I can’t help recalling 2005 when President Hosni Mubarak was up for re-election for the fifth time. In a great concession to the nation (and the US) the state had tweaked the constitution to allow multiple candidates to run against him. Sort of. He had no real opponents, but it gave the ruling party a chance to ‘campaign’ and bludgeon home their point that Mubarak was the only one capable of leading Egypt. Billboards and posters around Cairo featured the ageing president in an open-collared shirt looking ruefully underdressed, with the caption: ‘a crossing to the future’. ‘What future?’ a cab driver said to me. ‘It should have said malesh [Arabic for “never mind”]’, a more honest, and therefore wholly original campaign slogan. ‘Of course he’ll win,’ concluded the cabbie, who saw no point in voting, ‘but maybe in six more years…’ None of us could imagine how dramatically this apparent resignation would turn into its opposite: a passionate demand for democratic change.
I’ve always tried to portray Egyptians in all their beleaguered humanity, the occasional highs and the frequent lows. I tracked their battles with the decay around and within them, the mounting frustrations, the loss of self-worth, the eroding sense of community and the reasons behind it all with as much nuance as could be mustered, predicting (like other students of human nature) the upheaval that was one day bound to come. But I too had grown resigned, frustrated and eroded and seriously doubted I’d live to see it. Now that I have, I must see Egypt with fresh and bliss-filled eyes. I have no urge to predict the outcomes of this uprising (or revolution as the case may be) only to savour an extraordinary moment of openness and clarity, and consider what it means.
