Airing Out the House of Egypt
I’m a tenacious optimist. Not foolish, but tenacious. Our revolution in Egypt is very much alive. It has been battered, and left for dead too many times to count, but it’s still very much alive.
Our revolution did not call for either military rule or for an Islamist Egypt. It called for bread, liberty, social justice and dignity.
I’m writing this in Cairo where along with 13 other provinces we’re under curfew and a nationwide state of emergency has been announced just one day after a day drenched in blood – the bloodiest since our revolution – a day that included at least 20 churches getting torched.
Our revolution isn’t dead, it is bringing Egypt back to life, painfully and messily. Egypt is like a house that’s been under lock and key, every door and window trapped shut for more than 60 years. The revolution kicked them all open and the stench is unbearable. But we are persevering. My proof? Egypt has changed, forever.
Our brutal security forces whose lexicon is “beat and shoot to kill” have seen again and again that Egyptians will stand up to them. They can’t kill us all. The military–including its head, the Defense Minister Gen. El Sissi–knows that we stood up to the military junta that ran the country after Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down. Our protests ended more than six decades of military rule.
Wednesday’s horrors were a reminder of the vicious paradigm forced on Egypt for those 60 years: an authoritarian military regime or an authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood alternative. But our revolution did not call for either military rule or for an Islamist Egypt. It called for bread, liberty, social justice and dignity.
Activists and street protesters whose mass mobilizations ruffled both the military junta that preceded Morsi’s presidency and that continued to resist his authoritarianism are gradually realizing that freedom is more than romantic notions of “leaderless revolutions.” We are learning just how far protests can take us.
Don’t talk to me of numbers, of majority and minority. Revolutions are started and maintained by passionate minorities. Egypt is bigger than the military and the Muslim Brotherhood paradigm. At this stage, as we withstand the stench and clear out our house, there is not a political group that has not suffered or lost loved ones or been brutalized. Wise and cool heads in Egypt must remind us of that and rise above the mass killing and the torching of churches and say “enough.”
Our revolution has been declared dead many times. Throughout the massacres, protests and brutality of security forces, many have told us that we are done for, forever doomed to live in tyranny and that basically we are incapable of being free.
I refuse to give up on Egypt!
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-American feminist writer and commentator on Arab and Muslim issues.