Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  Inside the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, the divisions had hardened into dogma. Basem missed months of meetings and finally resigned. Zyad said he believed that the revolution had permanently unseated the old order, and that now it was time to turn to the ideological fights between socialists and neo-liberals, secularists and Islamists. I thought he was delusional. He began to talk about the Revolutionary Youth Coalition in the past tense.

  Against this pressure, Moaz still toiled for the revolution, increasingly alone. He was sure that the old regime was strong as ever. He was among the few who recognized that the protesters in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, had succeeded not because of their youth and vigor, or because the deep state was dying, but because of their unity: Islamist and secular together; right and left. Bumbling Moaz was right, where his more polished and urbane colleagues were mistaken. He had traveled a great distance from the years before the uprising, when he defended the Muslim Brotherhood’s doctrinaire leadership. From his Brotherhood education, he had learned that any effective political message had better make sense to regular folks. “If the Revolutionary Youth Coalition cannot trust Islamists, then there’s no hope for the rest of Egypt,” he said.

  One by one, Zyad confronted the other coalition leaders and told them it was time to vote to dissolve, and he insisted that the decision be unanimous. Moaz refused, and spoke in public about the internal fight. Zyad phoned him.

  “We are going to end the coalition, and you had better not say anything in public against this decision,” Zyad said. “Do you fucking understand?”

  Moaz hardly ever raised his voice, and he never cursed. “I understand you’re nervous,” he answered. “I respect you because I have broken bread with you in your home. But this decision is wrong, and I will say whatever I choose.”

  “What the fuck—” Zyad began, but Moaz cut him off. Now they were both shouting.

  “This is not a personal disagreement, it’s political!” Moaz said. “I will hang up now, and I don’t want to hear your voice again unless you can be polite.”

  Quietly, the Tuesday before the presidential runoff, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition voted to dissolve. Its union was already so moribund that most of the members didn’t bother to show up for the last meeting. Zyad phoned in his vote. Basem didn’t need to, since he’d already quit the coalition. Moaz had tried to dissuade his colleagues and couldn’t bear to attend the last vote. “It’s a mistake,” Moaz said, but he was one of the only ones who wanted to hold it together. Sally presided over the Revolutionary Youth Coalition’s last formal action: the composition of a letter to the public that enumerated the coalition’s hopes and failings. The members catalogued their mistakes and missteps, and pledged to lead by example one final time. Their experiment wasn’t working; their organization was no longer accomplishing its revolutionary aims. Rather than cling to power, they would disband and hope to reconstitute in a more felicitous shape.

  In this diagnosis, they were once more naïve. They believed new forums would emerge where Islamists, liberals, socialists, and anarchists would band together to talk ideology and tactics, to dream up a better Egypt. But, in fact, the centrifugal forces that had spun the young revolutionaries apart were pushing on all Egypt. With the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, a handful of young people had nurtured a shared space in the lee of violence and authoritarianism, but it hadn’t just sprung up organically. They had forced it into being, and then, through vanity or neglect or simply irreconcilable differences, had let it erode to nothing. By letting even its shell go, they reduced the chance that it could ever be rebuilt.

  The failure was signal and momentous, even if it felt anticlimactic. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition was the one entity in Egypt that respected cooperation without forsaking ideology. Its members didn’t pretend they had no principles or beliefs, or that they all agreed among themselves; this wasn’t the fake, imposed harmony of the National Democratic Party or the Brotherhood. They acknowledged their profound disagreements and still found a way to work together for the aims they shared: the end of tyranny, the advent of law, and a barrier of dignity for average people against the twin injustices of poverty and political oppression. This revolution belonged to them as a group, but they had gradually given it up. They no longer could communicate effectively enough to forge a common project. And if they couldn’t do it anymore, what chance was there for the old and stultified peacocks who’d never once shown the slightest interest in empathizing with their fellows and merging their political arcs?

  “No entity should speak for the revolution,” Zyad said to me. “The coalition didn’t have an identity.” I disagreed. The coalition’s identity was so simple that its own founders overlooked it. It was the one place where Egyptians were required to behave like citizens, to exercise their rights and take responsibility. It was the one place where people believed that they owned their government. It was the first and only place where people were required to have opinions, to foreswear passivity, and where they were allowed to disagree without seeking to destroy one another. It was the place where politics was born in Egypt, and the only place where it was nurtured with passion and integrity. Politics is the art of talk, of negotiation and compromise, and Egypt had had no politics whatsoever until these young activists began to work together across ideological lines. Some Arab exiles had enjoyed meaningful searches for consensus, but Mubarak had allowed just enough political space inside Egypt to thwart a motivated opposition movement abroad. The coalition had initiated something vital and human that had previously been absent. From the left, the center, and the right, from both secular and Islamist spaces, they had established common ground. They had achieved unimaginable goals in their early months agitating against the regime. These youth had been the lone adults who dared to subvert the dominant notion that moral people of principle never talk with their ideological enemies, much less work with them.

  Now they too had split along the old lines dividing Islamist and secular, left and center. They too boycotted and walked out of meetings rather than talking to the end. They had meant to set an example for Egypt, and so they had. Their example no longer gave anyone much cause to hope.

  A week after Morsi’s June 30 inauguration, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition made public its decision to dissolve. Its leaders had postponed their final press conference until the presidential succession was settled. With the political horizon safe and clear, they could now announce that the coalition was no more. Egyptians possessed avenues to seek their rights; the revolutionary period was over. Moaz refused to attend the final press conference at the el-Sawy Culture Wheel, a modernist complex of theaters and meeting spaces perched on the edge of the Nile beneath a bridge. He thought that Zyad and the rest were crazy to believe that Egypt was ripe for normal electoral politics.

  “People have not changed from the way of thinking that kept Mubarak in power for twenty-nine years,” Moaz told me, explaining his absence from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition’s final event. “Right now the people’s problems aren’t whether to be Islamist or secular. Their problems are how to find a job, get married, get a good education.”

  He made a final plea to save the coalition and expand it, inviting all the new youth groups that had emerged over the last year and a half. “We should not give up what we have,” he warned his friends. No one was interested. Even in its demise, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition caused a stir with its final public self-criticism, reading aloud from the lengthy “political audit” its leaders had drafted. The group wanted to set an example of accountability, even in its moment of terminal failure. “Even though it is not standard operating procedure in Egypt, we believe it is necessary for every group to submit a clear and transparent account of what it has done, good and bad,” Sally explained.

  They confessed that they had screwed up by not keeping open channels with the institutions of power: the military, the intelligence agencies, and the elected government. They acknowledged that it had been a mistake not to
expand their membership. They said that at times they had been too eager to speak on television even when they weren’t sure what or whom they were representing. The members took turns at the podium, seeming to almost relish their last moments in the spotlight as spokespeople for something much bigger than themselves and their fragmented movement. Afterward, the political audit was dutifully posted online, and, in a final funerary gesture, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition closed its Facebook page.

  The coalition’s honesty would have been rare and refreshing in politics anywhere, but was especially so in Egypt, where such a performance had never been seen. Yet the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition still avoided the questions that had undone them and that were poised to undo the entire promise of the original uprising a year and a half earlier. The revolution concerned many things, but at its core, it was about an attempt to seize power. The young people in Tahrir wanted to take power away from Mubarak’s system and give it to someone else. They had ideals, but in the end they needed to wield some sort of force in order to achieve them. The people of Tahrir, far more so than revolutionaries in other times and places, were uncomfortable with that necessity. They sanctified vague Platonic ideals such as revolution, “the people,” and youth while scorning dirty and earthly practices like politics, compromise, and “chairs,” the symbol of power.

  Some saw this as evidence of the coalition’s strong principles and some simply thought them excessively innocent, but by the time the members disbanded, it was clear to me that they were guilty of an obstinate intellectual failure. After so much time, blood, and work, these activists insisted on ignoring the central questions for which they were responsible, even though they were smart and well-read enough to address them. What were the rights and responsibilities of citizens and those who governed them? Who should have power in Egypt? What universal rights did human beings possess? Avoiding these questions was neither naïve nor principled; it was simply an evasion. They had no excuse.

  Very few of the activists had been truly committed to revolutionary goals. Few and far between were the firebrands who wanted to topple the state and usurp power. Many of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition were miscast; they were reformists, not revolutionaries. Even at the apex of Tahrir fervor, the youth activists never had the power or institutional support to force their will, and while they could be blamed for not having issued bolder demands, it was also fair to acknowledge that they’d never made very deep or broad inroads outside their narrow ranks. There was also little that unified the revolutionary movement beyond a rejection of Mubarak’s worst excesses.

  It was mind-bogglingly difficult to imagine a way forward from Egypt’s endemic poverty and misrule—so difficult that many of Egypt’s most talented revolutionaries refused to grapple with the most pressing questions. What compromise was acceptable? What could an Islamist and a secularist agree on? What did it really mean to stand in favor of the people, the nation, freedom? Basem and Moaz, at least, were trying to answer these questions, in thought and in deed. For their trouble, they were both derided as sellouts by some of their revolutionary peers, even as they parted ways with each other over the acceptable boundaries between religion and government.

  With the revolution and the regime at a temporary impasse, for the first time in his adult life, Basem took a rest. He sensed the respite wouldn’t last long. At its peak, the family business had employed three Kamel brothers and a half dozen others, but a free-falling economy had eliminated almost all ABC Architecture’s clients. Basem’s brothers found other jobs. Ramadan began in July, and Basem slept late. In the evenings, he ate with his wife and children. He took his children to the movies, the ice-skating rink, the fun park. At Family Land in the suburb of Maadi, he sipped mango juice with his wife, Rasha, while the kids rode bumper cars.

  “I can’t remember the last time we spent a day like this,” Basem said.

  “A long time,” Rasha said. “At first I thought life would go back to normal after the revolution. When you started building the party, I realized it never would.”

  They sat comfortably in silence. “Every day I worry you’ll get arrested,” Rasha confessed.

  Basem raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s a new world,” his wife said with equanimity and a hint of a smile. “We don’t know anything about what all this will bring.”

  Despite all the ominous signs, Moaz felt that grand possibilities still beckoned. At last, he believed, Egypt’s revolution was on track. There was a civilian president in Ittihadiya Palace, and for all the problems Moaz had with the Muslim Brotherhood, he was sure it would do a better job than Mubarak or the SCAF. New parliamentary elections were supposed to come in the fall, and Egyptians would have the chance to resolve their differences through flawed but fundamentally free politics. Flush with a sense of achievement, Moaz traveled to Syria for Ramadan to help the rebels fighting the dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Arab world was interconnected and suffered from a plague of dictators who displayed a similar contempt for the lives of their subjects. Moaz was sure that his experience as an Egyptian revolutionary could be of use to his Syrian brothers. In 2011 he had traveled on a medical convoy to Libya in the early stages of the uprising against al-Qaddhafi, and he felt a historical confluence. The Arab world was moving in concert into a new age of self-determination, with popular uprisings inevitably redrawing the blueprints of power. It seemed only natural to work in solidarity across borders with other civil society activists, providing help when possible and exchanging ideas about this bright new future.

  “The revolution isn’t only for making protests but also for advising other countries how to secure freedom and build better lives,” Moaz said. The Free Syrian Army had seized a sliver of territory in the north, and Moaz joined a mission organized by an international confederation of doctors, the Arab Medical Union, to help Syrian civilians, rather than militiamen, take control of the liberated areas. He joined activists in the town of Azaz, which the government bombarded daily. They were struggling to staff clinics, pick up garbage, and distribute food.

  “The people with guns shouldn’t be running bakeries, warehouses, cooking gas distribution,” Moaz counseled the Syrian activists.

  It was his first time in a combat zone, but it didn’t feel that different to him from the many battles with police. He sheltered in the basement with the few remaining doctors when the hospital in Azaz was shelled. Afterward, they zigzagged through deserted streets to pray the Eid al-Adha prayer in the town mosque, ignoring the occasional sniper bullet.

  “You won’t hear the bullet that kills you,” a Syrian advised Moaz. “So relax, don’t be afraid.”

  The activists decided to abandon the clinic at Azaz and smuggled Moaz over the border. It was time to go home; his visa was up. The war in Syria was more sprawling and lethal than anything Moaz had encountered during the Egyptian Revolution, and he realized that his type of civilian activism would make little difference. The best he could hope to accomplish for Syria, he thought, was to raise awareness and money to help refugees. Syria’s political problems seemed even more irresolvable than Egypt’s. “You can choose to start a war, but you cannot choose the end,” he reflected.

  He returned home to Egypt depressed and deflated, but more than ever committed to nonviolence. A psychologist friend suggested that change might shake Moaz out of his funk. He shaved his beard and resigned from the Egyptian Current Party, which had failed to sign up even three thousand members after a year of effort. Without members, money, or a clear idea, he saw no point in political parties.

  For all its machinations since January 25, 2011, the military had held to only two constants: it had grabbed any authority it could, and it had exercised that authority poorly. The Egyptian public adored the military, but it was a mediocre military at best: bad at the basics, such as training conscripts and organizing battalions, and worse at everything else. While the military happily expanded its powers, it also avoided responsibility for governance a
nd for matters like Egypt’s international loans. When charged with providing basic security during the revolutionary transition, the military, uneasy and unfamiliar with filling the role of domestic police, had arrested tens of thousands of innocent people, while street crime spiraled to never-before-seen levels. The military was authoritarian and guilty of greedy overreach; it was also incompetent.

  As President Morsi took over, the SCAF went about its business, confident it could simply ignore him. As Ramadan drew to a close in mid-August 2012, however, jihadists in the Sinai attacked a military base. They killed sixteen poorly trained conscripts, stole their armored vehicles, and stormed the Israeli border. The Israelis quickly repelled the attackers, but the ineptitude of Egypt’s military had been exposed publicly.

  At that moment, as the SCAF was apologizing for its embarrassing failure, Morsi made his move. He fired Defense Minister Tantawi, military chief Sami Enan, and all the other top generals. The SCAF was vulnerable, and Morsi saw the opportunity to remove Mubarak’s old henchmen and replace them with new officers whom he thought would be loyal to the elected president. It looked like a bold and sweeping transformation: the president righteously enforcing civilian primacy, firing the corrupt and senescent generals who had stifled Egypt as the backbone of Mubarak’s regime and later as his successors.

  In truth, though, the move was far less radical and significant than it appeared. The initiative to replace Tantawi and Enan came as much from the junior generals on the SCAF as it did from the new president. Morsi wanted Tantawi’s inner circle gone, but so did most of the younger SCAF generals, who had chafed as their superiors lingered on for generations after retirement age. There had been no renewal in the upper ranks for two decades. Morsi’s interests coincided with those of the SCAF, and he found a willing replacement for Tantawi: General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a religious man with a veiled wife and a solid record in military intelligence. El-Sisi was wily enough to prevent internal dissent in the armed forces and pious enough that Morsi considered him an ally. The SCAF generals had fumbled a lot of important decisions during their tenure as Egypt’s rulers, but they had maintained a fabulous discipline in their public appearances. There were rumors that influential officers disagreed about whether the military should run the country more directly or maintain a dignified distance as the power behind the throne, but this internal struggle never filtered out to the public. The generals always presented a united front to outsiders. They did so now as well. Tantawi and Enan accepted their forced retirement with public grace, and they had cause for satisfaction: they were granted immunity from crimes committed in office. El-Sisi and the other generals on the SCAF presented the changes as an amicable shuffle, chosen by the general staff and approved by the civilian president.