Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  When January 2011 came along, I was waiting for my visa papers to arrive from Cleveland when something radically unusual happened: hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets.

  Where did all those people come from? There was a mix of young and old people, with a hodgepodge of beliefs, yet there were no religious slogans. No complicated chants. They were shouting, “Down, down, Hosni Mubarak.”

  There are many stories of why people took to the streets. Maybe the most circulated one was about a Facebook page calling for a demonstration dedicated to renouncing police brutality in the wake of a young student being tortured and killed by the police. (Careful, America!)

  The other unofficial story was that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, which inspired young people in Egypt. We were not going to be upstaged by this small puny motherfucking country called Tunisia. Egypt is way bigger, cooler, and older than Tunisia, obviously. So yeah, there is a high probability that we may have started our revolution because we were simply attention whores and drama queens. Call us the Kardashians of the political world.

  If you were in the streets, it looked like an uprising, a revolution with thousands out there demanding their freedom and for Mubarak to step down. But the national networks refused to broadcast the unrest. There was a nationwide split personality disorder on display, in which two separate realities existed simultaneously: the brutal reality of the streets and the tranquil reality of the TV. According to the TV media, this was not a revolution but a conspiracy orchestrated by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), Mossad (Israeli national intelligence agency), Hezbollah (Lebanese Shi’a Islamist militant group), Hamas (Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist organization), and maybe even the Village People (New York’s super-gay disco group from the seventies).

  Pundits were popping up all over the screen to tell us about the “American Zionist conspiracy” to bring down Egypt, citing evidence to support that Iran and Hamas were also involved. You can’t make that shit up.

  With all those nations and security and intelligence agencies getting together to conspire against us, you would think that the Egyptian Revolution had already succeeded in the one thing every contestant in every beauty pageant claims she wants to achieve: world peace.

  “Those lovely youth in the streets don’t know what they are getting themselves into,” one pundit said. “Our Egyptian youth are falling victim to international conspiracies put into effect by our enemies.” It was as if he was saying, Whoops! Thousands of people just happened to accidentally take to the streets at the same time fundamentalist groups and counterintelligence agencies were looking to sabotage the Egyptian government.

  Sometimes, if you switched on the television you would see the cameras fixed on an empty bridge or a tranquil view of the Nile. One channel’s producer was so dumb that on a day when the camera was fixed on one of those bridges, he didn’t realize that at the top of the screen, on another bridge, huge clashes between protestors and security forces were taking place! News programming at its finest.

  The protests heralded in a new chapter: the rich, the poor, the liberal, the Islamist, the Christian, all sharing this common space in Tahrir Square. For three days I watched the clashes on international news networks and didn’t know what to make of it.

  I was one of those people who saw the Tunisian dictator flee his country a few weeks before, and like many people I never thought the same thing could happen in Egypt. Tunisians are one of the most educated populations in the Arab world. On the other hand, Egypt has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the region. “Egypt is not Tunisia” was the most repeated phrase on television. I, like many other Egyptians, believed that sentiment. Deep inside we hated the regime, but after thirty years of political stagnation, we never thought that change could actually be possible.

  AFTER THREE DAYS OF BEING CLEARED FROM THE STREETS BY the police, many protestors called for January 28 to be the “Day of Anger,” in which the protestors proclaimed that they would not leave the streets this time.

  On that day the government made quite possibly the worst decision possible: they shut down mobile phone service across the nation.

  Now people with no communication would have to see for themselves what was happening in the square. News about masses of Egyptians pouring into the streets was circulating widely. My wife, Hala, whom I had married only a couple of months earlier, was scared. She fought with me because I wanted to go to the square. “Can’t you see the clashes in the streets? I am not ready to be a widow yet!” she said.

  So I stayed home with her and watched the BBC and Al Jazeera channels, which were broadcasting live. The security forces seemed adamant that no one would come into the square that day.

  We witnessed something that we never thought we would see in our lifetime. Lines after lines of anti-riot police faced tens of thousands of protestors wanting to reach the square. The authorities considered this an ultimate standoff, where all bets were made or lost on those three hundred feet leading to the square. It was a scene that even Steven Spielberg couldn’t come up with.

  I kid, he can do anything!

  After hours of clashes, endless amounts of tear gas, rubber bullets, and armored cars crushing protestors, it happened: hundreds of black-suited heavily armored men turned the other way and started running. We the People were chasing after the police! It was unbelievable to see it the other way round. The almighty face of authority fell right there and then. Decades of fear and awe inflicted by an authoritarian regime fell at the feet of the protestors, who ran over the police gear to take the square.

  Millions like me decided to come down to the streets to see it with our own eyes.

  We felt like we had entered a post-apocalyptic movie set. (Hey! Maybe it was Spielberg after all!) There was the heavy smell of gas from the clashes the night before mixed with the smoke rising from burned, well, everything: shops and cars were completely destroyed. People were dancing and singing on destroyed police armored vehicles. Others were preparing for a long sit-in by setting up makeshift hospitals, organizing places to stay, and handing out food, while looters took over the burned-out building of the ruling party. We saw people running away with office chairs and even AC units. The L.A. riots looked pedestrian by comparison.

  As we approached the middle of the square, things were a little more organized. No looting or chaos there. Protestors were already setting up what would, in a few days, become the main stage. Checkpoints were being formed and huge banners prepared. The biggest of all read: THE PEOPLE DEMAND THE FALL OF THE REGIME. It rolls off the tongue a little better in Arabic.

  And then, of course, there were photographers, news reporters, and television crews. I passed by an American reporter from ABC interviewing one of the men setting up the tents. She was having difficulty understanding his poor English. I volunteered to translate and her face lit up, as if to say, Ohhh thank god, someone speaks our language. I think I stole that guy’s thunder, but it was time for me to make my TV debut. I can’t remember what she asked me exactly, but I remember saying, “Mubarak has already fallen.”

  She was surprised and asked me, “Isn’t it a bit premature for that assumption?”

  “I don’t know if what I am saying is making any sense or not,” I replied. “I am no politician or analyst, but I think Mubarak will fall, will be captured, and will be put on trial.”

  Oh, how cute and delusional at the same time, her smile seemed to say, which left me with a feeling that I was either too optimistic or just plain stupid. The jury is still out.

  My relationship with Tahrir Square over the next few days was a casual one. I didn’t stay overnight but would visit every day, as my wife and I distributed food to the people staying there. Despite the festive mood inside the square, something else was happening on the outside. Hundreds of thugs started appearing everywhere along the roads leading to the square. These paid thugs were an effective weapon used by the police for the past thirty years. They were used to suppress minor demo
nstrations, so it would seem that a struggle between different factions of the people had occurred. These thugs were also used to scare voters from entering polling stations during elections. They would later be employed by the authorities to do their dirty work, without getting uniformed police involved—not to mention they would be the ones to attack my studio three years later. These thugs had had a name for years, and it was coined by the state-run media: “honorable citizens.” Over the next couple of years we would become very familiar with their faces. You didn’t need an officer in uniform to scare you. Fear came in many forms.

  The thugs were stopping cars going to Tahrir, looking inside them to see if their occupants had any Egyptian flags. If flags were found, it could only mean that you were going there to celebrate with the “defectors.” In the U.S., not standing for the flag is considered unpatriotic; in 2011, carrying the Egyptian flag could get you in trouble.

  One day my wife and I drove toward the square, not carrying flags or banners in the car, but food supplies to offer to the people. We were stopped at a checkpoint controlled by those thugs when a guy came up to the car holding a thick stick. The scars on his face gave off a distinct “do not fuck with me” look.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “We are going to Tahrir Square,” I answered politely, as my wife’s body shook.

  He looked in the backseat and noticed the shopping bags. “What is this? Food? You better leave right now or else your car will be trashed.”

  We turned back, but managed to arrive at Tahrir through a more secure entrance, facilitated by the protestors.

  For three days I divided my time between those visits and my work in the hospital. On one of those days, Mubarak appeared on TV to deliver a sentimental speech that actually made a difference. He pledged that he would never run for president again, which caused many protestors to leave the square because they believed in his speech’s emotional rhetoric. Still, many remained because they didn’t trust the authorities or because they thought it was a trick, and that once they cleared the square they would all be arrested for treason.

  It was early in the afternoon of February 2 when something bizarre happened as we watched the TV at the hospital: people with camels and horses started attacking the square. Not armored vehicles, not security forces, but fucking camels and horses. Now, I know I’ve already joked that Egyptians don’t ride camels to work even though our region has been living in the seventh century, but this was just too much.

  The “official” story was that workers around the pyramids and tourist sites were complaining that there were no more tourists because of the clashes and the unrest, so they went to Tahrir to protest the protests!

  What had really happened was a full-on attack by tourist-site workers supported by hundreds of those “honorable citizens” thugs to disband the protestors. The regime was trying to tell the world that there were two sides to this conflict, and they weren’t the people versus the regime; they were people versus people. However, one of the only reasons there were pro-Mubarak forces involved was because people were being bribed and coerced into supporting the authorities.

  At this point, a decision was made by everyone at the hospital to go to the center of the action. The nurses prepared medical supplies, and before you knew it everyone had made their way to the clashes. The square, nearly empty that morning, was now full, as street wars erupted right there in the middle of Cairo.

  Each section of Tahrir Square seemed to represent a different reality. There were the “war zones” on the periphery, where there was a constant exchange of rocks and Molotov cocktails; there were the areas right in the center, where people sang and danced like it was the Egyptian version of Woodstock; then there were parents coming to visit the square with their children to buy food from street vendors offering sandwiches and tea. The variety of action was absurd.

  I remember the first time I went to the main clinic to check on those who had sustained injuries during the unrest. I spent around eight hours treating all kinds of injuries. Then, patients whom I’d stitched up headed directly back to the “firing line,” only to return with fresh injuries.

  I decided to leave the main clinic and make my way to some of the makeshift clinics on the periphery of the square, where I was only a couple of hundred meters from the hot zone. If I am going to be in the middle of a revolution, why not witness the action from a better seat? I told myself.

  You should know that I am not a violent person. The last fight I was involved in happened in eighth grade, and I had my ass handed to me by a guy two years my senior. Years later, I decided to take up boxing, and six months into it I got a bad black eye in a practice fight with an Egyptian boxing champion. I’d like to say you should’ve seen the other guy, but he was fine. Violence is just not my thing. But now I was tempted to take an active role and join those brave demonstrators. So I approached the protestors on our side that were defending the square. They were holding huge sheets of metal taken from a construction site nearby to form barricades. I decided that this was it, my big chance to be a part of the resistance. I picked up a stone from the ground and walked a few steps closer to the front line. I gathered my courage, and really let it fly. That throw was emblematic of my inability to physically fight an enemy, because my hand slipped, and instead of projecting the stone over the barricades to hit our attackers, I threw it straight ahead, nearly hitting one of the protestors on our side. One guy looked back to check out who the fucking traitor was. Thankfully, I was wearing a white doctor’s coat, which gave me some sort of moral status and deflected his suspicions. I turned the other way as innocently as possible and decided to continue treating injuries instead of causing them.

  Up until the moment I treated one of those thugs, I didn’t really understand why they were attacking the square, but then some protestors came over and asked me to verify a story told by one of the captured thugs.

  “We just captured this man who is claiming that he is on kidney dialysis and he needs to leave or he will be very sick; can you verify that?” I was asked.

  They led me to the entrance of the metro station, where they were keeping their “prisoners of war.” The man cried out to let him go. I asked him how he had gotten involved in the first place and he told me a similar story told by most of the thugs there—that many of them were either addicts or poor and had been rounded up by senior thugs who gave them money to go and “purify” the square of the “traitors.” Some of them mentioned the names of prominent figures from the ruling party.

  I examined the guy and found that he was indeed on dialysis treatment. “When you have nothing to eat you will do anything for two hundred pounds,” he told me.

  I asked the protestors in charge to release him, which they did. They told me that every time they released someone to the army, however, the person would come back and attack the protestors again the next day.

  At that time we still had faith in the army, though. We thought that when they took to the streets they were on our side or at least being neutral. However, looking back, while the thugs and their camels attacked the square, the armed forces never interfered. We were in denial (insert your own stupid “de-Nile” joke here) and refused to think too much about it. Back then, we thought that the army would never betray us. How stupid were we?

  For everyone who visited, the square was a sacred, beautiful place, where a powerful regime was toppled through mostly peaceful resistance. It would take us a few months to see that the regime hadn’t fallen, nor did the square maintain its sanctity.

  SUPER-DIGITIZE ME

  Let’s go back a couple of steps to before all this happened. In Egypt before 2010, Internet basically consisted of Facebook and a few YouTube videos. There was no original Arabic content on it.

  It was around this time that Tarek, an old friend of mine, graduated as an engineer and became one of the first people in Egypt to start managing YouTube content. Little did he know he was jump-starting a major trend.


  For whatever reason he came to me in the summer of 2010 and told me that he wanted to produce original content and use me as a host.

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “Well, you have a way,” he said. “When you talk, people listen. I think if I put a camera on you, people will watch.”

  “You are not using me for porn, are you?”

  “I wish we had the women, bro,” he answered. “I think you’re a great choice for the Internet. Also, you are my friend. So I can use you without paying you.”

  I guess that settled it.

  At that time, politics was really off the table. As a matter of fact, in 2001, before there was something called YouTube, a group of five young people made a video spoof of one of the most popular Egyptian war movies. People were sharing it through videotapes and CDs and hard disks. Ultimately, all five people ended up arrested and interrogated by national security officers. They were eventually let go, but only after they confirmed they were just a bunch of stupid young men who didn’t have any political agenda.

  Since politics was off limits, I decided to make my video debut about a less controversial topic. Religion!

  I was really asking for it.

  I came up with a concept and settled on a title for the webisodes, Searching for a God. Each episode was about a religion or a cult; I would discuss and mock some of their wacko beliefs in five minutes or less.

  This proves that I was ahead of Morgan Freeman by at least several years. I should sue him for stealing my idea with his new show The Story of God. Screw you, Morgan!

  We shot three episodes and showed them to our friends, who loved the concept and the controversial content. I was already having dreams of fame, but at the same time was dying to work as a doctor in the States. Actually, I was dying to leave the country, and medicine was my only ticket out! So in my head I reached a fantasy compromise. I would travel to the U.S. and in a couple of years some huge TV exec would discover those episodes on the Internet and hire me as the host of a show who goes around the world to film actual cults in their native countries. I would be the Anthony Bourdain of religions: Bassem Youssef: No Revelations. End of fantasy.