Published: 26 January, 2012
by JULIE TOMLIN

When the author Ahdaf Soueif arrived back in London after taking part in the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, shopkeepers and cabbies wanted to shake her hand.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to touch some of the “glitter” of Tahrir, says Soueif, who divides her time between London and Cairo.

Wherever she went in the world she met with the same response – because, she believes, the uprising that started in Egypt on January 25 showed us “the best of humanity”.

“I think the Egyptian revolution was a great symbol of hope in the world,” says Soueif, whose  latest book, Cairo My City, Our Revolution is published this week: “The fact that people could act with such unity; that a civilian population could, unarmed and non-violent, force the removal of the head of a corrupt and brutal regime was a general cause for optimism.”

Those “18 golden days” from January 25 to when President Mubarak stepped down on February 11, showed the Egyptian people not just what they could do but how they could be, Soueif writes.

It was this way of “being” that has captured the world’s imagination and inspired people’s movements, including the Occupy movement in London.

“The Occupy movements address the deep injustices of society and the structural problems that have resulted from the economic policies of the last three decades,” says Soueif. “As such they address many of the deep issues that the revolutions in the Arab world also address. You can basically sum them up as young people don’t like the direction that the world is taking with rampant capitalism, inequality and injustice, ecological disaster – in other words the world is being run in the interests of the few.”

Soueif’s memoir brings alive all the atmosphere and emotion of those 18 days.

There’s the young man – who she later finds out is one of 300 across Cairo and Egypt – who is raised above the crowd after Friday prayers on January 25 and begins the chant: “The people – demand – the fall of this regime!”

The people around him join in and begin to walk – as do thousands of others – to the amazement of the organisers.

We are given a glimpse into the vibrant culture of the Tahrir Midan, where there were cinemas, performance artists and experiments with organisation, communication and decision-making as well as pitched battles with the forces of the Mubarak regime.

There are snapshots of the frenzied activity of the young people involved in helping the injured, or setting up newspapers or making films as well as forming street patrols to protect Cairo’s streets when Mubarak set his thugs on the people.

The writer, whose novels include The Map of Love, an account of the consequences of British imperialism and Egyptian nationalism, also describes remarkable acts of courage shown by people in the face of the regime’s brutality, including her sister, Laila Soueif, who with two older women challenged the soldiers whose guns pointed at the young men.

She writes: “They shove several young men out of the way and they’re standing in front of the soldiers with their arms spread wide. ‘Shoot us, then,’ they say to the soldiers, ‘shoot the women. Shoot the mothers of Egypt. Shoot your mothers.”

This incident, however, took place on July 23 last year, and is part of a section titled “Interruption” that breaks up the narrative.

These pages illuminate the “dark forces” that have been at work in Egypt since February 11, when the counter revolution began, says Soueif, who is at pains to convey the importance of the present as well as record the heady days of the uprising.

The path of the revolution, Soueif admits, has not been “smooth”.

“How could it have been when the interests we are seeking to break free of are so powerful and so pervasive?” she writes. “A revolution is a process, not an event.”

Shortly after February 11, when Soueif spoke in London, she argued that the people had little option other than to trust the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

More than 10 months later, speaking at London’s Frontline Club, Soueif recognised that SCAF had betrayed the trust of the people: they have had an opportunity “every minute of every day since 11 February” to prove that they were worthy of the people’s trust but instead they had abused it and lost an “opportunity to go down in history as a military that actually saved their country,” she said.

But the power of those days remains.

“We are not alone,” she writes. “We were never alone; the feelings, the prayers, the messages that came pouring into Egypt from every place on Earth during those 18 days of Tahrir lodged in our minds and in our hearts and affirmed every minute what we knew already: that the freedom we sought was the freedom people wanted for us, and for themselves.”

• Cairo My City, Our Revolution. By Ahdaf Soueif. Bloomsbury publishing £14.99