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Activists and protesters have added their own slogans to the cartoon, as well as printing it out, cutting it up, and turning it into masks, banners and posters. It has popped up at protests in New York, Washington, Berlin, Paris and Oslo - and even in the back alleys of Cairo.

Egypt has seen an outbreak of protests against Sisi since 20 September, when protesters took to the streets of Cairo and other cities, calling for him to step down.

the most public show of opposition to the president since a crackdown on dissent after the 2013 military coup that brought Sisi to power. Hundreds of protesters were killed by security forces in Rabaa Square, with tens of thousands more arrested and imprisoned

A new wave of repression has followed this month's protests, with more than 2,200 people arrested, according to local activists. Last Friday Egyptian security forces locked down the centre of Cairo and other cities to deter crowds from taking to the streets.

Activists say Ganzeer's image not only plugged into the rising anger on the streets; drawing Sisi as a burglar fundamentally stripped the president down from a so-called statesman to an ordinary, petty thug who had literally stolen the presidency and now the coffers of the state.

Ganzeer’s Twitter account was among those briefly suspended earlier this week.

Middle East Eye asked Twitter why it had suspended the accounts of Egyptian activists and whether it was investigating the closures.

Ganzeer says his Twitter account was reactivated a couple of hours after he filed his appeal, but he told MEE he believed he had faced a coordinated online attack since publishing the image of Sisi. “Since I released the image, I have had to spend a lot of time just blocking [trolls]. It has been coordinated with a number of suspicious handles and accounts that clearly began in September.”

"Some back home are complaining that people are ignoring the deaths and detentions and crackdowns and his attempt to stay in power and now talking about corruption. "But if you ask me, I think this wave of protest is about exposing Sisi as a liar from the inside - and you could say it's a key to opening up all the other lies."

two powerful ayatollahs in Iran would like to see the project nipped in the bud, saying Sufism is a deviation from Shiite Islam and any attempt to promote or spread it with a movie would be "haram"

Part of the opposition to the film is based on the fact that it is a co-production with Turkey. A group of experts and journalists stated their opposition to the Rumi and Shams movie owing to the presence of a Turkish producer behind the film, implying that the two countries — both of which claim the heritage of Rumi — have different interpretations on the life and works of the mystic poet.

Members of the hadith current have issued fatwas against mystics repeatedly. For example, a summit in Qom in 2007 declared Rumi a heretic.

The country’s culture minister, Abbas Salehi, a cleric who doesn’t wear a turban, told reporters after the Sept. 25 Cabinet meeting that while the opinions of marjas — the highest Shiite authorities — should be respected, “the country has its own laws.” This was taken to mean that the making of the film would not be prohibited because of the objections. So far, there are no indications that the movie is being obstructed by Tehran.

“Drunk on Love” is not the only controversy in Iran over films that deal with religious figures. In September, member of parliament Ali Motahari called on authorities to permit the movie “Hussein Who Said No” to be screened in cinema and theaters across the country. The movie, which has been banned for seven years, narrates the story of battle of Karbala in the year 680, where the third imam of the Shiites, Hussein ibn Ali, and 72 male companions were killed by Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya’s army. “The main obstacle [in the way] of receiving the screening permit has been the portrayal of the face of ‘Abbas’ that I believe has no religious problem,” Motahari wrote on his Instagram page Sept. 23. Motahari said Abbas ibn Ali — the half-brother of Hussein — is not one of the sacred Shiite imams, which means the portrayal of his face should not be prohibited.

The series revolves around how Selim I, who is trying to extend the empire he forcefully took from his father, is faced with the opposition of the people of Cairo led by the fighter-turned-leader Toman Bay as he fights to conquer Egypt.

The $40 million series caused still another tension in Turkey’s strained relations with Egypt, due to Ankara's support of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and late President Mohammed Morsi. Ankara’s ties are also tense with Saudi Arabia — whose channel broadcasts the series — over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Moreover, the launch of the series is also believed to be strategically timed, to precede another Turkish production on the Ottoman Empire and the life and times of Osman, who gave the empire his name.

ome challenged his description of the Ottomans as “occupiers” and the Mamluks as the locals, whereas the Mamluks were also an occupying force in Egypt. Faisal bin Fahad bin Jasim Al Thani, chairman of one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates, tweeted that this sentence was “ignorance” coupled with hate. “Toman Bay and the Mamluks are Turks [not Egyptians], and the Ottomans are also Turks. So, if you consider the Ottomans to be an occupier, you need to concede that the Mamluks were, too,” he tweeted.

In recent years, there have been requests in Egypt to remove the name of this violent sultan from streets and squares in the country. The first attempt was in February 2018 when the Egyptian authorities decided to remove Selim’s name from a street in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the east of Cairo.

“The violence of a certain capitalist economy makes a lot of life fragile, vulnerable, and empty of meaning. The film is about the beauty and innocence of love between two 20-year-olds, which is ruined and cut down by economic issues.”

This attention to material reality is another way that Atlantics thwarts our expectations about class. Many of the recent international films tend to make it legible and palatable to audiences in the West. The working classes are maids, nannies, drivers, tutors; in Parasite, the Korean upper-class family is easily replaced with a German one. I’d love to interview Americans leaving the theater after watching Atlantics. Are these Senegalese characters rich or poor? What class are they? The women have hair weaves and take selfies. They wear T-shirts, possibly second-hand, that say “Froot Loops” or “Chicago.” Everyone is black. Everyone has a cell phone. Ada casually sells hers on the side of a dirt road where a man in flashy sports gear goes for a run past horse-drawn carts. Her parents take her to a modern clinic for a doctor to test if she is a virgin.

We are the Atlantics. The sea is the sweat of the great majority trying to live, love, and work.

The increased repression, coupled with persistent concerns over the government's incapacity to handle the pandemic, and plummeting oil prices that spell disaster for Algeria's economy, are all contributing factors to a tension threatening to boil over onto the streets, pandemic or not. 

"We work in fear," an Algerian filmmaker who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity said. "People aren't only afraid for their safety, but also for their families' safety, as you never know how things can escalate with this Kafkaesque judicial system.

"Algeria is the country where, more than any other in the Middle East, authorities have exploited the pandemic to neutralise active opposition to its rule," Eric Goldstein, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, told MEE.

"President Tebboune took office saying he had heard the Hirak's calls for reform and promised a new constitution. "Instead, he exploited the Covid-19 lockdown to try to put the Hirak genie back in the bottle, while proposing a draft constitution that does little to advance political and civil rights."

Reporters without Borders has ranked Algeria 146 out of 180 countries and territories in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index - five places lower than in 2019. 

Many journalists and activists face campaigns of disparate accusations and slander, and anyone using the internet to voice dissent against the monarchy and ruling elite faces possible prison time. 

Some 16 Moroccans have been arrested on similar charges as Radi since October, including famous rapper Gnawi, YouTubers, as well as several high school students.

Since Morocco's Hirak protest movement erupted in 2016, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights has documented more than 1,000 cases of political detention.

Moroccans continue to advocate under the #FreeKoulchi ("Free everything") campaign for the release of all those imprisoned.

Despite adopting some reforms since 2011, citizens are offered little political power under King Mohammed VI, who this year has entered his third decade heading the kingdom. Like much of North Africa as a whole, unemployment levels are high, political corruption and abuses of police power are widespread, and social services are lacking. 

According to the Arab Barometer,  a central resource for quantitative research on the Middle East, 70 percent of Moroccans aged 18-29 have thought about emigrating, a strongly held sentiment shared by both Algerians and Tunisians, whose migration to Europe has increased significantly this year. 

Last month, a Tunisian woman was sentenced to six months in jail after sharing a Facebook post about the coronavirus written as a Quranic verse. The post mimicked the style of the Quran in reference to Covid-19, encouraging people to wash their hands and observe social distancing.

he consolidation of the prime minister's power in Tunisia, high levels of corruption, security and economic challenges along with political stagnation, are all factors that have helped to scupper Tunisia's democratic consolidation.

Though the best performing out of the Maghreb countries, Tunisia still has much room for improvement when it comes to freedom of expression. Despite the steps taken, journalists still face pressure and intimidation from government officials, and reporters covering the operations of security forces often face harassment or arrest.

In terms of the pandemic, unlike in Morocco and neighbouring Algeria in particular, the majority of Tunisians have expressed trust in their government - with 71.2 percent trusting the government to control the virus, and 84.5 percent trusting it to communicate effectively with the public, according to the Sigma Conseil. 

"The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stress test for authoritarian and democratic governments alike,"

The social, economic, and security effects of the pandemic are likely to divert attention away from needed long-term reforms, the political agency of civil society, and risk the permanence of authoritarianism that mirrors Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after the worst of the pandemic has gone.  

I’d reported for the Guardian that Egypt likely had more coronavirus infections than the country’s official total

ranked 166th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index

Citizens are routinely detained on charges of “spreading rumors and fake news,” including about COVID-19; the country’s public prosecutor recently warned that those accused of spreading “false news” about the virus face steep fines and up to five years in prison

Atef Hasballah, the editor of news site AlkararPress, who was bundled into the back of a police van and arrested on suspicion of “joining a terrorist organisation” after questioning the health ministry’s official infection count on his Facebook page

My story, and the University of Toronto study, sparked outrage. This was more than angry phone calls from government officials, or the smattering of threatening tweets I’d received in the past. It appeared to be a coordinated campaign, one where publicly condemning my journalism had a political purpose.  Egyptian media, dominated by pro-government talk-show hosts and columnists decried the reporting. An army of online trolls attacked the Guardian under the hashtag “lies of the Guardian.” Alaa Mubarak, the son of former president Hosni Mubarak, described what he termed the “Guardian virus” as “no less dangerous than the coronavirus.” 

“We’d be blind to ignore the overlap between public health, economics, and socio-political issues. We try to stay on the public health side as much as possible. But of course people standing more in the sociopolitical realm select data according to their beliefs.” 

I was summoned, along with Declan Walsh of the New York Times, to the headquarters of Egypt’s State Information Service, the main government organ that handles the media. During the course of a nearly four-hour meeting, Diaa Rashwan, the head of SIS, demanded repeatedly that the Guardian retract the story, and that I publish a personal apology. 

Rashwan accused us of “spreading panic” about COVID-19. The next day, SIS revoked my press card.

in undemocratic countries, amidst a desire to control information as much as the disease, scientists, doctors, and journalists are frequent targets. Authorities in Venezuela, Iran, and Belarus have detained journalists or prevented them from publishing due to their COVID-19 reporting. China expelled dozens of American reporters in an ongoing dispute with the Trump White House about journalism credentials, taking the opportunity to do so while the world is distracted with the virus. 

Accusations of “spreading panic,” or use of laws criminalising “fake news,” are also common, as in Egypt and Turkey, where citizens have been detained on these charges. A Chinese doctor was detained and reprimanded for “spreading false rumours” about the coronavirus; he was forced to sign a confession that he had “seriously disrupted social order,” shortly before he died of COVID-19. Turkmenistan went as far as to simply ban the word “coronavirus,” as though this alone could remove the spread of disease.

In Iraq, the government banned the Reuters news agency from operating in the country on April 3, after the outlet published reporting citing five sources including health ministry officials claiming that the country has a higher infection rate of COVID-19 than the official figure.  The government also issued a $21,000 fine while accusing the news agency of endangering public safety and hindering government efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It demanded a public apology to the government and the people of Iraq. Reuters stood by the story, adding in a statement that the agency is “seeking to resolve the matter and…working to ensure we continue to deliver trusted news about Iraq.”

British officials attempted to negotiate with the Egyptian authorities. I understood that I had to leave, they explained, but with no more commercial flights I needed to wait until the airports reopened, allegedly in a few weeks’ time. Could they at least ensure I wasn’t arrested in the interim? The Egyptians offered no such reassurance, and continued to demand I show up at the visa office. They told my lawyer they were “offended” I hadn’t come in person. British officials offered for me to stay at the embassy in order to avoid detention.

In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.

While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.

During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.

I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.

a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.

in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”

In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians

It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages

Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.

By curating and translating the work of contemporary Arab poets, writers, visual artists and journalists based around a specific theme, Arabpop aims to fill a gap in accessibility to Arab stories specifically catering to people who are interested in what goes on in the Arab world beyond the daily headlines.

While it’s merely a coincidence that Arabpop came out almost exactly 20 years after 9/11, Comito does refer to the extreme rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that manifested itself since then, both in politics and society. “I say this at every presentation: a large part of the problem is the media, which in the last 20 years since the attack on the Twin Towers have unleashed a terrifying anti-Islam and anti-Arab country propaganda.”

Other highlights include an excerpt from the 2016 book Paolo by celebrated Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, which is so thoughtfully translated that you wish everyone could read Arabic translated into Italian – the cadence, the poetry of the mundane, the flow of the story shows how perfectly the two languages sway together when approached with a passion for language and culture and attention for detail.

PodFest Cairo is Egypt and Africa’s first podcasting conference, bringing podcasters and podcast listeners together to share experiences. Africa Podfest is a Kenyan, woman-led company which founded Africa Podcast Day (February 12) and whose primary objective is to cultivate the African podcasting community through networking and sharing resources. 

in Africa, podcasts are produced in many of the native languages, including Arabic, and thus reach audiences that are otherwise ignored by podcasters who reside outside of the Global South

globally, including in Africa, traditional radio is tethered to governments in terms of regulation and licensing and thus subject to various levels of censorship. On the other hand, podcasting is more rogue, with niche non-standard formats and topics. As a result, there is an exciting variety of podcasts, including emerging podcasts in true crime, wellness, history, and identity and culture. There is also a reciprocal relationship between the content podcasters are creating and what podcast listeners are interested in; meaning there is a focus on audience engagement. Buoyed by the growth in African podcasts that speak to the African experience, African podcast listenership has expanded.

Weak mobile and internet penetration, though increasing, stifles the ability of the industry to flourish

in Africa, where it’s estimated that there are at least 1500 languages, podcasts are produced in many languages

Aaisha Dadi Patel, a writer and journalist at the Wall Street Journal Africa bureau, says audiences are more likely to listen to the radio as opposed to undertaking the added burden of trying to find, download, and then listen to a podcast, not to mention the exorbitant cost for data

Just as the podcast medium’s presence is increasing in Africa, so too is research in the field. South African podcasters have seen their community grow and firms, like Edison Research, have taken notice by collecting data on the region, releasing their first report on South Africa in 2019. Scholarly research has also increased

Africa is the continent with the youngest population worldwide, with around 40 percent of the population aged 15 and under compared to the global average of 26 percent

Africa Podfest reports dating back to 2018 indicate that the types of podcasts released in Africa are consistently hyperlocal

With all this rich, Maghrebi and Middle Eastern culture, aesthetic and historical references on display, once again I must ask: where are the significant MENA actors?

What an opportunity it would have been to cast the likes of Egyptian actor Amr Waked or French-Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri in these roles. Instead, we get Javier Bardem doing whatever the Arab version of Blackface is.

The rest of the Fremen - those whose faces aren't masked and have speaking roles - are made up of actors of Guyanese, West or East African heritage. This wouldn’t be a problem at all if there were at least some MENA actors to reflect the diversity of that region which Villeunueve claims to care so much about and admitted to using as inspiration: “I feel true that I’m right in doing it this way. It feels authentic, it feels honest and true to the book.”

We’re used to being vilified, maligned or erased on screen. We’re used to having most of our representation in Hollywood limited to plane hijacking or suicide bombing or perverted sheikhs or refugees or having non-MENA actors replacing us in our own stories. Like Dwayne Johnson who is playing Black Adam, the first MENA superhero character to get his own solo movie. Can you imagine the outrage if The Rock was cast as Black Panther? Or Shang-Chi? People wouldn’t stand for it.

But in a post-9/11 world where Arabs and Islam are still considered too dangerous and foreign to pass the racial profiling in studio boardrooms and casting call discrimination, too taboo to be given the same equal opportunities for positive or nuanced representation as other ethnic minorities are now slowly beginning to benefit from, must we continue to wait and bittersweetly watch films like Dune that take but do not give back?

Garabli grew up in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa. The city made headlines this year after residents organized mass demonstrations to protest increasing gentrification, which has taken on an ethnic dimension as Jewish buyers displace Palestinian families who can no longer afford the rent on the homes they’ve been living in for generations.

In Jaffa, dance lessons were a privilege that not everyone could afford, she noted. There was also a social imbalance to the classes: the teachers were Jewish Israelis who did not speak Arabic or understand local norms, whereas most of the students were Palestinian citizens.

According to Garabli, who comes from a traditional Muslim family that prays and fasts during the holy month of Ramadan, many among the Palestinian community in Jaffa do not approve of dancing as a profession. Dance is considered a temptation, and women moving their bodies in such a free way can “damage” their reputations. Moreover, given that the community is heavily focused on its survival, advocating for affordable housing, and mobilizing against gun violence and police brutality, many Palestinian residents view artistic activities as an indulgence, Garabli explained. This, she added, is why relatively few Palestinians attend cultural events like hers.

there will be consequences for offences such as “provoking strife”, “promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting morality” and “contempt for religions”.

Earlier this month, Jordan blocked the popular satirical news site AlHudood, in a move denounced as censorship and an attack on freedom of expression.

in Latin America, one of the ways Gulf states’ rising profiles have been most evident is their forays into the soft power of soccer. Gulf countries are not among the top trading partners of Latin America’s largest economies, but sports fans know that both Messi and Brazilian star Neymar play for a club team that is owned by a subsidiary of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Paris Saint-Germain.

Latin American audiences are intimately familiar with the use of the World Cup for political aims, such as when Argentina sought international legitimacy for its bloody dictatorship when it hosted the tournament in 1978. Like the European and U.S. press, the show has discussed the human rights and labor rights complaints surrounding the Qatari-hosted event. Still, Wall told Foreign Policy that, overall, “in South America, perhaps we see [the World Cup] with different eyes.” Latin American coverage of the event has focused more on how soccer culture in both Latin America and the Middle East developed in the context of colonization. It’s been striking to encounter so many Brazil and Argentina fans from the Middle East and Asia at the World Cup, Wall added. “There is something that we see in each other.”

It has also prompted some to wonder if Latin American countries could better capitalize on their own soccer power. “The value of Argentine soft power” remains “much more potential than real,” former Argentine foreign ministry official Tomás Kroyer told Forbes Argentina this week. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party governments of 2003 to 2016 designed several policies to use the appeal of Brazilian soccer as a diplomatic tool, even taking the national team to play in Haiti to herald the arrival of Brazilian peacekeepers in 2004, Veiga de Almeida University international relations professor Tanguy Baghdadi told Foreign Policy in an interview.

so much has changed in both countries and the world, but the enmity between the two governments remains frozen in time, and Americans’ understanding of Iran and its people has progressed very little.

Leaks reveal insiders’ growing uneasiness, which points to the elephant-in-the-room question: Will MBS’ grandiose venture bankrupt the kingdom?

Saudi private investors will also be encouraged to pitch in during a potential public listing of Neom in 2024. That raises questions about how consensual this private investment will be. Indeed, Saudi Arabia reportedly “bullied” several of the kingdom’s wealthiest families to become cornerstone investors out of “patriotic duty” in the IPO of Saudi energy firm Aramco in 2019.

a large chunk of Saudi money carefully set aside for decades to fund the transition to a post-oil era will pay for Neom's astronomical price tag. A bet on an unproven vision

60 skyscrapers that were built in Riyadh’s financial center are still standing largely empty.

Neom’s initial burst of economic activity, if unsustainable at a similar pace, would simply be "stealing" future economic benefits to create an illusion of growth right now

perhaps the motive is not sustainable growth at all, but creating what Pettis calls a "pyramid effect." This would be an attempt to copy monarchs of ancient Egypt who redistributed wealth to the population through jobs – paid laborers built Egyptian pyramids, not slaves. Although Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is already redistributed to ordinary Saudis through public-sector jobs and subsidies, a large tranche is retained and stored in its sovereign wealth funds and U.S. Treasuries. In theory, flushing Saudi citizens with cash would stimulate the local non-oil economy. But in practice, the pyramid effect is likely to first and foremost cause economic leakages, as the kingdom imports most of what it consumes locally, including labor, despite the “Saudification” of the labor market being one of Vision 2030’s key priorities. Migrant workers account for about 77 percent of private sector jobs. At Neom, highly paid Western consultants are toiling to match MBS’ demands, and Asian low-income workers are building it, remitting Saudi money home.

Riyadh sweetened the project’s launch party with a flurry of social reforms, such as lifting the ban on women driving. (Saudi Arabia was the last country in the world to lift this kind of ban, and it didn’t do so as a principled stand on behalf of women’s rights.) The idea was not only creating a buzz among investors and the global public, but whipping up aspirational momentum among Saudis.

“Infrastructure spending is like doing lines of cocaine; you have to do bigger and bigger and bigger lines just to feel high,”

MBS, high on his visionary self-branding and his concentration of power, may have to pay the costs of bankruptcy – whether by admitting full responsibility or via a renewed deployment of decidedly imperious and despotic tactics to crush dissent. The latter path is, of course, what the late Shah of Iran chose, with notorious results.

“Whether it’s true or not, people have this feeling that it’s safer to protest on campus,” said Moeen, a Sharif University alum who has observed the protests and spoke on condition that only his first name be used. “It’s easier than orchestrating something at a random square in Tehran. There are student syndicates. There’s leadership.”

After the U.S.-backed 1953 coup, University of Tehran students revolted over then-Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to the capital. The shah’s security forces stormed the campus and shot three students dead.

Sharif University, among other campuses, was wracked by protests two decades later, when Marxist and Islamist student groups lit the fuse of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which ushered in the clerical establishment that still rules Iran.

Pro-reformist students protested at the University of Tehran in 1999, prompting a fearsome raid by security forces who fatally shot a student and flung others out of windows.

Sharif University — a competitive, high-tech hub considered less liberal and activist than others in the capital

Deepening global isolation and frustration over lagging political reforms convinced many students that nothing would come of engaging with the system.

in the fall of 2019, a fuel price hike set off the deadliest nationwide unrest since the Islamic Revolution. The Sharif Islamic Association, a misnomer for the students’ largely secular representative body, jumped into action, organizing demonstrations on campus

In 2020, the student group boycotted classes and held a protest vigil after the Iranian military’s downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane killed 176 people, including over a dozen Sharif University graduates

the biggest reason is freedom. We just want basic things that you have all over the world

Sharif University authorities denied the student association a protest permit, members said. Crowds demonstrated anyway, pumping their fists and chanting “Death to the dictator!” — a slogan that protesters have used around the country.

As hundreds of students chanted against Khamenei, plainclothes security forces raided campus. Professors formed a human shield so students could flee. But security forces beat the professors, ripped through their interlocked hands and chased protesters into the parking garage.

“For the sake of its own future, the government should care about these students. They’re the nerds. But it was clear it only cared about oppressing them.”

On Sunday, the university announced it would temporarily ban over two dozen students who contributed to the “unstable environment.”

Most recently this week, female students streamed into the male-only section of the dining hall in protest over campus gender segregation as male students cheered them on. The university closed the cafeteria on Tuesday, hoping to end the demonstrations.

Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.

Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”

Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.

US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.

When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.

“Audiences have loved me for many years. It was disappointing to see an international outlet label me as if all my accomplishments mean nothing. I am healthy and happy with the way I look, and to me that is all that matters,”

on 8 October 2019, Shehab responded to a tweet by a verified Saudi account that reports on developments in the kingdom’s infrastructure projects. When the account tweeted about the launch of a new network of buses, she tweeted the word “finally!”.

Recalling her own experience in Syria, Aljizawi described the phenomenon of citizens being unable to trust their own neighbours.“Sometimes people find themselves in trouble. They need a promotion or need to prove their loyalty to the state, so they do something like this. It’s enough to just take a screenshot and report it,”

“new phase of digital authoritarianism”.

“It is very concerning because people who post something cannot predict the risk or who is going to report them, and who is going to go back and search their feed for posts that don’t align with government propaganda,”

On official Saudi websites, Kollona Amn – which also has a Twitter account – is described as an app that allows citizens and expatriates to submit security and criminal reports related to personal life attacks, threats, impersonation, extortion, penetration of social media accounts, defamation, fraud and other criminal offences and security reports.

in the hands of a dictatorship targeting human rights defenders, technology transforms into a terrifying tool which fast tracks repression

Shehab would regularly tweet to support the rights of others but believed it went unnoticed because she did not have many Twitter followers.“She [would] always stand with all human rights in Saudi or outside of Saudi

Shehab, who has been studying in the UK since 2017, was not especially critical of the government and was a supporter of Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and towards services such as health and tourism.

The temptation to draw the comparison has some substance. In 2011, demonstrators explicitly demanded the end of regimes ruling over their respective countries, and the same is happening today.Moreover, both in 2011 and 2018-19, the protesters seem to be emboldened by the ongoing movements in other countries. Stephen McInerney, the executive director for the Project of Middle East Democracy (POMED), explained that “certainly what happens in one Arab country is seen elsewhere, and there are common frustrations shared across the region.”

It’s natural that boiling tensions inside countries and ongoing protests are giving way to the overarching claim that a new Arab Spring is underway. But that simplistic framing misunderstands the nature of political grievances and upheavals in the region. After all, they are similar to the protests in 2011, just as the 2011 protests are similar to those that happened in the decades before, and will be similar to those that happen in the future.

A ‘Spring’ implies in its history and usage, the new flowering of a spontaneous, overwhelming grassroots revolution that permanently changes the sociopolitical landscape of the countries and even the region. It paints a picture of a people awakened to the oppression they face and marching through the streets to demand justice.

But Arabs have been ‘awake’ to the corruption, misuse and abuse regimes have enacted upon them for decades, and have organized against it accordingly.

the same protests and chants that can be heard in Jordan and Sudan were yelled in the beginning of 2018. At both times and in both countries, the government cut bread and fuel subsidies in order to comply with loan conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).Egypt in 2017 also saw thousands take to Twitter and the streets to protest against similarly price hikes in bread following a government removal of subsidies, though the IMF continually insists it did not recommend these governments cut subsidies servicing poor and working class families.

To look at these continual mobilizations and isolate the movements happening now as an “Arab Spring 2.0” ignores the continual, inter-generational struggle for economic and political rights that has pushed continuously at the doors of old regimes. In their place, an alternate history is given whereby Arabs were resting, and were woken up.

“In Algeria, Jordan, and Sudan the regimes managed to dodge the original 2011 wave. The confrontation was avoided but popular discontent was not crushed, and the reasons for it not addressed. So this will continue to come back, until either a showdown happens or things change.”

It is less an ‘Arab Spring 2.0’ than a continuation of 2011’s protests, which were in themselves continuations of protests that occurred in the years before.

Ending practices of corruption and cronyism requires movements that aren’t framed as spontaneous ‘Springs’ of youth but as constituent parts of a broad-based, durable intergenerational call for justice from below.