Once Upon a Revolution

by Thanassis Cambanis

  A vast groundswell had turned against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Remnants of the old regime were casting their lot with Tammarod, but genuine public outrage had peaked against the sanctimonious and incompetent Brotherhood. People were sick of the unreliable gas and power lines, and the political grandstanding, while Christians feared that with each passing month they would be more likely to hear of a church burning or a lynch mob killing a Christian family in a distant village. The Coptic pope and even the most senior Sunni Muslim cleric in the country, the sheikh of Al-Azhar Mosque, endorsed the right of the faithful to join the anti-Morsi protests. The military began to issue public warnings. Defense Minister el-Sisi claimed he didn’t want to take sides, but if forced would always choose “the people.” There was much confusion in the political class about whether the military was signaling support for Tammarod or warning against destabilizing new protests. “The men of the armed forces don’t gamble with the present or the future of the nation,” el-Sisi said, clarifying nothing.

  In private meetings, the defense minister warned politicians from the government and the opposition that the military wouldn’t tolerate unrest. Both sides read what they wanted into el-Sisi’s messages. Members of Morsi’s inner cabinet were convinced that the military had no intention of taking charge. The opposition understood that if the crisis escalated, the military would step in. Because each side was convinced it had the military’s support, there was no incentive to negotiate a political compromise. Basem worked feverishly on a June 30 Committee that brought together most of the opposition youth movements and political parties. Their sole focus was to maximize the protest turnout. They planned marches in every Cairo neighborhood, every provincial city, every market town.

  “It could end up being nothing,” Basem said. “But if it’s big, June 30 will be the end of Morsi.” Basem predicted that the Brothers would fight in the streets to defend Morsi, and that if people died, even more Egyptians would turn against the Brotherhood. None of the Tammarod supporters imagined an outcome that left Morsi in office. They weren’t out for conciliation or a shift in government.

  Moaz thought that early presidential elections would undermine the entire revolutionary transition since Mubarak’s removal from office. He knew several of the Tammarod founders. One, Mahmoud Badr, was an old friend who had worked with the Kifaya movement in 2005, and another was active in Moaz’s most recent political home, the Ghad Party. He met them at cafés and tried to persuade them to pour their energy into a revolutionary campaign for parliament and then impeachment by constitutional means. Moaz worried that throwing out the first elected president so quickly would doom whoever came after. Badr wasn’t convinced, but he agreed to debate Moaz on television.

  “Wait until parliamentary elections. If we succeed, we can kick out the president,” Moaz said in the broadcast. “We have a democratic option to solve the problem.”

  “Mohamed Morsi is a criminal,” Badr replied. “He is killing the people.”

  Inside his party, Moaz had better luck. Some Ghad members wanted to join the Tammarod protests and the June 30 Committee. Moaz said that as a liberal party, Ghad should leave its members free to follow their consciences but should institutionally oppose a movement that was setting the stage for the military to return to power.

  “Should we accept that any time a president makes mistakes and the military disapproves, there can be a military coup?” Moaz said at the internal party debate. “These things will make our country unstable, with coups for generations.” He prevailed. Ghad members voted not to endorse the Tammarod rebellion.

  Morsi dismissed everything about Tammarod, despite his mounting and measurable failures in governance. “I am the legitimate, constitutional president,” Morsi insisted. He ignored the demand that he govern less like a dictator and more like a civilian elected by a narrow margin. Although he didn’t seem to know it, Morsi’s mandate was to steer an enormous, poor country out of authoritarian rule and toward democracy, and not to replace Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood. Until June 30, Morsi had plenty of options. On the drastic side, he could have scheduled a referendum on his presidency, buying time. He could have called for early presidential elections rather than serving his full four-year term, in the process ridding the Brotherhood of responsibility for a declining Egypt. Less radically, he could have pushed for immediate parliamentary elections, so there would be another branch of government to balance his powers. Or he could have dismissed his cabinet and appointed a new team of non-Brotherhood technocrats, dispelling the charge that he had mismanaged the state and appointed only cronies.

  Instead, with the support of the Brotherhood, Morsi took the most extreme tack possible. He acknowledged none of the criticisms of his presidency, and he dropped all pretense of moderation. He appointed as governor of Luxor a member of Gamaa Islamiya, the group that in 1997 had derailed Egyptian tourism with its terrorist attack on a temple in the province. At a rally for Syrian jihadis, he praised Islamist extremists willing to seek martyrdom. He smiled as clerics on the stage condemned the Egyptian opposition as godless infidels. Some of the clerics urged Egyptians to join the jihad in Syria, which was against Egyptian law and crossed one of the military’s historic red lines. It was a chilling performance: the president of Egypt sharing a platform with extremist clerics, blessing a religious war against anyone who opposed President Mohamed Morsi.

  Questions about Morsi’s competence grew, particularly in military circles. Mysteriously, a private meeting was aired on television. Morsi presided as advisers argued about a dam under way on the Upper Nile, in Ethiopia. The Egyptian government considered the dam a threat to the national water supply, and politicians had argued over the most effective way to persuade or force Ethiopia to abandon it. Senior politicians made incendiary proposals to sabotage the dam or arm Ethiopian rebels. To members of Egypt’s security establishment, the meeting made Morsi look like a dangerous amateur who might carelessly plunge Egypt into a regional war.

  The most charitable explanation for the Muslim Brotherhood’s obstinacy was that long decades underground had ill prepared it for public life. After a history of state suppression and anti-Brotherhood propaganda, even a well-intentioned Brother might find it confusing to distinguish real criticism from propaganda. So out of touch was Morsi that he told his counselors he was confident the armed forces would stay out of the fray; he believed in el-Sisi’s loyalty. The Brothers also exhibited unmistakable signs of messianic fervor and religious primacy. Morsi declared repeatedly that God had blessed his group, so it couldn’t ever be all that wrong. He was also shockingly comfortable with religious violence. The Brotherhood itself had foresworn violence long ago, in the 1950s, and had condemned its alumni who turned to takfiri murder of those deemed unbelievers. But now President Morsi had very notably failed to condemn the spate of anti-Christian attacks and the mid-June lynching of four Shia Muslims in a Cairo suburb. The more the Muslim Brotherhood considered itself under political assault, the more it resorted to menacing sectarian rhetoric. Morsi didn’t contradict his supporters, who went on television warning that a challenge to Morsi’s “legitimacy” could unleash the hellfires of Islamist jihadi extremists. For now, the jihadis were holding their fire only because the Brotherhood’s electoral success had given them the notion that maybe, just maybe, Islamists could gain dominion through politics rather than holy war.

  The two sides appeared determined to hold a collision course rather than negotiate, dooming Egypt to a destructive showdown. The Tammarod people wanted to erase Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from Egyptian politics, going further than Mubarak ever had. Morsi and the Brotherhood, meanwhile, branded their opponents as traitors. In his last opportunity for conciliation a few days before June 30, the president dismissed those protesting his reign: “We will deal with them decisively, and there will never be a place for them among us.”

  It would be either them or him.

  On June 30 anti-Morsi demonstrators clogged every major squ
are in Egypt. The military made absurd claims that twenty million or even thirty million had joined the protests, a number that would have been physically impossible. But the Tammarod protest was the largest ever in Egypt, larger even than the Tahrir Square demonstrations that had toppled Mubarak. Almost every demographic was represented, including some Salafis and religious folk who had voted for Morsi before turning against him. There were tried-and-true revolutionary youth who had braved the regime’s bullets, and there were veteran reactionaries who had never displayed a trace of sympathy for the uprising. The crowds were jubilant and diverse, and included vast numbers of government employees and first-time demonstrators from the lower, middle, and upper classes. Revolutionary protest mania had finally reached even the pro-stability crowd and the felool. Women in bouffant hairdos and pricey jewelry joined their husbands and children to demand the fall of Morsi. Some of them had complained about past protests disrupting traffic and business, but this time they were willing to make an exception. Unlike the ragtag, improvised protests of the past, Tammarod had high production values, thanks to its well-heeled backers. Everywhere were glossy signs that read “Irhal!” in Arabic and “Go Out!” in English. Military helicopters flew overhead, dumping flags on the people. Green laser pointers flickered everywhere. Men kissed policemen and danced in circles around them, welcoming them back into the fold.

  Again and again when I asked people what they hoped for, I heard the same refrains: “We have to ask the army to intervene.” “The Muslim Brotherhood is brainwashed; it is not part of Egypt.” “Morsi is an idiot. Morsi is a criminal.” Several told me they hoped the Brotherhood would be outlawed once again. The demands were almost careless. “I don’t care who will lead the country. We just want Morsi to leave,” said a lady in a fine tailored dress, sipping tea on a terrace near the presidential palace on a break from chanting. Many of the first-time protesters who joined Tammarod sounded remarkably similar to the felool supporters of the Horreya Party whose revival I had attended nearly two years earlier. A police officer, his white uniform freshly starched, announced that as soon as the Brotherhood was banished from the palace, the police would finally start doing their jobs again. “We can reestablish security overnight,” he said with a grin.

  Basem led a march of thousands from his old parliamentary office in Shoubra to the Ittihadiya Palace. To Basem, however, this day of rage felt no different from the first dogged parade from the pastry shop on January 25, 2011. Both were products of careful preparation and spontaneous popular anger. “God willing, we will liberate Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood’s occupation!” he shouted, as if Morsi and his cohorts were foreign invaders. He didn’t mind that elements of the old regime, along with the army and the police, were overtly backing the June 30 protests. To Basem, that only highlighted the justice of this latest popular revolt: it had animated the powerful and the armed and the privileged as well as the disenfranchised and dispossessed. Moaz approached the edges of the protest to get a sense of its size and composition. He saw thousands of regular people, but he also saw among them the police and bureaucrats of the old regime. A knot tightened in his stomach.

  Egypt under Morsi had reached an impasse. Some of the millions who filled the streets on June 30, 2013, believed they were continuing a popular revolution that had begun two and a half years earlier. Most of them didn’t see any legal or constitutional way to thwart Morsi’s budding repression and religious dictatorship. And those who could imagine other ways to challenge the despot didn’t think it was worth waiting. Basem, for instance, had come to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was incapable of respecting freedom, the law, and anyone who opposed its project to transform Egypt into a backward caliphate. He thought any delay in stopping the Brothers could be fatal for secular Egyptian democracy. Tammarod dangerously twinned two inaccurate dictums from Egypt’s revolutionary period: that vast crowds outweighed the authority of a ruler, and that the people’s will would restrain the military from resuming the history of abuse and incompetence that had continuously characterized its role in Egyptian life since 1952.

  The next day, July 1, the defense minister issued an ultimatum to President Morsi: Address the demands of the protesters, or else the military would issue a road map for a “transition to democracy.” The ultimatum didn’t come from the young Tammarod leaders or from the civilian politicians on the June 30 Committee. It came from el-Sisi, who theoretically served at the pleasure of the elected president to whom he was giving forty-eight hours notice. Until now the general had been almost a complete unknown, but now he appeared on television in oversized aviator sunglasses, looking every bit the military strongman. Basem was euphoric. He believed that el-Sisi and the other generals were bowing to the will of the crowds on the street. It never occurred to him that the military might have promoted the Tammarod protests behind the scenes in order to step into the breach and assume direct power once more.

  The Brothers had initiated their own counterprotest at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square in Nasr City, a quiet neighborhood of middle-class government employees that wasn’t a natural Brotherhood stronghold. The men and women in Rabaa were incredulous. They supported a leader who, for all his shortcomings, was the country’s legally elected civilian president, a man who had been in power for only a year, and who had contended the entire time with obstruction or outright rebellion from the most important branches of the government that he supposedly directed. Morsi’s supporters reflected the president’s cloistered worldview. They saw none of the Brotherhood’s guilt, only the hypocrisy of its critics. They didn’t recognize or acknowledge that the Brotherhood had trampled on pluralism, ignored the rights of secular Egyptians, and also displayed contempt for justice, accountability, and rule of law. Now, as the confrontation climaxed, they also hinted at violence.

  “There will be an Islamic revolution,” a man from the Gamaa Islamiya told me. He was a forty-nine-year-old construction worker named Taha Sayed Ali, wearing a hard hat and carrying a wooden pole. “I am not here for Morsi, I am here for legitimacy,” he said. “If they threaten our legitimacy, everybody will pay.”

  Everyone was waiting for Morsi’s response. As soon as General el-Sisi had imposed a deadline, Moaz understood that a military coup was under way. He saw only one way out: for Morsi to fire the insubordinate defense minister but at the same time admit his own mistakes and resign, effective once a new parliament was seated. But he knew firsthand the arrogance of the Brothers. He spent the day phoning every Brotherhood official he knew.

  “What’s your plan?” he asked. “Your time in power is finished. Find a way to avert a coup.”

  “God is with us,” one assured him. “Things will be fine.”

  After midnight, Morsi finally came on television. He rasped and ranted and shouted about his legitimacy. He didn’t relent an inch. It was the speech of a man who planned to go down fighting. It was a speech that comforted the men and women in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square who expected martyrdom. Moaz watched at a Brotherhood hospital with one of Morsi’s advisers.

  “It’s all over,” the adviser said. “There might have been a way out, but not after this speech.”

  “You know how a chicken keeps running around after you cut off its head?” Moaz remarked. “Morsi is like that.”

  After that, the coup proceeded clinically. The deadline passed, and Morsi had not stepped aside, so the military took charge. Soldiers arrested the president and took him to the presidential guard barracks. One by one, senior Brotherhood leaders were also taken into custody. Brotherhood television stations went off the air. Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 3, el-Sisi appeared on television, in uniform, sedately presenting his road map, flanked by leaders who should have had every reason to stand against the military and for the revolution: the Coptic pope, the sheikh of Al-Azhar, and Mohamed ElBaradei. The top judge from the Supreme Constitutional Court would serve as a figurehead interim president. A new constitution would be written, and then a parliament and president elected. It
was the original order of operations that ElBaradei had sought after January 25, along with Basem, Moaz, and many other activists. This time it came with a military guarantee that religious forces would be kept in check.

  The Tammarod crowd went wild. Fireworks, screaming, dancing, mob euphoria. Hundreds of green laser pointers followed the choppers overhead, draping them in an eerie green glow. At the moment of the coup, only a few Morsi critics still had the presence of mind to realize that a crime had been committed against democracy in the name of revolution, and the vast majority of them were ex-Islamists. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the ex-Brother and presidential candidate, had supported Tammarod but instantly decried military rule, in any form. So did the young ex-Brothers in al-Tayyar al-Masry. And so did Moaz. Perhaps their history made them sympathetic to the Islamist movement they had left, or perhaps their religious convictions reminded them to concentrate on the injustice in play. But their voices were lonely. Around them Egypt celebrated, while the deep state swiftly encircled the Brotherhood and began to dismantle it.