by Bruce Feiler
From this core concept of individual liberty, the Qur’an constructs a more comprehensive notion of political liberty. The key principle is that only God can limit human freedom. As Sura 12 puts it, “Judgment is Allah’s alone.” Since humans are forbidden from usurping God’s will, if a ruling authority gives orders that violate human dignity, individuals are not required to follow them. The hadith go even further, providing the basis for citizens legitimately standing up against lawlessness and despotism. In one such commentary, the prophet declares, “The best form of jihad is to tell a word of truth to an oppressive ruler.” And if fear causes a person to refuse to speak out against such a tyrant? “You should have feared me and put me above the fear of others,” says God. Take that, Sofa Party.
Given this underlying foundation of freedom in the holiest teachings of Islam, I asked Dr. Sabit whether he thought the current revolution was consciously tapping into these ideas. “For some people, yes,” he said. “But for most, probably not consciously.”
“So for those other people, where does their notion of freedom come from?”
“You have to understand,” he said, leaning forward, “we’ve all been oppressed. We’ve been living in a society that for all intents and purposes has been lawless. It was like a big zoo around here. We were the animals, and they were the keepers. There have been no fundamental rights: the right to an education, the right to health care, the right to work toward a decent life. These have all been denied to most of the population in this country.”
“But the idea that people deserve those rights, where is that grounded? Does it come from the West, from nature, from the Internet? There’s a widespread notion outside the Middle East that Islam and freedom are incompatible, that Muslims wouldn’t know how to handle freedom if you got it.”
He sat back. “We’re not Burkina Faso,” he said. “We’ve had this debate for centuries. We’ve had periods of great liberalism and freedom. We’ve had a progressive political system. We don’t have to look to the West for examples of these ideas. We can look to our own history.”
He cited two examples in which the Muslim world has interacted with the West to create an Islamic brand of a free, open society. The first was in the eighth century. Following the death of Muhammad in 632, Islam quickly spread across the Middle East and North Africa. In 750, after a century of expansion and internecine warfare, the descendants of Muhammad’s youngest uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, led a revolution against the more restrictive, pro-Arab regime known as the Umayyads, and ushered in a multiethnic, pluralist, deeply learned dynasty. The Abbasids moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad, set up vast bureaus for translating Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers into Arabic, and held ornate salons where Jews and Christians were invited to debate Muslim theologians on the finer points of religious doctrine. To be sure, this religious tolerance was partly practical—the newly minted Muslim conquerors could not control the religious practices of everyone in their entire empire. And authorities sometimes turned violent toward other People of the Book at a moment’s notice. But an extended period of freewheeling religious coexistence prevailed.
During this period, a powerful subgroup of the Abbasids introduced an idea called the Mu’tazila Doctrine, which argued that God’s wishes are accessible to rational thought and inquiry. The core of liberal Islam, the Mu’tazilites said reason was a central element of Islamic faith and used this principle to argue against political tyranny. Face-to-face with authoritarian figures, the much weaker Mu’tazilites did what both Christian and Jewish leaders had done in similar moments in their history: They reached back to privileges granted to Adam and argued that all humans have a right to freedom. And since God is not capable of doing wrong, they argued, human evil must be the result of people using their own free will improperly. In these situations, other humans are authorized to correct those misdeeds. The ruling Abbasids embraced the Mu’tazilites’ revolutionary ideologies when it was in the interests of their upstart regime. But within a few generations, once the Abbasids consolidated their own power, the Mu’tazilites were dispatched, their leaders burned at the stake.
“But not before they left behind an enduring antecedent of how a moderate, learned, pluralist civilization could thrive in the Islamic world,” said Dr. Sabit. “The revolutionary leaders of today can take comfort in the fact that they were not the first to mix Western ideas with Islamic traditions to create an open society.”
For the next thousand years, Islam largely stifled outside ideas. But the dream of a free society was reborn in the nineteenth century during another fruitful interaction between Islam and Western thought—this time inspired by the French Revolution. Egypt and other Arab states heard the infectious ideas of “liberté, égalité, et fraternité” and knew they held the promise that progress could improve their lives. Through technology, learning, and science, any state could unleash the full potential of its citizens. Muhammad Ali, the first governor of modern Egypt, who swept into power in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, dispatched young men to France to study the Enlightenment, translate writers like Voltaire and Montesquieu into Arabic, and articulate a vision for a new Islamic state. The most important of these emissaries, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, rejected some of the libertine excesses he witnessed in Paris, but insisted that Egypt could build a society where democracy coexisted with Islam; religion and science could be partners. His vision climaxed in 1878 with Egypt’s first homegrown constitution, which was updated in 1921.
“For thirty years until the first military takeover in 1952,” Dr. Sabit said, “we had a parliamentary life, we had constituencies, we had governments that cared for the population, brought about health care, programs, and projects. When we’re talking about freedom, we had a recent history that we can compare it to. Freedom is not something we’re trying for the first time. We’ve had practice.”
“So when you look at the current revolution, you’re reaction is . . .”
“We’re back on track, as we should be. And just like the best moments of progress from our past, this one was homegrown.”
This is why for the first time in his life, on January 28, 2011, Mahmoud Sabit put down his history books and set out to help make history himself.
You actually can’t sail very far on a felucca in Cairo these days. When Dr. Sabit was young, the bridges would open twice a day so the high-masted vessels could pass through with their wares. These days the automobile has overtaken the boat as the primary means of commerce, so the bridges no longer open. The roads have no need to bow down to the river.
As our short sail neared its end, we arrived at the concrete pylons underneath Qasr al-Nil Bridge. At either end of the bridge there are two bronze lions. (They reminded me of a similar stone lion I saw in Iraq that’s still standing in the ruins of ancient Babylon.) Completed in 1933, the mile-and-a-quarter bridge is flat, which creates a grand entrance from the island of Gezirah in the west into the grand heart of Cairo to the east. Just as it arrives downtown, the bridge pours pedestrians and cars alike directly into the center of Tahrir Square. Or at least it does when the road is not blocked by twenty thousand riot police.
In the days after January 25, Cairo was tense. Noor Ayman Nour was in hiding. The seasoned protesters such as Ahmed Maher and his colleagues in the April 6 Movement decided to lie low, regroup, and amass for what they hoped would be a much bigger “Day of Rage” on Friday, January 28. Unlike in the Judeo-Christian world, where the Sabbath day might be considered a poor day to call for massive demonstrations, Fridays proved pivotal in the Muslim uprisings because a) it’s a holiday from work, b) no Islamic government would dare intervene to stop people from gathering for noonday prayers, the holiest of the week, and c) you already have a sizable group of people in public on which to build, and those people are usually charged up from what are often highly politicized sermons. Glance at a timeline of the critical days of the revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere: Most are Frid
ays.
As a mark of how revolutionary fervor was spreading far beyond the young at this point, Dr. Sabit had four demonstrations to choose from. “But I wanted my wife to go,” he said, “so we went to the fluffy one. We met at a coffee shop on Gezirah Island after prayers.” The night before, they did some research on the Internet about what to bring: diving goggles, washcloths, and hooded sweatshirts.
“Ours was very much the latte demonstration,” he said. “Or at least was supposed to be. We met around 1 p.m. and had our coffee at Beano’s, which is our equivalent of Starbucks, and waited for our friends to appear. When we stepped outside, we caught the attention of two officers from state security, who very much thought we were highly amusing. We smiled, and started walking.”
When I asked what exactly they were doing when they walked, he said, “We were demonstrating. We were heading toward the bridge, chanting ‘Down, down, with the regime!’ and ‘Bread, freedom, and human rights!’ even though unlike a lot of the protesters, we didn’t really need the bread.” He chuckled. “By the time we got to the Qasr al-Nil Bridge, enough people had joined us from their flats and surrounding streets that we were five hundred, at which point the security police didn’t think it was so amusing anymore.”
The regime had already deployed teams of riot police to cordon off the east side of the bridge and with it the entrance to Tahrir Square. “We had a choice to try to break through the line, which we thought was a bit premature, or go back and get more people. The police started shelling us with tear gas. People were vomiting and crying, but others started pulling over their cars and joining us. We said, ‘Okay, let’s go back to the island, round up more people, and come back.’ ”
They turned and marched off the bridge, wound their way back through the streets, and soon enough had garnered close to two thousand people. “By this point we were getting pretty tired, and we decided to have another latte,” he said. “But the shopkeepers wouldn’t let us in. ‘You’re demonstrators,’ they said. ‘You’re toxic!’ Our fluffy demonstration had become serious.” By the time they arrived back at Qasr al-Nil, they had swelled to three thousand.
“The problem was, we had no idea what was going on anywhere else in the city,” Dr. Sabit said. “Mobile phones had been cut off. We thought we were the only demonstration in Cairo that day. We had no idea there were hundreds of thousands of people doing the exact same thing all over the city. Only later did we learn, ‘Wow. We’re not alone!’ ”
By close to 4 p.m., the crowd finally made its move toward the bridge. As they approached, they were hit with a wall of tear gas. Thousands of riot police had amassed on the east end of the bridge in thick, forbidding rows, blocking the entrance to Tahrir Square. The protesters gathered on the east side of the bridge. The two sides looked like anxious armies on a living chessboard. “I now know what a Roman legion looks like in full battle array, because I’ve seen it right here,” Dr. Sabit said. “Six thousand riot police in rows. Ready. They slid their helmets onto their heads, pounded their shields, and charged. Only this time, we charged back.”
For the next three hours, the two sides were locked in an old-fashioned ground war for control of the bridge. The police would take the roadway for a time, bringing in ugly green armored cars that looked like they came out of a Star Wars battle scene, from which half a dozen fire-hose nozzles would poke out without warning, gushing water in every direction like a spastic, pissing arachnid. But then the protesters would press forward, swarm the water cannons en masse, pull chunks of asphalt from the road and hurl them at the police, and simply overwhelm the authorities with their sheer bravado, discipline, and numbers.
“It was remarkably well organized,” Dr. Sabit said. “There where referee whistles, captains calling out orders.” These were the more experienced, professional protesters from the April 6 Movement and elsewhere, who suddenly got to experiment with the techniques they had been reading about for years. Put another way, for them it was as if the video game they had been playing suddenly jumped from their computer consoles to the streets of Cairo, like a virtual reality experiment that went shockingly, wonderfully right.
“A group of protesters would rush to the front of the line,” Dr. Sabit said, “take the brunt of the cannons, the batons, and the tear gas, then retreat, and a fresh band of demonstrators would rush forward to replace them.” Everyone else was chanting, taking videos with their iPhones, and carrying the wounded to makeshift clinics. The police would regroup and make their surge, and the protesters would retreat, reconfigure their ranks, and press forward once more. The most poignant scene, Dr. Sabit said, was a group of one hundred protesters who made their way to the deadliest part of the bridge, stood face-to-face with a fearsome assault from the water cannons, dropped to their knees in silence, bowed to the ground, and prayed.
“By early evening it was Armageddon,” he said. “Overturned police vehicles were on fire; smoke and tear gas curdled the air; the dreaded ruling party headquarters at the edge of Tahrir was in flames. By this point ten thousand people clogged the bridge; we were packed liked sardines. I was worried about a stampede. If the police had flooded the bridge, a lot more people would have died.”
But then, just as suddenly as the police had amassed, they fled. They turned and started retreating toward their barracks. As night fell on the Friday of Rage, the people had won the battle for the river. And as it had been since the days of the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago, the Nile again proved critical for Egypt. The consensus quickly emerged in Cairo that the battle for Qasr al-Nil was the pivotal event in the entire revolution. A cheer rose up; the victors rushed forward in jubilation and sprinted toward their destination. Tahrir Square would be theirs that night. Freedom would once more take root along the Nile.
I asked Dr. Sabit what he felt when he got to Tahrir. “That the regime was finished,” he said. “We’ve won. When the population has risen, to that degree, you can’t stop them. I know Egypt. When the fuse has been lit, you can’t dampen it down. It was only going to get brighter and brighter.”
“And the fact that the decisive battle took place along the river?”
“It’s part of a historical continuum,” he said. “The Nile once more emanating its influence on this country. It’s always been the main artery to the heart, and on January twenty-eighth it was again.”
Chapter III
The Voice of Freedom
Moses and Revolution
The view looking up from the bottom of the pyramid is chilling. The stones seem to climb at an impossibly sharp angle. Each block is about the size of a refrigerator-freezer. And the prospect of having my hand or foot slip on the crumbling limestone, sending my body tumbling down the jagged face of this 4,600-year-old sanctum of death, is irresistible to imagine. For a second my mind wonders how many layers a falling body would traverse. My breathing is labored. My heart is racing. It’s not too late to turn back. Climbers have not been allowed here for decades; too many were dying each year.
“Are you ready?” my guide asks.
“Let’s go,” I say.
On a chilly winter morning in 2005, I gripped the bottom layer of the second-tallest pyramid in Giza and began the tense process of pulling, pushing, and clambering my way to the top. I had come with special permission in hand to consider a question that has bedeviled lovers of the Bible for thousands of years: Did the Israelites build the pyramids? The question was part of my ongoing quest to understand the ancient world’s impact on contemporary life.
Even as late as the 1970s, when Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin made a state visit to Egypt as part of the Camp David peace process, he stood with Anwar Sadat at the pyramids and boasted, “Our forefathers built these.” The Egyptian president, dumbfounded, replied, “I don’t see this.” Aides came scurrying, but Begin brushed them away. In the Middle East, tradition is sometimes as important as facts.
The first few steps of the climb were harder than I expected. I had to search for tiny handhold
s on the rocks, look for corresponding footholds, then lever my body upward as if climbing the face of a cliff. I didn’t have special equipment. I wasn’t tethered to ropes. I began to wonder if I would make it to the top. A friend told me that a BBC reporter had gotten halfway up the side, then froze in fright. He had to be pried from his position.
A few layers up, I began to find a rhythm—grip, step, pull, push. The key was to climb the corner of the pyramid, because it presented the largest area to stand on, and to concentrate on the rocks immediately in front of your face. No looking up, and certainly no looking down. A pyramid without a view.
After about forty-five minutes, each layer became higher and narrower, and I could feel the tug from the top. My pace quickened. I ignored the ache in my thighs. And finally I bounded up the last few rocks to the top and raised my hands like a victorious prizefighter. I had reached the summit of one of the oldest tombs in the world. I had surmounted my fears. And before I collapsed in exhaustion, I peered over the edge and saw nothing but the knife’s blade of stone descending to the ground.
“You mean now I have to go down?”
That climb was with me five years later when I returned to the pyramids during Egypt’s revolution. The grounds were empty this time; no tourists were braving the city. I can safely say the pyramids seemed unaffected by the hullabaloo over Facebook and Twitter. This ain’t the first revolution they’ve seen. For me, this visit had a deeper meaning, because this trip was the first I had taken out of the United States since the year I spent fighting bone cancer in my left femur. I vowed to take my rebuilt leg and grit my way a few layers up the side. But no sooner had I gone two levels up than a security officer scurried over. I did not have permission, and he asked for a bribe.
My companion snapped at him. “This is the new Egypt. You can’t do that anymore!”
The officer slunk away into the sand.