I grew up in Cairo under Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for longer than I had been alive. I was 15 when the revolution erupted in January 2011, a high school student just coming into political consciousness as the streets around me cracked open with possibilities for otherwise futures.

Two years later, politics had permeated our homes, our friendships, our classrooms, our morgues. In July 2013, the military, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, overthrew Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Over the following weeks, Morsi’s supporters camped and protested in eastern Cairo near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque. In August 2013, the military and police opened fire on the protesters in what came to be known as the Rabaa massacre. The father of a dear friend was among those killed.

Enraged, I joined the street movement against the coup. On Oct. 6, 2013, I was arrested at a mass protest near Tahrir Square and spent the next six years and three months as a political prisoner. Released by a chance miracle in 2020, I fled Egypt for the United States.

Gen. el-Sisi crowned himself field marshal and president and continues to rule Egypt. The revolution has been crushed, tens of thousands remain imprisoned, and economic hardship has broken the backs of Egyptians. When I look back at my country, I see an Egypt structured by ghosts: four relentless hauntings that explain what has become of the country in the wake of those fleeting blue mornings in January 2011, when we were last touched by a dream.

Something always draws me back to Qasr El-Nil bridge. Even in my prison cell, I often closed my eyes and returned to the faded bronze of the two lions at its threshold. To Jan. 28, 2011, the "Friday of Rage," three days after the spark of the Egyptian revolution. Specifically: the famous video of clashes atop the bridge between protesters and police. 

Throughout the clip, security forces push the protesters back; armored vehicles accelerate to drive bodies back. Tear gas canisters sizzle through the air, leaving cloudy trails as they sail toward the advancing sea of bodies. Water cannons slam into protesters, catapulting them backward. Rubber bullets crack bones.

Yet something wondrous keeps happening: each time the police push the protesters off the bridge, the protesters surge forward again. And each time they return, they push and trespass farther. Push. Return. Trespass. Push. Return. Trespass. Until something ruptures: the masses start running not away from but toward the forces.

And you can tell that everyone on that bridge feels the rupture rip through the air, because for a split second, even the police freeze, confounded. And once the rupture takes hold, the soldiers—those who have never been run toward—turn and flee. The crowd erupts—cheering, screaming, cursing—as if shocked by the very movement of their bodies, the bodies they have always moved but have never moved this way before.  This is the second haunting. I begin with the second because I write from and toward the rupture.

To grasp Egypt's ghosts today, we must understand its first haunting: the Eagle Family. Since the Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952, Egypt’s political order has remained, in practice, under military rule. Officers emerged from that coup as the architects of the new state and cast themselves as the custodians of its national interest.

The military’s authority has been sanctified over seven decades, and that exalted status extends to the broader security apparatus: police, prosecutors, judges, and intelligence officers. Together they form the Eagle Family, named after the emblem on the Egyptian flag that also adorns officials’ uniforms. The eagle became shorthand for an implicit social contract: those who bear it personify the nation; those outside its ranks are expendable.

Then, the expendable subjects rose up in revolt on Jan. 25, 2011. After decades of repression, Egyptians were shaken by the brutal 2010 torture and killing of Khaled Saeed, a 28-year-old........

© Time