EGYPT: The Egyptian Revolution: First Impressions from the Field

By Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Mohammed A. Bamyeh teaches sociology at The University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity and the forthcoming Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East: Liberalism, Modernity and Political Discourse. Reprinted with the kind permission of Mark Selden at JapanFocus. 

 
Al-Qahira, The City Victorious, February 6, 2011
Never has a revolution that seemed so lacking in prospects gathered momentum so quickly and so unexpectedly.  The Egyptian Revolution, starting on January 25, lacked leadership and possessed little organization; its defining events, on Friday, January 28, occurred on a day when all communication technologies, including all Internet and phones, were barred; it took place in a large country known for sedate political life, a very long legacy of authoritarian continuity, and an enviable repressive apparatus consisting of more than 2 million members.  But on that day, the regime of Hosni Mubarak, entrenched for thirty years and seemingly eternal, the only regime that the vast majority of the protesters had ever known, evaporated in one day.

Though the regime continues to struggle, practically little government exists.  All ministries and government offices have been closed, and almost all police headquarters were burned down on January 28.  Except for the army, all security personnel disappeared, and a week after the uprising, only a few police officers ventured out.  Popular committees have since taken over security in the neighborhoods.  I saw patriotism expressed everywhere as collective pride in the realization that people who did not know each other could act together, intentionally and with a purpose.  During the ensuing week and a half, millions converged on the streets almost everywhere in Egypt, and one could empirically see how noble ethics—community and solidarity, care for others, respect for the dignity of all, feeling of personal responsibility for everyone—emerge precisely out of the disappearance of government.

Undoubtedly this revolution, which is continuing to unfold, will be the formative event in the lives of the millions of youth who spearheaded it in Egypt, and perhaps also the many more millions of youth who followed it throughout the Arab world.  It is clear that it is providing a new generation with a grand spectacle of the type that had shaped the political consciousness of every generation before them in modern Arab history.  All those common formative experiences of past generations were also grand national moments:  whether catastrophic defeats or triumphs against colonial powers or allies.

This revolution, too, will leave traces deep in the social fabric and psyche for a long time, but in ways that go beyond the youth.  While the youth were the driving force in the earlier days, the revolution quickly became national in every sense; over the days I saw an increasing demographic mix in demonstrations, where people from all age groups, social classes, men and women, Muslims and Christians, urban people and peasants—virtually all sectors of society, acting in large numbers and with a determination rarely seen before.

Everyone I talked to echoed similar transformative themes:  they highlighted a sense of wonder at how they discovered their neighbor again, how they never knew that they lived in “society” or even the meaning of the word, until this event, and how everyone who yesterday had appeared so distant is now so close.

I saw peasant women giving protestors onions to help them recover from tear gas attacks; young men dissuading others from acts of vandalism; the National Museum being protected by protestors’ human shield from looting and fire; protestors protecting captured baltagiyya (mercenaries) who had been attacking them from being harmed by other protestors; and countless other incidents of generous civility amidst the prevailing destruction and chaos.

I also saw how demonstrations alternated between battle scenes and debating circles, and how they provided a renewable spectacle in which everyone could see the diverse segments in social life converging on the common idea of bringing down the regime. 

While world media highlighted uncontrolled chaos, regional implications, and the specter of Islamism inpower, the ant’s perspective revealed the relative irrelevance of all of the above considerations.  As the Revolution took longer and longer to accomplish the mission of bringing down the regime, protestors themselves began to spend more time highlighting other accomplishments, such as how new ethics were emerging precisely amidst chaos.  Those evidenced themselves in a broadly shared sense of personal responsibility for civilization—voluntary street cleaning, standing in line, the complete disappearance of harassment of women in public, returning stolen and found objects, and countless other ethical decisions that had usually been ignored or left for others to worry about.

There are a number of basic features that are associated with this magnificent event that are key, I think, to understanding not just the Egyptian Revolution but also the emerging Arab uprisings of 2011.  Those features include the power of marginal forces; spontaneity as an art of moving; civic character as a conscious ethical contrast to the state’s barbarism; the priority assigned to political over all other kinds of demands, including economics; and lastly autocratic deafness, meaning the ill-preparedness of ruling elites to hear the early reverberations as anything but undifferentiated public noise that could be easily made inaudible again with the usual means.

First, marginality means that the revolution began at the margins.  In Tunisia it started that way, in marginal areas, from where it migrated to the capital.  And from Tunisia, itself relatively marginal in the larger context of the Arab world, it travelled to Egypt.  Obviously the situation in each Arab country is different in so far as economic indicators and degree of liberalization are concerned, but I was struck by how conscious the Egyptian youth were of the Tunisian example preceding them by just two weeks.  Several mentioned to me their pride in seeming to accomplish in just a few days what Tunisians needed a month to accomplish.


Marginality appears to have been an important factor within Egypt as well.  While much of the media focus was on Tahrir Square in central Cairo, to which I went every day, the large presence there was itself a manifestation of a possibility that suddenly became evident on January 25, when large demonstrations broke out in twelve of Egypt’s provinces.  The revolution would never have been perceived as possible had it been confined to Cairo, and in fact its most intense moment in its earlier days, when it really began to look as if a revolution was happening, were in more marginal sites like Suez.  The collective perception that a revolution was happening at the margins, where it was least expected, gave everyone the confidence necessary to realize that it could happen everywhere.

Second, in every sense the revolution maintained throughout a character of spontaneity, in the sense that it had no permanent organization.  Rather, organizational needs—for example governing how to communicate, what to do the next day, what to call that day, how to evacuate the injured, how to repulse baltagiyya assaults, and even how to formulate demands—emerged in the field directly and continued to develop in response to new situations.  Further, the revolution lacked recognized leadership from beginning to end, a fact that seemed to matter greatly to observers but not to participants.  

I saw several debates in which participants strongly resisted being represented by any existing group or leader, just as they resisted demands that they produce “representatives” that someone, such as al-Azhar or the government, could talk to.  

When the government asked that someone be designated as a spokesperson for this revolt, many participants flippantly designated one of the disappeared, in the hope that being so designated might hasten his reappearance.  A common statement I heard was that it was “the people” who decide.  It appeared that the idea of peoplehood was now assumed to be either too grand to be representable by any concrete authority or leadership, or that such representation would dilute the profound, almost spiritual, implication of the notion of “the people” as a whole being on the move.

Spontaneity was a key element also because it made the Revolution hard to predict or control; and because it provided for an unusual level of dynamism and lightness—so long as many millions remained completely committed to a collective priority of bringing down the regime, represented by its president.  But it also appeared that spontaneity played a therapeutic and not simply organizational or ideological role.  More than one participant mentioned to me how the revolution was psychologically liberating, because all the repression that they had internalized as self-criticism and perception of inborn weakness, was in the revolutionary climate turned outwards as positive energy and a discovery of self-worth, real rather than superficial connectedness to others, and limitless power to change the frozen reality.  I heard the term “awakening” being used endlessly to describe the movement as a whole as a sort of spontaneous emergence out of a condition of deep slumber, which no party program had been able to shake off before.

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