Egypt offers another example that non-violent and united protest by a determined people can change the course of history. It can dismantle powerful dictatorships that have powerful friends and can bring down an empire. The unbelievable 18-day uprising of the Egyptian masses which on February 11 ended the 30-year authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak is quite unique. It appeared on the scene without preparation or previous mobilisation or propaganda. (The success of the people’s protest in Tunisia, which came earlier, is similar but not quite the same category: the Tunisian dictator fled the scene very rapidly, the complexities of geo-strategic calculation in Tunisia’s case are far less, and Tunisia’s weight in the Arab world bears no comparison with that of Egypt.)

This singular quality sets it apart from the great struggle and victory of the majority blacks in South Africa, the tumult in Russia that brought down communism, and the triumph of the Iranian people which ended the empire of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Non-violent mass uprisings caused all of the above. For this reason the assertion of the will of the people is feared by state-formations that were not constructed by the people themselves. But the recent case of Egypt makes the further point that non-representative governments can collapse suddenly in the face of popular revolt if the challengers do not permit themselves to be divided or distracted. For this reason, all the regimes of the Arab world may today find themselves under pressure.
While the air in Egypt is reported to be one of hope and celebration, there is also unmistakably the air of an unfinished revolution about Egypt. This sense of incomplete business is a cause for uncertainty. For the time being the military has taken over. The Army, which had propped up President Mubarak, is for now seen to be on the side of the people whose key demand, of course, was that Mubarak relinquish power. With this being accomplished, will the people who toppled the dictator be ready to accept the tutelage of the armed forces and stay under their rule? We can’t be sure. The protesters who took centrestage were an amorphous mass with no clear-cut ideas of their political future. For its part, the Army may be perfectly willing to end the emergency law which helped Mubarak stay in power and allow a degree of political freedoms. The story could then quite plausibly turn out to be something like Pakistan where the military runs the show but allows political parties and people the illusion of being masters of their destiny. On the other hand, it is Egypt’s Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 and has greater experience of surviving through various regimes than any other political stream that Egypt has known, that can show the political skill and stamina to rise to the top in Egypt’s new political life. It has the organisation and the spread. That is why it was called by the Army for talks alongside the others though it is a proscribed party. The tactics and the game-plan of the MB are, thus, likely to be under scrutiny in Egypt and internationally.
Egypt is the political, intellectual and cultural nerve centre of the Arab universe. The emergence there of political Islam of the kind that frightens people is likely to have wide influence throughout West Asia, a region rich in petroleum around which much of world economics and politics revolves, and not a little impact internationally. Since the business of political change in Egypt may have only just started, Cairo will be in the eye of the storm for some time to come.