It would have been revolution had it not happened before with so much more edge. In many ways, of course, it was. It looked like the protest that started on 29 January, for one thing. No military materiel or personnel was to be seen anywhere, but the magnitude and the composition of the sit-in was very comparable; so were the many impromptu security, creative and commercial interventions in the absence of police.

Of course both police and military, as it seemed, had learned their lesson sufficiently not to use force against protesters. Perhaps force will be used yet, backed by patently counterrevolutionary calls from a sizable sector of the population - the same people who were against the first, 18-day sit in - to not further undermine "our revolution". But so far the right to peaceful protest seems to be respected; and that is why a significant part of the second Tahrir sit-in - too little too late as far as I'm concerned - could so easily turn into an upper middle class jamboree with live music and wifi.

That is the kind of freedom to which the majority of young Egyptians aspire, notwithstanding the desperate, more or less suicidal measures of joining or supporting the cause of political Islam, and perhaps that indeed is the way if not to achieve it then to establish the right to having it without bureaucratic or patriarchal intervention, without either religious or plainclothes police, and - most important of all - without it being monopolised by any one social class.

How it might fit in with a political vision for the future of Egypt, however - how it might get past the fact that Egypt remains both economically and militarily completely dependent - is not clear. There is an urgent reality to which the protests are responding - the fact that the Mubarak regime has in no way fallen as the revolution intended it to - but there is a different, less urgent and far more widespread reality of ignorance and poverty, racism and authoritarianism of which the Mubarak regime was as much an effect as a cause.

And perhaps that is why there was something unpleasantly dreamlike about going to Tahrir last Friday. It was as if the world had conspired to recreate the events of Jan-Feb under different and far less convincing circumstances - without the life-or-death urgency that invested the original uprising with so much meaning. The "revolution" was back, but it was no longer revolution.