January 2011: Glory that cannot be repeated or replicated

My years in prison became an unexpected opportunity for reflection and revision. I spent more than six and a half years among criminal inmates, removed from the quarrels of political prisoners, until the gates of my “temporary grave” opened, and I was thrust back into the world, forcing me to confront those dilemmas after all.

I tried to outmaneuver the ordeal through a small act of resistance, treating prison as enforced solitude for thinking, reading, and writing. Among the work I produced was an in-depth reappraisal of the cognitive and perceptual errors of the January revolutionaries.

Our generation was marked by a pronounced global orientation. We debated the French and Bolshevik revolutions, studied democratic transitions in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and invoked Gandhi and Mandela when we spoke of nonviolent struggle. Because this outward gaze was never detached from the revolution’s slogans—bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity—we rejected claims that our ideas were conspiracies or imported “color revolutions.” We insisted on our right, as a generation straddling two centuries, to draw from any human experience beyond chauvinistic nationalism. The cost, however, was a neglect of our own modern history.

I returned, therefore, to the Orabi Revolution of 1881, the 1919 revolution, the Free Officers’ movement of July 1952, the Bread Uprising of 1977, and finally the January 25, 2011 revolution, whose effects remain active, colliding and evolving. From this retrospective emerged a set of conclusions about generations, imagination, and the unfinished construction of Egypt’s collective dream.

First: No single generation makes two great events

As far as I know, no generation in Egypt—or elsewhere—has produced two events that decisively altered the course of history, whether revolutions, wars, or mass uprisings. With rare individual exceptions, broad segments of any one generation do not appear as the principal protagonists of two epochal moments. In the Egyptian case, the notable exception is Saad Zaghloul.

Zaghloul was among the younger participants in the Orabi Revolution of 1881, whose leader Ahmed Orabi was himself under forty when it erupted. Zaghloul later became the figurehead of the 1919 revolution. The rest of the Orabi leadership, by contrast, ended in temporary or permanent exile and, in time, in graves abroad or at home.

By the time the next transformative moment arrived, the leading figures of 1919 had met a similar fate. The makers of July 1952 had been infants when Egypt—city and countryside alike—reverberated with chants of “Egypt for the Egyptians” and “Full independence or death,” while blood flowed in Giza and Assiut under British aerial bombardment of rebellious villages.

The great leaders of the Wafd, who had demanded independence, died before the movement hardened into a party torn by internal schisms and external confrontation with the palace and the British occupation. Only Mostafa Al-Nahhas, Zaghloul’s heir, endured. By then, an old man whom the young officers of the 1952 coup—later dignified as a revolution—would indict and disparage until his death in 1965.

July 1952 did indeed produce a transformation at the apex of power and in the system of governance as a whole, reinforced by deep economic and social changes—sufficient to earn the officers’ movement the title of “revolution.” Yet once enthroned, it became a ruling apparatus that concentrated the transfer and circulation of power within the officer corps. Not even the most brazen apologist could plausibly claim that those officers played a decisive role in igniting the January 2011 revolution, whatever one’s assessment of the army’s posture toward it—containment, support, exploitation, hostility, or some combination thereof.

The pattern is clear: no new great event is made by the protagonists of the previous one. There may be continuities of ideas, and later generations may draw moral energy from earlier sacrifices, but the principal makers of any later event are almost always children, unborn, or not yet conceived when the earlier one erupts.

Second: Every modern generation had a major event—except one

By “modern” generations, I mean those shaped by a modern form of revolutionary action: the struggle for constitutional rights. On that basis, my survey does not extend earlier than the cohort of Ahmed Orabi, Mahmoud Sami Al-Barudi, Yaqub Sannu, Abdullah Al-Nadim, and Imam Muhammad Abduh, the student of Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani.

As historian Latifa Salem has argued, the Orabi Revolution was the first constitutional revolution in the Middle East. From that point onward, one can trace an unbroken tradition of Egyptian political struggle to recalibrate the relationship between ruled and ruler—seeking to extract rights and impose accountability—whether the ruler was Muslim, as a representative of Egypt’s subordination to the Ottoman caliphate, a colonial authority, or a local national regime.

Let critics describe Egyptians however they wish; I do not believe that, in the modern era, this people has ever been content with despotism. They may submit for a time—short or long. They may lapse into despair or lethargy, or be seized by fear and cowardice. Yet successive generations since Orabi have repeatedly registered a moral and political rejection of injustice and coercion.

No generation realized its dream in full. Even the 1919 revolution, which lasted three years and culminated in the Feb. 28 declaration, the 1923 constitution, and the formation of the region’s first parliamentary government, achieved its aspirations only partially, leaving bitterness and regret behind. What remains striking—and worthy of respect—is that each modern generation insisted on its right to dream, to articulate that dream, to proclaim it publicly, and to sacrifice for it.

All did so—except one.

Third: The ceiling for one generation becomes the floor for the next

If we set aside the dense particulars of each revolutionary episode and focus instead on the demands of each generation, a pattern emerges. Each generation reaches for what it can imagine, then stops at a ceiling it does not cross. The next generation arrives, stands on that ceiling as if it were a floor, and from there dares to imagine a higher horizon. The history of modern Egyptian struggle thus appears less like a series of isolated eruptions than like steps on an upward staircase. Each generation reaches for what it can imagine, then stops at a ceiling it does not cross. 

Ahmed Orabi, who denied the charge that he sought Egypt’s independence from the Ottoman caliphate, could not plausibly have imagined the sweeping 1919 slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians,” popularized by figures such as Shaykh Younis Al-Qadi and Sayyid Darwish. That slogan emerged in response to British refusals to grant independence, refusals justified by the claim that ending the protectorate would merely return Egypt to Ottoman rule. Likewise, however fierce the leaders of 1919 were in their demands for independence and constitutional governance, they did not imagine calling for an independent national army. For the next generation—born amid the early stirrings of that revolution—that comparatively “low” ceiling became the ground from which to take the next step upward, extending the continuous construction of Egypt’s collective dream.

At some point, however, the chain of imagination broke. Our generation arrived to find no ceiling to stand on—no inherited floor from which to rise. We grew up in an arid wasteland of imagination. We did not see great dreamers, nor did we hear a voice speaking of the future except through fear or through the hallucinations of political propaganda.

We watched our parents’ generation consumed by migration in pursuit of dirhams, riyals, and dinars, returning to settle in Smouha and Nasr City, or to erect concrete houses on land that had once been fertile farmland. We witnessed the violence done to the built environment—the assault on cities, the mutilation of public space—and the closing of horizons, literal and figurative. Even the names of flowers and plants that had filled earlier generations’ songs vanished from everyday speech, disappearing first from the landscape and later from the poets’ lexicon.

The generation before ours suffered from a sterile imagination, but the reasons are open to disagreement. In my view—one that remains open to error—two forces were decisive: fear of dreaming itself, and a formative encounter with humiliation. Fear of the present is common; fear of the future can be prudent; fear of state violence is rational. None of these necessarily blocks dreaming. The fear that does is fear of dreams themselves.

And yet our generation crossed that desert and carved, within the cement wilderness, a shaded oasis. When the very generation that had deprived us of dreams contested us for what we had wrested from a bleak, suffocating reality, we refused to inherit their misery. We listened and disobeyed. We revolted and rebelled.

What we forged from such rupture was an act of imagination, a dream that itself was glory. How fortunate, then, will the coming generation be—secure in its right to dream— if it receives from us support and solidarity rather than war and reproach.

Fourth: Humiliated and afraid, they could not dream; we did.

We may agree the generation before ours suffered a sterile imagination, though not on why. Disagreement is healthy. I believe—and could be wrong—that our parents lacked the force to dream for two reasons: fear of dreaming itself and a formative encounter with humiliation.

That generation came of age when dreams collapsed. It lived under the shadow of the 1967 Naksa, overturned by defeat. It saw earlier generations lift their heads, awaiting the promise to cast the occupier into the sea, only to have those heads ground into the mud by a foundling state born of armed gangs that seized Arab land.

Their childhood absorbed defeat like a sponge, and when pressed, yielded only resignation. They watched their parents—our grandparents—dream, then mourn the dream’s collapse, inheriting fear of dreaming lest it fail again.

If the revolutionaries of January 2011 are children of the 1980s, their parents are children of the 1950s—raised on a historical insult no one dared confront amid propaganda and intimidation. On Oct. 26, 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser, fresh from surviving an assassination attempt, stood before a people with five millennia of civilization and shouted: “I am the one who taught you pride…I am the one who taught you dignity!”

Strikingly, a people among whom at least a third had lived and fought in the 1919 revolution swallowed the insult in silence. No intellectual reminded the “eternal leader,” born in 1918, that he was still an infant when a venerable people had already risen to defend its dignity.

The generation before January bore a double fracture: dread of dreaming and the humiliation imposed by a regime that freed Egypt from foreign rule only to bind its people in local despotism, ruled by armed factions from within. Under such weight, how could they dream?

By contrast, our generation was not cursed or silenced. We inherited no phobia of imagination. That is why we could dream—and, almost unknowingly, mend a rupture in the chain of generational aspirations.

More importantly, we unbolted doors for the next generation—born in the decade of revolution—so they might storm every barricade. They will stand above the ceiling of our imagination and use it as the floor for their own.

If past generations built one stage, ours built two: we filled the void left by our predecessors, suspended without a platform, then raised our own legend with a solid ceiling for those who follow.

How miserable, then, are those who cannot grasp the value of what we achieved. How petty are those who diminish it.

Fifth: Between two great events lie intermediate events

In between the great events are others of lesser magnitude. The defeat of Orabi’s revolution gave way to smaller struggles and betrayals, yet the Denshawai incident of 1906 reignited resistance, paving the path to Egypt’s 1919 revolution.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, smaller events paved the way for the rupture of July 1952. The Naksa of 1967 reignited wounded dignity, sparking 1968 protests. The Bread Uprising of 1977 nurtured fragile dreams without becoming a revolution, while the 1980s and 1990s brought quiet but deep change. The new century, shaped by the second Palestinian intifada and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, turned our generation inward to dream—culminating in the uprising of January 25.

The January revolutionaries—whose uprising has ended as both event and wave—now face a choice. They may surrender, compounding defeat as Orabi and Al-Barudi did; they may despair, retreating into paralysis as Zaghloul once did; or they may withdraw from the streets yet continue the struggle in consciousness—defending our narrative so the torch may be passed, with honesty and courage, to those who will carry the dream forward in a future event beyond the January generation.

Some who hold the burning coal may yet become symbols in the next great event—unlikely before the 2040s. Until then, Egypt will face intermediate episodes shaped by wider regional and global forces.

We must accept that our task has changed. The heroism of future events belongs to those who will make them. We may advise, share experience, perhaps more—but we will not be among them. Such is the law of life.

Sixth: As creation was wrought in six days, so in six generations Egypt shall build its dream

The pioneering generation dreamed of equality between Egyptians, Turkish, and Circassian officers, of access to the palaces of rulers, and of a representative parliamentary body whose consultation would be serious, even if not binding.

The second generation extended that dream to “Egypt for the Egyptians”: independence from the Ottoman Empire and foreign occupation, equal rights and dignity for native Egyptians, and a government formed by elected representatives sharing authority with the monarchy.

The third generation pushed further, imagining not only independence and Egyptianized authority, but a strong national army and a more socially and economically just society with narrower class gaps. Then came the rupture.

Here the metaphor of construction becomes unavoidable. Like the reinforced-concrete frames parents erect for their children—columns poured, walls and roofs deferred—we, the January 2011 revolutionaries, arrived as the fifth generation to find pillars without shelter. We poured the floor that should have been our inheritance, erected columns no one had built for us, and raised our own ceiling, leaving steel rebars exposed for those who would follow.

Those broken by fear and humiliation may have been provoked by the sight of their own unfinished story: a bare storey without walls. Perhaps they resented us for completing what they had abandoned, for proceeding without them, and for preparing a ceiling and columns for the next generation. This may explain the ferocity of the war waged against us and against our dreams.

Yet despite the hostility of the dinosaurs, we resumed construction. We built our dream of dignity, freedom, and social justice within the framework of an independent nation-state.

The sixth generation will dream beyond the “national liberation state,” seeking to shed its authoritarian residues and to establish Egypt’s first civil republic, after the military-republic model has exhausted its legitimacy. That dream will be clearer and more ambitious—but it will not be realized soon.

Let time do what it does. Let us do what we must: study our experience, tell our story, and heal our wounds. Let our love for our children outweigh our hatred for our opponents, and let our gaze remain fixed on a future more urgent than endlessly recycling grief.

In our children’s laughter there is solace for pain and the hiss of snakes. In our inner life there is hope; in hope, confidence; in confidence, steadfastness; and in steadfastness, clarity—out of which comes a message.

Let the deaf hear and the mute speak: we lost the battle with honor, despite our mistakes, but the war has not ended and will not end, even if our generation’s wave of action has receded, never to return.

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(*) A version of this article was first published in Arabic on January 25, 2023.