More Than an Observer

On January 25, I was politically apathetic — at least for that morning, which will go down in history as the tipping point after which Egyptians, from all walks of life, were united in a desperate desire for change. During previous assignments as a journalist, I had managed to always stay on the sidelines, politically speaking. Without allegiances or partisanship, I floated across the political arena as an observer, an eyewitness at best. On January 25, I wasn’t assigned to cover this story. However, seeing the numbers flocking to Tahrir square throughout the day, I grew curious. Are we seeing a different kind of uprising? I’ve spent endless hours under a scorching sun covering workers’ strikes and mass demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere across Egypt, including the 2005 protests against the constitutional amendments, during which female journalists and other women were groped and brutally harassed. So I’m no stranger to riot police tightening the noose on protesters in an attempt to clamp down on them, using their batons if the situation called for it. Many times I’ve seen protesters dispersed, dragged to side streets and kicked and beaten up, and I saw people get arrested. But on January 25, something seemed different. That day, I watched on television people being violently dispersed, but — as if by an invisible force or a higher calling — they flocked back to the square. Persistence and a different brand of resilience that I hadn’t seen before were present. Cynicism — developed after years of disappointment by the failure of protests to curb growing corruption — gave way to questioning, until finally, my curiosity got the best of me. I finally decided to go to Tahrir Square myself to observe, to see if indeed we’re seeing a new trend. The protest scene in Tahrir carried markers of a different uprising, signs that, in retrospect, had foreshadowed a real revolution. Looking around me, I saw a different crowd. These were not workers or citizens from the lower socio-economic classes struggling to make ends meet. Most of the faces there were those of a familiar middle- and upper-middle class, and I thought, “Now that’s new.” Around the square, in addition to people carrying signs with anti-government slogans and groups of men and women huddled in circles reading newspapers or chatting, there were youths with guitars and drums, and other people singing, reading poetry or discussing politics in hushed voices. There were families, even children, and venders hawking tea and coffee and one — I promise you — selling colored balloons. “These people are protesting like hippies,” I told a friend. “Can this crowd seriously topple a regime? I doubt it.” But another friend corrected me, “Revolutions have often been initiated by the educated middle class.” And this was one of the first times I heard the word revolution uttered in connection to the situation. I attempted to argue back, “Yes, but look around. There are no leaders. There is no noticeable grassroots presence.” Later on Facebook, I wrote that people “with real day-to-day problems have to join. And they have to stay in Tahrir. Perhaps turn part of the square into a small tent city.” But that was later. On that January night in Tahrir, as I sat there watching, the peaceful crowd was overwhelmingly sprayed with tear gas and attacked with rubber bullets. Suddenly, the fight had become personal, in my eyes. As if moved by the invisible power that was mobilizing the masses, I myself was transformed too. Later that night, as I sat in bed pondering the events of the day, I remembered one of my favorite lines from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “For the world is changing. I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” And so it was.