When the Sun Falls over Tahrir 28 March 2015 SOMETIME IN THE SUMMER of 2011, I was sitting with a few friends at a café on the edge of a cliff overlooking Cairo. We were smoking shisha and drinking tea and beer, watching the sun set over the taupe tableau when we spotted two tall, blond men on the other side of the terrace with a digital camera, filming the sun’s descent through the smog.
An anti-Mubarak protester in Tahrir Square, in November 2014 (Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters) THANASSIS CAMBANIS, JAN 16 2015 CAIRO—Four years after the revolution he helped lead, Basem Kamel has noticeably scaled back his ambitions. The regime he and his friends thought they overthrew after storming Tahrir Square has returned. In the face of relentless pressure and violence from the authorities, most of the revolutionary movements have been sidelined or snuffed out. Egypt’s new strongman, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has injected new zeal and energy into the military establishment.
