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, orga-nized 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 truth behind what the media had been telling us, and found it was all wrong. The club HQ kept telling us the protesters were traitors, foreigners, and urging the ultras to go down there and do something about it. But when we got there, to Tahrir, we formed our own opinion: we bonded with the protesters and became part of them.
Ultras from rival club al-Ahly also joined in the fighting. By the end of the day numerous police cars had been torched, the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was on fire, and protesters controlled Tahrir Square.
He’s thin, Mahmoud, with a cheeky smile poking out from beneath his red-and-white Zamalek scarf. He says: ‘Why don’t you ask me about football?’ So I throw him some inane question about Zamalek’s position in the league. He chuckles: ‘Since the revolution I’ve been neglecting football hooliganism for a bigger cause: the revolution. I can speak for both myself and every ultra. We all have.’
A soft coup
On 29 January, with several hundred protesters killed across Egypt, the demonstrators forced the riot cops of the Central Security to vacate the streets; the ordinary police force withdrew too, in a calculated tactic to promote lawlessness. Army units were positioned at strategic points, but having refused an order from the interior ministry to use live ammo on the demonstrators, they took no part in the maintenance of law and order. All across Cairo, neighbourhoods responded by creating vigilante squads armed with clubs and small firearms. The main aim of these groups was to fend off the baltagiya—essentially a network of civilian thugs paid and organized by the police to carry out such beatings, rapes and tortures as are necessary to pacify a city of 22 million people without rights or decent livelihoods.
The moment was essentially a soft coup by the army against the parts of the regime loyal to Mubarak, but at the same time it created ‘fragmented power’ on the streets: not so much the ‘dual power’ of Marxist theory, but the kind of deconstructed power we saw taking shape