Editor: Text of the speech of a leading Coptic intellectual at Tahrir Square.

 

When the 'Prince of Poets' Ahmad Shawqī returned to the homeland from exile in 1920 following the end of the events of the 1919 revolution, he addressed the following verses to the nation:

 

  

I think we all, young and old, are meeting anew with our beloved nation, its visage glowing with freshness, vitality, and enthusiasm, after despair, stagnation, and the long wait had wracked us in the absence of any glimmer of hope. Tahrir (Liberation) Square, that you have transformed into freedom square, has become thanks to your glorious uprising the shining face of the nation and a bastion of freedom in the face of tyranny. Our blossoming youth, who loyally wrested the flame of the age and its modernity from the jaws of oppression, illuminating with them the gloominess of our daily lives, has to be recognized as a joyous new generation born of your pure hands the day you woke Egypt from its deep stupor, the day your sincere acts ignited the flame after we had lost all hope.

 

The hardships of recent days have united us, and death brought us together; for the martyrs of New Year's Eve at Alexandria's Church of the Two Saints stand side by side with the martyrs among the youth of the uprising in the 'week of rage' in paying on our behalf the price for a free and dignified life.

 

They have tried to no avail to rob us of the spirit of the nation; they struck at us once with the explosives they implanted at the Church of the Two Saints, and many times with the sticks, teargas, rubber bullets, and live bullets that struck your bare chests when you spoke the truth to the rulers of the nation.