ABSTRACT
The active movement that ate away at the foundations of the Mubarak regime until its fall can be considered to have started in 2004. During that year, Kifaya, a group that brought together liberals, Nasserites, leftists and Islamists, emerged. Kifaya, Arabic for “enough”, staged demonstrations in public spaces that were modest in magnitude but significant in meaning. They expressed their rejection of both the extension of Mubarak’s rule and of the so-called inheritance project in which Gamal, the president’s second son, would take over as head of state when his father stepped down. At the beginning, Kifaya was met with skepticism, yet it proved such skeptics wrong when a number of rejectionist groups emerged in its wake, such as the 9 March Movement, founded at Cairo University by a number of academics. This group had the same political convictions of Kifaya, but naturally emphasized academic freedoms and denounced the systematic interference of state security in university life. Several groups that followed, such as Writers Against Inheritance and The Egyptian Campaign Against Inheritance, focused solely on one objective: resisting the inheritance project. In 2009, the National Association for Change became the standard bearer of the wish to put an end to the Mubarak regime.
