Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  During the peak of the fighting, Basem’s father commanded one of his sons to go downtown, find Basem, and bring him home.

  “No,” his brother replied, turning the television to a satellite channel broadcasting the battle for the Qasr el-Nil bridge live. “You must pray for him and be proud of him.”

  The march filled Tahrir Square, and the police stayed away. All at once, Tahrir Square was the freest public space Egypt had known in a half century, maybe more. Dissidents, critics, and kids chanted and chatted, angry and euphoric. They had occupied Tahrir. Basem, Moaz, Zyad, and the rest of the fourteen youth activists conferred with one another and sought advice from elders who’d come to the square once the police had surrendered control. They talked to activists, lawyers, politicians, intellectuals. They had not expected to get this far, and instantly they understood that, without care, their victory would evaporate. By midnight, they had settled on a plan. They would escalate, calling for a massive nationwide “Friday of Rage” on January 28.

  “The wall of fear has been broken,” they told one another, equally proud and in awe of themselves and their fellow citizens. The wall of fear would quickly become a cliché, but it was no less true for that. The police had crumbled before common folk armed only with fury; in a single day, Egyptians had learned that it was possible to fight the regime and win. This lesson could not be untaught. Like a child who realizes that his father is an unbalanced, raving drunk, Egyptians would never again cower the same way before their state.

  The revolutionaries who for so long had labored as lonely pariahs suddenly counted legions of new friends. Almost every group in Egypt that wasn’t part of the state joined the groundswell for the Friday of Rage. The Muslim Brotherhood had sat out the January 25 protest despite requests from Moaz and other youth members. Now it smelled opportunity and followed out of self-interest. Basem, Moaz, and their youth cell were planning a march from the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque in Mohandiseen. This time, though, they were just one of hundreds of groups joining a national day of revolt. The Muslim Brotherhood was dispatching organizers to mosques all over the country. Middle-class kids invited friends on Facebook to join them in upscale neighborhoods, while in poorer quarters, people spread the call by word of mouth. The regime was frightened enough that, before dawn on January 28, it arrested as many known dissidents as it could, including dozens of senior Muslim Brothers. It was a sign of their disconnect from reality that the police thought the Brotherhood was leading the uprising. The inchoate revolutionary movement was led by no one, but its vanguard consisted of independent youth and small new factions operating without support from Egypt’s tired old politicians.

  Early in the morning on January 28, Zyad’s mother fried the spicy cured beef called basterma with eggs for her son’s team. She passed out sweaters so they wouldn’t get cold during a long day of marching and fighting with police. Before noon prayers, they strolled to the mosque, just a few blocks from Moaz’s house. The plaza was packed. People, mostly teenagers and folks in their twenties, had filled the fast-food chain restaurants near the mosque and then flocked there at the last minute. Basem was afraid as he approached. “What if no one shows up?” he asked himself. Then he heard a roar: tens of thousands of voices chanting in unison, spoiling for a fight. The small demonstration on January 25, with its symbolic victory over the police and reconquest of a public space, had triggered an avalanche. The police, it turned out, were too busy to block the way to Friday prayers. There were about two million Egyptians on the Interior Ministry payroll, but it seemed that their number wouldn’t suffice to control the country’s streets on the Friday of Rage. Rowdy crowds had assembled at dozens of Cairo mosques and all over the nation. Normally, the regime could move police from the provinces to deal with disturbances in Cairo or Alexandria, but on the Friday of Rage, it appeared that every population center in Egypt was in revolt.

  At the conclusion of prayers, the march from Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque pushed toward Tahrir with the inevitability of a tectonic shift. A concatenation of hundreds of thunderous marches rippled across Egypt. Basem, Moaz, Zyad, and their coconspirators were swept along, bobbing in the crowd. This time the battles with the police were quick and methodical. Each time riot police tried to block the march, the crowd ripped them away like weeds. Protests had engulfed Alexandria. The port city of Suez was burning. Fighting convulsed the factory and farm towns of the Nile Delta. Early in the afternoon, the outnumbered police simply gave up, leaving the streets without armed custodians for the first time since 1952. Just like that, Egypt belonged to its people. Triumphant mobs set neighborhood police stations aflame. In Tahrir, maybe a half million celebrated. This ill-groomed traffic circle, mottled with scruffy tufts of grass and flanked by concrete slab buildings and the gaping hole of a suspended construction site, would be the capital of liberated Egypt. When the military deployed that evening, it kept to the edges of the square.

  Armed camps ringed Tahrir. Army tanks and armored personnel carriers sealed the busiest entrance points. Soldiers checked IDs and sent foreigners, activists, and similarly suspicious people to security agents. Inside the square, plainclothes police milled about, filming everybody with their mobile phones. They affected intimidating stares, but now they were figures of impotence, with their clenched jaws and oversized leather jackets. The people in the square no longer feared arrests and beatings. The army’s gun turrets weren’t pointed at the crowds in Tahrir, although it would only take a minute to swivel them into place.

  The denizens of the square debated endlessly whether the military would attack. Basem spent every day there, leaving only to change clothes or sleep for a few hours in nearby apartments lent by supporters of the uprising. Moaz was coordinating a pharmacy stocked with first aid supplies, and worked as a medic at one of several field clinics established around the square. He never slept more than three hours straight, and at times was semidelirious. One night he asked me to meet him at the field hospital located in an arcade just off the square; fruitlessly, I searched for him among the bustle of doctors, citizen-journalists, and protesters waiting hours at a time to use the bathroom. Finally, I found Moaz beside a clump of blankets and bandages, curled up in a ball, asleep with his glasses on.

  The Muslim Brotherhood was now providing crucial personnel and know-how. The Brothers could smuggle medicine and food into the square. The Brotherhood could summon round-the-clock shifts of security guards and doctors. It assigned members to stay in the square overnight, ready to fight during the hours when the protester population was at its smallest and most vulnerable. Many of the original protesters considered the Brotherhood opportunistic, joining Tahrir only once it looked like it might succeed, but they welcomed the bodies and the help it provided. By now everyone in the square was ready to fight, but the protesters were at a loss to predict how the regime would strike.

  On Wednesday, February 2, they found out. Camel drivers wearing traditional galabiyas led a parade of thugs and hired hands into Tahrir. Police snipers hid among hundreds of civilians in muscle shirts. Tourists had fled because of the uprising, so the workers at the pyramids had nothing to do. The regime wanted to empty the square but wanted to disguise its involvement. So it hired its usual operatives, and brought in the workers from the pyramids to give the assault a populist flavor. The assault’s absurd appearance belied its lethality. The day’s violence would go down in history as the Battle of the Camel.

  From the roofs above Tahrir, men threw rocks the size of fists onto the heads of protesters below. Demonstrators and thugs fought hand to hand at the entrances to the square. Activists quickly smashed the pavement to make projectiles and threw them at their attackers. Police snipers returned fire methodically, shooting and killing demonstrators from an overpass. Dead and gravely wounded protesters piled up in the field hospitals around Tahrir, with new casualties carried in every minute. Moaz held one fighter as he died. A charismatic Che Guevara look-alike came to him bleeding where rocks had struck his temples. Moaz put thr
ee stitches in each side of the boy’s head with no anesthetic. The young man smiled the whole time. It was Moaz’s first encounter with Mina Daniel, a Coptic Christian who later in the year, after another fateful encounter with government security forces, would become an icon of the revolution.

  Women and men fought shoulder to shoulder. Revolutionaries snuck across lines to flush thugs from the rooftops. They outflanked the police snipers on the overpass. Twelve hours after it had begun, the Battle of the Camel was over. At least twenty-six demonstrators were dead and hundreds more seriously wounded. By defeating the Camel brigade, the revolt had scored a pivotal victory. The square reached its apogee; the euphoric golden period that Egyptians affectionately called “the Republic of Tahrir.” Volunteers guarded the spur streets. Garbage brigades picked up litter, while street kids distributed donated sandwiches and cookies. The ass-grabbing, sexual harassment, and rape that were everyday hazards for women in downtown Cairo subsided to almost zero. People who had reflexively shushed one another in public now couldn’t stop talking. They talked and talked, offering their names for publication and their cell phone numbers to stay in touch. People lined up patiently at the Omar Makram Mosque, which along with the field hospital offered the only two public bathrooms open to the hundreds of thousands in Tahrir. Christians and secular Muslims joined hands to protect those who were praying. To me, it felt like these frank people in Tahrir Square were redeeming the whole world’s age of defeat along with Egypt’s era of fear.

  The youth in the square welcomed anyone who entered with the requisite humility. One of the most striking denizens of Tahrir was an old diplomat named Mohamed Fathy Rifaah al-Tahtawi. He was a luminary of the establishment, the ruling class embodied. A descendant of one of the most important Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century, al-Tahtawi had served as deputy foreign minister and later as the spokesman for Al-Azhar, the preeminent seat of Islamic study. He was also a well-traveled intellectual who knew the world and saw that Egypt’s place in it had slipped. For decades he said nothing and pleased his masters well. But when he saw the youth congregate in Tahrir Square, he felt ashamed and seized his moment. On national television, al-Tahtawi resigned his post at Al-Azhar and decamped to Tahrir. There he made no speeches but asked many questions.

  When I met him, he led me to a quiet back alley. This man who had spent his entire professional life on fine upholstery and leather sofas brushed off the filthy curb with his bare hand, sat down, and said, “This will be my office now.” His demeanor said as much as his words. “Our children understood what we had forgotten,” the ambassador told me. “Now it is our turn to follow them. They might save the country that we have ruined.”

  He wasn’t the only mother, father, grandmother, or grandfather to enter Tahrir, head tilted in apology. They came and asked forgiveness for a lifetime of moral cowardice and for their final failed attempts at authoritarianism in the home, when they tried to prohibit their young from joining the revolution. Those parents, even more than their children, made a journey of stunning proportions out of the walled gardens of fear in which they had lived their entire lives.

  Scenes of euphoria and newfound faith played out everywhere in the square. Men and women circulated in yellow construction helmets, ready to withstand barrages of rocks. Security details ran drills in the middle of the night and staffed a jail in a subway stairwell. Anonymous donors sent in sandwiches, water, cookies, and koshari, the traditional Egyptian poor man’s dish of rice, lentils, noodles, and onions. An unemployed teacher working as part of a formal security detail told me that his best qualification as a fighter was that “I have nothing to lose.”

  Ayman Abouzaid, a cardiology resident, had joined the civilian protesters who were sleeping on the tanks beside the museum, to prevent them from intruding farther into the square. Each night, soldiers fired shots in the air and sometimes revved their tank engines. Ayman and the other men would cluster closer, daring the drivers to run them over. A light drizzle was falling, and the sun had set. Ayman wore a white medical jacket smeared with dirt. His glasses were dirty, and a bloodstained bandage was wrapped around his forehead. He had been in the square for ten days straight. “We will leave in only two situations,” he said. “When Hosni Mubarak and the National Democratic Party are judged and executed. Or we all have to be dead.”

  The revolutionary youth made their headquarters in a green tent on a traffic median at the southern end of Tahrir, where Abdelkader Hamza Street led toward the Omar Makram Mosque and the American Embassy. Activists passed through the tent around the clock. Sometimes a few would curl up and nap along the edge while others sat cross-legged, smoking inside the nylon hothouse as they drafted communiqués and plotted negotiating positions to present to the public and the generals. The Islamists dressed like old men, no matter their age, in pleated pants, Oxford dress shirts, loose sweaters, and leather shoes, usually in matching earth tones. The women wore loose cloaks, or abayas, and head scarves in muted grays or browns. The leftists tended to wear brighter colors and tighter clothes. When they expected a fight, everyone wore jeans, hoodies, and sneakers.

  Basem was preoccupied with sustaining turnout at the square. He believed that Tahrir itself was the best recruitment tool for the revolution. He was older than most of his confederates, and he was determined to woo people from his generation. His goal was to draw as many skeptics as possible to the Republic of Tahrir, so that they would return to tell their families and neighbors that the revolution was not as dark and destructive as it was being portrayed on state television.

  “Once people come here to see us and go back to the community, it changes,” a younger friend said to Basem outside the tent.

  “Today,” Basem said, “I was afraid I would find the square empty.”

  It was raining hard enough that the ink in my notebook ran. A child no more than ten passed out free chocolate-and-cream cookies.

  “Already the youth have accomplished more than we had asked for,” Basem said. “Nobody can control the square.”

  The fourteen youth leaders who had worked together on January 25 weren’t trying to control the square, but they were trying to lead it; they understood that a people power movement needed an agenda and spokespeople to harness its potential. However, they also understood that the spontaneity and diversity that gave Tahrir its potency could easily prevent it from cohering behind any single leader or idea.

  Even at Tahrir’s pinnacle, the seeds of future divisions had already taken root. A bitter divide had sprung up between the Egyptians in the square and those outside: the revolutionaries versus the Hizb al-Kanaba, or “sofa party,” who preferred to sit at home on their couches watching government television. State newspapers published unsourced accounts of cars with diplomatic license plates cruising through the square, with mysterious figures handing out cash from the windows. State television announcers delivered fabricated reports that the people in Tahrir Square were, in fact, being paid by European governments and Israel as part of a plot against the Egyptian nation. The perks of being a protester supposedly included free meals from Hardee’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, restaurants too expensive for most Egyptians. Outside Tahrir, I heard these baseless rumors repeated as fact by countless Egyptians, from the wealthy and well-read to the poor and cloistered. Inside Tahrir, in actuality, the fast-food restaurants had been shuttered since the first day of the revolt, and the protesters were living in primitive, overcrowded conditions. Such slander led to classic Egyptian humor. Protesters in Tahrir who hadn’t showered in days shared bowls of koshari. When choosing between measly portions, they’d say, “Is this Kentucky or Hardee’s?” A pair of Muslim Brothers who had slept on the dirt median for a week turned out their pockets. “I can’t find my euros or shekels anywhere!” one said, laughing at his own joke.

  Yet the government had successfully driven a wedge between the minority in the square and the majority at home. The people in Tahrir controlled no platform by which to address the wid
er public. They couldn’t get a moment’s airtime on state television; even regime-approved guests who mentioned Tahrir in anything but noxious terms were evicted from the studio. International media aired sympathetic reports about the revolutionaries, so Egyptians with satellite dishes could learn about the goals of Tahrir on Al Jazeera. The elite and the open-minded were more likely to seek out and believe foreign media (whether from the Arab world, like Al Jazeera, or the West, like the BBC or CNN). The majority, however, watched the monotonous false reports on state television or read the propaganda published in the most widely circulated newspapers, also run by the government. I heard some activists debate whether they should storm the state television headquarters a few hundred yards north of Tahrir in the squat fortress-like Maspero Building, its curved façade hulking like an alien bunker above the Nile. They dismissed the notion as impossible; there were dozens of army tanks surrounding the complex. They also thought it would be futile to take Maspero even if they could, since the government had alternate broadcasting venues. But that thinking signaled a failure of verve and imagination. Had the revolutionary youth taken over state television on January 28, they might have been running the country now. Instead, they fought a war of attrition for public opinion, using the platforms of family dinner tables, Twitter, and Facebook against the state’s vast broadcast and print conglomerates. The revolutionaries had no way to make their case to the masses of their peers. To some extent, they gave up from the start, figuring that the constituents of the sofa party had never made a difference in the past and wouldn’t in the future. Contempt for the majority, poured into the revolution’s foundation, would weaken it in later stages.