Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Aboul Fotouh and the Islamist students he brought with him began pushing the Brotherhood to compete in elections in the state-sponsored professional associations, like the doctors’ syndicate. Although Mubarak still outlawed the Brotherhood, its members eventually began running for Parliament, too, initially under the banners of existing parties and then as independents. By 1987, the Brotherhood’s candidates were distributing booklets that forswore any imposition of Islamic law and affirmed the equal citizenship of Coptic Christians. In 2000, the Brothers fielded female parliamentary candidates, reinterpreting Quranic verses about male guardianship to refer only to the family. Some leaders even said the head scarf was not a religious obligation, but “merely a question of identity and belonging, just as saris are for Indians.”

  Aboul Fotouh was the Brotherhood’s most prominent advocate of moderation and an increasingly visible spokesman. He belonged to a broader movement of like-minded Islamists around the region who advocated for religious values but secular governments—most notably including Aboul Fotouh’s close friend Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia. Essam Sultan, who upended the opening day of Parliament, was part of the same trend. By around 2005, they were conspicuous enough that journalists and scholars needed a term for them: “post-Islamist.”

  Then to the shock of most rank-and-file Muslim Brothers, their governing board voted in 2009 to expel Aboul Fotouh from his seat. He had dissented from a prototype party platform that rolled back much of what he stood for. It declared that only a male Muslim could serve as president of Egypt, and that the Parliament should be required to take the advice of a council of Muslim scholars. Despite the outward transformation of the Brotherhood, a conservative faction had the upper hand after all. “They controlled the Brotherhood completely,” Aboul Fotouh later told me. “There was no hope for me.”

  In June 2011, he was sitting in an airplane taxiing at the Cairo International Airport, having just returned from a visit to London, when his presidential campaign media adviser called with news from the Brotherhood. The same leaders who had removed Aboul Fotouh from its governing board had voted to expel him from membership in the Brotherhood. The board said he had defied its orders by running for president after the Brotherhood had pledged not to field a candidate. He wept in his seat.

  * * *

  • • •

  The revolts of the Arab Spring had pulled once-hushed debates about the goals of political Islam into the open. We heard versions of it playing out everywhere—from the street cafés of folding chairs selling Turkish coffees downtown to the cacophony of nightly talk shows.

  Aboul Fotouh, undaunted by the Brotherhood’s opposition, built a presidential campaign aimed at the center of the question. Dozens or hundreds of young Muslim Brothers were defecting to join him (including Shahawy, the 3M executive who had met with the Americans). His campaign media adviser was a young liberal whose primary qualification was experience on Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral campaign in New York. The campaign’s political adviser was an outspoken feminist and socialist, Rabab el-Mahdi, who had taught political science at Yale before coming home to join the American University in Cairo.

  I tracked her down at the end of yet another Tahrir Square rally against military rule, and she let me follow her to her car if I could keep up. She had wavy shoulder-length hair and colorful glasses, and she threw around words like “discourse” and “hegemony.”

  “Egypt needs to hear the core ideas of the left, but through an Islamist voice so it does not sound so alien,” she said. The Aboul Fotouh campaign set out “to create a left that included Islamists and non-Islamists, so we could talk about politics and stop talking about religion.”

  She made no secret of her delight at inflicting pain on the Brothers. “Aboul Fotouh is very dangerous for them—a matter of life and death. If he succeeds, it means the Brotherhood loses its monopoly on moderate Islam.”

  Aboul Fotouh’s views evolved, she told me years later. “At first he would say, ‘Why do I need a special policy for Copts? Why are Copts different than the Muslim Brotherhood? Aren’t the Muslim Brothers discriminated against, too?’” The day after the massacre of the Christians outside the Maspero building in October 2011, some of the ex-Islamists on Aboul Fotouh’s campaign team sympathized with the soldiers, suggesting they were obliged to defend against a Christian attack. Mahdi was outraged and stormed out of the campaign office.

  But after she left, Aboul Fotouh issued a stronger condemnation than almost any other party, stronger even than the Coptic Church itself. “Those who have fallen, the dead and the injured, are Egyptians, and we Egyptians have to unite to stop this threat to our national security,” he said.

  I came to consider Mahdi a friend, and she was merciless about any hint of sexism. But she was also critical of her fellow feminists who acted like political Islam was the only threat to the rights of Arab women. She knew from experience that Egyptian nationalists, liberals, and leftists were all sexist, too.

  “When I hear Egyptian women say, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood are going to put us down,’ I tell them, ‘Guys, we are already put down!’” she said. “In terms of sexism and patriarchy, the Muslim Brothers are very much in the Egyptian mainstream.”

  Like most Egyptian politicians, Aboul Fotouh started out referring to women as “girls,” talking about “wives and mothers and sisters,” or extolling the importance of women “to cultivate children and homes.”

  “I said, ‘dump that shit,’” Mahdi told me. Soon Aboul Fotouh was talking about “minimum income” instead of minimum wage, stressing the value of work inside homes, and correcting interviewers who asked him about “poverty.” Call it “impoverishment,” he would tell them, because it was a product of an economic system and not an immutable condition.

  “We sold him on everything,” Mahdi said.

  I followed Aboul Fotouh to rallies in Cairo and the Nile Delta. Whenever he was asked about religious issues, he replied that Egyptians were already religious enough. “Egypt has been proud of its Islamic and Arabic identity for fifteen centuries. Are we waiting for the Parliament to convert us?” he would say, or, “Egypt has enough mosques. What Egypt needs are factories.”

  Some of his younger supporters had recorded a song in the hip-hop-style computer-generated street music that blared from the speakers of tuk-tuks. “He is not American, not British, not Iranian. . . . He did not steal land. . . . He is a clean man. . . . Aboul Fotouh! Aboul Fotouh!” I was told that he hated it. I could not get it out of my head.

  * * *

  • • •

  Khairat el-Shater was a business tycoon and the deputy general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was its chief strategist, its top financier, and an old friend of Aboul Fotouh. That is, until 2009, when Shater emerged as the driving force behind Aboul Fotouh’s expulsion from the governing board and then the movement.

  Shater was sixty-two years old in 2012, and the tallest Egyptian I ever met. He stood well over six feet, and he was thick in the middle. Streaks of gray ran through his full beard, and his eyes were set deep below a high forehead. He had amassed a personal fortune investing in furniture, bus manufacturing, textiles, software, and other industries. We met in the headquarters of his holding company, in a high-rise in the neighborhood of Nasr City. Waiters served us cold glasses of freshly squeezed mango juice.

  Shater had spent a dozen years behind bars on various politicized charges under Mubarak, longer than any other Brotherhood leader. He had run his business empire, the Brotherhood, and a family of ten children from inside a jail cell. He had married off all eight of his daughters to young Muslim Brothers—some of whom were his fellow inmates. The eight grooms visited him in prison to ask his consent. Five said their vows behind bars. The Brotherhood was an insular world.

  If Aboul Fotouh had revitalized the Brotherhood, Shater had reorganized it. He had plotted and financed its political strategy, its expansion onto the inter
net, and its outreach to the West. He spoke with a time-is-money efficiency. Each utterance seemed to come out of his mouth already organized into roman numerals and capital letters. I am not sure he ever laughed.

  He told me that he had been drawn to the Brotherhood because it answered every question. “It talks about building the individual, building the family, building the society, building the state,” he said. “It talks about the economy. It talks about sociology. It talks about culture.”

  Shater had been as outspoken as anyone about the Brotherhood’s embrace of democracy and respect for the West. NO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF US was the headline of an opinion column he had contributed to the Guardian in 2005. Now Shater had led the Brotherhood to abandon the positions in the old prototype platform—the same one over which the group had pushed Aboul Fotouh off the governing board just three years earlier. The board no longer taught that only a male Muslim could be president and that Muslim scholars should guide the Parliament.

  But now that Mubarak was out, many younger Muslim Brothers complained that, in contrast to his calls for a democratic government, Shater was suppressing internal debate and dissent within the Brotherhood, running the group as a strongman. “We were deceived,” twenty-seven-year-old Mohamed el-Gibba told me as he was leaving the group.

  I was running into defecting Muslim Brothers right and left. Numbers were impossible to quantify, but there was clearly an exodus of Muslim Brothers leaving to express their own views. (Islam Lotfy, who helped organize the Police Day protests, was expelled, too, for starting a new post-Islamist party.)

  “They tightened the screws on anyone who had different ideas,” a former deputy general guide, Mohamed Habib, complained to me. “It should be a group for Muslims, not ‘the’ group for Muslims.”

  Why expel people from a religious movement over political disagreements? I asked Shater. Was that democratic?

  Shater, for the first time in our conversation, sounded heated. “The Muslim Brotherhood is a value-based organization that expresses itself using different means—political, economic, athletic, health related, and social,” he said. “You cannot take one part from one place and another part from another—this isn’t how it’s done.” Islam “regulates life in its entirety—politically, economically and socially; we don’t have this separation,” he said, referring to the line between religion and government.

  “You can’t adopt a different vision from the party that represents us, the party that represents the vision of the group,” he continued. So he had told dissenters, “Either you stay in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, or if you insist on another party, then you’ll be the ones leaving us!”

  I was beginning to wonder about his avowed commitment to democracy, which clearly did not extend to allowing real debate within the Brotherhood. Where was the Islam in the Brotherhood’s vision, then, if all faiths were equal under the law and if Muslim scholars played no role at all?

  Islam should shape everything, Shater insisted. In an ideal world, the minister of finance would know economics and also Islam. The health minister should master medicine and Islam. The minister of transportation should understand traffic and Islam. And so on. “It is better, with time, to have someone who knows both subjects,” he said. For Shater, I realized, Muslims were more equal. He supported elections. But he thought Muslims should win. No Christian could ever be so qualified.

  Aboul Fotouh, the liberal Islamist, had gone to war against that all-or-nothing vision of the Brotherhood. On the campaign trail, he now vowed to force the Brotherhood to follow the same laws as any nonprofit, including disclosing its finances and severing its political arm. He would end the Brotherhood as Egypt had known it, and Shater’s power with it.

  The presidential race turned into an Islamist free-for-all. A moderate Islamist lawyer had jumped in on one side, a charismatic Salafi television preacher was sprinting ahead on the other. The Salafi, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, promised all kinds of trouble: he vowed to cut back international trade, arrest women for wearing bikinis, and annul the peace with Israel. The Brotherhood risked losing its status as the standard of political Islam.

  What’s more, the military’s repeated deferral of the handover of power meant that whoever won the presidency could have the decisive voice in shaping (or rolling back) the political transition. The Parliament would remain impotent until a constitution was drafted, and the president could put his stamp on it.

  Having expelled Aboul Fotouh for violating the Brotherhood’s pledge not to run a presidential candidate, Shater broke the same pledge himself. In a close vote of its internal assembly, in March 2012, the Brotherhood voted to run a candidate after all. It nominated Shater to run against Aboul Fotouh. The fight over the future of the Muslim Brotherhood was out in the open now. Exposure to the sunlight promised to change political Islam, if that open debate was allowed to continue. Surely that was a development that liberals would cheer, or so I assumed.

  10

  Thug Versus Thug

  May 23, 2012–June 17, 2012

  The presidential election promised a decisive break with the Mubarak era. But daily life in the spring of 2012 reminded me of Mubarak’s penultimate speech, in which he warned of the fine line separating freedom and chaos.

  One spring day Laura took our sons and another family on a visit to the Cairo neighborhood known as Garbage City, high in the cliffs overlooking Cairo. The refuse of Cairo was removed by trash collectors—zabaleen—who hauled it in bicycle and donkey carts back to Garbage City. There, whole families, including children, sifted it into towering piles of glass, paper, cardboard, varieties of metals, types of plastic, and so on, for resale and recycling. The zabaleen were Coptic Christians who had lived there for decades, and in 1976, they had blasted and carved out an immense, majestic cave cathedral in the cliffs. Known as the Monastery of St. Simon, it could accommodate twenty thousand worshippers. The Garbage City cave church was one of the largest houses of Christian worship in the Middle East.

  Laura and our friends had agreed in advance with two taxi drivers on a fixed price, about eighteen dollars, for the trips there and back. But upon their return, the two drivers demanded double. Laura had no more cash, and the two drivers refused to leave. They began banging on our metal gates and scaring the children. When Laura threatened to call the police, the drivers laughed in her face. What police? The police had been AWOL for more than a year, since the Day of Rage.

  A cheerful walrus of a police guard was always stationed on our corner, outside the nearby South Korean embassy, and he sauntered over to the taxi drivers with his hand on his sidearm.

  Pay up, he told Laura.

  She called me in a panic. I was more than an hour away, so a neighborhood friend eventually coughed up enough to get the drivers to leave (we paid him back). We had been warned.

  Under Mubarak, most Egyptians thought of the police as abusive, corrupt, and frightening. But they were ubiquitous. Even if arbitrary, their punishments had deterred blatant criminality. Of course, for rich people or Westerners, it had always been a different story. The police had taken much better care of us than they did of ordinary Egyptians. Maadi under Mubarak felt as safe as Bethesda.

  Having lunch at an Italian restaurant in our neighborhood not long after the taxi incident, Laura watched a half dozen men run out of a jewelry store carrying long guns and bags of loot. We heard that thieves on motorcycles were snatching purses outside local international schools, and then one of them tried to grab Laura’s. A private security team for an American oil company, Apache, caught one of the culprits. But the police did nothing.

  Rena Effendi, a thirty-five-year-old photojournalist from Azerbaijan, was riding home to Maadi in a licensed taxi one night when the driver stopped the car, locked the doors, and pulled out a knife. He tried to rape her, but she fought back. He drove away with her handbag and left her in the dark by the side of the road.

/>   Some days later, the police showed her a mug shot of a man they had caught using her stolen cell phone. But they made no effort to trace the chain of custody back to her assailant. “If they want to find him, they could,” she told me. “I don’t know if they are looking very hard.”

  Other taxi drivers were victims. Thirty-two-year-old Sayid Fathy Mohamed said two passengers had pulled knives on him in broad daylight while two other accomplices on a motorcycle—one with a shotgun—had pulled up next to his taxi. The four bloodied his face, left him in a field, and made off with his car, cell phone, and wallet.

  The police seemed afraid and refused to visit the scene of the crime. So he called his cell phone and reached his attackers. He borrowed money from neighbors to pay the thieves a ransom equivalent to two thousand dollars for the return of his taxi. “I paid the money and took the car on the spot,” he said.

  Carjacking had become routine enough that thieves explicitly instructed victims to call their own phones to buy back their vehicles. Portions of the highway circling Cairo were so lawless that our driver refused to visit them even by day. Amani el-Sharkawi, a twenty-five-year-old English teacher, was riding in the back of a taxi when she saw men with chains and weapons stopping cars on a deserted patch of road just ahead. Her driver threw the car into reverse and backed down the highway. “Can you imagine that?” she marveled.

  The poor inevitably bore the brunt of the crime, and in hard-pressed neighborhoods and towns some took matters into their own hands. In a small village in the Nile Delta province of Sharqiya, residents posted an internet video of two naked bodies hanging from a street lamp. Mayy el-Sheikh and I drove out to investigate.