One of Salih’s fundamental insights is about what she calls the conundrum of nationalism. She and her comrades believed that they stood at the center of a political map: “To the east the socialist camp, to the west the capitalist one and in the middle, at the very beating heart, the national independence movements of the third world.” But her small Marxist contingent would be quickly consigned to this map’s margins. “The only struggle in town, the only one of real interest to the masses,” Salih writes, was nationalism: it was the real foundation of the students’ political consciousness—whether they knew it or not—and it trumped their radical but often superficial leftism at every turn.

It was also the means by which the young Egyptian regime could be sure to guarantee its own survival. Any attempt to question economic inequality and political repression could be recast as an attack on the newly independent nation. “The explosion of the student movement onto the political scene was the result of a crack in the walls of the regime’s house, a house of which it was still, nonetheless, the undisputed master,” Salih writes. “The masses were sympathetic to the student movement because it ‘pressured’ the regime, not because it sought to overturn it. … The people’s worst fear was the destruction of the regime at the hands of the country’s enemies.”

Just like the student activists of Salih’s time, the secular progressive activists who had found themselves lionized, briefly, as “revolutionary youth” in Egypt in 2011 were quickly sidelined by Islamists, the military and foreign powers. They continued to take to the streets for several years but drew dwindling crowds. They discovered, like their predecessors, that they were a vanguard with only temporary, contingent mass support. Soon they were accused of being foreign agents, puppets in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Qatar, Israel, the United States: the same enemies who had supposedly orchestrated the initial protests against President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 with the purpose of weakening Egypt.