April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

you have been consistent.” Another young man came to embrace me and
say, “Oh Nawal, we are the new generations who read your books. I did
and was guided by creativity and rebellion and the revolution of your
thoughts.”
Swallowing tears, I said to them, “This Eid [festival] is to us all the festival
of freedom, dignity, creativity, rebellion, and the revolution.”
A young woman called Rania said, “We call for a new constitution that
does not distinguish between people on the basis of religion, sex, or creed,
race, or other.” A young Christian named Boutros added, “We want a
uniform civil code of personal status for all people without distinction as
to religion, sex, or sect.” A young man called Tariq told me, “We who
made the revolution have to choose our transitional government and a
national commission to change the constitution.” Another, named
Mohammad Amin, cried, “We want a solution to the People’s Assembly and
Shura Council and the work of fair elections to choose a new president and
boards of a new popularity.” Yet another named Jalal, said, “We are a
popular revolution for a new social contract, we want to select the
transitional government, and to choose the National Committee, which can
change the constitution. We do not want the new-formed Committee of
the Elders of the Revolution, imposing their ideas on us. They are
opportunists who did not participate here with us, suffer here with us.
They arrive now from Europe or America, Egyptians who have lived their
lives outside the homeland, come now to assume the leadership of the
revolution. To them we say: ‘We lead the revolution, having among us our
own “Elders” of young people aged thirty or forty or fifty years; we have
specialists in all scientific, political, economic and other fields.’” And a
young man named Mohammed said “I feel proud for the first time in my
life because I am an Egyptian. Some of us were killed, but we turned the
defeat into victory, paying the price of freedom with the blood of our
martyrs. There is no force that can bring us back to back. Never.”
So they continue, building the city of the field to complete its facilities;
building the makeshift hospital, wherein lies the injured tended by
volunteer doctors and nurses from the crowds of young people; building
the city in the field for which people volunteered blankets and medicines,
cotton and linen, food and water.
This is like a dream.
I live with these young men and women day and night, watching as they
form committees to take on the work of daily cleaning the field to the
transfer of the injured to hospital, to the provision of food and medicines,
to defending the field and responding to the regime’s lies in the media, to
the nomination of names for the Transitional Government.
We are one people. Everyone calls for the departure of Mubarak and his
men in the Party and the government, calls for an end to the bloodshed
like that last Wednesday, and an end to corruption, tyranny, and over 30
years of entrenched governance, and calls for a chance to speak the rest
of our reality out loud to the world.
This English language version is a Women’s Media Center Exclusive that will
also be posted on the Ms. Magazine Blog.
www.zcommunications.org
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and
do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not
endorse candidates.