To compare or not to compare:  Is Revolution an Egyptian Word?

The blog Abu Muqawama ("Egypt: A Humble Request," January 30, 2011) makes a timely point: "can we all agree to stop using European historical analogies to describe what is taking place in Egypt? It's not Europe in 1848 or Eastern Europe in 1989 or France in 1789: it's Egypt in 2011.... When we use "western" frames of reference to make sense of what is taking place, by contrast, we a) sound really freaking narcissistic and b) fail to take those local phenomena seriously and thus miss a lot of what is going on."

I think the problem is not a Western frame of reference. After all, students of revolutions have developed some interesting insights into revolutions around the World by comparing them to earlier revolutions for which there is a fair amount of detail (France, Russia, China, etc.). 

The problem is the use of an analysis of a past revolution, to explain the future development of a rebellion that has not developed into a revolution as yet.  It turns out that no revolution springs full-blown from the head of Zeus, or from those involved in the early days (American mythology of founding fathers not withstanding).  Entrenched groups resist, movements radicalize, and the end result is much different than what people foresaw going in. (see The Dangers of Reification)

So, yes, that said, it IS important to remind commentators that (1) understanding 20th-century Egyptian history is more important than understanding 19th-century European history in understanding the current situation in Egypt (in this sense, 1952, 1956, 1981 in Egypt are more important than 1848, 1968, etc., elsewhere); and (2) to compare in revolutions is to deploy a metaphor (and as John Gaddis, Landscape of History suggests, that is what scientists, from geologists to astrophysicists, do).