"Stunning end!"

"...“From Tahrir Square to our brothers in fellow countries ... is there anyone who has a president bothering them?”......

 (via AngryArab)

The beginning was as stunning a moment as the Arab world has witnessed, written in the smallest acts of citizenship and the grandest gestures of defiance. From the first day, Tahrir Square represented a model of people seizing the initiative from a hapless government, be it cleaning the streets or running their own security. The very acts seemed an antidote to decades of autocracy, stagnation and festering resentment over their own powerlessness. “We’ve discovered ourselves,” said one of the organizers, Wael Khalil.

As revelatory was a new form of politics, the protests of the long-derided Arab street, where dutiful crowds were trotted out at the whim of dictators in Syria and Iraq or deployed by the sheer organizational skills of Islamist movements like Lebanon’s Hezbollah....

Protesters in Cairo were blunter. One leader had fallen, but some worried about a military that sought to claim the mantle of the revolution even as it remained a bulwark of the old order. Asked what they would do if it imposed its own brand of rule, Ahmed Sleem, an organizer with an opposition group led by Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate, said simply, “We know the way to Tahrir Square.”...

Whatever order emerges will almost certainly be less favorable to Israel and the United States, both symbols to many protesters of Egyptian subservience. It was no coincidence that the most outspoken proponents of Mr. Mubarak’s rule were Israel and Saudi Arabia who, with Egypt, formed the spine of American dominance in the region. Nor will economic reforms of the kind mandated by the International Monetary Fund make headway in a country that blames them for creating a class of crony capitalists.

But a defining trait of Egypt’s revolution was the way it looked inward at a country whose stagnation rankled even more than the petty humiliations of the police and the prisons that held thousands without charge. Democracy was the cry on Friday in Tahrir Square, a way to rejuvenation, even as some acknowledged that the unity that created one of the most remarkable tableaus in Egyptian history could splinter as it faces a transition that remained opaque....

Egypt’s military struck the right note in its communiqués. A spokesman even raised his hand in salute as he praised the youths killed in the revolution. But like the bureaucracy, utterly incapable of meeting the demands of a city of 18 million, the military remains an entrenched institution, itself a symbol of the array of interests — from tribes in Jordan, a ruling minority in Syria and ruling families in the gulf — that may offer up some reform, as Bahrain and Yemen’s leaders have, to defuse radical change....

Few believe that the revolution will represent the kind of moment that Eastern Europe experienced in 1989. The Arab world, ruled by monarchies, republics and something in between, has too many different ideologies and disparate histories. Of all Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt have the strongest sense of national identity, a cohesiveness that helped their revolutions coalesce so quickly. Neither had a military that would brutally crush dissent (as in Syria), or the ability to play off populations against each other (as in Jordan) or even the money to pay people to stay quiet (as in the gulf)....

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Egypt’s revolution, though, will prove its most intangible: a sense of pride. After the 1967 war, Nizar Qabbani, a renowned Arab poet, wrote, “Our shouting is louder than our actions, our swords are taller than us. This is our tragedy.” On Friday night in Tahrir Square, the song of a contemporary, the Egyptian icon Abdel-Halim Hafez, blared from the speakers. Everyone nearby shouted the chorus.

“You rose up, oh Egypt. And after patience and the night came victory,” it went. “Egypt, you rose up, and your son succeeded and he waved your flag high.”