Thanassis Cambanis

Egypt’s revolutionaries suspect the ecumenical and utopian nature of their wave will bless the next phase of their struggle. So many of the people I talked to on the streets today – before and after Mubarak skulked to his summer palace – already were busy imagining a future in their own indigenous vernacular. Mubarak’s cruelty drove them into a frenzy of rage, but once released from their state-induced torpor and timidity, they found themselves more interested in screaming about the things they wanted, rather than the things they wanted to get rid of.

Mubarak was a spark but also a footnote.

“He treated us all as if we were stupid,” said Leila Abdelbar, a staffer on parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “He underestimated us. He should have respected us.” She was angry, at a father who didn’t take his own children seriously. She also was angry at herself, for having acted for so long like she believed him.

“We have to thank our children for showing us the way,” she said, looking with adoration at her daughter Heba.

She and her friends are conservative Muslims, some of them wearing the full-face covering niqab. They’re not in the Muslim Brotherhood and they’re not interested in an Islamic state; they spoke with longing about a new constitution, a reconstituted judiciary, and a state that provided basic rights: rule of law, education, health and safety.

No one in the crowd used the American democracy vocabulary. They spoke with organic idioms, conjuring huriya, liberty, based on citizens who took their own rights, rather than received them as a leader’s prerogative. “We will take our rights,” many people repeated; they meant that they would demand a new compact, in which they would articulate their needs and if those needs went unmet, they would remake their state.

The specifics varied, and some people still drifted in vague hope for something better. Some talked of their right not to be arrested at will by unaccountable secret police. Some yearned for better schools and hospital care for the poor.

Protest leaders feted the moment but kept planning. “We’ll work until the last moment,” said Basem Kamel, one of the leaders of the Baradei civil reform campaign. Youth leaders were meeting at 1 a.m. to coordinate a clean withdrawal from the square and set negotiating terms for their discussions with the army (Kamel is 41 and balding, but youth is also a state of mind).

I have no doubt there will be reversals ahead, but Egypt has written a new chapter in modern history with utter disregard for all expectations for the contrary – their own as well as those of outsiders. There’s every reason to hope that the same millions of Egyptians who drove a tyrant to flee without firing a shot and without calling for the destruction of anything, and who discarded all their traditional corroded institutions to invent a unified popular front, might now manage the parlous task of writing a new constitution, convincing the military to abdicate to a truly civilian order, and crafting a polity dedicated to serving its own citizens’ conception of their right to justice, liberty and security.

“We did it,” Ziad Al-Alaimy said after lifting me off the ground in a bear hug. “Tomorrow belongs to us.”

It’s a long road ahead, surely, but as many people said: Egypt has learned the way to Tahrir Square. They won’t soon forget it, and let’s hope, neither will their new leaders.