by Kim Ghattas
* * *
When Shahbaz Taseer finally came home in March 2016, his father’s killer was dead and buried. The Taseers’ broken hearts, still mourning Salmaan, were partly mended by the joy of Shahbaz’s almost miraculous survival. The family home was now cordoned off from the city by a security perimeter and police barricades, a metaphor for the ever-shrinking freedoms of progressive-minded Pakistanis. Aamna had all her children and grandchildren near her, but she knew that in that first week of January 2011, when twenty-seven bullets had riddled her husband’s body, something had been irremediably shattered, not only for herself and her family, but also for the country. It was the culmination of what had been a long dark road for Pakistan: a dead end.
The same week that Governor Taseer had been shot, hope was surging three thousand miles to the east through the streets of Cairo and Tunis, hope that change was possible, that there was a passageway out of that dead end of life under Arab dictators. But the region was still hostage to the dynamics unleashed in 1979, and the Saudi-Iran rivalry would mutate yet again.
16
COUNTERREVOLUTION
EGYPT
2010–16
I did not wield a dagger
Or even an old weapon
Nothing but a rage born of hunger.
—Amal Dunqul, “Do Not Reconcile” (1976)
Ebtehal Younes was now the widow of an apostate, just like Aamna Taseer in Pakistan. The French literature professor, who had not shed a tear when President Sadat was killed but had found her life upended by the black wave that had followed his death, was back in Egypt after years of exile in the Netherlands. For the first time in decades, she felt hopeful about the future of Egypt. She was a widow, but at least her husband, Nasr Abu Zeid, had not met a violent death; he died in 2010 of a deadly viral infection contracted during a trip to Indonesia. He was gone but perhaps more alive than ever. Young Egyptians had discovered his words, and they were reading him, quoting him, in Cairo but also in the provinces in rural Egypt, where boredom reigned and books were still the cheapest form of entertainment. Egypt’s youth were frustrated, restless, boiling; they were thirsty for life, answers, and justice.
At the time of his death, Nasr had reached a reconciliation of sorts with his homeland. In 2002, after seven years in exile, he returned for a short visit to see his family in the village of Quhafa. For years, he had dreamed of going home and he wanted a decent return. Perhaps he even fantasized of having a grand return, like that of his idol Taha Hussein, carried on his students’ shoulders back into his office after accusations of apostasy in the 1930s.
But that Egypt was long gone. Cairo University never invited him back; he never taught there again. Nasr made a few more low-key visits. His village, Quhafa, once surrounded by fields, with no running water, had become a suburb of the city of Tanta. Hosni Mubarak was still president, dutifully overseeing the decline and deepening rot of his country since he took over from the assassinated president in 1981. In 2002, the population was around 73 million. There were 40 million people under twenty-five. A conservative estimate put the number of unemployed at 7 million. By 2010, the population was almost 85 million and everything was worse. The black wave from the Gulf appeared to have ebbed, or at least it didn’t feel like an aggressive campaign anymore, perhaps because, just as in Pakistan, the changes unleashed in the 1980s and 1990s had achieved their purpose, of molding Egypt into the stifling society that Nasr found on his first visit back to the homeland.
Still, there were small openings, pockets of oxygen. Privately owned satellite television in particular had changed the conversation in Egypt and the region since the proliferation of stations, starting in the 1990s. Stale and sanitized, state television was no longer the only source of information or entertainment. There were now three hundred channels to choose from, with everything from scantily dressed singers contorting in impossible dance moves on Rotana TV to Salafist preachers pronouncing fatwas and discussing the road to salvation on al-Nass TV. In the schizophrenic world of Gulf power and money, it was no surprise that rich Saudis owned both those channels. Television had become a powerful soapbox for Islamists; the channels were split almost equally between religious programming and regular political or cultural programming, although those speaking in the name of religion were louder, and always on a mission.
But it was thanks to television that Nasr was reintroduced to the Egyptian and Arab public. During his years in exile, he had been recognized and celebrated around the world, had won awards, and been in the presence of legends like Nelson Mandela. In the febrile post-9/11 period, where all the talk was of a clash of civilizations, here was an erudite, well-traveled Muslim man who was both a believer and a reformist, a man who did not skirt around the issue of acts of terror perpetrated by Muslims, while making a rational case for why violence was not inherent to his religion. More important, Nasr had thought through the question posed after 9/11 by the British American historian Bernard Lewis: “What went wrong?” Lewis saw everything as a clash of civilizations, and it was he who coined that term. He believed that Arab countries were sick: “either we bring them freedom or they destroy us.”
If Nasr agreed with Lewis about the decline of Islamic civilization because of intellectual stagnation, the kind that had sent him into exile, he disagreed virulently with the idea that Muslim society was intrinsically retrograde. He saw the way forward very differently: salvation did not have to come from the West. Islam’s transition to modernity would come from within; renewal was possible. He knew it because he was a product of that intellectual journey and was walking in the footsteps of nineteenth-century progressive Salafist thinkers like Muhammad Abduh, those who took inspiration from the wisdom of the prophet’s companions to forge a way forward in the modern world.
Nasr’s speeches and writings had been noticed in the Arab world, too, where the attack on the Twin Towers had caused a strange mix of consternation and unspoken satisfaction but mostly had provoked a serious crisis of identity. Friends and colleagues back in Egypt helped pave the way for his return, and on one of his visits to Cairo, in 2005, Abu Zeid was invited to appear on Egyptian state television for an hour-long interview on a popular talk show, Bayt Baytak (Our Home Is Your Home). Watched by several million Egyptians, he talked about his life in exile, his thoughts on the Quran, the veil, and freedom. Nasr had not grown bitter in exile, he had softened, because he believed that his personal ordeal paled in comparison to what his homeland was going through. Egyptians watching the show could see he was one of them; he, too, had suffered from poverty, bureaucracy, and cronyism. He was his usual jovial, affable self. He did not look like an apostate—whatever an apostate was supposed to look like.
In 2008, Nasr was invited to give a series of lectures at the Alexandria library and the American University of Cairo. He chose to speak about his favorite subject, the rationalist Mu’tazilah movement of the eighth century. But he also spoke about the need to regenerate the country’s highest religious institution, Al-Azhar, and address the stifling of art by religious taboos, as well as the state of affairs in Egypt, where there was no freedom and no democracy and the state still abused religion to outdo the Islamists and maintain its grip on people. He didn’t know what type of reception he would receive, but Egyptians answered his call, especially the young, who had rarely heard such public discussions. All the seats were taken. People stood in the back; they sat between the aisles and on the floor in front of the stage. They were young, mostly in their twenties, thirsty for what had been forbidden, eager for a window onto the world of rationality. Here was a man who spoke about the need to renew the understanding of Islam and Islamic tradition; here was a man who had fought for his thoughts and for freedom of thought, a man who stood his ground. By the time Nasr fell ill in 2010, he felt at peace with his homeland, enough that he requested to fly back to Cairo to be treated there. As death neared, he asked Ebtehal to bury him in his village. The funeral was small. There was no large procession, no government r
epresentation. But he was home.
Ahmed Naji had gone to Nasr’s 2008 lectures though he cared little for religion, despite or perhaps because of the devout home he’d grown up in. But he sat in the crowded auditorium enthralled to listen in person to a man whose writings he had recently discovered, due to his love of literature and the Arabic language. Nasr was a master of the Arabic word; it was his entry point into understanding the Quran. Ahmed loved Nasr’s smiling, calm demeanor that defused the criticism of antagonistic questioners in the lecture hall. He was mesmerized by the enduring love between Nasr and Ebtehal, a kind of modern-day, Egyptian Romeo and Juliet who had survived the charge of apostasy and the tragedy of exile.
Ahmed had recently returned to Cairo after a childhood spent between Kuwait and Libya. He studied journalism and joined the staff of Akhbar al-Adab, Cairo’s literary review magazine. With his short curly hair and Frank Zappa mustache, his patterned Nehru shirts, his vests, and his cigarillos, Ahmed looked like a British dandy. But he was deeply subversive; his writings were political without ever openly discussing politics. He was irreverent and humorous, and he spoke fast. By the age of twenty-two, he was a published author. At thirty, in 2016, he would end up in jail for writing fiction: not journalism or reportage or even activism, but fiction. In Egypt, to write was to resist. Ahmed saw in Nasr a writer who had resisted, and inspired others to do the same.
But before jail, there was revolution. Unrest had been in the air for a few years, but no one recognized the signs or the magnitude of what was about to unfold.
Then on January 25, 2011, Egyptians took to the streets to express a rage that had been building up within them, maybe for decades. They’d had enough of the corrupt, oppressive, inert, dilapidated swamp they were living in. Next door, Tunisians had just rid their country of their president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. On January 14, Ben Ali had fled to Saudi Arabia. Two weeks of protests had put an end to twenty-two years of despotic rule. Now, Egyptians were going after President Hosni Mubarak and his thirty-year rule. Every day, the protests and the rage grew. But so did the elation, as women with coiffed hair and designer bags or tightly wrapped veils and long manteaus, bearded sheikhs and teens in jeans and football jerseys, peasants in gallabiyas and businessmen in suits, all converged on Tahrir Square. They inhabited different planets, but they met as Egyptians for the first time and found one another on a square with a long history as a symbol of patriotism, dating back to British rule. Surrounded by grand buildings telling Egypt’s story, from the Egyptian Museum to the Arab League headquarters and the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the somewhat shapeless square had several boulevards converging on it, a rare open space in the heart of Cairo, with a grassy roundabout in the middle, a perfect stage for Egypt’s bon enfant festival against tyranny. Ahmed drank it all up. He wasn’t sleeping. He felt alive, perhaps for the first time in his life. Tahrir means “liberation” in Arabic. Ahmed wanted the square to earn its name.
Day after day, millions of Egyptians protested. “The people want the fall of the regime,” they chanted. There were violent clashes with the police. More than eight hundred people died. Mubarak promised some reforms, then promised he wouldn’t run again for president. It was no longer enough to send the protesters home. They were camped on Tahrir Square; the nights were tense. For courage and reinforcement, they painted the walls with verses and sang poetry.
The brave men are brave … The cowards are cowardly …
Come with the brave … Together to the Square …
We defeat defeatism and heal the wounds …
Those were the words of Fouad Ahmed Negm, poet of the people, the man who’d praised the Iranian Revolution in 1979, hoping it would usher in a real, social democracy in the region. He’d spent a total of eighteen years in jail for irking all of Egypt’s rulers. His old poems mocking the late president Sadat were brought back to life. Finally, this was the revolution of the people that Negm, now eighty-two, had been waiting for his whole life. Or so he thought. As did Ahmed.
Iran and Saudi Arabia were both watching closely. People power made the Iranians nervous. Revolution had brought down the shah in 1979 and the largest crowds since then had come out in 2009 to protest fraud in the reelection of President Ahmadinejad. Dubbed the Green Movement, they almost brought down the Islamic Republic. But there were no Islamic slogans in the Egypt protests: there were flags, music and dancing, families picnicking. Thousands prostrated for Friday prayers on the square, but their demands were for bread and justice. Was this a new dawn for a secular democracy in Egypt?
On February 1, after almost nine days of complete silence, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, seemed to have made up his mind—or perhaps he hoped that if he said it and willed it, it would be so. He declared that the uprising in Egypt was “like the yell that the Iranian nation let out against America and against global arrogance and tyranny” in 1979. Mubarak would meet the same fate as the shah, said Khamenei; this was the beginning of an Islamic awakening in the Middle East. For Iran, this was an opportunity, the one that had not been fully exploited in 1981 by the assassins of Sadat, Khaled Islambouli, Abboud Zomor, and Mohammad Abd al-Salam Farag.
At 6:00 p.m. on February 11, Vice President Omar Suleiman announced Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, putting an end to his thirty years in power. The universe has a dark sense of irony: February 11 was also the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, the day that the government left behind by the shah had fallen in 1979. The Iranians probably saw this as a sign from heaven. The Saudis weren’t amused. They weren’t simply fearful that their own people could be inspired by uprisings in the Arab world; they had traumatic flashbacks to 1979 as they watched events unfold in Egypt: streets thronged by millions, America dropping a longtime loyal ally almost overnight, the most powerful army in the Arab world standing by, a regional power paralyzed—the echoes of Iran and the downfall of the shah were overwhelming. The Saudis had been oblivious to the dangers of Khomeini in 1979. Since then, they had lived in constant fear of a repeat of a revolution in the Arab world, Islamic or other. They had tried to warn the Americans, but President Obama believed that the arc of history bends toward freedom, and he saw it bending in Egypt. For Saudi Arabia, this was a nightmare. The time to strike back was now.
* * *
Just over a year after the fall of Mubarak, in the summer of 2012, Mohammad Morsi, an engineering professor with a PhD from the University of Southern California, was elected president of Egypt. Where the United States saw free and fair elections, the Saudis saw a vital threat, for two reasons. Morsi was a lifelong member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which meant Islamists had arrived at the top, not with a coup, not with an assassination, not with an uprising, but through the ballot box; a successful example of political Islam could feed calls for elections in Saudi Arabia itself. The Saudis were also deeply distrustful of the Muslim Brotherhood generally, since the betrayal of the political sahwa of the 1990s.
A heavyset man with a short-cropped beard, Morsi had served in parliament for a few years. He understood the importance of Saudi Arabia as one of Egypt’s key financial backers. His first foreign trip was to Riyadh. But his second trip was to Tehran, in September 2012, to attend the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement—it was the first visit to Iran of an Egyptian president since Sadat had visited the shah in 1976. Iran had tried to meddle in Egypt throughout Mubarak’s time in power, reportedly plotting assassinations and sabotage. The only remaining Iranian diplomat in Egypt was expelled in 1992. There had been a thaw during President Khatami’s time in power and then tension again: in 2009, Hezbollah was accused of planning attacks in Egypt. There were still no diplomatic relations between the two countries. And now came a visit that had been unthinkable just a year earlier, a turning point, made possible by the continued warmth in the relationship between Iran and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Although the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood had felt betrayed by Iran in the early 1980s, the Egyptian Brotherhoo
d had never denounced the Islamic Republic of Iran. In fact, when Khomeini died in 1989, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood publicly mourned him as the man who had unleashed an Islamic revolution against oppressors everywhere. The long history between Egypt’s Brothers and revolutionary Iran had been forgotten by most in the region, but in newspaper articles and newly published books, its details were resurfacing: Khomeini’s admiration for Sayyid Qutb, the 1984 postage stamp in his honor, the visit to Cairo of Navvab Safavi, leader of Iran’s Fedayeen-e Islam. Mostly, people were remarking on the similar structure of the rule of the religious jurist, with a Supreme Leader in Iran and a Supreme Guide for the Brotherhood in Egypt.
Then, in February 2013, President Ahmadinejad traveled to Cairo to attend a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Morsi rolled out the red carpet for the Iranian leader and all the other heads of state attending. But the rest of Ahmadinejad’s visit was troubled—a protester even threw a shoe in his face as he was walking out of a mosque. Ahmadinejad visited Al-Azhar and had a tense meeting with the Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb. Afterward, another sheikh from Al-Azhar, Hassan al-Shafie, made a few comments in front of television cameras, Ahmadinejad by his side. After calling the Iranian leader a friend of Egypt, he veered into contentious terrain. “There are people who are spreading the Shiite sect in Egypt and are frequently visiting Iran,” said Shafie. Ahmadinejad started to shake his head. “Those people are insulting the prophet Muhammad’s companions, who are symbols to Sunnis,” Shafie continued. “We reject this, and this has been affecting the relations between the Egyptian and the Iranian people.” Ahmadinejad and a Shia cleric accompanying him started whispering to each other. The Iranian president interjected, in Arabic: “This is not what we agreed. We agreed [to talk about] unity, brotherhood.” The Azhari sheikh nodded but persisted. He next chided Iran for its involvement in Syria. A popular uprising against Assad had begun there around the same time as Egypt’s revolution, but unlike Mubarak, the Syrian dictator was not willing to bend to the popular will and offered no concessions. Within weeks, he was raining a deluge of bullets on the protesters who were calling for democracy. The opposition took up arms to defend themselves and fight back. Within months, Assad had deployed artillery and fighter jets. Iran stood by his side; Hezbollah was helping on the ground. The country would soon be engulfed in war, with multiple fronts and multiple players.