Gen Z & the Revolution| Egypt's last supper

I don’t have many memories of the moment on January 25. I was in the third year of middle school. I followed the revolution on TV, switching between channels: some vilified the protesters with the ugliest insults, accusing them of conspiracy and sabotage, featuring officers who swore that no more than a few thousand people were in the square. Other channels showed a square packed with millions, supporting the protesters and their demands.

While my father called the protesters “misguided youth,” my mother followed updates on social media—until the internet was cut and pro-revolution channels lost signal. The revolution became an enigma to me.

I didn’t take to the streets of my small hometown in Damietta until after Mubarak’s resignation, when protesters had already left the squares and only graffiti remained to answer my questions.

I watched the same channels that had attacked the revolutionaries days earlier suddenly praise them, inviting them on-air as the revolution was declared victorious and the regime fallen—those same figures who would later be arrested after its failure, or dissolve into the new regime and shed their old skin.

Unity was real, yet brief

The revolution left behind a multitude of question marks. I searched for answers in history books. The Bolshevik revolution began with raising awareness among workers about their rights. The French revolution began with awareness-raising in theater.

Other revolutions managed to unite peoples of diverse orientations and beliefs to form a single front and mobilize the public behind one position—just as happened in 2011.

The revolution brought together people of different religions and those with no religion, people with different sexual orientations and gender identities. Islamists stood with secularists and leftists; Muslims with Christians—not in some performative display of national unity, but as equals. Yet it turned out to be the Egyptians’ last supper.

The regime succeeded in assassinating the revolution by fragmenting its popular base. Differences of opinion now sever friendships and splinter the cause itself. The various factions have lost any path toward dialogue.

The cancer within

Cultural elitism—the cancer of the revolution—contributed to this fragmentation. No one wants to listen to someone who monopolizes the podium as though their words descended from the heavens. Nor to those who presume that anyone younger has no right to object. What arrogance possessed the revolutionaries to believe their voices were superior and that those younger than them were fools without awareness?

When these two poles meet, friction is inevitable, between the generation of the square and the generation that came after. As though the right to speak belonged only to those who had gone to the square. But is it truly the intellectual’s role to throw out jargon the public can’t understand, then mock them and call them ignorant and unrefined?

I count myself among the generation that found its weapon in social media

The one who informed on Che Guevara was a farmer—one of the very people he had fought for—because Guevara had disturbed his flock. That’s a lesson our revolutionaries failed to learn: that it was necessary to raise people’s awareness of the motivations, the potential outcomes, and the future vision before mobilizing them to overthrow the regime. Today, many curse the revolution and its revolutionaries. They wish it had never happened. They blame it for ruining their lives, for the rising cost of living, for worsening conditions.

Whenever freedoms are restricted, or a sectarian incident breaks out, the revolution and its revolutionaries are blamed. The same happens every January. The anniversary becomes a nightmare: random street searches, sometimes even arrests. It only deepens public resentment toward the revolution.

The battle over narrative

I believe Ibn Khaldun’s warning in “The Muqaddimah”about the falsification of history: barely a decade after January, its narratives are already riddled with contradiction. Political currents veer between claiming exclusive credit for the revolution and disowning their failures, while the broader revolutionary bloc never forged a coherent narrative—leaving open the question of how movements unable to agree on memory could ever unite again, or be trusted not to erase dissenting voices.

Even today, many revolutionaries deny the presence and role of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities in the square, refuse to defend prisoners of conscience tied to other political currents, and in some cases accept—or even gloat over—their isolation, abuse, and death.

This level of fragmentation makes it hard to imagine rebuilding a united society. But it isn’t impossible.

It’s good that the January revolutionaries left us a space—in the virtual world— where we can still raise our causes. I consider myself part of the generation that found its weapon in social media. Posting and sharing help us respond quickly to incidents of sexual harassment and gender-based violence, and to spread sex education and awareness—despite the constant security risks faced by anyone who raises their voice or attracts too many views.