I had almost reprimanded myself for anticipating civil conflict in the wake of major protests against the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) President Mohamed Morsi remaining in office. After what apparently was the largest demonstration in the history of humankind on Sunday 30 June 2013, the army's statement in support of “the people's demands” this afternoon prompted wild festivity on the streets. But at the time of writing (the evening of Monday, 1 July), “clashes” — some of which had begun yesterday evening — are raging, on and off, in Alexandria, Mahalla, Suez, Assiut and Qena as well as the Cairo suburb of 6 October and the Muqattam Hills, where the Guidance Bureau of the MB is located in Cairo. I put “clashes” in quotation marks because it is inaccurate: what is happening now, like what has been happening periodically since 25 January 2011, consists largely of the watchdogs of power attacking not only the mostly Muslim protesters but also Copts and other minorities — and the victims trying to defend themselves. The difference is that, where the watchdogs were mostly (if not exclusively) state employees before Morsi was elected president on 30 June 2012, they are now mostly MB members and affiliates, Islamists to a man; instead of young men in uniform “doing their job” (however overeagerly), there are now bearded young men “engaged in holy war” (paradoxically against fellow Muslims). One outcome of “the June revolution”, however temporary, is that the state employees in question, many of whom have been disgruntled with the MB in power, are aligning themselves clearly with the protesters. Aside from being much larger in number, the protesters themselves are differently constituted, too — and that is the subject of this article. I am too tense to follow the brief I've assigned myself. I had planned on analysing the multiple, often bafflingly metaphysical discourses of revolution — showing just how, by ignoring common sense and empirical evidence as well as combining idealistic morals with emotional excess, revolution — once a creative and joyous form of sociopolitical godlessness — becomes merely another kind of blind and wrathful god. The historian Sherif Younis, a representative of what might be termed the Academic pro-25 January position, for example, is perhaps the greatest fulul-chaser on Facebook — fulul being the amorphous and ridiculously over-abused term for partisans of the former president Hosni Mubarak (who was ousted after handing over power to the army on 11 February 2011). Only minutes ago Younis described the army's involvement in what he would term “the third wave of revolution” as “a coup d'état”. I am too tense to argue with this though it infuriates me — and not out of any kind of sympathy with the military — believing as I do both that the army has no interest in ruling the country and that its support for the protests in the next few days is crucial. Instead, I want to trace the strange trajectory of what has been called “a revolution without revolutionaries”: partly to reassure myself that I wasn't entirely mistaken to participate in 25 January; partly to spell out why I have been against the outcome of the revolution for at least a year before Morsi was elected president (and virtually reborn fulul since); but mainly to whisper in the ears of the Academics and other brands of Revolutionary, “Listen, buddy. The current protests are against YOU as much as Morsi. You hear me?” First it was about the police. This is true not only of the drive behind the demonstration that would give rise to the perhaps not so arbitrarily so-called revolution of 2011, which took place (not coincidentally) on Police Day, but also of Egypt's state structure itself. It was then that the figure of the online activist — soon to be called “the Revolutionary” — came into its own. This new archetype of the Egyptian citizen emerged not so much by exposing hitherto unannounced police abuses — not to mention, of course, all the other shortcomings of the regime: corruption, autocracy, inefficiency and underdevelopment as well as plans to bequeath the so-called republic to Mubarak's son Gamal à la Al-Assad — which everyone knew about anyway (and, to varying degrees, put up with). It emerged by epically dramatising and filming those abuses on the streets, challenging the president to do something about them. Mubarak didn't do anything about them, and that expanded the scale of the drama enough to make him an enemy of the people who unlike Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Al-Assad on becoming one had it in him to step down within only 18 days of the start of the revolution. In what was arguably secondary to his heroic epic of “peaceful” regime change, Revolutionary demonstrated to enough people that Mubarak was willing to let Egyptians die to stay in power. He demonstrated that the state apparatus with the exception of the army and a significant proportion of society were willing not only to tell lies but also to be party to the death of Egyptians so that Mubarak could stay in power. Doing the killing was of course the job of the police, and the police — about whose criminality the whole thing had first erupted — became the epitome of fulul: the counterrevolution. Thus far, despite being a middle-class state employee, I could not possibly be fulul; I had hated the police all my life, I had assumed that the police caused more trouble than it solved and — completely unaware that the availability of basic amenities like electricity and petrol might be under threat, completely unaware that the absence of the police resulting from the revolution would dramatically increase crime rates — my pro-25 January position was clear. One other idea that would only occur to me later is that, had Mubarak dismissed the minister of the interior — had the police been less murderous and more competent in suppressing protests, in fact — things would probably not have developed quite that far. It was a condition of Revolutionary's success that the regime should be so central and entrenched and so utterly hopelessly incompetent. Two things happened when Mubarak stepped down. The army took over power (including much riot control); and Revolutionary, his epic acted out to astounding success, was at a complete loss what to do. Within weeks of course the whole of society had found in the revolution something to celebrate, but people were discussing not the lack of universal rights and freedoms to which police abuses had alerted Revolutionary when he first went out to demonstrate but who would replace Mubarak and his retinue — and many automatically cast the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in the role of surrogate patriarch — even as SCAF was actually cooking up the “road map” whereby the MB would eventually have the honour. Revolutionary in turn did two things: he became a totally incompetent politician who trusted first the army and then the Islamists as the most obvious representatives of Mubarak's “opposition”; and he kept trying to reenact his epic for its own sake, again and again and again, adopting the Islamists' “demands” when he couldn't think up any of his own. Failing to develop or adopt adequate political representation turned an already clueless Revolutionary into the otherwise irrelevant icon of a political treasure hunt whose outcome had never been planned or even seriously considered. Reenacting the epic had two effects. It cast the army in the villain role instead of the police and made the majority of the people impatient with the protests. That majority, “the honourable citizens” as the army took to calling them, looked hopefully to political Islam as a possible improvement on Mubarak. At the same time they willingly deferred to the army as the only remaining state institution they could trust. In so far as they deferred to the army while it murdered protesters, Revolutionary declared them fulul; in so far as they voted for Islamists, they were pro-25 January. It did not occur to Revolutionary that THEY WERE THE SAME PEOPLE, and it took him much longer than them to figure out that the Islamists as embodied by the MB were not only incomparably more inefficient and autocratic than Mubarak but also equally “evil”. Even now it has not yet dawned on Revolutionary that preserving protesters' lives has far more to do with technical training, institutional competence and social transparency than with who happens to be in charge of riot control. As a lifelong hater of the military dictatorship founded by Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1952, and as an aspiring liberal, I was still in no position to become fulul. What the army was doing was ugly and the protesters still had credibility with me. I did not agree to the political process of which they had become part by failing to boycott referendums and elections even as they reenacted their epic, but neither — despite casting their votes and moronically endorsing the process — did they. Then one day a group of Islamists took their protest to the Defence Ministry and Revolutionary joined them there. What the Islamists were protesting was the fact that their presidential candidate of choice had been disqualified from the race when it was discovered that his mother held American citizenship (it had been agreed that both a candidate's parents must have only Egyptian citizenship in order for that candidate to qualify). This man was a fundamentalist who promised to deny infinitely more rights and freedoms than those denied under Mubarak. He was clearly lying about his mother. He had allied himself with the army against Revolutionary when it suited him, he had failed to be there when his supporters were subjected to violent suppression, everything he said made it clear he was completely incompetent. Yet Revolutionary went off to the Defence Ministry because Revolutionary's slogan of choice at the time was “Down with military rule”. That was “the second wave of revolution”. Many were killed at the Defence Ministry, in the absence of the presidential candidate himself — as usual. They were killed not by people in uniform but by honourable citizens and residents avenging the death of family members accidentally caught in the fray. It was then, I think, that I was reborn — as much out of disgust with Revolutionary as concern for the future of my own life as one possible variation on the theme of the Egyptian citizen who started out wanting a better country. I have not been enjoying the power cuts and petrol shortages. I do not feel as physically safe as I used to under Mubarak. I am concerned with the financial future of my family, in the light of the economy plummeting and tourism going to the dogs. I don't like the fact that fundamentalists including terrorists have much more space and power than they ever have before, and unlike many Obamaesque bullshitters I don't feel this has anything to do with democracy. I don't like the fact that the constitution, the drafting of which was monopolised by Islamists, denies many universal rights and promotes Sunni sectarianism. I don't like the fact that national security is threatened, whether through terrorism and arms trade on the border or through the Ethiopian threat to Egypt's water supply. None of the rights and freedoms for which I participated in 25 January have even been brought up in government circles, let alone legally enshrined. I am fulul. Elsewhere, in parliament, in SCAF-MB politicking and “conflict”, when people died at the Defence Ministry, it was clear that “Down with military rule” served one purpose only: to enable the MB to monopolise power, or think they have. Yet Revolutionary continued to chant “Down with military rule” — with gusto. When the presidential runoffs demonstrated that, rather than opening up democratic space, what 25 January had done was give the people a choice between the representative of Mubarak's regime Ahmed Shafik and his MB rival, Revolutionary was instrumental to Morsi winning. Revolutionary has since fallen back on versions of the epic and a vastly truncated rights discourse while continuing to oppose both MB and fulul; hence the current drivel about “junta politics”, which prompts me to ask — in passing — whose republic is banana now. Yet it is precisely fulul — including police and military — who made 30 June possible: people who, if they hadn't been positively against 25 January (whether because they were pro-police, pro-military or pro-common sense), were at least not ecstatic about it. It may seem irrelevant whether 30 June is “the continuation” of 25 January or a new revolution altogether. I feel it is important to note that, in so far as it is led by people who (like me) find Revolutionary guilty not only of bringing the MB to power — and hence of all that has been tormenting the people, to a far greater extent than they were ever tormented under Mubarak — but also of having no idea what he was doing and being irresponsible enough to do it anyway. If 25 January brought the MB to power and 25 was the revolution, then 30 June can only be the counterrevolution. But to me as to Revolutionary (I suspect), it looks far more like revolution than anything seen since the day Mubarak stepped down.
