Introduction

Protests broke out in Greece in December 2008 after a fifteen-year-old student was killed by two policemen, resulting in widespread riots in Greece and later, in solidarity demonstrations in several cities such as London and Paris. The Egyptian popular al-Youm al-Sabei newspaper carried out an investigation in the wake of this riot, wondering why Egyptians did not revolt against police abuse as they had done in Greece (Al-Said 2008). Asking several Egyptian citizens and a police general that question, the newspaper journalist expressed her surprise that those she interviewed did not show much interest in joining protests against the police, concluding that those street protesters seemed to be ‘so different from those leading strikes in front of professional syndicates, writing blogs or joining Facebook groups’. The 2011 revolution had therefore come as a shocking and unexpected event. Everyone was left wondering about the conditions which could trigger Egyptians to revolt. This chapter examines these conditions, as defined by selected Egyptian intellectuals, including Islamists, and how the Egyptian uprisings between 1952 and 30 June 2013 have been viewed.

The word ‘revolution’ stems from Latin and has the meaning of ‘change and turn’ (revolving). It perhaps first appeared in political discourse in seventeenth- century England in reference to the Declaration of Rights, which marked the triumph of parliamentarians in what was called the Glorious Revolution. History books also refer to both the American Revolution (1775–83) and the French Revolution (1787–99) as the greatest in modern Western history, in which the first sculpted the relationship between the new independent state and the people, while the latter marked the collapse of the French monarchy and the rise of French republicanism – Liberté, égalité, fraternité.