The mirage of January 25: When freedom came last

Was January 25 a revolution or an uprising?

This question concerns the future more than the past.

Was the aim to change the system of governance, to remove President Hosni Mubarak, to block the transfer of power to his son Gamal, or simply to demonstrate that Egypt was no less revolutionary than Tunisia, which completed its revolution 11 days earlier?

The answers are as varied as the figures who participated in shaping the event and influencing its course. Even the administrators of the “We Are All Khaled Said” page—which initiated the call for January 25—later disagreed over the true objective of their “historic” appeal.

This divergence extends beyond defining the goal to identifying who played the decisive role in the event: political elites of various ideological persuasions, or the vast numbers of ordinary Egyptians across the country who participated on the ground and paid a heavy price in blood and eyes.

One fact, however, is undisputed: the call for January 25, 2011 was a call for a “Day of Rage” protest. It was not a call to overthrow Mubarak, to change the system of governance, or to launch a revolution. Yet a convergence of factors propelled the event far beyond what its initiators—or the most prominent figures who led the ensuing 17 days of protest—had anticipated.

These factors included the accumulation of grievances over years and decades, the exhaustion of hope in reform—especially after the farce of the 2010 parliamentary elections—and the catalytic effect of the Tunisian model, which in just four weeks grew from a single act of desperate self-immolation to the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Egypt, too, contained conditions that could have transformed the Day of Rage into a fundamental change in the nature of the system of governance, comparable to—or even exceeding—Tunisia’s. But the decisive difference lay in the nature of the military institutions in the two countries, and in their sharply divergent positions on the question of political change—differences that ultimately determined the divergence of the two paths.

There is little doubt that growing suspicions over Mubarak’s intention to bequeath power to his “civilian” son—echoing Hafez Al-Assad’s transfer of authority to his physician son Bashar—became a decisive and incendiary factor. Throughout 2010, Egyptian newspapers published sustained and often scathing criticism of this prospect.

Remarkably, many of these journalists appeared to enjoy tacit protection—likely from a military establishment opposed to hereditary succession—from the usual security and judicial harassment.

By contrast, years earlier, a late Egyptian academic paid a heavy price for merely alluding to the same scenario. Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim lost his freedom, and suffered severe damage to his physical and psychological health, despite pressure from Washington and the international community to secure his release as a prisoner of conscience and to end the politically motivated prosecutions against him.

The political ceiling of January 25

The lack of consensus regarding the “Day of Rage” naturally resulted in a fragmented political program for the January 25 forces. Comprising a diverse mix of formal parties, youth movements, and prominent activists, these groups were caught off guard. The suddenness of the uprising left them no time to develop a cohesive vision beyond the immediate confrontation and a general desire to push history forward.

Despite sharp ideological divides—uniting Islamists and Marxists—the movement’s demands converged strikingly within the framework of the July 23 system. Rather than overthrowing the regime's essence as some analysts expected, these groups sought only to improve the existing structure without fundamentally changing it.

Key demands focused on expanding political freedoms and security reform, while social and economic goals mirrored the Nasserist era—specifically limiting privatization and alleviating poverty. Notably, this “political ceiling” was reached through consensus rather than the decisive influence of Nasserists or any single ideological group.

While some fringe groups held differing views on systemic change and foreign policy that exceeded the July 23 framework, their influence remained marginal. Instead, the movement’s “program” evolved dynamically, shaped by two forces: the ideological leanings of key figures in the square and—more crucially—the shifting realities on the ground. This included the escalation of clashes with security forces—specifically on Jan. 28 and Feb. 2— and the evolving responses from both the presidency and the international community.

Both political dialogue and field confrontations remained bound by the July 23 framework. The primary adversary was a head of state seeking a "civilian" succession for his son, while the mediator was the military—the founder and guardian of the 1952 system. This system ensured that governance, from the presidency to senior civilian and security roles, remained strictly within the military's lineage—including those who occupied senior positions in the public sector and in civilian ministries and institutions and security agencies..

On the ground, July 23 was also the security bulwark. The bloody confrontations in Cairo and several Egyptian cities on January 25 were with a police force that the July system had restructured and politicized since its earliest days, transforming it from a professional institution into a protector of the system of governance—with advice from the British and American embassies in Cairo and the recruitment of German experts for this purpose, veterans in founding and managing the ferocity of Adolf Hitler’s security apparatuses in the two decades preceding the defeat of Nazi rule. Later, the performance of “national service” in the army by broad segments of uneducated youth in Egypt was channeled into the Central Security Forces—affiliated with the Interior Ministry—tasked with protecting the July 23 system, not the nation.

For the July state, the Central Security Forces are the front-line defense when prisons and torture centers fail to “rehabilitate” political, cultural, and labor actors—by convincing them to adopt the political and ideological discourse of the July system, or by forcing them to cease inciting Egyptians to participate in changing the negative aspects of their political, economic, social, or cultural reality.

Communist militant Saad Zahran recalled how he and his comrades were stunned by hours of daily, brutal torture—sometimes fatal—despite never being asked for confessions. Crucially, this violence occurred while they still considered themselves allies of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But Nasser never sought allies among Egyptians. He demanded subservience—from Mohamed Naguib, head of the July 23 Revolutionary Command Council, whom he later overthrew and imprisoned; from fellow council members, who exited one by one without protest; and from the leadership of his single mass organization, first the National Union, then the Arab Socialist Union. When his lifelong friend and unqualified defense minister, Abdel Hakim Amer, began to seek a different balance in their relationship, Egypt paid the price—and continues to do so—in the catastrophic military defeat of June 5, 1967.

Milestones on the road to January 25

In legal literature worldwide, prisons are framed as rehabilitation centers, designed to prepare inmates for reintegration into society after serving their sentences. Since the Nasser era, however, prisons have functioned as tools of conscience conversion, employing systematic illegal and inhumane methods against political and ideological opponents—pressuring them into withdrawal from politics, social silence, or exile if possible. Saad Zahran is a case in point.

Prisons have since also sought to reshape inmates’ orientations, absorbing them into the regime’s political, media, and cultural machinery—a machinery designed, above all, to mold society into a herd moving in one imposed direction. That direction is not debated but dictated, extending from daily domestic concerns to the classification of Arab and non-Arab states as enemies or allies, according to the system’s leadership and its agencies. One such apparatus is named by George Orwell, in his iconic novel “1984” on totalitarian systems, the “Ministry of Love.” The ultimate goal is for the herd to believe that 2 + 2 = 5.

In that totalitarian system, the novel labels the conversion of a victim’s conscience through torture as “treatment.” The head of the Ministry of Love explains: “We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn out all evil and illusion, bring him to our side—not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of us before we kill him.”

This multi-layered “treatment” lies at the heart of the July system. Gamal Abdel Nasser used the same term when responding to Ihsan Abdel Quddous—the journalist and writer who supported the 1952 coup—after Abdel Quddous expressed astonishment at his 1954 arrest and solitary confinement without investigation or trial. Upon his release, Nasser repeatedly invited him to lunch, never explaining either the arrest or the invitations. “I am trying to treat you psychologically, Ihsan,” Nasser replied—“with full love.”

Abdel Quddous was not an exceptional case. Nasser took it upon himself to carry out “therapeutic guidance” missions with other political figures of weight, alongside the parallel efforts of torture centers, which only relatively subsided during Anwar Sadat’s era, before resuming their “therapeutic” duties with greater intensity after his assassination.

Orwell published his novel in 1949, before the emergence of Nasser’s totalitarian system. Yet eighteen years later, on June 9, 1967, millions of Egyptians—believers that 2 + 2 = 5—took to the streets, weeping and pleading with the head of the regime who had led them to the greatest military and civilizational defeat in their modern history, begging him not to relinquish his grip on the steering wheel, nor on their necks and minds.

One wonders what would Orwell have said had he still been alive then?

Historian Sherif Younis interprets this scene as the outcome of “mobilization”—the cumulative result of a long-term dismantling of political life. Power not only generates consciousness but also molds it, and absolute power is the most effective at doing so.

Younis does not mean that the marches rejecting Nasser’s resignation were a response to directives from the Arab Socialist Union. Rather, they were a spontaneous internal response from miserable masses stripped, over the course of fifteen years, of all tools for independent thought and action—eyes fixed on the void, in constant anticipation of a signal from “Big Brother,” in Orwell’s words. Absolute loyalty means the absence of consciousness.

The events of June 9 raise a pressing question about January 25: to what extent did Egyptian consciousness, at the outset of the uprising, break from the deeply entrenched patterns of “mobilization” that had shaped collective thought for over six decades? The question grows more urgent in light of the long-term destruction of political life and the continued resistance of cultural and political elites to the critical reassessments advanced by leading thinkers and writers of the Nasserist—“Big Brother”—era.

Was rejecting Hosni Mubarak alone enough to show that Egyptians had moved beyond six decades of systematic mental manipulation and domestication? And could time itself—through generations and successive rulers—dissolve the roots of this “mobilization,” when those rulers continued to rely, in varying forms, on unchanged guardian institutions and on political, media, educational, and religious discourses whose core remained intact?

After January 25

January 25 formed under a unique political troika in modern Egyptian history: civil forces long deprived of free political activity waged a peaceful, street-based struggle—paid for in blood and eyes—beneath the political ceiling of July 23. Confronting them with live ammunition were security forces defending the latest incarnation of that system. Mediating between the two was the institution that had founded and long safeguarded the system itself.

On one side stood two actors seasoned in practical politics, armed with legal and constitutional legitimacy and sustained by automatic discipline. On the other was a front of divergent tendencies and clashing ideologies, denied by decades of political desertification any space for genuine dialogue and lacking both a declared coordinating council and even a minimal unified program.

Equally significant is that, within this context and under its political ceiling, the value of freedom occupied a relatively modest place in the shared hierarchy of the January 25 forces. It was accompanied by a hesitant willingness to sacrifice freedom—whether for illusory or short-term gains, for other competing values, for the priorities of particular organizations at the expense of the broader public interest, or for the sake of a fleeting victory for a given ideological conception.

The relative downgrading of freedom in the priorities of the January 25 forces was not confined to the events of the uprising itself. It went on to play a decisive role in shaping the trajectory after Mubarak’s resignation on Feb. 11, extending over the following fifteen years and culminating in the loss of every major political battle that followed.

The Muslim Brotherhood were the last to arrive in the square and the first to break the general consensus, responding to then–Vice President Omar Suleiman’s call for dialogue before Mubarak’s resignation. But this readiness to bargain was not confined to the Brotherhood. Several prominent figures within the January 25 movement remained silent in the face of the politicized judicial-security campaign against human rights organizations—launched in November 2011 and ongoing to this day—while some even welcomed it.

The following year, the elected president, who was supported by January forces, issued a constitutional declaration of a dictatorial nature, then endorsed a massacre overseen by the interior minister. Citing such negative practices by the Muslim Brotherhood, the majority of civil and secular forces chose to ally with the military institution and security agencies to oust the civilian president, then slid into complicity in the largest single-day massacre in history—the Rabaa massacre—and into refusing to treat tens of thousands of imprisoned Islamists as prisoners of conscience.

The new ruling system later politically strangled these same civil and secular forces, reducing them to total marginality despite the existence of dozens of parties on paper. At the same time, new forms of collective “rehabilitative treatment” have proliferated in the tradition of the founding “Big Brother”: staged “National Dialogue” sessions, carnival-like launches of a “National Human Rights Strategy,” and—alongside them—thirteen uninterrupted years of “hard” treatment for tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience, Islamist and secular alike, all under the blessing of revamped “Ministries of Love,” from the National Council for Human Rights to ministerial “human rights” committees.

Reflecting on the positions of some of the most prominent January figures—secular and Islamist alike—regarding today’s major global events unfortunately leads to no different conclusion: freedom still occupies the lowest rung. The freedom of peoples and their aspirations for economic, social, and spiritual progress are viewed only through the lens of the position of certain Western states and/or Israel vis-à-vis those aspirations—even when rulers commit genocidal crimes against their own peoples, such as Bashar Al-Assad and before him Saddam Hussein, or when they preside over fascist regimes far more brutal than the ruler Egyptians overthrew on January 25, such as Iran.

In Orwell’s words, this is “crude nationalism” filling the void left by political and intellectual desertification.

Over the past two years, in a sustained weekly display, the majority of peoples in the Global North—from Sweden in the north to Australia in the south—have demonstrated, in contradiction to the positions of some of their governments, the decisive priority of freedom in their value systems, by expressing solidarity—through the participation of millions, including prominent Jewish figures—with the Palestinian people. Just as they had previously expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people, and before that with the Vietnamese, Iraqi, and Syrian peoples, and later with the Sudanese and Iranian peoples.

Meanwhile, Egyptians have been unable even to express symbolic solidarity with Palestinians, despite the fact that a broad segment of Egyptian activists view the Palestinian cause as the central issue for Egyptians.

This inability may be explained by the fact that freedom has not yet risen to become the foremost central issue in Egyptians’ struggle.

Finally, the January 25 movement was a monumental moment in a longer historical process that may one day wean Egyptians from an authoritarian system that violated them for seven decades—denying them what other societies, North and South, possess: the capacity for independent thought, collective and individual action, and the freedom to organize their lives. In doing so, it also prevented the Egyptian state from reaching a level of economic and human development commensurate with its natural and human resources.

Egyptians today are living through a period of political and economic regression—more authoritarian, less free, poorer, and more culturally and educationally degraded than they were fifteen years ago. Yet the struggle of peoples does not always move in a straight or upward line, however great the sacrifices.

The essential step toward shortening the road and reducing further suffering is to draw the right lessons. This is the minimum owed to the martyrs of January 25—and a symbolic recognition of the value of their sacrifices.