In ‘Maksur ya Iqa‘’, (‘Broken Rhythm’), a song performed in the wake of the 2011 revolution, the author plays with the connotations of the term ghawgha’. He claims the insult: ‘ihna al-ghawgha’, ‘we are the rabble’, he says, we, the people, are the riff raff, the mob, the dangerous crowds. By using ‘we’, he subverts the term, ridiculing those who seek to separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ people. In his 1946 history of the 1919 revolution, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i expresses his dismay at the use of the terms ghawgha’ (rabble) and ri‘a’ (riff-raff ) in British military reports about the demonstrators.2However, it was not the term itself, nor its use in an Egyptian context, that upset al Rafi‘i. Rather, it was the fact that the British mistook for ghawgha’ the intel-lectuals (muthaqaffun) or youth (shabab) who constituted, according to him, the majority of the protesting crowds (al-Rafi‘i 1946: 190). In doing so, he was seeking to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ demonstrators, implic-itly stripping the so-called ‘rabble’ of any positive role in the anti-colonial struggle. He was no exception: ghawgha’– and its many synonyms – is a term that has a long history in Egyptian discourses about the nationalist movement, and is recurrent in narratives about the 1919 revolution.

One of those narratives, al-Dahik al-Baki (The Weeping Laugher, 1933), an autobiographical novel by Fikri Abaza (1897–1979), focuses on the revo-lution in Upper Egypt. Set between 1917 and 1926, the novel narrates the sentimental tribulations of a young Cairene lawyer, Shukri, who is unable to find a suitable wife. After one of his failed romantic relationships, Shukri finds himself in Asyut in 1919 and actively participates in the organisation of the nationalist movement, along with Mariam, a sixteen-year-old girl from a middle-class Christian family. Unlike al-Rafi‘i, it is not the confusion between ghawgha’ and muthaqaffun or shabab that upsets Abaza. Rather, it is their very presence in the streets of Asyut, and their role during the revolutionary strug-gle, which he identifies as a dangerous threat to the nationalist movement.