Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  A lighthearted sheikh from the Sinai leaned over with a bit of wordplay. “We are ful,” he said, meaning jasmine blossoms, “not felool.”

  Hisham el-Sheini took the podium, gloating as he beheld the thousands of men who had accepted the free airfare. “Just by sitting here, you have scared everyone,” he said. “Just by showing your respect, everyone ran into their holes.”

  The whole event appeared staged for the cameras. Men in the audience shouted or chanted only when cued. Off camera, the hosts ignored the other speakers, socializing with one another, talking on the phone, smoking, and relishing the smell of roasting meat from next door. At a signal from Hisham el-Sheini, we decamped to the yard of his three-story villa, where glistening sides of lamb lay on the tables. The flesh was moist and delicious, perfectly cooked. In tribal style, the most senior man at each table ripped off the choicest morsels of meat with his right hand and distributed them to his juniors. Only then did he eat himself. We rushed to eat and board the minivan, to catch a late-night flight back to Cairo.

  At the airport, the same group reassembled, now flush with meat, exhaustion, and a sense of righteousness stoked by the rally. But the revolution had another surprise for the felool. Domestic flights had been cancelled by an air traffic controllers’ strike: another manifestation of the spreading labor unrest. Other passengers in the lounge waited stoically, but not the Horreya members.

  “Look what the revolution brought us!” AbdelShafik Sanousi sneered, lighting a cigarette and pacing by the gate. “The revolution of workers and laborers.”

  A skinny man in a suit stood up and in an even voice confronted this boor from Horreya. “This revolution brought us a lot more than that,” he said. “It brought us dignity.”

  The Marsa Matrouh tribesman was shocked to find a plebeian speaking to him. He had treated the airport lounge, like the bus and the tent, as just another extension of his private domain, where his guests could speak but strangers and servants would remain silent.

  “You should think about what you say,” the young man continued. “You can afford to eat, but some people cannot. This revolution was about their dignity. People like you caused this revolution.”

  AbdelShafik Sanousi was the type of bully who couldn’t deal with victims that fought back. “Fuck you,” he muttered in response, but he already was walking toward the café and the designated smoking area.

  It was too much for Iman. First to be insulted by her fellow felool and now by an upstart revolutionary. “How dare you!” she screamed, striding over to the man in the suit. “You don’t own the revolution.” She continued in an almost crazed vein, shouting unintelligibly at the man, who seemed torn between his desire to respond to her ridiculous arguments and his humane instinct to help her calm down. Eventually another Horreya member led Iman, weeping, away from the gate.

  The flight was cancelled until the following night. Twenty-four hours later, the same cast of characters reassembled in the same small lounge at the Luxor airport. This time the civilians knew what to expect and eyed the Horreya members warily. Thirty-six hours after they’d left their homes, the regime heavies looked worse for wear, their formal attire wrinkled. At the lounge, I befriended the man with the suit, Aly Malek. He was an accountant and a Revolutionary Youth Coalition member. He told me that in Nag Hammadi, things hadn’t changed as much as they had in Cairo. “When we march, the police shut us down,” he said. “They try to intimidate us.” Hisham el-Sheini, Moataz Mahmoud, and other local enforcers had tried to incite sectarian fear between Muslims and Christians, he said, and now were manipulating their tribesmen in order to protect narrow and corrupt family enterprises.

  “What brought down Hosni Mubarak could bring down these guys as well,” he said. “But it’s harder for us here, because we’re nonviolent and we’re facing not the army or the police but the armed followers of these guys.”

  A doctor sitting beside us looked up from his laptop.

  “Last night I thought these guys were drunk. But look, there they are, at it again, smoking and disrespecting everybody,” he said.

  A janitor from the snack bar approached AbdelShafik and pointed to the smoking area, glassed off from the rest of the gate.

  “Pimps!” AbdelShafik shouted. Next to me, another traveler, a young professional with a crew cut working on a tablet computer, snapped.

  “Who are you?” he screamed, jumping up and running toward AbdelShafik. “Who are you to call us pimps? This country does not need people like you!”

  The janitor wasn’t cowed either and piped up. “I am responsible for this place, and you cannot smoke here.”

  The Sanousis, the Sinai sheikhs, and even the Cairene felool couldn’t have looked more shocked if zombies had lurched into the airport and attacked them. Their own private nightmare was coming to life. At their rally, with the rest of Egypt weeded out, they had felt like big bosses, indomitable, the once and future masters of a meek country. But in the light of day, in a public space inhabited by actual Egyptian citizens, they were exposed as venal has-beens, with dwindling power in their hands but no legitimacy.

  AbdelShafik, for a second time, retreated with his cigarette. “Fuck the coffee shop,” he said. “They’re all fuckers and pimps. Long live Mubarak.”

  The janitor, victorious, smiled. “Fuck Mubarak,” he said.

  7.

  THE OWNER OF THIS WORLD IS A DEVIL

  The Christians were marching again to Maspero, the state media headquarters. Their predicament had worsened considerably during the year after Mubarak. They had always felt vulnerable because of their small numbers and the constant attacks from Islamist extremists on their legitimacy as Egyptians. Before Nasser, Christians had figured disproportionately in the moneyed elite, but by now, second-class citizenship had long been a reality for them. They could amass financial but not political power. There were no Christians in the top echelons of the army and police. They sometimes held token positions in the government, but never was a Christian preeminent in the ruling party. Christians needed special permission to renovate churches, and that permission often wasn’t granted. When they fixed falling-down structures, they frequently were accused of building them taller or bigger than before, which was against the law. Steeple height was perhaps the only construction code in Egypt that was zealously enforced. Mini-pogroms often erupted in response to rural church construction and repairs; another common trigger was rumors, usually unfounded, that priests or nuns had kidnapped a Christian woman from her Muslim husband. Meanwhile, jihadi fundamentalists killed Christians and burned churches with startling regularity. These crimes occurred several times a year, usually in some faraway village in Upper Egypt.

  All this abuse and persecution had accelerated since January 25, 2011. Shortly after the original uprising in Tahrir Square, a group of Christian hunger strikers camped in front of Maspero, demanding equal protection under the law. They were savagely beaten by soldiers and thugs. That first post-Tahrir insult galvanized the Christians; the church had stayed away from politics, trying to cultivate protection from the dictatorship, but its minority flock was frightened into action. They organized a sectarian activist front. Choosing Maspero as the symbolic Christian counterpoint to Tahrir, they called it the Maspero Youth Union, and they began to advocate for religious freedom and Christian rights with an intensity almost never found among Coptic church officials. Soon after, three churches were torched in Cairo’s Imbaba neighborhood. Fifteen people died, and two hundred were injured in the riots that followed. On September 30 a Salafi mob burned down a church in the obscure village of Marinab, near Aswan in Upper Egypt. Once again, despite its promises, the government made no investigation.

  Whenever the Christians marched, the most principled of the revolutionaries joined them. It was an article of faith among certain Egyptians that they must protect their country’s nonsectarian identity carefully. The majority of Egyptians were Muslim, but that didn’t mean Islam defined Egypt. Even though the Coptic Church
was sectarian in its own way, a core group of revolutionary youth felt a vital moral obligation to stand with it, including Muslims, Christians, and unbelievers. Otherwise, they feared, naked sectarianism would swamp Egypt’s transcendent national identity.

  The Coptic marches always elicited an almost reflexive spasm of official violence, and no one expected the march on October 9 to be any different. The Copts had so long been taken for granted by the regime that they barely rose to the level of an afterthought. Whatever the state did, it knew the Christians were compromised and afraid: compromised because they had given their support to an oppressive, arbitrary government, and afraid because they knew that, without its peremptory protection, their community might perish. As capricious and insubstantial as it was, the state’s protection provided a final barrier against the murderous intolerance that made Coptic life nearly untenable in places that functioned mostly outside the state’s ambit, such as Marinab.

  As usual, the march began in Abbasiya at the Coptic Church’s mammoth cathedral, not far from the Ministry of Defense. Thousands gathered, including the Maspero Youth Union, a delegation from the church, and the most dedicated members of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. Sally was there; she never missed a march. Among the leaders was Mina Daniel, the charismatic Che look-alike whom Moaz had stitched up during the original uprising in Tahrir. Bothaina Kamal, a former television announcer who was the sole woman running for president (and no relation to Basem), was there. So were dozens of other familiar personalities. Attending protests was part of their job description as activists, and one never knew when a routine demo would suddenly become a turning point. However, the crowd heading to Maspero on that Sunday night thought it knew what to expect, conditioned from nearly a year of controlled violence.

  It took almost two hours to reach Maspero as they passed through a succession of working-class and commercial areas, some of them hostile and some friendly. As the protesters approached downtown, thousands more joined them for the finish. Just as night fell, thugs struck. Men with swords and sticks charged the marchers. Others hidden in the dusk threw rocks. Sadly, nothing about that first attack in Bulaq Dakrour felt out of the ordinary. The marchers pushed through, as they had done so many times before. They linked arms, chanted, and sang, punctuating every call with a refrain of unity: “Muslim, Christian, one hand!” They expected a few wounded, maybe a few more clashes, and then they would sweep into the safe area in front of Maspero. Dozens of armored personnel carriers were stationed on the Corniche outside of Maspero, along with several companies of military police. The regime considered the state media headquarters a precious strategic asset and guarded it as smotheringly as the Ministry of Defense itself. The activists knew that they’d be safe once they reached Maspero. The military didn’t care about Christian rights but had always protected Christians themselves.

  The crowd surged down the six-lane Corniche, bounded on one side by the Nile and on the other by a dense popular quarter that also housed the Foreign Ministry and Maspero. Families with children stood at the head of the crowd in front of Maspero, chanting for equality. Then, as unexpected as a gale, the military struck. Soldiers screamed insults at the demonstrators, and odd disembodied clicking sounds filled the air. People screamed and ran; the noise was gunfire. The assailants were the military police, supposedly there to protect the people they were now shooting. The last upright bastion of national unity, the army—the army!—was killing people, outright and in plain sight.

  Gas, fog, and smoke from burning cars distorted the columns of light thrown by the streetlamps. Plainclothesmen appeared at the escape routes. An armored personnel carrier, like a crazed charging rhinoceros, was driven at wild speeds with cold intent toward groups of protesters, running them down by the dozen. Those who couldn’t jump out of the way fast enough were crushed beneath the vehicle. Mina Daniel fell, shot once in the head and once in the shoulder. This time Moaz’s first aid couldn’t be of any help. His friends dragged him away. “If I die, I want my funeral in Tahrir Square,” Mina said.

  The SCAF’s true and vile intent in starting the mayhem at Maspero soon became clear on television. Egyptians saw the terror and confusion of civilians running, soldiers shooting, and unknown knots of men loitering in the darkness on the edge, without knowing what had caused it. Meanwhile, the military junta gave the people its own dastardly explanation of the events on the Corniche. The story was simple: crazy Christians had taken up arms and were attacking the military, in a deranged plot to tumble Egypt into anarchy. They had to be stopped, and the threat these rampaging Christians posed was apparently so great that the army couldn’t do it alone. With a speed suggesting they had planned in advance, soldiers raided independent television stations broadcasting live footage of the massacre and cut off their transmissions. Only pro-SCAF television would be allowed on this night.

  “Go help the army,” one announcer exhorted his viewers. “Our soldiers are being attacked by Christians.”

  The crawl on state television repeated the fabricated news about murdered soldiers and Christian activists on the prowl. It was textbook incitement, and it targeted an audience already groomed to believe sectarian slander. General Hamdy Badeen, a member of the SCAF and head of the military police, who had been beating, detaining, and torturing with impunity since the revolution, phoned in to a raft of sympathetic stations with entirely spurious reports that Christian demonstrators had attacked the soldiers guarding Maspero.

  “The army is with Egypt above all,” he told a sycophantic announcer at state-run al-Masriya Television. “We read the fatiha for our dead and prayed in the Maspero building. National unity will prevail. Those who created this strife will be held responsible.”

  The cynicism was breathtaking. General Badeen at that moment must have known probably none of his men had been killed, although evidence later surfaced that one soldier might have died that night. The army was the only party shooting. General Badeen was the one summoning civilians to fight on the streets. If anyone was responsible for trying to start a sectarian civil war that night, it was Hamdy Badeen. He clearly didn’t expect to be held to account. General Badeen called on honorable Egyptians to help. It was a direct lie that the unarmed marchers had attacked the army. In fact, the driver of one of the APCs that had driven through and over the crowd was seized and beaten, but then protected by a priest who turned him over to the army. “Honorable Egyptians” materialized throughout downtown, interrogating passersby. “Where are the Christians?” they chanted. “The Muslims are here!” They beat any Copts they found. Regular, “good” citizens had responded to the state’s sectarian call.

  But despite its best efforts, the military couldn’t block footage of the massacre. There were too many journalists around and too many activists with cameras. Grisly loops of video showed the APC hunting like a prehistoric beast among tiny prey, soldiers tossing a body in the river, mobs with homemade guns and spears chasing those who tried to escape. This wasn’t the controlled violence that had punctuated the months since the Battle of the Camel. People were dead, and lynch mobs were hunting for Christians. Bullets were crackling: not blanks, not warning shots or tracers, not tear-gas canisters, but spinning, flesh-tearing, bone-crushing bullets, doing their work on the bodies of the demonstrators. This violence spilled onto many levels, much more deadly and widespread than the usual combat between uniformed security forces with tear gas and unarmed protesters with stones.

  Mobs of bloodthirsty thousands ambushed the demonstrators from the bridge and the side streets. They had swords and boards and nails and guns and fists, street-fighting weapons and murder weapons. Some were inflamed by what they’d heard and ready to believe the worst about infidel Christians. Many showed the thick, stupid, scarred faces of the veteran baltagaya brigades: the Interior Ministry’s thugs who came out to beat people on Election Day, at demonstrations, and, sometimes for good measure, out of the blue on a big shopping day downtown. Plainclothes thugs were seen saluting the uniformed offi
cers. A police officer cursed at a woman from the Maspero Youth Union. “Do you think you’ll take the country from us?” he sneered.

  The massacre at Maspero felt different from the violence in January and February. It felt out of control. It didn’t feel like the calibrated violence of a brutal state. It felt like the furious attack of a wounded system fighting for its life. One of the last remaining zones of safety had evaporated. The army was willing to kill people so casually, so publicly, so prolifically. Even more terrifying, it was willing to unleash the specter of sectarian hate, which would ripple throughout Egypt and dangerously destabilize the country. Even Mubarak’s cynical regime had played the sectarian card sparingly. The massacre unfolding in front of Maspero required the active complicity of soldiers, the SCAF, the state media, and whichever intelligence or police service was able to so quickly orchestrate so many well-armed flash mobs all over Cairo. This was evil, pure and simple, and it was the kind of ploy that was easier to set in motion than it was to control. Once ignited, religious hatred could damage Egyptian society irreparably.

  Bothaina Kamal, the presidential candidate, had been at the front of the march when the shooting started. She ran past five corpses as she sought shelter down a side street. She hid in an entryway with some others, including a priest. They turned off their cell phones, terrified of being found and beaten or killed. She was covered with blood, and more blood coated the stairs. Policemen and soldiers tried to break down the door, shouting, “God is great!” Bothaina had been expecting attacks from Salafis or riled-up Islamists, but not from the army and the police. “For God’s sake!” she called through the door. Finally, she and her companions talked their way past the police. Farther along was a siege line. To cross it, you had to utter the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”