By the time he finally resigned Friday, Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak had ruled Egypt longer than anyone since Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Albanian-born viceroy of the Ottoman Empire credited with bringing Egypt into the modern age. Mubarak was a son of the soil, born 82 years ago on the Nile delta, but in his three decades as its president, the Land of the Pharaohs surrendered its position as leader of the contemporary Arab world. Egypt remained by far the most populous Arab nation, but its historic power to inspire the masses was crimped, beaten and subdued along with the citizens who restored it in the space of a fortnight, simply by assembling, day after day, and chanting for him to leave.

When he did, a day late, the announcement fell to the first vice president Mubarak found the need to appoint in the last 30 years, the indefatigable spymaster Omar Suleiman, a figure who would be right at home on the 1950′s era black-and-white movies that flicker on the television sets in every Cairo coffee shop and kiosk, to the remembered glory of Egyptian cinema. At once terse and lugubrious, the former general delivered his walk-off line like the undertaker he likely thought he had become: “May God help everybody.”

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