Gen Z & the Revolution| The flood on the horizon

“What does the January 25 revolution mean to Gen Z?”; I tried to avoid the question posed by Al Manassa in this series because ideologically, I reject the notion that “generations” are themselves the agent that propels the process of historical transformation.

What binds me to those who share my age ends with birthdates. Our theories of change, concerns, material interests, and politics can diverge, yet the taxonomy of generations keeps conscripting us into one homogenized legion—“Gen Z.”

A stiff brush then sweeps protests from Morocco’s streets to Sri Lanka’s universities into the same lazy headline—“Gen Z are wreaking havoc!”—a framing that both glosses over real points of similarity, like a global struggle for liberation across contexts, and dodges the harder work of examining variations in demands, material realities, and political formations.

Flashy fads—Discord, a shared online lexicon, nimbleness with AI tools—become enough to corral dissent under an impossibly large tent. That fixation on “big tents” was the blind spot which, in my view, thwarted the revolution’s aims.

I was only 13 when demonstrators took to squares in all major Egyptian cities. Back then, and in the years that followed, I remember how proudly the protesters boasted that the uprising had brought together all strata of the Egyptian people—leftists, liberals, Islamists, nationalists, apolitical shopkeepers. 

They said it like it was alchemy—and for a moment, it was. With starry-eyed innocence, they clung to their strange bedfellows in times of war. But once the fog of war cleared and the common enemy disappeared under the winter sun of Sharm El-Sheikh, the spears turned inward, and the contradictory interests grew louder and more aggressive, devouring what had briefly felt like dreamy unity.

Smells like teen spirit

So, I asked, what revolution am I being asked to reflect on here? The blood-stained 18 days in Egypt’s struggle against subordination—or the untouchable shrine of its memory, guarded by liturgical language and reverence for its icons? I’m still unsure. The revolution and its memory have collapsed into one carcass in my mind, but we must bifurcate the two if any critique of the past is to be fruitful.

This has not always been easy. 

Because what I’ve found over the past decade is you cannot have a constructive conversation, let alone a critical one, with someone whose hands are tied behind their back—not just by the yoke of the state but also by the ghosts of their own nostalgia. Who gazes at an image from 15 years ago, unable to register that the colors have faded, the corners have frayed? That the picture is, perhaps, no longer even there.

As for me, I graduated school in 2015. My first steps into “adult life” did not land on solid ground. They were immediately sucked into the quicksand of the first Egyptian pound float in 2016. So, I don’t consider myself—or my political consciousness—a direct product of the revolution. I am, instead, entirely molded by the edges of the counterrevolution—the thrashing which followed the uprising's failure.

Yes, failure. That sacred term, “the Revolution,” hoarded by those who “were really there”—I am writing against that closure for the first time, in public.

Stuck in a pearl jam

Between the jailed, the exiled, and the wounded, my own sense of empathy will not allow me to engage in an exhaustive debate with those battling PTSD—nor do I blame them. And yet, we all inhabit a shared political present. A bleak and dangerous one, affecting all generations.

My first taste of protest, came in my early years of university, in April 2016, when we took to the streets against the historically detrimental handover of Tiran and Sanafir islands. The march didn’t last ten minutes before live bullets scattered us across the alleyways of Dokki. Later that day, I told my mother I’d been at the movies.

That experience gave me my first real clarity: state repression is not an irrational, sadistic impulse to “oppress” for oppression’s sake, but a functional obligation—one that allows our government to more effectively serve its role in the imperialist plan for the region, at our expense.

And yet, I lived for years in this hesitant in-between. Critiquing the revolution tentatively. Not because I saw things more clearly than others—but because I lacked the language to describe my own muddled relation to “the revolution” and “the Arab Spring,” more generally. 

Then suddenly, on a brisk Saturday morning where I was, like all the Saturdays before it in 2023, frantically working on my master’s thesis, Palestinian bulldozers ruptured the fence suffocating the Gaza Strip for nearly two decades, reclaiming the stolen lands that lay beyond. 

Even though I was blissfully unaware they had gone cold, blood gushed to my limbs as the siege broke from land, air, and sea. The world created by Al-Aqsa Flood, from that moment onward, has empowered me with a more incisive vocabulary. 

Losing my religion

The January revolution’s “failure” wasn’t preordained, but it was certainly shaped by a limited, if understandable, political imagination. Hindsight is, of course, 20/20, but I would not be writing these words if that same dreamy innocence of 2011 was not still blurring our political imagination.

While we grovel at the foot of the European “garden” and its donor gods, begging for crumbs of “rights” in exchange for deeper debt, and benign lip service to a selective bouquet of human rights abuses, our kin just a few kilometers away dream—no, work—to tear the fortress down.

Yes, January 25 was disruptive: it terrified the ruling elite, and carried the seeds of class conflict—visible in labor strikes across the country. But did those strikes make it into the Revolution’s archive, or did they melt against the chilled surface of an incongruous liberalism, poorly poached from the pamphlets of a failed “global citizenry”?

Here comes the flood

When the latest iteration of Israeli genocide began in October 2023, it shattered the myths of “international law” and “human rights,” making clear that no true freedom can exist without unconditional sovereignty in the Global South. And yet what do some of the loudest voices of opposition still aspire to? Less “erratic” economic policies, more “respectable” summit speeches, an affirming embrace from the “civilized” West.

The restrictive nature of this political imagination became even more glaring in December 2024. When Bashar Al-Assad fled to Moscow, and Syria was served up—just as had been decreed by Washington and Tel Aviv a decade earlier—to a reformed ISIS fighter now in a tailored suit, the picture became irrefutable. 

We were never just contending with oppressive domestic policy. We have always been confronting an imperial machine more vicious than internal repression. An existential threat before which no half-measure reforms can be realized. As the regional reordering churns on, according to the Zionist-Emirati plan, we must aspire to more than scraps, more than “stability,” and the accepting gaze of the world upon us.

I realized that rescuing the future requires a different framework—one not built on uninformed hope. One that doesn’t treat tragedy as the end of politics, but as its beginning. We need a politics rooted in tools—material, and unapologetic in naming what is killing us, and a language that speaks plainly and names the beast in its lair.

The enemy is, thus, not a single man to be overthrown, but a totalizing order, and we must clearly recognize our roles as cogs within it.

The masses are not meant to remain passive spectators of catastrophe. Given structure and form, they can move history. Stripped of both, they become flesh—paralyzed, left only with individual survival.

That is why I refuse to surrender my soul to grief alone, or let politics collapse into tears and fits of rage. Emotions are vital—but without translation into tools, action, and a materially-grounded vision, they suffocate revolutionary potential under their sheer weight.