Q & A With Middle East Entrepreneur Habib Haddad

Haddad discusses the grassroots project that's getting Egyptians' voices out to the world, the role of social media in the uprising, and his hopes for the region's future.

Habib Haddad is a Middle East entrepreneur and youth leader. He is the founder of Arabic search engine Yamli and a co-creator of Alive in Egypt, a website for transcribing voicemail messages from Egypt and translating them from Arabic into English, Spanish, German, and French.

He spoke with journalist Salimah Yvette Ebrahim.

SE: Habib, thanks so much for taking the time to join us given how quickly things are unfolding in Egypt.

HH: No problem.

SE: I know you’ve been at the frontlines of getting voices heard in Egypt – and we’ll get to that in a moment – but I want to get your thoughts on the shifting mood in Egypt, which we’ve seen over the last 48 hours as it has moved from a peaceful protest to what now seems to be, in effect, a gun battle on the streets of Egypt as people fight for the country’s future. What are your thoughts on this shift?

HH: I’ll speak from the perspective of someone who is helping the voices of Egypt get out to the world – and what we’ve seen is a shift in those voices as well.

When people were calling in from Egypt, right before the big demonstration, they were saying “We’re going. We’re excited and passionate and we might not come back, but we don’t care. Long live Egypt.” And then on the day of the clashes, we started getting disturbing and very intense voice messages from people talking about what was happening in the clashes – people running around and calling in to say, “We’re being killed. We’re being destroyed by thugs and thieves on the street.” Since then, things in Egypt have gone crazy … but I really think it has given even more passion and even more adrenaline to the demonstrators on the streets, as more than ever right now the fear has been killed. This is what we are hearing in the voices coming in from Egypt.

SE: That’s interesting, because the fear was that this crackdown by the government would start to kill the momentum on the ground – but you’re seeing otherwise?

HH: Yes. In fact, a woman named Mona Seif gave a very iconic interview on Al Jazeera not too long ago. She spoke about how she was being followed, and how she saw people on the bridge being shot and killed in front of her, and how this is the point of no return. If we do go back, she said, she fears for her life. It’s interesting because we have a recording of her speaking on an audio tweet from the day before, and at that point she was much more calm and looking towards the future. I think at the point of the atrocities, there was no going back. So the fear kind of just died, and there is only one way forward now for demonstrators on the street.

SE: As the founder of [Arabic search engine] Yamli and other ventures, you’ve been an online leader in the Middle East, and in recent days you’ve co-founded Alive in Egypt, an online portal designed to help people in Egypt get their voices out to the world. Can you tell us about that project and what its goals are?

HH: Right, and to be honest I am only one of probably 1,000 other co-founders! It’s really a grassroots effort. As soon as Google announced that it was launching a new service that allows people to leave voice tweets online just by calling in, we noticed that the majority of those tweets were coming in from Egypt, and for obvious reasons because this service allows people to leave their tweets without need of the internet. But all of those messages were in Arabic, so the goal of getting those messages to the world was not very effective. Seeing this, I immediately tweeted and said, “Who can help me translate them?” and hundreds of tweets came right back. And then there was a small group that offered technical help. They came in and set up the site, and we set up a Google doc that we shared with the translators, and the input started coming in by the hundreds. We had people self-organize, pulling links to the audio so individuals could first transcribe those audio clips into Arabic and then translate them into English, Spanish, German, and French. Since then it has been non-stop. People have been working back-to-back shifts, sleeping for only a few hours at a time. And because we’re international we’ve been able to work around the clock.