These are uprisings with all the energy and optimism of a rock festival

Traditional political assumptions cannot be applied to an opposition movement going through a chaotic - and joyful - birth
Peter Beaumont-The Observer

A girl waves her national flag as anti-government protesters gather in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Photograph: Manoocher Deghati/AP

There was a moment last week in Cairo that gave me pause for thought. I was talking to Mohamed Negahid, a 30-year-old quality manager, at a pro-Mubarak demonstration outside the state television station.

Egypt, he told me, was not like Tunisia, where I had been barely two weeks before, covering the Jasmine Revolution that deposed Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Nor is Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, like Ben Ali.

He was right, of course. All revolutions have their own trajectories and fault lines. But something else struck me. Used to a certain kind of politics in our own countries, we have been looking to find the same in these upheavals in the Arab world. And not finding it, we have declared the process unfocused or unsatisfactory.

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