Long before a "revolution" could have been anticipated, people - especially urban Arabs - noticed something about Cairo. In a roundabout way, the title of a book of poems by the Lebanese globe-trotter Suzanne Alaywan, All Roads Lead to Salah Salem (a reference to one major road linking northern and southern ends of the megalopolis) accurately expresses that sentiment: Of all the world's cities, Cairo seems to have the capacity to absorb people into its folds, to make them - in appearance and attitude if not in thinking or values - like other people already established inside it; it has the capacity, brutishly but somehow peaceably, to iron out difference.

The poet was not at cross purpose with the fact. I tend to think she, like others within and without, saw it as inevitable but positive, a possible answer to otherwise intractable inter-issue dilemmas which liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, could only solve with the help of economic and institutional hardware not available to the Arab or the Third World. The more or less forced homogeneity of course has its roots in a culture of compromise and hypocrisy, in people's willingness to lie about how they feel in order to benefit from other people, whose difference - in looks, tongue, dress code, income level - offers further justification for practically robbing them.

Yet, as the aftermath of events has demonstrated, there is more to that proverbial Rome of the mind than simple untruth. Decades of corruption were also decades of voluntary repression, in which excessive panhandling just might have been a sublimation of mugging, and pay-for-your-difference an ameliorated form of the marauding mob. The difference-eliminating software is after all as evident in Arab nationalism as it is in political Islam, and perhaps even Mubarak's client government sought to accommodate the interests of global liberalism only insofar as the world order, up to and including Saudi Arabia (which as far as I am concerned is a greater threat to Egypt than Israel) could provide that government with the required alms.

That is over now, despite the military and its supporters, backed by said world order, doing all they can - hitting below as well as above the belt, even idiotically risking sectarian war in the process - to reinstate the beggar-mentality status quo. Egyptians should be thankful for the "revolution" not because it proved successful or achieved its goal, but because it will make elimination of difference by begging increasingly impossible. People can no longer pretend to be safe from their compatriots, the myth of "national unity" is no longer viable, not all those who are different can pay. Whether they like it or not, the Other will assert themselves at last, bringing forth even through catastrophe all the many beautiful Egypts have been squeaking for dear life.