Whatever happens in the Arab uprisings, nothing can take away from the miracle of Tahrir Square, where young protesters combined a Stone Age armory of rocks and sticks with 21st-century weapons of mass communication—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—and, to their surprise and eternal glory, overwhelmed one of the most brutal and best-organized police states in the Arab world.

The further we get from the 18 days it took to end Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak’s 30-year rule in Egypt, the more remarkable and heroic they seem. Egyptians can hardly believe what they achieved in Tahrir Square and the running battles of Alexandria and Suez. And now they celebrate not just freedom and the novelty of publicly debating their country’s future, but a new sense of dignity and self-worth. The confidence of these highly educated young Arabs, who were brought up on Al Jazeera and came of age with social media, has spread across the region like a rapid 60s youthquake. One young protester quotes President Obama’s enabling ”Yes we can” when I ask him why his generation rose up. What he is perhaps also saying is ”Why on earth not?”

They knew that violence would be unleashed on them when they joined up with veteran opposition groups. It was understood that the indispensable accoutrements of the elderly Arab dictator—apart from hair dye—are torture and extrajudicial killing, that the more desperate a regime becomes, the more willing it is to send young men to torture cells and then arrange for their disappearance. But in January this became a unifying factor, rather than a deterrent, as Heba Morayef, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Cairo, points out: ”Police abuse is the one cross-class, cross-gender experience that people are aware of.”

The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings were each sparked by revulsion at the treatment of a young man. In Tunisia it was a 26-year-old fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi, who set fire to himself in protest after police confiscated his wares and he was slapped by a public official. In Egypt, people rallied to the story of a 28-year-old named Khaled Said, who was beaten to death in public by two police officers in Alexandria last June. Illicit pictures of Said’s mangled face, taken in the morgue, inspired a Google executive named Wael Ghonim (right) to put together an anonymous Facebook page, called ”We Are All Khaled Said,” and later to announce the date of January 25—National Police Day—for protests.

But revolutions need more than young martyrs and generational solidarity. Although President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his kleptomaniac family had been thrown out of Tunisia just 11 days before January 25, it wasn’t clear whether the Egyptians possessed the resolve seen in Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine Revolution. When the day came, however, large numbers reached Tahrir Square and then began an epic contest of wills which would last for the next two and a half weeks. Through the ebb and flow of a battle, which included arson, tear-gas attacks, fusillades of rubber bullets, snipers shooting from the rooftops, mass prostration in prayer, Molotov cocktails, barricades being hastily erected and fought over, as though this were 19th-century Paris, and—bizarrely—a camel charge by Mubarak’s supporters, it almost seemed as if the revolution were being directed by David Lean.

But this was no movie—no student sit-in either. Some 500 died in the clashes. There were many casualties when unarmed young men rashly stormed the Ministry of Interior building and were mowed down. Countless more were injured when Mubarak supporters tried to take the square. Those hurt refused to go to the hospital for fear of being arrested. ”The cliché is absolutely true,” says Rabab el-Mahdi, a political-scientist at the American University in Cairo, who was in the square for the duration. ”The regime brought out the worst in Egyptians; the revolution brought out the best.”

As the Mubarak regime did everything in its power to dislodge the demonstrators—bringing in tanks, arresting journalists and human-rights workers, shutting down the cellular-phone networks and the Internet, and, it now emerges, torturing protesters in a makeshift interrogation center in the shadow of the Egyptian Museum—the crowd swelled, and an extraordinary spirit of unity and cooperation emerged, with Egyptians of all classes and religions finding common cause. Sherine Tadros, an Egyptian correspondent for Al Jazeera (see slide 12), says of her contemporaries, ”I was very, very proud of their conviction and organization and the peaceful way in which things were happening. It was almost as if they created the Egypt they wanted to see in that square. No sexual harassment. People able to talk politics. Muslims with Christians.”

The protesters showed great ingenuity during the siege of Tahrir. Vast quantities of water, food, and blankets were brought in, despite roadblocks. Egyptair’s ticketing office became a medical center. Tips were offered on such things as how to connect to the Internet when the regime cut communications and what to do about the effects of tear gas. (Wash your face with Coca-Cola.) And when the army replaced the hated police, who had vanished quite early in the proceedings, the protesters showed a shrewd political instinct by embracing the young soldiers and crowding round Mubarak’s tanks, which for one thing meant the vehicles could not move in. At night, a 22-year-old Internet activist named Ahmed Abd Rabo (see slide 13) organized a rota of protesters to sleep under the tanks to keep them from taking up new positions. The sustained courage of the protesters will be remembered for generations. ”When snipers were shooting,” says el-Mahdi, her voice cracking with emotion, ”they [the protesters] would chant, ‘Keep on going. There are 80 million of us.’ ” She saw two people shot dead and was herself saved when a stranger covered in blood dragged her out of the way of a charging vehicle. And yet she says, ”This was a moment of Utopia, when it did not matter what your religion was, how you dressed, or where you came from.”

On February 11 at six P.M., to a roar that was heard from one end of the Arab world to the other, Hosni Mubarak’s resignation was announced. The uprising was over, but the struggle goes on—since that day there have been sectarian clashes and some bloody exchanges between the army and the protesters. Whatever happens, Egyptians now know that democracy and freedom are never given: they must be taken.