The massive protests that erupted spontaneously in Egypt three weeks ago, and that have mesmerised much of the Arab world, attracting tens, then hundreds, of thousands of ordinary Egyptians into their city streets, most graphically around Tahrir Square, pose a tough call for those of us attempting to locate the right place for these protests in the annals of past revolutionary smackdowns between a popular uprising and the ruler of a powerful state.

But why attempt such a comparison? For just as it is true that no nation, no culture, no political movement is identical to another, it is equally true that no revolutionary upheaval in one country is replicated by another.

Truisms aside, every revolution is unique, with its reach, logic and authority determined by echoes from a people's own historical archetype. But what most revolutionary movements in human history have had in common, what bound them together in an almost mystical fashion, as it were, was that they were started not in ivory towers, but in the streets, by a dispossessed majority whose discontent — running deep and long but often silent — had reached a critical mass. The March on the Bastille in 1789, that triggered the French Revolution, was initiated by the sans culotte (tellingly, those too poor to buy ‘knee breeches'), essentially the urban poor, the shopkeepers, the artisans, and the like, who had had to put up with shortages of bread, with political injustice and with vast disparities between rich and poor.

A similarly disenfranchised crowd of alienated, angry and impoverished people in 1917, in St Petersburg, marched on to the palace of the autocratic tsar, Nicholas II, calling for his abdication, and thus launched the Russian Revolution.

Great examples

Recall Mahatma Gandhi's 23-day Salt March in 1930 through the streets of Indian cities, where "that mendicant" (as Winston Churchill dismissed Gandhi at the time) picked up more, and yet more, satyagrahis as his followers were known.

And consider, closer to home, in our part of the world, those hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Iranians who marched down their streets in 1979, in a spontaneously inspired revolutionary upheaval, to call for the overthrow of their Shah, a ‘king of kings' whose lavishly financed army and security forces were then at the peak of their power.

And lest we forget, the people of Algeria in 1962 waged the Battle of Algiers — a pivotal event in their struggle for independence that was projected so eloquently on the screen in Gilo Ponticovro's 1966 iconic film of the same name — in the streets of their capital, as did Parisians in their own streets during l'evenements de 1968 that toppled General de Gaule's government.

And so it goes with the magic of the streets, where people, denied genuine expression of their mass sentiment, go to define themselves, as if by emotional fiat. And so it has been with Egypt in recent days.

American officials, along with the president and the secretary of state, have stated that the future of Egypt will be determined, in the end, by the people of Egypt. Well and good. And these officials will be held to account by Egyptians, and other Arabs, for that pledge. No more pursuit of stability, in other words, above democracy.

The public debate, however, is another story. Most media commentators, evincing little insight into the political dynamic in the region, have focused on the potential of the Mulim Brotherhood "taking over power" and "turning Egypt into another Iran". Oh, the horror, the horror! Some of these worthies, say, like the columnist Richard Cohn of the Washington Post, writing as if they were foaming at the mouth, have convinced themselves, and in the process many of their readers, that "fanatic Islamists", driven by a hatred of Israel, and an anti-western mindset, will soon be running the show from the presidential palace in Cairo.

No ideological angle

The revolutionary movement in Egypt, joined by Egyptians from all social classes and ideological persuasions, has little to do, of course, with Islamic activists, folks whose alienation derives from the image they carry of a lost coherence, of a centre that had held at one time in their history, but now humiliatingly no longer does.

Rather, it has more to do with a mass of people who feel that, for decades, a kind of torpor had been secreted, like a poison, into the nerve-ends of their political, social and economic lives by a regime that failed them, and betrayed their children's tomorrow. Thus the time had come for Egyptians to go to Tahrir Square — and elsewhere in their streets — where history was now every man's, every woman's, indeed every child's milieu.

Call all that what the French call it, la grande epopee, an ‘epic time' where transmutations of value and perception take place.

Without my crystal ball, I can't predict Egypt's future. But I can predict this: 85 million Egyptians, virtually half of them in their twenties, will not tolerate the prospect — not after Tahrir Square — of social immobility as their lot in life, of living in a society made inert by repressive authority.

And why will they not? Consider here, seeing that we are on the object of "people power", what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say in his commentary on the French Revolution: "So long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds".

When the hour meets the people, when the need to be free — an impulse imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information on our sensibility — overwhelms us, there's no going back. That's the only time that revolutions are said to be identical. Each, however, will go its own own way, reaching its own terminus. And Egypt's revolution, animate with revolutionary ardour, is still unfolding right before our eyes.

And who would not wish the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" in Tahrir Square the best of all possible futures?

 

- Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.