Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  The country would vote in three waves. This was just round one. The first results surprised almost everyone. The Muslim Brotherhood was winning about 40 percent, a little more than expected. The Salafis were winning 25 percent, a lot more than expected. The Wafd, the old, corrupted, and officially sanctioned opposition, was polling about 10 percent. The remaining quarter of the votes were split among the other secular movements. The felool parties that wanted to resuscitate the old regime won barely 5 percent. The results wouldn’t be official until just before the seating of parliament at the end of January, but Basem and Zyad appeared to have won comfortably.

  In the second round of voting on December 15, the Islamists cruised forward. This was also Moaz’s round, but his campaign had never recovered after November. He paraded through his neighborhood with about fifty volunteers, chanting, “Revolution in the square! Revolution in parliament!” but didn’t shake people’s hands. It wasn’t even clear that he was a candidate. When polls opened, Moaz couldn’t find his ID card. He was too disorganized even to vote for himself.

  The army had erected a stone wall across Mohamed Mahmoud Street to shut down the fight there. Immediately after the second round of voting, soldiers violently cleared a small group of revolutionaries from a sit-in beside the parliament building. Impervious to the rolling news cameras, security men threw furniture from the parliament roof onto the unarmed revolutionaries five floors below. One soldier unzipped his fly and urinated languorously on them, his piss stream tracing a line across the slogan affixed to the side of the building: “Democracy proves that authority rests with the people.” Indifferent that Zyad was a member of parliament–elect, soldiers punched and clubbed him. “To hell with your parliament!” they said.

  Their disregard was a hint of the future relations between the military and Egypt’s elected politicians. A young woman was thrown to the ground, and soldiers tore off her abaya, revealing a neon-blue bra. In what became an iconic image, a soldier leapt energetically in the air and landed a foot in her rib cage. An older woman who tried to intervene was clubbed over the head until she collapsed. The entire assault was videotaped and viewed widely.

  The generals were sending a blunt message that, elections notwithstanding, the military was the final arbiter. Every time the military murdered or humiliated civilian demonstrators, the state media and the ruling generals lambasted the victims, and each time they were met with more public approval. They were weakening the revolutionaries and discrediting them in the eyes of much of the public.

  Whatever its motives, the SCAF had created a Pavlovian cycle. The generals changed course only in response to huge crowds or violent clashes at Tahrir. They taught the revolutionaries that protest was the only tool that worked, and therefore the revolutionaries returned to Tahrir in response to every crisis. At the heart of the revolutionary movement was a tiny number of extraordinarily motivated individuals, a few thousand at most, who organized the rest. Each time the state opened the spigot of force, it sent some tens to the cemetery, some hundreds to the hospital, and some hundreds more to detention. Each casualty required inordinate attention from the activists: the prosecutions must be resisted, the torture documented, the wounded healed, the dead mourned. Four days of clashes might exhaust the following month’s energy. All that time spent cleaning up the aftermath was time not spent appealing to everyday Egyptians. Whether that was the SCAF’s plan or merely a collateral benefit, it was in any case to the SCAF’s advantage.

  There was some talk about whether the revolution had been lost. Basem believed it would take a generation to change national attitudes, and that the best way was through sustained, grinding work in parliament, state institutions, and political parties. Success would take years. Moaz dreamed of a more radical transformation for the country but had no idea how to bring it about. Like so many revolutionaries, he suffered from a kind of political attention deficit disorder, always juggling too many ideas to concentrate fully on one.

  “We’ve got to leave the square and make many Tahrir Squares all around Egypt,” Sally Moore told anyone who would listen. “We’ve been talking about this idea for a long time, getting to the neighborhoods and breaking the isolation of Tahrir Square. We need to do it.” She’d had a breakthrough after the assault on the woman in the abaya. Now that she was choosing to work away from the party and outside the square, she felt rejuvenated.

  Sally wasn’t alone in the sentiment. Revolutionaries had ghettoized themselves geographically and culturally, encouraging one another in isolation from the mainstream. Now they had an idea: Why not campaign against the SCAF’s lies block by block, village by village? They borrowed the name for their new citizen’s movement from a newspaper headline about the blue bra beating: Askar Kazeboon! (“the Military Lies!”). Activists and filmmakers assembled many short videos that juxtaposed lying SCAF members with footage of the military crimes they were denying. It was powerful and simple, with an important, easy-to-understand message: at last, a distillation of a revolutionary idea that could reach a wide audience.

  Sally and her friends held Kazeboon! screenings all over Cairo, even projecting films onto the wall of Maspero above the heads of the soldiers guarding it. The idea was designed to go viral. Activists anywhere in Egypt could download the clips or make their own and get out into the neighborhoods to declare: The military lies! Emotionally, the campaign marked an almost Oedipal breakthrough. For a year, revolutionaries had chanted, “The army and the people are one hand!” even when the army was standing by indifferently while police officers murdered civilian demonstrators. The revolutionaries had avoided blaming the military directly for its abuses because of the hallowed place the military held in Egyptian life, even long after it was clear that the military was all too willing to kill or suppress the people it pretended to protect. Finally, the young revolutionaries were abandoning their false pose of national unity and calling out the army and its leaders on the SCAF for their tyranny.

  The new parliament would be seated on January 23, 2012. The week that followed was scheduled as a national holiday to commemorate the previous year’s uprising. No matter how incomplete the revolution seemed, the election was a tangible accomplishment. Egyptians had voted, and despite widespread instances of small-scale fraud, all the parties involved had endorsed the results. Egypt would have a parliament with a diversity of voices that roughly approximated the people’s actual choices. The old system remained intact, but it had not been able to shut down entirely the mechanisms of protest and dissent. Egyptians still were able to exercise the rights of free speech and assembly that they had won a year before. Though they might be killed for demonstrating, now their deaths would be reported in Egyptian media, in some cases even accurately. All this fell short of a revolution, but it was more movement toward freedom and dignity than Egypt had ever seen.

  Two days before parliament was to take the oath of office, the government finally published the election results. The most heartening number was the tally of ballots: twenty-seven million, the most votes ever cast in an Egyptian election. The high turnout was a sign of faith in the democratic process. Most depressing was the number of revolutionary youth who made it into parliament: three. Zyad, Basem, and Mostafa el-Naggar, a former Muslim Brotherhood and ElBaradei activist who’d founded his own Justice Party and won an independent seat in Cairo. (There were dozens of parties with indistinguishable names blending the words “justice,” “freedom,” “revolution,” and “democracy.”) After a year and a thousand or more deaths, after a tyrant had been tried and an entire system of governance cast into doubt, the revolutionaries had managed to capture only three seats in a parliament of 508. Just half of 1 percent. Moaz wasn’t elected, and neither were any of the other young activists; the only victories for the Revolution Continues came from a batch of seasoned older socialist politicians who ran as coalition partners.

  Even before the official results were posted, Moaz figured that his compatriots had been shut out. He already had moved
on. He was organizing salasel, or human chains, in which supporters of the revolution silently lined streets, holding signs with slogans. Anyone who wanted to engage them in conversation could, but there was no chanting or disrupting traffic. This was an attempt to reach the Egypt left behind by the revolution.

  One Sunday night along Abou el-Ezz Street, a commercial boulevard in Mohandiseen, about fifty people showed up for one of Moaz’s salasel gatherings, most of them women. Everyone dressed in his or her best. They held up signs that said things like “I am not a thug” and “Our battle is with corruption, poverty, ignorance, and injustice.” The links in the human chain stood about arm’s length apart alongside the slow-moving traffic.

  “Who’s in charge?” asked a woman clutching a bag of posters. Moaz was nowhere to be found; he was running late for his own event. He made it after a half hour.

  “Dude, you said five minutes!” said his childhood friend and erstwhile campaign manager.

  He blamed the traffic. “It’s Egypt,” Moaz said haplessly. “What can I do?”

  Moaz also was running security for a January 25 anniversary march. He met some of his team in Tahrir at the Belady Café, an upscale establishment replete with faux vintage photos of January 25 that marketed itself as the new revolutionary hangout. On state TV, we could hear an announcer heaping scorn on the upcoming anniversary marches. “These rabble-rousers want to burn down the country,” he said. Moaz had tried to persuade the revolutionary groups and the Brotherhood to have a single, unified stage in Tahrir. He had failed. He was recruiting as many strong, athletic people as he could to provide security on January 25. He was afraid of thugs. “The revolution started with a few tiny protests, and in the end, there will be nothing left of it but a few tiny protests,” he said.

  Across town at the Golden Tulip Flamenco Hotel in Zamalek, the twenty-two elected members of the Social Democratic Party were plotting their legislative agenda. They spent the entire day in a conference room upholstered in burgundy velour. Late on Saturday evening, they unveiled it to the world. Only a half dozen reporters were interested enough to show. Basem and his colleagues waited an hour, but there were no more comers. Their performance was a harbinger of the embarrassment to come inside parliament. Each elected member of parliament gave a short, vacuous speech with no specifics. None of them listened when the others spoke. The gossiping delegates were so loud that the reporters had to move closer to the front to hear the vapid presentations. “We want to help the poor,” they all said.

  A few reporters asked pointed questions. Each time the candidate deferred: “Basem will take that question. He is our revolutionary.” When Basem’s turn came, he walked through the audience, handing out papers with every official’s personal cell phone number and email. The others didn’t look so happy about it. That day, Basem changed his profession on Facebook from “architect” to “politician.”

  During the campaign, Basem had shaken fifty thousand hands. He rarely saw his children anymore, and his wife was usually asleep by the time he got home and fell into bed. He had spent the last two months canvassing his working-class district, and he felt acutely the difference between the clear, revolutionary agenda of his old Tahrir comrades and the spectrum of overlapping, sometimes contradictory interests of his constituents. The most pressing problems remained simple to describe and nearly impossible to solve: unemployment, rising food and fuel prices, inadequate housing. Questions of politics and rights felt secondary to the Egyptian majority struggling every day with individual poverty and a broken national economy. When Basem asked about politics in Shoubra, some people simply wanted a new president elected, with no more protests in the meantime. Others wanted the military to stand down immediately. Many Christians were more concerned about the Islamist surge than about the junta’s powers. Few evinced sympathy for the revolutionary youth. The previous week a Kazeboon! team had set up a screening on a Shoubra street, and irritated neighbors cut off its electricity; they didn’t want to hear any complaints about the army. Basem invited the Kazeboon! team to plug into his district office on the main avenue and project its videos against the wall.

  A year in, Basem said, the revolutionaries had achieved symbolic victories by putting Mubarak on trial and holding elections. People had stopped being afraid, but the system that controlled them remained obstinately in place. Parliament and his own election notwithstanding, Basem said, street demonstrations remained the only tool by which people could affect the government, but even the effectiveness of protest was in question now. On January 25, 2012, Egypt would celebrate the one-year anniversary of its uprising, but it wasn’t just the Revolutionary Youth Coalition planning a commemoration in Tahrir. So were the Muslim Brotherhood and the SCAF. With everyone claiming the revolution, it was hard to agree on what, if anything, it meant.

  “It’s not clear to me what people want,” I said.

  “It’s not clear to me either,” Basem said. “That is the problem.”

  At ten o’clock, early in the morning for these late-rising revolutionaries, Egypt’s first meaningful parliament since World War II was sworn in. It was a Monday, just two days before the anniversary of January 25. The inaugural session was a balm to some and a source of rage to others. For the Islamists, who had won a commanding majority, it was a victory and vindication. The new parliament wouldn’t end their struggle, but it marked a sea change in their political status. For the hard-left revolutionaries such as Sally, the new parliament meant nothing; they had boycotted the vote. Today they would protest an assembly they considered powerless, packed with fools, chauvinists, and religious obscurantists. In the middle fell those like Basem, who believed that politics and revolution were not mutually exclusive. They were conflicted, for they knew that a hall full of Salafis and Muslim Brothers would be unlikely to organize sustained resistance against the military junta or to showcase clever consensual lawmaking. Nonetheless, they believed in the democratic process. To them, the seating of parliament marked a decisive, if tainted, step toward rule of law.

  Zyad made a symbolic walk through Tahrir Square to the swearing-in. Over his untucked shirt, he wore a sash that read, “No to military trials.” All the Social Democrats would wear them, an affirmation of their revolutionary pedigree. “I’m from here,” he said, pointing at the square. Then he pointed at the gates of parliament. “Not from there. The street for me is the most important thing.” A street vendor shouted at him, “Don’t forget the poor!” We walked through a maze of barbed wire and concrete barriers, a new martial geography designed to make downtown protests impossible. He walked along the same route he had taken nine months earlier to vote in the constitutional referendum, when the possibilities for Egypt and the revolution had seemed so much happier. He morosely passed a crowd of Muslim Brothers who were singing and waving carnations; today marked an outright victory for them. “The people want God’s law!” the Islamists chanted.

  It took all day for the speaker to swear in the 508 members. All over the country, Egyptians watched on television. When it was Basem’s turn, he spoke the oath: “I swear to uphold the law and the constitution.” Before the speaker could cut him off, he added his own extra twist: “And I swear to continue the revolution.”

  Immediately, the Muslim Brotherhood stepped from the ranks of underground opposition into a state of intoxicated power. No sooner had the members of parliament taken their oaths than the Brothers sidelined everyone who opposed them. There wouldn’t be any legislating by consensus or even minority consultation. The Brothers and the Salafis installed supermajorities on every committee. The chamber they envisioned would have no meaningful minority power.

  It rained overnight before the revolution’s anniversary on January 25, leaving puddles everywhere. Some of the streets leading to Tahrir were flooded ankle-deep with water from sidewalk to sidewalk: makeshift reflecting pools. Cold humidity sapped the city.

  This was the Brotherhood’s celebration. Whereas the original January 25 marches emerged more or le
ss spontaneously, the first anniversary was an exercise in organized power. After dawn prayers, tens of thousands of well-instructed Muslim Brothers took to Tahrir. They were polite and impeccably dressed, and all elaborated on the same talking points.

  For the Muslim Brotherhood, all was not won, but Egypt was heading in its direction. For the revolutionary youth, all was not lost, but little had been achieved. A secretive and repressive junta had succeeded Mubarak, and now two mammoths sat astride Egypt: the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Moaz and his peers felt an urgent need to rejuvenate a stalled revolution. Should the January 25 anniversary be a celebration or a protest? On this semantic hook hung the future of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the revolutionaries.

  All the original revolutionaries were marching on Tahrir to re-create the feeling of the year before. Zyad and Moaz marched from the same mosque where they had gathered on January 28, 2011. Ayyash marched from Café Riche in Talaat Harb Square, five minutes away. Basem and Sally joined a march that began outside Basem’s parliamentary office in Shoubra. In a gesture of tribute and unity, the Coptic Maspero Youth Union had built a thirty-foot-tall obelisk out of lacquered canvas stretched on a wooden frame, on which its members had carefully painted the name of every martyr of every persuasion since January 25, 2011. As he walked, Basem chatted with constituents about the Brotherhood’s alarming behavior in parliament. Moaz and the other ex–Muslim Brotherhood Youth patrolled the march perimeter, making sure no one harassed the women. This was a march for all the revolutionary youth, no matter their affiliation or sect, the last place where dissident Brothers and secular liberals still worked in tandem.

  The different branches of the march united and crawled up Talaat Harb Street, but when the revolutionaries reached Tahrir, the square was already full to capacity with Muslim Brothers and Salafis. Rainwater blocked the way forward where the street met the square. The memorial obelisk was stalled. The march stopped. The crowd was so densely packed, it was hard to move in any direction.