because of the Emergency Law: more than two is illegal. Then someone gave me a paper with lawyers’ numbers ‘in case you get detained’—and I am going: ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’
Her eyes whiten as she relives it. She speaks perfect American English, dresses like any student in London or New York, and has that confident tone of voice you hear in the Starbucks of the world:
We were roaming around; people started hiding in alleys, walking in twos and you could look at another two people, the other side of the street and know they don’t belong here. And I’m thinking, ‘I know why you are here’—there’s a moment of eye contact. Someone started chanting and then all of a sudden people came from the alleys and we were about 200 people, in this tiny street. And people came onto the balconies to see what was happening.
Among the crowd she spotted Abd El Rahman Hennawy (@Hennawy89). The twenty-five-year-old is hard to miss: he sports a large beard, a red Bedouin scarf and a t-shirt bearing the word ‘socialism’. He seemed surprised to see her: ‘Before then, whenever Hennawy called us out to protest, in the university, I’d be like, sorry, man, I can’t. He saw me and said, what are you doing here? This is my stuff, it’s what I do!’ Hennawy was part of the core of protesters who knew what was going to happen. On the night before, 24 January, he had attended a packed meeting in a private flat. Then, like all the activists there, he’d organized a cell of six people to sleep on the floor of his own apartment and to wait there for information.
They’d been working like this since Mahalla in 2008: misdirecting the police by planning spoof marches openly on their cellphones and then failing to turn up, or launching flash demos out of the radical coffee shops in the alleyways around Tahrir. Recently they’d switched from demonstrating in the centre to demonstrating in the slums and suburbs. ‘On 25 January,’ Hennawy recalls,
we put three things together for the first time: the surprise demonstration, plus going to the slums instead of downtown, plus the chants. We chanted about economics, not politics. If you are shouting ‘Down with Mubarak!’ in the slums, nobody cares. They care about food and shelter. So we chanted: ‘How expensive is bread; how expensive is sugar; why do we have to sell our furniture?’ And people joined in. We had no idea it was going to be a revolution, though. I thought it would be just a demonstration.
Hennawy estimates that the 200 activists who went to Naheya were able to mobilize up to 20,000 people on the day. The urban poor responded to two issues in particular: police brutality and the price of bread.
As this crowd, and others, marched to Tahrir Square, a pattern developed: they would hit a wall of riot police, and the wall would break. The scenes would be posted on YouTube later, but if you track back through the Twitter feeds of the leading activists (in English, because the world was watching), you can see it happen:
13:21:56: @Sandmonkey: Huge demo going to Tahrir #jan25 shit just got real
13:42:45: @norashalaby: Fuck got kettled almost suffocated till they broke cordon
14:08:55: @Ghonim: Everyone come to Dar El Hekma security police allow people to join us and we are few hundreds2
When they got to Tahrir, the fighting started. Sarah says: ‘I was getting hit with water cannons, tear gas and bricks, and getting very close to being detained, and that’s the moment’—she snaps her fingers—‘when it hit me.’
Someone who knows nothing about history, the opposition, nothing about freedom in Egypt and how it’s been suppressed—because I’ve been so disconnected—you see all these people around you chanting the same thing and it triggers something in your mind … You see people running towards the police, hurling bricks at them—and wow: the normal scenario would be to run away. I went home and I told my mother—I am not myself. I am somebody new that was born today.
The demonstrators took Tahrir Square. They fought the police, held impromptu meetings, gave sound bites to the world’s media and, by nightfall, the Egyptian Revolution had begun. Twitter was blocked by the Egyptian government around 5 p.m., but the main activists were back on via a proxy (hidemyass.com) around 9 p.m. It was—as some of the activists proclaimed—a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube. The global news channels, above all Al Jazeera, became a massive amplifier for the amateur reports and videos, spreading the revolution’s impact across the world.
The farther away you stood, the more it looked like this was an uprising of secular youth with perfect teeth, speaking the kind of English you hear at Princeton or Berkeley. Even the Mubarak regime convinced itself that the revolt was something imposed from outside: tales of ‘foreign agents with an agenda’ were spread via the state-run rumour networks. On the night of 27 January, the government switched off the Internet. It was then that the world found out the revolution was neither digital nor alien.
Day of Rage, 28 May 2011
Next day, Friday the 28th, the Muslim day of prayer, tens of thousands streamed out of the mosques and headed for Tahrir Square. This was the ‘Day of Rage’: the day the Mubarak clique effectively lost control, though it would take two more weeks to oust the man from power. The moment was captured on mobile phones and posted on YouTube.
In one video, a crowd of around three thousand pushes the riot police back over the Qasr al-Nil bridge—the main route from Zamalek Island, in western Cairo, into Tahrir Square.3 Arcing over their heads are white plumes of tear-gas canisters. Two water-cannon trucks speed forward and swerve into the crowd, doing U-turns and jerks to flatten as many demonstrators as possible, but the security forces are unable to stop the crowd, now so big it fills the bridge.
The water cannons fire. The crowd halts. An imam appears, clad in white. The men at the front form a row and now, soaked through and shielding their eyes, just yards from the police, they kneel and pray. Those behind them do the same. Everybody is clawing at their faces as the water concentrates the tear gas, spraying a burning cocktail onto their skin.
Now, police trucks drive directly into the crowd; the praying ends, the crowds scatter. Police shoot a man in the face with a tear-gas grenade, point-blank (later, video footage of him on the operating table shows up on YouTube, smashed teeth protruding from a hole where his mouth had been). The crowd panics, pursued by four trucks and the far end of the bridge is engulfed in smoke, and now flames, as somebody has torched a car.
It seems like game over, but it’s not. Soon the police are in full retreat, back across the bridge: the crowd has armed itself with traffic barriers and a tube-shaped metal kiosk, which they roll before them on its side like a tank. A water-cannon truck has been captured and the rioters turn this, too, into a moving barricade. The police beat a headlong, terrified retreat. If the crowd pursuing them look like football fans, that’s because many of them are: the ‘ultras’ of Zamalek Sporting Club.
Mahmoud, who I met in Tahrir Square a few weeks later, draped in the flag of Zamalek SC, was among them. ‘There was me and about four thousand others at Qasr al-Nil bridge,’ he recalled. ‘It was a beautiful feeling: to know that Egypt is finally free of all the corruption, the rule of the iron fist.’
The ‘ultras’—named after the notorious Italian football hooligan gangs—had organized for years in the face of police repression, at all big soccer clubs. The police accused the ultras of fostering terrorism and organized crime, and they, in turn, found ways of getting their banners, flares and weapons into the stadiums. They would meet up at pre-arranged venues, ready to fight each other and the cops. On 28 January they were initially summoned to go and smash the demonstration, says Mahmoud, in response to rumours that it was organized by foreign agents:
We came down to see what was the
