The 1919 Popular Uprising against the British occupation in Egypt, often also referred to as the 1919 Revolution, was a landmark event in the country's modern history. It played a great role in the development of Egypt's awareness of itself as a nation and in the development of the political institutions that came with such awareness. Its influence on the national imaginary has passed on from generation to generation and is still alive today a hundred years on, not only in the history books and lecture rooms but also in the wider public arena, most notably in Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square throughout January and February of 2011, which witnessed the revival of images and slogans first used during 1919. Many analysts saw the 2011 popular uprising that toppled the Mubarak regime after thirty years of autocratic rule as a natural descendant of the 1919 Revolution, bypassing Nasser's 1952 ‘revolu-tion’ which was in fact a military coup that kept the military in power for generations until the ouster of Mubarak.

While the 1919 revolution may have been seen to have failed at the time in that it did not gain Egypt its independence from the British, its strategic success, if not immediately comprehended, was to make Egypt feel its potential, its unity, its nationhood. Such budding consciousness naturally took form in literary and other artistic expressions, notably the then nascent genre of the novel. Indeed, the revolution is credited with helping the evolution of the genre in Egyptian literature, at the time still dominated by poetry. In turn, however, the evolving genre helped the educated class to grasp the significance of the revolution and become conscious of their nationhood. Thus, within a few years of 1919, Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), then a young writer, was to write the first major novel to celebrate the events of 1919, The Return of the Spirit. But it was Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) who eventually documented and immortalised the revolution in his magnum opus, The Cairo Trilogy published in 1956–7.