A Republic Called Tahrir
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
CAIRO — Beyond politics there is culture. You don’t live on the same patch of land for millennia without acquiring a deep form of it. If, for Flaubert, style was “the discharge from a deeper wound,” Egyptian culture is also the product of this nation’s scars. Its wisdom, issued from suffering, is rooted in humanity.
Tahrir Square — the locus of a great national awakening from almost six decades of dictatorship, overlooked appropriately enough by a museum that houses the Egyptian heritage and by the headquarters of the long-slumbering Arab League — has become a reflection of that culture. Its spontaneous development into a tolerant mini-republic is a riposte to President Hosni Mubarak’s warnings of chaos.
Far from chaos, there is serendipitous order. “We’ve been organizing as we go; if there’s a problem, solve it,” Omar el-Shamy, a 21-year-old student who hasn’t left the square for a week, told me. Through necessity talent is allotted: the doctor here, the engineer there, the security guy in that corner and the IT expert in this one.
An infirmary is born. Garbage is collected, defense marshaled. Food is ferried, prayer respected. The Brotherhood coexists with a dynamic sisterhood. As my colleague David Kirkpatrick remarked of a flag-waving youth atop a lamppost: “Where is Delacroix when you need him?”
(More here.)
NYT
CAIRO — Beyond politics there is culture. You don’t live on the same patch of land for millennia without acquiring a deep form of it. If, for Flaubert, style was “the discharge from a deeper wound,” Egyptian culture is also the product of this nation’s scars. Its wisdom, issued from suffering, is rooted in humanity.
Tahrir Square — the locus of a great national awakening from almost six decades of dictatorship, overlooked appropriately enough by a museum that houses the Egyptian heritage and by the headquarters of the long-slumbering Arab League — has become a reflection of that culture. Its spontaneous development into a tolerant mini-republic is a riposte to President Hosni Mubarak’s warnings of chaos.
Far from chaos, there is serendipitous order. “We’ve been organizing as we go; if there’s a problem, solve it,” Omar el-Shamy, a 21-year-old student who hasn’t left the square for a week, told me. Through necessity talent is allotted: the doctor here, the engineer there, the security guy in that corner and the IT expert in this one.
An infirmary is born. Garbage is collected, defense marshaled. Food is ferried, prayer respected. The Brotherhood coexists with a dynamic sisterhood. As my colleague David Kirkpatrick remarked of a flag-waving youth atop a lamppost: “Where is Delacroix when you need him?”
(More here.)
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