Anwar Sadat, the nephew of the former president, told me the American relationship reminded him of an old Egyptian proverb: “I beg you for charity, but I am your master.”
* * *
• • •
The LaHood case was my first encounter with the workings of the Egyptian judiciary, which played a pivotal role in the presidential runoff and everything that followed.
I passed the Supreme Constitutional Court every day on my way to the office. It was housed in a concave block of mirrored glass and beige concrete facing the Nile at the northern edge of Maadi. Its faux Pharaonic columns and totems might have been borrowed from a Disney movie about ancient Egypt. But the justices saw themselves as high priests of a holy tradition.
Their forebear, the great Egyptian jurist Abd al-Razzak al-Sanhuri, had laid the foundation of legal systems across the Arab world in the first half of the twentieth century. He grounded Western structures not only in natural law but also in Islamic tradition. He aspired to establish a distinctively Arab legal order that would constrain the powerful as well as the lowly—as any law must, and as Muslims believe that Islamic Sharia did in its early history. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Kuwait, and other Arab states all recruited Sanhuri to help establish court systems on Egypt’s model. Lawyers across the region still revere him.
Sanhuri’s system, on a Napoleonic pattern, included no such thing as a Supreme Constitutional Court. But when Sanhuri and other liberal jurists were seeking to restrain the president’s powers, Abdel Nasser bridled. He circumvented those jurists by grafting new courts and, in 1969, a “supreme” court, onto the preexisting judiciary. Sadat and Mubarak followed his example, adding special benches and emergency courts to get around uncooperative judges. Mubarak in particular became a master of court packing, especially in the run-up to his anticipated 2011 campaign for reelection.
In 2003, Mubarak installed onto the Supreme Constitutional Court the first woman in Egypt ever to serve at any level as either a judge or prosecutor: Judge Tahani el-Gebali. She was an outspoken Suzanne Mubarak–style feminist and a passionate admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser. No fewer than six photographs of him adorned her chambers, like photographs of a rock star in the bedroom of a groupie.
“The military in Egypt is unlike in other countries,” Gebali told me in our first interview, in July 2011. Because of the role Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers had played in Egyptian history, “it is only normal that the military will share some of the responsibility” for governing, she said. She had sometimes argued that the uneducated or illiterate should be denied the right to vote altogether. And she hated Islamists.
After Mubarak’s ouster, Gebali campaigned publicly to postpone any elections because Islamists might win. An Islamist Parliament would be “catastrophic,” she declared in speeches and interviews, so the generals must forever retain some hold on power.
“I knew the elections would bring a majority from the movements of political Islam,” Gebali told me in another interview.
She said she had begun advising the generals as early as May 2011, and by July, they had enlisted her to help prepare their aborted constitutional principles. But their plan to engrave their power into the new charter “was thwarted every time by all the noise, the popular mobilization, the ‘million-man marches.’”
Gebali and the judges of Egypt saw themselves not just as a profession but as a caste. I once visited the downtown Cairo headquarters of the professional association for judges, known as the Judges Club. Men smoked cigars and read newspapers in battered leather chairs, or ate their lunches on a patio overlooking a well-tended garden. Obituaries posted on a notice board in the front hall read something like this: We mourn the passing of Judge So-and-so, who was the father of Judge So-and-so, brother of Judge So-and-so, and cousin of Judge So-and-so. The judiciary was one big clan. A seat on the bench was a birthright.
Judges defended their nepotism as a virtue. Mubarak, in 2007, tried to institute a minimum standard of law school results for new prosecutors and judges. The Judges Club rose in revolt and threatened to block it in court. Ahmed el-Zend, president of the club, argued that growing up “in a judicial environment,” as the son of a judge, was more important than exam results. No “spiteful haters” would stop the “sacred march” of the sons and nephews onto the bench, he vowed, and he called judges “successors of God.” (Three of his own sons were prosecutors or judges.) Zend won, and Mubarak backed down. I can only imagine how the uprising of 2011 must have frightened Zend, Gebali, and the rest of the judges.
In anticipation of the 2011 presidential election, Mubarak had appointed a chief to the Supreme Constitutional Court with virtually no experience as a judge or, for that matter, as a civilian lawyer. The new chief judge, Farouk Sultan, had spent his entire career prosecuting Islamists in special military or security courts.
Now, in 2012, Sultan was sixty-five, the mandatory retirement age. But the generals nonetheless made him chairman of the presidential election commission—the one that had knocked out so many candidates.
In June, a week before the presidential runoff, Zend and the other judges plunged into the campaign. “We won’t leave matters for those who can’t manage them, with the excuse that we’re not people of politics,” he said in a televised speech. He claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had “a systematic plan meticulously designed to destroy this country: ‘It is either us or no Egypt.’”
Ambassador Anne Patterson saw that a court challenge to the election of the Parliament was before the Supreme Constitutional Court, and she feared what the judges might do. She was a small woman with a blond bob and a slow Arkansas twang, but she brought with her a reputation for toughness from her previous assignment as ambassador to Pakistan. She had been deeply involved in the American drone campaign against Islamist militants, and I noticed that others in Foggy Bottom treated her with a deference bordering on trepidation.
Patterson implored the generals not to act against the Parliament at the very moment they were poised to fulfill their promise of a handover of power. She knew they were dictating the rules of the transition, so they controlled the implementation if not the substance of any court verdict. She reminded them how much they enjoyed the international praise they received for running fair elections, and how much they appreciated having an elected legislature for political cover.
Two days before the runoff, the generals moved anyway. The Supreme Constitutional Court had twice before dissolved Mubarak parliaments on election law technicalities, but in each case only after years of deliberations. Now the court announced after only a few weeks that it was nullifying Egypt’s first freely elected legislature. The election scheme had always contained a “fatal poison,” Gebali later told me, meaning that under Mubarak-era precedents it could have happened at any time.
I raced to the Parliament when the decision was announced, and military police in riot gear were standing guard outside. The soldiers had locked out the lawmakers and ringed the building in barbed wire.
Within twenty-four hours, the generals seized for themselves almost all the authority that had been expected to go to whomever was elected president. The military council, led by Mubarak’s Defense Minister Tantawi, was evidently still afraid of a handover, no matter how gentle a transition Shafik or Morsi promised.
* * *
• • •
I thought Egyptians might object to the rollback of their first democratic election. In fact, the non-Islamist side of the political class—even those who had lost seats in the now-dissolved Parliament—welcomed it.
“Definitely it is a good,” a leader of the Social Democratic Party, Emad Gad, told me. The Islamists, he said, were too popular. Liberals could demonstrate against a military strongman; “we cannot demonstrate against the Islamists.”
I strained to understand how other Egyptians made sense of it. They dismissed specific decisions or judges as rigged or corrupt
, but in the abstract they had an extraordinary regard for the judiciary. They revered the idea of their courts, which held the historic promise of fairness and justice. And since courts had dissolved parliaments before under Mubarak, invalidating one more seemed legal enough. In any case, the news media covered the decision as if the generals had no choice. This was the law. The public shrugged.
For the Muslim Brothers, the presidential runoff became a matter of life or death. The Brotherhood campaign headquarters was located across the street from the Interior Ministry. If former air marshal Shafik won, the staff joked, they would walk across the street to turn themselves in.
Voters went to the polls on June 16 and 17, and the ballots were counted in public inside the same polling place as soon as the voting ended: 52 percent for Morsi and 48 percent for Shafik. The difference was more than eight hundred thousand votes scattered across Egypt. It was impossible to fake.
Someone powerful had other ideas. Sultan and the electoral commission refused to certify the results and declare Morsi the winner. They postponed the announcement of any winner, they said, while they considered unspecified appeals.
* * *
• • •
The White House National Security Council was convening frantic, round-the-clock meetings in the Situation Room, worried that Egypt might explode again. American intelligence agencies were reporting that Farouk Sultan and others on the electoral commission wanted to invalidate the results and declare Shafik the winner. The generals were supportive. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which feared both Islamists and free elections, were pushing for it.
“It felt like the eighteen days all over again,” Rhodes later told me, alluding to the eighteen days of protests that had removed Mubarak.
Many in the American military and intelligence agencies dreaded the prospect of an Islamist president of Egypt, too. But given the generals’ performance so far, a rigged Shafik victory seemed to guarantee only continued chaos.
“You could tell a lot of the people in the room were sympathetic to the Shafik play,” Rhodes recalled. “But even those people just could not sustain knowing that the other guy won a free election and we were acting against it.”
The White House threw its weight behind the recognition of Morsi’s victory. Clinton called it “imperative” for the generals to “turn over power to the legitimate winner.” The administration again threatened to cancel the $1.3 billion in annual military aid. Diplomats told the Emiratis and Saudis to back off as well.
“The Gulfies did not appreciate it,” Rhodes told me, “but I think it moderated their heavy-handedness.”
In Cairo, a coalition of non-Islamist politicians (most of whom I had previously called liberal) held a televised press conference to urge the commission to declare Shafik president. “We have seen the United States forcing the military to hand power to the Muslim Brotherhood,” claimed one, Osama el-Ghazali Harb.
“Real democracy,” he told the Islamists without irony, “means the courage to accept defeat.”
Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s preeminent decision maker, warned the military council that if it called the election for Shafik, the Brotherhood would take over every public square in Egypt.
“The message was, if you steal this, we will be in the street in full force,” an Islamist familiar with the conversations later told me. “We are going to stop holding back the antimilitary forces. You are on your own, and you are going to lose. Things have changed.”
After a full week of delays, the electoral commission finally scheduled a news conference on Sunday, June 24, to declare a winner. Excitement had soured into anxiety. Another court had just ruled Mubarak’s top security chiefs innocent of killing protesters, setting up Mubarak’s own likely acquittal on appeal. By now anyone could guess that the commission was searching for an excuse not to call it for Morsi.
Cairo was nearly paralyzed. Banks, schools, and businesses closed. The streets were deserted. The army stationed tanks and armored vehicles at vital buildings, key intersections, and the airport. Soldiers in riot gear surrounded the square, and the military helicopters buzzed low again. The Health Ministry readied eighteen hundred ambulances.
By noon the temperature in Tahrir Square hovered around 90 degrees. It was virtually the only place downtown where people were out, and a crowd of Morsi supporters waiting there had swelled to tens of thousands. Finally, forty-five minutes late, a hush descended, and the rumbling voice of Sultan crackled from loudspeakers.
I strained to hear. He droned on about the hard work of the commission, the nobility of its purpose, and the calumny hurled against it. “Candidates’ appeals came one after another, until the total number of appeals became 456. . . .”
Inside the American embassy, Ambassador Patterson was on a video call with Denis McDonough in the White House, and she was telling him it was over. The American pressure had failed. The generals had tipped the election, and Sultan was calling it for Shafik. It was time to plan for possible violence.
An aide interrupted their call. Sultan was forty-five minutes into his speech and he had just coughed up the full name of the winner: “Dr. Mohamed Mohamed Morsi.”
American officials privy to intelligence reports later told me that the deciding factor was not the Brotherhood’s threats or the White House’s cajoling, although each took away an inflated sense of its own influence. Two honest members of the five-man commission had simply rejected the fix. One of them was the same son of a general who had helped draft the first transitional charter in 2011, the one who had earnestly turned to the Princeton University website for help: Hatem Bagato. (No Islamist himself, Bagato nonetheless publicly defended the inarguable evidence of Morsi’s victory after its announcement at the price of enduring a campaign of slurs and conspiracy theories from Egyptians who wanted a different outcome. But when the political winds later turned, Bagato denied blocking a fix.)
The pavement around me in Tahrir Square turned into a giant trampoline. Tens of thousands of people jumped up and down in jubilation. Cars honked horns and people stopped traffic. “Freedom, freedom,” they chanted, clapping their hands to give it rhythm. Revelers called out “Morsi, Morsi” and “God is great” in a kind of syncopation. Grown men wept in joy and relief. Putting down their weapons, soldiers embraced Islamists.
Some Egyptians had called the schemes of the generals to shape the constitution an unsuccessful military coup. Others described the dissolution of the Parliament as a “judicial coup.” It looked that day like Egypt had beaten back its third coup d’état since the removal of Mubarak.
12
The Night of Power
June 30, 2012–November 19, 2012
In less than two months, Mohamed Morsi had stepped out of obscurity to win the first fair presidential election in millennia of Arab history. His victory was the greatest achievement in the eighty-five-year history of political Islam in the Sunni Muslim world. He now presided over eighty-five million citizens, in a nation of singular significance. Would he lead toward tolerance and democracy, or tyranny and extremism? Perhaps no one could be ready for his new job. Morsi certainly was not.
He was personally unimposing. He was short and stocky. He wore square wire-rimmed glasses that slid askew on his nose. He had grown up on a small farm in the Nile Delta and become engaged in 1978 at the age of twenty-six to a sixteen-year-old first cousin—a common arrangement in rural families. He moved to the United States the same year for a doctoral program in engineering at the University of Southern California. His wife joined him two years later. They made their first home in South Central Los Angeles, spent seven years in California, and give birth to a son there. It was in the Muslim community in Los Angeles that the couple decided to join the Muslim Brotherhood. Aside from a stint teaching in oil-rich Libya to support the family, he spent the rest of his career at the university in Zagazig, not far from his birthplace.
I first met Morsi in his presidential office. He slouched down in a Louis XIV desk chair, and I tried to warm him up with friendly questions like What did he think of his California sojourn?
Morsi looked worried. “The president is not quite sure if this is relevant to the interview, or is this socializing or something like that?” his official interpreter, a Mubarak-era holdover, said.
The new president was a stranger to such rituals. Panetta, a former congressman from California, also tried to break the ice by bringing up Morsi’s history in the state. Morsi looked at him blankly. Later, he abruptly volunteered that his oldest son had been born there. “He could be president of the United States!” Morsi laughed. Panetta changed the subject.
Reassured by an adviser about my small talk, Morsi gushed with enthusiasm about his USC dissertation adviser. “Ferdinand A. Kroger—he writes it with a u, or with two dots over the o. He wrote a very big book, The Chemistry of Imperfect Crystals.”
Morsi chuckled about USC campus culture—“Go, Trojans!”—and he reminisced about Barbara Walters in the morning and Walter Cronkite at night. “And that’s the way it is!” he said, in a decent imitation.
Was there anything he admired about American culture? I expected him to pick an answer flattering to Americans and previously missing from Egypt, like freedom of conscience, equal protection under the law, or the peaceful rotation of power. No. Morsi admired American work habits and time management. “The people follow the advice of Abraham Lincoln: they go to sleep early and they wake early,” Morsi said. (He was thinking of Benjamin Franklin.) “This is because the community has a firm and serious order.”
He thought that a president should speak his national language, Arabic, but when he felt strongly about something, he switched into crisp English. When the interpreter said Morsi had “learned a lot” in the United States, Morsi quickly corrected her. “Scientifically!” Morsi interjected. What he had learned was science—just science. “I lived in America but I did not change a lot. I am Egyptian blood and flesh!”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 18