Flickr/Gigi Ibrahim. Some rights reserved.On Monday, if you were in Tahrir Square and didn’t know any better, you might have been forgiven for thinking that 25 January in Egypt marked nothing more than ‘police day’, as it did before 2011. People handed roses to security forces who filled the Square, long scrubbed of graffiti. You might have been forgiven for thinking the revolution had never happened.
Except for Sanaa Seif, recently released from Sisi’s prisons, a lone reminder walking through Tahrir in the rain, "the January revolution continues" written on the back of her jacket. As heart breaking as it was to see that this is all that seems to be left of the millions packed into the Square demanding justice and freedom, it was a small but clear visual reminder that there are cracks in the edifice of counter-revolution.
If you have no other reason than this to read Jack Shenker’s truly astonishing book, The Egyptians: A Radical Story, it would be enough: to be reminded of the myriad ways in which the revolution continues, despite the regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to tell us that it failed, or never happened, or was their idea all along. To be reminded that there is yet hope and that much of the states’ continued repression is a manifestation of “the absurdity of power on the brink of collapse.”
