Ecstatic crowds in Cairo prove there is no clash of civilisations – everyone wants freedom. The question is, how to get it?'No one predicted this, but everyone could explain it afterwards." Said of another revolution, as true of this one. "To be honest, we thought we'd last about five minutes,"one of the organisers of the original 25 January protest which began this Egyptian revolution told the BBC. "We thought we'd get arrested straight away." If they had been, if Hosni Mubarak's security forces had once again murdered the foetus in the womb, the world wide web would now be filled with articles by experts explaining why "Egypt is not Tunisia". Instead, the web is abuzz with instant, confident explanations of what nobody anticipated. Such are the illusions of retrospective determinism.
So before we go any further, let us make two deep bows. First and deepest to those who started this, at great personal risk, with no support from the professedly freedom-loving west, and against a regime that habitually uses torture. Honour and respect to you. Second, hats off to Lady Luck, contingency, fortuna – which, as Machiavelli observed, accounts for half of everything that happens in human affairs. No revolution has ever got anywhere without brave individuals and good luck.
One leathery old victim of this revolution, at whose death we should rejoice, is the fallacy of cultural determinism – and specifically the notion that Arabs and/or Muslims are not really up for freedom, dignity and human rights. Their "culture", so we were assured by Samuel Huntington and others, programmed them otherwise. Tell that to the people dancing on Tahrir Square.
This is not to deny that the religious-political patterns of both radical and conservative Islam, and specific legacies of modern Arab history, will make a transition to consolidated liberal democracy more difficult than it was in, say, the Czech Republic. They will. Maybe the whole thing will still go horribly wrong. But the profoundly condescending idea that "this could never happen there" has been refuted on the streets of Tunis and Cairo.
While we are talking determinisms, let's dispense with another one. In tags like "Facebook revolution", "Twitter revolution" and "Al-Jazeera revolution", we meet again the ghost of technological determinism. Talking to friends in Cairo, I am left in no doubt that these media did play a major role in organising and multiplying the popular protests that began on 25 January. As I have been writing this column, I have been watching the growth of the Facebook page set up by Egyptians to "authorise" Wael Ghonim, the Google executive recently released from prison and newly anointed hero of the revolution, to speak in their name. When I first visited it, at 08:51 on Wednesday morning, it had 213,376 people following it; as this article goes to press (and what a gloriously arcane phrase that is!) it has 236,305. Ghonim had been the pseudonymous organiser of an earlier Facebook page which contributed to the protests, and now has more than 600,000 followers.
As in Tunisia, it is the interaction of online and mobile social networks with the older superpower of television that creates the catalytic effect. Al-Jazeera TV has produced a compelling narrative of liberation struggle, drawing on blogposts and blurry footage from mobile phone cameras. Ghonim became a popular hero because soon after his release from prison he appeared on an Egyptian television programme, thus reaching a wider mass audience for the first time. So these old and new technologies of communication matter enormously – but they did not prevent popular protest movements being crushed in Belarus and Iran, they do not determine the outcome, and the medium is not the message.
Then we have the historical analogies. I have lost count of how many articles I have seen (including, I hasten to add, one by myself) asking whether or not this is the Arab 1989. "The Arab world's Berlin Wall moment," shouts one headline. "This is no 1989 moment," cries another. The comparison may not, in the end, tell us all that much about what is happening in Egypt, Tunisia or Jordan – but it certainly tells us something about 1989. There is no longer any doubt that 1989 has become the early 21st century's default model and metaphor for revolution. Forget 1917, 1848 or 1789.
A close runner-up, in the analogy stakes, is Iran in 1979 – and the prospect of radical, violent Islamists coming out on top. Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who has produced some splendid reported columns from Tunisia and Egypt, follows the first law of journalism ("first simplify, then exaggerate") when he writes that the "core issue" in Egypt is "are we witnessing Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989?" To which one answer is: what we are witnessing in Cairo in 2011 is Cairo 2011. I mean this not in the trivial sense that every event is unique, but in a deeper one. For what characterises a true revolution is the emergence of something genuinely new, on the one hand, and the return of a suppressed human universal on the other.
New in Cairo 2011 is that it is now Arabs and Muslims standing up in large numbers, with courage and (for the most part) peaceful discipline, for basic human dignity, against corrupt, oppressive rulers. New in 2011 is the degree of decentered, networked animation of the demonstrations, so that even the best-informed observers there struggle to answer the question "who is organising this?". New in 2011 is the extraordinary underlying pressure of demography, with half the population in most of these countries being under 25.
Old in Cairo 2011 – as old as the pyramids, as old as human civilisation – is the cry of oppressed men and women, overcoming the barrier of fear and feeling, however fleetingly, the sense of freedom and dignity. My heart jumped for joy as I watched the footage of the vast, celebrating crowds in central Cairo on Tuesday. But when we have finished humming the prisoners' chorus from Beethoven's Fidelio, we must remind ourselves that these moments are always transient. The hard grind of consolidating liberty is all ahead.
This is where historical comparisons come into their own. They are no substitute for firsthand, informed analysis of the unique circumstances on the spot. What they do offer, however, is an extensive toolkit of experience, showing the many ways in which a revolution can go wrong and the rare combination needed for it to keep going right.
Neither on the opposition nor on the official side do I yet see a vital ingredient for it going right: the organised, credible partners for a negotiated transition. Some proto-organisation has clearly emerged on Tahrir Square.
In Ghonim, the protesters have a symbol who might yet become a leader. But we seem still to be a very long way from any alliance of opposition forces that could funnel popular pressure to the negotiating table. On the official side, Hosni Mubarak and his vice-president must give way to an interim government, headed by someone acceptable to all (or at least, most) sides – someone like the wily old Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League. Only when those two things happen may we begin to have confidence that the Egyptian revolution is on the right road.