“There is a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood whose entire job and concern is to fabricate photos and videos that tell people that the police are assaulting protesters—that this one is bleeding, that one is injured,” he said.
A few days later, the police arrested the deputy chairman of her political party—he had been a personal friend of Sabbagh’s—on suspicion that he had fired a concealed weapon through his jacket pocket to murder her. Progovernment newscasts were saying it was a setup to blame the police. Then a judge ordered a media blackout on news, and we heard little more about it.
I was so inured to the deaths that I barely reacted. I was at a swimming pool with my sons when I first heard of Sabbagh’s killing. I did not think it was worth interrupting a day with my family to write about the death of one more protester. Police killed at least a few almost every week—mostly Islamists, but also leftists or liberals. They killed a seventeen-year-old girl at an Islamist rally in Alexandria the same day Sabbagh died. They killed twenty more the next day, January 25, on the anniversary of the uprising. They killed a student five days later in clashes after a demonstration in the province of Sharqiya, a short drive north of Cairo. It went on and on.
But those pictures. The expression on Sabbagh’s face during her last seconds was unforgettable. So startled, so naïve.
For three years, whenever I asked an Egyptian liberal or leftist about the repression under Sisi, their answers always began the same way: with a long prologue about the culpability of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brothers should have shared more power. They should have taken on the generals. They should have governed better. They should have exited the stage before they were pushed. Sisi was the Brotherhood’s fault. Every Western diplomat and journalist in Cairo from 2013 through 2016 heard the same argument over and over. But time attenuated that explanation. No Muslim Brother held the gun that killed Shaimaa el-Sabbagh.
After four years, the answers started to change. Sisi surprised Egypt in 2016 by announcing the transfer of two empty Red Sea islands to his patron, the king of Saudi Arabia. Sisi’s fellow blood-and-soil nationalists demonstrated against the surrender of Egyptian territory, and the police started arresting and shooting them as if they had been Islamists. He had turned on his nationalist allies. I thought of the pigs in Animal Farm crushing a strike by the hens.
New evidence emerged of disorder in the regime. While an Italian trade delegation was visiting Cairo in early 2016, the body of an Italian graduate student who had been studying in Egypt, Giulio Regeni, was disovered half naked and covered in blood by the side of the Alexandria highway. One of his front teeth was missing and others were chipped or broken. His skin was pocked with cigarette burns. His back was lacerated with deep cuts. His right earlobe had been sliced off, and the bones of his wrists, shoulders, and feet were shattered. An Italian autopsy later confirmed that he had been beaten, burned, stabbed, and probably flogged on the soles of his feet over a period of four days. A broken neck finally killed him.
The police tried to put over a series of explanations. First they made up false allegations of homosexuality. Then they invented a gang that impersonated police in order to steal foreign passports. Their implausible scenarios all crumbled away. Debating which branch of the military or security services killed him and why became a gruesome parlor game among Egyptian intellectuals.
American officials in Washington and Cairo later told me that they had concluded that the intelligence service that killed Regeni did not do it on Sisi’s order. Nor did it kill Regeni to undermine Sisi. It had tortured and killed Regeni on its own authority, without asking permission. And the killers had deliberately left his body to be discovered while the Italian delegation was in Cairo, to send some kind of message.
A Western passport was no longer protection. Units of the security services believed they could kill whomever they liked. More than a year later, in 2018, the Egyptian government had not identified the unit responsible, and two American officials told me that they thought they knew a reason. Sisi’s son Mahmoud was one of three officers in the general intelligence service who might have directed the operation.
Dalia Abdel Hamid was a thirty-five-year-old researcher for a human rights group. She wore little wire glasses and had long, wavy hair, and she worked on issues that would be considered forward thinking even in New York and London, like the rights of Egyptian transsexuals.
Like most Egyptians I knew, Abdel Hamid had relatives on both sides of the culture wars. Her parents were left-leaning teachers in the state schools, and her brother was a prominent organizer of the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. But her uncle was a midlevel Brotherhood leader. After the street fighting outside the presidential palace in December 2012, Abdel Hamid refused to talk to him.
“I was so angry. I felt like they were dragging us to some kind of civil war,” she told me.
In early 2017, Abdel Hamid decided to compose a reflection for an online journal about the psychological state of her milieu—the Cairo intelligentsia, the liberals, leftists, and artists who were her community. I invited her to dinner at a Japanese restaurant popular with Egyptian liberals and Western journalists, expecting to hear the customary Brotherhood blaming.
For her, she said, the massacre at Rabaa had erased that. “It all seemed so meaningless.” Her uncle in the Brotherhood fled underground but snuck furtive visits to his sister—Abdel Hamid’s mother. Her uncle had planned to attend a secret meeting in June 2015 of fugitive Brotherhood leaders and defense lawyers at an apartment in the October 6 suburb. The police broke into the apartment and executed everyone present—at least nine people in all. Abdel Hamid’s uncle survived because he had been caught and arrested before he got there.
“So I guess I am glad he is a prisoner,” she told me. He sometimes called her from inside, and she was glad to hear from him.
She divorced her husband in the summer of 2013, and two of her close friends got divorced that year as well. She thought it was related to the depression hanging over her circle. Facebook, once the signature tool of the Tahrir Square organizers, had become a receptacle of their agony.
“My Facebook timeline starts each morning with people narrating the nightmares that they had the previous night,” she said. “‘I was running from the army,’ ‘I was in the middle of a mob sexual attack in my nightmare,’ ‘I dreamed of my imprisoned husband.’
“As the day progresses, people complain of panic attacks, anxiety attacks. ‘I am so depressed I cannot get out of the bed today.’ ‘I am so depressed I cannot move a muscle today.’ By night, they are talking about insomnia, and it starts all over again.
“All our Facebook postings now are about ‘Please free this person,’ ‘Get this prisoner to a hospital, he needs to be treated,’ ‘Allow this person out to see his dying parent and bury his dead,’ or ‘This person is eighty years old, let him out to die in dignity.’ These are now the demands of everyday Egypt.”
What were her friends doing about it? “We have all turned to personal projects. The obsessions we have developed. Cooking, children, the gym, yoga, learning a musical instrument, learning a new language, alcohol, eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia—you name it, we have it all. You want to feel that you are in control of something, if only your own body. But we are failing at this as well.
“The trauma we went through, the dead people we saw, the morgue scenes, the sexual attacks, the massacres . . .” Abdel Hamid trailed off. “On the anniversary of each incident in the revolution, Facebook turns into a war zone. ‘You did this,’ ‘You did that,’ ‘You did not join this march,’ or ‘You did not sign that petition.’ People accuse each other of stuff that happened six years ago. It is absolute madness, a manifestation of helplessness and utter defeat. We are all turning against each other, like when cocks are fighting. We are becoming so vicious to each other.”
She paused. “Everybody wants to find the point where it all went wrong,”
she said, “and nobody wants to discuss Rabaa.”
I had seldom heard a Cairo liberal acknowledge that reticence. Abdel Hamid immediately changed the subject. She turned back to the feelings of her fellow activists. “We were so full of ourselves,” she said. “I think that some of us, maybe not consciously, hated that a different revolutionary faction than us”—the Muslim Brothers—“made it to power.”
She rushed through the obligatory disclaimers. “Of course, the record of the Muslim Brothers in power was so miserable. Of course, I am not defending them by any means. But we need to stop our obsession with what they did wrong. We need to look at what we did wrong.
“We forgot that these people also participated in this revolution, and they paid a price. In the early days of the revolution, in Tahrir Square, it was the Muslim Brothers who slept under the wheels of the tanks to prevent them from moving. They were there, and they were courageous. . . . I think we hated the Muslim Brothers so much that some of us thought regaining the old regime would be better than having them in power.”
Ethics, she said, was what activists and intellectuals stood for. “That summer, in 2013, we did not abide by our ethics,” she said slowly. “Consciously or not, we were so blinded by hatred . . .” She trailed off again, and tears welled up in her eyes. “See how I struggle talking about it?”
“We did not want to believe it was a coup. We thought that we would have another chance. We overestimated our power. We hated the Brothers so much. We were brainwashed by the media . . .” Another long pause.
“The defeat is so heavy, you don’t want to be accountable. It is difficult to imagine that you have something to do with this,” she acknowledged at last.
“We were non-Jews in Nazi Germany,” she continued. “We failed the test. We failed to bear witness. Ethics is our capital. When that is lost, you have nothing. You forget who you are. You can drown yourself in alcohol or Xanax or whatever you want. But this thing will keep haunting you. And sooner or later, we all arrive there.”
I left Cairo early the next morning with no plans to return.
Epilogue
I watched much of the 2016 presidential race from Cairo, and that vantage point made the discussion of the Middle East especially bracing. Candidate Donald J. Trump’s hostility to Islam was blunt and unmistakable. He made a point of saying “radical Islam” instead of “Islamic radicalism” to underscore that the creed itself was the problem. He promised to bar all Muslims from entering the United States. He claimed Muslims in Jersey City had cheered for the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. He told apocryphal stories glorifying the killing of Muslim fighters with bullets soaked in pig fat. He even insinuated that Obama himself was a crypto-Muslim. So how would Trump get along with Sisi, who had pledged as president of Egypt to teach and defend Islam?
They adored each other. Sisi leaped to excuse the candidate’s promise to ban Muslims. It was just campaign talk, Sisi told CNN. He was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump on election night, and when they met at the White House, Sisi seized the new president’s outstretched hand with the awkward eagerness of a teenager meeting his idol. “I have had a deep appreciation and admiration of your unique personality,” Sisi told Trump.
“A fantastic guy,” Trump called Sisi when they first met, in September 2016, and again during Sisi’s official visit to the White House the following April. “He took control of Egypt, and he really took control of it,” Trump raved, explaining that Egypt had “tremendous problems” with “terrorists” before Sisi had “wiped them out.”
The facts were less flattering. The number of Egyptians killed each year from bombings or shootings by Islamist militants had escalated sharply under Sisi—whether compared with Morsi’s sole year in office or with Mubarak’s last years. By “terrorists,” Trump presumably meant the Muslim Brothers, whom Sisi had indeed driven underground (although not eradicated). But Trump was clear enough. Sisi was a strongman, just the kind he admired.
“We are going to be friends for a long, long period of time,” Trump concluded after their White House meeting.
The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were just as delighted with Trump as Sisi was. The Saudi royals hosted him in Riyadh, handed him a sword, and danced arm in arm. King Salman, Sisi, and Trump posed together at a Saudi counterterrorism center with their hands on a surreal, glowing white orb of no clear purpose. Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the king’s favorite son and dominant adviser, visited the White House and pronounced Trump “a true friend of Muslims.”
Why did Trump and the Arab autocrats get along? Trump had chosen General James Mattis as his defense secretary and General Mike Flynn as his first national security adviser, both eager supporters of General Sisi and relentless foes of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ambassador Otaiba of the UAE—Bro-taiba—became a kind of tutor in regional affairs to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser. Perhaps Trump and the Arab autocrats both found reasons to overlook his fear of Muslims.
I wondered, though, if Trump’s fear of Muslims was not an impediment at all. It was part of the bond. Flynn had admired Sisi precisely because he was a “very secular” or “moderate” Muslim. He was one of the good ones, not like the others. In some ways, Sisi and the Arab autocrats appeared to agree that their Muslim citizens were too “backward” to govern themselves. Egyptians lagged Western Europeans by a “civilizational gap,” Sisi told a German magazine in 2015, trying to explain the necessity of the killings at Rabaa. Egyptian friends took the prejudice for granted: Arab dictators like Sisi always appealed to a kind of Western bigotry. The rights that Westerners considered universal at home could not apply to Arabs, because the people and culture were fundamentally different.
By 2016, the hope for democratic change in the Arab world felt like a cruel hoax. It was easy to forget that the revolts of 2011 had created a real opening, that for a time Egypt’s generals had feared public disapproval, or that Tunisia had completed a peaceful rotation of power. The uprisings had spread more chaos and violence across the region than at any time since the end of World War I. Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq were riven by civil war; Bahrain was held together only by Saudi military force. Struggles for democracy had degenerated into sectarian feuds. Local antagonists were enlisted as pawns in cynical proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or between the UAE and Qatar—two rich little American allies in a bizarre family feud.
The leaders of Al Qaeda had worried in 2011 that movements for democracy were upstaging their jihad, offering Muslims what Osama Bin Laden called “half-measures.” But the jihadists came roaring back after the turn again to authoritarianism. America was pulled back into war in Iraq for the third time in a quarter century. Refugees from Arab conflicts flooded westward and triggered a nationalist backlash. It was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the tumult across the Arab world had helped to elect Trump as president and to scare Britain out of the European Union.
I happened to be in Washington on the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian uprising, January 25, 2016. Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser from the start of the uprising until the weekend of the coup, spoke at a public forum hosted by Politico magazine. What happened to the Arab Spring? was the first question put to him.
“It has been a negative for the people of the Middle East, and it has been a negative for the security of the United States,” Donilon said, with I-told-you-so resignation. “You have seen a collapse of the state system in the Muslim Arab world.” I thought of Sisi’s warnings about “the collapse of the state,” and I saw heads nodding around me.
The conclusion that settled over Washington was that the people of the region would have been better off if they had never risen up. Arabs had failed at democracy; maybe they preferred strongmen. We should thank Sisi for restoring order. We should coax him to open the Egyptian economy (Washington’s perennial recommendation). And we should keep sending $1.3 bi
llion a year in Apaches and F-16s to fight the Islamic State in the Sinai (as if Sisi’s takeover itself had not ignited the insurgency). Political Islam—whether ISIS or the Muslim Brotherhood—was a threat to the West, and Sisi was a bulwark against it. He was a “natural partner,” Dennis Ross, the veteran Middle East diplomat who stood with Obama during his last call to Mubarak, argued in his New York Times op-ed, “Islamists Are Not Our Friends.”
“The only way to support Egypt’s maturation as a country with civil society, with democracy, is to support President el-Sisi,” General Mattis argued in April 2016, in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (which received major funding from the Emiratis). Three years earlier, Mattis had said Egyptians removed Morsi because of his “imperious leadership.” Now Mattis said that with Sisi trying “to reduce the amount of negatives about the Muslim religion, I think it’s time for us to support him and take our own side in this.”
Six years in Egypt, though, convinced me that the uprisings were hardly the source of the chaos. The old order was crumbling, visibly, from the moment I landed in Cairo, long before the first demonstrator set foot in Tahrir Square. It felt obvious in 2011—and even clearer in 2018—that the failure of that Arab state system was the cause of the uprising, not its consequence. The old autocracies were as fragile as their rulers had feared, but that was because their dependence on corruption and coercion had hollowed them out. So nothing could be more naïve than to think that putting the face of a different soldier in front of a refurbished autocracy would yield a more stable result. The thirty months of imperfect steps toward democracy in Egypt had offered at least a chance of an alternative.
Plenty of Egyptians now say that their struggle was doomed from the start. Oddly, living through the utter, calamitous failure of the uprising has convinced me of the opposite: Egyptians have as much potential as any people to fulfill the promises of freedom and democracy that brought Tahrir Square to life. I watched thousands give their lives to build a more just and free Egypt. Their sacrifices are no less inspiring because they were defeated. They labored under the burden of more than six decades of unresolved fears and resentments, against powerful cliques like the judges and generals still deeply invested in the old status quo. And for those thirty months, longer than anyone had a right to expect, Egyptians nonetheless beat back repeated attempts to restore that old order.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 39