Gen Z & the Revolution| A generation taken off the will

At eight years old, my entire world revolved around my quiet hometown of Ismailia. The most exciting part of my day was waiting for my father to come home from work so we could share time and stories. I didn’t know anything about Cairo, and the name “Tahrir Square” meant nothing to me—until the day my father came home unusually early.

His eyes were fixed on the TV screen, and I froze beside him, watching for the first time those massive waves of people. I asked innocently, “What’s going on?” His answer carved itself into my memory: “It’s a revolution... something that only happens once in a lifetime. Even your grandfather never lived through one.”

That sentence didn’t pass lightly. It planted in me a fierce feeling of being “lucky”—lucky to have been born at the right moment to witness this exception. I believed him then, and I still believe him now, 15 years later. His words lit an unquenchable curiosity in me, a lifelong passion for every story from the square and for listening to every person who had made the noble attempt.

As the days passed, my father transformed from a viewer behind a screen to one of the people in those waves, this time in Ismailia’s El-Mamar Square. I became a small guard at the window, waiting for his return with a mix of pride and fear.

Then came the night of Feb. 11. Hosni Mubarak stepped down. I watched my father cry for the first time, sitting beside my mother in solemn silence before the TV. When I asked why he was crying, he said in a trembling voice, “I never believed this day would come...He’d been suffocating us for thirty years.”

That night, I inherited my father’s sense of triumph. What I didn’t know was that I’d also inherited questions that would grow with me.

Years passed, and the revolution left its mark on our home. One day, my father brought back a poster and hung it on our door. At its center were the words “The flowers that bloomed in Egypt’s gardens,” surrounded by the faces of young people. I used to stand in front of that poster for long stretches, studying the faces, names, and ages. What astonished me most was how young they were—most were in their twenties.

That poster sparked in my young mind a simple, earnest belief: that twenty is the age of true maturity, heroism—the age when a person becomes aware and influential enough to die for their country. I used to ask myself, “When I turn twenty, will I be like them?”

Now I’m older than some of those martyrs had been, and I realize how harsh my question was, how unfair the comparison. Not because our generation is “less than,” but because that moment was extraordinary—it pulled heroes from among the youth who matched its magnitude.

With time and the distance between me and Cairo, I started my personal search. I read, followed, and slowly understood things my younger mind couldn’t grasp back then. But that understanding came with a painful realization about us, Gen Z.

I began to feel a strange sense of “exclusivity” claimed by the revolutionary generation—as if January belonged only to those who marched, chanted, or were wounded. On a human level, I understand that feeling. But to an entire generation who were children at the time and who now long to belong to that history, it’s disheartening. In so many conversations, both direct and subtle, I received one message: “You were just a kid... Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”

It should have been the opposite. The revolutionaries should have been proud that a new generation, who wasn’t physically in the square but lived it deeply in their hearts, wanted to continue the story. You should have opened the door, not closed it in our faces because we weren’t there.

And here, I can’t help but think of the example of the October War. Most of us weren’t alive in 1973, and yet those who were there made sure we inherited that victory. We learned about it in school, we drew our victorious tanks in art class, we knew our enemy was Israel, and we grew up believing we could win any day—even though we’d never heard the sound of a single shell.

The irony is that October was a military victory adopted by the state, and so it became a legacy shared by all. January was a purely popular triumph—yet those who made it kept it to themselves. Why were we able to inherit a war but not a revolution? Why did October give us a sense of power, while January, because of the silence of its witnesses, never made us feel we could win?

My answer is not naive. I don’t blame the state, nor do I expect it to celebrate an event that challenged its authority. I fully understand that regimes, by nature, may not love January and will not pass its torch to new generations. I don’t count on that, nor do I ask for it.

My deepest reproach—my entire lament—is directed at the people. At you, those who took part in the revolution. At the generation that made history, then fell silent. January was orphaned, lacking an institutional body to protect it. But it didn’t have to be orphaned in memory, too.

It deserved to be told at home, regardless of school curriculums which erased it. We should have been raised, orally and emotionally, on the belief that we can change things. That injustice is not eternal. That freedom is worth striving for, even if the outcome falters.

Today, I see children and teenagers who know nothing about January except that it was a time of “riots” or just a public holiday. It was never retold to them by those who lived it—or if it was, it was told with a tone of despair that pushed them away.

Every January, the older generation repeats the phrase, “We once touched the dream.” I believe them, and I respect their sorrow. But I grieve, too, because only they got to touch it. They never let it reach us.

So the real question isn’t “Did the revolution succeed or fail?”

The question is: Can a revolution that is not passed down still be called a revolution?

This isn’t just a reproach for the generation before us. It’s a call to break the silence. Don’t leave our memory to the void or to distortion. Free January from the monopoly of the “wounded,” and gift it to the dreamers.

Tell us the story—with its victories and defeats, its beauty and its ugliness—so we can understand who we are.

I am that child who grew up standing on tiptoe, peeking through the window of history, waiting for someone to open the door.

Please don’t keep it shut. Because the story that isn’t told dies. And we don’t want January to die.