 2007, could not be published until 2011 due to the difficulty for new writers to break into the publishing sector in Egypt. In the interim, Zaki made the text available on the Internet as an openaccess pdf file that could be downloaded and read for free. However, once it finally came out, the book rapidly spread during the weeks of the revolution through downtown cafes and Tahrir Square. What was happening in Egypt at the time was a modern version of some of the ideas of this revolutionary school in the twenty-first century:

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non-ideological multitudes with broad social participation, groups without hierarchical leadersor professional politicians to organize the waves of protests. (Zaki 2012, p. 7)

The author then understood that the title no longer did justice to the reality on the ground. For that reason, for the publication of the book’s second edition in July 2012 the author decided to change the title to al-Anarkiyya: al-Madrasa al-thawriyya allati na‘rifha (Anarchism: The Revolutionary School that we Know). Despite this change, the content of the book remained intact; there is no chapter or annex analyzing the 2011 Revolution through the lens of anarchism, nor is there a new chapter addressing anarchism in Egypt. The only acknowledgment of the experience of anarchism made in the second edition is in the introduction. Younger activists such as Yasir Abdallah have published several texts in an attempt to criticize the Eurocentric view of classical anarchism. In his text ‘Kayfa yumkin ta‘rif al-ishtirakiyya al-taharruriya’ (How can we Define Libertarian Socialism?) (2011), Abdallah describes libertarian socialism as a way of fusing anarchism and Marxism without going back to the First International. For Yasir, ‘libertarian socialism’ is composed of two words: socialism and libertarian. Both terms have been stigmatized and popularized by totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism, the Baath party and Nasserism. Libertarian socialism has no relation to one-party government, the centralization of power or nationalization, all commonly associated with socialism. For Abdallah, libertarian socialism is: […] a class society without a State. A self-organized society. A society without presidents, masters or leaders. This is the main content as expressed by Bakunin in his famous phrase: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”. We can use any label we like: libertarian socialism, libertarian communism, anarcho-communism or anti-authoritarianism; they can all be synonyms as long as the content remains the same. In the end, “it is not the label but the content which matters”, as Wayne Price proclaims.

In his other work, ‘al-Anarkiyyafawqa-l-nil’ (Anarchism on the Nile) (2013), Yasir Abdallah revisits the history of anarchism in Egypt from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth century. His intention is to rediscover the history of anarchism from a postcolonial and post-anarchist point of view.1

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Most of the anarchist theoretical contributions are made online and are open access, meaning they can be read and downloaded for free. Most of these translations are found on the blog al-Anarkiyya bi-l‘arabiyya (Anarchism in Arabic), the famous leftist web page al-Hiwwar al-mutamaddin (The Civilized Dialogue),2 and the WordPress blog (as well as Facebook page and Twitter account) Tahrir International Collective, known as Tahrir ICN, founded by the famous activist and writer Leila al-Shami with five other activist from different countries (Woller 2018, 49). Tahrir ICN has distributed articles in English and Arabic mainly about the Arab Revolutions of 2011 and the anti-authoritarian experiences that emerged within them. In their manifesto, which adopts a very internationalist perspective, the collective states that “[t]hrough this network we want to create a platform for discussions, for presenting the issues of struggle and their local conditions and differences, for presenting and explaining undertaken actions and planning joint activities in future. There is one World, and one Struggle”. The Internet, social networks, and new information and communication technologies have provided new spaces for new social movements, including Southern Mediterranean anarchism, to work and organize. The Zapatista movement was one of the first to make use of the Internet during the first campaigns against free trade. Activists and movements “have used social networks to organize direct actions, share information and resources, and coordinate campaigns through distance communication in real time” (Juris 2004, p. 415). I am interested in Jeffrey S. Juris’s definition of social movements on the Internet, because of its relevance for analyzing the workings of contemporary anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean. Such movements are: – Global: They echo and participate in causes of ideologically related collectives. – Informational: They produce images for the mass media. They share the information of other movements, create their own iconography and promote individual direct action. – Organizational: Social networks enable platforms that become the ideal of the political culture of anarchism in that “[…] they give rise to new decentralized forms of doing politics and exercising direct democracy, and therefore reflect the traditional values of anarchism and the logic of computer networks” (Juris 2004, p. 422).

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Another important use of technology for anarchists in the Arab world is the need to avoid repression. The will to achieve visibility, overcome marginality and ensure remembrance are part of the media practices of anarchists in the South (Woller 2018, p. 54). Almut Woller raises important questions when dealing with the use of new technologies in the dissemination and visibility of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean, such as the fragility of the Facebook pages, YouTube videos and blogs that have been deleted, mostly through the censorship of authoritarian regimes. In fact, this is reflected in the many web pages referenced in this book that even at the time of writing are no longer online. However, she considers that one of the most important outcomes of the media practices of anarchists in the Southern Mediterranean is the conviction that they are not alone. While building transnational and translocal networks and outwitting the censors while translating and producing works on anarchism, anarchists in the Southern Mediterranean create a feeling of belonging, solidarity and “affinity” that are central to their politics (Woller 2018, p. 56). In contemporary anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean, published translations are especially important in the emergence and spread of radical culture in Arabic. Such books have been available in bookstores in the Arab world since the 1980s, albeit with irregular distribution. The Lebanese group al-Badil al-taharruri (Libertarian Alternative), linked to the French group Alternative Libertaire, translated Daniel Guérin’s Anarchism: From Theory to Practice in 1981. The book was widely available in Cairo bookstores until 2013.3 Unlike other translations, here translator George Sa‘adopted for the term taharruriyya (libertarian current) to refer to anarchism. While this choice of terminology is less common, it is nevertheless interesting. Taharruriyya refers to the revolutionary libertarian current, rather than anarcho-capitalist liberarianism. In the prologue, Sa‘ad explains that the term fawdawiyya favors the right-wing and liberal perception of anarchism as a synonym of chaos, meaning that its use could be counterproductive. He prefers the French term libertaire, which is more in line with this “revolutionary current” (Guérin 1981, p. 13). In the 2015 reprinting of Guérin’s book by the same publisher, Dar Gallimard changed the title to anarkiyya instead of taharruriyya, given the widespread use of the term anarkiyya after the Arab Revolutions. However, around the same time, translator Marwa Abdelsalam employed

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a different term, la-sultawiyya, in two major translations: Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism, also available in bookstores in Beirut and Tunis from 2014 to 2017 (Woller 2018, p. 49), and Colin Ward’s Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, both published by Egyptian publisher Hindawi Foundation for Education and Culture in 2014. Although I do not have conclusive evidence, it may be the case that the choice of term is rooted in the sociopolitical history of the local contexts in the Arabic-speaking countries where they are translated and disseminated. In each context one term or the other might be more readily received and understood. Although anarchist works were available in translation well before the events of 2011, the social uprisings and revolutions in the Southern Mediterranean brought about the necessity to put a name to what the people and revolutionaries were experiencing. Anarchism appeared as a potent synthesis of the revolutionary ideas and social and political practices of the revolutionary impulse. While some people first discovered anarchism in the squares, others were already familiar with it as a political philosophy; however, all of them were certain that this was the political current that was playing out before them. In one way or another, anarchism entered into the political discourse in Arabic and rapidly spread to many sectors of society, modifying the understanding of how politics could be lived, practiced and experienced.

Theory as Practice, Practice as Theory: The Failure of Arab Socialism and the Search for Political Alternatives A progressive transformation can be detected among the generation of activists who came of age with the political revolts of the late 1960s and the student movements of the 1970s in Egypt, whose repertoires of collective action gradually shifted away from the political parties of the traditional left. Starting in the 1980s, as their disillusionment became increasingly evident, such activists began to reject structured organizations altogether. This generation delved into the activism of professional trade unions on the one hand, and on the other, into literature and the press, both channels for disseminating their political debates and a means of direct action. Sameh Said Abud is one representative of this trajectory, that of a generation that shifted between street activism, party membership and intellectual activism. His figure, as well as his theoretical legacy,

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can help us to understand the complex dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and to deconstruct both terms and their meaning in a postcolonial context. The 1980s represented a turning point in the way members of the 1970s generation in Egypt articulated their activism. The construction of alternative channels of political expression, with the aim of gaining greater autonomy, was one of the ways out of the failure of traditional political organizations and structures. The lack of credibility of these organizations or the search for alternative methods usually did not imply a total withdrawal from political activism (Duboc 2011, p. 71). Literary and journalistic production emerged, or rather re-emerged, as it had in the 1930s alongside leftist organizations (see below the section “Practice as Theory”), as a form of political activism and direct action, which although it did not change the traditional methods of political expression, did provide complementary channels through which to express disillusionment with the left of the time. Literature and the press became repertoires of collective action. The disintegration of the Egyptian Communist Party and left-wing organizations left their members in a state of confusion, leading a whole generation to disillusionment with organized party politics. This phase coincided with personal changes in the members of the generation of the 1970s, who in many cases retired from public life or left the country, which led many of them to temporarily withdraw from politics. The ‘reconciliation’ of Sadat’s regime with the opposition in the early 1980s weakened these organizations’ ability to open up as spaces to operate as opposing political forces, and, according to Duboc (2011, p. 71), this played a fundamental role in the feeling of “disillusionment” among intellectuals at the time. However, the lack of left-wing organizational structures and political parties that served as a space for coordinating opposition to the regime did not do away with the leftist ideas espoused by members of these organizations. Alternative cultural spaces were created as a form of opposition during the Nasser and Sadat regimes, when culture and cultural spaces were controlled by the government. One of these initiatives was the literary group Gallery 68, whose first magazine, published in 1968, was the first initiative to create an alternative production space independent of the official magazines (Duboc 2011, p. 68). For Duboc, publishing in this type of journals, especially between 1960 and 1970, may have served as a substitute for membership in leftist political organizations, or at least as

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a complementary form of action on equal footing with it (Duboc 2011, p. 68). This was also the case of Sameh Said Abud (Egypt, 1956–2018), an intellectual during this period who, especially from the 1990s onwards, alternated political affiliation with literary activism. Sameh Said Abud was born in July 1956 into a lower-middle-class family, in the working-class Cairene neighborhood of Imbaba in the north of the governorate of Giza. His parents were the first generation in his family to leave rural Lower Egypt for the city. His mother came from a rural family in the Munufiyya governorate, while his father came from the village of Talibiyya in al-Gharbiyya. Sameh was the youngest of four siblings, and the only one to express any interest in politics. However, it was his father, a worker at the Government Printers, who introduced him early on to politics, as he was a member of the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (known as HADITU). In 1988, after graduating from Cairo University with a degree in law, he worked as a lawyer in an important labor law firm and as a secretary in the Egyptian Communist Party. He later split with the Communist Party and joined the Socialist People’s Party. After working as an independent lawyer from 1991 to 1996, he quit law in order to focus all his energies on intellectual life. In 1996, he published two books, Mawjaztarikh al-madawa al-wa‘i (A Brief History of Matter and Consciousness) and al-‘Ilmwa al-Usturamunhijanlil-taghyir al-ijtima‘i (Science and Myth: Two methods for social change). That same year he joined the Mahrousa Research Center (Markaz al-mahrusalil-khidmat al-sahafiyyawa al-abhathwa al-nashar) where he worked as head of the Research Department until January 25, 2011, when the Egyptian Revolution broke out. However, most of his professional and political activity was relegated to his private life due to his difficult health situation. In 2012, Sameh underwent open-heart surgery, which removed him from his public political and intellectual activities. However, in spite of his difficult situation, he continued his theoretical and political activity by publishing articles on social media sites such as Facebook, and on the Web site al-Hiwwar almutamaddin, a space that began hosting the debates of the Arab left in 1999, but which gradually opened up to those writing from other ideological perspectives as well. In fact, social media, and more specifically Facebook, became an essential platform for the author’s political ideas, with over 1300 followers. It is important to point out that most of these followers come from the Arabic-speaking world, since Arabic

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was Sameh’s vehicular language, which he used for his comments on social media, his essays on political theory and his translations of anarchist book. Among his followers were numerous young anarchists from all over the Arabic-speaking world (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), many of whom I have met and shared intellectual concerns with throughout the course of this research. In this sense, Sameh has truly earned his nickname as the “godfather” of the new generation of post-2011 Arab anarchists.4 Sameh also collaborated with the magazine al-Rayya al-‘Arabiyya (The Arab Banner), which ran from 1988 to 1994. It was founded by the former Marxists Omar Sharif Yunis, now professor of history at the University of Helwan; Adil Omari, a cardiologist and former member of the 8 January Egyptian Communist Party5 ; and Ahmed SadekSa‘ad, leader of the 1940s Egyptian Marxist movement and founder of the Workers and Peasants Party a decade later (Galián 2019, p. 275). Such publications were made possible by Sadat’s Party Press Law of 1977, which helped turn the press into a vehicle for propagating the younger generation’s political ideas, and evidenced the vulnerability of the existing party structures. The acknowledgment of the right to a free press as stated in the Constitution, alongside an unquestionable power to control the information that reached the people, speaks to the heart of the contradictions that characterized the last years of Sadat’s mandate (Gómez García 1992, p. 45). Despite Sadat’s efforts to control the press, this type of publications helped create a public platform where one could criticize the corruption of the political elite, the negative effects of economic liberalization, the peace agreements with Israel, the role of the state in the degradation of public services, and the repression of the opposition (El Khawaga 2003, p. 280). At the same time, several key debilitating factors beset the new opposition parties, as their inability to build an electoral base, and most important, regarding the new roll of the party press, the censorship of magazines and newspapers, and their own internal conflicts, especially with regard to the choice of editorial policies. All of this led, in El Khawaga’s opinion, to the finishing of the initial “euphoria” and, more important, to the perception that the access of militants of the “traditional left” into party activities was an evidence of their integration in the “democratic transition”, as it would be titled by the regime. This “democratic transition” had allowed a change in some traditional means for expressing political demands. For example, professional associations, which eschewed the old structures of trade unionism co-opted by

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the regime since Nasser’s arrival to power, were transformed into spaces for political dissent. The lawyers’, journalists’, engineers’ and doctors’ unions helped spread a new culture of democracy and opposition to the regime, channeling public outcry against the political, economic and legal transformations imposed by the Sadat and, later, Mubarak regimes. New organizations began to emerge, such as the Union of Egyptian University Teachers or national and international research centers. Between 1989 and 1995, these specialized research, support or legal assistance centers acted within the new international human rights framework. From these new spaces of dissent and opposition emerged a new generation of activism and political activists outside the traditional parties. Focused on the new human rights narrative, which gradually reduced the sense of ‘disillusionment’, these new organizations helped in the formulation of new sensibilities and identities through this alternative activism (El Khawaga 2003, p. 286). Specialization, professionalization and also legalism and international visibility characterized these new political spaces of opposition. They presented a new language that cast the relationship between activists and the state in new terms, and marked the emergence of what has since been called ‘Egyptian civil society’. In addition to professional associations and civil society institutions, between 1978 and 1986 multiplied weekly seminars and public lectures (nadawatusbu‘iyya) denouncing the regime’s political and economic policies. More importantly, such initiatives constitute the first instance— within professional unions and opposition parties but not only—of what have since come to be known as ‘freedom committees’ (lijan al-hurriyyat), whose aim is to denounce or prosecute anti-democratic laws. This cycle of mobilization illustrates, on the one hand, the transformation of the older generation of leftists, who ended up transitioning from party affiliation to association-based activism, and, on the other and more important, establish new and fruitful inter- and intra-generational and ideological solidarities (El Khawaga 2003, p. 291). During these years, while any form of non-Islamist radical dissent disappeared from the mainstream political arena, NGOs and professional associations became the sphere of a new form of activism. Within an institutionalized and state-controlled form of organization, NGOs managed to absorb and rearticulate human rights discourses. In this context, disenchanted leftists returned to the intellectual sphere in order to continue their political activism.

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In the late 1990s a new window for dissidence opened. The arrival of the Internet provided a free and suitable distribution channel for articles and debates that had been excluded by the traditional press and the censorship apparatus, or even by the indirectly controlled discourse of NGOs. It was against this backdrop that in 1998 Sameh began his online activism following the launch of the Web site al-Taharruriyya alJama‘ iyya (Collective Liberation), which created a free space to publish his books and articles. At the same time, Sameh helped build Web sites for various platforms and popular committees such as the Committee for the Coordination of Rights and Freedoms of Association, or the Anti-Globalization Committee (AGEEG).6 After a long path through different clandestine Marxist organizations that had begun in small student circles in 1980, Sameh came to realize that his ideas were actually more in line with anarchism and antiauthoritarian currents of the left than with other currents of socialism, including Trotskyism. In fact Sameh got involved in 1991 in the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialist Group (al-Ishtirakiyun al-Thawriyyun), a Trotskyite organization that began in the 1980s, and was largely composed of students from the American University of Cairo. Sameh discovered anarchism through Marxist translations into Arabic financed by the Soviet Union, which at that time continued to hold sway over the Egyptian Communist Party and other Marxist organizations. These books projected a negative image of anarchism which, however, did not prevent the author from feeling attracted by its ideas and postulates. According to Sameh, it is the lack of literature about anarchism in Arabic that has kept the ideology from spreading in the Southern Mediterranean. The language barrier has meant that many or most anarchists have had a good command of both English and IT, which is precisely why prior to 2011 it was the younger generations of activists who were able to truly immerse themselves in anarchism. “Anarchism Is the Solution”: Theory as Practice In his article “Limadha tahawwaltu li-l-la-sultawiyya” (Why I became an anarchist) (Said Abud 2002, pp. 251–252), Sameh details his conversion to anarchism. It was not just due to his more than 20 years of experience in the organizations of the Egyptian left, but also to his discovery of a common cause among all political currents, whether from the left or the

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right: desire for power and the division of society into oppressors and oppressed. What fostered my conversion from Marxism-Leninism to anarchism [alla-sultawiyya], in addition to my experience in the Egyptian communist movement, of course, was the discovery of the common root of all political movements, whether they were from the left or from the right. The root of this problem is the basis of society’s ills. It is the root that everyone carefully conceals behind their various demands on their own or others’ behalf, or uses tohighlight, set right or falsify the distinctions between them. Everyone is a slave to power, bows down before it and longs for it, while denying and condemning the existence of other states. Everyone tries in different ways to monopolize power in order to achieve their goals, without the consent of the opposition, and with the consent of people who know how to deceive the masses, despite any claimsor sloganspromising freedom, equality and fraternity. Though human beings continue to be divided between masters and slaves, between oppressors and oppressed, teachers and students, leaders and followers, generals and soldiers, they remain eager to toast to the masses. They act as if they were the legal guardians of minors, and do so in the name of religion, or in the name of nationalism, the homeland and the nation, or in the name of the working class and other proletarian classes. (Said Abud 2002, p. 251)

For Sameh, all existing political currents—whether left wing, right wing or Islamist—are characterized by authoritarianism. All of them divide society up between valid human beings within their “imagined communities” and invalid ones. In this regard, he finds all of these currents to follow the same formula: Islamists divide the world up in the name of the absolute ideas of God and religion; nationalists divide it up in the name of collective identities that they claim to protect through the idea of nation (watan); and Marxists, who claim to represent the working class, divide society up based on those who belong to the party and those who do not. In Sameh’s words: Islamists divide human beings into believers and infidels, whereby believers must prevail over infidels, since those who believe the most prevail over those who believe the least. This perpetuates oppression and exploitation in the name of Islam. Similarly, Jews divide human beings into God’s “chosen people” and Gentiles, forever expelled from God’s mercy and care. God and religion are generally absolute units and must therefore be represented by some particular human being – a caliph or pope – or by an institution

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that speaks for and tyrannizes others, and oppresses them in the name of absolute entities such as the caliphate, the church, etc. In the same way, Marxist-Leninists also divide human beings into party members who represent the working classes and those who are not party members, into loyal followers and enemies. This perpetuates the social gap between leaders and followers in the name of the working classes, which gives party members the right to represent them on their own without any discussion. Thus, they speak in the name of Marxist scientific truth, appealing to the knowledge of party members alone, without competitors or opponents. There is not even any discussion by their followers, or participation on the other side of the barricades. Nationalists also rely on their representation of the unique and absolute collective identity, which is the community [umma], nation [watan] and nationalism [qawmiyya]. They do not accept the dismantling or questioning of this arbitrary representation, and they make subordinates of those who do not share their opinion, whether they belong to the very masses they claim to represent, or fall outside this collective identity. (2002, p. 251)

In this article, Sameh compares the parliamentary trends in 1990s Egypt, and concludes that all of them share an authoritarian and sectarian nature, namely: Islamism, represented to the greatest extent by the Muslim Brotherhood; nationalism, increasingly open to the capitalist market with the Neo-Wafd Party; and Marxism, represented by the National Progressive Unionist Party, also known as Tagammu’, which united old Marxists and Nasserists under a framework of protection and co-optation as the party grew increasingly close to the Mubarak regime. For this reason, in his famous pamphlet “Mabadi’ al-la-sultawiyya” (Principles of Anarchism), published in his book Inhiyar ‘ibadat al-dawla (The Fall of State-Worship) (2002), he promotes anti-authoritarian politics as a way to overcome the current political status quo in the country and worldwide. In this first pamphlet, Sameh used the term la-sultawiyya (anti-authoritarianism) as opposed to anarkiyya (anarchism, a term that does not appear in his work until the days of the 2011 Revolution in Egypt). Many members of the non-authoritarian left from his generation have avoided calling themselves anarchists, despite their important role in the emergence, development, dissemination and transmission of anarchism in Arabic in Egypt and across the Southern Mediterranean. In this way, “Principles of Anarchism” starts with a necessary terminological

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explanation to inform the reader about the underlying ideology behind his choice of Arabic translation: al-la-sultawiyya is the best translation into Arabic to explain a political, social and philosophical current that has received numerous names and intellectual symbols. It has been embodied in revolutionary movements or revolutions throughout history. It varies within each school, even though it is unified within a general framework. It is known in Arabic as alfawdawiyya, an inaccurate translation of a word [i.e. anarchism] which in Greek means ‘without government’, while al-fawdawiyya is derived from the Arabic fawda, based on its English translation [i.e. chaos]. As such, this translation of the term is not only imprecise but also malicious, as it aims to alienate the listener. This current is also known as al-lasultawiyya [non-authoritarianism], taharruriyya[libertarianism], and other more specific and important names such as al-shuyu‘iyya al-taharruriyya [libertarian communism]. (Said Abud 2002, p. 145)

In this quote, Sameh not only states his intentions, but also brings to the table the ideological use of concepts. His choice of terminology responds to the circumstances of his political experience in the Egyptian left, and thus, he uses the term “anti-authoritarianism” over other possibilities that he himself offers in Arabic. In his work he levels harsh criticism against the authoritarian tendencies of the various ideologies in Egypt, opting for an anti-state and anti-authoritarian alternative in the form of anarchism. Again, the issue of translation arises as an indissoluble problem in the search for a political ideology that goes beyond the borders of the nationalist left and party politics in Egypt. However, translation is presented as a tool of resistance and as a decolonizing act. It is therefore a space for discursive and ideological negotiation: Translation is not solely a channel of colonization; it can also be a site of active resistance to colonial and neocolonial powers. A number of studies that approached translation from a postcolonial perspective have revealed traces of resistance inscribed in translations undertaken in colonial contexts and proposed ways of putting translation at the service of decolonization. (Hui 2008, p. 202)

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Surrealism, Anarchism and Counter-Culture in Egypt: Practice as Theory In Mexico in 1938, André Breton and Diego Rivera (and possibly Trotsky) penned the manifesto “For an Independent Revolutionary Art”, in which the signatories expressed their more libertarian commitments in art and moved away from authoritarian socialism: If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history. It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called pure art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art. (Breton and Rivera 1938)

This statement, openly sympathetic to anarchism, was received by surrealists worldwide and found support among the members of the Art and Liberty Group (Jama‘a al-fannwa-l-hurriyya) in Cairo. And yet, apart from a handful of recent academic works (Bardaouil 2017; Bardaouil and Fellrath 2017), scant research has been done into how this manifesto and subsequent political and cultural engagements influenced the counter-culture scene in the Southern Mediterranean. Large volumes on anarchism have for the most part either overlooked or marginalized the role of culture and art in the movement. In reference books, even those written by recognized anarchist authors, art has only been pointed out as a secondary part of this tradition, i.e., as a side effect of anarchism as a political and social ideology. In fact, when mentioned, art and culture appear as an external aspect, at a remove from the political (Evren Türkeli 2012, p. 131). Anarchist theory, however, has called on artists to take part in the transformation of society, which is

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why at the turn of the century anarchism exerted a greater influence on the arts than any of the other brands of socialism (Leighten 2013, p. 7). Numerous studies on the origin of surrealism have demonstrated not only the relationship between anarchism and different artistic currents of the interwar period in Europe and beyond, but also its direct influence on these artistic developments (Löwy 2009; Cohn 2013; Reynaud Paligot 1995). Löwy, for example, sums up the relationship between surrealism and anarchism in the following terms: “The alliance was firmly based on the affinities the Surrealists shared with the anarchists’ commitments to anti-patriotism, anti-capitalism, anti-militarism, anti-statism, revolt, class struggle, desertion, and sabotage” (2009, p. xviii). Löwy restores the notion of surrealism as a radical political force, dismissing its portrayal as a purely artistic movement. By putting the emphasis on the affinities between surrealism and anarchism, Löwy avoids interpreting political movements in ideological terms and recalls surrealism as a cross-cultural entity that is always subversive and trans-historical. In the case of surrealism and anarchism, affinities therefore prove more important in the construction of political alternatives than fighting against hegemonies, as argued by Day (2005). In this sense, I follow Jesse Cohn’s (2013) notion of affinities and commitments when speaking about the relationship between anarchism and surrealism: “rather than situating anarchisant writers by political ‘commitments’ or ‘alignments’, we have to think in terms of ‘traditions’, ‘affinities’ and … ‘networks’” (Cohn 2013, p. 107). In addition to Breton (1896–1966), other surrealists such as Benjamin Péret (1899–1959) and Louis Aragon (1897–1982) were very much influenced by anarchism during their adolescence. Louis Aragon declared himself to be an individualist in the 1920s, and André Breton in the 1950s. Given their common struggle against fascism and authoritarianism, at the time surrealists, anarchists and Trotskyists enjoyed good relations; however, their ideological affiliations have stood in the way of viewing this proximity from the perspective of artistic analysis. Löwy points out that despite André Breton’s alliances with communism and later with Trotskyism, his own Marxist thinking was in many ways distinct from them. The French Communist Party was deeply influenced by the rationalist, scientific, Cartesian and positivist tendencies of eighteenth-century French materialism (Löwy 2009, p. xiv). Libertarian Spain—from Francisco Ferrer, the Catalonian educator falsely accused of attempted regicide, to the CNT and FAI, through

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to the Spanish libertarians and Anarchists in exile in the 1950s—held an important position in the surrealist imaginary and influenced André Breton’s thought and political position. Breton’s stance in favor of libertarian communism quickly found a niche in the anarchist movement. Serge Ninn, a libertarian artist who started out as a communist only to become an anarcho-individualist, was one of the artists who favored the encounter between anarchism and surrealism (Reynaud Paligot 1995, p. 238). During World War II, Ninn joined the Surrealist Group in London, which at the moment was in close collaboration with the Anarchist Federation. Together with Georges Fontenis, they organized anarcho-surrealist meetings. Upon this backdrop, we will examine the Art and Liberty Group in Egypt, which falls not only within the paradigm of transnational liberation, but also within the local political and art scene of the time. In this section, I would like to trace the genealogy and development of the group of artists, activists and writers whose purpose was to free thought— and by extension society—from the limits imposed by the rise of fascism and by the morals of the bourgeoisie and capitalism of the time. The group’s activities (in form and content), as well as its affinities, transnational networks and artistic production, make it a necessary case study in order to broaden our understanding of the history and experiences of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean. It can thereby decolonize this political philosophy and shed some light on the complex relationship between practice and theory, while problematizing the existing “affinities” and “commitments” between surrealism and anarchism. On December 22, 1938, thirty-one artists, writers and lawyers signed the manifesto “Long life to degenerate art” (Yahiyya al-Fann al-Munhat). Written by Georges Henein (1914–1973), the manifesto strongly criticized the authoritarianism of “modern society” and its institutions. It emerged as a response to the Nazi regime’s campaign against “repulsive artists and poets” (al-shu‘ur bi-l-ishmi’zaz), i.e., “degenerate art”. More specifically, it came in response to the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibitions in Munich, which exhibited 650 works of art by 112 artists (Kane 2014, p. 97). By claiming the term “degenerate” (al-munhat) as its own, the Art and Liberty Group articulated an anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist discourse, proclaiming that “art, by its nature, was a constant intellectual and emotional exchange in which humanity as a whole participates and cannot therefore accept these artificial limitations” (Henein 1992, p. 6).

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The publication of the manifesto resulted in innumerable articles in the liberal and conservative newspapers of the time seeking to discredit the recently created group. In July 1939, art critic Aziz Ahmad Fahmi explained in the liberal nationalist newspaper al-Risala (1933–1953) why he believed that the manifesto had immediately been met with the rejection of Cairo’s artistic community. For Fahmi, art could not be “degenerated” because by definition it was the supreme expression of the human spirit. Anwar Kamil (1919–1973), a member of the Art and Liberty Group and the editor of their magazine al-Tatawwur (Progress), responded to Fahmi’s article with a defense of the group’s aims. In the article, Kamil explained that the group’s goal was to disseminate the ideas of an internationalist and socialist culture among the Egyptian youth through art, and went on to describe the group as anarchist (Kamil 1939, pp. 1520–1521). As a result of this debate in al-Risala, Georges Henein formally founded the Art and Liberty Group on January 19, 1939. Born in Cairo, by this time Georges Henein was already an important poet, writer and journalist. His father, a professional diplomat, and ambassador first to Italy and later to Spain, put Henein in contact with the reality of these two countries. These two early experiences influenced his literary production and his later political and anti-fascist activity. Of Coptic origin and a native speaker of French, the life and work of Georges Henein has been extensively studied and claimed by French academia (Alexandrian 1981; Boidard Boisson 1993); however, far less attention has been paid to his work in Arabic, which has yet to be systematically studied in connection to his literary, artistic and political affinities. al-Risala’s diatribe was not the only factor that gave rise to the group, it was also motivated by a desire to contest the surge in fascism. The dispute between Georges Henein and Italian Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) marked another turning point for the Art and Liberty Group. On March 24, 1938, Marinetti presented his essay “Motorized poetry” at the club Les Essayistes in Cairo. During this event, Henein interrupted the speaker, protesting against his apology of fascism and imperialism, since months earlier Marinetti had openly supported Mussolini’s intervention in Ethiopia. The rise of fascism, both inside and outside Egypt, paved the way for the Art and Liberty Group. Their goal was, first and foremost, liberation from all forms of oppression by authoritarian regimes through the propagation of a revolutionary program defending imagination, free artistic and bodily expression, and social freedom. In their founding manifesto, they stated their objectives as:

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The affirmation of cultural and artistic freedom; To promote awareness of works, individuals, and values, knowledge of which is indispensable to understand the present time; To maintain a close contact between the youth of Egypt and current literary, artistic, and social developments around the world.7 The majority of the members of the Art and Liberty Group belonged to upper-middle-class Egyptian families, but did not fully belong to the effendiyya, the middle-working class connected to the old Ottoman elite and linked to the rural class. In this sense, I understand that the formation of the middle class is not only a category that revolves around economic factors, but also constitutes a social construct associated with a series of historical and material circumstances. In Keith David Watenpaugh’s words (1966, p. 19): Critically my conceptualization of this stratum as the middle class builds upon a consensus that “middle class” is more than a neutral economic category, but rather constitutes an intellectual, social, and cultural construct linked to a set of historical and material circumstances; class is more than just one’s relationship to the means of production or the accumulation of wealth (which is also a reason why I have avoided the potential confusion that might ensue were I to characterize this stratum as merely an Eastern Mediterranean petit bourgeoisie).

Following Watenpaugh’s conceptualization of the middle class, most members of the Art and Liberty Group were not part of the effendiyya. The effendiyya carries with it the adoption of the cultural concept of “respectability”, shaped by education and manners. Likewise, this social class was constructed around the concept of adab, understood to encompass good manners, good taste and humanism (Watenpaugh 1966, p. 23). By contrast, the members of the Art and Liberty Group emerged as a direct rebellion against this type of middle class and its concept of modernization as synonymous with Westernization. In his article “L’Art dans la Mélée” (1939), Georges Henein defines modernity as “returning to reality, not as something that ended and stopped, but on the contrary, as something dynamic, malleable, perfectible” (Henein 1939). Despite the group’s predominantly masculine character, it also included important female figures. Among them were Romanian-born poet and writer Maria Cavadia (1901–1970), who moved to Egypt in

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1929; poet Iqbal al-Alali, known to her friends as “Boula”, one of the foremost members of the group; writer InjiAflatun (1924–1989); and poet Joyce Mansour (1928–1986), among many others. From a heterogeneous background and with different life stories, Art and Liberty members shared their common motivation to fight for a free society and artistic freedom. Among them was RamsisYunan (1913– 1966), one of the group’s founding members. A painter and a writer, Yunan was born in the province of Minya in Upper Egypt to a lowermiddle-class family. In 1933, he entered the Cairo School of Fine Arts and later taught design at a secondary school. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1956, when he was expelled from France after living there for almost a decade, he considered himself to be an anarcho-individualist (Rosemont and Robin 2009, p. 161). Anwar Kamil is probably one of the most unknown and interesting members of Art and Liberty. He was not an artist himself and had a more political profile within the group. He and his younger brother Fuad Kamil were born in Beni Suefto a small petit bourgeois family. While Anwar studied at the American University and later became a member of the group Les Essayistes, Fuad became an artist and art professor after graduating from the Egyptian School of Arts, where he met RamsisYunan. In 1937, he participated in the Neo-Orientalist Society, which aimed at reclaiming art from the orientalists (Gharib 1986, p. 39; Kane 2013, p. 59), where he met Kamil al-Telmisany (1915–1972). Al-Telmisany was born into a lower-middleclass family in Shebin al-Kanater in the governorate of al-Qalyubia. In 1925, he moved to Cairo, where he studied at el-Sayyid high school. After failing to become a veterinarian, he turned to cinema, completing his first film, The Black Market, in 1946. Franco-Egyptian writer Albert Cossery (1913–2008) and anarchist writer Angelo de Riz were also part of the group. Cossery’s novels, although written in French, drew much of their inspiration from Egypt or from imaginary images of the “Middle East”, despite the fact that at the age of 17 he emigrated to Paris to continue his studies (which he never finished) and remained there until his death in 2008. The Art and Liberty Group is considered to be the first episode of the surrealist movement in Egypt, although not all members of the group defined themselves as surrealists and many of them belonged to other artistic movements (Creagh 2015, p. 144). In the opinion of Sam Bardaouil (2013), even if many members did not work in a surrealist style (or at least not according to its conventional definition in political and

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aesthetic terms in Europe), many sympathized with their revolutionary political project (p. 1). As it was a revolutionary and not exclusively artistic project, many young activists of the time would gather in the evenings at Tommy’s Bar to discuss, debate and organize the group’s activities (Desvaux 2014, p. 93).8 Since the end of the nineteenth century, formal or informal study groups had become spaces to discuss ideas, build affinities, or propagate political, artistic or social ideas. The aforementioned study group Les Essayistes, with which Georges Henein was in contact as of 1930, directly preceded the Art and Liberty Group, and published the magazine Un Effort (1929–1937) in Alexandria. In fact, it was an article that Henein wrote for Un Effort following French surrealist René Crevel’s suicide in 1935 that put him in contact with André Breton in Paris. From there the two began to exchange letters about the possibilities of creating a revolutionary and surrealist movement in Egypt (LaCoss, 2010). In 1935, Un Effort published a short dictionary titled “Fragments du petit Larousse illustré. Dictionnaire à l’usage du monde burgeois” (Excerpts from the Illustrated Petit Larousse: Dictionary of the bourgeois world), where anarchism was defined as “victory of the spirit over certainty” and the police as “directed murder” (Un Effort 1935, p. 22). Also under the aegis of Les Essayistes, on February 4, 1937 an Egyptian state radio program broadcast, first in Cairo and later in Alexandria, a reading by the group in which Henein delivered a talk entitled “Bilan du mouvementsurréaliste” (Balance of the Surrealist Movement). In this seminar, he offered a very orderly and chronological account of how and why the surrealist movement arose in Paris, as well as the goals of the movement, as stipulated by André Bréton in the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930). The Formation of an Eclectic Libertarian School of Thought The Art and Liberty Group is an interesting case study for the conceptualization of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean (Galián and Paonessa 2017, p. 43). Although it has been relegated to a marginal position in the literature dealing with the left in Egypt in the interwar period (Botman 1988; Said 1986), in the last decade or so critical voices have challenged the position that the Art and Liberty Group has been accorded in the historiography of the Egyptian left, especially in terms of its role in the configuration of a heterogeneous map of ideologies

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that emerged between the two World Wars (Creagh 2015; LaCoss 2010, 2014; Bardaouil 2017).9 Renton (2004) argues that in Africa “literary Trostkyism” was led by Georges Henein. Similarly, he considers that the Art and Liberty Group, along with the offshoot Bread and Freedom Group founded by Anwar Kamil in 1940, was part of the unexplored and forgotten Egyptian Trotskyist current (2011). David Renton in both articles situates Georges Henein and the Art and Liberty Group as part of the international Trotskyist movement, given that in 1938 Georges Henein signed the manifesto of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (in French FIARI) promoted by André Bretón, Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera. However, there is ample evidence to suggest that this affiliation falls short of capturing the group’s ideological framework. Egyptian historian Bashir Siba‘i, a professed Trotskyite of the 1970s, has argued that there never was a Trotskyist current in Egyptor anywhere else in the Arab world, with the exception of Palestine (Sib¯a‘ii 1987, p. 395). Renowned Egyptian historian Rifa‘atSa‘id (1986) has pointed out on numerous occasions the problems with pinning down the ideological affiliation of the Art and Liberty Group and its members. The author suggests that al-Tatawwur’s writings and the group’s statements are most closely aligned with anarchism. To demonstrate this, the author cites Marcel Israel, an Arabized Jew with Italian citizenship and a leading member of the Egyptian Communist Party, who on several occasions stated that the group went from having “an anarchist and surrealist magazine to a commercial one” (Sa‘id 1986, p. 90). Furthermore, Sa‘id considers that the five issues of the magazine (there were in fact seven in total) “suggest its proximity to anarchist thought” (1986, p. 90), constituting sufficient grounds to argue that the magazine and the group were directly influenced by anarchism and had “anarchist affiliations” (intima‘atfawdawiyya). Rifa‘atSa‘id does not go so far as to label al-Tatawwur and the Art and Liberty Group themselves as anarchist, citing his inability to establish firm links such as group members’ affiliation in anarchist groups. However, affiliations and affinities did exist. It is precisely this view of anarchism, as a pre-established ideology with closed ideological underpinnings and organized into formal groups that I wish to dismantle and deconstruct. Rifa‘atSa‘id is correct in considering that there is no direct affiliation of the members of the Art and Liberty Group in any anarchist organization inside or outside Egypt. And yet, their emancipatory discourse, the “form” of their organization, and their concept of art

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all indicate that they undoubtedly constitute an anarchist and libertarian experience that decolonizes and broadens the history of anarchism. Sam Bardaouil (2017) is correct in stating that the surrealists’ search for a revolutionary culture “would see many of them shift from the Communism of Stalin to the Marxism of Trotsky, and eventually to a version of anarchism that in 1943 would be described by Herbert Read as the ‘politics of the unpolitical’” (Bardaouil 2017, p. 151). Anwar Kamil declared in 1980 that Trotskyism’s idea of “permanent revolution” did not influence him during his first years in the group simply because he had never even heard of it. In fact, when asked if al-Tatawwur was a Trotskyist-leaning publication, he answered that: … at the time we were revolutionaries without dogma. Even in my first article I addressed myself to the people saying that we have no definite principles to give but we give the opportunity for progressive ideas to interact and to create the way for reformation. I cannot say that either Art and Liberty, Bread and Freedom or al-Tatawwur were Trotskyte, inspite[sic]of the fact that Henein himself was a Trotskyte. I was not a Trotskyte, but a mixture of different influences, one of which might have been Trotsky. At most, were pro-Trotsky, perhaps. (Personal communication between Selma Botmanand Anwar Kamil 1980, p. 5)

Anwar Kamil’s answer is representative of the sentiment of other members of the group. None of them, as far as I know, ever declared themselves to belong to any particular political ideology. They were united by a strong anti-Stalinist sentiment (because of the trend’s marked authoritarianism in the late 1930s), and a desire for the liberation of the individual (of themselves and of society). The individual, always framed in relation to society and collectivity, became the focus of al-Tatawwur’s analyses and artistic vision, hence the eminently political character of the artistic and cultural project proposed by its members. When Georges Henein went to Paris and left the leadership of the Art and Liberty Group to RamsisYunan, he wrote a letter to his friend Nicolas Calas (1907–1988), a Greek-American poet, in which he expressed his sympathy with anarchism while explaining his frustration with the Fourth International: “I have come to a growing sympathy with the anarchists whose attitude despite (or because of) its innocence, is fine, consistent and honest…” (Renton 2004, p. 98).

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In 1945, Georges Henein, RamsisYunan, Hassan al-Tilmisani, Adel Amin and Kamil Zahari signed the manifesto “Tufulat al-shay‘” (The Childhood of the Thing),10 whose criticism of Marxism is a clear example of the group’s marked tendency toward anti-authoritarian and libertarian positions, which in its last years of existence led the group to openly declare its sympathies for anarchism. The critique of Marxism outlined in the manifesto focuses on its authoritarian character and its censorship of critical voices: “our complaints against Marxism are not based on its revolutionary objective, but on its negative, reactionary, frozen position towards the scientific revolution and the revolution of thought in general” (Tufulat al-shay 1948). The manifesto ends by stating that what is important is individual freedom within all collective processes: The individual against the tyrannical state The imagination against the routine of dialectical materialism Freedom against terror in all its forms Art and Liberty therefore promoted a discourse and conception of the freedom of the individual and the imagination as fundamental factors for social change and regeneration, and as such the group deserves to be framed as an important chapter in the experiences of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean. However, it was not until the late 1940s that many of its members (in particular Henein and Yunan) openly declared their adherence to and sympathies for their libertarian and anarchist comrades. Their preference for anarchism over Trotskyism was due to the twofold disillusionment of the communist left, first with Stalinism’s authoritarian shift, and then with the Troskyist cadres in the wake of Trotsky’s 1940 assassination. In Henein’s words: In truth, what is tearing me away from the strategy of the Fourth International, is its lack of passion, which combines with an overabundance of plans. With Trotsky, there was passion, nobility, the whiff of gunpowder. I see nothing of these in the voice or the bearing of his successors. (Cited in Renton 2004, p. 98)

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Art and Liberty’s Writings and Exhibitions To define “freedom” is to restrict its meaning, to explain it is to limit its scope. The word “freedom” is one of those words that, when set free, reveals its own meaning. The furthest the human mind can go in imagining how to free itself from limits and frontiers is perhaps the meaning of the anarchist motto, “No gods, no masters”. (AbderlrrahmanShahinder 1940)

Between 1940 and 1945 the Art and Liberty Group published their Arabic-language revolutionary magazine al-Tatawwur and organized five art exhibitions, where they reflected their theoretical revolutionary concepts and their political affinities. Although it lasted barely six months, al-Tatawwur was the first libertarian and surrealist literary and artistic magazine published in Arabic. Its influence on the development of a revolutionary, artistic and cultural school of thought was not only limited to the years before World War II in Egypt, but served as an inspiration for the development of other surrealist and libertarian movements throughout the Arab world and its diaspora, such as the group organized around the magazine al-Raghba al-Ibahiyya (Libertarian Desire) and its French version Le DésirLibertaire founded by Abdul Kader al-Jannabi in the late 1970s in Paris. Most of the copies of the first issue of the magazine (more than 1000 according to Anwar Kamil) were distributed at the space where the group’s first exhibition was held, the Nile Gallery on Suleiman Pasha Square (now Tala‘atHarb) in Cairo. The space served not only to publicize the artists’ work, but also to spread and exchange their political ideas. The first issue of the magazine al-Tatawwur was not the only publication distributed at the gallery; there were also pamphlets such as RamsisYunan’s “We are still In Turmoil” (Gharib 1986, p. 14). The first exhibition was titled “Toward a Free Independent Art” (also referred to in some instances as “Free Art”) which according to Samir Gharib (1986) was a nod to Breton and Rivera’s manifesto. Years later, Badr al-Din Abu Ghazi described it as: “a violent revolution against order, beauty and logic” (quoted in Gharib 1986, p. 12). This characterization could be equally applied to their discourses in the pages of al-Tatawwur. The magazine propagated a positivist view of Egyptian society, arguing that it was sick (mujtama‘marid) and

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unbalanced (faqid li-l-ittizan). For this reason, the main purpose of alTatawwur was to awaken the interest of young Egyptians in order to “seek out free ideas and aspire to renewal in order to grow, mature and lay the groundwork for the country’s progress[tatawwur]” (Ittijahjadid 1940). According to its anti-systemic ideas, which ran contrary to the established order and promoted creativity and free imagination, the magazine did not organize the topics discussed in each issue according to a strict structural division.11 Al-Tatawwur, especially in the first three issues of its short run, opened up a space of total freedom where its authors, all members of the Art and Liberty Group, could express their political, social and artistic ideals, preoccupations and interests. Al-Tatawwur served to link artistic thought to social change, as Art and Liberty’s members sought to forge a new breed of Egyptian intellectuals connected to the reality of the society around them (Kamil 1940, p. 2). For this reason, numerous articles were devoted to the regeneration of education in the country. For al-Tatawwur, the Egyptian intellectual would become the guarantor of progress in society. Progress was understood to encompass the defense of women’s rights, the distribution of wealth, workers’ rights, the importance of the peasantry in Egypt’s economic and social development, and the abolition of religious institutions such as the Awqaf. Like the texts published in al-Tatawwur, Art and Liberty’s exhibitions expressed the group’s interest in form and practice as a way to express their subversive stance toward arts and politics. Sam Bardaouil (2013) provides an excellent overview of how form makes up part of their repertoire of contentious politics through art as a response to the established bourgeois order of the moment (2013, p. 4). The five exhibitions demonstrated the group’s intentions to disassociate themselves from what had traditionally been considered “appropriate” or “respectable” in the cultural context of the time. Sam Bardaouil is probably one of the few researchers to have taken up a serious analysis of the group’s artistic style, focusing mainly on the correlation between their theory and practice throughout their exhibitions. When recognizing the importance of form in their artistic politics, Bardaouil rightly states that: Art and Liberty has succeeded in creating a model of dissent that conceived the “form of the exhibition” as a tool for protest, a measure that was unavoidable and that had o be taken in order to break down the nationalist, bourgeois and academic dictates that controlled almost every aspect of the artistic sphere in Egypt at the time. (Bardaouil 2017, p. 175)

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In fact, for the second exhibition, held from 10 to 25 March 1940 in the recently built Immobilia Building, the organizers created a labyrinth filled with handprints and upside-down posters in an “attempt to confuse rather than guide” (Bardaouil 2013, p. 7). At the time of the opening, the paint was not yet dry, giving the impression that work had just finished hours earlier (cited in Gharib 1986, p. 14). Different materials were used: photographs, newspaper collages and dancing models. An Italian artist, Trashier, who visited the exhibition, commented that: “I saw a collage of photos and newspaper cuttings in meaningless designs – at least to a novice like you or me…. There were some childish drawings by Miss Shehate; on the walls of the maze were hung ridiculous masks made by Aby Khalil Lutfy” (Gharib 1986, p. 14). This second exhibition was accompanied by the manifesto “Free Art in Egypt”, which offered a vision of what Egyptian art was and where it could be found: The repulsion of the wave of conservative classicalist image making; the arousal of astonishment in the minds of the masses, as it is often the beginning of conscious self-enlightenment; and the linkage of young artists in Egypt with Modern art. (Gharib 1986, p. 18)

The third of the exhibitions took place from 21 to 30 May 1942 at the Continental Hotel in Cairo. This exhibition was the first to host artists from other Arab countries—in the previous two shows most of the nonEgyptian artists were European—and created a space for the construction of a transnational artistic and revolutionary movement. It could be read as an attempt to build a pan-Arab identity through art in order to confront colonialism. This regional transnationalism was the embryo of an Arab internationalism where art emerged as a subversive tool dismissed by colonial powers like Great Britain as unthreatening against the backdrop of World War II. In the fourth exhibition, held at the French Lyceum in Cairo from 12 to 22 May 1944, 150 photographs, sculptures and paintings were shown. The anti-fascist newspaper Giustizia e Libertà, in an article rendered somewhat dubious by its marked orientalist take on the work of InjiAfflaitun and on Egyptian art in general, described the group’s fourth exhibition as “comforting and exemplary” and stated that it “shows us how the poetic imagination served by an effective technique is able to conquer the most remote and least expected worlds of human vision” (Gliindependenti 1944).12 The last exhibition, on May 30, 1945, while

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less ambitious than the previous ones, retained the same subversive and contentious character in its form and choice of space. According to Bardaouil (2013, p. 9), the subversion of space and form in Art and Liberty’s exhibitions was, on the one hand, a response to the aesthetic hierarchies of the work of art. These hierarchies were based on geographical location and the hegemony of the metropolis over the periphery and its colonies. On the other, these exhibitions offered an alternative to the rigid cultural structures of state patronage and the academic setting of most exhibitions in Cairo. In responding to this understanding of art, the Art and Liberty Group also fought against the perpetuation of a colonial vision expressed through the nationalization of Ancient Egyptian art, the construction of the Egyptian Museum, and thus the institutionalization and scientification of art, in what Timothy Mitchell has called “the machinery of representation” (Mitchell 1988, pp. 1–33).

Concluding Remarks Any everyday story in daily performance is oriented by language in execution, by talking and speaking, just as no love story is thinkable without at least three words—you, I, we. Any social event in its manifold connections is based on preparatory communicative acts and achievements of linguistic mediation. (Koselleck 1989, p. 312)

As Reinhart Koselleck suggests, all social and historical events depend on language. This is not to say that language totally conditions actions, but that social history is in constant dialogue with conceptual history and, therefore, is intrinsically embedded in language. Following this rationale, this chapter has sought to underline the implications of language when defining ideologies: to what extent does language transform and reframe concepts? In the case at hand, any attempt to answer to this question must necessarily go back to the nineteenth century and the Nahda, before which time the concept was unknown in Arabic. The different terms used to refer to anarchism—fawdawiyya, anarkiyya, la-sultawiyya or taharruriyya—each emphasize concrete characteristics of this political philosophy, while fawdawiyya specificallyexpresses its initial reception in liberal circles. In all cases, approaches to anarchism in the Arabic language have had major implications on how this political philosophy has been

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translated, understood and performed in the Southern Mediterranean. While this is not to say that these terms have modified anarchism or its political practices, there is no doubt that the use of each of them reflects the ways in which anarchism has been entwined with the pre-existing social, historical and political actors across the region. While fawdawiyya was the most widely used term in the early 1900s among liberal newspapers, scholars or those alleging its harmful effects, by contrast anarkiyya, la-sultawiyya and taharruriyya have been chosen by the political actors who perform it, mainly after the social revolutions of 2011. On the one hand, political initiatives such as the Art and Liberty group in the 1930s have underlined the way in which theory can be performed through art, while redefining the use of Arabic in libertarian and surrealist thought. On the other hand, Sameh Said Abud’s translations and anarchist theories have influenced a whole generation of young anarchists in the Southern Mediterranean, making the case for Daniel Guerin’s book Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as the reverse: Anarchism from practice to theory. Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that language has played a critical role in defining and materializing the collective action of anarchism in the Southern Mediterranean and, to a greater or lesser extent, in localizing and situating the knowledge it has produced while decolonizing its European roots.

Notes 1. In 2013, Egyptian anarchists started to look into their own history in a moment of self-reflection. In fact, Yasir Abdallah’s Anarchism on the Nile is the result of a talk delivered at the headquarters of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party in April 2013 together with Syrian anarchist Mazen Kam al-Maz, titled: “Al-Anarkiyya. Ma‘anaha wa tarikhuha” (Anarchism: Its meaning and history), where Abdallah and Kam al-Maz reconstructed the meaning and history of anarchism in Egypt and Syria. 2. It was founded by the Kurdish-Iraqi political activist Razkar ‘Aqarawi, currently a political refugee in Denmark and a former member of the Iraqi Communist Party. Al-Hiwwar al-Mutamadden has become a major reference space for Arab political debate and an important channel of political activism for the democratic transition under harsh neoliberal dictatorial regimes in numerous countries of the Mediterranean basin. See: http:// www.ahewar.org/debat/nr.asp. 3. According to the group, the translation was financed with the help of other anarchist groups internationally and more than 4000 copies were

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printed. 2000 of these were distributed among Arabic-speaking communities in Europe and 2000 in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East. Retrieved from: https://www.struggle.ws/inter/albadil.html. In 2013, there was an article on Correspondents.org that called Sameh Said “The Godfather of Egyptian anarchism” for his implication in the emergence of contemporary anarchism in Egypt and beyond. See: Faraj, M. (2013). ‘Arrab al-Anarkiyya al-Misriyya. “al-Thawra tanhat”. Correspondents.org. Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/2Ycmtfq. The 8 January Communist Party was founded in 1975 and consisted of a small, ultra-secret party, composed of a group of activists who never accepted the dissolution of the Egyptian Communist Party in 1965 and who never participated in the Arab Socialist Union (Hammad 2016, p. 141). AGEG appeared in 2002 as an antithesis of Egyptian politics, as it was a form of political activism that emerged as a result of the failure of the corrupt parliamentary politics, authoritarianism and neoliberal economics of the Hosni Mubarak regime. This is the English translation of Marjolijin de Jager in Rosemont, F., & R. D. G. Kelley (Eds.). (2009). Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 152. The original text in Arabic can be found in the bulletin Art et Liberté/alFann wa-l-hurriyya, March and April 1939; and in French in “Art et Liberté” Clé: Bulletin Mensuel de la Féderation Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Independent, 2, February 1939. Tommy’s bar was also a meeting place of the Allied soldiers in Egypt. See: Duggan-Smith, P. (1997). Don’t Tell My Mother: How to Fight War on Your Own Terms. Ottawa: The Golden Dog Press, p. 128. The recent publication of Sam Bardaouil’s Surrealism in Egypt. Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group (2017) is noteworthy in this regard. It is so far one of the few systematic studies to break the historiography’s silence on the group, delving into its history, dynamics and transnational networks from the local and the Egyptian perspective and not only through the francophone literature, as has been traditionally the case until now. This is my own direct translation of the manifesto from Arabic. I do not know where the manifesto was originally published. There is an English translation by P. Wood in Rosemont, F., & R. D. G. Kelley (Eds.). (2009). Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 150–151, which likewise does not specify where it was published. In our copy in Arabic the date of publication is 1948 while in Rosemont, F., & Jekkey, D. G. (2009) the date of publication is given as 1945.

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11. The first three issues of the magazine had a more or less equal number of pages, after which its length was reduced due to the censorship of the Egyptian authorities, who ultimately shut down the publication (Monaco 2012, p. 23). 12. The connection of the Art and Liberty group with Italian anti-fascism in Egypt has yet to be explored and studied in depth. As we have already discussed elsewhere (Galián and Paonessa 2017, p. 46), many Italian anti-fascists fled to Egypt in the late thirties, where they found a pre-existing and well-established Italian community that was mostly, but not entirely, composed of fascists (and to a lesser extent communists and anarchists). Under these circumstances, Italian anti-fascism developed in Egypt through the work of Radio Cairo, founded and organized by Fausta Cialente (1898–1994), and of Paolo Vitorelli’s group Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), whose Egyptian branch was founded in the 1940s. Stefano Terra, a self-declared anarchist and member of the Art and Liberty group, put the Italian and the Egyptian groups in direct contact. In fact, Georges Henein regularly wrote for Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom Papers), the magazine associated with the group. Likewise, Quaderni provided coverage for the activities of the Art and Liberty group, which were very much acclaimed by Italian audiences.

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CHAPTER 5

Mapping the South of the Mediterranean

The aim of mapping the anarchist experiences that have emerged along the last century in the South of the Mediterranean is not to write a history of anarchism, but rather to bring to light what has been said, hidden and unexplored in this subaltern narrative. Relatively ignored by those concentrating on democratization theories, waves of riots and demonstrations, anarchism has sparked in almost every single country in the South of the Mediterranean in the last decade but also in the previous century: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine. Most of these new waves of contentious politics were stimulated by the rapid rise in food staple prices and the deeply rooted revolts against authoritarian rule, extensive official corruption and unemployment. Mapping how anarchism has emerged, contested power, adapted to local conditions and modified the ways of doing and performing repertoires of contentious politics in the South of the Mediterranean comes with a close examination of the phenomena of migration, diaspora, global capitalism and syndicalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Numerous scholars have discussed the relationship between immigration and working-class militancy, but there are major disagreements about the nature of this relationship. Historians like Donna Gabaccia, Michael Miller Topp and Davide Turcato have extensively studied the continuity and connections between the Italian diaspora in America and American

© The Author(s) 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4_5

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radical culture (Zimmer 2010, p. 19). Historians have posited the link between migration and Italian American anarchism as the reason for the emergence of forms of resistance that relied on direct action rather than voting. Despite the need for a larger account of the histories of anarchisms in the South of the Mediterranean, not just with the arrival of political exiles and workers from Italy, and from Greece and other parts of the Ottoman Empire who already were aware of the repertoire of contentious politics claimed by anarchism, but also how it developed and continued in these contexts, it could be said, without doubt, that the Arab Revolutions have played an important part in “maintaining, reclaiming and decolonising anarchism as a political philosophy” (Galián 2018, p. 715). While these movements are very diverse, they also share similarities that allow us to identify a pattern: horizontality, radical urban transformation and the reappropriation of public space, and generally speaking, their anti-authoritarian stances are the political strategies that have served as a common denominator among these new movements.

From the End of the Ottoman Empire to the Unfinished Decolonization Lebanon and Syria: Fragmentation and Local Organizing The immigration of Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals to Egypt at the end of the Ottoman Empire was one of the factors that gave place to the exchange and dissemination of radical leftist ideas between Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 46). In the formation of the modern Egyptian nation-state by Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor or Egypt (1805–1848), Egyptian rulers recruited Syrian intellectuals for positions in ministries, in modern medicine, or as journalists, interpreters and translators. Due to repressive policies and censorship in their places of origin, as well as the need to continue the work of publishing their newspapers, Egypt became a meeting point for Mahjar literature, and numerous editors of Lebanese and Syrian newspapers played a fundamental role in the translation and dissemination of anarchism in Arabic. In this context, a network of dissent was formed, which disseminated new radical ideas that were being incorporated into the already existing repertoires of contentious politics in South Mediterranean societies. In fact, in October 1909, a theater play was performed in solidarity with Catalan

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anarchist and pedagogue Francisco Ferrer, who was falsely accused of committing a terrorist attack and instigating the Tragic Week in Barcelona (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 60). While it is true that an anarchist movement did not develop in the Southeast of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Armenia (Schimdt and Van Der Walt 2010), the development of transnational networks served as the channel for the exchange of radical leftist ideas in Syria and Lebanon, and was key to the organization of local leftist movements. There are no accounts of the existence of a selfdeclared anarchist movement in the modern history of Lebanon, nor in Syria until the mid-1990s. In Lebanon, the civil war that devastated the country for more than fifteen years (1975–2000) left a postwar political system that revolved around two factions: the Syrian, which controlled the country militarily and politically, and the Saudi, represented by businessman Rafic Hariri, Prime Minister (1992–1998, 2000–2004), and the promoter of the country’s reconstruction work through million-dollar contracts with foreign companies (Yacoub 2013, p. 91). In the mid-1990s, the emergence of a new left that opposed this system in which the country was controlled by these two factions became clear. Najah Wakim, the leader of the People’s Movement, a democratic leftist political party founded in 2000 by important figures on the Lebanese left, started to attract the attention of the youth. The People’s Movement opposed the neoliberal policies of al-Hariri and adopted radical alter-globalist positions. Parallel to the re-emergence of the People’s Movement (had no seat in the parliament at that time), a new wave of student mobilization started to emerge in the private universities of the country through organizations such as No Frontiers (American University of Beirut), Pablo Neruda (Lebanese American University) and Tanyous Shaheen (Saint Joseph University) (Yacoub 2013, p. 91). This new wave of mobilizations, along with the disillusionment of a large part of the left with the corruption of the Lebanese Communist Party, gave rise to the Democratic Left Movement (DLM). At that moment, the Lebanese Communist Party was divided between a “statist” sector, which controlled the committees opposed to change in the party’s foreign policies, and the “reformist” sector, critical of the party’s centralized structure and in favor of abolishing “democratic centralism” (Nassif 2000). But at the same time, at a moment of increase in the country’s sectarian tensions in 2005, the LCP “experienced a certain bewilderment when it came to clarifying its position on the two dominant axes” (Velasco Muñoz 2019, p. 102).

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The DLM was founded in 2004 by intellectuals such as Elias Khoury, Ziad Majed, Samir Kassir and the ‘Group of Independent Students’. Their goal was to work toward a democratic secular society, to protect individual freedoms and to promote center-left economic policies. What makes this party interesting was its marked decentralized organization, its participation in the Cedar Revolution in 20051 and its opposition to the country’s relationship with Syria. Without question, it had no relationship whatsoever with anarchism, but in this case its emergence helps us to contextualize the existence of other alternatives closer to anti-authoritarian stances. Parallel to the emergence of the new left in Lebanon, another left-wing group known as al-Badil al-Taharouri (Libertarian Alternative, LA) began to take form, outside the parliamentary current of the new libertarian and radical left. The LA was born in the mid-1990s, side by side with the new Lebanese left. It was associated with the Communist Intifada, a split from the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP). The LCP defined the new Lebanese left as: […] most of this new left is identical to the petty bourgeois parties, more interested in getting the biggest piece of the pie than in a real change. Its members support the government’s liberal economic policies - it is strange sometimes to hear the old Maoists quote Marx to justify their “provisional return” to capitalism. (Samir 1996)

The Lebanese Libertarian Alternative that receives its name from its French counterpart Alternative Libertaire was active from 1995 until 2008.2 In its manifesto, it stated that: We are a group of persons convinced by the libertarian communist ideas, or to be more specific convinced that the libertarian communist holds an efficacious strategy for the transformation of the society. Our ideas take from all the contributions in the history of socialism. In the east as in the occident Karl Marx and Bakounin are two great founders. But too many philosophers and Arab thinkers also. We give a great importance for the autonomous action of the social movement and for the construction of the opposite in the society. As well as the project of a libertarian communist society: economical and political equality of all the citizens, direct democracy, collective solidarity to assure the outspread social rights, individual independence and the individuals

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right of choosing freely their form of life [sic.]. (Al Badil Al Chouyouii Al Taharrouri 2008)

Despite the affirmation that their ideas come from Arab thinkers as well as Western philosophers, at no time did the group mention the names of these Arab philosophers, which makes it difficult to trace the influences of Arab thought in their ideas and political practice. One of the group’s major accomplishments was the Arabic translation of Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism from Theory to Practice (1970) by George Saad, Professor of Law at the Lebanese University and a member of the group in 2000. More than 4000 copies of the book were distributed (half of them in Arabic-speaking countries). The purpose was to make anarchism known in the Arabic-speaking contexts of the South of the Mediterranean. The distribution of the translation of Guerin’s work into Arabic has been fundamental for the dissemination of libertarian socialism in this part of the world, as was discussed in Chapter 4. It is not clear why the Libertarian Alternative group of Lebanon ceased its activities. It did, however, have a notorious influence on the evolution of libertarian radical thought in Lebanon and other parts of the South of the Mediterranean. It is, as far as I am concerned, the first anarchist group established in the Arabic-speaking countries in contemporary times. Directly influenced or not by previous experiences, in 2008 a new anarchist collective was founded in Lebanon known as Radical Beirut (RB). RB started to organize itself firstly through social media and then on the street after the solidarity activities that resulted from the attack on Gaza in 2008–2009. Despite the fact that for the past few years the collective has only been working online, it has numerous followers and is well known in the anarchist circles in the South of the Mediterranean. Its activities through social media aim to “radicalize, revolutionize and renew the activist scene in the Mediterranean area, especially in the Arab world” as well as to “propagate a vision of awareness, resistance, and transformation” (Radical Beirut 2012). In Lebanon, there have been other libertarian experiences in the last decade. Among them, we find the Red and Anarchist Skinhead (RASH), an anti-fascist collective at the Lebanese University founded in 2007. According to Hazem, a member of RASH Lebanon (Commission Journal 2007), the group started with five young activists that were studying in France and was initially composed of fifteen militants, many of them outside Lebanon. Some of them died in the 2006 Lebanese War, and it

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seems that the organization no longer exists. Their main goal was within the field of education: Our work focuses on education, we do free school tutoring, we hold meetings so that children from different villages can get to know each other. Here children can start working at the age of 8 or 12, they have to finish their schooling. We seek funding for them to continue their studies, if we believe they have a chance to succeed. Sometimes we invite families to conferences, a popular meal or a neighborhood assembly. It’s grassroots social work, but I think that’s really where we need to start. It’s an informal network, we try to improve the structure, but in Lebanon, creating a legal association is not easy. There is a lot of police control and harassment, so it’s not the order of the day. (Commission Journal 2007)

Likewise, there are other initiatives where the anarchist participation in horizontal movements in Lebanon has been notorious. Such is the case of Autonomia or the Samidoun (Unbreakable) collective.3 Most anarchists in Lebanon, outside self-declared anarchist collectives, work in the environmental, feminist and LGBTQ/queer movements, and even, as Hazem asserts, in: the western bourgeois NGOs, which although they do not practice the libertarian struggle, have done a great job of conquering women’s rights in the most impoverished neighborhoods of Beirut. (Commission Journal 2007)

However, among the aforementioned movements, groups and collectives, Libertarian Alternative (LA) and Radical Beirut (RB) are probably the two self-declared anarchists groups with the longest trajectories in the country. On some occasions, their work has needed the help of their international counterparts and international solidarity networks that, on certain occasions, has become the channel for paternalistic and neocolonial behaviors. Although LA has been from its beginning a subsidiary of the French Alternative Libertaire, they differed with their parent organization over their own support for the 14 March Movement, a popular movement born after the Cedar Revolution in 2005, out of the union of different political parties united by their opposition to the Syrian position in the country and opposition to the 8 March Alliance, a set of political parties with pro-Syrian tendencies. The Lebanese LA accused the French Alternative Libertaire of a “colonialist spirit and a Jacobin vanity”

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and of using Stalinist practices (Sécretariat International 2007). For the French Alternative Libertaire, the position of the Lebanese Libertarian Alternative with regard to the 14 March Movement was a mistake given that it supported a movement composed of forces of the party of Hariri (who was murdered in 2005 by the Syrian state), the Kataeb Party, the Lebanese Phalangist Party and the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing racist party. Along this line, Radical Beirut published a letter in May 2013 addressed to North American anarchists with the title: “A Letter to North American Anarchists” (Radical Beirut 2013). The letter acknowledged the sacrifices of anarchist groups and activists in the West, as well as those of comrades in the South of the Mediterranean. It clearly sets out the need to learn from these experiences. However, it also condemns the attitude of activists from the Global North when it comes to teaching and patronizing newly emerged anarchist movements in the Global South. According to the letter, such activists, especially those from the United States, have a very narrow conception of ideologies and political practice: “but we also realize that the radical non-authoritarian scene in the West, and especially in North America, is dominated by the strict boundaries of a single ‘politically correct’ ideology”. For RB: It’s fine if the ideological and tactical parameters you chose work for you, but it doesn’t work for everyone, and it definitely doesn’t work for us. So it’s unfortunate that during many exchanges with North American anarchists (and to a less extent European anarchists), some of our comrades were always trying to impose their politically correct ideology on us. (Radical Beirut 2013)

This critique is fundamental to understanding why RB, despite coming ideologically from a self-declared anarchist group, distances itself from anarchism, which they believe is deeply connected to its Eurocentric label. For RB, “anarchism is still for many of us a closed white eurocentric ideology with a post-modernist core”. Both the Lebanese LA and RB decolonize the attempts to “imitate” the “true” ideological core by Western groups and their efforts to establish, in an authoritarian and patronizing way, the limits of anarchism. RB has been at the forefront of the dissemination of anti-authoritarian and environmentalist politics on social media since 2008. It has also been very active during the new wave of contentious politics in Lebanon in

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2019. The 2019 Lebanese Revolution has come, as did those in other parts of the South of the Mediterranean, Algeria, Iraq, Sudan and Iran, with a certain degree of surprise but with much less international attention than the 2011 revolutions. The demonstrations in Lebanon that started by denouncing the foundations of the political and economic system have gathered the major sectors of society, mainly workers and students. The demonstrations were clear about their shared goals: the fight against these foundations, deeply rooted in social injustice and sectarianism. In fact, one of the chants at the demonstrations is “everyone means everyone”, meaning that all people are the same despite their religious or ethnic background. These demands come along with an increase in the decentralization of the movement in geographical terms. Although Beirut has experienced the vast majority of gatherings, sit-ins and demonstrations, cities such as Tripoli have also been at the forefront of the current rebellion. This revolutionary context, involving a popular social movement with no leader and no hierarchy, has been conducive to the emergence of a new anarchist movement in the country, Kafeh! (Fight!). With the hashtag “al-taharrur aatin” (liberation is coming), the group’s anarchist ideas are displayed online. However, despite the tendencies of many anarchist groups in the South of the Mediterranean, as studied by Woller (2018), to operate online, Kafeh! has mainly been actively present in the streets of Lebanon during the last months. In fact, when stating their support for the ongoing revolution in Lebanon, Kafeh!’s members have built camps and participated through direct actions (as they show in the videos and photos displayed on their web page) during demonstrations. Kafeh!’s support for the ongoing Lebanese uprising is due to its similar and shared characteristics with anarchism: It is decentralized, anti-hierarchical and anti-sectarian, and opposed to the whole system of oppression in Lebanon. The appearance of Kafeh! in the streets of Lebanon, as well as their support for the ongoing revolution in Lebanon, demonstrates two of the main hypotheses of this book: Firstly, that the Arab Revolutions of 2011, which are still ongoing as revolutionary processes, have been experienced, lived and understood as anarchist uprisings by their participants; secondly, that these revolutionary experiences and the spaces they occupied have performed the prefigurative politics of anarchism. Kafeh! materializes a new wave of anarchist street politics in the South of the Mediterranean, and it will probably not be the only one in the coming months.

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In Syria, in contrast to Lebanon, there have not been any explicitly anarchist movements until the spark of the 2011 Revolution. It does not mean that there was no horizontal and decentralized organizing before the Revolution; however, as the researcher Nader Atassi affirms, due to the characteristics of the neo-Patriarchal state of Al-Assad, no anarchist movement has existed in Syria in recent decades. This is partly due to the difficulties faced by political dissidents in the country, tightly controlled by the secret police of the regime (Stephens 2013a). However, this has not prevented the flourishing of anarchist thought which, on the level of individuals, has carried out a great deal of theoretical and disseminating work in Arabic. Among them, a Syrian anarchist speaks about his work: I began translating the works of Bakunin (who directly impacted me with his crazy devotion to freedom and revolution) and other well-known “anarchists”. The theory of State capitalism was very important to me, and to some of my friends who went in the same direction. We used it to describe al-Assad regime and to promote a policy of direct opposition in 2000. However, it was the Arab spring what gave anarchism a real push. I left my job as a general practitioner in the Gulf and went to Egypt and then to “liberated Syria” in 2012. I saw the movement flourish in Egypt and in some areas of Syria. (Anonymous, personal communication, 2013)

As with the Egyptian and Tunisian cases, the Second Palestinian Intifada and the Iraq War were the two main events that prompted the political opportunity for Syrian society to organize itself and take the streets, albeit under tight state control and monitoring by the secret police. These two events, and the solidarity demonstrations that followed them, fostered a series of protests and changed the demands and petitions of the popular movement, which progressively began to address national issues. Like the 2003 mobilizations in Aleppo University (known as the “University of the Revolution”) in a demonstration against the Iraq War, banners with the insignia “No to the Emergency Law” were seen. Emergency Law was in force in Syria from 1963 when the Ba’ath Party came to power until April 2011 when it was rescinded by Bashar al-Assad. Although squares were not the central focus of the Syrian Revolution, Syrians took to the streets, as did their Egyptian and Tunisian neighbors, demanding an end to the long-lasting authoritarian and corrupt regime. “Days of Rage”, as the first days of protests were called on the 4th and the 5th of February 2011,

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were not as followed by people as expected for the fear of a severe backlash by the regime. However, on the 15th of March 2011, or the ‘Third day of Rage’, thousands of Syrians headed to the streets of cities such as Hama, Hasakah, Deir al-Zor and Deraa. These demonstrations were followed by extensive detentions, assaults and arrests on the part of the regime (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016, p. 37). The characteristics of the repressive Syrian forces made clear from the beginning of the uprising that the revolution’s strategies in the country were going to differ greatly from those of their Southern Mediterranean counterparts. The Syrian Revolution has in fact, at least at the beginning, searched for self-managed forms of government and subverted the status quo (Galián 2018, p. 720). There has been an increase in academic and media attention to the selfmanagement projects and experiences of the Local Councils in the Syrian Revolution, and concretely to the figure of Omar Aziz (Damascus, 1946– 2013) (Hassan 2013a, 2015; al-Shami 2014; Kam al-Maz 2014). As an intellectual, economist and anarchist, Omar Aziz spent most part of his life in exile (Saudi Arabia and the United States). At the age of 62, he went back to Syria to enroll in the Free Syrian Army during the first days of the revolution. When speaking about Omar Aziz’s personality, Budour Hassan (2013a) rightly states that “Omar Aziz did not wear a Vendetta mask, nor did he form Black Blocs. He was not obsessed with giving interviews to the press, nor did he make the headlines of mainstream media upon his arrest”. Perhaps, what she intends to say is that he was not an anarchist as we would imagine them nowadays. Aziz was a person preoccupied with the development of a horizontal and decentralized organization in a revolutionary Syria. He considered, after long discussions with young Syrian revolutionaries, that long-lasting grassroots work was necessary to dismantle the hierarchical and authoritarian roots of the structures imposed by the Syrian state and the al-Assad regime. For the revolution to be successful, a radical change in the organization of society and its deeply rooted social dynamics was needed. This radical change had to permeate all aspects of life in order to confront and fight against the very foundation of the system of domination and oppression. Aziz designed the theoretical principles for organizing the Local Councils around which society needed to be organized. Local Councils were to become the principal pillar of cooperation among the members of a community. Inspired by the local committees of Rosa Luxemburg and above all, in the examples of self-management during the first months of the Syrian Revolution, Local Councils were for Aziz the space where

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people of different ethnicities or economic levels could work together aiming at managing their lives autonomously outside the institutions of the state, and providing a space where the collective collaboration of individuals would reactivate and push the social revolution at a local, regional and national level (al-Shami 2014). History is understood by Aziz through a concrete theoretical approach that divides it into two different periods: the time of authority (thaman al-sulta) and the revolutionary time (thaman al-thawra) (Aziz 2013). For Aziz, revolution becomes an exceptional event that alters the history of societies. Revolution is, moreover, a rupture in space and time that makes humans live in two consecutive and contradictory times, the time of authority and the revolutionary time. A vivid example is the first eight months of the Syrian Revolution, which at that time was still a peaceful revolution. Aziz concluded that the constant division of the lives of Syrians in these two times, that of authority, where the regime still manages their daily life, and that of revolution, in which activists work every day to overthrow the regime, would end up tiring out the people who would see the revolution as a disruptive event that would lead them to take arms. In order to guarantee the continuity of the revolutionary time, collective and self-managed work was necessary, as other territories of the country were already doing. This would guarantee the legal and medical aid needed. For Aziz, a society with flexible structures based on the collaboration between the revolution and the daily life of people through Local Councils (Majalis al-Mahaliyya) was the ultimate goal of the revolution. These councils had to intervene in the process, changing the time of authority in a collective way. Local Councils had to work to: Guarantee housing for families and provide their basic needs. Write statements for detainees and transfer the information to the respective revolutionary authorities. The council has to fix the legal issues and find the families the necessary support. Manage the petitions and report of affected families and work to secure the expenses through financial assistance with a “regional revolutionary fund”. (Aziz 2013)

Omar Aziz was aware that his idea of a revolutionary self-managed society was going to be a slow and gradual task. The transfer of a life that lied in the comfort provided by the institutions of the state to a

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life outside this structure through Local Councils needs the trust of citizens. To achieve that goal, new social relations among individuals had to be established. Aziz never used the word sha’ab (people), but rather bashr (human beings). His colleague and friend, Mohamad Sami al-Kayal considers that Omar Aziz did not believe in “the people”, considering it as a social category coined by the authority to maintain itself in power, as has been the case during the Arab Revolutions. Within this logic, Local Councils would become spaces that provide a place for discussion where human beings would discuss their concerns, and search for solutions to problems in their daily lives. Local Councils would build horizontal networks of mutual aid among different Local Councils of a concrete territory and eventually among different councils of different regions. As with the resistance movements of the Abya Yala people that interweave alternative ethics and epistemologies for a sustainable culture, the defense of land was one of the fundamental points of Omar’s theoretical approach. The land, expropriated by the Syrian state to guarantee its power and hegemony, had to be defended by the Local Councils with rapid intervention in those properties expecting imminent expropriation. Providing legal methods to ensure true collectivization of the land was a matter of vital importance to the residents of an area. However, Local Councils would not work only by themselves, a national (nonhierarchical) structure for coordination would be necessary. The work of a National Council would ensure the revolutionary sustainability of the councils and facilitate coordination between the different local and regional councils in a flexible way, thus guaranteeing the search for a common ground of action. Omar Aziz was arrested in November 2012 by the Syrian regime and assassinated. His work continued in the form of the tansiquiyyat , even some of the Local Councils were replaced by Sharia-based and other Islamist structures (Galián 2018, p. 728). These committees were responsible for organizing meetings, planning events and taking direct action within the different communities. Over time, the committees began to coordinate among themselves in order to synchronize their activities, movements and political actions. Eventually, they established a coordinating organization: Lajan al-tansiquiyyat al-majaliyya (Local Committee Coordinator) with members in the majority of cities and villages in Syria. In these committees, activists had different functions, from documenting and reporting the violations perpetrated by the al-Assad regime, the

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organization of protests and civil disobedience campaigns, and the coordination of humanitarian aid in bombarded or besieged areas. They worked in a horizontal way, decentralized and without leaders, and all sectors of society were integrated into their structure. Palestine and Jordan: ‘Citizenship’, Nationalism and Decolonization One of the least explored and most interesting cases of the experiences of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean is that of Palestine. It is at the same time a nation without a state and a territory under occupation. Judith Butler argues in her article ‘Palestine, the State Politics and the Anarchist Impasse’ (2013) that if “Anarchism, when defined explicitly as anti-authoritarian or as anti-statist, assumes the existence of a state against which it rallies, even though it also practises and instates forms of sociability that are unrestricted by the terms of the state” (Butler 2013, p. 207), hence, continues the author, when the object of resistance “is either the state or networks of corporate exploitation and monopoly, what about enduring forms of colonial state power?” (Butler 2013, p. 207). Butler rightly suggests a fair question to be asked: How is anarchism expressed and performed in a settler colonial context with no state? In the modern history of Palestine, Palestinians have organized themselves in a horizontal way at an economic and social level. In the revolutionary period of 1936–1939, Palestinian revolutionaries were organized in brigades without leaders. Many of them armed themselves selling their personal property. However, there are hardly any studies on this period of Palestinian history. The so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–1939 has been and still is a marginalized history in both Western and non-Western historiography on Palestine. No experience of Palestinian resistance, despite its relationship to anarchist theory, has been incorporated into the history of anti-authoritarian movements worldwide. In the last few decades, two Palestinian-Israeli combined initiatives have emerged and have made the case for a new understanding of the colonial struggles of Palestinians. These initiatives monopolize the anarchist solidarity in the Occupied Territories: Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW) and Unity. Uri Gordon, Professor at Loughborough University, believes that the fight against Israeli occupation in Palestine has to be led by Palestinians, without minimizing the role of the Israeli civil disobedience against the colonial Israeli state and against its militarist practices and rhetoric (Gordon and Grietzer 2013; Gordon 2010, p. 413). AATW was

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born in 2003 when a group of activists formed an initiative to oppose the construction by Israel of the wall in the West Bank. In the city of Mas’ha, a group of Palestinians, Israelis and international activists gathered to fight against the construction of the separation wall. Tired of the tactics used until that moment by Israeli peace movements such as lobbying, participating in the electoral process, or interfaith dialogue, AATW drew its inspiration from other international solidarity networks, such as anarchist and alter-globalization movements (Gordon and Grietzer 2013). While its joined history can be traced back to the Second Intifada in 2005, weekly demonstrations in Bil’in made the mobilization recognized worldwide. The direct action was organized after the Friday prayer, where the residents of a certain village and their supporters marched to the fence chanting slogans. Although these are not the only joined actions of AATW, or the only actions that Palestinian and Israeli activists carry out together, they are probably the ones given the most media attention. For Uri Gordon, these joint practices must be analyzed with the aim of building and strengthening a feeling of binationality in the fight against Israeli apartheid. However, for Palestinian anarchists, AATW is another example of white anarchism. For Budour Hassan, a Palestinian activist,“‘White anarchism’ has yet to break away from orientalist prejudices that plague the Western left more generally” (Hassan 2013b). Budour Hassan considers that: not only does ‘white anarchism’ tend to ostracise people of colour, its emphasis on image and style leads to the marginalisation of people with disabilities and those who do not necessarily self-identify as anarchists despite being vehemently anti-authoritarian. (Hassan 2013b)

Budour Hassan is right in criticizing the privileged position of white anarchism toward other forms of existence and inhabiting the world. Palestinian and Israeli activists have the same objectives: anti-Zionism, the Palestinian right of return and the belief in a democratic country within the borders of historical Palestine. However, this form of activism, born out of Israeli civil society and later joined and coordinated with Palestinian activists in the West Bank, has failed to analyze and criticize its own ‘white’ privileges. According to Budour Hassan, the group was dominated by middle-class, educated, white, Israeli, Ashkenazi Jewish activists. Even if some activists recognized their privilege, “they do not recognise that their privileges permeate their daily lives, allowing for them

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broader choices from how to move to where they live” (Hassan 2013b). For instance, in order to participate in the weekly demonstration in the West Bank, many activists take the settler-only road from Tel Aviv, or cross through Israeli-only checkpoints. This not only does not help to dismantle the oppressive colonial system but also, as Budour continues, it “is neither revolutionary”. Thanks to their citizenship, Israeli anarchists are privileged over Palestinians by law, even when arrested or when injured which means that the whole “co-resistance” mantra is a farce. At the end of the day, and after dodging few bullets, smelling tear-gas and skunk spray and taking some dramatic pictures, Israeli anarchists go back to the colony of Tel Aviv, at times through Jewish-only roads, they get to spend a good night out in a bar. Meanwhile, Palestinian villagers with whom they “co-resist” every Friday are always under the looming threat of night raids and retaliation by Israeli occupation soldiers. (Hassan 2013b)

Citizenship plays a key role in the anarchist solidarity movement in Palestine and configures the power structure of activists. Citizenship—a concept that emerges along with the modern state—is certainly imposed in a colonial or postcolonial context. It is well known that there is a strong link between controlling immigration and limiting it to only those with sufficient income within the racist capitalist system. Borders are another way through which markets are expanded (Butler 2013, p. 203). The Israeli border is constantly shifting and expanding through land confiscation, annexation and settler colonialism in the West Bank through legal violence and military control. Citizenship is therefore a key element that demystifies and problematizes the myth of equal co-resistance in the joined struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. In fact, Butler (2013) makes an interesting observation. When reflecting about the AATW activists, she rightly asks to what extent anarchism “as an ethos of sociability depends upon citizenship?” (Butler 2013, p. 205), since citizens are the ones who perform civil disobedience and non-citizen can never perform these acts of contentious politics. When criticizing Gordon’s view on AATW group actions, Butler suggests that he himself frames his understanding of AATW within the limits of citizenship and the nation-state and its privileges as well (Butler 2013, p. 209). For Budour Hassan, the acknowledgment of these privileges has to come at the cost of dismantling their own local system and not within the Palestinian territories.

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Not only does white anarchism becomes for Palestinian activists and anarchists a form of imperialism, but it also has long-lasting consequences for anarchism itself and how it is understood in a colonized territory. In a conversation with a group of Palestinian anarchists held by Joshua Stephens (2013b), when the term ‘anarchism’ and the label ‘anarchist’ were discussed participants put the emphasis on the ‘tactics’ rather than the ‘label’. According to them, the struggle of the Palestinian people has never had the ‘anarchist’ label, but has nevertheless been organized in a self-managed, horizontal and collective way. For this reason, these activists consider that their anarchist struggle in Palestine greatly differs from that of white anarchists because “Being an anarchist doesn’t mean having the black and red flag or going black bloc” “I don’t want to imitate any western group in the way that they ‘do’ anarchism…. it is not going to work here […]” argues activist Ahmad Nimer (Stephens 2013b). This difference in conceiving anarchism reformulates the priorities of the struggle. In the Palestinian case, the struggle against colonization, as the system that governs Palestinian lives, comes at the forefront of dismantling any oppressive system. “For an anarchist in the US, decolonization might be a part of anti-authoritarian struggle; for me, it’s simply what needs to happen” continues Nimer. The fight for decolonization inevitably entails the articulation of a discourse about nation and nationalism. “You’re talking about sixty years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, and sixty years of resisting that through nationalism. That’s too long, it’s unhealthy. People can go from nationalist to fascist, quite quickly” argues Nimer. For all these reasons, Palestinian anarchists suggested the necessity of a Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting, like the one carried out in Tunis by the group Le Commun Libertaire in 2015. They consider that Mediterranean anarchists and concretely those from the Arab Mediterranean countries have a lot more in common, despite the fact that they meet mostly with international activists. Despite their good intentions, they say that many international activists “remain stuck within their misconceptions and Islamophobia”. According to Palestinian anarchists, aware that white anarchism imposed their conception of solidarity and the liberation tactics, have, at times, a counterproductive effect, search to reformulate anarchism in order to adapt it to their sociopolitical conditions, their fighting needs and those of the Mediterranean contexts that reflect their experiences with colonialism and patriarchy (Stephens 2013b). In this sense, Palestinian activists have established several connections and alliances with the Zapatista movement because of the similarities

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in their struggles and the critique that they both have. The EZLN has asserted on many occasions, when accused of not being anarchist that: The EZLN and its larger populist body the FZLN are NOT Anarchist. Nor do we intend to be, nor should we be. In order for us to make concrete change in our social and political struggles, we cannot limit ourselves by adhering to a singular ideology. Our political and military body encompasses a wide range of belief systems from a wide range of cultures that cannot be defined under a narrow ideological microscope. (EZLN 2019)

In Jordan, there were no anarchist movements or groups before 2008. In an article published in the platform Anarkismo, Hamza (2008) affirms that after decades of Marxist and Communist predominance in the country, the libertarian current began to come to life. Among its members, there were mostly people from the artistic and cultural arena. In Jordan, anarchism is found in the movement known as the Social Left (al-Yasar al-Ijtima’y) an umbrella organization for their political philosophy in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Social Left in Jordan, a split from the Jordanian Communist Party, included Marxists, anarchists, post-leftists and other activists not necessarily identifying with one of these labels. For anarchists, this movement offered “legal protection”, given that political activism in Jordan outside the legal parameters can lead to three years in prison. Despite the fact that the movement had a couple thousand activists, it had only around two dozen anarchists. They had a great influence on the future of the group’s decision-making, so much so that “when old traditional Marxists criticize the movement they sometimes say: ‘It is an anarchic movement!!’” “For the first time in the history of Jordan a leftist movement is willing to adopt a nonhierarchal structure” (Anarchism in Jordan 2008). That same year, the blog al-Anarkiyyah bi-l-Urdun/Jordanian Anarchists was founded and lasted for a year. Defined as a group of young people who “embrace and start the activities of a group for justice and freedom”, the group joined the ranks of the Social Left Movement “to save Jordan from the clutches of neoliberalism and the impoverishment of people” (Anarchism in Jordan 2008). On this blog, they covered topics related to anarchism and announced their activities, such as the protest in solidarity with Gaza after Operation Cast Lead in 2008–2009, the boycott of the “Jordanian music Festival” organized by international cooperation closely controlled by Israel.

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For Jordanian anarchists: “anarchism is the most efficient tool to rid society of the chains of racism and oppression and to liberate women and save society from consumerism and Americanism” (Anarchism in Jordan 2008). However, how and why the group was formed and how these young activists became politicized within the framework of anarchism are still questions to be answered. Fadi Amireh, a self-declared Jordanian anarchist, might bring some light to these questions. The process of identifying as an anarchist was a deep personal process of self-exploring and personal reflection for Fadi. The young activists emphasize that, after being educated in a school that belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, he identified as an Islamist before he identified as anarchist. However, the Revolutions of 2011 were a turning point in his political affinities and personal trajectory: I went through very profound mental changes while seeking the existence of God. For this reason I am here. This process led me to atheism and, suddenly, all illusions collapsed in my head. I realized that we had been mentally slaves under a repressive authority and hierarchical institutions […]. At that moment I thought I was losing my mind. However, in the meantime, I discovered that there were others who thought like me and this is when I discovered and found what we call “anarchism”. (Fadi Amireh, personal communication, 2015)

Transnational Networks of Dissent: Migration and Colonialism in Egyptian Anarchism Coloniality and Subalternity of European Anarchists4 Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean and concretely in Egypt started to flourish together with the colonial project. The need of capitalist societies for skilled workers to create and develop the industrial fabric of the colonial venture in North Africa attracted a great number of Spanish, Italian, Greek and French workers to the south coast of the Mediterranean. The transmission and propagation of libertarian ideologies and syndicalism are linked to the process of globalization experienced at the end of the nineteenth century and the incorporation of the peripheries into the world economy (Khuri-Makdisi 2010). In Egypt, Muhammad Ali’s rule (1805–1848) was characterized by the commercial sector which represented the pre-capitalist formation of Egypt. This transitional stage was necessary in Egypt’s integration into the world market

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system (Gran 1998, p. 111). In fact, the entrance of Egypt and part of the South of the Mediterranean into capitalism created an interdependent system of subordination of the periphery to Europe and resulted in a restructuring of the social and cultural relations of the time. Thus, Greeks, Italians, Maltese, Syrians, Armenians and Jews from the Ottoman Empire circulated around the Mediterranean in search of employment. Between 1870 and 1890, numerous workers from the Balkans, Italy, Greece and Spain emigrated to Egypt, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 148). In 1893, after a long debate, the Socialist International passed a motion inciting socialist parties around the world (especially the Italian Socialist Party) to carry out propaganda and organizational campaigns among migrant workers to promote their affiliation to the unions in the countries where they settled (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, pp. 149–150). Internal migration in the peripheral territories and the rural exodus that Egypt suffered at the end of the nineteenth century paved the way for the construction of greater industry and the growth of cities such as Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said and Ismailia. These cities experienced a rapid growth and expansion, which contributed to the creation of spaces of dissent. It partially explains how these new urban spaces became centers of workers’ mobilization, exchange and spread of radical ideas, solidarity and mutual support. This process of globalization was linked to migration and diaspora, and resulted in the global spread of a radical, revolutionary and antiauthoritarian culture, as well as the spread of new repertoires of collective action worldwide. Benedict Anderson (2013) sets out a world-history paradigm where historical events are connected to each other. He thus demonstrates how the anti-colonization movements of the Philippines and Cuba, whose anti-imperialist revolutions were a year apart from the disintegration of the Spanish Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, were not a mere coincidence, but a series of interconnected events that highlight this transnational history of dissent. Italy, and consequently Italian anarchism, is a paradigmatic case study when it comes to exemplifying this history of migration, diaspora, transnationalism and the creation of a global network of dissent. Between 1870 and 1914, more than 14 million workers emigrated from Italy (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, p. 147). These networks created at the end of the nineteenth century were examples of a rhizomatic, transatlantic and trans-Mediterranean movement that spread a radical view of the world

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(Turcato 2007, p. 10). Their participation in the anarchist movement was established in two directions. On the one hand, activists were sent to congresses and encounters in Europe, and on the other, European anarchists collaborated in the emancipatory project of Egypt and other countries on the Mediterranean basin, given the relative political security of the country. Egypt hosted many activists who had been persecuted in their countries of origin. Among them was the famous anarchist Errico Malatesta, who came to Egypt in September 1878, after fleeing from imprisonment in Naples due to his role in the Matese Band insurrection (Adams 2002, p. 25). These workers and political exiles imported new practices of social action and mobilization, introduced unionization as a new form to fight for workers’ rights and spread the anarchist and socialist propaganda of the First International. In addition to the ‘propaganda by the deed’, these activists were especially notorious for their emphasis on the ‘propaganda by the word’ and the dissemination of the ‘idea’ through newspapers, clubs, and free and popular educational institutions, such as L‘Università Popolare Libera founded in 1901 in Alexandria (Gorman 2005). In fact, the history of Italian anarchism in Egypt can be divided into three different periods (Galián and Paonessa 2017, p. 33). The first one goes from 1877 to 1898, when many political exiles who were members of the Mazzinian and local mutual aid organizations helped establish them in Egypt. Anarchists started to attempt at unifying and organizing the various anarchist groups already present in the country, among them the Circolo Europeo di Studi Sociali (European Circle of Social Studies) founded by the famous activist Ugo Icilio Parrini (1850–1906)5 that served as a space for discussion and debate as well as the dissemination of radical anarchist journals and literature in several languages. At this point, the split between the individualist and organizational tendencies within the Italian anarchist movements started to play out as well in their community in Egypt and that greatly influenced the second period of the movement, which lasted from 1898 to 1906. This period, despite the notorious differences among its members, saw the flourishing of the anarchist movement, as well as the increasing repression of the Italian and Egyptian authorities toward this kind of activism. In fact, anarchists were falsely accused of plotting against German Emperor Wilhelm II, and many members of the anarchist community were arrested (Galián and Paonessa 2017, p. 35). At the turn of the century, the anarchist movement in Egypt was multidimensional, dynamic and autonomous. It had

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several sections in different cities such as Alexandria, Cairo and Port Said. It also had a very heterogeneous social composition that included people from different communities: Greeks, Egyptians, above all Jewish Egyptians, Romanians and Italians. Their commitment to education resulted in the foundation of the Free Popular University in Alexandria. Founded by anarchists, workers and local bourgeois intellectuals, the University popularized education among workers, introduced Arabic as a teaching language and spread a libertarian pedagogy similar to that of the Modern School of Francisco Ferrer. Although the project only lasted a year, it has been one of the most remembered and ambitious projects of the anarchist movement in the country. The third period of this short but notorious anarchist history of Egypt begins in 1909 and ends with the outbreak of World War I. It started with the execution of Francisco Ferrer in Catalonia, after being falsely accused of murder. Anarchists in Alexandria organized a demonstration at the Civil Cemetery that served on many occasions as a space of dissent and dissemination. Afterward, although activities of dissemination among activists that participated in different international venues and the publication of journals were still taking place despite the strong internal divisions, the outbreak of World War I was a blow to the movement. A hardening of surveillance and control on the part of the Italian consulate, the colonial authorities and the local ones, afraid of the spread of Bolshevism, strictly suppressed all forms of activism in the country. Many nationalists were detained and foreign anarchists deported. Despite the briefness of this anarchist movement in Egypt, the reception of these new repertoires of contentious politics in the South of the Mediterranean and in Egypt concretely had an important impact on the development of trade unionism, socialism and syndicalism in Egypt, and elsewhere in the region. However, this did not translate into a local and autonomous anarchist movement outside the European communities. Despite trying to build spaces of encounter and common struggle in the industrial and port areas, especially in Alexandria and Port Said, these foreign workers and political exiles occupied a privileged position, subjected to the legal system of Capitulations. This hindered their group cohesion with local workers, for the purpose of a common class struggle. The experience of European political exiles in North Africa and the Middle East has captured a great deal of academic interest in the last decade. The works produced on the First International and the spread of anarchism in the Global South portray an image of anarchism as a

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transnational and leading phenomenon that paved the way for revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, and it was so to a certain extent. Most of these works are part of a historiographical current that tries to legitimize transnational history as a discipline that surpasses national and at times, chauvinist narratives. This literature depicts the working-class encounter of the Global North and South as the union of a universal and unique subject that, having been deprived of its voice in different moments of history, meets each other and creates revolutionary, transnational and horizontal movements around the world. Provenance, ethnicity or language have been mostly ignored as part of the struggle for equality and social justice in this narrative, and a postcolonial perspective is still not totally part of these analyses. Anthony Gorman (2005, 2008a, b, 2010, 2013) and Ilham KhuriMakdisi (2010) have extensively researched the emergence of anarchism in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their work mostly focuses on the solidarity networks created in Egypt at the beginning of the century. This literature rightly responds to Marxist and Egyptian nationalist historiographies which have not included in their accounts of the Egyptian left the organic role of communities of European exiles and foreign workers in the country. This literature also goes further away from the Italian nationalist historiography when dealing with its diaspora at the beginning of the century. The discourse of the Italian nationalist historiography of the ‘cosmopolitan myth’ describes the encounter of the different cultures coexisting in the Alexandrian ‘Golden Age’—that is, at the turn of the nineteenth century to twentieth century—with the purpose of serving the Italian unification policies during the Risorgimento (Santilli 2013). This myth focuses on the constitution of a multi-ethnic community in Alexandria that was made up of famous members of the Italian community at an institutional and political level, the majority being part of the bourgeois class. This cosmopolitan myth left aside the vast majority of the Italian community, composed of workers and political exiles. Some estimations indicate that by 1840 there were approximately 6000 Italians living in Egypt, in 1870 around 14,524 and by the end of the century 24,467, reaching 52,462 in 1927. As we can see, the Italian population in Egypt increased tenfold in less than a century (Lazzarino del Grosso 2011, p. 64) and its importance in the country’s development in this time was certainly distinctive. Despite the revisionist approaches to the history of the influence that the First International had in Egypt and elsewhere in the South of

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the Mediterranean, there are still some unresolved and yet not totally concluded questions that revolve around the ideological and identity tensions that arose at the time. The conflicts arising from the privileges of race, provenance and social position, institutionalized through the Capitulations (al-imtiyazat ), the legal privileges conceded to certain European nationalities, are not yet part of the analysis of these histories. In fact, the Capitulations or the guarantees granted by the Ottoman sultans to certain European countries at the end of the sixteenth century allowed European nationals to be judged in Ottoman territories under the national law of their own home country. The Capitulations also gave them the right to trade in the Ottoman territories, given that the Ottoman Muslim Law could only be applied to Muslims (al-Sayyid Marsot 2007, p. 84). The discussions about foreign workers and residents were determined by their association with the imperial system of protection and about the legal privileges of nationality. Gordon correctly comments on this point that “[…] Capitulations stand as both the symbol and substance of the fundamental division between Egyptian and foreign nationals” (Gorman 2003, p. 179). There were financial, individual and legal aspects of the Capitulations that need to be emphasized, by which legal privileges were granted to European nationals: immunity in terms of individual freedom and extraterritorial immunity from local jurisdiction; since 1876, Egyptian courts could not judge foreigners who had their own locally based Mixed Courts (Abdel-Malek 1969, p. 74). There were, however, exceptions to this legal colonial protection. In the 1917 census, approximately more than a quarter of those cataloged as “of the Greek race” were either local workers or possessed Ottoman nationality and, therefore, were not protected by the Capitulations (Gorman 2008a, p. 239). Armenians, Jews and Ottoman Syrians were not subjected to this privileged status either. Although literature has rightly recognized the problematic relationship between foreign and local workers due to the capitulations, it generally concludes that the greatest difficulties faced by the anarchists in Egypt before the World War I were due to the harsh repression of political dissidents prior to and during the emergence of the Egyptian nationalist movement, which is partially true and correct. However, it ignores the internal problems and conflicts of the movement and prevents the case for a more profound critique that tackles the ideological foundations of the movement, by casting the blame for the deterioration of the anarchist movement in Egypt entirely on external causes (Paonessa 2019).

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From this perspective, the role of the European political exiles in North Africa described by this literature, and concretely, that of the Italian anarchists in Egypt, is called into question and needs a different methodological approach. In fact, my purpose is to apply the concept of intersectionality to the discourse analysis of the anarchist press published by Italian activists in Egypt.6 The role of these activists revolves around their ambivalent and sometimes contradictory position as ‘subalterns’ in the terms described by Spivak (1988) in their relationship with the metropolis and, at the same time, as the bearers of colonial privileges in their relation to the colony, as has already being discussed by Anthony Gorman (2008a). This aporia prevented political collaboration with the local population and in the achievement of an internationalist enterprise of the European left in the region. Unveiling this contradictory situation helps to understand how the universalism of European modernity was translated into the internationalist narrative of the left and how it reproduced the discursive tools of colonization. It therefore perpetuated ‘coloniality’ in Quijano’s and Wallerstein’s sense (1992), as the perdurability of structures that perpetuate the situation of domination once that colonial situation is over. Internationalism in the Face of Colonialism: The Civilizing Work of the European Left Leonardo Bettini in his ‘Appunti per una storia dell’anarchismo italiano in Egitto’ (Notes toward a history of Italian anarchism in Egypt) (Bettini 1976, Vol. 1.2, pp. 281–288) argues that, despite the efforts of the Italian anarchist movement in spreading and disseminating anarchism while trying to establish a local movement among Egyptian workers, it was unable to develop a program of action which would respond to local needs. In spite of everything, attempts at political penetration inside the local working environment are revealed to be completely unsuccessful. Lacking an organizational profile and deprived of a unitary programmatic base, the Italian libertarians of Egypt did not really know how to carry out a political intervention adequate to the demands of the environment, which obviously did not respond to the European schemes. (Bettini 1976, pp. 281–285)

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Bettini introduces an indisputable and little-analyzed variable to explain why the Italian anarchist movement was considered an exogenous movement to Egypt and why it did not result in the construction of a local anarchist organization. The ‘European schemes’, as Bettini puts it, i.e., the hegemony of the Eurocentric epistemic privilege that articulated the workers’ struggle as a universal struggle, among other factors, explain why the anarchist movement in Egypt, present from 1860 to 1914, could not mobilize the local population in the struggle for its own liberation, nor did it know how to create a local autonomous movement that was at the vanguard of the workers’ movements or the anti-colonial mobilization. Following Costantino Paonessa’s work (2017, 2019) that analyzes the orientalist and racist discourses and narratives of the Italian anarchist community toward their Egyptian counterparts and expanded in its theoretical framework with George Ciccariello-Maher’s (2010) thesis on ‘Anarchist Imperialism’, our analysis of the anarchist newspapers published in Egypt glimpses the prejudices underlying this enlightened presence of anarchists in a peripheral Mediterranean region. The aim is to explain the lack of influence and development of a local anarchist movement in Egypt, before, during and after World War I. What motivated Italian anarchists to carry out their activities and continue with their campaign of anarchist propaganda and revolutionary ideas in Egypt elsewhere was their love for “truth and light” and the “emancipation from the capitalist subjugation of the working class, with which we will indicate the way forward if we try to conquer not public powers but civil freedom” declared Enrico Insabato, a famous anarchist of the Italian community in Egypt (Insabato 1903a). Two basic principles motivated the activists of the time: on the one hand, the enlightened thought, where ‘truth’ becomes ‘light’ and therefore ‘awakening’, and, on the other, the emancipation of the ‘working class’, understood as a universal category. The universalist character of the Italian anarchist discourse in Egypt expressed their deepest solidarity with the Egyptian people, as well as their own class interests, even if the effect of these actions and discourses prevented the materialization of a common emancipatory project. It led them to the lack of recognition of their privileged status with respect to their Egyptian peers, since they never questioned the Capitulations as a colonialist legal system. They ignore the racial colonial system in which they were articulating their common struggle. In fact, the anarchists themselves recognized in their discourse their Egyptian counterparts by assuming the universalist language where

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all workers—whatever their origin was—were equal in political terms, but not, however, in human terms. The racialized Egyptian subject depicted by the Italian anarchists in their newspapers was equal in political terms; that is, it was expected of them to fight for their class rights, as workers, in an egalitarian way, but they were not equal on a human level, that is, within the hierarchies of ‘civilizations’. In the article “La nostra opera” (Our Work), the editor of the newspaper Lux!, after speaking of their intentions to liberate the working class, argued that the climatic conditions in Egypt lead the citizens to a state of despondency that did not allow them to think properly. In effect, the writer cancels out the rational capacity of Egyptian, an imperative of civilization and progress: Unfortunately, in Egypt people give little thought. No matter how hard you try, you find it difficult at every step to induce people to think, to talk and to argue. Climate reasons may prevent the educated brains here from reflecting. With a few exceptions, young Egyptians don’t feel like studying once they leave school. (Insabato 1903b)

Climate is understood as a factor that prevents Egyptians from being on the same level as the European civilized subject. The educational task therefore becomes difficult when the people to whom this task is directed are described as incapable of a function that until then only corresponded to the Europeans. The Italo-anarchist understanding of the ‘human’ did not include their Egyptian comrades who were excluded from this category, although they were considered capable of aspiring to it, just as in the colonialist-civilizing discourse. Thus, the work of anarchism, like that of colonialism, was to humanize the non-human. In Fanonian terms, the anarchist discourse in Egypt places the Egyptians in a nonbeing zone, that is: an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. (Fanon 2008, p. 2)

In their civilizing project, the Italian anarchists formed an integral part of the colonial enterprise. The anarchists’ discourse used the colonizer’s own terms to refer to their Egyptian peers. In this discourse, they labeled the racialized Egyptian subject with the terms ‘indigenous’ and

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‘oriental’. The term ‘indigenous’ was used as a synonym for ‘inactive, apathetic, disinterested, uncivil, inferior, rough’ (Paonessa 2017, p. 423). The term ‘oriental’, on the other hand, refers to a distant, indecipherable, rare, different and uncivilized being: “the eastern soul is still too far from us” stated the newspaper Lux! In July 1903. Roberto D’Angiò (1871–1923) an Italian anarchist, promoter of the reopening of the newspaper L’Operario and a defender of a collectivist anarchism, in his famous article “Quattro anni in Egitto” (Four Years in Egypt) considered that due to their “oriental traditions” the Egyptians have moved away from anarchism: The working class in Egypt, either because in Egypt one lives relatively better than in other places, or because anarchist ideas really frighten them, whether it is for climate reasons or oriental traditions, [Egyptians] have always, constantly, stubbornly, maintained themselves distant from the anarchists. (D’Angiò 1905)

In this quote, one can see how the anarchism of the time considered the local population, that is, the Egyptian ‘oriental’ subject, as responsible for distancing themselves from anarchist ideas and the global working class. Along this line, the Italian anarchists in Egypt, in collusion with the colonial enterprise, considered themselves to be continuators of the scientific work of the European orientalists in the region; that is to say, they had the mission of understanding the “oriental traditions” in order to be able to spread anarchism: Only we know now, thanks to the strength of mind of a small phalanx of orientalist scientists, who with enormous efforts have overcome the ocean of misunderstandings, prejudices and hatreds between East and West, that we are motivated by the same feelings, even if they are expressed in different ways. (Insabato 1903a)

Although the objective of the anarchists was to break through the study of Otherness and to find a common language, the existing barriers between the categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’ at the time were assumed to be impediments in their civilizational work. By this logic, Europe was still positioned in a higher stage of progress, to which the colonized could and had to hope for. In “Le Idee Avanzete in Egitto”, Enrico Insabato (1903a) declared that the East was behind Europe in a civilizational sense:

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The mixed East is still a long way behind, we must begin by entering the public consciousness before attempting any other enterprise. In addition to that, unconscious or forced works have no value and do not give any result. (Insabato 1903a)

The ideas of ‘progress’, ‘advance’ and ‘backwardness’, features of the colonial enterprise’s civilizing mission, were assumed and used by internationalist activists to justify their anarchist work in the region. Their effort was perceived as a civil achievement: “Egypt wakes up. These people are starting to feel the impulse of European ideas and events” declared the newspaper L’Operaio on 11 April 1903 (D’Angió 1905). As in the Nahda discourse, framed in the idea of an Arab awakening with the arrival of the Europeans, the European anarchist presence in the region revived the “consciousness of the indigenous”. In this line, L’Operaio continues “We consider the strike of the drivers as the awakening of the consciousness of the indigenous”. “This awakening, in the Eastern border, makes us happy”. Exemplifying this, Ugo I. Parrini considered that Egypt was an integral part of Europe; that is, it was an extension of the motherland, as were some colonies, such as Algeria for the French metropolis. In 1902, he explained it for Il Domani as follows: Egypt, as an appendix of Europe, thinks and feels like Europe itself. It intervenes in its affairs and forms an important part of its movements […]. (Parrini 1903)

In this quotation, Parrini’s reference to the non-human becomes a human only when it resembles Europeans, when it “thinks and feels like it”. It is in this moment of becoming when Egypt turns to be part of Europe, an appendix of the European matrix, and therefore, part of the civilized world and its geography. In this case, European borders become porous and non-existent. This corroborates what Edgardo Lander argues about colonial knowledge in social sciences: The different historical discourses (evangelization, civilization, the white man’s burden, modernization, development, globalization) are all sustained by the conception that there is a civilizing pattern that is simultaneously superior and normal. (Lander et al. 2000, p. 25)

Italian anarchists in Egypt have tried to build internationalist solidarity ties through mutual aid in resistance leagues, mixed unions, educational

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projects and collaboration and support in the repertoires of collective action of the Egyptian proletariat. However, it was not able to develop into a local movement adapted to the needs of the moment and the colonized population. Authors such as Anthony Gorman and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi have pointed out two reasons that prevented this final goal of the European anarchists in the South of the Mediterranean. Firstly, they consider that the emergence of the nationalist movement, mainly in Egypt, led by the Egyptian capitalist bourgeoisie, co-opted the social struggle and prioritized the anti-colonial movement and national independence. Secondly, they point out that the newborn communist and socialist parties in Egypt attracted the attention of the anarchists from the beginning. Likewise, the end of the Capitulations and the privileges of migrant workers following the semi-independence of Egypt in 1922 led many of them to leave the country or to end their political activism in the region. All of this, together with the strong global and local repression and persecution of anarchism, led this political philosophy to historical and historiographic ostracism in the South of the Mediterranean and in Egypt in particular. While these variables are undoubtedly fundamental to understanding the historical and historiographic “disappearance” of anarchism in Egypt after World War I, I consider that, as was reflected in the internationalist and universalists discourse of Italian anarchist newspapers at the time, that Italian anarchists in Egypt used the binary categories of the colonizers in their own civilizing enterprise and ultimately prevented political collaboration among equal peers in a common path of struggle. ‘Class’ as a category of analysis that placed the Egyptian proletariat and the foreign workers as the same unique subject did not have the desired effect on the part of its instigators. The Capitulation system, as well as the division of capitalist work by the businessmen of the time,7 led the Egyptian proletariat not to see in their foreign peers equal companions. In the absence of a truly self-conscious working class, the process of decolonization through the anti-imperialist and nationalist revolution of 1919 was led by the bourgeois capitalist class, the efendiyya. The efendiyya benefited from British colonialism and was supported by the Egyptian labor movements. Although it may have tangentially influenced certain repertoires of collective action of the 1919 nationalist revolution, anarchism did not participate as an instigating force of the anti-colonial process nor did it pay enough attention to this issue on the discursive level. It prioritized

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internationalism over nationalism and in doing so, prevented the emergence of a truly anti-authoritarian emancipatory movement in the lands of the Pharaohs. The New Egyptian Anarchists Using Graeber’s title of his 2002 article ‘The New anarchists’, I intend in this section to shed some light on the re-emergence of anarchism in Egypt from 2000 onward. Although the Zapatista movement and the events of Seattle in 1999 were tipping points in the emergence of worldwide antiglobalization struggles, the effects of these anti-capitalist discourses were not completely part of Egyptian political discourse until the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000 and the Iraq War in 2003. It all begins in the Second Intifada of the year 2000. Many of my generation remember the assassination of Muammad al-Durrah which sparked major protests in all Arabic-speaking countries. All these protests ended in Egypt by forming a solidarity movement called the Popular Committee of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Like many of our comrades in the U.S. who began their political activism during the protests against globalization and the G8, many of us in Egypt began our political activism against Mubarak’s regime in solidarity with the Second Intifada. (Yasir Abdallah, personal communication, April 23, 2013)

As Yasir Abdallah affirms, the Popular Egyptian Committee with the Palestinian People Uprising that emerged after the eruption of the Second Palestinian Intifada became the turning point in the formation of an internationalist as well as a localist political consciousness. It intensified after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the formation of a new movement, the 20th of March Movement for Change. The new social movements that have emerged in Arab Mediterranean contexts in the last decade are not disconnected from their emergence on a global scale, but they share a number of unique features that explain their genealogy and development. All of them have been significant because of their decentralization, lack of leadership and horizontality in their political practices, mainly from the 2011 Revolutions onward. While traditional social movements are characterized by the collective exercise of people who share an idea about social reality and are organized through structures such as trade unions or political parties, the new social movements, which emerged in the 1970s

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in the post-industrial stage of capitalist economies, are separated from this conventional paradigm and look to guarantee human rights from an identarian perspective and through their criticism of different forms of oppression. In Egypt, decades of co-optation of the political opposition by parties and trade unions, as well as professional associations that ceased to represent those who claimed to do so, have been challenged by the emergence of informal and self-managed organizations and collectives whose repertoires of collective action, especially since the 2000s, have marked a “before and after” in the type of opposition strategies and political performativity, mobilizing previously depoliticized sectors of the population. These new social movements eventually converged, in the case of Egypt, in the famous Kifayya Movement (Enough) that stands for the Egyptian Movement for Change, a grassroots coalition that emerged in 2004 and served as an umbrella organization for the new left and the different social movements for human rights at that moment. The Kifayya movement was the first one to openly criticize Mubarak’s regime, which at the time formed a growing corrupted state that was paving the way for Gamal Mubarak, Mubarak’s son to come to power. Kifayya called for free elections and for the end of the Emergency Law and the consolidation of Mubarak’s and the National Democratic Party (NDP)’s presidential power (Onodera 2009, p. 45). Jeroen Gunning and Ilan Zvi Baron (2014) divide the new social movements that emerged in Egypt after the Second Palestinian Intifada into four ‘waves’ of protests. The first one goes from 2000 to 2004. The protests were generally directed toward international actors, such as the United States, for its policies in the Middle East and Israel. The second wave took place from 2004 to 2006, and it was the first one that directed its attention against Mubarak’s regime. Their demands concentrated on the 2005 presidential elections. The third wave, from 2006 to 2009, mainly occurred in industrial areas devastated by economic problems. This wave saw the emergence of new youth networks, many of them affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Finally, the fourth wave, from 2010 to 2011, was in direct opposition to Mubarak’s regime and the corruption of the state. The protests were brutally repressed by the state security apparatus; however, they brought into play the social networks that had been woven in previous years and that ended up in a mass movement like the one that bloomed in January and February 2011. Although

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the division of the pretest in waves as framed by Gunning and Baron is interesting in order to analyze the process of progressive polarization and street politics in Egypt, I believe that a division of the protests centered on their “demands” rather than on the waves gives more information in analytic terms. If we understand the demands as vindications formulated by the political actors, together with the construction of networks and their repertoires of collective actions, the change in the directionality of their petitions, the organization of their basis and the constructions of activists networks, we can see the glocal logic behind these new social movements in the region. Glocality therefore appears as a signifier to refer to the global and at the same time local character of these movements. They require a global reorganization of the socio-cultural models and demand concrete local transformations “demands which, in both cases, go beyond the mere granting of abstract and universal rights” (Santos 2001, p. 180). These new social movements in Egypt, characterized by their horizontal, decentralized, anti-hierarchical organization, as well as their intention to occupy a space outside the traditional parliamentary party politics, broke up the status quo and challenged the regime in unprecedented ways that finally resulted in the 25th January Revolution in Egypt. In that sense, Tahrir Square became the symbol of the 25th January Revolution. It was not the only square occupied in Egypt, nor was it the only space of contention. However, it symbolized the revolution for anarchists in three ways: It was a place of convergence, of encounter and an “anarchist experience in itself” (Galián 2018, p. 715). Tahrir was the place of convergence of social movements’ long-lasting mobilizations. Also, militants and activists encountered each other in the occupied spaces of the square after the end of demonstrations and clashes with the police. For anarchists in Egypt, the Square also symbolized their first “anarchist experience”. In the occupation of Tahrir, direct democracy, decentralization and horizontality were all practiced. The 25th January Revolution, the occupation of squares and street politics were all key parts in the theory and practice of anarchism in Egypt and in the South of the Mediterranean. Tahrir Square contributed to transforming the experience of their inhabitants by creating spatial counter-practices. For Mohamad Bamyeh, the revolutions in the South of the Mediterranean displayed, in their performances and doings, anarchist methods:

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In this sense that the current Arab revolutionary wave is closest to anarchist ideals, which highlight spontaneous order and posit the principle of unimposed order as the highest form of a rational society and which like all revolutionary currents in nineteenth-century Europe, had clear roots in Enlightenment thought. (Bamyeh 2015, p. 331)

This revolutionary anti-authoritarian context allowed the foundation of self-declared anarchist organizations in Egypt, such as the Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM). It also created a revolutionary ethos that still continues in other forms of autonomous and decentralized political practices in the region. As I have briefly explained in Chapter 4, the LSM was founded in Tahrir Square by a heterogeneous group of people from Cairo, Alexandria and other parts of the country who found each other in the Square or during clashes with the police or the army. On the one hand, there were those who already identified themselves as anarchists but did not know each other. On the other hand, there were those who learnt about anarchism during the revolution. They mainly belonged to two different generations: those who already had a political trajectory within Marxist organizations and a younger generation, mostly politicized during 2011 events, with no previous political experience. Within that sociopolitical context, in May 2011 the Libertarian Socialist Movement was created as: An organization of anarchy-communists who believe in class struggle as the only way to finish with Capitalism and the State power of repression. It adopts the aspirations and demands of the working classes: industrial workers, farmers, peasants, proletarians, and those who just have the power of their work to sell, without the control of the production process. (LSM 2012a)

The official communiqués of the LSM expressed the three main principles in which contemporary anarchist thought is expressed (Galián 2015, p. 362): 1. The rejection of any form of domination: The two main forms of domination for the LSM are the State and the Capital. The first one promotes and helps the correct functioning of capital, of what they call ‘State Capitalism’ (LSM 2011). At the same time, the domination of the capital is incarnated and represented by the local regimes such as the National Democratic Party (NDP) during Mubarak, or

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of the Muslim Brotherhood with Muhammad Morsi as a leading figure (LSM 2012b). 2. Repertoires of collective actions and forms of resistance: Given that the LSM is an organization closely related to labor movements in Egypt, one of its most used forms of direct actions was through anarcho-syndicalism. The LSM considers the general strike and civil disobedience to be the most effective tactics to fight for workers’ rights. 3. Future society: The main goal of the LSM is the establishment of an anti-authoritarian class-free society away from the State and Capital. They call for administrative decentralization, self-management, and the organization of Local Councils and the creation of self-managed cooperatives under the framework of respect for all forms of human freedom such as religion, association or thought. Given the small numbers of participants, the LSM’s organization can be framed under Gordon’s definition of local milieu, that is, a context where the majority of people know each other and participants are close to each other (Gordon 2007, p. 33). Shortly after the coup in 2013, the group ceased its public activities. However, the LSM participated in the MAM in 2015 in Tunisia with a public statement, which indicated that they still existed and considered themselves as a group. Furthermore, Yassir Abdelkawi, a member of Alexandria local of LSM, published a statement in 2015 concerning the situation of Egypt under the rule of Sisi (Abdelkawi 2015). However, anarchism in Egypt did not just appear as a self-declared ideology. Many self-managed, horizontal and decentralized collectives organized autonomously appeared in 2011, as well as different forms of direct action and spaces that anarchists were part of. The question of space is important to understand the development of the revolution in Egypt. There is a strong relationship between the modern revolution and urbanism. For Guy Debord, the urban-architecture, that is, the space, is closely related to the individual and the reactions the space provokes in the people. The author understands the urban as the experience lived by the individual. For Saul Newman (2011), autonomy means not the seizing of power or a direct participation in the institutions, but a construction of autonomous spaces through the occupation (permanent or temporary) of political spaces. This definition of autonomy is closely

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linked to that of anarchism. For Newman, autonomy is a political practice of post-anarchism. The new social movements, through their political practices, modes of collective action and discourses, create new economic spaces and new imaginaries. The construction of autonomous spaces is carried out through cooperation and re-appropriation of the public space through street art, football matches, music, gender politics, etc. Making graffiti was a much better way of direct action. Millions of people could see them. Then we would take pictures of them and hang them on social media, so that more people, even outside Egypt, could see our story. The real television. The piece of art is the truth. This is the way anarchism and art are connected. It is an act for the people, to tell the truth. (Anonymous activists, personal communication, 2016)

For these activists, who were part of the Union of Artists of the Revolution (UAR), street art was an alternative way of information away from the state or private liberal media, and a collective way of narrating the ‘truth’ of the Revolution, what really happened according to its participants. In fact, there are many people who considered themselves to be anarchists and who participated in the widespread phenomenon of street art and graffiti in Egypt. Hence, graffiti has helped make anarchism visible as a political philosophy. Between 2011 and 2013, there were numerous depictions of the anarchist circle-A that appeared in the streets of Egypt (Imgae 5.1). The growing politicization of the youth in Egypt entered the football stadiums as well. The progressive politicization of the ultras in Egypt came hand in hand with the social and political movements that began to organize against Mubarak’s regime in the 2000s (El-Zatmanh 2015, p. 802). Football stadiums and the ultras have been understood as part of the social politicization and autonomous spaces created by Egyptians in the years leading up to the 2011 Revolution. But this was not new as a phenomenon. In the 1990s, the term ‘Ultras’ started to be heard and widespread in the media. The ultras as a social phenomenon appeared in Egypt due to the influence of other Arab countries (Bashir 2011, p. 39). It substituted the ‘terso fans’ that in the political culture in Egypt referred to those football fans who were only eligible to buy “third class” football tickets (El-Zatmanh 2015, p. 801).

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Image 5.1 Street in Downtown Cairo (Photo credit: Luz Gómez)

When I was 18, I entered in the Zamalek Ultras. Before that, I already knew them, I knew their history. I knew them through Google. I had heard the word ‘Ultra’ somewhere and started looking for it, searching. I liked their history, it is very interesting. It has an incredible political and social content. It’s like anarchists, without leaders, organized in circles. In Italy in the 60s, as the workers were forbidden to meet to debate and discuss their situation. The only way they could do that was in the football stadium, where large numbers of people could gather. (Anonymous activist, personal communication, 2014)

This participant’s narrative is prototypical. The ultras’ history as well as their way of organizing became a motive for lower-middle-class young Egyptians to affiliate into these groups. The football stadium was an ideal place for social mobilization. Furthermore, the Internet and social networks became spaces for the dissemination of the political culture of the ultras football clubs (El-Zatmanh 2015, p. 802). For Shawki ElZatmanh, unlike the activists of the urban secular and left-wing social

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movements who mostly belonged to the upper-middle classes, the ultras fans belonged to the most impoverished classes and emerged as a consequence of “economic liberalism”. For the interviewee, his activism within the ultras preceded his activism in anarchist organizations. The comparison between anarchism and the ultras’ way of organizing is due to their decentralization and anti-hierarchical structures, as well as the content of their demands, contrary and antagonistic to the state security forces. Inside there were people from all the political spectrum. From the Muslim Brotherhood to people of the left (communists, Nasserist, anarchists etc.). All of them shared a common goal and had two enemies: the police and the followers of other teams. I think we were united because we did not have anything: neither expectations, nor where to hold on to, we all needed to give meaning to our lives. (Anonymous activists, personal communication, 2014)

Whether or not this narration exemplifies the experiences of other young anarchist activists who were part of the ultras culture in Egypt, it is nevertheless symptomatic of the state of things at the moment in Egypt. The political opportunity of the emergence of anarchism and anarchist practices in Egypt has given rise to a series of revolutionary projects and new forms of contentious politics that transcend the widespread narrations of the Arab Springs. Squares and the strategies used by the new social movements performed the prefigurative politics of anarchism. This prefigurative politics was continued in different ‘autonomous spaces’ as defined by Saul Newman (2011), through the radical occupation of public spaces, which at the same time entailed a great deal of internal tensions and conflicts. The repression of the new Egyptian regime that was already coming to materialize as a counterrevolution began by monitoring and persecuting these spaces of autonomy with the closure of cultural centers, or by penalizing any form of peaceful social protest through the Antiterrorist Law of 2014. Almost 5 years later, the counterrevolution has resulted in the large-scale imprisonment of political activists and the strong repression of any form of dissent with arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances or extrajudicial executions as denounced by Amnesty International. While Egypt seems to have stifled any possibility of social mobilization, the citizens’ revolts at the end of September 2019 following the declarations of the businessman in exile Mohamed Aly seem to announce new

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Image 5.2 Mohammed Mahmud Street in Downtown Cairo (Photo credit: Francesco Schiro)

waves of protest in a context of strong economic crisis and police repression that join the demands for social justice that scourge the southern Mediterranean region from the Rif to Iraq (Image 5.2).

Political Exiles and Decolonial Anarchism in the Maghreb From Hosting European Political Exiles During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the North of Africa and other parts of the South of the Mediterranean became a place of refuge for many Spanish, Italian and Greek immigrants and political exiles. In the case of Tunisia, the history of anarchism ran parallel to that of Egypt, since in both contexts

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the European population increased markedly at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In Tunisia, the largest European population was Italian (64%), followed by the French (22%) and by the Anglo-Maltese colony. However, as Bernabé López asserts “contrary to its numerical importance, this French minority occupies a strategic position and for that reason was known by the nickname of les preponderantes (the dominators)” (López García 2007, p. 87). Thus, in Tunisia as well as in Egypt, an important Italian community of political exiles and specialized workers found a hosting environment. This was not the case in Algeria and Morocco, where Spanish immigrants and French settlers were the most numerous European expatriates. In Tunisia, Italian immigrants found a space for exchange, diffusion and practices of their anarchist or socialist political ideas. Despite the great difficulties and the precarious economic conditions of editors and printers that in many cases worked clandestinely due to the surveillance of the Italian consular authorities, some newspapers of the Italian anarchist community were published, among them: L’Operaio (1888), La Protesta Umana (1896), Il Vespro Sociale (1924), Il Vespo Anarchico (1924). Il Domani (1935) was also an important vehicle for the diffusion of anarchism in Tunisia. It was under the supervision of Antonin Casubolo, later known as Nino Casubolo, an important Italian anarchist in Tunisia who became a French citizen (Felici 2016, pp. 1–2). Beyond the study of Leonardo Bettini (1976), there are no studies that have examined the genealogy of Italian anarchism in Tunisia, nor to what extent these European exiles could have influenced the development of the left in Tunisia, with the foundation of the Tunisian Communist Party in 1924. As in the Egyptian case, the libertarian narrative in Tunisia has been forgotten and marginalized by a historiography that has been going around between the nationalist discourse of the new Tunisian bourgeois class and the historiography of the left, centered on the analysis of parliamentary politics. Historiographical oblivion has largely resulted in the absence of alternative narratives for historical processes. Despite the Spanish state’s use of the northern coast of Africa for legal and penal purposes, the history of Spanish exiles in North Africa, before and after the Spanish Civil War, has also been absent in the main history books. The North of Africa was a place of exile for many Spanish anarchists and political refugees. Conciencia Libre was accused of being an anarchist newspaper by the Spanish authorities in Tangier in 1896. Its publication caused major fear in the Spanish community in Tangier, due to the danger of the spread of

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anarchist ideas, which led to a great deal of correspondence between the British and Spanish authorities (Sánchez Díaz and Mula Gómez 1996, p. 641). After the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Tangier, which until then had the status of an international city, came under the control of Franco’s regime. With the arrival of the Nazi troops from the Third Reich to Paris, Francoist troops entered Tangier, evicted foreign forces and seized the city until 1945. This led to a brutal repression of the leftists in the city. Many Spanish political exiles fled to Casablanca and Algeria. However, as Bernabé López points out, the history of Spanish political exiles in North Africa is still yet unwritten: “It is clear that in the face of the very numerous works on the republican exodus to Latin America or France, there are practically no works on exile to the countries of the Maghreb’’ (López García 2007, p. 176). For this reason, there is a need for more research to clarify to what extent Spanish anarchists could have influenced the spread of the libertarian leftist thought in North Africa. On the other hand, some works are starting to appear on the image of Morocco, Moroccans and the Spanish colonial interests in the anarchist newspapers of the moment (Alcolea Escribano 2012). However, the history of anarchism in Algeria, due to the characteristics of French colonization, differs significantly from the Moroccan and the Tunisian experiences. David Porter, in his book Eyes to the South: French Anarchists in Algeria (2011), rightly asserts that “Small numbers of anarchists (of explicit Western tradition) were present in colonial Algeria from at least the end of the 19th century, but were almost exclusively among the European population” (Porter 2011, p. 20). The author acknowledges that the first anarchists in Algeria were “exclusively European” as was the case with other Southern Mediterranean contexts. Under French domination, Algeria was an important place of anarchist activism since 1830, mainly due to the spread of anarchist publication such as L’Action Revolutionnaire (1887), Le Tocsin (1890), Le Libertaire (1892) and La Marmita Social (1893) (Van Der Walt and Schmidt 2009, p. 19). French writer and journalist Victor Barrucand, owner of the newspaper Akhbar since 1902, published the newspaper Les Nouvelles in Algiers at the beginning of the twentieth century, with one of his most famous collaborators being Isabelle Eberhard. Victor was concerned with the “defence” of Muslims rights in Algeria (Aissaoui and Elbridge 2017, p. 72). Before World War I, anarchism in Algeria was mainly composed of French militants, and their publications were mainly in French. There is

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plenty of documentation on the anarchist presence in Algeria after World War II. At that moment, the anarchists in Algeria were mainly composed of two groups: the French anarchists, with a long history in the country and including some local anarcho-individualists such as Saïl Mohamed (1894–1953), who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and a small number of Spanish anarchists who fled Spain after Franco’s victory and the arrival of Fascism. In the 1950s, they were mostly established in the cities of Oran, Algiers, Costantinopla, Mostaganem and Blida. To the Creation of Decolonial Projects While the presence of European exiles was important in the development of anarchist movements in the South of the Mediterranean, there were also a series of decolonial anarchist projects that emerged there before, during and after the decolonization processes in these countries. One of the most interesting experiences of anarchism in Algeria after World War II is the case of Säil Mohamed, who was involved in the French libertarian movement from 1910 until his death in 1953. Saïl was born in a small village of the Kabylia, a mountainous region in the east, mostly of Berber population. After his imprisonment during World War I for desertion, he moved to Paris and joined the Union Anarchiste, one of the most important anarchist organizations of the time (Porter 2011, p. 20). In 1929, Saïl joined the Confederation général du travail- Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire (CGT-SR) (the Revolutionary Syndicalist General Labor Confederation) that organized the Algerian section and published the magazine Terre Libre in 1934. Saïl also volunteered for the International Group of the Durruti Column in Spain in 1936. Wounded in Zaragoza, he returned to France where he continued his activism. Between 1930 and 1940, Saïl was incarcerated several times by the French authorities for his anarchist militancy, yet he never gave up his activism. In 1930, his activity mainly focused on the rights for equality of Algerians in France. He began asking Algerians to rise up against colonial authority in a social revolution to build an anarchist federalist society in the 1940s (Saïl 1930). One of the most important aspects of Saïl’s thought was his intention of decolonizing anarchism by searching for anarchist and antiauthoritarian structures and practices in his own local context. Despite his life of activism in French anarchist organizations, Saïl did not conceive anarchism in purely European terms. Algerian rural society, especially that of his homeland, Kabylia, already practiced anarchism within its social

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organization without explicitly calling it that way: It was a self-managed community and had a decentralized organization, averse to colonial or national structures: From a moral point of view, the pure-bred Algerians, i.e. the Kabyles, are fundamentally libertarians, resistant to any militarism. In their native country, they practice free trade and solidarity on a large scale. The right of asylum is sacred to them. In their hearts filled with native pride, a revolt roars and takes shape that instinctively pushes them towards all that is liberation of the individual, despite the fierce repression that strikes them. Nothing will stop their momentum. Their submission, more apparent than real, weighs on them and they judge without indulgence the sinister puppets of so-called civilized people who have abused too long an awkward and arbitrary authority. (Saïl 1935)

For Saïl, the nature of Algerian culture was not in itself religious, as the French colonizers have tried to show. The colonial liberation of Algeria, he assured, would not lead to another hierarchical regime. For this reason, he denounced the opportunist character of the leaders of the Algerian nationalist movement. Although there is a growing interest in the life and work of Saïl, it is still necessary to reconstruct his story and to know to what extent his theory and practice have influenced the Algerian national liberation movement and the country’s later history. His experience as well as his work constitute without any doubt another episode of the decolonial history of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean that still needs to be explored and reconstructed. After Algeria’s independence from France, there has not been any anarchist organization or movement in the country that can be affiliated directly with anarchism. However, many activists have identified themselves as libertarians and/or anarchists, and in the last five decades, after independence, and there have been movements of anarchist character and form (Porter 2011, p. 22). Porter rightly affirms, and I strongly agree with his point of view, which can be extrapolated to other contexts in the South of the Mediterranean, that the absence of published data on the existence of anarchists and/or anarchisms during and after the Algerian War of Independence does not mean that they did not exist. A closer investigation of the history of anarchism in Algeria is still needed. However, Porter also reminds us that “it’s important to acknowledge that

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quasi-anarchist behavior and values no doubt flourished in many local Algerian wartime contexts” (Porter 2011, p. 476). From 1962 to the present, there has been no anarchist organization in Algeria that we know of. However, the influences of anarchism or libertarian struggle in the workers’ and labor movement, and the Amazigh struggle for self-determination and recognition has been constant. In 1980, after the repression of the Tafsut ImaziGen (Berber Spring) by the regime, a group of autonomist Algerians published a book called L’Algérie brûle! (Algeria is burning!) as a tribute to the insurgents of Tizi-Ouzou. The importance of the book relies on the fact that it highlights the horizontal, anti-hierarchical and leaderless character of the rebellious Amazigh movement of Algeria. Likewise, its authors recall the similarities of this insurrection with that of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Spanish Social Revolution in 1936 and that of the strikes and occupations in May 1968 (Porter 2011, p. 477). In the last two decades, although there has not been any anarchist movement in Algeria, discussions and debates have taken place online, and have reflected the existence of anarchist militants in different spheres of Algerian civil society. A blog entitled ‘Algerian Anarchists’, points out Porter, was founded in 2007. The site described itself as an internationalist and anarcho-communist movement and denounced religion, capitalism and state nationalism, all imposed morals and injustice.8 There is some anarchist activity online in Facebook groups such as ‘Anarchistes Algeriens’, made up of around sixty members dedicated to sharing information, articles, local artistic initiatives or references from anarchist books; however, the discussion and debates they generate are quite limited (Anarchists Algeriens 2014). In 2011, another Facebook group with a blog ‘Algérie libertaire’ was also created. With the motto of creating a safe space for sharing information for anarchists in Algeria and elsewhere: This space is intended to be a plain, a garden, a home and a mountain from above from which every libertarian, in Algeria or elsewhere, will shout his rage, his revolt, his anger, his indignation, his ability to say no and his rebellion against all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism and against all injustices of the world wherever they may be, so that this space may be one more voice for freedom, freedom and nothing but freedom, in the hope that one day Algeria libertarian will be published, read, loved and anchored in the social struggle in Algeria and elsewhere, a bridge between

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the souls, feathers and free hearts of Algeria and the whole world. (Algérie Libertaire 2011)

Nowadays, despite the activity online, there is a big presence of anarchist militants in the Algerian syndicalist movement. The trade union situation in Algeria presents the same complications as the Egyptian Trade Unionism that has been co-opted by the state apparatus after independence, and has served as interlocutors of the interests of both regimes. Faced with this type of integrated trade unionism, there is an autonomous trade union movement in Algeria that took shape in the Confédération Générale Autonome des Travailleurs en Algérie (CGATA), created in 2014 for confronting the institutionalized and bureaucratized trade unionism. One member of this network is the Conseils des Lycées d’Algérie (CLA), an independent trade union created in 2003 mostly composed of secondary school teachers united by interprofessional struggles. However, this type of trade unionism faces many difficulties. The organization of any type of mobilization by trade unions is illegal in the country, and its leaders have faced a great deal of persecution and repression by the state. Achoud Idir, an anarchist from Algiers and a member of CLA, he considers that the CLA to be the only legitimate trade union in their fight for labor rights: Today, the CLA represents more than 15,000 teachers. In the world of bureaucratic and corrupt teaching unionism, we are a credible reference for our positions and commitments in the field of class struggle. (Berthuin 2009)

There are numerous anarchists in the trade union movement in Algeria, although not in an organized way: “There is no union that openly claims to be anarcho-syndicalist. But there are numerous anarcho-syndicalist affiliates active in various unions. We are not many, but we do exist”, confirms Achour. Although Algeria did not live and experience the social uprisings of 2011 as happened in other Southern Mediterranean contexts, it did in 2019. The mass demonstrations experienced in Algeria during the first ten months of 2019 have been so far the most successful ones in the region. Although Bouteflika’s long-lasting corrupt regime has been removed, this is not so much the case with le pouvoir, that is, the deep state apparatus that sustains its repressive and authoritarian form. Even if

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the material conditions of dissatisfaction remain the same, the Algerian uprising represents a new wave of the process of the Arab Revolutions of 2011, and its popular movement Hirak Sha’bi enacts the logic of the previous ones: leaderless, decentralized and anti-hierarchical. In Tunisia, unlike Algeria, anarchism has emerged in strength during the 2011 uprisings. In his cartography dedicated to the Tunisian left, Mouldi Guessoumi (2014) assures in a footnote that that Tunisian left is also composed, among others, of “anarchists” and goes on to define anarchism as: “defined by Proudhon as a state of social cohesion resulting from the complete abolition of all government apparatuses. It was the goal of the movement started by Bakunin in 1860” (Guessoumi 2014, p. 23). Although it does not analyze under what circumstances and discourses anarchism has arisen in Tunisia, Guessomi’s footnote constitutes the first academic reference where anarchism becomes part of the analysis of the left in Tunisia. This reference, even if anecdotal, reveals the importance of the new social movements and the libertarian and anti-authoritarian tendencies in the region. Since 1924, the communist left in Tunisia, together with Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) (General Federation of Tunisian Workers), has monopolized the narrative of the left in Tunisia. It is impossible to measure, at this point, to what extent the first European anarchists, mainly those of Italian origins in Tunisia, have influenced the local development of the Tunisian CGT or the Communist Party, founded by Abdul-Aziz al-Tha’alibi in the 1920s, since there are no studies that explore this line of research. However, as in the Egyptian case, anarchism in Tunisia did not emerge as a movement until the Tunisian Revolution of 2010–2011, which does not exclude the existence of anarchist individuals and anti-authoritarian politics, not explicitly self-declared as anarchists, that have worked in a horizontal, anti-hierarchical and antiauthoritarian way. However, in January and February 2011, with the occupation of Kasbah Square in Tunis, the center of what has been called the Jasmine Revolution, the libertarian and anti-authoritarian movement Asian (Desobedience) was created. For its members, the fertile political terrain during the Revolution gave rise to a series of movements of libertarian and anti-hierarchical nature due to two main factors: the disillusionment with traditional party politics, which from the outset betrayed the revolutionary process by standing for elections, and the failure of the modern state, which had not been able to solve its problems: “The conditions here have made possible the emergence of a popular anarchist

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movement, not just intellectual or elitist, a movement that is really present in the popular neighborhoods and that works with the people” (Talarcrea 2013) (Image 5.3). The group was self-proclaimed as “libertarian and anti-authoritarian” and aims at fighting against capitalism and its authoritarian apparatuses. Its objective is the self-organization of people and the direct self-management of life and wealth. Their goals were, among others: the struggle against the state and its central power, which has to be replaced by direct self-management and the self-administration of life’s resources; the struggle against representation through elections; the abolition of any kind of oppression and discrimination; the resistance to all forms of colonialism and capitalist exploitation; and therefore the support for all kind of liberation movements in the world, particularly that of the Palestinian people (Asian 2012). While the manifesto places special emphasis on colonization and the Palestinian question, the principles of Asian do not differ largely from any classical European anarchist organization.

Image 5.3 Downtown Tunis (Photo credit: Laura Galián)

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Asian has been especially linked to the bases of the UGTT and the Union of Unemployed Graduates (UCD), the only organization that advocates nationwide regarding the problem of unemployment among the youth in Tunisia, where numerous anarchists can be found. Likewise, the Tunisian anarchist movement is composed of many university and high school students and artists of different kinds. In fact, one of the focal points of anarchist activity and dissemination of anarchism in Tunisia has been the cultural revolution experienced since the beginning of 2011 Revolution (Fédération Anarchiste 2012, p. 23). However, the creation of self-managed and autonomous spaces has been, as in the Egyptian case, one of the main objectives of the Tunisian anarchist movement, simulating its “imagined community” in Anderson’s terms. In 2013, during the World Social Forum (WSF) that took place in Al-Manar University, Asian created a parallel space to collectively boycott and denounce the counterrevolutionary aspects of the WSF: “the WSF is counter revolutionary because it gives the illusion that the state can give the solution to the problems of society […] if this forum was really what it claims to be, it would never have been legalized by the State” (Talarcrea 2013). For Douha, an ex-member of Asian, the WSF was not an alternative to propose solutions, it was inscribed within the global capitalist system: “We are here to say no and to create an alternative what is really embedded in the social struggle” (Amadee 2013). The occupied space became a self-managed camp, with a collective kitchen that offered food at onethird of the price at the WSF. The occupied spaces at the WSF organized other activities such as workshops and seminars with the participation of members of the UCD, the Victory for Rural Women Association with the support of the General Union of Students in Tunisia (UGTE) which officially withdrew from the WSF. After the WSF, Asian collective split into other sections mainly due to organizational issues, as was the case of the LSM in Egypt. From this schism appeared the group al-Mushtarak al-Taharruri or La Commune Libertaire (Libertarian Commune, LA) responsible for the organization of the MAM (Chapter 3), which continued somehow with the main goals, strategies and activities of the previous group. Anarcho-feminist groups also existed at the time such as Feminism Attack that gathered some of its members from Asian. Feminism Attack was a self-managed collective inspired by anarchism and the libertarian movement. It was founded as a result of the meeting of different subjectivities fighting in the same direction after the Tunisian Revolution. The

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intention of the collective was that of counteracting the regression in women’s rights that the activists felt Tunisia could face in the new wave of Islamist movements. Despite the short life of the group, it received a lot of media attention, mainly after the actions of the FEMEN group in Tunisia, which led Amina Tyler, a famous Tunisian activist, to denounce the group as Islamophobic and to publicly express her alignment with Feminism Attack. Feminism Attack has publicly expressed its criticism toward FEMEM. This criticism reflects the process of decolonization of the political practices of libertarian and anti-authoritarian politics in the South of the Mediterranean. On its Facebook page, Feminism Attack published a note called “Why are we against FEMEN?” where they criticize FEMEN’s actions as neocolonialism. If FEMEN are perceived as foreigners in the Maghreb, it is because their mode of action is Western, it is not a phenomenon derived from the “Maghrebi civilizations”. They remind us of the policies of “emancipation” of women carried out by the West during colonization. (Feminism Attack 2013)

For Feminism Attack, the body of women is constituted as a vehicle and as a meeting place between “the East and the West”, a space of cultural domination. The use and abuse of FEMEN’s privileges, as well as the imposition of a repertoire of collective action, such as that of nudity, without a prior analysis of its effects on the society where it is carried out make FEMEN, according to the members of Feminism Attack, into another form of colonization. For Feminism Attacks’ militants, recognizing the locus of enunciation is important in order not to fall into neocolonial behaviors, as does FEMEN. In Tunisia, there are other selfmanaged and libertarian collectives that have emerged after the revolution in the music, cultural and artistic scenes as well as in the queer and gender struggle. Although they do not call themselves anarchists, they do work and organize in a similar way. Morocco, on the other hand, has not experienced the same degree of political upheaval as other Southern Mediterranean countries. The 20th February Movement in 2011 constituted a similar path of struggle as other new social movements in the South of the Mediterranean. The 20th February Movement centered its demands on political reform, denunciation of police brutality and electoral fraud, as well as censorship and high youth unemployment. Unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian cases, in Morocco

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there is not enough evidence to link the emergence of anarchism with the 2011 uprisings, yet there has been a great revival of anarchist politics in the last few years, mainly, after the Rif incidents and upheavals since 2016 and 2017. As in the Lebanese case, the French anarchist group Alternative Libertaire (Libertarian Alternative) had a section in Morocco that was linked to the 20th February Movement and the emergence of new social movements. They have two main fronts of activism: building alliances with social movements and building a non-authoritarian movement that nurtures and influences existing social movements in Morocco. There is not much information on when it was founded and what their activities were. However, its main motto is very much related to that of the French group: to establish a socialist, non-authoritarian and leaderless society based on voluntary cooperation. In their manifesto, they specified that its legacy comes from the anti-authoritarian worker’s movement that emerged during the First International (Radical Guide n.d.). In fact, their main references are those from the European tradition (e.g., Bakunin, the French CGT or the Durruti column). Once again, the emergence of new social movements and anarchist politics converged, also in the case of Morocco. Most recently, there has been an emergence of ‘Do it yourself’ (DIT) and autonomous initiatives in Morocco connected to punk music and Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ). The Festival Hardzazat Hardcore is an example. With its first edition in 2018, Hardzazat Festival is a free, annual music and art festival. Located in the touristic environment of Ouarzazate, Hardzazat Festival was born as a decolonial musical festival carried out for non-white people in an environment of systemic racism. Hardzazat Hardcore DIY is a decolonial movement, criticizing the racism and white privilege in what’s supposed to be “Hardcore DIY” spaces. A reason for why we have created a safe space for people of color, where the violence they’re victim of due to the supremacy of the northern culture over countries of the south is not tolerated. It’s a space where diversity is celebrated, not neo-liberalism, where we can get back our culture far from exotic fantasies. A space of political engagement, material solidarity believing that all the issues are equally important and creativity where we experience the paradigms of utopia. (Hardzazat Hardcore Fest 2019)

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Acknowledging its position in a postcolonial context and the necessity of decolonizing the political environment by creating a safe space where issues of racism, homophobia, gender and diversity are discussed, the youth in Morocco subverts the still existing colonial logic of the Makhzen—or the Moroccan state—and the dynamics of the neoliberal order. Parallel to the emergence of Hardzazat, other libertarian cultural projects have also flourished in cities such as Rabat and Casablanca with the Tilila collective. Tilila is a cultural space with the goal of contributing to the construction of an autonomous, libertarian and emancipated society through direct democracy, anti-authoritarianism and the fight against all forms of discrimination. What is interesting about the group, beyond its close connection to the Amazigh culture in Morocco, is its use of Moroccan Arabic—darija maghrebiyya—in its statements and social media posts (Tilila 2012).

Against Millenarism Hobsbawm’s millenarianist vision insists that anarchism results from spontaneous combustion in different historical epochs. For Hobsbawm (1959), anarchist’s millenarianism is based on revolutionism, that is, on its profound rejection of the present, on being a standardized ideology and on not having the adequate tools to adapt to practical needs. Classical anarchism is thus a form of peasant movement almost incapable of effective adaptation to modern conditions, though it is their outcome. Had a different ideology penetrated the Andalusian countryside in the 1870s, it might have transformed the spontaneous and unstable rebelliousness of the peasants into something far more formidable, becoming more disciplined, as communism has sometimes succeeded in doing. This did not happen. And thus the history of anarchism, almost along among modern social movements, is one of unrelieved failure; and unless some unforeseen historical changes occur, it is likely to go down in the books with the Anabaptists and the rest of the prophets who, though not unarmed, did not know what to do with their arms, and were defeated forever. (Hobsbawm 1959, p. 92)

Far from being a reality, this chapter has refuted Hobsbawn’s claims. Anarchism, because of its ability to adapt, to create transnational networks of subversion and dissemination, as well as its multiple political strategies to fight different forms of oppression, has proven to be one of the most

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valuable political philosophies in social revolutions around the world and in the ongoing processes of decolonization. Through the analysis of the new social movements, and the different expressions of the anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, we have seen how anarchism expresses itself through the creation of autonomous spaces. These experiences, not always identified as anarchists, are organized in a self-managed, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian way. They decolonize the concept of anarchism insofar as they situate it at a local level, adapt it to the needs of the context and focus its struggle on concrete problems of the society in question. The subversion of language, of the ways of relating and the appropriation of the habitable spaces of the urban (including the prison itself) are constituted as necessary tools for reaching freedom, emancipation and autonomy. To understand anarchism not as a doctrinal framework belonging to European thought, but as a political and cultural expression in continuous reformulation of the struggle for freedom and emancipation of the peoples of the world outside the structures of the state in force, is essential to deconstruct our historical thinking and understand how the histories of the people from the Global South, and in this case, the South of the Mediterranean, are full of examples that still need to be studied and that could shed light on anarchist ideas and theory.

Notes 1. The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon was a series of demonstrations that sparked in the country, mainly in the capital, Beirut, after the assassination of the ex-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005. Fed up with the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the demonstrations were remarkable for their peaceful approaches and the use of civil resistance repertoires. In fact, this popular uprising bears many similarities to those that took place in 2010 and 2011 and later in 2019. The results of this uprising were the resignation of Prime Minister Omar Karami, new elections, the formation of a new government and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon (Sutton 2014, p. 97). 2. The group appears in the reports of the Ruesta (Zaragoza, Spain) anarchist meeting in 1995. It also participated in a meeting in Nice in 2000. With a change of name from al-Badil al-Shuyu’y al-Taharruri (Communist Libertarian Alternative) to simple al-Badil al-Taharruri (Libertarian Alternative), the group started a blog in 2008. Although the blog is still online, there is no activity since 2008. Despite my effort to contact some members of the group, no contact has been established. See Al Badil Al Chouyouii

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4.

5.

6.

7.

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Al Taharrouri. (2008). Al Badil Al Chouyouii Al Taharrouri/Alternative Communiste Libertaire-Liban. Wordpress. Retrieved from: https://albadi laltaharrouri.wordpress.com/who-are-we/. Hazem speaks about the existence of two collectives in the interview he gave to Alternative Libertaire in 2007: Autonomia and Samidun. However, there is barely any information about them. This section was originally published under the title “El anarquismo truncado: Los trabajadores italianos ante los privilegios epistémicos de la colonización” (2019) In L. Gómez (Ed.), GarcíaIslam y desposesión. Resignificar la pertenencia (pp. 261–276). Madrid: Ediciones de Oriente y del Mediterráneo. Ugo Icilio Parrini (1850–1906) was born in Livorno. After graduating from elementary school, he became a typographist. He migrated to Alexandria in 1871 where he positioned himself with Garibaldi and against Mazzini. In Egypt, he started to frequent the group ‘Pensieroe Azzione’ that was in charge of the internationalist propaganda in Egypt. He was arrested for his radical activities in Egypt and led to Italy and then France. After he returned to Egypt in 1898, where he also funded the ‘Circolo Libertario’ (Libertarian Circle), he was in constant dispute with Roberto D’Angió (1871–1923) due to their differences in the organizational ways of the anarchist movement in Egypt. On the anarchist press in Egypt, see Marchi, A. (2010). La presse d’expression italienne en Égypte. De 1845 à 1950. Rivista dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Europea Mediterranea (RiMe), 5, 91–125; Bettini, L. (1976). Bibliografia Dell’anarchismo. Firenze: Crescita politica editrice, 81–88; Gorman, A. (2018). The Anarchist Press in Egypt. In The Press in the Middle East and North Africa 1850–1950 (pp. 237–264). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The labor space was divided into ethnic hierarchies, mostly industries and companies financed by foreign capital. Shoe shops mostly belonged to Greeks and Armenians, the upholstery trade was controlled by Jews, Syrians and Europeans, and the tailoring mainly by Jews. But not only was the working class divided by origin, this division in turn affected the stratification of labor. The most privileged, skilled workers: electricians, machinists, plumbers, leaf rollers, came mostly from Europe or the Levant, and could earn between 20 and 40 piasters per day. The intermediate labor category was made up of construction workers, mechanics, blacksmiths and railway or tram workers. These positions were occupied by Egyptians and their wages oscillated between 15 and 30 piasters a day. The least qualified employees, tram or train drivers, bricklayers, etc., earned between 8 and 15 piasters a day and most of them were Egyptians (Bardinet 2013, pp. 341–342). This blog is not online anymore.

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Samir. (1996). News from the Land of Cedars. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved from: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/samir-al-badil-al-taharouri-newsfrom-the-land-of-cedars?v=1566422584. Sánchez Díaz, A. M., & Mula Gómez, A. J. (1996). Noticia sobre la circulación en Tánger en 1896 del periódico Conciencia Libre de Valencia. Anales de Historia Contemporánea, 12, 639–649. Santilli, A. (2013). Penser et analyser le Cosmopolitisme. Le cas des Italiens d’Alexandrie au XIXe siècle. Mélanges de l’École francais de Rome - Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines. Retrieved from: http://mefrim.rev ues.org/1516. Santos, B. D. S. (2001). Los Nuevos Movimientos Sociales. Revista del Observatorio Social de América Latina/OSAL (5), 177–188. Schmidt, M., & Van Der Walt, L. (2010). The Kurdish Question: Through the Lens of Anarchist Resistance in the Heart of the Ottoman Empire 1880–1923. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved from: https://theanarchistlib rary.org/library/michael-schmidt-lucien-van-der-walt-the-kurdish-questionthrough-the-lens-of-anarchist-resistan. Secrétariat International. (2007). A Propos du Text d’Al Badil Al Chouyouii Al Taharrouri Du 23 Février 2007. Alternative Libertaire. Retrieved from: http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?A-propos-du-texte-d-Al-Badil-al. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313) Basignstoke: Macmillan Education. Stephens, J. (2013a, September 6). Syrian Anarchist Challenges the Rebel/Regime Binary. Truthout. Retrieved from: http://www.truthout.org/news/item/18617-syrian-anarchist-challenges-the-rebel-regime-bin ary-view-of-resistance. Stephens, J. (2013b, December 7). Palestinian Anarchists in Conversation: Recalibrating Anarchism in a Colonized Country. The Hampton Institute. A Working-Class Think Tank. Retrieved from: http://www.hamptoninstitut ion.org/palestinian-anarchism.html#.XWZXuZMzZmA. Sutton, R. (2014). Lebanon’s Arab Spring: The Cedar Revolution Nine Years On. In S. Toperich & A. Mullins (Eds.), A New Paradigm: Perspectives on the Changing Mediterranean (pp. 97–111). Brookings Institution Press. Talarcrea, M. (2013). Le peuple veut la chute du systeme. An V de la revolution tunisienne. Cine2000 [YouTube]. Retrieved from: http://cine2000.org/lepeuple-veut-la-chute-du-systeme.html [Broken link]. Tilila. (2012). Tilila. Tilila. [Facebook]. Retrieved from: https://www.facebook. com/collectif.tilila/. Turcato, D. (2007). Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885– 1915. International Review of Social History, 52(03), 407–444. Retrieved from: http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0020859007003057.

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Van Der Walt, L., & Schmidt, M. (2009). The Anarchist Movement in North Africa: 1877–1951. ZABALAZA: A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism, 10, 18–21. Velasco Muñoz, R. (2019). The Lebanese Communist Party. Continuity against All Odds. In L. Feliu & F. Izquierdo Brichs (Eds.), Communist Parties in the Middle East. 100 Years of History. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Woller, A. (2018). Self-Mediation Practices of Arab Anarchists. In C. Richter, A. Antonakis, & C. Harders (Eds.), Digital Media and the Politics of Transformation in the Arab World and Asia (pp. 35–60). Berlin: Springer VS. Yacoub, H. (2013). The Lebanese Left: The Impossibility of the Impossible. In J. Hilal & K. Hermann (Eds.), Mapping of the Arab Left. Contemporary Leftist Politics in the Arab East (pp. 82–101). Ramallah: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Regional Office Palestine. Yassin-Kassab, R., & Al-Shami, L. (2016). Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. London: Pluto Press. Zimmer, K. (2010). ‘The Whole World Is Our Country’: Immigration and Anarchism in the United States, 1885–1940 (Doctoral dissertation). University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions: Anarchism Is Still Pertinent

The 2019 uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, the Moroccan Rif, Egypt and Iraq (also Iran and other parts of the South of the Mediterranean) may not have been anarchist uprisings in themselves but have updated and represented a new wave of contentious politics in the Middle East. They have confirmed, once again, that the 2011 Revolutions are still ongoing, and that the motto al-thawra mustamirra (the revolution continues) is valid and alive. With the previous experiences in Egypt, Tunis and Syria, as well as Yemen and Libya, the people in these countries have waged an inspiring revolt against deeply rooted dictatorial regimes such as Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s, Omar al-Bashir’s, Mohamed VI’s, Abdelfatah al-Sisi’s and their authoritarian and corrupted regimes, their alliances with the economic and Western powers, and the harsh structural adjustments imposed by the IMF that led to a unbearable youth unemployment in the region, insecurity and lack of any imaginable future. The acceptance of the Western security agenda entails the repression of all dissidence and the violation of human rights, with racism as its maximum exponent becoming naturalized and affecting the flows of migrants toward Europe also helps to explain the current situation. These protests are so far the largest civil unrests since 2011and their repertoires of contentious politics continue with the decentralization, horizontality and direct action of the previous uprisings. Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, as the one in Cairo in 2011 and 2012, became a place of © The Author(s) 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4_6

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encounter and reenacted the prefigurative politics of anarchism. But it was by no means the center of the revolutionary wave in Iraq. What happened in 2019 was already predicted from Basra a year before. In Sudan, the people’s movement was able to see a constitutional agreement with the country’s armed forces in summer 2019 after the downfall of Omar al-Bashir. It was probably one of the best organized movements in the region. Different sectors of society, from students to professionals, gathered outside the military headquarters, the focal point of the ongoing Sudanese Revolution. They were clear about their demands after having learned a valuable lesson from their Egyptian neighbors, with whom they demonstrated a great deal of solidarity: The military was not going to be on their side and the revolution was not over despite Bashir’s disappearance. In fact, they were very attentive to the counterrevolutionary forces backlash. Violent crackdown on protesters in central Khartoum came after a series of meetings between autocratic Arab regimes such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the Sudanese military junta trying to design the country’s future. So too in Lebanon. The government’s announcement of the implementation of new taxes on social media apps such as WhatsApp was the tip of the iceberg. At this point, the people decided to go to the streets to demonstrate against corruption, austerity measures and the deepening of the economic crisis. Overcoming all forms of statecontrolled and constructed sectarianism, this movement was more rooted with students and the working class rather than the middle classes. As activists and scholar Rima Majed assures: The mobilizations of the past few days have shown the emergence of a new class-based alliance between the unemployed, underemployed, working classes, and middle classes against the ruling oligarchy. This is a breakthrough. (Majed 2019)

With the perseverance that characterize their history people in Algeria have defeated the deeply rooted colonial structures of le pouvoir (the power) by means of the Hirak, a non-hierarchical social movement that have organized pacifist demonstrations every single Friday for the past 10 months.1 Without trying to romanticize these movements that are still ongoing and facing the consequences of harsh repression in some cases, they have also brought to the table a debate of major importance for this book: the necessity of breaking down the colonial understanding of

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power, perdurable in the structures of the economic and political institutions of the postcolonial states, but also on its social structure: the sectarianism of colonial Lebanon and the neocolonial sectarianism of postSaddam Iraq, the military societal structure of postcolonial Algeria, the religious tribalism of the pre- and post-partition Sudan, etc. All of them are examples of these forms of persisting and enduring colonialism. The Moroccan Hirak’s movement especially highlighted the colonial ties of the nation-state’s socio-political endeavors. The Amazigh-majority region of the Rif in North Morocco has been marked by social marginalization since the establishment of Morocco’s pre- and postcolonial borders. After the assassination of an illegal fishermen at the back of a truck in 2016 when the popular movement al-Hirak al-Shaabi sparked in Al Hoceima, people have demanded to put an end to the status quo. Many other cities in the country, such as Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech and Meknes, have joined the protests against the regime’s corruption and appropriation of the country’s resources, that is, against the so-called makhzen which is the correlative of the Algerian pouvoir. What these new waves of contentious politics have rightly learned from previous experiences is the necessity of not giving up street politics despite the illusion of upcoming elections or any empty political promises. In Algeria, the Hirak is clear in its rejection of the presidential elections in December 2019. After more than 42 weeks of Friday protests: “These elections are a fraud. I want to vote but once our country is free” states a young Algerian concerning the presidential elections.2 In Iraq, popular passion has pulled down several ‘pro-Iranian’ candidates after the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on November 2019, exceeding the constitutional deadlines for nominations and putting the country in a constitutional limbo. That is also the case in Lebanon: Although the traditional forces have come to an agreement for appointing a new prime minister, the people reject the new-old candidates and continue with the mobilizations. Acknowledging that these uprisings are not anarchist in their base, but yes in their utopia, they materialize the increasing tensions and conflicts between political, military and religious authorities and society, divided in different pressure groups and interests, enacting the prefigurative politics of anarchism. Leaderless individuals continue to revolt against neoliberal authoritarian states in most parts of the Global South, from Hong Kong to Chile, while we are reminded once again that these new forms of doing

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and performing politics are not so new and are not so remote from the South of the Mediterranean. But what has led historians to omit the anti-authoritarian experiences that emerge in non-Western contexts? What is the relationship of this oblivion with the disappearance of the anarchist movement of the first globalization that arrived through the first foreign workers to the southern Mediterranean region at the end of the nineteenth century? Why wasn’t this first wave of anarchism able to develop into local and indigenous movements that would last beyond the 1920s? Has the conception of anarchism (as a white and European ‘idea’) influenced the lack of studies regarding other anti-authoritarian political philosophies and experiences in the Southern Mediterranean region? How can we subvert this Eurocentric view when it comes to address the study of anarchism? These are the questions that guided me. I did not intend to answer them but to open a still pertinent debate. This debate revolves around the question of what anarchism is and how it is experienced in the South of the Mediterranean. Far from being in a homogeneous cultural, political and philosophical space, a ‘universal’ anarchist space, the theoretical and practical expressions of anarchism differ depending on the local epistemologies in which they are developed. It is ambivalent, changeable, multiple and differential insofar as a political culture. It is also a situated knowledge: Its practices, repertoires of collective action, narratives and discourses change according to the locus of enunciation. This change in enunciation is central in this book, especially when thinking about the postcolonial situation of the emancipatory projects, like the one of anarchism, that is still formulated from a privileged epistemic space that reproduce, as observed, the colonial power relations and the coloniality of knowledge. The problem of constructing and reconstructing a narrative that has not been “spoken” yet, using Spivak’s terms, is still relevant. Setting off from this foundation, this book’s goal was that of relocating the postcolonial epistemological context and rethinking the continuity of the power relations of anti-authoritarian, libertarian and anarchist narratives in the Southern Mediterranean. To achieve this goal, the critique of the conception of anarchism as a white and European ideology was imperative. The coloniality of knowledge and power has been reproduced by the anarchist canon and led it to omit anti-authoritarian and libertarian narratives, not always self-referential, in the Global South. This doctrinaire anarchism restores the history of the “modern/colonial capitalist/

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patriarchal world system” that, as Ramon Grosfoguel states, has privileged the knowledge produced by Western countries. The global design of the anarchist epistemology has made it to other context from a perspective of superiority, understanding the difference not as a virtue but as an inability to ‘become’. The Other (a para-anarchist entity in the best casescenario), in contrast to the I (authentic anarchist), needs to become like the colonizer in order to exist, a well-known failed endeavor. Hence, the libertarian, anti-authoritarian, decentralized and horizontal emancipatory projects that emerge in the Southern Mediterranean societies have not yet been integrated within the history of anarchism, in spite of having experiences that share the same variables that articulate this political culture: They are decentralized, anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian. A series of axis are the backbone of our interpretation of these processes. On the one hand, there is the still existing idea among many left-wing activists and anarchists that the European Enlightenment and latter ‘Modernity’ determine the universal nature of ideas of progress and reason. The propensity toward the universalization of these particular perspectives also influences the anarchist discourse. The relationship between the anarchist canon and the conception of the world system produced by the coupling of coloniality/modernity that is established by Walter Mignolo is valid when analyzing how anarchism has been treated as a historical subject in the South of the Mediterranean. The contemporary emergence of anarchism in the Global South opposes this Eurocentric view. While reformulating the possibilities of encounter between Islam and anarchism, many individuals, activists and political projects have subverted this modern-colonial logic. It blurs the lines and dichotomic limits and redesigns affinities and subjective political potentialities in their approaches and practices. The history of European workers and political exiles in the process of the construction of nation-states at the end of the Ottoman Empire demonstrate this hypothesis. The experience Italian expatriates in Egypt that organized themselves in order to create the first unions, workers associations and labor movements with the intention of spreading the ‘idea’ is especially paradigmatic and show a double logic of transnationalism and colonialism. The anarchist newspapers in Italian language edited there at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth reproduced an internationalist and universalist discourse that used the same binary categories of the colonizers in its own contradictory emancipatory and civilizing enterprise. This logic explains, partially, why there

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was not a local and autonomous anarchist movement among the Egyptian population, and why the local workers were not really interested in coalescing, and why after the end of this anarchist experience, relegated to foreign workers communities, the academic literature has not delved into any other experience as part of the history of the anti-authoritarianism and anarchism in the region. Moreover, anarchist narratives in non-Western countries, and in the South of the Mediterranean, have been pushed into the backstage of both the history of anarchism and national histories. These experiences break the established canon regarding the construction of a binary history: the anarchist universal one, and the national one, both of them written under the prism of the state. The histories of the global left during the twentieth century have focused on the partisan analysis within the state power logic, either by parliamentary or revolutionary way. Along this line, the European left has reproduced, both in its theoretical formulations and within its organizations, the colonial, racial and ethnic authoritarian hierarchies based on white domination over non-European people. These narratives and projects are rooted in colonial thought. The white European left should question itself and problematize its own history and postulates. That is, reconsider if by favoring the class struggle over the racial, ethnic and colonial struggle, the socialist, communist and anarchist emancipatory movements have undermined their revolutionary ability and hindered themselves from obtaining the desired results and objectives. On the other hand, national history, based on the nation-state as the epitome of the liberation of the people, has focused on the study of the social, political and cultural history through the lenses of institutions that uphold and reproduce the domination structures. The forge of Southern Mediterranean nation-states has been written by the imperatives of the coloniality of knowledge and power of the European colonial project in the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the national histories have favored the narratives of the competing elites and excluded, marginalized and subordinated other uncomfortable and unpleasant narratives in order to legitimize their hegemonic position. The vital trajectory and the political project of Sameh Said Abud illustrate this contradiction and materialize what Ferran Izquierdo (2009) states in his sociology of power’s theory. According to Izquierdo, the elites perpetuate themselves in power by means of competition for control over the resources in the nation-state in a circular manner. The democratic solution to these circular power relationships has to restore the

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linearity of the relationships and recover control over resources. The democratic option implies control over the state, capital and production means, in order to guarantee, as supported by Sameh Said, a decentralized and participatory management along with the abolition of salaried labor. Summarizing the proposal of Abud in the frame of Ferran Izquierdo: The liberation, the real democratization, can only be obtained through the dismantling of the hierarchical system, turning the person into an actor, a subject that builds itself. (Izquierdo Brichs 2008, p. 157)

The experiences of anarchism that took place from 1860 until the revolutionary waves still fighting for social justice nowadays are characterized by the premise of real democratization and liberation. All of them, despite the historical distance, are illustrative and connected as they share three main characteristics. In the first place, the experiences of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean brought to light in this book are numerous, diverse and multidimensional. They are connected by variables that exceed the linearity of the diachronic narration of history. All of them make special emphasis, with different degrees of understanding, in ‘form’ as political praxis. Thus Arabic language and translation are potent tools for direct action, dissemination, resistance and decolonization. That is why the members of the Art and Liberty Group in the 1930s and the autonomous spaces that emerge during the occupation of the squares and strategic places in 2011 justify their search for freedom and emancipation by emphasizing ‘form’ rather than ‘content’. ‘Content’, in that sense, is generally disseminated in Arabic, as a way to subvert colonial logic and localize, situate and disseminate anarchism democratically. Culture and language become means to subvert the hierarchy of institutions and the personal, artistic and linguistic relationships with the city and urban spaces as well. The Art and Liberty group did so through artistic and literary change, subverting the mechanisms of the visual and linguistic design and distorting, breaking and playing with the conventional artistic forms of the time. The exhibitions of independent art held from 1940 to 1945 opposed the institutionalized art and its alliance with the nationalist and colonialist propaganda of the time. For their part, the collectives that emerged in 2011, in most parts of the South of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Jordan, by means of the re-appropriation of the public space in the urban contexts in the Southern Mediterranean cities, broke with

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the logic imposed by capitalist consumption in an attempt to collectivize and appropriate public space. They are organized in a decentralized and horizontal manner and with a direct assembly-based democracy. They continued with the claims of the revolutions, radically reconfiguring the notion of the political. These forms of collective action, social and interpersonal practices and dynamics, while claiming their right to exist in the city also redefine the concept of anarchism. Walls become archives; the citizens became journalists; squares were transformed to meeting points and prefigurative spaces of collective and personal concerns; and the people became actors and political subjects as well as legitimate agents of change. These subversive practices challenged the concept of political representation, both in its parliamentary logic and in the institutions of the same civil society. Secondly, the anti-authoritarian and anarchist experiences in the South of the Mediterranean are glocal. They are globally connected even if their effects are perceived locally. The dialectical relationship between the local histories and the global designs, as proposed by Mignolo, can be found in various aspects of the social, political and cultural history of the southern Mediterranean contexts. The anarchist movement built around the foreign expatriate communities between 1860 and 1920 determined and influenced the formation of the communist and socialist parties in Egypt and Tunisia. The Art and Liberty Group competed with the Egyptian left of the time controlled by the Comintern. The authoritarian drift of the Soviet Union, as well as the growing European fascism that moved eventually to Egypt, led the members of the group to articulate a harsh critique toward authoritarianism both globally and locally, institutional and artistic, political and social. Hence, they established their alliance not only with French Surrealism, but also with Italian anti-fascism and always within and outside Egypt’s borders. Likewise following this sinuous relationship of competence and coexistence, the generation of the 1970s and especially Sameh Said Abud illustrates how the great emancipating and decolonizing narrative promoted by Gamal Abdel Naser largely disillusioned the youth when it became the tool of power monopolies and articulated the circular power relationships of its particular elites. His generation, politicized in the first years of Nasserism, looked for alternatives to the models of Arab socialism in anti-authoritarian and collective postulates, first through university militancy and, afterward activism on an intellectual and theoretical level. All these anti-authoritarian alternatives criticize capitalism, the role of the state as a guarantor of oppression

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and elite privilege system, as well as all forms of authoritarianism. These voices subvert the Marxist macro-narratives of the dominant models, that in many cases are used to justify the capitalist expansion and glorify the role of the state that upholds it. Thirdly, these experiences are built in rhizomatic networks. The nodes are connected within an egocentric network. These nodes are related to other time-space moments that turn these experiences into examples that help to enrich the perspectives and case studies of transnational history while decolonizing it. The transnational connections of the activists, their political trajectories, along with their participation by means of autonomous political practices in anti-authoritarian emancipatory projects scattered in the Mediterranean area knit a network of figures and life paths that contribute to a possible rewriting of the contemporary history of the South of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM) held in Tunisia in 2015 wanted to underline and take advantage of this glocal situational position of Southern Mediterranean anarchisms, in plural. While doing so it wanted to break the logic of NorthSouth transmission of knowledge by creating a rithomatic revolutionary networks to advance and enhance the anti-authoritarian possibilities of the still ongoing revolutions. All these anarchist experiences are not modern or anti-modern, but differentiated and localized, critical and emancipatory. In that sense, Dussel’s project of ‘transmodernity’ helps at conceptualizing these experiences since it materializes at the political level the continuation of the decolonization project. That is, as the Argentinian author states, these experiences are “beyond any internal possibility of a sole Modernity”. But this does not contradict the fact that, sometimes, the political subjects, along with certain anarchist movements in the Southern Mediterranean region, may have used and still use European references when it comes to the articulation of their repertoires of collective actions. It needs to be noted that, as observed, not all the political subjects or collective projects are self-declared anarchists, that is, not all of them hold onto the anarchist canon. Despite this evidence, many authors have already argued the necessary reevaluation of the history of anarchism as an anti-authoritarian project always reevaluating itself, a historiographical trend that I relate to, and on that resides one of the main objectives of this book. In summary, and taking all the necessary cautions, it is necessary to decolonize the history of anarchism by reviewing its epistemological foundations and assigning non-Western experiences to its history. The

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practices and performances of anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean are forms of the emancipatory, anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian and decentralized projects that, in many occasions, are connected in affinity with groups and networks to European anarchism, sometimes understood in its classical terms sometimes in a critical manner. Likewise, how these experiences have been forgotten and marginalized in the national histories and in the own history of this political philosophy is a question that is not yet totally answered. And both perspectives, the inner history and the related history, are basic when it comes to critically review the European emancipatory projects, which need themselves a profound decolonization. The beginning of the decolonization of anarchism lays on the epistemic diversity of its experiences, an indispensable strategy in order to achieve the anarchist purpose of an emancipatory human project, as we can learn from the South of the Mediterranean.

Notes 1. Gómez García, L. (2019). 42 viernes por la democracia en Argelia. El País. Retrieved from: https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/12/11/act ualidad/1576080827_243425.html. 2. González, R. (2019). Votaré solo cuando Argelia sea libre. El País. Retrieved from: https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/12/10/act ualidad/1575999716_577190.html.

References Izquierdo Brichs, F. (2008). Poder y felicidad. Una propuesta de sociología del poder. Madrid: Los libros de la catarata. Majed, R. (2019). Lebanon’s ‘October Revolution’ Must Go On! openDemocracy. Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/2SfIYR7.

Index

A Abdallah, Yasir, 7, 17, 91, 92, 99, 102, 164 AbderlrrahmanShahinder, F., 124 Abya Yala, 146 Acharya, M.P.T., 7, 71 Adab, 118 Affinity, 17 Affinity group, 12 Aflatun, Inji, 119 Africa, 38, 68, 72, 121, 173 Ahmed SadekSa‘ad, 108 Akhbar, 174 Al-Alali, Iqbal, 119 Al-Anarkiyya bel ‘Arabiyya (Anarchism in Arabic), 21, 91, 95, 98, 103, 110, 112, 136 Al-Assad, Bashar, 56, 143 Al-Badil al-Taharouri (Libertarian Alternative), 104, 138 Al-Bashir, Omar, 195, 196 Aleppo University, 143

Alexandria, 19, 77, 120, 136, 153–155, 167, 168, 186 Algeria, 2, 3, 17, 22, 76, 77, 108, 135, 142, 162, 173–179, 195–197 ‘Algerian Anarchists’, 177 Algerian Revolution/Algerian War of Independence, 73, 176 Algiers, 174, 175, 178 Al-Hilal , 94–96 Al Hoceima, 197 Ali, Imam, 82 Al-Jannabi, Abdul Kader, 124 Al-Kawakibi, Abdel Rahman, 97 Al-Muqtataf , 94, 95 Al-Raghba al-Ibahiyya, 124 Al-Risala, 117 Al-Shami, Leila, 103, 144, 145 Al-Sisi, Abdelfatah, 195 Alston, A., 36, 37 Al-Taharruriyya al-Jama‘iyya (Collective Liberation), 110

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 L. Galián, Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean, Middle East Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45449-4

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INDEX

Al-Tatawwur, 21, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125 Al-Telmisany, Kamil, 119 Alternative Libertaire, 104, 138, 140, 183, 186 Al-Thawra (the revolution), 81 Al-Thawra mustamirra (the revolution continues), 17, 56, 195 Al-Tilmisani, Hassan, 123 Aly, Mohamed, 171 Amazigh, 197 Amazigh struggle, 177 American radical culture, 135 American University of Cairo, 110 Amin, Adel, 123 Amireh, Fadi, 152 “Anarca-Islam”, 12, 79, 80 Anarchic-Ijtihad, 79, 80 Anarchism, 1–8, 16, 31, 58, 75, 93, 94, 96, 99, 147, 150, 152 canonical history of, 60 canon of, 4, 12, 33, 50, 100, 199 in Jordan, 151 in Tunisia, 55 Anarchist experience, 13, 20, 22, 41, 44, 45, 50, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 135, 166, 200, 202, 203 Anarchist imperialism, 40, 159 Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW), 147 Anarchist Sicilian Federation, 83 anarchist studies, 84 Anarcho-christian activism, 12 Anarcho-collectivism, 11, 62 Anarcho-communism, 11, 62, 102 Anarcho-feminism, 12, 13, 33 Anarcho-individualism, 11, 62, 77 Anarcho-syndicalism, 11, 62, 67, 168 Anarchy (anarki), 9, 10, 60, 94, 99, 167 Anarkiyya, 92–94

Andalusia, 62 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 35, 71, 72, 153, 181 Anti-authoritarian, 1–4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22, 41, 47, 50, 60, 61, 66, 72, 78, 80, 99, 103, 110, 112, 113, 116, 123, 136, 138, 141, 147, 148, 150, 153, 164, 167, 175, 179, 180, 182, 183, 185, 198, 199, 202, 203 Anti-colonialism, 37 Anticolonial movements, 34 Anti-colonial struggles, 70–72 Anti-fascism, 18, 202 Anti-Globalization Committee (AGEEG), 110 Anti-globalization movements, 65, 164 Anti-hierarchical, 9, 11, 49, 60, 65, 142, 166, 171, 177, 179, 199, 203 Anti-racism, 66 Anti-sectarian, 142 Anti-Stalinist, 122 Anti-statism, 34, 41, 115 Antiterrorist Law of 2014, 171 Anti-Zionism, 148 Apartheid, 148 The Arab Banner, 108 Arabic, 21, 49, 50, 76, 77, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101, 104, 105, 110, 113, 117, 124, 127, 128, 155, 184, 201 Arabic speaking contexts, 44 Arab Revolt, 147 Arab Revolutions/Arab Springs, 2, 22, 56, 57, 83, 103, 104, 136, 142, 146, 171, 179 Arab socialism, 202 Arab Socialist Union, 50, 129 Arab world, 49, 56, 69, 104, 121, 124, 139

INDEX

Aragon, Louis, 115 Archive, 16, 202 Armenia, 137, 153, 157, 186 Art and Liberty Group (Jama‘a al-fannwa-l-hurriyya), 21, 50, 114, 116–122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 201, 202 Asian, 56, 179, 181 Association Victoire For Rural Women, 57 Atheism, 152 Authoritarianism, 2, 111, 115, 116, 177, 202 Authoritarian socialism, 61, 65, 114 Authority, 6, 7, 9–11, 17, 42, 58, 74, 75, 82, 94, 96, 100, 145, 146, 152, 175 Autonomia (autonomy), 38, 106, 140, 168 Autonomous movement, 13, 159 Autonomous spaces, 19, 168, 169, 171, 181, 185, 201 Awqaf, 125 Aziz, Omar, 144–146 B Ba’ath Party, 102, 143 Baghdad, 195 Bakunin, Mikhail, 10, 11, 13, 36, 45, 61, 62, 64, 76, 92, 101, 102, 143, 179, 183 Balkans, 153 Baracca Rossa, 77 Barcelona, 64, 137 Barclay, Harold, 8, 81 Barrucand, Victor, 174 Basra, 196 Battle of Annual, 72 Battle of Siffin, 82 Beirut, 105, 136, 140, 142, 185 Ben Ali, 17, 59 Bhabha, Homi, 42, 100, 101

207

Bil’in, 148 Binationality, 148 Black Army, 63 Black bloc, 2, 98, 144, 150 Black community, 36 Black Hand (Mano Negra), 62 Black movements, 40, 41 Blackness, 40, 41 Black Panther Party, 36 Black struggle, 39 Blanqui, Auguste, 73 Blida, 175 Bolsheviks/Bolshevism, 63, 155 Boochkin, Murray, 8 Borders, 18, 39, 49, 67, 68, 113, 148, 149, 162, 197, 202 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 178, 195 Brazil, 55 Breton, André, 114–116, 120, 124 British colonialism, 163 British Enlightenment, 60 Buddhism/Buddhist, 43, 74

C Caballero, Largo, 64 Cabet, Étienne, 61 Cairo, 19, 45, 76, 95, 104, 114, 117, 120, 124, 126, 136, 153, 155, 167, 195 Calas, Nicolas, 122 Caliphate, 112 Canary Islands, 72 Capitalism, 9, 12, 28, 34, 39, 47, 55, 58, 65, 95, 116, 138, 153, 177, 180, 202 Capitulations (al-imtiyazat ), 155, 157, 159, 163 Cappelletti, Ángel, 9, 10, 60, 61 Casablanca, 174, 184, 197 Casubolo, Antonin, 173 Catalonia, 64, 155

208

INDEX

Cavadia, Maria, 118 Cedar Revolution, 138, 140, 185 Chaos, 7, 9, 94, 98, 99, 104, 113 Checkpoints, 149 Chile, 197 China, 71 Christianity/Christians, 12, 75 Cialente, Fausta, 130 Circolo Europeo di Studi Sociali (European Circle of Social Studies), 154 Circolo Libertario ((Libertarian Circle)), 186 Citizenship, 50, 121, 149 Civil Cemetery, 155 Civil disobedience, 147, 149, 168 Civilization, 9, 30, 67, 68, 95, 97, 160, 162 Civilizing mission, 28, 162 Civil War, 64, 137 Class, 12, 14, 39, 40, 64, 92, 118, 163 Classical anarchism, 7, 37, 65, 69, 80, 102, 184 Classical anarchist history, 5 Class struggle, 35, 36, 115, 155, 167, 178, 200 Colonial and post-colonial context, 12 Colonialism/colonization, 14, 19, 20, 22, 27–29, 32, 34, 38, 44, 70, 71, 73, 126, 150, 160, 180, 197, 199 Coloniality, 20, 27–29, 34, 41, 95, 158, 199 of being, 70 of knowledge, 70, 198, 200 of power, 70 Colonial knowledge, 17, 162 Colonial responses, 12 Colonial violence, 30 Colony, 27, 30, 149, 158 Comintern, 202

Communalism, 38 Communism, 18, 61, 102, 115, 116, 122, 184 Communist Intifada, 138 Communist left, 50, 123, 179 Communist Red Army, 63 Community (umma), 7, 47, 56, 99, 112, 117, 144, 154, 156, 159, 173, 176 Conceptual change, 21, 68, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101 Conceptual history, 15, 21, 93, 95, 96, 127 Conciencia Libre, 173 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), 64 Confederation général du travailSyndicaliste Révolutionnaire (CGT-SR), 175 Confédération Générale Autonome des Travailleurs en Algérie (CGATA), 178 Conseils des Lycées d’Algérie (CLA), 178 Content, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 16, 47, 102, 114, 116, 171, 201 Cooperativism, 11, 61 Coordination of Rights and Freedoms of Association, 110 Corean anarchism, 71 Corean independence, 71 Co-resistance, 149 Cosmopolitan myth, 156 Cossery, Albert, 119 Costantinopla, 175 Councilists, 11 Counterrevolution, 58, 171 counter-revolutionary backlash, 17 Counterrevolutionary forces, 97, 196 Counterrevolutionary process, 17, 56 Count of Gabineau, 39 Critique of democracy, 10

INDEX

Cuban independence, 72 Cultural hegemony, 35, 40 Cultural Marxism, 40 Culture, 33, 35, 38, 40, 42, 50, 69, 76, 80, 81, 96, 106, 109, 114, 117, 122, 146, 153, 171, 176, 183, 184, 201 D D’Angiò, Roberto, 161 Darwinism, 95 Decentralization, 49, 65, 142, 164, 166, 168, 171, 195 Decolonial anarchism, 80 Decolonial critique, 41 Decolonial Study Group, 29 Decolonial turn, 20, 28 Decolonization, 4, 35, 41, 44, 56, 59, 91, 150, 163, 182, 201, 203, 204 Decolonization processes, 70, 72, 175 Defence National Council, 64 Degenerate art, 116 Deir al-Zor, 144 Delgado, Secundino, 72 Democratic Left Movement (DLM), 137 Democratic Movement for National Liberation (HADITU), 107 Democratic transition, 108 Democratization, 92, 96, 97, 101, 135, 201 Deraa, 144 de Rouvroym, Claude Henri, 61 Dervish, 82 Diaspora, 124, 135, 153, 156 Dictatorship of the proletariat, 9 Direct action, 11, 47, 101, 103, 105, 106, 136, 142, 146, 148, 168, 169, 195, 201 Direct democracy, 10, 103, 138, 166, 184

209

Disillusionment, 50, 105, 106, 109, 123, 137, 179 Do it yourself (DIT), 183 Durruti column, 175, 183

E Eberhardt, Isabelle, 76, 84 Eco-anarchism, 12 Efendiyya/effendiyya, 118, 163 Egalitarianism, 82 Egypt, 1–3, 15, 17, 19, 22, 45, 49, 56, 71, 73, 77, 92–94, 97–99, 101, 102, 106–108, 112, 113, 116–121, 124–126, 135, 136, 143, 152–163, 173, 181 Egyptian Black Bloc, 1, 2 Egyptian Communist Party, 106–108, 110, 121 Egyptian Movement for Change, 165 Egyptian revolution of 2011, 1, 45, 166, 195 Egyptian Trotskyist, 121 el-Krim, Abd, 72 El Manar University, 55 Emancipation, 4, 6, 12, 19, 30, 37, 40, 47, 49, 56, 61, 74, 79, 159, 182, 185, 201 Emancipatory movements, 48, 200 Emergency Law, 143, 165 Empire, 68 End of history, 34 Enlightenment, 29–31, 41, 43, 68, 126, 167 Entartete Kunst , 116 Epistemological imperialism, 14 Epistemology, 70, 92, 199 Escuela Moderna, 3 Ethical truth, 45 Ethiopia, 117 Ethnicity, 38, 69, 156 Eurocentric thought, 30

210

INDEX

Eurocentrism, 13, 20, 30, 31, 35, 40, 41, 50, 67, 70, 102, 141, 159, 198, 199 Europe, 9, 13, 19, 21, 28–30, 34, 36, 43, 44, 62, 67–69, 80, 96, 97, 115, 120, 153, 154, 161, 162, 167, 186, 195 European anarchists, 22, 71, 91, 141, 154, 163, 179 European Enlightenment, 40, 199 European exiles, 156, 173, 175 European modernity, 27, 42, 70, 158 Evren, T.S., 13, 33 Exiles, 3, 71, 73 Experience, 1, 4, 12–14, 16, 17, 27, 34, 39, 44–46, 70, 73, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 110, 113, 155, 167, 168, 199 EZLN, 151

Form, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 35, 47, 116, 121, 201 Francoist, 72, 174 Free Art in Egypt, 126 Free Syrian Army, 144 French, 18, 22, 49, 72, 73, 104, 117, 119 French Anarchist Federation (FA), 56, 83 French CNT, 73 French Communist Party, 115 French International Anarchist Federation (FAI), 83 French materialism, 115 French National Confederation of Labor (CNT), 83 French Revolution, 30, 31, 60 French Surrealism, 202 French workers, 3, 61

F Fanelli, Giuseppe, 64, 69 Fanon, Frantz, 38, 40, 41, 160 Fascism, 18, 65, 115–117, 202 Fawda, 94, 113 Fawdawiyya, 92–95, 97–100, 104, 127, 128 20th February Movement, 182, 183 FEMEN, 182 Feminism, 6, 14, 66 Feminism Attack, 181, 182 Feminist movement, 14, 40 Ferrer, Francisco, 3, 115, 136, 155 First globalization, 13, 198 First International, 3, 9, 61, 69, 92, 102, 154–156, 183 FLN, 73 Fontenis, Georges, 91, 116 Football stadiums, 169 Foreign workers, 13, 155–157, 163, 198, 200

G G8, 164 Gallery 68, 106 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 7 Gandhism, 7 Gates of Ijtihad, 79 Gender, 10, 14, 182, 184 General Union of Students in Tunisia (UGTE), 181 Girondins, 60 Giustizia e Libertà, 126 Giza, 107 Global capitalism, 28, 135 Global history, 13 Globalization, 31, 72, 93, 148, 152, 153, 162 Global North, 12, 14, 15, 19, 57–59, 141, 156 Global South, 13, 15, 19, 35, 47, 48, 57, 59, 141, 155, 185, 197–199 Glocal/glocality, 4, 166

INDEX

God, 5, 73, 74, 78, 82, 111, 152 Godwin, William, 60, 62 Golden Age, 156 Goldman, Emma, 5 Goodwin, William, 10 Graeber, David, 11, 65, 101 Graffiti, 169 Graham, Robert, 8, 9 Gramsci, Antonio, 40 Greece, 3, 9, 68, 93, 94, 113, 122, 152, 153, 155, 172, 186 Greece workers, 3 Green anarchism, 12 Gudo, Uchiyama, 43 Guérin, Daniel, 64, 104 Gustaf Agelii, John, 76 H Hama, 144 Hardzazat Hardcore, 183 Hariri, Rafic, 137, 185 Hasakah, 144 Hegemony, 40, 56, 127, 146, 159 Henein, Georges, 116–118, 120–123 Heteronormative, 50 Hierarchical institutions, 152 Hirak movement, 196, 197 Hirak Sha’bi, 179 Holy Scriptures, 12 Hong Kong, 197 Horizon of expectations, 96, 97 Hybridism, 42, 81, 101 I Iberian family, 73 Icarians, 61 Idea/ideas, 2–4, 6, 7, 12, 13, 18, 22, 29, 36, 37, 40, 43–46, 50, 60–63, 65–67, 69, 70, 73–75, 93, 95, 97, 101, 105–108, 110, 111, 117, 120, 122, 124, 136,

211

138, 139, 145, 153, 154, 159, 161, 162, 164, 173, 174, 185, 198, 199 Ideologization, 96, 101 Idir, Achoud, 178 Iimagined community, 9 Ijma, 79 Ikhwan Wiki, 98 Il Domani, 162, 173 Il Vespo Anarchico, 173 Il Vespro Sociale, 173 Imagined community, 35, 49, 181 Imamate, 82 Imbaba, 107 IMF, 195 Immigration, 135, 136, 149 Imperialism, 14, 29, 31, 35, 55, 71, 117, 150 Independence, 36, 41, 71, 138, 163, 178 India, 7, 41, 71 Indigenous, 39, 160 Indigenous movements, 40, 198 Indigenous struggles, 39 Individualists, 11, 62, 175 Insabato, Enrico, 159–162 Insurrectionary anarchism, 12 Insurrectionists and Platformists, 11 International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art, 121 Internationalism, 35, 36, 50, 126, 164 International Workers Association (IWA), 64 Internet, 91, 101, 103, 110, 170 Intersectionality, 13, 14, 40, 158 Iran, 142, 195 Iraq, 22, 56, 142, 172, 195–197 Iraq War, 143, 164 Ishtiqaq, 93, 94 Islam, 12, 21, 67, 73–81, 96, 111 Islamic anarchism, 75

212

INDEX

Islamic Empire, 27, 28, 30 Islamism/Islamist, 2, 82, 97, 111, 112, 146, 152, 182 Islamophobia, 150 Isma‘ilis, 96 Ismailia, 153 Italian activists, 18 Italian American anarchism, 136 Italian anarchism, 50, 153, 154, 158, 173 Italian anti-fascism, 130 Italian diaspora, 135 Italian Socialist Party, 153 Italian workers, 3 Italy, 3, 62, 64, 68, 69, 117, 136, 153, 170, 186 J Jacobins, 62 Japan, 71 Jewish Egyptians, 155 Jihad, 82 Jihadism/Jihadist, 56, 82 Jordan, 2, 17, 22, 108, 135, 151 Jordanian Communist Party, 151 Journals, 3, 106, 154, 155 K Kabylia, 175 Kafeh!, 1, 22, 142 Kam al-Maz, Mazen, 91, 144 Kamil, Anwar, 117, 119, 121, 122, 124 Kamil, Fuad, 119 Karami, Omar, 185 Kasbah Square, 179 Kataeb Party, 141 Kenmyo, Takagi, 43 Kharijites, 81, 82, 96 Khartoum, 196 Kifayya movement, 165

Knight, Michael Muhammad, 81 Kornegger, Peggy, 5, 6 Koselleck, Reinhart, 21, 95, 96, 98, 127 Kropotkin, Peter, 7, 8, 10, 36 Kurdish Anarchist Forum (KAF), 83

L Labor movements, 163, 168, 199 Labour migration, 18 La Commun Libertaire—al-Mushtarak al-Taharruri, 21, 56, 181 L’Action Revolutionnaire, 174 Lajan al-tansiquiyyat al-majaliyya (Local Committee Coordinator), 146 La Marmita Social , 174 La Protesta Umana, 173 La-sultawiyya, 92–94, 98, 99, 105, 112 La-sultawiyyin, 99 Latin America, 3, 14, 69, 174 Leaderless, 177, 179, 183, 197 Lebanese Communist Party, 137, 138 Lebanese Forces, 141 Lebanese left, 137, 138 Lebanese University, 139 Lebanese uprising, 142 Lebanon, 1–3, 17, 22, 108, 135, 137–143, 185, 195–197 Le Commun Libertaire, 150 Le Libertaire, 174 Leninism, 11, 111 Le pouvoir, 178, 196 Les Essayistes, 117, 119, 120 Les Nouvelles , 174 Les preponderantes , 173 Le Tocsin, 174 Libertarian, 2–4, 12, 21, 43, 47, 50, 55, 58, 74, 78, 79, 99, 101, 128, 138, 151, 155, 176

INDEX

Libertarian orientalism, 76, 77 Libertarian socialism, 7, 43, 77, 102, 139 Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM), 57, 98, 167 Libya, 56, 195 Literary activism, 107 Local Councils, 144–146, 168 Local milieu, 168 Locus of enunciation, 47, 48, 182, 198 L’Operaio, 161, 173 L’Union geénerale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), 83 L’Union Génerale des étudiants de Tunisie (UGET), 83 L‘Università Popolare Libera, 3, 154 Lux!, 160, 161 Luxemburg, Rosa, 144

M Maddock, Kenneth, 8 Mahjar literature, 136 Mahrousa Research Center, 107 Majnó, Nestor, 63 Makhzen, 184 Malatesta, Errico, 36, 49, 62, 71, 154 Mansour, Joyce, 119 Maoism, 11 Marcel Israel, 121 March 8 Alliance, 140 14 March Movement, 140, 141 20th of March Movement for Change, 164 Maréchal, Sylvain, 60 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 117 Marrakech, 197 Martí, José, 72 Marxism, 4, 7, 11, 37, 40, 101, 102, 111, 112, 122, 123 Marxist left, 50, 97

213

Marx, Karl, 9, 43, 61, 92, 138 Mas’ha, 148 Maslaha, 79 Massad, Joseph, 92 Matese Band, 154 May 1968, 66, 177 Mazzinian, 154 Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting (MAM), 21, 50, 59, 73, 150, 203 Meknes, 197 Metropolis, 27, 158, 162 Middle East, 14, 49, 67, 76, 119, 155, 165, 195 Migrant workers, 153, 163 Migration, 18, 29, 40, 69, 95, 135, 195 Military coup d’état, 17 Minorities, 40 Mixed Courts, 157 Mixed unions, 162 Modernity, 16, 20, 28–32, 34, 43, 68, 70, 95, 118, 199 Modern School, 155 Modern Standard Arabic, 93, 94 Mohamed, Saïl, 175 Mohamed VI, 195 Moors, 73 Moroccan colonies, 72 Morocco, 2, 4, 15, 17, 21, 22, 44, 72, 108, 135, 173, 174, 182–184 Morsi, Mohamed, 17, 168 Mostaganem, 175 Muammad al-Durrah, 164 Muatazila school, 82 Muatazilites, 82 Mubarak, Gamal, 109, 112, 164, 165, 167, 169 Muhammad Ali, 136, 152 Multiple modernities, 31 Music, 47, 80, 81, 169, 182

214

INDEX

Muslim Brotherhood, 98, 112, 152, 165, 168, 171 Muslims, 75, 76, 81, 157, 174 Mutual aid organizations, 154 Mutual support, 11, 15, 38, 58, 153 Mystical anarchism, 79 Myth of modernity, 30, 68 Myth of universalism, 34

N Nahda, 93–95, 127, 162 Najdiyya, 82 Naples, 154 Naser, Gamal Abdel, 202 Nasserism, 102, 202 Nation, 14, 35–38, 49, 50, 67, 111, 112, 147, 150, 197, 199, 200 National Council, 146 National Democratic Party (NDP), 165, 167 National identity, 36, 41 Nationalism, 34–38, 72, 111, 112, 150, 177 Nationalist movements, 36 Nationalist White Army, 63 Nationalization, 61, 102, 127 National liberation, 35, 37, 176 National Progressive Unionist Party (Tagammu), 112 National question, 35, 38 Nazism, 36, 102 Neo-colonial state, 38 Neoliberalism, 55, 151 Neo-Patriarchal state, 143 Neo-Wafd Party, 112 Network, 13, 15, 17, 19, 45, 49, 50, 57, 65, 71, 72, 103, 104, 115, 140, 146–148, 153, 156, 165, 166, 170, 178, 204 Network of dissent, 49, 136, 153 Network of revolutionaries, 44

New anarchism, 65, 101, 164 New left, 65, 137, 138, 165 Newspapers, 49, 63, 72, 94, 95, 97, 98, 108, 117, 128, 136, 154, 159, 160, 163, 173, 174, 199 Nida Tunis, 17 Nihilism, 98 Ninn, Serge, 116 No Borders Movement, 83 Nodes, 13, 19, 45, 49, 50, 203 Non-Western, 3, 4, 21, 32, 42, 47, 60, 69, 70, 80, 101, 147, 198, 200, 203 North Africa, 3, 14, 152, 153, 155, 158, 172–174 O Occupation, 45, 147, 150, 166, 168, 171, 177, 179, 185, 201 Occupied Territories, 147 Operation Cast Lead, 151 Oran, 175 Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, 63 Orientalism, 76 Orientalist imagination, 74 Other/othering, 14, 15, 67 Ottoman Empire, 22, 118, 136, 137, 153, 157, 199 P Pacifism, 22 Paleoanarchism, 9 Palestine, 2, 4, 17, 22, 44, 108, 121, 135, 147–150 Paris, 19, 61, 65, 76, 120, 122, 124, 174, 175 Parliamentarism, 50 Parrini, Ugo Icilio, 154, 162, 186 Patriarchy, 12, 47, 150 Pea, Enrico, 77

INDEX

Peasantry, 41, 125 Pensieroe Azzione, 186 People’s Movement, 137 Péret, Benjamin, 115 Peripheries, 3, 152 Perlman, Fredy, 8 Philippines, 71, 72, 153 Pieds-noirs , 73 Political culture, 2, 45, 46, 101, 103, 169, 170, 198, 199 Political exiles, 18, 22, 136, 154–156, 158, 172–174, 199 Political ideologies, 33, 45 Political philosophy, 2–4, 7, 10–14, 17, 21, 32, 34, 41, 44, 50, 71, 74, 78, 91–93, 95, 99, 105, 116, 127, 136, 151, 163, 169, 204 Political refugees, 173 Politicization, 96, 98, 101, 169 Popular Committee of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 164 Popular educational institutions, 154 Port Said, 153, 155 Post-anarchism, 7, 66, 69, 169 Postcolonial context, 21, 32, 41, 48, 106, 149, 184 Post-colonialism, 20 Postcolonial studies, 28, 29, 42, 66, 67 Post-modern anarchism, 66 Postmodernity, 42 Post-structuralist anarchism, 66 Practice, 2, 6, 9, 11–13, 21, 22, 32, 35, 39, 40, 43, 44, 48, 50, 59, 62, 73, 74, 77, 80, 93, 94, 96, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 116, 125, 128, 139, 141, 148, 169, 175, 198, 199, 202, 203 Prado, Abdennur, 79 Prefigurative politics, 2, 6, 47, 99, 142, 171, 195, 197 Primitive, 8, 30, 68

215

Privilege, 4, 9, 14, 15, 28, 35, 39, 40, 50, 70, 92, 97, 102, 148, 149, 155, 157, 159, 183, 198 Privilege theory, 39 Producing knowledge, 16 Proletarian dictatorship, 61 Propaganda by the deed, 62, 154 Propaganda by the word, 63, 154 Protoanarchism, 9 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 10, 13, 45, 60, 179 Public space, 136, 169, 171, 201 Punk music, 80, 183

Q Qadiriyya, 77 Qiyas , 93 Queer, 6, 39, 66, 99, 182 Queer anarchism, 12 Queer movements, 40, 140 Question of race, 34 Quran, 79, 82

R Rabat, 19, 184, 197 Race, 14, 39, 69, 157 Radical Beirut (RB), 139–141 Radio Cairo, 130 Rafanelli, Leda, 77, 78 Ramnath, Maia, 6, 20, 32, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44 Rationalism, 41, 43 Reconquista, 28, 73 Red and Anarchist Skinhead (RASH), 139 Religion, 12, 73–75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 111, 168, 177 Repertoire of contentious politics, 21, 91, 125, 136

216

INDEX

Repertoires of collective action, 2, 19, 105, 106, 153, 163, 165, 166, 168, 198, 203 Representation, 10, 15, 16, 60, 79, 100, 112, 180, 202 Repression, 56, 58, 104, 108, 154, 157, 163, 167, 171, 174, 176–178, 195, 196 Republicans, 62 Republican Spanish, 3 Resistance leagues, 162 Revolution, 38, 143 Revolutionary network, 58, 203 Revolutionary process, 57, 58, 64, 142, 179 Revolutionary Socialist, 110 2011 Revolutions, 21, 75 Rhizomatic network, 4, 49, 203 Rif, Morocco, 172, 183, 195, 197 Rif war, 72 Risorgimento, 156 Rivera, Diego, 114, 121, 124 Romanticism, 43, 68 Ruh al-‘Asar, 97 Russia, 63 Russian Revolution, 63, 64

S Saad, George, 139 Sadat, Anwar, 106, 109 Said Abud, Samih, 21, 49, 50, 91, 105, 107, 110, 111, 113, 128, 200, 202 Saint-Imier Anarchist International, 61 Saint-Simonianism, 61 Salafism, 82, 83 Samidoun, 140 Saudi Arabia, 144, 196 School of Basra, 93 School of Fine Arts, 119

Seattle, 65, 164 Second Intifada, 148, 164 Second Palestinian Intifada, 143, 164, 165 Sectarianism, 1, 142, 196, 197 Self-determination, 6, 36, 177 Sender, Ramón J., 72 Settler colonialism, 50, 149 Sexuality, 14, 33 Sha’ab, 146 Shinran Shonin, 74 Shurah, 79 Si Mahmoud Essadi, 77 Situated knowledge, 198 Situationism, 66 Situationist International, 66 Socialism, 7, 9, 11, 38, 47, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 110, 115, 138, 155 Socialist International, 153 Socialist People’s Party, 107 Social Left (al-Yasar al-Ijtima’y), 151 Social movements, 39, 103, 164–166, 169, 171, 179, 182–185 Social revolution, 12, 17, 22, 61, 64, 71, 128, 145, 175, 185 2019 social uprisings, 22 Southeast Asia, 69 South-Mediterranean, 13 Soviet of Guliaipole, 63 Soviet Union, 50, 110, 202 Spain, 27, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 115, 117, 153, 175, 185 Spanish Civil War, 64, 65, 73, 173–175 Spanish Empire, 153 Spanish exiles, 73, 173 Spanish General Confederation of Labour (CGT), 83 Spanish Revolution, 34, 101 Spanish workers, 3 Spivak, 158, 198

INDEX

Squares, 105, 143, 166, 171, 201, 202 Stalinist left, 50 State, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 32, 35–37, 56, 64, 75, 98, 102, 106, 108, 109, 144, 145, 149, 160, 165, 167, 178, 179, 185 State anarchism, 98 Stirner, Max, 62 Subaltern/subalterns, 47, 135, 158 Sudan, 22, 142, 195–197 Sudanese Revolution, 196 Sufism, 77–79, 82 Sulta, 94 Sunnah, 79, 80 Surrealism, 19, 115, 116 Surrealism in Egypt, 49 Syndicalism, 135, 152, 155 Syndicalist movements, 18 Syria, 2, 3, 17, 19, 21, 56, 71, 108, 135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 146, 195 Syrian Revolution, 143–145

T Tafsir, 79 Tafsut ImaziGen (Berber Spring), 177 Taharruriyya, 104, 113, 128 Tahrir International Collective, 103 Tahrir Square, 45, 101, 166, 167, 195 Taixu, 43 Tangier, 173, 174 Tansiquiyyat , 146 Taqwa, 81 The Taqwacores , 80, 81 Tariqa, 77 Temporalization, 96, 101 Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ), 183 Terre Libre, 175 Terso fans, 169

217

Thaman al-sulta, 145 Thaman al-thawra, 145 Theory and practice, 45, 48, 91, 101, 106, 125, 166, 176 Theory of anarchism’s failure, 66 Third Reich, 174 Thoreau, Henry David, 62 Tilila collective, 184 Tizi-Ouzou, 177 Toma de Granada, 28 Trade unionist, 18 Tragic Week, 137 Translation, 16, 21, 50, 91–94, 99–101, 104, 108, 113, 139 Translator, 50, 91, 92, 104, 136 Transmodernity, 42, 43, 203 Transnational history, 2, 18–20, 93, 153, 156, 203 Transnationalism, 126, 153, 199 Transnational networks, 116, 137, 184 Tribalism, 197 Tripoli, 142 Trotskyism, 110, 115, 122, 123 Trotskyist movement, 121 Trotsky, Leon, 63, 114, 121, 122 Tunis, 19, 50, 56, 77, 105, 150, 179 Tunisia, 2, 3, 15, 17, 22, 55, 56, 59, 73, 99, 108, 135, 168, 172, 173, 179, 181, 182 Tunisian Communist Party, 173, 179 Tunisian revolutionary movement, 58 Tyler, Amina, 182

U UAE, 196 Ultras, 98, 169, 171 Umberto I, 71 Un Effort , 120 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 77 Union Anarchiste, 175

218

INDEX

Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), 179, 181 Union of Artists of the Revolution (UAR), 169 Union of Egyptian University Teachers, 109 Union of Unemployed Graduates (UCD), 57, 59, 181 Unions, 64, 105, 109, 153, 164, 178, 199 United States, 34, 36, 61, 62, 67, 141, 144, 165 Unity, 63, 64, 147 Universal, 10, 13, 34, 39, 43, 44, 156, 159, 166, 198–200 Universalism, 31, 34, 35, 41, 158 Universality, 20, 34 Urabi Revolution, 49, 71 Utopia, 7, 11, 197 Utopian socialism, 60, 61 V Veneuse, Mohamed Jean, 12, 41, 79, 80 Venezuela, 72 V for Vendetta, 98 Victory for Rural Women Association, 181 Violence, 5, 7, 10, 27, 38, 41, 55, 56, 68, 98, 149, 183 Vitorelli, Paolo, 130 W Wakim, Najah, 137 West, 2, 12, 29, 42, 66, 67, 69, 70, 75, 78, 79, 141, 161, 182 West Bank, 148, 149 Western anarchisms, 70

WhatsApp, 196 White, 36 White anarchism, 39, 40, 44, 148, 150 Whiteness, 40 White-supremacy imperialism, 41 Wilhelm II, 154 Woman/women, 5, 13, 14, 31, 39, 40, 76, 152 Workers, 3, 11, 14, 18, 40, 60, 61, 63, 65, 93, 95, 125, 136, 142, 152–158, 160, 186, 199 Workers and Peasants Party, 108 Workers’ mobilization, 153 Working class, 111, 112, 118, 159–161, 163, 167, 186, 196 ‘World-modern system’, 28 World Social Forum (WSF), 55, 181 World system, 28, 30, 198, 199 World War I, 13, 18, 64, 72, 95, 155, 157, 159, 163, 174, 175 World War II, 34, 116, 124, 126, 175

Y Yemen, 195 Yunan, Ramsis, 119, 122–124 Yunis, Omar Sharif, 108

Z Zahari, Kamil, 123 Zaki, Ahmed, 91, 100–102 Zamalek Ultras, 170 Zapatista movement, 103, 150, 164 Zapatistas, 65 Zaragoza, 175, 185 Zerzan, John, 8 Zionism, 50