مشروع ويكي تنظير/English

Name of the Organization

Hawamesh

Title of the Proposed Project

Wiki Tanzeer

Contact Information

Gehan Shaaban

Project Coordinator and Main Editor

gehan.shaaban@gmail.com

Ahmed Gharbiya

Technical Officer

ahmad@gharbeia.org

Brief Description

Wiki Tanzeer is a participatory platform that seeks to produce Arabic open content about ideas, theories and historical events that have paved the long struggle road for justice, freedom and equality and led to the development of liberating and progressive values.

Wiki Tanzeer works in an ever-evolving, cumulative way, open to discussion and contribution to content development.

In addition to written knowledge, developed by an editorial board composed mainly of young people, we aspire to, or encourage others to, produce memes, infographics, videos and podcasts, based on the written knowledge.

The content we care about includes concepts, terminology, theories, historical events, and intellectual questions that have contributed to change people's lives for the better and fuelled reasoning and critical thinking.

Estimate Budget

15,000EUR

Project Goals

We hope that the future will provide humans with remarkable opportunities for progress and emancipation. We believe that the most important of these opportunities will relate to that particular advantage that humans possess, namely, codifying their experiences so that others can benefit from it. This is what we hope to contribute to through Wiki Tanzeer.

Under the motto: "practice without theory is blind, theory without practice is sterile" we aim to re-establish the relationship between theory and practice, in a smart way, realizing that this will not always be an easy task. As the chain linking one to the other will not always be short. But it must exist. We will therefore seek to clarify and simplify arguments and analyzes of all their complexity. This will not mean that we will always be able to use vocabulary that everyone understands, but we will explain each concept, term and word we suspect to be strange to our target audience.

In detail we will seek to:

• Produce valuable and fact-based content; that promotes reasoning, critical thinking, and progressive libertarian values of freedoms, justice and equality. A content that can attract the attention of young people and be remembered.

• Produce a cognitive pattern, based on critical thinking, theorizing and the ability to deconstruct and reconstruct, in order to develop an interpretive vision.

• Explain liberating progressive ideas simply, clearly and concisely without compromising.

• Stay away from "Byzantine", "schooling", and addressing theoretical questions as if they have value in themselves, by re-planting theories in the human practice, they developed in, with the aim of recognizing their importance here and now.

• Recall history, not as a set of events to memorize and study, but as the cultural, intellectual and philosophical vessel to develop and humanize societies. We call for its most important events, for accountability and interpretation, in search of that aspect of practical value, which can show us the means to make the present a better future.

• Give seekers for justice and freedom an opportunity to develop to their fullest potential by providing indispensable tools to develop, crystallize, explain their positions, determine their movement and give them a push forward.

• Enable those who wish to change the world to formulate a theoretical conception about change paths, state structure, relationship of the state to the society, how to form a new regime... Enable them also to determine their position from the army, the administrative apparatus of the state, different political factions… Furthermore, Enable them to define their perceptions about economics and their economics biases, as well as issues such as public and private freedom and equality. This will enable them, in the long term, to adopt clear positions, and not to fall into a continuous tactical trap. It will also protect them from fragmentation by adopting less priority issues and delaying or ignoring the adoption of priority issues.

• Create a progressive and liberating political Intellectual current, formed around our participatory platform, without colliding with organizing difficulties in Egypt today, or with the tendency of this generation to refrain from traditional way of organization.

• Provide free, participatory content that can be reused by others to produce audiovisual materials.

• Form an editorial board, mostly from the millennium generation, to get a content addressing this category as much as possible.

• Experiment a learning process to be able to address a generation with unique defining characteristics, who grew up in a world where internet and digital devices are reality, and who knew politics in the sense of major uprising, street warfare and breathless tactics.

Context

Perhaps "theorizing" is the term with the worst reputation, among youth who seek social change. As it is associated with the image of an isolated intellectual in his ivory tower, reading and contemplating about thoughts away from reality, speaking with an arrogant rhetoric that no one understand. The definitive evidence of the corruption of "theorizing" is that it is abstract, which means from their point of view, lack of realism and reason, and thus is condemned as a waste of effort and time.

In fact, everyone is a philosopher, in his own way, even if he does not realize it. Everyone, regardless of affiliation or activity, has a collection of generalizations, and initial assumptions about the world, himself, his position and the relationship with others. Every one of us adopts a theory regardless his admission. There is no exception between loyalist and opponent; reactionary, conservative and progressive; who discriminate women, racist, sectarian or homophobic; or nationalist, liberal, Islamic, leftist, and even the state security officer who monitor them all.

Each of us crystallizes his "theory" cumulatively, through a mix of different and often contradictory concepts; initially, as a result of simply being in a society with certain biases, and receiving specific culture; then, at a later stage, through experience, theoretical knowledge and interaction with individuals and groups with different experiences.

The battle for justice, freedom and equality is at core a battle between different concepts of the world; a battle to get rid of ideas that promote exploitation, tyranny and discrimination and replace them with progressive liberating ideas and theories that call for justice, freedom and equality.

Activists, who say that they do not need theory and only follow their instinct, i.e. try to change the world without making the enough effort to understand it as it really is, with its deformity and change possibilities, and to understand their role and position in this process, are actually fighting windmills blindfolded. Their "common sense" may include elements needed to lay the groundwork for a new world, but those elements need to be extracted, purified, developed, and isolated from a pile of contradictory and conflicting ideas that also contribute to the formation of "common sense".

This is a very difficult task in general. As the dominant ideas always belong to those who shape education, media, religion, culture and other determinants of consciousness. Interest of those is to dedicate the status quo.

If the prevalent ideas in general are not enough to understand the forces that shape our lives and the possibilities to confront them, the situation in Egypt is catastrophic, as the forces of knowledge production, whether individuals or institutions, are systematically deviating from anything that helps to develop interpretation, analysis, critique and develop new visions. There is a disjointed and transient certified code of ideas, whoever adopts it, is rewarded with acceptance, belonging and appreciation. While anyone who tries to question it, suffers from exclusion, rejection, disdain and accountability, let alone trying to criticize it.

Despite the billions spent on public and private education each year, the quality of schooling in Egypt falls to the point where Egyptians consistently point out that they "have no education." The only exception is international education, which is obtained only by the margin of margin. Curriculum development in Egypt is often about what the government decides and just enough to pass exams, which tend to reward students for memorizing skills, not understanding, making arguments or being creative. In Egypt, students enrol in school at the age of four and leave it at the age of eighteen, without being exposed to the long history of struggle for justice, freedom and equality. There is nothing, of course, about the evolution of progressive liberating ideas or the concepts of collective or personal rights.

History is merely a preaching account serving the regime ideology, in the name of developing national sense and belonging to the homeland, or to religion. It is an artificial imaginative process glorifying figures, loaded with piles of dates; students are burdened by memorizing them, without acquiring the ability to link them, understand the logic behind their flow, or even understand how these events have changed people's lives positively or negatively. All what Egyptian student gets as history throughout his pre-university education is the Pharaonic, Islamic and contemporary history of Egypt, which is repeated every three years in the same order with some expansion. Nothing about the history of the world outside Egypt, as if Egypt is an isolated island or exists on an independent planet, or as if people history is not an interaction between different cultures and civilizations. Nothing can convey the feeling that we are part of the collective heritage of humanity. Of course, within this context of official narrative, there is no place for the eight centuries of Coptic Egypt, which occurred between the end of Pharaonic civilization and the Islamic conquest of Egypt.

If the student chooses the "scientific" track, it means that he will not be exposed to the whole field of humanities, not a single word about philosophy, psychology, sociology or economics. While the student who chooses the "literary" studies, will receive fragments of these sciences, dealing with their theories as rigid moulds imported from the West, having nothing to do with our reality. The study of "scientific" track on the other hand, will only address vaguely theories about universe emergence, evolution and other theories that contradict the "adopted" narrative.

Media is no less miserable. Egyptian media have always been monitored and censored. But what happened since 2013 coup and Rabaa massacre was quite different. Apart from dominating state radio, television and newspapers, the new regime tightened his grip on every private satellite channel, radio station and newspaper, allowing only pure propaganda. Internet became no longer a place where alternative narratives can be found; as hundreds of websites, including satellite channels, newspapers, publishing platforms and political group sites, have been banned.

Political repression is not the main scourge of Arabic Internet. Despite repression and the transformation of social networking platforms to fishers for dissidents and platforms to broadcast official propaganda through an organized network of loyalists, the Internet remains the only participatory media tool available and the cheapest way to get information and to be exposed to ideas. Here, in fact, the problem lies. The Arabic content on the Internet is a lamentable reality that suffers from extreme poverty and weakness. If the attempt to obtain serious or scientific information is very difficult in the midst of piles of superstition, friction, superficiality and frenzied sectarian conflicts, the opportunity to be exposed to ideas that contradict what is taken for granted, or help to understand and change the world is almost impossible. If one is lucky, and stumbles on an idea of this kind, most likely it will be a translation of a classical writing, an article written in a very complex fossil language, or an intervention or intrigue that will soon fade into the social networking swallow.

Rationale for the Proposed Project

Wiki Tanzeer do not only try to confront this objective circumstance that deprives the Egyptian (and Arab) youth of exposure to progressive and liberating ideas; as a result of the nature of society, the level of education and media, and the low quality of Arabic electronic content; by providing serious content based on facts, and promoting reasoning , critical thinking and values of justice and freedom; but it also take into account the self-circumstance of the millennium generation.

The millennium generation, or at least a large part of it, does not read paper books or newspapers, and does not watch television. It is a generation who grew up on the Internet and on the use of digital devices that perform functions of communication, entertainment and learning, all-in-one. If one of them is exposed to a complex idea or something written in a language far from his vocabulary or in unjustified prolongation, he will move away from it by a touch on his phone screen.

Not only we will strive for quality, simplicity and attractiveness, but we will be modest enough to admit that, during the content production process, we will be learning how to address this generation by relying on a majority of young editors. We will discuss, guide and help but at the end the content will come out expressing them and trying to respond to their aspirations, not our perception about of them.

We will start by producing, cumulative and constantly evolving, written knowledge, provided with links to other readings for those who want to expand. But we will target the use this content, perhaps through others, in producing memes, infographics, videos, and podcasts, in order that the message arrives, to whom do not read at all, and prefer these mediums to receive knowledge.

Project Activities