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

by David D. Kirkpatrick

  Michael Morrell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, reflected on the period in his memoir, The Great War of Our Time (New York: Twelve, 2015). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) set the conventionally accepted narrative of the White House debates over the uprising. His opponents in that debate say he misstated their argument. They argued in part that Mubarak’s rule was untenable regardless of the American position. The account here reflects interviews with more than a dozen people involved in all sides of that debate.

  The journalist who decorated her apartment with revolutionary graffiti was Wendell Steavenson of the New Yorker. I relied on Revolution 2.0 by Wael Ghonim (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and a March 21, 2018, reflection he wrote on the website Medium. I also interviewed him in 2011 as well. “Orientalising the Egyptian Uprising” by Rabab el-Mahdi, published April 11, 2011, in the online journal Jadaliyya, dissects Western views of the Egyptian uprising.

  Edward Walker was quoted in The Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2006). I have also relied on Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power by my colleague Mark Landler (New York: Random House, 2016) and Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). Morrell describes his own back channels with Suleiman in The Great War of Our Time.

  4: “We Don’t Do That Anymore”

  The dinners with intellectuals and journalists were organized by General Mohamed el-Assar. Among the subjects discussed was General Sisi’s advice to the military council in 2010 about the likelihood of an uprising against a Gamal Mubarak succession in 2011; as noted previously, Hassan Nafaa, a liberal critical of the military, and Yasser Rizk, a promilitary nationalist close to Sisi, each independently described to me the dinners and the message about Sisi.

  Tantawi’s nickname, “Mubarak’s Poodle,” was reported by American diplomats in a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks.

  I learned about the improvisation of the constitutional drafting committee and its reliance on the Princeton website from a committee member who spoke on condition of anonymity. Nathan J. Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies the Egyptian judiciary, has reported the reliance on the website as well. Other members of the panel, notably Tarek el-Bishry, have written about its goals. The general in charge of legal affairs who announced the rule change was General Mamdouh Shahin.

  Some Egyptian liberals or leftists consider the moment of the referendum to have been the beginning of the end for the uprising because it turned Islamists and non-Islamists against one another, dividing those seeking a civilian government. Islamists campaigned for the military-backed interim charter in the hope of an early transition from military rule; some non-Islamists opposed the referendum and sought delayed elections because they believed the Islamists had a head start in organizing. The fiercest liberal critics of the Muslim Brotherhood argue that supporting the referendum amounted to collaboration with the military, swapping the Brotherhood’s support for political advantage. But it was clear to me even then that the Islamists feared the generals. The Brotherhood sought early elections to get the military out of power as soon as possible, not to collaborate with it. And the Muslim Brothers were all too confident of their long-term popularity. They did not see any electoral advantage in early elections, because they did not fear that delaying elections might allow others to catch up. Most diplomats and analysts I spoke with concur.

  Some Muslim Brothers, on the other hand, argue that at least some of the liberals were not merely afraid of early elections; they dreaded any elections because they knew they would lose. But it is easy enough to understand why non-Islamists preferred a delay without resorting to such theories, and many of the people who campaigned against the referendum went on to demonstrate for a swift end to military rule. Although the referendum was the first split in the unity of the uprising; I do not credit the conspiracy theories from either side.

  About the “Thursdays of concessions,” Menawy wrote in Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak that “the tactic of announcing concessions to the public like this, the day before a protest, was widely adopted throughout the following months in Egypt, in order to mitigate the size and aggression of the coming demonstrations.”

  The young woman I quote brushing back the bribe-seeking officer was Lara el-Gibaly.

  The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution by Jack Shenker (New York: New Press, 2016) focuses on labor and working-class activism during the years of the uprising.

  The blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy once worked as a reporting assistant for the New York Times in Cairo, long before I got there.

  In the high-level American courtship of Egyptian military leaders, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Adviser Donilon each met in Washington with the military general who had been appointed to succeed Suleiman as spy chief, Murad Muwafi.

  About the attack on the Israeli embassy, I interviewed many American officials, including Steve Simon, Leon Panetta, and Daniel Shapiro, then U.S. ambassador to Israel. The Egyptian journalist Heba Afify reported with me for the New York Times from outside the embassy.

  The number of jihadists released by the generals appeared in “Who Let the Jihadis Out?” by Hossam Bahgat, published in the online publication Mada Masr on February 16, 2014. Supporters of the military takeover in 2013 falsely blamed Morsi for the release.

  5: The First Lady and the Blue Bra

  This chapter has benefited greatly from the insights and guidance of Nour Youssef and Mayy el-Sheikh. In Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), Edward W. Said wrote at length about the Western preoccupation with Arab sexuality and a Western impulse to explain Arab politics in sexual terms (anticipating the “blue balls theory” of jihad). Said famously accused the scholar Bernard Lewis of belittling the idea of an Arab “revolution” by comparing it, in sexual language, to the “rising up” of a camel.

  Among other sources, I have relied here on two important biographies. One is Doria Shafik: Egyptian Feminist by Cynthia Nelson (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 1996). The other is Casting Off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2015).

  The United Nations survey that assessed the prevalence of female genital mutilation was taken in 2015. It is safe to say that the rate was at least as high in 2011. More background is in Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).

  The “summer bride” deposit law was implemented by Justice Minister Ahmed el-Zind under President Sisi. It updated a seldom-enforced law that had previously required only a small token sum.

  I learned about Tawfik Hamid from his book Inside Jihad: How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, and How to Defeat It (Mountain Lake Park, MD: Mountain Lake Press, 2015). The cover features a blurb from Senator John McCain.

  Merna Thomas later worked for a time as a journalist for the New York Times.

  The columnist Lamees Gaber was writing in the Wafd newspaper, and Khaled Abdullah spoke on television.

  6: The Theban Legion

  I am grateful to Mina Thabet, a former spokesman for the Maspero Youth Union, and Wael Eskandar, a liberal activist and writer, for their help and comments on this chapter. The account of the Maspero massacre here is the product of my own reporting from the scene that night, interviews with more than a dozen witnesses to the killings or participants in the march, and a review of the voluminous video footage.

  Samuel Tadros, a scholar in Washington who writes about Egypt, helped put me in touch with Awad Basseet, a former editor of the Theban Legion. Basseet provided valuable perspective, helped me track down the two priests, and volunteered the conclusion that life for Egyptian Christians was better under Morsi than it was un
der Sisi.

  Another useful account of the night of the Maspero massacre, including the allegations against Father Filopateer, is in Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

  The generals who held the press conference were Adel Emara and Mahmoud Hegazy. Hegazy, related to General Sisi through a marriage of their children, later succeeded him as chief of military intelligence and then became military chief of staff.

  7: “How the Downfall of a State Can Happen”

  Many Egyptian liberals argue that the Muslim Brotherhood effectively collaborated with the generals by discouraging direct confrontations against military rule while the uprising still had momentum. But it is unclear if a direct confrontation in 2011 would have produced a different outcome. The Brothers’ nonconfrontational approach was an outgrowth of the group’s traditional gradualism. It may also have reflected a credible—even correct—assessment of the military’s power. In any case, the end of the story here turned out to be about conflict between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, not conspiracy or collaboration between them. In the West, I have more often heard the contention that the Muslim Brothers moved too quickly to challenge the generals, and that is certainly wrong.

  General Mohamed el-Assar led a delegation to Washington in the summer of 2011, and on July 25, he told an audience at the United States Institute of Peace that “the Muslim Brothers and Salafis are components of the Egyptian people” and thus “cannot be ignored.” He added: “They have the willingness to share in the political life . . . they are sharing in good ways.”

  As for the Muslim Brotherhood’s thinking during this period, Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s chief financier and strategist, had talked publicly for months about the fear of “the Algeria scenario”—an Islamist landslide in parliamentary elections in Algeria in 1991 had triggered a Western-backed coup and a decade-long civil war that killed more than two hundred thousand Algerians. The fighting gave birth to the group that later became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

  I visited Shater’s office around the time of those street clashes, and one of his advisers told me that during the fighting the generals had been on the phone every day with Shater, all but baiting the Brotherhood into the streets: Are you going down yet? Are you going down now?

  Arguing Islam After the Revival of Arab Politics by Nathan J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) provides an excellent analysis of the public debate in Egypt during this period. Freedom and social media made it easier than ever to argue and demonize, but the absence of a political process made resolution impossible. Division and polarization were the result. “It should be no surprise that rhetoric spins out of control if it finds no traction in policy outcomes.”

  The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued its Communiqué #69 on July 22, 2011. Fayza Aboulnaga, a holdover Cabinet member, had been leading an investigation of the Western funding of Egyptian nonprofits since early spring.

  The military council’s “principles” for the constitution appeared under the name of one of the civilian deputy prime ministers working under them in the government, Ali el-Selmi; the principles were known as the Selmi document.

  The Brotherhood leader who was jeered out of the square was Mohamed Beltagy, the one who wryly brought a bouquet of flowers to the Police Day protest on January 25, 2011. In the first days of the clashes, he apologized for the fact that the rest of the Brotherhood leadership was staying away. “You have a right to be angry,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have to reconsider our positions.”

  I caught up with him as he sat in a folding chair in the dusty anteroom of the Brotherhood’s old headquarters two days after he was chased out of the square. “I thought that we should go to the square in great numbers to protect the protesters, secure the entrances, ensure the peacefulness—that we should not keep a distance,” he told me, but Shater and the other leaders saw the fighting “as an attempt to draw the Brotherhood into a made-up crisis.”

  Ben Rhodes recalled writing the Thanksgiving statement and Tom Donilon’s anger. Steven Simon, the senior director for North Africa and the Middle East, described his call with Donilon; Donilon did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Several others in the Obama administration said it was not uncommon for the tone or content of White House statements to reflect differences depending on who was on duty at the time.

  8: Forefathers

  I am grateful to the scholar Emad Shahin for his consultation and comments on the chapters about political Islam.

  This chapter is based primarily on my reporting among Egyptian Salafis in Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, and Port Said. For background, I have consulted Islam and Modernism in Egypt by Charles C. Adams (London: Russell & Russell, 1933) and Muhammad Abduh by Mark Sedgwick (London: Oneworld Publications, 2010), which are among the few good English-language biographies of Abduh.

  For the context of contemporary Salafism, I relied on Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement edited by Roel Meijer (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2009) and, in that volume, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action” by Bernard Haykel.

  Islam and Politics by Peter Mandaville (London: Routledge, 2014) is a terrific overview of Islamist political movements, and its author appears in these pages as an adviser to the State Department. Another useful book by someone who was in the White House during this period is The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (New York: Random House, 2012).

  The title “khedive” was used by the heirs of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the founder of the modern Egyptian state, who in 1805 had established himself as the independent ruler of the Ottoman province of Egypt.

  The claim that the Prophet Mohamed invented constitutional democracy is a reference to the Charter of Medina. Promulgated there by the Prophet Mohamed when he arrived from Mecca in 622, the charter guaranteed equal religious freedom and political rights to Jews and pagans as well as Muslims living in the city. Some scholars reckon it a social contract establishing a pluralist ministate, even if the Prophet Mohamed later deprecated other faiths or preached religious war.

  9: Parliament Grows a Beard

  In addition to Emad Shahin, Shadi Hamid read and commented on an earlier version of the short history of the Muslim Brotherhood presented here.

  The most important source of history and background for this chapter is the landmark The Society of the Muslim Brothers by Richard P. Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). I have relied significantly on two more contemporary articles about the recent history: “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers” by Mona El-Ghobashy, in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (vol. 37, no. 3, August 2005) and “The Brotherhood Goes to Parliament” by Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher, in Middle East Report (no. 240, fall 2006). I also drew on “U.S. Policy and the Muslim Brotherhood” by Steven Brooke, in The West and the Muslim Brotherhood After the Arab Spring (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2013), which quoted Condoleezza Rice at the American University in Cairo. Mandaville’s book Islam and Politics is indispensable.

  In discussions of the Muslim Brotherhood in this chapter and throughout, I also drew on Hasan el-Banna by Gudrun Krämer (London: Oneworld Publications, 2010); Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islam by John Calvert (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2011); A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010); A Portrait of Egypt by Mary Anne Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam Is Reshaping the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), both by Shadi Hamid; Counting Islam: Religion, Class and Elections in Egypt by Tarek Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Inside the Brotherhood by Hazim Kandil (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014); an
d Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days by Eric Trager (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016), among others.

  Two non-Islamists whose incarceration President George W. Bush made a fuss about were Ayman Nour, a liberal politician, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an intellectual.

  In 2007, Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, bumped into Saad el-Katatni at the home of the United States ambassador.

  General James Mattis described the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda as “swimming in the same sea” on May 14, 2015, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. He has said similar things many times. Dennis Ross’s op-ed was published in the New York Times on September 11, 2014.

  The intercepted phone call between Abdel Nasser and the king of Jordan was recounted vividly in Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September.

  Aboul Fotouh’s meeting in the shoe store was with Kamal al-Sananiri, a brother-in-law of the thinker Sayyid Qutb. It was described in Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh: A Witness to the History of Egypt’s Islamic Movement, 1970–1984 (Cairo: Dar el-Shorouk, 2010), his memoirs as told to Hossam Tammam. It is available only in Arabic, and I relied on Deena Adel and Mayy el-Sheikh for translation.

  The best source in English for personal background of Banna is Krämer, cited above. The quotes from Banna used here come from Mitchell’s definitive early work. The main intellectual successor to Muhammad Abduh was Rashid Rida, who was a pivotal intermediary in the evolution of Islamic modernism from Abduh to Banna.

  The quote about the head scarf appears in “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers” by Ghobashy, attributed to the guidance council members Essam el-Erian and Aboul Fotouh. Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam by Anthony Shadid (London: Westview Press, 2002) is about post-Islamist politics and tells the story of the Center Party in Egypt. That was the Brotherhood breakaway party that included Essam Sultan.