Press Association/AP/Nasser Nasser. All rights reserved.The question of the Egyptian revolution’s future has become as much a cliché as the discourse on its utopian history. The former is as excessive in its pessimism as the latter is in its optimism. Although neither abide by empirical rationale, both are politically understandable.
But before asking the classical question: “does the Egyptian revolution still have a future?”; let us first agree that such a pessimistically oriented question, or rather proposition, is engrained in and stems from a wider and more comprehensive history of Egypt and the revolution as independent concepts. We do not give rise to such propositions, for history thrusts them upon us as questions nagging for answers, while hiding its own answers within the questions it imposes. So let us not repeat after the ‘written-by-the-victorious’ history what it wants us to keep repeating; and rather seek hidden impulses beneath the surface of contemporary understandings of the Egyptian revolution.
That a huge number of Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 was a necessary moment, a proposition that forced itself. Other propositions were later born out of that momentous rupture. But it was not exactly a rupture; not a total break with the past. It is only an attempt at rupture, better yet a crack.
