Gen Z & the Revolution| Raised by the elephant in the room

I have no memory of January 25. I was only ten months old at the time. What I do have are photographs of myself as a baby in Tahrir Square during the revolution, alongside videos, documentaries, and the stories my parents and others who lived through it have told me.

Growing up, my parents avoided discussing politics at home in front of me, despite being deeply involved themselves. I later understood how difficult it must have been to explain to a three- or five-year-old why family friends had been shot, why others were missing eyes at the hands of “bad cops,” and why friends' parents’ friends—brave people falsely imprisoned—were not released simply because they happened to stand in front of a “bad judge.” All the while, they were trying to make me feel safe, to raise me loving Egypt and believing that a functioning system existed. And because that world did not exist, they chose silence.

I remember that for years—before our household began boycotting in 2023—we marked January 25 by eating KFC, accompanied by a surface-level explanation of what the day commemorated.

Except for one year. My mother was feeling particularly emotional and put on the documentary “Reporting... A Revolution” which includes raw footage filmed by people we know—some of whom appear in it. She watched it and let me watch too. It was a completely new world. I was used to the familiar story of police brutality against civilians. What I saw instead was working-class Egyptians wielding power, locked in what felt like an epic battle.

As I grew older, I learned about 2011 more broadly through the internet: following Egyptian political debates on Twitter, watching historical material on YouTube, reading fragments here and there. This shaped my understanding of Egyptian politics, but in a detached way. I was politically aware, yet locally disconnected.

About two years ago, I discussed January 25 with my mother again. I accused her of being defeatist when she said, “Our generation already had a revolution and we got screwed. And now the new generation wants another.”

The sheer force behind January

At school, I developed an interest in modern world history. My private school education allowed me to become intellectually politicized, even while remaining sheltered from the lived realities of this country. The British curriculum never covered Egypt. Meanwhile, the state history curriculum was so transparently propagandistic that even my pre-teen self could recognize it as such.

Because I never truly “witnessed” 25 January, the image of the average Egyptian expressing themselves so radically does not fully register for me. All I have ever known is the aftermath.

Based on those fragmented stories and perspectives, my reflections are fairly simple. I see the 2011 revolution as a bold, impressive, and historically significant attempt. A loud, spontaneous uprising born of years of political suffocation under a decadent regime and worsening material conditions.

But therein lay the problem. Spontaneity allowed the movement to include everyone, yet it left it unprincipled and disorganized—united around a single demand, but powerless beyond it.

When people recount their experiences, one question is almost always missing: what happened after? Those who were in Tahrir when Mubarak’s resignation was announced—what did they do once the celebrations ended? More often than not, the answer is that they went home. The hard part was believed to be over. The battle, it seemed, had been won.

This was not cowardice. It was the absence of revolutionary infrastructure. There were no unified demands for what would follow Mubarak’s fall; the only shared objective was that the regime itself had to go.

This is not to say the revolution failed to produce leaders. It produced many—each advancing different, and often conflicting, ideas. The vacuum created by the uprising was filled rapidly by political elites and the military. These forces could never have confronted the people at the height of mass mobilization, but they out-organised them once that moment passed. This, to me, is the fundamental failure of 2011.

One insight that emerges from these retellings—one that makes me slightly less politically depressed—is that conservative, even socially reactionary Egyptians were willing to engage in mass confrontation with power. Political radicalism, it turns out, is not synonymous with social progressivism.

Looking forward, I believe the sheer force behind January 25 is bound to return unless meaningful material change occurs in this country. Regimes like this one, and those before it, inevitably generate opposition and do not endure indefinitely. This inevitability is both a danger and a resource. When revolutionary energy re-emerges, it must be accompanied by revolutionary direction.

That direction cannot arise spontaneously in a moment of crisis. It has to be cultivated long beforehand. A revolutionary culture is not defined only by slogans or confrontations with the state, but by the slow, difficult work of making education, literacy, and intellectual engagement working-class traits rather than elite ones.

This means building spaces where political discussion is normal; where reading and debate are not luxuries; where people are given the language to understand their conditions rather than simply endure them. Without this cultural groundwork, moments of uprising risk collapsing back into silence once repression returns.

Just as importantly, political expression cannot precede dignity. Those living in desperation are rarely afforded the time, security, or confidence needed to articulate political demands. Creating social spaces is not a distraction from revolutionary politics—it is a precondition for it. Dignity allows people to see themselves not as victims of circumstance, but as political actors capable of shaping the future.

The task facing revolutionaries—to ensure that the next movement opposes domination rather than merely rearranges hierarchy—is monumental. Egypt, mother of the world, can be thought of as a kind of Petri dish, except what we are cultivating is human culture rather than bacteria. The question is not only how to remove a regime, but how to emancipate a people.

What must be built is a political organization capable of spreading ideas before the streets fill, and of teaching people what to do after victory.

My parents were revolutionaries. I hope that when the next moment comes, we are better prepared to see it through.