Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  He thought that the Brotherhood could lead a unified coalition to contest the parliamentary elections, which would include everyone who resisted the old regime. Such unity, of course, had never been achieved before. Even before Tahrir, in the fall of 2010, when most political opposition parties had called for a boycott of the parliamentary ballot, the Brotherhood had refused to join. El-Shater didn’t seem to understand how much the liberals hated the Islamists, and how much the revolutionary Islamist youth mistrusted the Brotherhood leadership, himself included. He used some inclusive rhetoric when he talked about secular political parties, although there was no evidence as to whether he meant it. When it came to his internal critics, el-Shater sounded as authoritarian as Mubarak. Young Muslim Brothers, including Ayyash and Moaz, had publicly criticized the Brotherhood’s decision to enter directly into politics. They thought the Brotherhood should concentrate on its charities and religious outreach, leaving its members free to form an assortment of different political parties that would be fully independent of the supreme guide. El-Shater dismissed the breakaway Islamists as inexperienced and impatient. “I spent twelve years in prison under Mubarak’s reign,” he said. “The youth don’t realize how hard we’ve had it. They can talk about change, but the Brotherhood as an organization will decide what it wants.”

  Ayyash hedged his bets. He froze his active membership in the Brotherhood, but he agreed to work for el-Shater as a consultant for the Brotherhood’s websites. His mentor in the Brotherhood had always entertained Ayyash’s critical thinking but had advised him to “hold fast to the group with your dog teeth.” Now Ayyash had grown to loathe the authoritarian leaders of the group and their backward policies against women, Christians, and secular Egyptians. He also feared the organization: he had seen the Brotherhood slander former members who broke with it. Yet so deeply ingrained was the society of Muslim Brothers in his life that he could not imagine rejecting the group fully. All his friends and coworkers bore the stamp of the Brotherhood, whether their membership was active, dormant, or lapsed. Even his mentor’s son Mohammed had quit in disgust.

  “I won’t leave the idea of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Ayyash told Mohammed over orzo soup one afternoon. “I will leave the organization of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

  “It’s become a dictatorship,” his friend said, shaking his head angrily.

  “I will leave the country if the Muslim Brotherhood is ruling!” Ayyash agreed. “Maybe in ten years’ time, they will be ready.”

  Moaz and the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s youth wing, who had worked for the revolution since the beginning, made a clearer break. They told their supervisors that they could not support the transformation of the Brotherhood into a political party, which they believed would erase all its moral authority. They planned to establish their own political party, which among other things would clearly endorse a secular state.

  “Why don’t you join our new Freedom and Justice Party?” his supervisor asked him. “You can be a founding member.”

  “It is a huge mistake for the Brotherhood to become a political party,” Moaz said. “I cannot support it. We will go ahead with our own plan.”

  “If you do this, you risk expulsion from the Brotherhood,” the supervisor warned him.

  “The Brotherhood’s rules are not from God or the Prophet. If these rules don’t fit our time, why not change them?” Moaz replied. “I will never leave the Brotherhood. I hope it does not leave me.”

  There were other schisms in the party too. A senior member of the Guidance Bureau, a popular doctor and lifelong Brother named Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, had declared that he would run for president. He had immediately been kicked out of the group, and the leaders had announced that any Brother who worked for Aboul Fotouh’s presidential bid could be stripped of his membership. The disaffected Muslim Brotherhood youth met at a hotel in Zamalek, in defiance of Khairat el-Shater’s direct orders. It was understood that anyone who attended the conference would be in trouble. Moaz and the other independent liberal Islamist youth felt ready to test their appeal. If they could draw enough of the dynamic youth activists to their conference, they could decisively break with the Brotherhood and galvanize their own movement.

  Hundreds of elite Muslim Brotherhood youth showed up, among them the children of senior Brotherhood leaders who had been groomed for important futures in the group. Two Islamist lawyers who had gone to school with Zyad, Islam Lutfi and Mohammed al-Qasas, were selected to lead a new party, which they would call al-Tayyar al-Masry: the Egyptian Current. Their idea had a beautiful simplicity: As individuals, they would bring Brotherhood values to their party: discipline, focus, hard work, good morals, and a dedication to helping others. But as a group, al-Tayyar al-Masry was to be the opposite of the Brotherhood in every possible way. Egypt was for everybody, they believed, and not just for devout Muslims. Al-Tayyar was premised on a commitment to a secular, inclusive state. Beyond that, the party’s members would choose, through transparent internal votes, every single policy position. In this party, no leader would tell the rank and file what to think. The members would have full control, and the leaders would serve them.

  Moaz loved this bottom-up philosophy, but he cared less about the idea than whether it would work. If al-Tayyar could attract members and money, it could spread its message. From the start, the party’s democratic idealism interfered with recruiting. People flocked by the hundreds to the party’s early interest meetings in the spring and summer; they were drawn by the pedigree of al-Tayyar’s founders. Once in the door, however, prospective members were confused to find the party a work in progress.

  “I came here because I don’t like what’s going on in the Brotherhood, and I like the youth. But I want to hear an ideology. What is your program?” a potential recruit asked quizzically at an interest meeting I attended.

  “That’ll be for you to decide,” the recruiter explained. “We won’t be a dictatorship. Once we have a critical mass of members, we will convene a convention, and the members will decide the party’s program.”

  In the abstract, it was a magnificently democratic notion, but in practice, it confused people who were seeking an idea to rally behind, not a project to shoulder. As the months wore on, al-Tayyar’s membership lingered in the low thousands.

  However, the Brotherhood still took its young critics seriously. It moved first against the official leaders, expelling Islam Lutfi right away and initiating hearings against the others. Moaz they hoped to persuade to recant; he thought just as eagerly that he could get the Brotherhood leaders to see things his way. He was summoned to a disciplinary hearing. His supervisor asked him to respond to charges of disobedience and doctrinal heresy. Moaz spent nine hours explaining his view that he was, in fact, staying true to the Brotherhood’s actual mission, based on its founding texts, and that it was the policies of the group’s current leadership that were deviant. Naïvely, perhaps, Moaz thought he had a chance to change the minds of his inquisitors. He had never stopped calling his supervisor every day. He had never hidden any of his thoughts or plans. In May, when the long-banned Brotherhood opened a gleaming new hilltop headquarters on Cairo’s edge, Moaz came to congratulate el-Shater and the rest of the leaders. It was a surreal scene, with an Islamic pop band singing and old state security agents and politicians politely shaking hands with Brothers fresh out of prison. Moaz wandered through the party like an estranged cousin. Technically, this was still his group and family; he had yet to be formally expelled. But he left alone. A few blocks down the hill, he got a flat tire. He jacked up his car, unscrewed the wheel, and, without help from anyone, rolled it to a repair shop, all the while bathed in the percussive beats of the Brotherhood’s music.

  By July, Ayyash had withdrawn from all his Brotherhood projects. The second leader of al-Tayyar al-Masry was formally kicked out of the Brotherhood, and Moaz realized that he would suffer the same fate sooner or later. Moaz’s hearings went on for weeks. He brought a lawyer and rallied suppo
rt among young Brothers on Facebook. Already he had stopped meeting with his usra, and his supervisor no longer spoke to him every day. When the decision came, it sent Moaz into depression. The secular activists on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had never known the feeling of identifying so completely with a vast and powerful organization. They asked Moaz with genuine wonder how it felt after a lifetime to no longer be a Brother. “It’s like a split in a big family,” he said quietly. “Like I am no longer welcome at my father’s table.”

  The Brotherhood juggernaut crashed forward, with simple, compelling slogans such as “Elections first.” A huge number of Egyptians trusted that the Muslim Brotherhood was, at a minimum, competent and moral. Its members were religious, and the organization had been providing health care, education, and religious instruction since 1928. It was a record no other group in Egypt could match. The Brotherhood leaders believed that they should force elections on the quickest possible timetable for two reasons: it would maximize the Brotherhood’s advantage over other political forces, which were still getting organized, and it would allow a civilian government to take office before the military and the old regime had time to regroup and cancel the whole democratic experiment. Gone was the caution of Khairat el-Shater in the spring, when he was concerned about mollifying the Brotherhood’s critics. Now the Brotherhood was claiming that it represented 90 percent of the population, and that Egypt was “by nature an Islamic state.” Once elections were held, the Brotherhood would consider itself entitled to do whatever it wanted, with the blessing of the majority. The group’s awesome organizational muscle was on display in every province. While the revolutionaries scrambled to establish tiny political parties, and young activists convened teach-ins and tweet meetups, the Brotherhood was campaigning for political office. Parliamentary and presidential elections hadn’t been scheduled yet, but the Brotherhood rallied its base of millions for an inevitable contest.

  Mohamed Morsi, a rocket engineer and el-Shater loyalist, was running the Brotherhood’s newly established political arm, named the Freedom and Justice Party. The name was confusingly similar to that of the much smaller revolutionary group called the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom. Morsi barnstormed Egypt. His rallies drew thousands of spectators to a well-calibrated mix of inspiration, political talking points, and patronage. I attended one of these Brotherhood events in the corn-growing delta town of Shibin el-Kom. Brotherhood businessmen sold food and household goods at a discount. Clerics were on hand to talk about the Koran, and agronomists to explain the Brotherhood’s plan to streamline farmers’ cooperatives. There was a protected area for children to play. Morsi gave a feisty speech packed with policy specifics and with market-tested suggestions for his supporters. He repeated a simple summary of the Brotherhood’s platform, and he asked every member to approach seven voters a day. In what would later become his signature cry, Morsi issued a warning against the military, which had begun to act like it was in charge.

  “The people made this revolution! The military is only temporarily protecting it!” he shouted. “The only legitimacy in this country today comes from the people!”

  At the end of July, a few weeks later, just before Ramadan, the Brother-hood and its Salafi allies scheduled a pan-Islamist demonstration in Tahrir. The military gave its blessing. The SCAF and the Brotherhood shared a common interest in strong-arming secular liberals. It turned out to be the most crowded protest since the revolution: maybe a million people, some of them carrying the black flag of jihad or the green flag of Saudi Arabia, chanting, “The people want God’s law!” The show of unity and religious extremism unnerved liberal revolutionaries, who called it “Kandahar Friday,” after the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. A half year after Mubarak’s fall, the momentum lay not with revolutionary idealists but with a clandestine organization run in absolute secret by a group of bearded men.

  6.

  STUCK IN THE SQUARE

  Tensions were flaring within the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. Its obsession with the process of democracy often distracted its leaders from the goal of transforming Egypt into a more democratic place. The commitment to pluralism and transparency made the revolutionaries at times seem much too reasonable for the dirty fight at hand. The Islamist members felt marginalized, and there had been a lot of anger over the decision of Zyad and the other ElBaradei supporters to form a political party. Many of the revolutionaries, secular as well as Islamic, felt it was premature to enter such a deformed political process, especially one that was designed and controlled by the military. In the contest of stability against chaos, stability seemed always to have the advantage. The generals in power had set the terms of the narrative, employing the dominant machinery of the state bureaucracy and media. The revolutionaries were afraid to criticize the military in public and had produced no real, visible leaders. There was talk of disbanding the coalition, even though it was the only trustworthy group that could speak for Tahrir. Its Thursday-night meetings at the Café Balad bookstore, on Mohamed Mahmoud Street beside the Cilantro coffee shop, felt less and less like a font of possibility and more like drudge work. Maintaining manpower and focus was a problem. Some of the major strategists among the revolutionaries were struggling to make ends meet. Alaa Abdel Fattah, the blogger and labor activist, and one of the smartest thinkers among the revolutionaries, had to take a computer programming job in South Africa to earn a living.

  At the end of March, the SCAF had proposed a law that would criminalize all protests. There was just enough backlash from young people in the squares and from the new political leaders to make it shelve the idea, at least for the moment. Weekly protests drew only a few hundred hard-core activists, who groused that the coalition, and the founders of political parties such as the Social Democrats and al-Tayyar, were “stealing the revolution.” People preoccupied with politics would talk instead of fight, the thinking went, and the old regime would win.

  On the last Friday in May, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition organized its first million-man march in Tahrir without any help from the Islamists. The coalition was determined to prove that it could assemble a crowd even without Muslim Brothers, but it won only a Pyrrhic victory, filling the crowd but exposing its divisions. Speakers screamed from five competing platforms. There were dozens of different messages. The only thing everyone agreed on was that Mubarak should go on trial. Moaz was proud that hundreds of Brotherhood youth had attended, heeding the call of the breakaway al-Tayyar al-Masry faction rather than the command of the supreme guide.

  Despite its tiny number of recruits, al-Tayyar had managed security for the protest, which was called “the Friday of the Second Revolution.” Basem saw danger in the incoherence. “Everyone still wants to have his own stage,” he said. “We have to make dialogue between all of us to decide on what we need.” Basem wanted the law to come first: a bill of rights that would protect the Egyptian people from any surge by powerful forces: the Islamists, the military, the old regime. The old energy was gone. Basem, Moaz, and the rest of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition hoped they could reinvigorate the same people who had filled Tahrir from January 25 to February 11. This time around, though, the protest felt like a party, with ice-cream cones, cotton candy, and garbage underfoot. Even the songs lacked punch. The anthem of the eighteen days was a guttural ballad directed at Mubarak by the folk singer Ramy Essam, entitled “Leave!” Now Ramy sang new words to the same tune: “Civil state! Civil state!” It didn’t rouse the crowd.

  For the first time, the liberals in the revolution, people such as Basem and Zyad, imagined that they might have more in common with the military than with the civilian Islamists. Liberals were asking for a delay in the elections: they wanted more time to prepare so that they could compete fairly with the Islamists, and they wanted to enshrine protections in the constitution for a civil, not religious, state before the Muslim Brotherhood gained a foothold in government. Uncomfortably for Basem, many of the young activists revealed a disturbingly uncritical
love for the military.

  A small minority understood that the transition was fixed in favor of the army and the old elite, and that even the slightest reform faced an uphill battle. But the more dreamy masses thought they already had reached the promised land, and had simply to choose their preferred way. Egypt was in ferment, with everyone dreaming of an ideal constitution and convinced that, in a few short months, a relatively painless transition would be over. A sterling new ideal would be established for the Arab world by the trailblazing Egyptians. Libya and Syria were rising up against their dictators, which many Egyptians interpreted as proof that a revolutionary Egypt was leading the Arab world again. It felt like things were changing. Even the SCAF generals were on Facebook. Egypt seemed dynamic, influential, important. Revolutionaries were barraged with invitations to travel abroad and lecture about their experiences. Free trips were on offer around the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Moaz joined a caravan of volunteers to deliver medical supplies to Benghazi, where the Libyans welcomed them as inspirational brothers in revolution. Basem was headed to Holland to meet with Social Democrats from around the world. Moaz was planning a trip to Germany for a conference about nuclear energy. Zyad was invited to a film festival in Germany and a junket in Italy. Muslim Brothers were being dispatched around the world to refresh old ties and construct new ones. Ayyash’s mentor had meetings in Japan, Europe, and the Maghreb region of North Africa.

  It was a time for dreamers. Some of Egypt’s great minds were imagining a constitution of remarkable simplicity, brief and enduring, that could inspire the entire Arab world with its recipe for freedom, rights, responsibilities, and—at long last—accountable governance. Some of Egypt’s bravest citizens were putting their bodies on the line to force power into the hands of the people. And some of Egypt’s smartest bureaucrats were scheming to keep everything the way it had been. In this contest, the bureaucrats had an advantage: they were veterans, with experience running the machinery of state and managing its millions of minions. And, Tahrir notwithstanding, they were still in control.