My theme is MESA and the American university. It is a worthy topic because MESA, and MESA’s membership, occupy distinctive places in the American academy. We are, as academic organizations and academic fields go, relatively small; but our membership constitutes, collectively and often individually, a deep reservoir of knowledge about a part of the world that has become of central importance to our country over the past several decades, and is likely long so to remain. The diverse and detailed understanding we hold about our region of special interest-the Middle East-is, or at least should be, a resource of immense value for those in our country, and beyond, who are also concerned with it-whether they are ordinary citizens, or business leaders, or political leaders and others who shape policy.

MESA exists, of course, in the context of the North American university system. MESA was founded in 1966 by a small group of American academicians-at a meeting in Chicago, no less, that quintessentially American city in which I am so fortunate to live. It offers a unique forum for the unfettered exchange of information and ideas on the Middle East, especially the contemporary and recent Middle East, free of any political or economic or cultural or religious orthodoxies; and it serves as a vehicle for encouraging scholarship on every aspect of the region from the perspective of all disciplines, and for encouraging and sustaining the intellectual development of the scholars who undertake such work. While MESA is autonomous and independent of any particular university, we all realize that it simply could not function effectively in the absence of the hundreds of universities and colleges in which most MESA members serve as faculty, academic staff, or students. Without our university or college paychecks most of us would hardly be able to pursue research on the Middle East. It is, I think, no mere coincidence that MESA was born in the 1960s and grew rapidly in the subsequent three decades, the period when the American university system itself reached perhaps its apogee in size and sophistication. MESA can be seen in some sense as a reflection of that period of educational flourishing.

Mamduh Adwan (1941-2005) was right eighteen years ago. The people whose lives Hafiz al-Assad had poisoned and whose souls he had wounded would pursue his son for blood. Decades of living with walls that are—not have—ears have produced rage and a demand for vengeance and justice: “From now on we shall begin our great duty: This tyranny shall never recur.” These lines call for revolution. It is not enough to cut off the hand of the jailor. The jail must be destroyed.

I have been thinking about Egyptian protest culture for a number of years, although not always as a scholar. For the bulk of that time, much of this protest culture was largely confined to particular segments of Egyptian society, activists, intellectuals and students. The major icon of this culture, Sheikh Imam, was clearly more revered outside of Egypt than at home. However, with the January 25 uprising, what was marginal became a dominant strand in contemporary Egyptian expressive culture. Like so many others, I found myself caught up in collecting, archiving and analyzing the explosion of revolutionary culture in Egypt. Among the first things I collected were slogans.

During the Eighteen-Day Uprising, I noticed that many observers treated slogans as if they were spontaneous linguistic statements of an unambiguouspopular will. This treatment both resonated and clashed with what I thoughtI knew about the history of protest culture in Egypt. On the one hand, it resonated with how activists themselves spoke about their own experiences interms of surprise and spontaneity, and how they routinely considered slogans to be clear proof-texts of an articulate collective voice. But it also clashed with the fact that some of these same activists had for years been planning and practicing just such an uprising, and chanting some of the same slogans that were to resound across Egypt on January 25. The more I listened to activists, the more I began to realize that the meaning of slogans could not be reduced to their immediate context or their semantic aspect, nor was their meaning so straightforward or stable.

One of the most inspiring aspects of the Egyptian revolution was the outpouring of creative expression that accompanied the uprising’s social and political movements in the form of protest songs, poetry, slogans, chants, graffiti and installation art, street theatre, cartoons, among other forms of artistic inventiveness. Creative dissidence has always been an integral part of protest movements, as argued by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (2011):

Antoon evokes Abū al-Qāsim al-Shābī, whose poem “The Will to Live,” referenced in the epigraph, symbolized the battle cry of Tunisians in the anti-colonial struggles of the early 1900s. Refrains from the poem echoed in both Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab spring uprisings over one century later, thereby highlighting the intimate synergies between the creative imaginary and revolutionary action.

As protestors filled Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011, Western diplomats, academics, and political pundits were searching for the best political analogy for the promise—and problems—of the Arab Uprising. Whereas neoconservative skeptics fretted that Egypt and Tunisia might go the way of post-revolutionary Iran, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright praised Indonesia’s democratization as the ideal model for the Arab Spring. During her 2009 visit to Indonesia, Clinton proclaimed: “If you want to know whether Islam, democracy, modernity, and women’s rights can coexist, go to Indonesia.” Certainly Indonesia of May 1998 is not Egypt of January 2011, yet some comparisons are instructive. Still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, middle class Indonesians were fed up with corruption, cronyism, and a military that operated with impunity. On 21 May 1998 Soeharto resigned after three decades of authoritarian rule. Despite fits of starts and stops, the democratic transition has brought political and economic stability. Whereas academics and pundits have debated the merits of the Indonesia model for democratic transition, in this article I consider how the notion of Indonesia as a model for the Arab Spring has reconfigured transnational Muslim networks and recalibrated claims to authority and authenticity within the global umma.

An increasing body of scholarship devoted to global Muslim networks offers important insights into the longue durée of merchant traders and itinerant preachers connecting the Middle East with Southeast Asia. In his critique of Benedict Anderson’s famous explanation of “imagined communities” as the result of print capitalism within national borders, historian Michael Laffan argued that Indonesian nationalism had important roots in global Muslim networks connecting the Dutch East Indies with Cairo’s famous al-Azhar University.