The Arab Spring

The first account belongs to the people who built it, and it begins six months before Bouazizi, in that internet cafe in Alexandria.

The photograph Khaled Said's family took at the morgue, jaw broken, skull fractured, teeth knocked out, became the Facebook page that had half a million followers within three months, and it is the page that posted the call to march on January the twenty fifth.

The revolutionaries had no vanguard party, no ideology, no armed wing. In Tunisia, a labor union with five hundred thousand members called the strikes that paralyzed the country. In Egypt, the square itself became a government: field hospitals, food committees, a newspaper printed on the pavement.

The second account is the one every falling government was making at the time, in its own words, and Syria said it loudest.

Five weeks later his own security forces were firing on unarmed demonstrators in Daraa.

The argument had three parts. Order: Egypt's state employed five point six million people, and its army owned an estimated twenty five to forty percent of the economy. Identity: a state guaranteeing Alawites, Christians, and Druze against a Sunni majority. And the alternative: look at what happens when the state actually falls, in Libya.

Saudi Arabia spent one hundred thirty billion dollars on housing, unemployment benefits, and a new minimum wage, before a single protester reached its own streets.

The third account belongs to an organization that had been organizing since 1928, eighty three years before this moment.

By 2011 it had chapters in every Arab country and the deepest grassroots network in the region: clinics and schools that reached millions the state had abandoned. When Egypt held its first free parliamentary elections that November, its party took thirty seven and a half percent of the vote, and Islamist parties together held seventy three percent of parliament.

That was not a hijacking of the revolution. It was eighty years of organizing the secular opposition had not done.

Mohammed Morsi won the presidential runoff in June 2012 with fifty one point seven percent of the vote. Here he is, campaigning in Tahrir Square that same month.

His government lasted three hundred sixty eight days.

The fourth account says the revolution ended the day outside money noticed it, and it can put a date on that.

On March the fourteenth, 2011, twelve hundred Saudi troops crossed the King Fahd Causeway into Bahrain, to make sure a Shia majority near Saudi Arabia's own oil fields never got what Tunisia got.

Qatar funded the Brotherhood through Al Jazeera and roughly three billion dollars in direct support. Saudi Arabia deposited five billion dollars in Egypt's central bank within weeks of the coup that removed it. The revolution was fought with chants. The counter revolution was fought with checkbooks.

NATO's seven thousand seven hundred air strikes over Libya were authorized to protect civilians and ended by removing a government. Russia cites Libya as the reason it vetoed Syria resolutions seventeen times.

The fifth account starts less than a month after Mubarak fell, when the Egyptian military detained seventeen women from Tahrir Square and forced them to submit to what soldiers called virginity tests, examinations conducted by a male military doctor while soldiers watched.

A protester named Samira Ibrahim sued the military over it. She won. The doctor was acquitted on appeal.

Women had been in this from day one. On January the eighteenth, a twenty six year old named Asmaa Mahfouz posted a video calling Egyptians to march.

Tunisia guaranteed gender equality in its 2014 constitution and equalized inheritance rights. Egypt's post coup constitution had fewer protections for women than the one it replaced. Human Rights Watch counted at least one hundred eighty six cases of mob sexual assault in Tahrir Square between 2012 and 2014.