The year since Mubarak

The year began in Egypt with a sudden but thankfully short-lived rash of self-immolations by aggrieved Egyptians following the example of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young street vendor who set himself ablaze in a solitary protest in southern Tunisia, December 2010. Tongue in cheek, commentator Issandr el-Amrani predicted “a year of spontaneous combustion” and imagined the authorities grappling with an epidemic of suicides across the oppressed nation. But millions of Egyptians, inspired by the Tunisians who drove out President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, had other ideas about how best to express their grievances. Less than a month after the first Egyptian doused himself with petrol and lit the match, President Hosni Mubarak had been toppled from the throne he had held for almost 30 years, pushed out of office by the largest street demonstrations the Middle East has seen since the Iranian revolution of 1979. As the sun set on February