The people of Egypt are experiencing what Hannah Arendt describes in the” Life of the Mind “ as an “event breaking into the continuum of chronological time “.
For today, and since the beginning of their Revolution, they are in this exhilarating time zone between the “ no more” and the “ not yet”: everything seems possible because on the one hand, the past is slowly moving away and becoming an impossibility, while on the other, the future has not yet materialized. It only appears in a dense fog, displaying the colors of a sumptuous rainbow. Theirs is a privileged zone , where hope-drunken people are awaiting the birth of a new world .
People in that zone experience time differently from the way we, onlookers ,do.
For us, Time is a successions of nows, linked together in a continuously flowing stream of consciousness. ( Bergson) But for those actively participating in the Revolution, there is no stream, no past , no future but only an everlasing Now. Time is abolished , or better yet , has lost its relativeness and has stopped having a hold on them. They mock its laws , and by doing so , get closer to the gods than at any other time of their lives. They now participate in the divine essence, outside the world and outside Time, while getting ready to lay down the foundation of a new order. Revolutionaries live in the zone of the “ absolute”, where only the gods dwell .
Yesterday, Mohammed Al Baradei requested the immediate departure of the tyrant, declaring to the world that the Egyptian people want a “new beginning”. Mrs Clinton, operating in the Eastern Standard Zone responded by offering “ reforms”.
The world is scared of that new beginning , an uncertain future that has never been planned, and that the Egyptian people will have to reinvent on a daily basis . But the world forgets that new beginnings are what life is all about: For it is the essence of Nature to constantly regenerate itself through the process of deaths and rebirths, ends and beginnings. As Hannah Arendt says it so well, beginnings are a function of " natality”, and not “creativity”.
The Egyptians want a new beginning the way the European exiles wanted a new beginning when they first set foot in America. Those new immigrants never meant a beginning in the absolute sense of the word but were only aiming at restoring the values of justice and liberty that their native countries had shed .
The hippy movement in the 60’s was not a new beginning in the sense that it was born in a vacuum , but a movement aiming at restoring authenticity and returning to a nature that an industrialized society was leaving behind.
And when Karl Marx described socialism as the only just society of the future, all he was trying to do ( hard to believe but true) is find a way to restore Paradise on earth .
There are no new absolute beginnings because every new wave is the resurgence of an old one in a definite past and the one before it a resurgence of even an older one: and so forth until we reach the first initial wave --which is unreachable because it is outside of human history ( Hannah Arendt)
Nothing in the Egyptian Revolution points to an Islamic wave. All we see is people battered by years of hunger and humiliation seeking a better life . And if indeed the Internet was a major factor in the people’s move towards freedom, then it means that the Egyptians are seeking outside their own history, a foundation for their new beginning. There are very good chances that this foundation is the Democratic ideal
And if indeed there are Muslim slogans chanted , they are an attempt of the people to restore some of that old dignity and righteousness that was the hallmark of Islam in its most brilliant times.
Egypt is a five-thousand years old highly refined civilization with a sumptuous history and fabulous princesses backing it . Time and again, during those ancient and modern times, the Egyptians have come as a people and as a "we" , to make countless new beginnings.
Why not give them the benefit of the doubt ?
