Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  Of those arrested or charged, nineteen were Americans, including Sam LaHood, the son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. He had been helping to train new political parties. The SCAF didn’t expect this move to jeopardize the next $1.55 million that Washington was due to send it, but an Egyptian military delegation to Washington in February got an earful. Pursuing the son of an American cabinet official triggered a level of irritation that the massacres had not. The Egyptian judges in charge of the case relented immediately, allowing the Americans to be released if each posted $300,000 bail. The supposedly independent judicial system had exposed the depths to which it had sunk.

  That spring of 2012, the presidential campaign swept over Egypt in a dazzling display. All the country’s political forces emerged into the open. The old regime’s organization and supporters had largely stayed out of sight during the fall parliamentary campaign, but they were done hiding. The presidency was too important, and none of the new liberal parties was strong enough to absorb the old elite. Until now politics had played out mostly between the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the revolutionary protesters. But there were others to be reckoned with, and the most important was the old regime, which fielded two candidates: Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s prime minister, and Omar Suleiman, the elderly spymaster who ran Mubarak’s intelligence services. Suleiman in particular cut a terrifying figure to many Egyptians: he was a quintessential man of the shadows, and he had been in charge of all the most important business of Mubarak’s regime, from squelching terrorism and domestic dissent to handling relations with Israel and Palestine. When it came time to file official candidacy papers, Suleiman’s henchmen delivered hundreds of thousands of signatures, far more than required, and leaked that the state intelligence services had gathered them.

  The Muslim Brotherhood had insisted it would not put forth presidential candidates, but broke that promise and announced two: Khairat el-Shater, the organization’s de facto strongman, and Mohamed Morsi, the loyal enforcer, as backup. Morsi was quickly labeled “the spare tire.” Another phenomenon was the Salafi Sheikh Hazem Salah and his fanatical followers, the Hazemoon. They had managed to glue posters of the sheikh everywhere, unnerving secular Egyptians and mainstream Islamists too.

  Suddenly Egypt’s political landscape appeared in a different light. The dominant candidates represented the old regime’s intelligence service, the extremist Salafis, and the hard-line wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a wide array of candidates in between with more nuanced and moderate views, but until the first round of voting in May, no one could gauge their popularity. There were no credible opinion polls. Unlike the parliamentary elections, which featured broad coalitions, the presidential race would serve as a precise measure of voter preference. There was a secular Arab nationalist who had worked for the old regime (Amr Mousa), and another who had not (Hamdeen Sabbahi). There was a lawyer with impeccable revolutionary credentials but no direct involvement in rabble-rousing protest (Khaled Ali). There were the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis, and then there was a lifelong Muslim Brother who had been thrown out because of his independence and his willingness to work with secular people (Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh).

  Unless a single candidate captured more than 50 percent of the vote in May, there would be a runoff a month later between the top two finishers. Egypt faced the clearest test yet of the population’s political tastes. The field of candidates was huge. The extremes frightened many people, who didn’t want to be governed by a Salafi or an intelligence man. The Muslim Brothers and former regime candidates had the most polished campaigns because of their organizations’ long histories, but on occasion, they veered into rhetoric as mad as Sheikh Hazem’s. The moderate majority was fragmented among conservative Arab nationalists, secular liberals, Christians, old regime sympathizers, secular revolutionaries, and religious revolutionaries. It was obvious to all the campaigns that if the moderates could agree on a single candidate, they were almost guaranteed to win. They would need someone who was untainted by the old regime and could make at least a nod to revolutionary sentiment, and who was committed to a secular, liberal state, as well as someone who could rally the support of Christians, big businesses, and people who wanted stability but didn’t seek a full restoration of Mubarak. It was also obvious to every candidate that he himself should be that unifying representative. No one could agree, and the field remained split.

  In the first round, Basem was drawn immediately to the campaign of Hamdeen Sabbahi, a handsome Nasserist politician who delivered rousing, revolutionary-sounding speeches in a sultry rasp. His actual views were quite reactionary. Sabbahi liked a robust military, and he wasn’t much concerned with due process and minority rights. His vision was of a resurgent Egypt that would dominate the Arab world. Sabbahi spouted xenophobic nonsense and conspiracy theories just like the old regime. His slogan was “One of us.” Basem happily campaigned for him. He liked that Sabbahi wouldn’t kowtow to the United States, and he found it reassuring that for all the blather about Nasser and the patriotic army, Sabbahi argued that the military should stay in the barracks, away from the presidential palace, Ittihadiya, in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. Other secular revolutionaries stayed away from Sabbahi, gravitating instead to the little-known but more thoroughly liberal lawyer Khaled Ali, who never managed to gain even tiny name recognition among voters. (He ultimately won just 1 percent of the vote.)

  Revolutionaries with religious backgrounds joined the campaign of Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, who for a few weeks seemed poised to bridge the divide between secular and Islamist Egyptians. Aboul Fotouh convinced an impressive group of notable secular academics and doctors to join his campaign, and at the same time he won the backing of Salafis. Young activists, including Moaz and Ayyash, gushed; they were convinced this campaign was inventing a new form of Islamic liberalism. However, Aboul Fotouh never committed overtly to basic liberal principles: he acted like an open-minded pluralist, but he never said whether he wanted Egypt to be a secular state, and he never said he would guarantee freedoms for minorities, political parties, and the nonreligious. He grew popular, but because of his silence on central questions, Aboul Fotouh never could gain the trust of Christians or resolutely secular Egyptians.

  As a reminder that the old regime’s arbitrary enforcement of the law still prevailed, the supposedly independent commission overseeing the presidential ballot disqualified the three most alarming candidates: the Brotherhood’s el-Shater; the old spy, Omar Suleiman; and the Salafi Sheikh Hazem. The outraged Hazemoon besieged the Ministry of Defense, camping in tents outside the gates and stockpiling weapons. They seemed crazed, a genuine threat to the state. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition begged them to disperse, but they refused. Some secular revolutionaries even joined the sit-in, a move that the coalition leaders knew would only discredit their cause. Moaz thought he could end the standoff: he planned a march called the “the Final Friday” at the end of the month of May, and assembled a big tent of youth groups, secular and religious. They would walk from downtown to the Ministry of Defense, gather up the Salafis, and take them away, providing a face-saving way for the Hazemoon to back down. The idea did not seem likely to work. Once Moaz’s march reached the ministry, most of its participants joined the Salafis in throwing rocks at the army.

  “Selmiya! Selmiya!” Moaz shouted in vain. “Peaceful! Peaceful!”

  But a different chant from the crowd drowned him out: “Death, not humiliation!”

  The army moved quickly, sending phalanxes of soldiers into the crowd. Some fled, others stood and fought. Men from the neighborhood armed with buckshot rifles, clubs, and Molotov cocktails came up from the side streets; they had grown sick a long time ago of revolutionary interlopers. As the fighting intensified, Moaz ran through the tear gas pleading.

  “This is not what we should be doing!” he shouted, his voice giving out from overuse. “It is not to our benefit to fight here!”

  “I’ve been waiting a year for this,” a lefti
st answered. “I want to send the SCAF messages carved in dead bodies.”

  Against such bloodthirst, politics offered little. Moaz knew that with this clash the revolution would lose yet another sizable chunk of public opinion. Presidential elections were just a few weeks away. The SCAF had promised to cede power by June 30. Couldn’t these impatient young people wait even a little?

  Basem was in the provinces meeting with Social Democrats when he heard about the fighting outside the Defense Ministry. “All we’re going to reap at the end of the battle is more martyrs and martial law,” he remarked in disgust. The revolutionaries had impulses but no grand plan. A few days later, Moaz, Sally, and a few hundred activists marched on parliament, demanding an investigation of the violence outside the ministry. They phoned Basem, who was inside. He refused to come out and join them.

  A week after those Final Friday clashes outside the Defense Ministry, most of Egypt watched the two perceived front-runners interrogate each other on live television in the nation’s first-ever debate: Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the doctor and former Muslim Brother, versus Amr Moussa, Mubarak’s former foreign minister and recent head of the Arab League, the diplomatic forum for the Arab states. In classic Egyptian style, Aboul Fotouh was a half hour late to the studio because of traffic, and the debate itself stretched nearly four hours, long after midnight. In a polity where pointed questions had been extinct in political life, the debate was a revelation. The former diplomat and the former Muslim Brotherhood strategist went after each other high and low. Aboul Fotouh embarrassed his opponent by asking how he had acquired his expensive home and large fortune after a lifetime as a public servant. Moussa cornered Aboul Fotouh over his historical ties to radical Islamist positions that he still had never repudiated. In the cafés, people followed attentively. Audiences seemed to love that the candidates were exposed, but they hated the candidates themselves. The polls that established the two men as front-runners were suspect in the first place, but after the debate, both of them lost support. Once people saw their prospective leaders chafe at critical questions, they seemed to reject them. These consequences were so distressing to the other candidates that they all cancelled the debates they had scheduled for the following week.

  After the vote, the first-round results surprised everybody except for the Brothers and the felool. Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s uninspiring backup candidate, finished first, and almost even with him was Ahmed Shafik, the bumbling man who had all but spat on Tahrir at its beginning and who, as prime minister, had declared among his achievements that he had killed and been killed. Morsi and Shafik each drew on well-organized constituencies, enough to put them atop a crowded field. People who yearned for stability—including Christians who saw a grim future for themselves under Islamist rule—had gravitated to Shafik’s hard secular law-and-order rhetoric.

  It was a dispiriting result. The most regressive candidates had come out ahead. No matter how one sliced the numbers, the revolution had screwed up. Aboul Fotouh and Sabbahi, the two overtly revolutionary candidates, had failed to merge their campaigns. Together they could have dominated the race. Apart, they finished third and fourth, a million votes behind Morsi and Shafik. People had voted in droves, and a decisive majority had voted for candidates who explicitly supported a secular state, and against the old order in the person of the felool candidates. And yet, divided among themselves, the reformist, revolutionary public hadn’t managed to back one single candidate for the presidency. Therefore, they were left with no one.

  The Muslim Brotherhood and the National Democratic Party would go to a runoff. It was a choice between two evils, both soundly rejected by the majority. The Muslim Brotherhood had been Mubarak’s insurance policy. He had erased all other opposition so that he could tell his critics: It’s either me or the Islamists. Now Egypt faced a choice of Mubarak’s devising: his handpicked successor or his handpicked opponent.

  Moaz was distraught. A vote for Shafik was impossible: the man embodied everything that January 25, 2011, had opposed. Reluctantly, Moaz would vote for Morsi in the June runoff, but he knew the Muslim Brotherhood cared nothing for the revolution, only for its own power. “In one year, I have lost everything,” he said. “I lost the Muslim Brotherhood. I lost the revolution. I lost our country.” All he had left was his family, with whom he spent less and less time.

  For other revolutionaries, especially the secular ones, a vote for Morsi was impossible as well. “We don’t want to trade the old fascists for new fascists who claim God is on their side,” Basem said. “Shafik will bring out the old weapons. We can deal with them.” The Islamists, he feared, had more potent tricks in store.

  “If the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, they will put Islamists everywhere,” Basem said. “They will take to the streets and call us infidels.” Even if the old regime retained power, he believed, it would be vulnerable because it had no legitimacy. The Islamists were different, because they could reimpose authoritarianism while claiming democratic legitimacy; they could tyrannize secular Egypt and say they were doing it in the name of the people.

  In parliament’s last session before the election, Basem made his first speech. He addressed the Muslim Brothers as hypocritical authoritarians.

  “You used to say you wanted consensus,” Basem said. “But in the back rooms and at the negotiating tables, you always talk about the majority. We will never again follow you and fight your battles.” Immediately afterward, he was slammed in the Muslim Brotherhood press.

  Shafik was campaigning on people’s fear: of instability, of greater poverty, of Islamism. He had all the style and confidence of the old regime, with the added fuel of the real concerns about the Brotherhood. The Islamists purged their own organizations of any internal dissent and pluralism; how, then, would they be able to tolerate pluralism and dissent in the country as a whole, especially if they found themselves suddenly in the control room with all the levers and buttons at their disposal? Shafik promised to at least keep Egypt secular, if not free.

  Two days before the presidential runoff, two momentous rulings came from the Supreme Constitutional Court, which, like the US Supreme Court, was the final arbiter on matters of law in Egypt. The first was a decision on whether Shafik’s membership in the old ruling party disqualified his candidacy. The second was whether to shut down parliament because of flaws in the way it was elected.

  Long ago, Egypt’s judges had earned a reputation for independence and legal dynamism. Mubarak had eroded that critical streak steadily, and by the end of his reign, the courts remained powerful but reactionary. Now the Supreme Constitutional Court was unapologetically connected to the military and the old regime. Its vice chair had made herself one of the most prominent public voices arguing that the military should take a stronger hand and should outlaw all Islamist political parties. Even before the new Muslim Brotherhood–dominated parliament was sworn in, she told a friend of mine, “Don’t worry, we’ve written a legal decision disbanding parliament. It’s in a drawer waiting until we need it.”

  Apparently the time had come. With the possibility of a Muslim Brother in the president’s office, it wouldn’t do to have a Muslim Brotherhood majority in the legislature. There was ample historical precedent for the court to send an entire parliament home. It had happened several times before, under Mubarak. Politicians had figured that the court, despite its tremendous power, would leave the status quo intact, allowing Shafik to run but also leaving parliament in place. Instead, late in the day, the court announced that Shafik was fine, but the parliament had to go. As if to emphasize that true power still remained in that ill-defined constellation of security forces, bureaucracy, and anonymous officials that formed the deep state, the SCAF announced that it would assume legislative powers in the parliament’s absence. It was in every sense of the term a judicial coup, and perhaps it was a precursor of worse to come. If Shafik won, the deep state would have an ally in Ittihadiya Palace, and the SCAF now had insurance in case its preferred choice did
n’t make it. A victorious Morsi would come to an office with castrated powers.

  For liberals, the real battle was over the constitution, and the court’s decision made it even harder to imagine a new charter that would exile the military from politics forever. Yet some were glad to be rid of the Islamist parliament, even if its demise came by an illiberal judicial mugging. “I’m happy,” Basem said as soon as he heard the news. “You cannot imagine how much we suffered under the aggressive Islamist majority.” I thought he should have been worried about how his desired result came about.

  That night, Moaz joined a delegation of revolutionary youth who met with Morsi.

  “Drop out of the race,” they told him. “These elections are a sham. Even if you win, the military will not let you govern. They control everything.”

  Morsi refused. As the Brotherhood entered this round against the regime, its members felt so sure of victory that they didn’t even bother to court the young revolutionaries. They had made it to the brink of power despite never once joining wholeheartedly with the revolution. The Brothers hadn’t consulted or communicated with the revolutionaries at any of the vital junctures, and they didn’t plan to now.

  Moaz felt stymied, facing two enemies at once: the Muslim Brothers and the old police state. “How can we make strategy,” he asked, “when our only weapons are strikes and protests, but they have guns?”