On 18 September 2011, almost eight months after the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution and the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak, thousands of Egyptians gathered for the funeral of Khalid Abdel Nasser, the eldest son of late President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70). SCAF, Egypt's Supreme Council of Armed Forces, was ruling the country. While carrying pictures of Nasser and expressing nostalgia for him, the mourners were also chanting, yasqut yasqut hukm al-'askar (down, down with military rule!). The irony of the incident did not elude several Egyptian journalists. Many noted how the funeral became an occasion for protesting the rule of the military while celebrating the person who reinstitutionalised it in Egypt in 1952. Indeed, jokes about this irony abounded in newspapers the next day, one of which sarcastically asked whether those protestors had taken Nasser to be an obstetrician!

Besides Nasser's continued presence in Egyptian everyday life and discourse, the story above also reveals how many Egyptians separate Nasser as a person from the regime that he had created. For them, Nasser functions as a site of memory, a space of associations at times disconnected from the real figure that he once was. As French historian Pierre Nora argues, sites of memory are ‘moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’. As such, they are the embodiment of memory, the residue of that long process of remembering and forgetting that takes place in living societies before it enters the realm of history. History, on the other hand, is ‘the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer’. Constituting a counterdiscourse, of which history ‘is perpetually suspicious’, these sites of memory take the form of films, songs, novels, and paintings, among other media.