Half Million Saudi ‘egg people’ take to Internet to Protest Despotic Saudi Regime

Saudi Arabia Faces New Challenge From Its Restive Youth
By: Barbara Slavin – AlMonitor – 7 January

On Twitter, the social media site now used by about 400,000 Saudis, anonymous government tweeters are derided as “egg people” because they don’t post their pictures and are thus depicted only by white ovals.

A new book by a veteran American journalist Caryle Murphy predicts that Saudi Arabia faces an “increasingly bumpy” two decades as its youth — who make up more than 60% of the population — demand jobs, economic justice and greater individual freedom.

This detail is among many fascinating nuggets in a new book — A Kingdom’s Future: Saudi Arabia Through the Eyes of its Twenty somethings — in which veteran journalist Caryle Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of Saudi youth and explains the challenge they pose to the government and society of a pivotal economic and regional power.

Like the eye of a hurricane, Saudi Arabia has been relatively peaceful over the past two years while popular uprisings have swirled around it. Only in the restive Shiite east of the country have there been significant protests, which the government has handily suppressed. Still, the kingdom is facing what Murphy describes as an “increasingly bumpy” two decades as it contends with demands for jobs, homes and other material benefits and greater personal freedom from its youth, who comprise 64% of the country’s 19 million citizens.

Murphy’s account, drawn from interviews conducted while she worked as a reporter in the kingdom from 2008 to 2011 as well as encounters with Saudi students abroad, is less gloomy than another recent book on Saudi Arabia that depicts a country seething with tension and anger. Murphy does not foresee an end to the monarchy or rejection of the country’s conservative Islamic faith and traditions. But she does predict more pressure for acceptance of individuality, growing rejection of official interpretations of Islam and increasing demands for economic justice.

“Young people are worried about unemployment and being able to find an affordable home for their family,” Murphy writes. “They are angered by the perceived favoritism in government services, and the need for a wasta, or contacts, to get many things done […] Above all, they express a deep desire for greater freedom and space in their personal lives, whether it be how they dress, what major they choose at university or classes they take in high school.”

The pressure for change is due in part to modern technology as well as the dispatch of more than 140,000 students abroad. Saudi youth are more connected to each other and to global trends than ever before.

Internet users have grown from about 200,000 12 years ago to an astonishing 14.7 million — more than half the country’s residents. Among young people aged 18 to 24 in 12 Arab countries, Internet use was the highest — 91% — in Saudi Arabia, Murphy writes. Saudi Arabia is also first in the survey in terms of Twitter users.

Thus when Saudis protest, they often turn to social media. A Saudi woman confronted by religious police and ordered to leave a Riyadh shopping mall because she was wearing lipstick and nail polish filmed the encounter and posted it on YouTube on May 23, 2012. It was viewed nearly two million times in only a few weeks, Murphy writes.

Manal Al Sharif led a 2011 campaign against the ban on female driving by filming herself driving and posting the video, which soon went viral. In 2012, Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old blogger and writer, created an uproar by posting an imaginary conversation with the Prophet Muhammad on Twitter in which Kashgari said he would treat the Prophet as a mere human being.
…more