Why did you try to escape again, Balaha? an asylum guard mistakenly asked the cab driver, forcing him into the hospital. “I am not balaha!” he sputters. I am not a date!
The balaha scene lasted only minutes and contributed nothing to the plot. But Egyptians found a new nickname for their president—Balaha. By 2017, an Arab speaker searching Google for information about date fruit—“balaha”—would find only a long list of satiric web postings and videos about Sisi.
“Did you escape again, Balaha?” interviewers asked him in dubbed dialogue. “I am not Balaha!” he protested again and again. “I am not Balaha!”
* * *
• • •
When somebody comes who tries to divide you, then kill them, whoever they are,” a gray-bearded sheikh was saying. In his customary tall red fez wrapped in white—the uniform of a religious scholar trained at the Al Azhar Institute—the former Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa had come to a Defense Ministry auditorium after the Rabaa massacre to give the soldiers a religious pep talk.
Sheikh Gomaa was appointed by Mubarak in 2003, served for a decade as Egypt’s highest Muslim religious authority, and carried on a tradition of hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood that has shaped the clerical establishment since Abdel Nasser’s takeover. Now, in August 2013, Gomaa told the soldiers that the Muslim Brothers were heretics—like Kharijites, a sect notorious for its rebellion against the early Muslim caliphs. “Even with the sanctity and greatness of blood, the prophet permits us to fight this.”
“Shoot to kill,” he said, again, at these “rotten and stinking people.”
A senior scholar in the ministry of mosques took the stage and backed up Gomaa. The protesters at Rabaa were “aggressors who have to repent” and “not honorable Egyptians.” Using deadly force against them was a military duty. “The heart is at ease about this.”
Then a celebrity televangelist, Amr Khaled, reminded the soldiers that Islam obliged them to obey the orders of their commanders. “You, you conscript in the Egyptian military, you are performing a task for God Almighty!”
The military’s Department of Moral Affairs showed a video of the lectures on Islam to soldiers and riot police stationed across the country, presumably to help put to rest any moral or ethical qualms about killing their fellow Egyptians. Gomaa became an informal religious adviser to Sisi and often preached the same bloody sermon. At a Friday prayer service in early 2014, for example, he again sanctified the soldiers and police who fought that “faction of hypocrites” and “terrorists,” the Muslim Brothers. “Blessed are those who kill them, as well as those whom they kill,” he proclaimed. State television broadcast the sermon, and its cameras panned to Sisi listening attentively from the floor. This was the Islam of the deep state, and its clerics were as adept as jihadists at justifying bloodshed.
Abdel Nasser had been the first to nationalize Egypt’s Muslim religious establishment—Al Azhar, the Grand Mufti, and the ministry of mosques. It was under his rule that Egypt’s clerics had set the template for demonizing the Muslim Brothers. “Brothers of the Devil,” his sheikhs called them.
In 2011, all the highest religious authorities in Egypt had urged Muslims to shun the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak, and in 2012, Grand Mufti Gomaa had endorsed the general running against Morsi. Air Marshal Shafik was “closer to God,” Gomaa announced. Now, after 2013, the voices of the religious establishment sometimes hailed Sisi as “a messenger of God” or “God’s shadow on earth.”
Sisi embraced the role. He pledged several times in his short campaign that part of his job would be to “present God” in the correct way to the public. He vowed to remain “alert and responsible,” to fix the errors of others about Islam. “I lead the people, so there cannot be a leadership that speaks and presents while I am sitting on the sidelines watching,” he said on the subject of preaching. The new constitution approved under Sisi at the start of 2014 was scarcely more secular than either the one passed under Morsi in 2012 or the one in place under Mubarak. The principles of Islamic Sharia were still its foundation.
After terrorist attacks against the West in 2015, Sisi made headlines around the world by calling for a “revolution” in Islam. “It is unbelievable that the thought we hold holy pushes the Muslim community to be a source of worry, fear, danger, murder, and destruction to all the world,” he told the clerics of Al Azhar in a televised speech. “You need to stand sternly.”
American commentators heralded the speech as a sign that Sisi was the long-awaited Muslim Martin Luther. George Will recommended him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Many, to my bewilderment, called him secular.
An Egyptian lawyer and television host tried to answer Sisi’s call for reform by opening a debate about the sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohamed. Misunderstandings of the sayings had justified violence, the host, Islam Beheri, contended.
The sheikhs of Al Azhar accused him of insulting Islam and insulting them, too—both crimes under Sisi’s constitution. And Sisi backed Al Azhar against the free thinker. Only Al Azhar could guide any “reform,” Sisi said, and no one could contradict it. Sisi’s government imprisoned Beheri in Tora a year for his heresy, before he was released by a presidential pardon.
When it comes to our own religion or politics, Americans and Western Europeans usually say we believe that independent reasoning and open debate are the way to reform. (Sheik Muhammad Abduh thought so as well.) But Sisi’s idea of “reform” was the Islam of the deep state: dictated from above. He banned heterodox books about Islam and imposed tight controls over Islamic teaching. He closed down twenty-seven thousand independent mosques. He forbade preaching by unlicensed imams. His government issued mandatory sermon guidelines for those still at their minbars.
“To avoid evil and please God, a person shall obey the rulers” read an official 3,100-word sermon issued for the 2016 anniversary of the Arab Spring protests. Rising up brought only “ruin and chaos,” the sermon text warned.
American Christians would riot if our government tried to control our churches. But Arab authoritarians have pushed that same top-down approach to religious “reform” for more than half a century. It has so far succeeded only in driving dissent underground, where radicalism has flourished. Will the outcome be different under Sisi?
In time I came to suspect Sisi and his supporters believed the fundamental problem was not behind the minbar at all. The problem was the people on the prayer mats. The elite distrusted Egyptian Muslims too much to allow them to consider or reject reforms for themselves.
“Religious thought, or religious discourse, is afflicted with backwardness,” Sisi’s first minister of culture, Gaber Asfour, declared in a morning television interview, throwing up his hands, as he often did, at the failings of his fellow Egyptians. “We now live in an age of backwardness.”
Tawadros II, who ascended to the Coptic papacy in 2012, preached a parallel gospel. He not only endorsed Sisi for president; Tawadros absolved the military of the Maspero massacre. The pope usually maintained that no one knew who had killed those two dozen Christians. Sometimes, though, he went as far as to blame the Muslim Brothers: he claimed that they had somehow duped the Christians into clashing with the army and then fled the scene.
“We can pray in a nation without a church,” Tawadros II said in June 2014, “but we can’t pray in a church without a nation.” It was the psalm of the deep state, trumpeted the next day on the front page of Al Ahram.
Sisi brought some boons to the church. He silenced the sectarian invective of the Salafi television preachers. After his inauguration as president, he paid a surprise visit to Mass for Coptic Christmas Eve, on January 6, 2015. Mubarak and Morsi had wished the pope Merry Christmas over the telephone and sent envoys to the service, and Morsi had attended the Mass in his capacity as a Brotherhood leader before his election. But Sisi was the first president to show up at the service.
“Let no one say, ‘What kind
of Egyptian are you?’” Sisi told the worshippers. “We must only be Egyptians!” Then he left with his retinue of bodyguards before the first prayers.
In some ways, though, Christians fared worse under Sisi than they had under Morsi, in part because they became scapegoats for anger at the coup. I visited the Father Moses Church in Minya, 140 miles south of Cairo, a month after Rabaa. Its soaring sanctuary had been stripped of stained glass, icons, iron light fixtures, copper wires, and anything else the looters could steal. Attackers had built a bonfire of the pews. The high stone dome was blackened; ashes and debris covered the floor. So I joined hundreds of parishioners gathered in folding chairs in a low concrete basement. It was lit by bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, and I felt like I was praying in the Roman catacombs.
Sixty-eight-year-old Father Samuel Aziz, with a long white beard and glasses, told me he was trapped in a church office during the attack. A police commander called to offer an escort to safety, but none ever showed up. “They were too weak and outnumbered,” the priest said. A month later, he was still waiting for any police officer to visit the scene.
In the nearby town of Dalga, a mob attacked a 1,650-year-old monastery and stole icons and relics older than Islam along with a medieval baptismal font. Arsonists set fire to thirty-five homes belonging to Christians. One Christian had defended his home with a gun, and he was killed and dragged through the streets.
But the police had not shown up yet in Dalga either. Forty-seven-year-old Father Abraam Tenesa told me that “thugs” were trying to shake Christians down for protection money, like the medieval tax on Christians, jizya.
Christians complained of the same bias against them. Three months after Sisi took power, a court convicted three Christians of murdering a Muslim in the outbreak of violence that had led to the assault on the cathedral under Morsi. Each Christian was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. No Muslims were found guilty of killing any of the five Christians who had died during the fight.
Prosecutors still jailed Christians for blasphemy against Islam. A committee of Muslim scholars still censored the screening of movies. Despite a promise from Sisi, church building still required special permission from security agencies, which frequently denied it.
Worst of all, police failed to protect Christians from the rising violence against them. In May 2016, a rumor spread through the village of Karm, Minya, about a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. A mob of forty Muslims burned the Christian’s home to the ground, beat up the family, and dragged the seventy-year-old matriarch, Suad Thabet, naked through the streets. Prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge anyone for the crimes. No wonder the Islamic State saw an easy target, declaring Christians its “favorite prey,” and started bombing churches.
When I found Father Matthias, who led the march that ended in the Maspero massacre in 2011, he told me that the soldier who had kicked and beaten him—then major Ibrahim el-Damaty—had been elevated the next year to chief of the military police under Defense Minister Sisi. “Under Sisi, pushing a priest gets you promoted right away,” Father Matthias said ruefully.
Father Filopateer, the other priest at the head of that march, told me he could no longer return to Cairo without fear of arrest for his activism.
“Life for Copts under the Muslim Brotherhood was a lot better,” Father Filopateer told me. At least then Copts had the freedom to organize and protest. “We are dealing with a dictator and he is ready to do anything to maintain his power,” he went on. “In economics, in politics, in freedom—everything is going in the wrong direction.”
* * *
• • •
The standard coup playbook calls for special tribunals to dispense with the old regime. Sisi did not bother. He designated only a circuit of existing courts where quick-ruling, anti-Islamist judges handled “terrorism” cases. No need for special rules or panels. Judges everywhere were eager to lock up anyone the police or mukhabarat hauled into the docket.
On March 24, 2014, a three-judge panel in Minya had sentenced 529 alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death, all for the killing of a single police officer during an antigovernment riot on the day of the Rabaa massacre. The trial took only two sessions, each less than an hour. More than 400 defendants were sentenced in absentia.
A month later, the same panel sentenced to death another 680 alleged Muslim Brothers, after an equally swift trial, again for the murder of a single policeman. One of the condemned was the seventy-year-old general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie; he had been in Cairo on the day of the crime and no specific evidence was presented to link him to the killing. Another alleged culprit was a feeble sixty-year-old high school principal, Mohamed Abdel Wahab.
Sitting at home in his living room surrounded by several grown children, the principal said he had just returned from his retirement party when he heard the news of his conviction in absentia. “We are living in absurdity,” he said, and his children all nodded.
He had survived multiple heart surgeries. He could not walk up stairs or breathe near smoke. He pulled up his galabiya to show me surgical scars on both calves. “I am the one who broke into the police station and killed the police officer?” he asked. “Everything is a whim. There is no rule of law.”
In December, a court in Giza sentenced to death another 188 alleged Muslim Brothers (one of them a minor). The Times barely covered it. Preposterous mass death sentences had become so common they were not news anymore. The appeals process dragged out for years.
Morsi, who the military had quietly transferred to a prison in Alexandria, was sentenced to life for walking out of his brief detention during the Tahrir Square uprising. Prosecutors said Hamas, the Sunni militants in Gaza, and Hezbollah, the Shiites in Lebanon, had improbably conspired together to bust him out of prison in Cairo.
Another court convicted Morsi of committing espionage while in office as president, allegedly by sharing secrets with Qatar. A third court sentenced him to death for the killings in the brawl outside the presidential palace in December 2012, when he was far from the scene.
I assumed the appeals process would keep him from the gallows, but I wondered how a judge could keep a straight face about such ludicrous rulings. The Egyptian judiciary had prided itself for decades on its independence.
Judge Mahmoud Sherif, the general secretary of the judges club at the time of the coup, had been promoted to an office high in the justice ministry when I met him in early 2017. Sherif wore French cuffs and a European suit, and he acknowledged candidly that Morsi never controlled much—certainly not the army, police, judges, state media, the religious establishment, or the rest of the bureaucracy. But why take the chance that he might? “I don’t have to wait until he becomes a tyrant!” Sherif said.
Egypt had now cycled through three constitutions in three years—the charter in place under Mubarak, the charter approved under Morsi, and a third ratified under Sisi. Was it difficult, I asked, for the judges of Egypt to adjust so quickly to new legal frameworks? Not at all, he said. “The people chose several different constitutions. We have to obey, because we rule in their name.”
How did all the judges know that a constitution ratified only six months earlier had lost all legitimacy overnight? “When people take to the streets,” he fired back, grinning at his own rousing populism. “The power comes from the people!”
So how many of “the people” does it take? Would a few million do it? I asked, probing gently.
“We need thirty million exactly!” he answered instantly: the obviously inflated figure that government propagandists had settled on as the size of the June 30 protests against Morsi. “Not twenty-nine million, not twenty-nine and a half million!” he said, slapping his desk. “It must be exactly thirty million!”
We both burst out laughing.
* * *
• • •
Controlling the
news media was a priority for the generals. After Mubarak’s ouster, “people and the media rode roughshod over us in a way that isn’t normal,” one senior military office had groused to Sisi in a private meeting before he took power. (An audio recording later leaked out.)
“Correct,” agreed Sisi, but he urged patience. “It takes a very long time until you possess an appropriate share of influence over the media,” but “we are working on this, for sure.”
Within months after his takeover, Sisi’s levers of influence were locked into place. A new law prescribed a jail sentence for any journalist who contradicted the military’s official statements about its war against “terrorism.” The owners of all the major newspapers pledged in writing not to criticize Sisi’s government during the time of crisis. Television networks suspended talk show hosts who came too close to the line. Soldiers confiscated newspaper print runs. Four years after the takeover, Egypt had become one of the world’s most aggressive jailers of journalists. More than twenty-five were behind bars.
Sisi used the media to build his own cult of personality, too. In another leaked recording, he told his office manager to be sure the news media portrayed him as a hero “on a nearly impossible mission” and “carrying the responsibility of a country in an existential crisis.” Another recording caught the office manager ensuring just that. “There is a point we want all of our media personalities on TV to debate,” he told an unnamed intermediary: questioning Sisi was a “shame” to the nation.
Criticizing Sisi—“this brave, special, free and patriotic Egyptian”—would be “slandering this beautiful thing we have found in our lives,” the office manager said, and he listed a half dozen talk show hosts who should deliver that message.
“Our dear Egyptian people, do you like this being done to the man who labored and sacrificed?” the office manager suggested. “Are you listening? Are you writing this down or not?” he interjected several times. “Stir up the people with it!”
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 37