January 25 and the republic of Tahrir Square

Egyptians mark a full year since their January 25 revolution kicked off in Tahrir Square, where for the eighteen days it took to unseat Mubarak, it was its own 'republic' [REUTERS]

Oxford, United Kingdom - It was a day in history
when Cairo reclaimed its name as the "victorious" city. But what was
launched on that momentous day at Tahrir Square was more than a
revolution for liberty and dignity. It was an act of designing an
immaterial (formless) republic, a state of mind and psyche.

It was a day of judgment. Egyptians in spectacular unison set out to
dismantle a dysfunctional and decayed republic and for 18 days,
creatively founded the "republic of Tahrir Square", changing the course
of an entire region.

Tunisia once
again connects with Egypt. Just as the Fatimids left Mahdia to go and
flourish and prosper in Egypt, founding Cairo, so did the revolution
sparked by Bouazizi. Nowhere in the Arab Middle East was Tunisia's
revolution received more warmly and pmindionately than in Egypt. The
embrace of the flags said it all, and the slogan read: "You first, we
next" (antum al-sabiqun wa nahnu allahiqun).

Egypt was already in a revolutionary mood and mode - the mahallah
textile strikes and display of defiance, the hereditary bandwagon,
corruption and the 2010 rigged elections all combined to bring the day
of reckoning, tahrir as it were, emancipation, nearer.

As if Tahrir Square was built for that day, awaiting to receive the
deluge of waves upon waves of human crowds all converging on the square
to help it live up to its name - liberation square - and measure up to
the slogan to "stand tall, you are Egyptian".

Agency was
displayed in multiple colours, prayers, words, shapes, cries, songs,
dances and slogans. Perhaps, nothing equals the beauty of such
creativity than Egyptians taking over the public square to make it their
own and taking charge of time. That is when 31 years of dictatorial
urban planning and of regimented timing ceased to have an effect.

When they re-fashioned time and space to suit the moment of
liberation, the state was thrown into complete disarray. Never before in
the history of humankind was there a Friday of anger. Every Friday,
there were the security forces lining up the streets leading up to
Al-Azhar mosque and other places where the state kept a watchful eye on
citizens it distrusted and controlled via fear. Time was designed to
worry about livelihood and the rest of it was apportioned between
commuting, working and looking for ways to escape thinking about the
things that mattered most at the subliminal level: tahrir from hunger and from tyranny, from Mubarak and from the expanding Gamal club and co.

When Egyptians, like other Arabs, discovered that to topple a state
required wresting time and space from the state, they realised they
found the antidote to misrule. It was licence for liberators and for
liberation, inverting authoritarian orders, resisting in rebellious
terms, and in ways no police force in the world was ever trained to
sabotage much less handle.

Mikhail Bakhtin comes to mind and so does his notion of the "carnivalesque".

Humanity at
its best was displayed in the square. The square was turned into a space
where pmindion for change, defiance and rediscovering "Egytpian-ness"
and "humanness" supplanted the pmindivity of 31 years when the
Egyptians - with unimaginable capacity for gentleness misused by state
elites and power-holders.

That public and sustained peaceful display of defiance placed the
square into the world's chronicles of revolution, giving Egyptians a
spot in the hearts and minds of billions of global onlookers tuned to
the malyuniyyahs (millions) of Tahrir Square. A square that was
polyphonic, multi-colourful and vibrant in its contestation of tyranny,
day after day simulating the downfall of the Pharaoh.

The world watched and imbibed the unfolding and sweeping
revolutionary ethos that was to spread further afield. Without Tahrir,
Libya would not have risen in rebellion, nor would have Syria and Yemen.
In large part, the square was the second birthplace of the Arab Spring.

Rebellion was integral to tahrir
to the moment when the world stopped to watch Egypt reinvent itself.
Rebelling is good. Every myth, every ethic and every policy in Egypt and
the rest of the Arab world was always geared towards oppressing even
the thought of rebellion much less playing it out so openly, defiantly
and collectively in the hub of the Pharaoh's city, close to his mugamma and in full view of his uniformed and un-uniformed guardians. The 'ghalabah'
(down-trodden) complex so entrenched in Egypt was smashed with every
song, dance, amongst other endless carnivalesque techniques for
overthrowing tyranny. The Egyptians did this on their terms, through
re-ordered time and space.

They stopped. The state's time froze on that day and over the following 18 days. A different clock started ticking away, tahrir
time was on. Space too was changed. The Square where no one dared
crossing was returned to the people. That was the fatal blow to the
Trojan horse of Pharaonic rule. The security apparatus was beaten in its
own game: Clmindically, they guarded TV and the structures symbolic of
officialdom.

Intelligent
protest: That is the answer to what kind of protest Egyptians staged in
the square. Egyptians dismissed the state when they shifted the focus of
protest, attention and creative protest to a central square. It escaped
the attention of security planners. More or less, the goal posts were
changed, and with it the terrain on which Egyptians did draw the lines
of battlefield with Mubarak and co. That was partly how they triumphed.

They were able to open up a space of protest and a geography of
solidarity against tyranny. It was the onset of a different project: A
public arena for reclaiming popular sovereignty and enacting peoplehood.

Republic is
the word. They disowned the rules of engagement which condemned them to
denizenship. That they did creatively and intelligently. The republic
they founded was a state of mind and psyche - for which no police force
or state has a plan. A republic in a space impossible to reclaim by any
material means of state control and penetration. It was immaterial
running to a time of its own, time made out of values no state-holder in
Mubarak's state could respond to.

That republic will live on - always lurking to bring the Egyptians
back to a square of no particular dimensions to resist, if need be. The
other republic materially being today designed and populated with
parliamentarians, officialdom and state offices matters. But it matters
even more if the republic that was Tahrir Square on January 25 for 18
days remains a beacon of inspiration and hope.

Dr Larbi Sadiki is a Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, and author of Arab Democratisation: Elections without Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2009), The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004) and forthcoming Hamas and the Political Process (2012).

Revolution of January 25 in egypt



January
25 revolution is a peaceful popular uprising began on Tuesday, January
25, 2011 (01/25/2011) corresponding to 21 February 1432 [4]. On
25 January, which was chosen to coincide with Holiday Police identified
several points of the Egyptian opposition and Almstkulaian, including
the April 6 Youth Movement [5] and the Kifaya movement, as well as
groups of young people across the social networking site Facebook, which
is the most famous group «We are all Khaled Said» and «Monitoring
Network» The
young Muslim Brotherhood. [6] [7] [8] Despite the initial statements
which indicated that the group would not participate as strong political
or political body that participation needs to plan and agreement
between all political forces before going down to the street, the group
had
warned if the situation continues, what it is from a popular
revolution, but as they called them ("not of our making," but we can not
prevent it) [9]. The
call came in protest against living conditions and political and
economic conditions as well as to what is considered corrupt under the
rule of President Hosni Mubarak. [10] [11] [12] Two years ago, a girl
named Esra Abdel Fattah, she was then that the age of 17 years, from through
its "Logo", calling for a peaceful strike, in the 6 ‬ April / April
2008, in protest against the deterioration of living conditions, and
soon received a response from the call about 70 thousand of the public. The
result is that the strike succeeded, and called the Isra at the time
the title "Girl Logo" and "leadership default" [13], and since half the
opposition to start awareness of the sons of the provinces to do the job
in protest against poor conditions in Egypt, most notably the April 6
Youth Movement and the movement of the adequacy of After
the incident, Khalid Saeed activist Wael Ghoneim and political activist
Abdul Rahman Mansour, a page that we are all Khaled Said on Facebook
and urged Egyptians to get rid of the system and ill-treatment by police
of the people.

Led
this revolution to the resignation of President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak
from power in February 11th, 2011 M 0.8 March 1432, in the sixth on
Friday, February 11, 2011 AD Deputy President Omar Suleiman in a short
statement
on the abandonment of the president from office and that mindigned to
the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Department of the country