Egyptians elected a president from the Muslim Brotherhood, and the dreaded theocratic takeover did not come to pass. Morsi may have been a second-rate amateur of a president, yet for a time he looked like he might hang on long enough to be voted out of office, like the Islamists of Tunisia. Morsi was not wrong to suspect enmity from the deep state. Nor was he wrong to worry that the Saudis and Emiratis were out to undermine him, or that many in Washington would be glad to see him gone. Morsi was wrong to trust Sisi.
Nor were liberals like ElBaradei wrong to fear that Muslim Brotherhood leaders might be tempted to cling to power. The demonstrators outside Morsi’s palace were not wrong to worry that the Interior Ministry was still intact, abusive, and menacing. But ElBaradei and the demonstrators made the same mistake. They trusted Sisi. They lent their credibility to a coup that destroyed the very thing that they said they stood for: the chance to build a liberal democracy. The civilians let their fears divide them, and the generals were ready and waiting.
On the morning of Trump’s election, I met my friend Hossam Bahgat for coffee in Zamalek. He was thirty-seven years old but still looked like a graduate student. He was clean-shaven, with close-cropped hair and oval-shaped glasses, and he hauled around a leather satchel of books and newspapers slung over his shoulder.
Fifteen years earlier, at the age of twenty-two, Bahgat had founded what became Egypt’s most important human rights organization, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. He had done more than anyone to document the dark sides of authoritarianism—torture, police abuse, sexism, homophobia, sectarianism, and corruption. To a generation of Western journalists and diplomats, Bahgat was an indispensable resource. Whenever a big shot from the home office came to Cairo, the first thing we all did was to set up a meeting with Bahgat. Then Mubarak fell, the news media opened up, and Bahgat reinvented himself as Egypt’s most important investigative journalist. He wrote for and then edited the left-leaning online publication Mada Masr (The Scope of Egypt, though mada can also mean the setting of a precious stone). I thought Bahgat was one of the smartest people I have ever met, and one of the bravest.
He had narrowly evaded arrest at least twice since Sisi took power. In October 2014, he was tipped off that the police were coming for him. He caught the next flight to New York, where he accepted a fellowship at the Columbia School of Journalism. But Bahgat loved Egypt. Also, he hated cold weather. So a year later he convinced himself that Cairo was safe enough to return.
Military intelligence called him in for questioning in November 2015 about something he had written. The officers detained him in their headquarters, and as soon as I found out, I wrote an article for the website of the New York Times as quickly as I could. The State Department expressed alarm about the rule of law and freedom of expression. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations issued a personal appeal. And after two nights Bahgat was out. “Mama Amreeka” still had some clout, I thought.
But the mukhabarat was only biding its time. In early 2016, prosecutors opened a criminal case against Bahgat for accepting unauthorized foreign contributions to the rights group he had founded. He was banned from travel and his assets were frozen (along with those of several others). A long series of hearings began.
Then Trump won the election. “Now I am definitely going to jail,” Bahgat joked to me in a text message that morning.
He had no great love for Hillary Clinton; Bahgat preferred Bernie Sanders. But we both knew that Trump had shown no patience for human rights at home, much less in Egypt. He was not about to pressure Sisi to free someone like Bahgat.
Bahgat’s trial ground on through 2017, and he kept a brave face. He told me that over time he had found something to like about Trump. Bahgat thought: Here was an American president who made his family members top White House advisers. He pushed conspiracy theories, called critics treasonous, and bullied the news media. He lied with impunity. He disdained legal customs and parliamentary process. He fired a top law enforcement official whose investigations threatened him. And Americans on both the left and the right had started speaking of a “deep state” of their own—a permanent government that had either stymied Obama or thwarted Trump, depending on who was talking.
Washington had puzzled about why Egyptians behaved so differently than we did. Bahgat thought we were starting to act a little Egyptian. “America,” Bahgat wrote on Twitter in the spring of 2017. “So deliciously third world.”
Acknowledgments
Mayy el-Sheikh risked her life, braved threats and insults from her fellow Egyptians, and worked around the clock for more than two years—all to try to tell the truth about what was happening in her country. I was an incidental beneficiary of her efforts, and so were the readers of the New York Times. During the writing of this book, she consulted on its planning, filled in gaps in the reporting, and provided valuable comments on early drafts of the chapters. My gratitude to her is undying, and I hope some day she writes her own book about all that she witnessed.
Anthony Shadid was the Times bureau chief in Beirut in 2011. He raced to Cairo to help cover the Tahrir Square sit-in, and I knew him only for the next thirteen months, until he died on February 16, 2012, covering the uprising in Syria. He was the greatest international correspondent of our generation working in the region, and he taught me a great deal. Anthony had a special gift for translating the poetry in the voices of everyday Arabs, and I have tried my best to follow the example of his exceptional empathy. I wish I could read the book he would have written.
The unrivaled commitment to international reporting by the New York Times and the Sulzberger family made this book possible. I am especially grateful for the support, insight, and friendship of Michael Slackman—my predecessor in Cairo, my editor during the Arab Spring, and head of the international desk by 2018. I also owe thanks to many others: Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn, Susan Chira, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson (who I suspect helped persuade the international desk to send me to Cairo), and Jim Yardley. Bill Schmidt arranged for my family during its first evacuation; Janet Elder, who died last year, took care of the second. I benefited from the wisdom and patience of more editors and copy editors on the desk than I can possibly name here.
I am grateful for the collaboration and camaraderie of many New York Times colleagues in the field, including Kareem Fahim, Ben Hubbard, Declan Walsh, Anne Bernard, Neil MacFarquhar, Rod Nordland, Robert Worth, Liam Stack, Mona el-Naggar, Nour Youssef, Robert Mackey, and others. Outside the Times, I am thankful for the friendship in Cairo of the journalists Patrick Kingsley, Edmund Blair, Amina Ismail, Leila Fadel, Abigail Hauslohner, Heba Saleh, Max Rodenbeck, Maggie Michaels, Louisa Loveluck, Matt Bradley, Thanassis Cambanis, and others. I also owe deep thanks to the Egyptian staff of the Times Cairo bureau. They asked not to be named, for their safety.
Nour Youssef made valuable introductions and provided insightful consultations during the writing of this book. Two interpreters who worked with me also asked not to be named, to avoid retaliation.
I owe thanks to many for places to stay during the research and writing: Simon Kitchen and Karima Zein el-Abedeen, Andre and Annie Houston, Jared and Shaye Hardner, Kathy Bradford, Susan and Peter Bradford, and my parents, Nancy and Douglas Kirkpatrick.
The Royal United Services Institute provided a base in London and the Woodrow Wilson Center provided office space in Washington. Steven Cook, Hazem Kandil, Khaled Fahmy, Michele Dunne, Nathan Brown, Michael Hanna, Amy Hawthorne, Andrew Miller, Daniel Benaim, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Samuel Tadros, Moktar Awad, Brian Katulis, and Jon Alterman all shared their time and consultation.
My agent, Elyse Cheney, coaxed out of me a book-length proposal that remained the blueprint for this book. Wendy Wolf at Viking was brilliant, committed, and merciless—all that any author could hope for. Jane Cavolina copyedited with the eyes of an eagle.
Rebecca Corbett read early drafts of each chapter (as well as some that died along the way) and a
dvised me on their structure. I am not sure I could have finished the book without her. Ruth Feycech gave it an extra line edit at the end. My father, Douglas Kirkpatrick, interrupted his retirement to mark up the pages in process. Ariel Kaminer, my friend and editor for more than a quarter century, provided valuable suggestions in several places and sustained me with her enthusiasm. Patrick Kingsley, who covered Cairo for the Guardian in 2013 and now works for the Times, read the near-finished manuscript and helped fix many details. Mietek Boduszyński, a political scientist who was an American diplomat in the region during the Arab Spring, offered helpful comments as well.
Many others who lived through the events provided advice or corrections on parts of the text: Hossam Bahgat, the founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, and Emad Shahin, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Islam, each read large sections. Wael Eskandar, Mina Thabet, Wael Haddara, Shadi Hamid, Nour Youssef, Mozn Hassan, Mohamed Soltan, Suliman Ali Zway, and Moises Salman read portions.
None of them bear any responsibility for any defects of this work. Any conclusions, faults, or errors are mine alone.
My sons Thomas, now twelve, and Emmett, now nine, are heroes: marvels of resilience and determination. They not only inspired me; they also nagged me to get back to the keyboard. “Dad, you have got to finish the book!”
My greatest debt is to Laura Bradford. I am thankful that she married me fifteen years ago, thankful that she moved with me to Cairo, and thankful for her insights and contributions as a partner in all that went into the writing this book. I forced her to shoulder the burden of parenting alone all too often. Who could forget my weekend trip to Libya that went on for two months, or the year I spent your birthday covering a riot in Cairo? But it is as true today as it was the day we met: I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.
Notes
The main sources of information for this book were my personal experiences and interviews. Many of those I interviewed speak for themselves in the text, so I have not noted them here. Others—mainly current and former officials in Washington or political dissenters in Egypt—spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals of one kind or another. When I have relied on undisclosed sources, I have confirmed their accounts with one or more others wherever possible.
I wrote this book in part to answer questions that troubled me at the end of my time as the bureau chief in Cairo, and to do that I pursued additional reporting in both Egypt and Washington. But I have also made extensive use of my reporting in the New York Times: published articles, crates of notebooks, megabytes of digital files, and hours of audio recordings produced during my work for the paper. Where I have relied on specific reporting by other journalists, I have tried to acknowledge that in the text.
These notes are for readers with a special interest in Egypt, the Arab world, or American foreign policy. I have listed selected books or articles that I relied on for historical background or context, and I have provided names or details that I removed from the text to avoid overburdening a general reader. In a few places, I have also addressed debates of concern primarily to those who have lived through or studied these events. In transliterating Arab names, I followed no consistent rule. I tried to use the preferred spelling of the subject, the most common English spelling, or the spelling in the New York Times, for easy reference to its archives.
1: Whoever Drinks the Water
I first encountered the truism that rivers shaped the cultures of Egypt and Iraq in Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2005). A great book about the city is Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck (London: Picador, 1998).
I relied on two firsthand accounts of the Aswan Dam and the Suez Crisis from an Egyptian perspective: The Cairo Documents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971) and Cutting the Lion’s Tale (New York: Arbor House, 1987), both by Mohamed Heikal. I used Eisenhower 1956 by David A. Nichols (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) as a reference for the American role. I also benefited from Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt, 1955–1981 by William J. Burns (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), who appears in these pages as a diplomat.
In 2017, the import of new Western-made drugs had recently begun to lower the prevalence of hepatitis C.
2: City of Contradictions
The blogger at the American embassy iftar was Wael Abbas; the political scientist was Maye Kassem. The newspaper columnist sentenced to jail, Ibrahim Eissa, was saved from incarceration by a presidential pardon.
Some of the background about Ahmed Ezz comes from my conversations with him after his release from prison.
Two excellent and very different histories of modern Egypt that I have consulted are The Struggle for Egypt by Steven A. Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil (London: Verso, 2012).
For background on the Obama administration’s approach to the Arab world before the Arab Spring, a useful starting point is The Obamians by James Mann (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012).
Three different people with very different agendas and ideologies but all with firsthand knowledge told me independently about Sisi’s warnings to the generals in 2010: Mohamed Heikal, Abdel Nasser’s propagandist and the dean of Egyptian political commentators; Hassan Nafaa, a liberal professor of political science at Cairo University; and Yasser Rizk, an Egyptian journalist close to Sisi. Nafaa is especially credible about this because he is sharply critical of Sisi. Heikal and Nafaa heard the account of Sisi’s assessment from groups of generals, including Sisi himself, in 2011, as I recount later in the book.
Heikal, who became an adviser to Sisi, told me that Sisi had asked the generals: “‘Are we ready? How do we respond to this question?’ . . . He was the one who proposed to the army that they should not back Mubarak.”
I heard the memorable phrase “irreversible decline” from Parag Khanna, a scholar of international relations.
The Egypt Human Development Report 2010, sponsored in part by the United Nations Development Programme, provided statistics on poverty in Egypt. Some official Egyptian statistics were assembled by the journalist Mohamed Aboul Gheit in the newspaper El-Masry El-Youm.
The Naguib Mahfouz novel here is Palace of Desire, the second volume of his Cairo trilogy, first published in Arabic in 1957. I read the English translation published in 1991 by the American University in Cairo.
I drew on Counting Islam by Tarek Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) for its excellent reflection on Egypt in 2010, including Ezz’s assessments. I am following the general usage of “the Washington consensus” to mean a set of prescriptions for free markets and privatizations—what critics call neoliberalism.
Sisi disclosed details about the size of the public payroll in speeches, and some of the comparisons here first appeared in “Egypt’s Failed Revolution” by Peter Hessler, in the January 2, 2017, issue of the New Yorker.
For the history of the United States and Egypt, important sources were The Cairo Documents, Cutting the Lion’s Tale, and Secret Channels (London: HarperCollins, 1996), also by Heikal; Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution by Gamal Abdel Nasser (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1956); In Search of Identity by Anwar Sadat (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Thirteen Days in September by Lawrence Wright (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Eisenhower 1956 by Nichols; The Struggle for Egypt by Cook; and most of all, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen by Kandil. I drew heavily on Kandil.
There are conflicting accounts about the details of the Free Officers’ communications with the Americans before the launch of the 1952 coup, but there is no doubt that the outreach took place, and the Free Officers correctly believed that they could enlist the United States on their side. Kandil’s Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen documented Sadat’s courtship of Henry Kissinger. Sadat said that the United States “holds 99 percent of the cards” during a Marc
h 1977 interview on CBS television and he often repeated the phrase, as the Washington Post noted in its obituary on October 7, 1981. The “God help us” comment was recounted to me by Mietek Boduszyński, a diplomat who heard it.
Hisham Talaat Moustapha was removed from prison to a hospital for health reasons after three years. He received a full pardon from President Sisi in 2017.
3: Police Day
The best account of the suicide of the fruit peddler, “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia,” was published in the January 22, 2011, issue of the New York Times by Kareem Fahim.
The organizer who told me “we always start from the elite” was Islam Lotfy. In addition to Fahim’s real-time reports, this account of January 25 is based on interviews with many of the organizers and others who marched that day. Sondos Asem was one of the Brotherhood women who believed they were first to reach the square, along with her mother, a former Brotherhood lawmaker. I was back in Cairo by the morning of January 26.
Waleed Rashed, who had predicted a revolution on the morning of January 28, gave up politics to found and sell an internet-based messenger business. The last time we talked, over coffee in 2016, he was a mentor at an “incubator” for start-ups and was founding a second company.
The number of police stations and cars burned on January 28, 2011, and the inside account of the state media, comes from Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak by Abdel Latif el-Menawy (London: Gilgamesh Publishing, 2012). Menawy was president of the news division of the state media at the time.
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