Naguib Samih, a freshman from Egypt, hopes his teachers will understand why he was absent so much during winter quarter. "The number of lectures I've missed. . . ." He lets the sentence drift off with a rueful expression that fills in the rest.
For weeks after a popular uprising began in his country—an uprising that eventually sent President Hosni Mubarak packing after 30 years of rule—Samih was awake in the wee hours getting information about events back home. "I usually would go online about 1 a.m. California time when the Egyptian newspapers are published, and I'd Skype with friends and family just to learn what was happening that day," he says. Despite not traveling during that time, "I'm jet-lagged."
It was the same for other Stanford students from the Middle East and North Africa. Thousands of miles from family and friends, they watched with a combination of pride and alarm as antigovernment protests hurled their home countries into the world's spotlight.
Omar Ezzine, a freshman from Tunisia who grew up in the United States, says events in his country consumed his time and his thoughts. "It literally took over my life for a week or two. I didn't want to focus on IHUM and philosophy. All I wanted to do was go home and check online. It's taken a big academic toll, regrettably."
Even as events were unfolding, these students struggled to get a grip on what was happening. Large-scale protests in the streets of Cairo, with the military's blessing, "would have seemed incomprehensible" even weeks earlier, says senior Mai El-Sadany, an Egyptian-American who has family in Egypt.
"I was thinking, this is the Middle East, this is never going to happen," says Samih. "In the past we had small pockets of unrest but always over very quickly. It was an unbelievable moment in the history of the Arab world."
In the early days of the Tunisian unrest, "I was following it closely but loosely," recalls Ezzine. "I remember Skyping with my grandmother, 'Do you know what's going on?' and she said, 'Yes, but we don't want to talk it about it.' The initial reaction was to watch from the sidelines, size up the situation. When the protests reached the capital of Tunis, that's when everyone got involved.
"There was excitement but also fear and concern for my family. The apartment next to my aunt's was completely decimated because snipers from [President Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali's militia were firing into it the whole night. My whole family was locked into their home, terrified."
Facebook received lots of attention in media reports as a key tool in attracting and consolidating protestors, but the students say the role of social media differed dramatically country by country. In Egypt, Samih says, its impact was overstated. "Facebook has only about 5 to 7 percent penetration in Egypt, and less than 25 percent [of the populace] have ever used the Internet. More traditional institutions—the mosque or the town center—are where people met up and shared information."
In Tunisia, however, Facebook was a principal enabler of the revolution. "Tunisia is a country with 10 million citizens, 2 million of whom are on Facebook," Ezzine notes. "Who are the people who go on Facebook? They were the very people who were leading the revolution. It's definitely what made me feel implicated despite being geographically detached. I felt connected to it."
Khaled Alshawi, a sophomore from Bahrain, agrees. "This wouldn't have happened without the social networks. You have [images of] people fighting on Twitter and Facebook, showing police attacking its own citizens. Sixty percent of the population in the Arab world is under the age of 30. The young population is more likely to use these new platforms."
Will the protests that resulted in ousting dictators be replaced by something better? "I'm optimistic," says Ezzine. "The first yardstick would be democratic elections but it wouldn't stop there. It would have to be measured in the patience of the Tunisian people. Would the people who are elected be willing to step down if they aren't re-elected?"
"A sense of democratic culture needs to take hold," says El-Sadany. "I was encouraged by the realization of the Egyptian people that they don't have to be ruled by someone they don't like. I'm a little more hesitant because there are institutional problems; those are harder to change."
Alshawi professed pride in the citizen revolts, but also yearns for normalcy both in Bahrain and in the region. "The perception is that there is instability everywhere in the Arab world and that is holding us back. It's slowing us down."
"Regardless of what happens next, these were momentous events in the history of the Arab world," says El-Sadany. "I do have a sense of pride about that."
