Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  The Salafis, meanwhile, were agitating for a “Revolution of God.” They spoke in more urgent, aggressive tones than either the secular workers or the faithful Muslim Brothers. A special level of repression had been reserved for Egypt’s Salafis under the old regime, and not without reason: their ranks had spawned an international elite of jihadi extremists. Fanatical Egyptian Salafis had murdered President Anwar Sadat; they had helped found and lead al-Qaeda; they had led an overt war against the Egyptian state in the 1990s; and they had surfaced in violent plots and movements around the world. Unleashed into politics by the Tahrir Revolution’s clean slate, Salafi preachers and leaders careered into the political arena with the wind of millions of animated, passionate, and maximalist followers at their backs. If Egypt was in the throes of a family succession, the Muslim Brotherhood would have been the patient elder son who had served his apprenticeship and was sure that if he was willing to wait and show respect, he would succeed the father. The Salafi movement was the youngest sibling: perhaps a little more sharp and clever than the older brothers, and definitely at the peak of his physical vigor. In the hotheaded tradition of youth, he interpreted the world in absolutes and was willing to use force in service of his ardent ideals.

  Their presidential contender was Sheikh Hazem Salah Abou Ismail, who preached on television and every Saturday night at his neighborhood mosque in Dokki, the West Cairo neighborhood. He drew thousands of young male followers so inspired by his words that they identified themselves as Hazemoon, partisans of Hazem, which had an added ring because it also meant “the determined ones.” To the alarm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian liberals alike, the man’s candidacy was viable; there were scenarios in which this antediluvian cleric could succeed Mubarak. Sheikh Hazem was the kind of guy who could be found on YouTube decrying modern women gone wild or suggesting that if Egyptians saved their change and planted crops in the desert, their beggared nation could become economically self-sufficient in a couple of years.

  Hazem Salah was fat, with a beatific smile and a ragged Salafi beard, and he said all the kinds of things that drove liberals into an anticlerical frenzy and made incremental Islamists like the Muslim Brothers terrified that they would lose all the most fervent religious youth to irresponsible fundamentalist clerics. He drove his followers to ecstasy. His central slogan declared simply, “By sharia, we shall live with dignity.” Sharia, the Islamic law, meant something different to every individual Muslim; the call to sharia was vague, allowing some observers to think that Hazem Salah was appealing to widely shared Islamic values and others to believe he was calling for the restoration of the caliphate, the leader of the faithful who had presided over the Islamic empire in its early centuries. His followers had adapted the revolutionary chant to call for Islamic law rather than system change. Unlike most political figures, there was nothing mealymouthed about Hazem Salah. He wanted Egypt’s social mores restored to those of the seventh century, but he also spoke forcefully against the military’s abuse of power, and constantly demanded the lifting of the state of emergency. In September many secular liberals were saying that a period of semiauthoritarian transition under military rule would be better than a democracy that brought Islamists to untrammeled power. Hazem Salah, by contrast, unequivocally condemned state torture, detentions, and military trials of civilians.

  He walked into his weekly confab in Dokki at the end of September after nightfall, holding a yellow wildflower in his hand. The men mobbed and kissed him. He walked slowly to the front of the mosque, sat by the minbar, or pulpit, and spoke without a break for nearly three hours. There was a crisis, he said, and no time for the faithful to stop to wait for clarity. It was a time for action, a decisive time. He made his case quietly, and his audience strained for every word. In every speech and at every meeting, Hazem Salah invoked a state of religious emergency. There was no message with which to better rally the youth. “We are the most humiliated of nations, but Islam has raised us high,” he said. He scorned those afraid to take sides, or those like President Barack Obama, “who have completely submitted to the Jews and the Zionist lobby.”

  “Don’t wait for an order,” he warned. “This time is crucial. Wash well, pray well. Every man must prepare himself to raise the flag of reform.” The ranks of the Hazemoon were growing more quickly than any other political current.

  The parallel ferment among the workers and the Salafis discomfited not only the military wardens but also their would-be replacements in the revolutionary mainstream. The Brotherhood and the liberals both wanted to supplant the old order yet retain much of its machinery. Real revolutionaries, however, were baying for blood, and they sought a much more anarchic reinvention of Egypt, with little concern for procedural niceties like the law.

  Worry had only grown among the revolutionaries. The government had set a date for elections: November 28, two months away. Time was winding down, and none of the revolutionaries seemed prepared. Field Marshal Tantawi had released what looked like a campaign video of himself strolling about downtown Cairo. The felool had emerged from behind the curtain, announcing new political parties composed of former leaders from Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party. The old bosses were running for their old seats in parliament. The Salafis and the Muslim Brothers were spreading the message that the secular parties would spit on custom and force humiliating, godless, libertine lifestyles on the conservative folk of Egypt.

  Nasser Abdel Hamid, a Revolutionary Youth Coalition leader from Mahalla, received a spate of threats after attracting thousands to a campaign rally there. Sally wouldn’t even consider running: her dual nationality would make her a target for xenophobic attacks. Moaz was despondent. Two months before the election, there was no revolutionary platform to speak of, no unified group of candidates who had real constituencies and who could honestly be described as representing both Islamist and secular Egyptians. “It’s a disaster,” he said as he tried to organize the parliamentary campaign from a table at the Costa Café. “How do they organize campaigns in the US?”

  Perhaps eager to forestall new protests, the generals announced a series of minimal but important concessions. Parliament would convene in January on an accelerated timetable rather than later in the spring. Members of political parties would be allowed to stand for independent seats, vastly curtailing the advantage of the ex–regime figures. Emergency rule would be suspended during elections, but not ended. Military trials for civilians would be curtailed. In exchange, the generals convinced a host of established party leaders to sign a document endorsing the SCAF’s good faith.

  But as soon as the signatures were published, the politicians realized that they looked like fools. At a moment of power, civilian politicians had forced the SCAF to compromise. As if they regretted backing the junta into a corner, the same leaders had then signed a meaningless document that made them sound like toady courtiers. The SCAF said it would continue military trials “for those matters covered by military law,” which in Egypt could mean anything; and it had refused to implement the “treason law” that would ban former National Democratic Party officials from running for office for a period of five years. Within hours, at least two party leaders rescinded their signatures, but it was too late: the document was all over Facebook, and everyone knew that its significance was only symbolic.

  The symbolism was this: the old men who led Egypt’s political parties, even its revolutionary parties, didn’t have the balls to stand up to the SCAF generals on an entirely ceremonial matter when they found themselves face-to-face in the same room, pressured by a coot in uniform blabbing about the national interest. At best, the political leadership looked like amateurs. “It’s like the guy who throws the bones to the dogs,” Moaz scoffed. “They will get all busy with the bones and forget that behind these bones is a lot of meat. The bones are the elections. The meat is the power to control the state.”

  At its most elemental, state control was exerted town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood, by local bosse
s whose power had survived across generations and regimes. They usually controlled the police, the criminals, and the major businesses in their sphere. For some time, word had circulated in Upper Egypt that the old regime henchmen had emerged from hiding. An activist from the hamlet of Nag Hammadi told me that the area’s old dynasty had officially registered a new political vehicle, the Horreya, or Freedom, Party. According to the activist, the top families in Nag Hammadi made their money from construction and gunrunning, and for decades had maintained a lock on the local parliament seats and the police chief’s office. Tahrir Square had some say over Egypt’s narrative, but not over its machinery, which remained the supreme power in the rural communities where two-thirds of the population lived.

  Moataz Mahmoud, the head of the Horreya Party, wanted as much press as possible for his felool revival. He was handing out free plane tickets to anyone who wanted to fly to Luxor and drive another hour to Nag Hammadi, where he was holding a national rally. He had money and an office that hummed with efficiency. The party’s chief of staff was a retired police general. Most of the staff and candidates already had careers in parliament, the police, or the military. Revolutionaries were calling for the revival of an old “treason law,” which they thought could be used to bar senior members of the old ruling party from running for election. The Horreya Party took this as a clarion call. What about their rights as felool ? They called their event “Beware the Righteous Anger of the Said,” the colloquial name for Upper Egypt. Even though the treason law was a theoretical prospect, the entitled stalwarts of the old regime were beginning to fear for their survival. If they couldn’t get a sliver of parliament, they would become even more vulnerable. They feared for the fortunes they had amassed through patronage; for the illegal enterprises that continued to enrich them; for the fiefdoms they controlled in the provinces, free from any state oversight; and for their own liberty, which in a just society would be imperiled by inevitable, and deserved, trials and prison terms.

  Moataz Mahmoud was a rich man, accustomed to power and deference but also to maneuvering and manipulation. It took more than submission to obtain power in the olden days, especially in the competition for loot and local authority in Upper Egypt. He was struggling to adapt now, although he was a cynical opportunist. He had a support base among the tribes and the families that depended on him for their livelihoods, and he had a natural web of allies around the country from his class. They were trying to figure out how to play it: quiet strong-arming behind the scenes, or overt nastiness? Buy votes and pressure judges, or march down Main Street with machine guns—as Moataz Mahmoud’s friend Hisham el-Sheini had recently done in Nag Hammadi? These Horreya men all came from old feudal families. For centuries, they had owned all the land. The poor, not long ago, had literally been their vassals. Today the legal relationship had been liberalized, but the web of control was not all that different. They controlled the local industry and the local police. They had more to lose from a revolution than anybody. Even a half-assed junta like the SCAF could destroy their way of life.

  Their style was evolving, but the deep strategy remained the same: mobilize the privileged by appealing to their fears. Moataz Mahmoud wore a trim gray suit, a white shirt, and no tie. When he spoke, he sounded very old-school: 2005 with whiffs of 1955. “We need a national ideology,” he said. “Ours is to resist the constructive chaos mentioned by Condoleezza Rice. We want to stop the American plan to divide the Middle East and to divide Egypt into pieces like Iraq.” Like many conspiracy-obsessed people in the region, he had seized on Rice’s offhand comment from 2005, which he continued to believe revealed America’s secret long-term plans. He went on about the dangers of American domination and the Islamists who were scheming to take power in Egypt and turn it into a hellish version of seventh-century Arabia, when Islam was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. “We are in a state of chaos!” he cried. “There will be a civil war when the Islamists try to impose sharia law. And now they want to strip the tribes of their power and ban us from politics.”

  A bald and threatening power play was afoot. The young activist Asmaa Mahfouz had proclaimed her support for the treason law that week. She was a popular figure on YouTube and among young revolutionaries because she was a veiled believer totally committed to the principles of a secular state, and she was a compelling orator. By no means, however, was she a figure of major influence. Like the Mubarak propaganda machine, however, the Horreya Party wanted a villain, and Asmaa Mahfouz became the galvanizing scapegoat. “When Asmaa Mahfouz comes out and says that families in Upper Egypt should not be allowed to run for office, people get emotional, they get angry. They want to block the roads. I will try to calm them down,” Moataz Mahmoud said. It didn’t matter that Asmaa had said no such thing; she could be blamed, and then Moataz Mahmoud could make a show of unleashing and then restraining his offended followers.

  Moataz Mahmoud’s father had served nearly a decade in parliament. His brother had taken over the seat in 2010. Now it was Moataz’s turn. The seat, he believed, was a hereditary right, along with the family’s ceramic factory and its landholdings in the city of Qena and Nag Hammadi. If they were allowed to run, he promised, the felool would get a third of the vote easily. I flew to Luxor the next morning with a group of Horreya Party members. All year long, people had wondered what the old regime was up to. Now one of its appendages was reemerging. The police and intelligence remained behind a curtain, along with some of the more powerful plutocrats, but these ruling party clans represented an elite whose feudal power predated the Egyptian republic and whose influence would last far longer than Mubarak’s or the National Democratic Party’s.

  At the EgyptAir gate for the Luxor flight, it became quickly apparent who was on their way to take part in Beware the Righteous Anger of the Said. The Horreya Party delegates were louder than anyone else, smoked in the no-smoking areas, and wore bright tribal vests embroidered with gold thread. The flight was short, and a party employee steered us to a waiting minibus with a Persian carpet on the floor. Two twentysomething cousins from Marsa Matrouh, a coastal town between Alexandria and the Libyan border, squashed their cigarettes into the ornate pile. They spoke to each other in a staccato dialect that was unintelligible to the other Egyptians on the bus. I quickly felt like I had stumbled into a private meeting of a sinister fraternity. Their tribal name was Sanousi, and they wore sparkling white robes and impressive deep-green brocade vests. They smoked cigarette after cigarette, and then sang an ode of praise to recently martyred Libyan dictator Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi, a distant relative in the Sanousi clan. A popular revolt had driven al-Qaddhafi from power, and eventually his own citizens hunted him down in a ditch and killed him. His tribal kin mourned the fallen dictator. They kept rhythm with a peculiar kind of finger clicking, accomplished by feverishly striking their middle fingers against their thumbs. A middle-aged Cairene in professional dress grimaced at the tribesmen. Her name was Iman el-Bawwab, and she clearly did not relish having these crude men as her political bedfellows.

  “They talk about isolating us,” AbdelShafik Sanousi said. “We are not a contagious disease.”

  Atallah Hassan Atallah, the other cousin from Marsa Matrouh, leaned back in his minibus seat. “Our religion says we can marry four women,” he said, smiling lewdly.

  “The Koran limits that freedom,” Iman corrected. “You can marry four only if you have the resources to take proper care of four.”

  Atallah began to curse her in the Marsa Matrouh dialect, and the tribesmen laughed together. Iman and the other Cairenes on the minibus recoiled at the rudeness.

  A few minutes later, Atallah leaned over to me. “You know what I was calling her?” he asked me.

  “I can guess,” I said.

  “I called her a cunt!” he said, and burst into laughter all over again.

  It wouldn’t be fair to say that this behavior represented the entire ethos of the old ruling class, but it would be dishonest to ignore the integral part it played.
The lords of the old regime didn’t merely tolerate abusive bullies; they depended on them as enforcers. I was suddenly in the equivalent of a private back room where the old ruling class was behaving at ease, and it was ugly. As the sun set, we pulled up to a great tent erected next to Hisham el-Sheini’s estate, among the irrigated fields. Several thousand tribal notables sat in the rows of chairs. Moataz Mahmoud, clean shaven in a suit, greeted the newcomers. El-Sheini, with a walrus mustache and bald head, roamed in his flowing white galabiya, extending hospitality and kisses in every direction like a jolly chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.

  Hisham el-Sheini was aghast at the elections, which he viewed as an attempted coup against his birthright. “This seat in parliament has been in our family for twenty-four years,” he told me. “If people here didn’t like us, how would it have been stable? Why are they scared of us?”