Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  This corrosive cocktail had eroded the patience of Egyptians. Policemen did nothing to unsnarl the quotidian traffic jams but constantly thrust their hands forward for bribes. Bosses connected to the ruling party sent their employees to pay their personal bills. One day a neighbor tried to sexually assault Basem Kamel’s seven-year-old niece. When Basem and his brother went to the police, the officer rudely propped his bare feet on his desk, mumbling as he took the report. Eventually Basem’s family arrested the perpetrator themselves and delivered him to the authorities. Thus was justice managed in Mubarak’s Egypt. The government didn’t serve the people; the people served the government. These depredations had been barely tolerable when the country’s standard of living had actually been improving, in the 1950s and 1960s. Now the quality of life kept worsening, while the abuse remained constant.

  Basem followed it all from a remove on foreign satellite networks. He digested the dissent, silently applauding it but all the while convinced of its noble futility. A mundane event jolted Basem from his personal slumber, readying him for the political awakening to come. For a decade, Basem had worked ceaselessly, forgoing weekends and holidays with his children to push forward the family architecture business he had established. Then, in 2008, a relative died and Basem skipped work to go to the funeral. It was the first day he could remember spending without his phone. The business survived. Basem realized that he could spend time for pleasure. He took his children to the Citadel and his wife to the opera. He looked at the paintings in the Cairo Museum of Art and the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum. These diversions opened him to other thoughts he had avoided.

  It was in this receptive state that he had clicked on the dissident Facebook group. Only when he joined the welcoming committee for Mohamed ElBaradei did Basem dare to believe that things could change not merely in his own life but also for all of Egypt. And he began to meet other Egyptian men and women, a small but growing phalanx of dedicated dreamers who had always believed it, or who, like Basem, were now ready to surrender to idealism. They were poor and rich, educated and self-taught, brawny and effete, secular and religious. They were the youth of the revolution (even though many, like Basem, verged on middle age), and in each setback, they discovered another incentive to act.

  ElBaradei returned to Egypt after his long career abroad, and he welcomed the volunteers who had conjured up an organization for him. Basem and the others became ElBaradei’s aides, raising a professional-class campaign out of a vacuum. One spring day in 2010, Basem came home long after midnight. He had been with ElBaradei. Basem’s father, convinced that his son had been arrested, grew agitated and collapsed. At the hospital, the doctors said it was a stroke.

  “No more politics,” Basem’s mother pleaded.

  “We won’t discuss it anymore,” Basem said with a reassuring smile. He didn’t plan to stop, but he no longer would tell his parents what he was doing. A few months later, Basem went missing again on a weekend.

  “Where is your brother?” his father demanded as the family sat in front of the television.

  “At work,” his youngest brother said. Just then the newscast showed a group of activists escorting ElBaradei through the provincial city of Fayoum. At the candidate’s side was Basem. Mohamed Kamel, foggy since his stroke, noticed nothing. But Basem’s mother did. She leaned in close to her youngest son.

  “Liar,” she hissed.

  In the summer of 2010, police in Alexandria beat a young man named Khaled Said to death; the kind of brutal act that had become routine long ago. There were unsubstantiated claims that he had posted an online video documenting police brutality, but later reports suggested that Khaled Said was an apolitical homebody who hung out with stoners and liked to chat online. Plenty of witnesses saw the two cops batter Khaled Said at the internet café near his apartment, and then later in the street. He might have been punished for refusing to snitch on local drug dealers. In any case, such beatings were commonplace in Egypt, although they normally didn’t end with murder. The police expected to get away with it. With straight faces, they claimed that Khaled Said had choked to death trying to conceal contraband marijuana in his mouth. There had been an obscene parade of victims like him, decade after decade. But his death struck a chord because he was so manifestly neither a criminal nor a political dissident. He posed no conceivable threat. He was a middle-class boy trying to keep his head down, and that still hadn’t been enough. The regime’s message turned out to be that nobody was safe, even those who kept their mouths shut and followed the popular adage to avoid attention and “walk by the wall.” Egypt’s middle-class youth identified overwhelmingly with Khaled Said.

  The police’s actions were normal for Mubarak’s Egypt, but this time the response was not. A Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said drew hundreds of thousands of members. Egyptians who had avoided politics adopted the cause, joining the veterans from Kifaya, ElBaradei’s campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood youth organization, and the other small but dedicated activist groups. Weekly vigils began. The Facebook page became an instant organizing tool, but the government seemed oblivious. Mohamed ElBaradei initiated a petition campaign with the almost meek demand that Mubarak’s regime follow its own laws in the next election. Incredibly, a million people signed, making their names and identity numbers public; this sort of act typically led to detention. Even more surprising, the Muslim Brotherhood joined ElBaradei’s effort, collecting millions more signatures. Something was shifting. People had truly had enough and were willing to take new risks in order to show it. Basem trained volunteers to talk people into signing the petition, and went out asking himself. He was willing to sacrifice his livelihood, the cohesion of his family, and even his father’s health: all the things he most valued. He was not alone. What was the point of preserving order at home and across the nation if its individual human foundations were crumbling?

  Then parliamentary elections were held in the fall of 2010. The tired and ineffectual secular opposition boycotted them, invoking a storied tradition. In modern Arab history, weaker parties had often used boycotts to level the playing field, scuttling agreements, elections, regional summits, and peace talks by staying away. But it was a weapon of last resort that worked only when used sparingly, when the group doing the boycotting had enough power to confer or deny legitimacy to the more powerful.

  The Muslim Brotherhood decided to participate in the elections. The regime didn’t even bother to disguise its fraud, simply locking voters out of polling stations in Brotherhood areas and awarding seats to regime loyalists. The government’s caprice and violence in the parliamentary elections energized Basem and his new friends. They had bigger plans than elections and new rules. They thought they could force Mubarak to fire his despised interior minister Habib el-Adly, the man in charge of the riot police and state spies who watched and constrained the people’s every move. Tunisians had unexpectedly revolted in December, putting a seasoned dictator on the run and jolting the entire Arab world. National Police Day was coming up on January 25, 2011, mere weeks after Tunisia’s revolution. The youth would take to the streets, circumventing police blocks, and demand the interior minister’s resignation on his own day of celebration. It was at one of these planning meetings, at the house of another activist’s mother, that Basem Kamel met Moaz Abdelkarim, a young Muslim Brother who had cast his lot with this new wave of creative nationalist agitators.

  Moaz was cut from different cloth than Basem. His family came from a noble pedigree of Islamists. Religion and politics were their oxygen. He had grown up around men and women who tried to live the words of the Prophet Muhammad in their daily life, through Koranic study, charity work, and political resistance against a regime that never stopped tracking and persecuting them. Their faith was profoundly humanistic and also political. In his speaking, Moaz picked up the lulling cadences of the imams who shaped his prodigious sense of moral responsibility. On his own, he sharpened a borderline-sacrilegious sense of humor. Even as a teenager, Moaz ha
d a potbelly and dressed like an old man, in the fashion of the Brotherhood: pleated pants, plaid shirts, furry sweaters. His hair arched skyward in a pomaded bouffant, and most of the time he wore a light beard. He ambled rather than walked, like someone with arthritic hips. When he laughed, which was often, he revealed a front tooth broken in half. As the years went by, he never found time to have it fixed, even though he could afford it. He was always late, even for meetings that he requested. Sometimes Moaz would phone a day or two after failing to show up to ask a friend if he was still waiting. Unless there was a street battle, Moaz seemed incapable of rushing. He would stop to tousle the hair of the street kids and tell them jokes. He had a slight streak of vanity too. His eyeglasses were the latest model Ray-Bans, and he posted pictures of his new shoes on Facebook. For all his jocular and bumbling exterior, however, Moaz was profoundly serious about his faith and his democratic principles.

  Moaz’s grandfather had agitated in the 1920s alongside Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Society of the Muslim Brothers; three generations of his lineage had claimed allegiance to the secretive religious revolutionary group. The Abdelkarims’ story was intertwined with Egypt’s trajectory, like that of the Kamel family. But just as the Kamels were embedded in the Arab Republic of Egypt’s proud tradition of secular nationalism, Moaz’s family sprung from an equally proud tradition of radical religious dissidence. In modern times, Egypt has been the cradle of Arab political thought, giving the world Arab nationalism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and, later on, the extremist variant of Sunni fundamentalism known as takfiri jihad and the dictatorial innovation of the deep state. Moaz’s family was part of the Islamist nucleus. The original Brothers worked in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. The Canal Zone was the most strategic part of Egypt. It was a security priority for the British colonizers, but it also housed the country’s best-paid, most urbanized workers because of the canal facilities. The British maltreatment of Egyptians intersected with a population that was especially well educated and organized, ripe conditions for the emerging Brotherhood. The austere religious activists who gathered under the Muslim Brotherhood banner in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to expel the British and vanquish the secular Egyptians who served the colonials. The Brothers also proselytized for their conservative religious views: they encouraged more separation of the genders, more women wearing head scarves in a country that was fast abandoning the tradition, and Koranic study as the center of everyone’s education.

  The founding Brothers made education their first battleground, correctly figuring that they could change society by changing children’s minds. They also opened doors by spreading their message through charity. Islamic activists delivered food to the poor and paid school fees. Their clients in turn were receptive to the Brotherhood’s political message, which at its simplest promised that a return to God and the injunctions of the Koran would be good for families and good for Egypt. Moaz’s grandfather Hassan Mokhtar Hilal was a journalist and a typesetter, but in the years before World War II his main political activity was painting Brotherhood slogans on walls. A popular one declared: “God helps those who help themselves.”

  The Brotherhood, from its early years, vacillated between an almost bourgeois mission of communal self-improvement and a radical strain of violence. Some of its members, like Moaz’s grandfather, engaged in intellectual polemics. Others concentrated on more physical action, training secret militias and assassination cells. In Canal Zone villages, Brotherhood vigilantes were known to beat collaborators and enemies. In 1948 the group’s “secret apparatus” killed Egypt’s prime minister. The promise of violence always hovered close to its religious rhetoric, and its insistence on an Islamic way of life left little room for the majority of Egyptians, who were Christian, agnostic, or more secular Muslims. The Kamels, for instance, were Muslims through and through; they apologized to no one for their piety, but their personal faith supported a belief in a secular, civil state as passionate as the Brothers’ commitment to an exclusionary state of God.

  When Gamal Abdel Nasser took over Egypt and exiled the king in 1952, he experimented with the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally. He gave the Brothers freedom to organize, and considered including them in his government. But Nasser’s Free Officers and the Muslim Brotherhood were destined to clash. Both movements were authoritarian, and both claimed exclusive province over the truth. In 1953, thousands of Brothers protested outside the presidential palace. One of their leaders met in the palace with Nasser and agreed to give the president time to meet the Brotherhood’s demands. He stepped out of the palace, raised one hand, and the crowd fell silent. “Let’s go,” he said, and the crowd dispersed instantly. In the telling most frequently repeated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser was far more discomfited by the show of disciplined obedience than he had been by the protest.

  Within months, he began to round up Muslim Brothers. A gunman tried to assassinate Nasser during a speech; the plot was pinned on the Brotherhood, and the group was banned, its leaders thrown in prison. It was never clear whether the Brothers had tried to kill Nasser or whether the president had staged the attempt to boost his own popularity and create a pretext to sideline the Brotherhood. Either way, Nasser ended open politics for a generation. Tens of thousands of Egyptians were detained, many of them Brotherhood sympathizers and many of them incidental victims, like Basem Kamel’s father. Moaz’s grandfather continued to write for Muslim Brotherhood newspapers until the risk grew too great and he fled Egypt, eventually settling in Kuwait in 1964. Much of the Muslim Brotherhood elite in that era took refuge in the Gulf, where they prospered economically and were allowed to organize against Nasser so long as they didn’t challenge the local monarchs.

  Israel’s total victory over the Arab armies in 1967 discredited politicians and military leaders, prompting a region-wide depression and then introspection. Faith flourished in the aftermath. A religious awakening spread. The language of religion flowed into the ideological void left by the raw failure of Arab nationalism, and Muslim Brothers across the Arab world established themselves not only as credible community activists in their clinics and engineering offices but also as exponents of the next big idea. Islam became the new public square. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, encouraged the Brotherhood as a counterweight to Nasser loyalists.

  Moaz’s grandfather returned to Egypt from his exile in 1974 with his daughter Mona Hassan Mokhtar Hilal. He had done well there writing for a Brotherhood magazine called al-Mujtama (The Community). He owned a villa in Imbaba, the same poor outlying neighborhood where the Kamel family had lived in the 1960s. A decade had ruined the place. It was barely livable, congested with with new arrivals. The Islamist elite was more upwardly mobile than its Arab nationalist counterparts. While the Kamel family had to flee Imbaba for a remote satellite community in the desert, Moaz’s family was able to leap up several rungs on the status ladder. Moaz’s grandfather built a spacious apartment building in central Cairo, in the elite upper-middle-class neighborhood of Mohandiseen, the Engineer’s Quarter. Mohandiseen hugged the Nile, a quick drive to downtown just across the river. The neighborhood was laid out carefully with curlicue streets and tree-filled medians. His daughter finished university, worked briefly as an Arabic teacher, and then met a diligent young math teacher and Brother named Abdelkarim Abdelfattah Mohammed. The families quickly agreed on the match. Moaz’s parents married in 1979. Both of them had grown up in Brotherhood families, and the secret society bound them as much as their faith. They moved immediately to Saudi Arabia, not out of economic desperation but as a financial investment, so that they could return to Egypt better equipped to secure their children’s livelihoods.

  Back in Egypt, things took a turn for the worse. For forty years, the Arab states had agreed that no country would make a separate peace with Israel; their only leverage came from standing together with the Palestinians. Sadat broke that understanding, and signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978. President Jimmy Carter brokered the deal
, which brought Egypt solidly into the fold as an American ally. From the moment he signed the agreement on the White House lawn, Sadat was marked. The Islamists that the president had let loose now turned against him. Alumni of one of the Brotherhood’s more virulent strains plotted to kill the president, and in 1981 they succeeded. The crowded defendants’ cage at the trial of Sadat’s assassins contained the radicals who would go on to establish al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad. Again, Islamists of all sorts were rounded up, jailed, and tortured. Moaz’s grandfather was detained briefly. Under Sadat, the Brotherhood had been tolerated but never legalized, and Mubarak instructed his police to enforce the ban with renewed vigor. Once again the Islamist elite dispersed into exile, where it thrived in business and proselytization. The Brotherhood refined its message and expanded its web of business ventures.

  Members of the Brotherhood honed a particular rhetorical style during their long discussions in the diaspora and inside Egyptian prisons. They nursed grudges against the Egyptian government and polished their idea of a more perfect Muslim society, led toward grace and vitality by a pious, driven, wheeling-and-dealing vanguard. They were free among themselves to argue about the responsibilities of a Muslim, about the kind of society they should build, about the Brotherhood’s policies. No matter how spirited the arguments, however, once the group reached a decision, everyone had to support it unanimously. Every year after the hajj to Mecca, Muslim Brothers who had made their annual pilgrimage to the birthplace of Islam would then gather in nearby Jeddah and debate strategy. It was like a seasonal senate for the umma, the community of the faithful. Moaz’s father, who taught math at university in Jeddah, met daily with his usra, or Brotherhood family. At the individual level, every member of the Brotherhood had an usra and a supervisor. The “family” studied Koran together, socialized, and acted as a support group. If a Brother needed help, he could turn to his usra as easily as to his blood relatives.