Introduction

Who made Egypt's revolution?

The events of January and February 2011 brought together powerful institutional actors, most importantly those in authority in the Egyptian state, and a vast number of protestors for whom engagement in public politics was a novel experience. Who participated and what was the nature of their involvement? How did they view their experiences and what were their preferred outcomes? Was this a movement of protest, a project of reform or the start of a 'revolution'?

The scale of popular participation in the uprising that began on 25 January 2011 may be unprecedented in modern history. The numbers involved, and the breadth and depth of the movement, suggest extraordinarily high levels of engagement. State officials, police and army chiefs were stunned by the size and energy of demonstrations: Mona El-Ghobasy describes the impact on security forces as one of 'shock and awe' (2011). In a typical exchange on 28 January between officers of the Amn al-Markazi (Central Security Force [CSF], the riot police), a junior officer in the streets of Alexandria told his commander: 'The situation here is beyond belief. I'm telling you, sir, beyond belief.' The CSF was soon ordered to retreat to protect the city's police stations. There were similar incidents in most Egyptian cities, the speed and scale of events surprising both police and protestors. Ibrahim, an organiser of the initial 25 January protest in Cairo relates his experience:

We agreed to meet at the Journalists' Syndicate downtown. On the morning of 25 January we said if there were 500 of us we'd stay for an hour; if a thousand we'd try to march down the street; if more we'd head for Tahrir [Square]. When we found the street was full we marched anyway, then we found there were people in Ramses Street and Gala' Street and we heard of thousands coming from Shubra and Bulaq and we kept moving. We broke into Tahrir from 'Abd al-Mun'im Riyad Square. The police ran: what a moment of liberation!

On the night of 25 January, 10,000 riot police cleared Tahrir Square and occupied access streets to ensure that protestors did not return. All over Egypt city centres that had also been occupied by large crowds were assaulted by CSF detachments using tear gas and live ammunition – by morning, a Cairo newspaper reported, 'some squares looked like a sea of black-clad security officers'. The regime had laid down its challenge: if demonstrators wanted the streets as a stage for their protests, they must redouble their numbers and be prepared to fight. Activists responded by declaring 28 January a 'Day of Rage' and government officials ordered a curfew, denying Internet access and closing mobile phone networks. At this point the regime's strategists seemed to believe assessments of the protests as a 'Facebook Revolution'. On this view, repeated widely in the European and North American press, the events were organised and led by middle-class youth who were 'tech-savvy', their use of electronic networks allowing demonstrators to evade the state's usual means of surveillance and control, so that without the Internet and telephone networks they could be isolated and protests would peter out. The notion that protests were the work of highly educated young agitators complemented a long-standing theme in regime propaganda – the idea that the government represented the common interests of the people and that opposition came from a small minority that, in the words of President Mubarak, 'sought to spread chaos and violence' (2011). As we shall see, networks of activists long engaged in attempts to contest the autocracy played a key role in the protests. Most were not 'digital revolutionaries' nor did they possess the influence to initiate events on the scale of protests now under way.

Sameh Naguib, a radical activist and participant in the initial mobilisation on 25 January, comments that suspending the Internet and phone networks had no visible effect, as the vast majority of leaders and organisers did not have access to Facebook and could easily use more traditional forms of communication: rather, he suggests, 'it emboldened the demonstrators even more by proving the regime was desperate and weak' (Naguib 2011a: 17). On 28 January, the protest movement answered the regime's challenge by bringing millions of people to city squares. They came from every sector of urban society: in Cairo demonstrations began at many assembly points, drawing participants from prosperous middle-class suburbs, from traditional working-class neighbourhoods and from 'popular quarters' in both inner areas, and from the swathes of informal housing of the ashwaiyyat that surround the city.

Hussein, a campaigner with long experience in the democracy movement, describes the impact in his suburban area south of Cairo:

We started off in Ma'adi with a few hundred people. We were all tense and fearful – we knew that anything could happen. As we marched towards the city centre the demonstration grew and grew – but when we got to Dar al-Salam [an 'informal' area] it increased hugely. It seemed as if the whole area was joining in. People left their jobs, students left schools, at each road junction the march swelled and swelled. I'd estimate that at least 40,000 people joined in as we passed through Dar al-Salam – and then more and more as we moved on towards Tahrir through the other poor areas south of the centre.

This picture is confirmed by Marwa, in her account of a march from the middle-class suburb of Medinet Nasr, east of the city centre:

When we began in Medinet Nasr it was all a gamble. The government had ordered all mobile networks and the Internet to be shut down, so we were calling people to join us by every means. As we headed into the city people came from everywhere – but when we got near the popular quarters an army of people joined us. That was crucial because at Ramses Square the Amn al-Markazi [CSF] put up a serious fight. We beat them, taking many casualties. An unarmed crowd broke through against trained, armed police! In the end we simply exhausted them – they fell back and we poured through. It was all about numbers – a people's insurrection.

By evening, and despite many casualties, Tahrir Square had been secured by demonstrators who were not to leave for many weeks. The pattern was repeated nationwide, especially in cities with large working-class populations. In Port Said, with a population of 600,000, some 80,000 people were said to be on the streets, with demonstrations of comparable proportions in Alexandria, Suez, Damietta and Mansoura (Beaumont and Sherwood 2011). In Suez, Al Jazeera reported, 'The police have been quite comprehensively defeated by the power of the...