Thread by @AbuMrouj

Fifty years ago this month, Egyptian university students launched one of the great uprisings in modern history. Their efforts and accomplishments should be remembered by anyone who cheered for #25Jan

#انتفاضةـالطلاب

Jan 1972: engineering students @ Cairo University organize a Palestine solidarity exhibit. Within days, this grows into a mass protest.
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Palestinian-Egyptian solidarity is self-evident: both peoples are fighting to liberate their soil from Israeli occupation. They chant:
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For his part, Pres. Sadat’s grip on power is shaky. Never popular, he faces opposition for reversing Nasser’s labor and land reforms. Factions in the military challenge him in unsuccessful coups.
Sadat had declared 1971 “year of decision.” The year ends w/o action.

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13Jan: Sadat postpones military engagement with Israel yet again. This time because of “the fog” of civil war in Pakistan.

Sadat’s policy of “no peace, no war” was far from popular. In campus broadsheets (مجلات الحائط) student groups skewer Sadat’s indecisiveness.

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17Jan: University students hold Palestine Solidarity Conference in Sawi Lecture Hall @ Cairo U, demanding mass mobilization to liberate Egypt.

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They chant:
يا شباب ثور ثور وارفض الاعتقالات الزور

أنور بيه يا أنور بيه بعت مصر ولا أيه؟

ياللي تاجروا بفلسطين هتبيعوا الشعب المصري لمين؟

الصحيوني على ترابي والمباحث على بابي

قالوا يسار قالوا يمين واعتقلوا أخواننا الوطنيين

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19Jan: 2nd conference to discuss the issue of preparing the Home Front for war effort. Ends with decision to occupy campus.

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2500 students agree to participate in first sit-ins. First National Student Committee formed, led by Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Sha‘ban, Siham Sabri, Muhammad Abu l-Wafa’, Kamal Khalil, and others.

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20Jan: National High Committee for the Students of Cairo University formed, led by: Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Sha‘ban, Ahmad Abdallah, Zayn al-Abdin Fu’ad, Hani Idward, Shawqi al-Kurdi.

Campus Occupation continues, pissing off officials.

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20Jan: 10,000 students attend conference in Cairo U’s main events hall. Student activist Zayn al-Abdin Fu’ad starts things off by reading his 1967 elegy to ‘Abd al-Hakam al-Garrahi:

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Students assemble and begin to march, chanting:
شباب مصر
عشان مصر
حيمشي في طريقه
لحد النصر

ضم الصوابع ضمها
واضرب بيدك
الأرض أرضك
والغريب بيضمها

دم أخواتنا مش قربان
لا للعملا والأمريكان

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Students say that they will continue their strike until their demands are announced in newspapers and on the radio & Sadat comes to the university to meet with them.

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20Jan: Student Union of al-Azhar University: “We fully believe that a military solution is the only way to liberate Egyptian land. We reject any concession and bargaining away of any inch of our Arab lands, and reject any neglecting of the rights of the Palestinian people.”

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Campus occupation continues. The poet, Ahmed Fouad Negm, composes a panegyric to them: “The Kids Are Back.”

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23Jan: Students decide to march to Parliament, with banners, loudspeakers and song. Govt officials convince students to send delegation instead.
Students meet with officials in parliament and reach an agreement to announce student demands in state media at 11PM.

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State media announces instead: the University is now closed & Sadat will hold a national conference on January 25.
24Jan: 1AM Gamāl al-‘Aṭayfī, head of Parliamentary legislative committee, informs students that they’d been tricked.

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430AM security Forces surround the university. Over loudspeakers, they demand students surrender. With axes and crowbars, they break into occupied halls.
5AM: Student committee ends campus occupation. Students exit the building between two rows of soldiers. 100s arrested.

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Students are taken to training camp in Tora, then held together in a single barracks, a former horse stable.
Police separate 30 leaders from the rest. These are taken to Citadel Prison and held for more than 30 days. (Negm would compose أنا رحت القلعة in their honor).

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24Jan 8AM: Students who did not spend the night at the university arrive to find security forces surrounding the university.
Prevented from entering the university, students reassemble at the Nahdat Misr statue. Ayn Shams students arrive and add their support.

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24 Jan 2PM: Calls go out to converge on Midan Tahrir. 20,000 students & workers stage mass sit-in, using the Astra Café as headquarters. Sheikh Imam and Negm perform while students sing along.

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Human printing press. Dozens of students stand next to committee members writing up a communiqué. They recite it out loud from the original, while others copy. Hundreds of copies produced in minutes.

Writers, artists, & poets come to see for themselves.

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25 Jan 5AM: Central Security Forces attack Midan Tahrir at dawn. With billy clubs, tear gas, bullets & firehoses. Many decide to make a final stand at the Tahrir landmark known as the Stone Cake.

Students escape into downtown, singing “أصحي يامصر”

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Sadat says: “The students are fine, but there is a minority of deviants among them, thirty or so. They go around, insulting their professors, smoking cigarettes. The boys and girls are mixing together. It’s morally reprehensible.”

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Tahrir is cleared after many hours of skirmishes in the street. Student leaders languish in jail for the days and weeks that followed. The poet/activist Zayn al-‘Abdin Fu’ad, one of dozens held at the Citadel, composes poems from the inside, including this gem:
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The state press is filled with patronizing nonsense about the students, with accusations of foreign influence and outside agitators. The events quickly disappear from state media even though they were unprecedented & shook the Sadat regime to the core.
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Establishment writers Haykel, Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi & Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus talk condescendingly about youthful enthusiasm, while offering stern warnings not to cross the rule of law.
In contrast, Muhammad Sayyid Ahmad & Louis ‘Awad think the students had a point.

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Negm was also rounded up. He languished in the Citadel Prison even after the students were released. Besides his remarkable short poem, “I went to the Citadel,” he also composed others, including this dialogic experiment, “Page from the Case File.”

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The uprising of 1972 became a loud silence in the historical record. Aside from memoirs, oral tradition & Abdalla’s foundational study, little of this radical history is known outside activist circles.
Also vividly described in Aslan’s The Heron or Ashour’s Warm Stone.

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And in poetry too, especially also Amal Dunqul’s “Stone Cake Song,” which appeared in the March issue of Sanabil. Borrowing from Lorca, Dunqul narrates the bravery and brutality of #25Jan as an elegy.

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The official reaction to Dunqul’s poem was swift: Sanabil, the extraordinary journal dedicated to experimental modernism with military themes was shuttered soon after, never to appear again. What a loss.

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The student movement would continue for five more years, reaching its zenith with the Jan 1977 Bread Uprising which nearly toppled Sadat.

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This generation of student militants would go on to dominate Egyptian arts and letters and politics for the next forty years.

Besides those mentioned, see also: Yusry Nasrallah, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Fathi Imbabi, Hani Shukrallah & many, many more...

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