About the revolution
By Tareq Heggy
January 25, 2011: IN defiance of State Security arsenals and an interior ministry swollen from one hundred thousand men in 1981 to over a million at the beginning of 2011, despite extensive wiretapping and eavesdropping on all forms of electronic and tele- communications and tight state control over much of the media, the January 25 revolution was a well-organised movement from the start. Armed with a steely determination, it succeeded in mustering a mass following that was remarkably united across class, age and sectarian lines.
These features of the revolution deserve to be studied in depth. They also deserve to be highly praised. When the police state shut off access to Facebook and the Internet, then text messages on cell phones and finally cell phones themselves, its attempts to abort the revolution backfired as popular indignation sparked even wider protests. A respectable state, one that respects its people, would never resort to such shameful acts, and those who ordered the social media blackout must be brought to justice.
Despite the regime’s best efforts, however, the revolution flowed on as relentlessly as though following a detailed musical score. In the final analysis, science defeated a primitive power structure out of touch with the realities of the age. The leaders of the Kifaya movement told me of their frustration over the years because of their inability to mobilise even one thousand people for a demonstration.
Then out of the blue, as it were, the January 25 generation miraculously man- aged to organise a 1000-strong demonstration that swelled in just four days to a one- million strong revolution in one square. The reason is simply that these youngsters man- aged to break the fear barrier and that they believed in themselves and in their message. At the same time, they knew that though their enemy appeared strong it was in fact extremely weak.
A revolution for freedom, not bread:
While no-one disputes the importance of ensuring decent living standards for all citizens, ‘dignity’ and ‘freedom’, not ‘bread’ and ‘jobs’ were the catchwords and triggers of the revolution. In fact, there is a dialectical relationship between dignity and freedom on the one hand and bread and jobs on the other that the revolution’s youth under- stood full well.
The failure to provide all Egyptian citizens with decent living standards is the direct result of a political system that denied freedom to its people and stripped them of their dignity.
People who enjoy freedom with dignity participate in political life; they can change their rulers and the rules by which they are governed and eventually reach a stage in which all citizens enjoy equal rights to decent living standards with all that the term implies: housing, food, the right to marry and to found a family, medical treatment, etc.
The demands of the revolution:
The demands of the revolution were pre- dominantly political – freedom, dignity, participation and social justice. They were also limited to the domestic front.
The revolutionaries did not attempt to deceive people with rousing slogans related to matters outside the national borders. Their main concern was to reform the country, not the world. Prioritising goals and placing them in the right sequence is a sign of emotional maturity and mental equilibrium.
Secularism of the revolution:
From the very first moment until the overthrow of the head of the regime, the revolution was purely secular in all its aspects. On the few occasions when some of the protesters attempted to raise religious slogans the majority would shout them down with cries of “secular.....secular”.
Among the many achievements of this great revolution was that it exposed the real weight of the government of president Mubarak, of the opposition parties formed during his years in office and of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The revolution showed the whole world that although there can be no denying the existence and influence of the Brotherhood, the regime deliberately exaggerated its weight to frighten the world into believing Mubarak was the only alternative to a takeover by political Islam.