Ragy el-Kashef's torture lasted six hours. He was beaten, whipped and electrically stunned while lying face down on the pavement.
The setting was the grounds of the Egyptian Museum, downtown Cairo's terracotta centrepiece that attracts millions of tourists a year to its dusty, neglected display cabinets. The contrast between the building's iconic status and the shabby, dilapidated air within makes it a darkly appropriate stage for human rights crimes: a reminder of the chasm between Egypt's millennia of cultural achievement and its consequent stagnation under Hosni Mubarak; a bricks and mortar embodiment of the colossal gap between the PR-sanitised face a dictator can show to the world and the brutal security apparatus on which his power can rest at home.
But Ragy's torture was carried out after Mubarak's departure, a stone's throw from the square where Egyptians came together to reimagine something different and dream up a new society. His torturers were the footsoldiers of those tasked with overseeing the country's "transition" to democracy; they took the chants of the revolution and twisted them into words of abuse, leaving lattice-webs of bloody welts on Egyptian backsides before holding 10-minute kangaroo court hearings in secret to find their captives guilty.
As the international media shifted its attention to Libya, Egypt's ongoing revolution faded into the background and found itself incorporated into fresh, unthreatening narratives deployed by western politicians to enable them to talk admiringly of "people struggling for universal rights" while giving a green light for those same universal rights to be scythed down in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Plastic-wrapped as victorious, peaceful and – most importantly of all – over, the spirit of Tahrir has been pulped into the equivalent of resistance muzak, playing harmlessly and blandly in the hotel elevator while the real struggles play out elsewhere.
But in reality the Egyptian struggle continues to rage apace, and in the shadows where it has been deposited by the world's press, there have been some disturbing developments.
The past fortnight has seen fresh outbreaks of sectarian violence, attacks on an International Women's Day march, the reappearance of the baltagiyya (regime-backed thugs) on the streets of the capital, the forceful eviction of the remaining protesters in Tahrir and a hardened stance by the authorities towards workers striking to demand their basic economic rights.
Popular feeling among those that led the occupation of the square is that a counter-revolution is under way, a sentiment echoed by the prime minister himself. One friend emailed me despondently last week after watching bystanders laugh with soldiers and sweep dirt from the square following the vicious removal of demonstrators. "The revolution has failed," he wrote.
The latest manifestation of this showdown between two Egypts, old and new, is Saturday's referendum, in which millions of Egyptians will go to the polls to endorse or reject a package of constitutional amendments drawn up by a committee of legal experts, backed by the interim government. If they pass, we'll see national elections taking place within six months. Although most of the amendments appear positive in isolation, critics say they are designed to legalise dictatorship and rush the country towards a hurried poll from which only conservative forces like the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of Mubarak's NDP party can emerge victorious.
Campaigning for the referendum has ranged an unlikely alliance of the Brotherhood, Salafists, the NDP and the army top brass – all pushing for a yes vote – against an equally unlikely alliance of almost everybody else calling for no, from establishment figures such as Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa to a wide range of youth coalitions, as well as many prominent legal experts.
As Ursula Lindsey has observed, there's a sense that beyond the substance of the amendments themselves, this is a referendum on which sort of politics is appropriate for the post-Mubarak era – and the process by which these clauses are being rammed through is troubling.
"If the amendments pass, it sets a bad precedent," Lindsey argues. "Egyptians should be fully included and informed about a momentous step like this; not handed a list of amendments written in a closed room by a dozen old men and rushed into voting using the spectre, once again, of instability."
But suggestions that this is only about young revolutionaries versus a regressive old guard, or secularists versus Islamists, are wide of the mark. I spoke at length to the well-respected leftist activist Alaa Abd El Fattah who will vote in favour of the amendments. Prominent blogger Zeinobia has set out her support for the reform package as well. Both played a critical role in the uprising which toppled Mubarak and are hardly counter-revolutionary stalwarts; rather, they believe that pushing the military out of politics should be done as soon as possible.
Of course many of their opponents want the same thing – they just disagree on the means. We don't know who's right. But that very debate – the vibrant exchange of ideas among Egyptians about how their country, their streets, their institutions can best be reshaped, that faith in their ability to remodel their country's future and their unerring passion in bringing that about – that's what matters, and that's why I think my friend was wrong when he wrote that the revolution had failed.
Egypt's revolution triumphed not on 11 February, when Mubarak stood down, but on 25 January when protesters first broke through the lines of riot police attempting to seal them off from their own towns and cities and punctured that psychological barrier of fear and fatalism that had thwarted attempts at change for so long.
Decapitating the regime was merely the first step, but as long as Egyptians' fantasies for the future go beyond the narrow, claustrophobic delineations of formal politics and encompass far-reaching social and economic changes as well, then that energy and ability to mobilise will resist the permanently lapping waves of counter-revolution, however much the tide ebbs and flows.
A revolution isn't an insta-event, it's a permanent struggle to unleash the creativity of people's minds and translate that into a new reality. As the arguments over this weekend's referendum show, that struggle is alive and well in Egypt and will continue to be so – whether the world is watching or not.