The extraordinary young people of Egypt have given their uprising a beautiful and unforgettable face.  They are the Facebook Generation, young, educated, principled, and fearless. Their laptops, courage, awareness and bodies are their only weapons. They adhere to no one party. They announce no religious program other than unity and tolerance, marching with the cross and the crescent in hand. Theirs is neither a narrow political nor a religious revolution:  it is a revolution for freedom and human rights. They riveted attention on the battered face of unknown young man from Alexandria who was savagely beaten to death by the security police.  They announced “we are all Khaled Said” and in doing so they responded to Khaled’s call for help.  With that gesture, they restored Khaled’s human dignity and made him a symbol of the battles of his generation. The young people said quite simply that they were ready to die for their freedom. The most extraordinary achievement of the youth movement is breaking through the wall of fear that has kept an odious dictatorship in power for thirty years. They understood that only the departure of Mubarak could effectively mark the fall of that wall.  Against all odds, they held out in Tahrir Square until that momentous announcement came.

 

Beauty can overwhelm all else.  For Egypt’s revolt has a second face, equally important for its success in advancing from cyberspace to Tahrir Square and other squares in Egypt’s major cities.  The millions of ordinary people who responded to the call to freedom came with their own cries for social justice.  Bilal Fadl, known as the author of “the have-nots”, has been telling their stories for years with humor and compassion. Of the crimes of the regime none is more terrible in its impact than the economic enslavement of Egypt’s people.  For those who know the country the most devastating markers are signs of sheer exhaustion on the faces of Egyptians.  As prices for the necessities have skyrocketed and subsidies have shrunken, Egyptians must, literally, work themselves to death in order to survive. The young clerks in the city shops are paid salaries of 500 to 600 LE or about a hundred dollars a month to work twelve and more hours a day.  And they count themselves the lucky ones because they have jobs.  The lower middle classes with university and institute degrees in hand work all morning in government jobs for salaries only slightly higher and then drive cabs until midnight and beyond to pay the necessities of food, private lessons for their children in the collapsed government schools, and the inevitable medical emergencies. The invitation to revolution was indeed issued by the wonderful Facebook generation.  But workers in Mehalla, an industrial center known for its activist labor base, and elsewhere had already undertaken a series of strikes.  Ordinary people had committed spontaneous acts of resistance, blocking highways to signal their local hardships.  The economic grievances of the mass of Egyptians drew them to squares and the sense of hope the young people had miraculously stimulated. Those public squares, above all Tahrir Square, have become sacred ground.

 

Least visible but perhaps most historic of the three faces of events in Egypt is the uprising against the Arab national security state. This oppressive and corrupt state system is embodied by Mubarak’s regime but in fact defines the ugly political reality of political repression and economic deprivation throughout the region.  A fourteen year old Egyptian girl announced in a video circulated al Jazeera that she was not going the way of self-immolation as the Mohamed Bouazizi had done in Tunisia. Rather, she declared her intention to go to Tahrir to demonstrate and called on the men of Egypt to be there to protect her from the government thugs she bore witness to that terrible shared fate.  These repressive structures have nothing to do with inherited Arab or Islamic political traditions.  They are the creations of Western powers, the offspring of imperial and colonial systems.  They have been molded to serve the interests of external powers.  Egypt’s national security state originated from the military and gained its original legitimacy in struggles for national independence. In the early years of the 1950’s and 1960’s dominant Western powers were momentarily forced to accommodate such states. In a bipolar world there was room for maneuver.  There were periods, such as the decade from 1956 – 1966, when Nasserist Egypt did respond to the demands of Egypt’s people for development and national pride, if not for political freedom. The 1967 war ended all those aspirations.  Under Sadat Egypt was drawn into the American orbit with its over-riding interest in stability and security for its most favored regional ally, Israel.  The corruption and hollowing out of all the progressive features of the Arab national security state followed.

 

Analysts are loath to recognize the unities of the Arab world, whether under nationalist or Islamic banners.  Yet, it is a mistake to see in the promising wave of uprisings in the region, from North Africa to Yemen, a series of isolated nationalist revolts.  There are special local circumstances and distinctive nationalisms at work in the Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni and Jordanian cases. But embodied in each is also an Arab revolt that holds great promise for all the peoples of the Arab world who yearn to rid themselves of the national security states that have robbed them of freedom and plundered their national wealth.

 

Egyptians, ordinary Egyptians inspired by their sons and daughters, are the authors of the narrative of  freedom, social justice, and political liberation written in Tahrir and other public squares.  They made the dreams born in cyberspace touch ground in Egypt, providing hope and inspiration for all of Egypt and the Arab world beyond.

 

 

 

Raymond William Baker is the College Professor of International Politics at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His most recent books are Islam Without Fear (Harvard, 2006 and Dar al Sharouq, 2010) and [coedited with Shereem T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael], Cultural Cleansing in Iraq (Pluto, 2010 and Dar al Sharouq, 2010).

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