Egyptian revolutionary youth see Turkey as model for Egypt

İPEK YEZDANİ

ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

Members of Egyptian revolutionary youth groups who are visiting Turkey and meeting high-ranking state officials said Sunday that they are looking at Turkey as a role model for the future of their country.

“Everybody in Egypt sees Turkey as a model for the future of Egypt, this is a widespread thought. The fact that Turkey has a secular regime and is run by an Islamic party is a very good example for us,” group spokesman Abdallah Helmy, 34, told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview Sunday.

“[It is] not just [about] the economic and social systems, we even take the relations between the army and the Constitution in Turkey as an example,” said Helmy, who is the program officer of the Reform and Development Party.

While in Turkey, the group is meeting with officials including President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

According to Helmy, the Islamic law system shariah does not pose an obstacle for Egypt to take Turkey, which has a secular regime, as a role model.

“The Islamic shariah regime is only a framework for the legislation in Egypt and it is the identity of the country according to the constitution. We have a consensus in the country that Islamic shariah must be the framework for legislation. At the same time, however, we agree that our Christian friends must have their own framework of legislation,” Helmy said.

Lessons from Serbian revolutionaries

The process that led to revolution in Egypt did not start on Jan. 25 in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square as is widely believed, said Waleed Rashed, 27, one of the founders of the April 6 Youth movement. Instead, he said, it started in spring 2008 with the setting up of an Egyptian Facebook group to support workers in the industrial town of El-Mahalla El-Kubra, who went on strike April 6, 2008.

“We have been reading about the lives of people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and taking lessons from the revolutionist movements everywhere around the world since then,” Rashed said, referring to two leaders of the civil-rights movement in the United States.

According to Rashed, one of the members of the movement also went to Serbia in January 2009 and learned from the experience of the “Otpor!” (Resistance!) revolutionary group, which overthrew Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.

The other big initiative behind the youth revolution of Egypt was “We are all Khaled Saeed” group, according to Abdurrahman Jad, 23. The group was set up on Facebook to commemorate a 28-year-old who died at the hands of the Egyptian police in 2010. “Khaled Saeed was killed by the police in a brutal way, he was the one who sparked the revolution in Egypt,” said Jad.

The Khaled Saeed Facebook group took the initiative to declare Jan. 25 a day of Egyptian revolt to condemn police brutality. Bloggers, Facebook and Twitter users, as well as activist groups and associations, quickly answered the call. Although few believed it could actually happen, the initiative snowballed to become Egypt’s largest uprising in its modern history.

Women protesters took men out of their shops to attend the rally

Mona Shahein, 26, is one of the Egyptian women protesters who led the organization of the meetings in Tahrir Square via Facebook and Twitter. “Before the revolution, we all changed our Facebook profiles and put the picture of Khaled Saeed on our pages. Everybody associated himself or herself with Saeed, because he was like any of us,” she said.

According to Shahein, when the revolution started on Jan. 25, it was women protesters who were calling people out onto the streets to attend the march. “Girls were taking people out of their cars, out of their shops, and telling them to attend the rally with the young people, and people were joining us like this,” she said. “While we marched our number increased, and when we realized that thousands of people were joining us, we understood that this was not a protest anymore, it was a revolution.”

“The Egyptian nation is one voice now, this is the main reason why we succeeded in Tahrir Square – we forgot our ideologies, we forgot our cultural or religious identities, we just focused on our goal, which was the revolution. Now we want to focus on how Egypt can make progress as a whole nation,” said Tame Ashry, a 27-year-old Egyptian filmmaker who also took part in the revolution process.

“We must remind ourselves that the revolution is not complete yet, our new aim is to rebuild our country,” Rashed added.

The members of the Egyptian revolutionary youth group met Saturday in Istanbul with President Gül, who told them the fire they fueled in Egypt and Tunisia has enlightened the whole Islamic world, daily Hürriyet reported.

The group said Gül gave them very important recommendations and told them “to focus on the will of the people.” Members of the group were scheduled to meet Prime Minister Erdoğan during his rally Sunday in Istanbul’s Kazlıçeşme district.

via Egyptian revolutionary youth see Turkey as model for Egypt – Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review.