Once Upon a Revolution (10 page)

The denizens of the square debated endlessly whether the military would attack. Basem spent every day there, leaving only to change clothes or sleep for a few hours in nearby apartments lent by supporters of the uprising. Moaz was coordinating a pharmacy stocked with first aid supplies, and worked as a medic at one of several field clinics established around the square. He never slept more than three hours straight, and at times was semidelirious. One night he asked me to meet him at the field hospital located in an arcade just off the square; fruitlessly, I searched for him among the bustle of doctors, citizen-journalists, and protesters waiting hours at a time to use the bathroom. Finally, I found Moaz beside a clump of blankets and bandages, curled up in a ball, asleep with his glasses on.

The Muslim Brotherhood was now providing crucial personnel and know-how. The Brothers could smuggle medicine and food into the square. The Brotherhood could summon round-the-clock shifts of security guards and doctors. It assigned members to stay in the square overnight, ready to fight during the hours when the protester population was at its smallest and most vulnerable. Many of the original protesters considered the Brotherhood opportunistic, joining Tahrir only once it looked like it might succeed, but they welcomed the bodies and the help it provided. By now everyone in the square was ready to fight, but the protesters were at a loss to predict how the regime would strike.

On Wednesday, February 2, they found out. Camel drivers wearing traditional galabiyas led a parade of thugs and hired hands into Tahrir. Police snipers hid among hundreds of civilians in muscle shirts. Tourists had fled because of the uprising, so the workers at the pyramids had nothing to do. The regime wanted to empty the square but wanted to disguise its involvement. So it hired its usual operatives, and brought in the workers from the pyramids to give the assault a populist flavor. The assault's absurd appearance belied its lethality. The day's violence would go down in history as the Battle of the Camel.

From the roofs above Tahrir, men threw rocks the size of fists onto the heads of protesters below. Demonstrators and thugs fought hand to hand at the entrances to the square. Activists quickly smashed the pavement to make projectiles and threw them at their attackers. Police snipers returned fire methodically, shooting and killing demonstrators from an overpass. Dead and gravely wounded protesters piled up in the field hospitals around Tahrir, with new casualties carried in every minute. Moaz held one fighter as he died. A charismatic Che Guevara look-alike came to him bleeding where rocks had struck his temples. Moaz put three stitches in each side of the boy's head with no anesthetic. The young man smiled the whole time. It was Moaz's first encounter with Mina Daniel, a Coptic Christian who later in the year, after another fateful encounter with government security forces, would become an icon of the revolution.

Women and men fought shoulder to shoulder. Revolutionaries snuck across lines to flush thugs from the rooftops. They outflanked the police snipers on the overpass. Twelve hours after it had begun, the Battle of the Camel was over. At least twenty-six demonstrators were dead and hundreds more seriously wounded. By defeating the Camel brigade, the revolt had scored a pivotal victory. The square reached its apogee; the euphoric golden period that Egyptians affectionately called “the Republic of Tahrir.” Volunteers guarded the spur streets. Garbage brigades picked up litter, while street kids distributed donated sandwiches and cookies. The ass-grabbing, sexual harassment, and rape that were everyday hazards for women in downtown Cairo subsided to almost zero. People who had reflexively shushed one another in public now couldn't stop talking. They talked and talked, offering their names for publication and their cell phone numbers to stay in touch. People lined up patiently at the Omar Makram Mosque, which along with the field hospital offered the only two public bathrooms open to the hundreds of thousands in Tahrir. Christians and secular Muslims joined hands to protect those who were praying. To me, it felt like these frank people in Tahrir Square were redeeming the whole world's age of defeat along with Egypt's era of fear.

The youth in the square welcomed anyone who entered with the requisite humility. One of the most striking denizens of Tahrir was an old diplomat named Mohamed Fathy Rifaah al-Tahtawi. He was a luminary
of the establishment, the ruling class embodied. A descendant of one of the most important Islamic scholars of the nineteenth century, al-Tahtawi had served as deputy foreign minister and later as the spokesman for Al-Azhar, the preeminent seat of Islamic study. He was also a well-traveled intellectual who knew the world and saw that Egypt's place in it had slipped. For decades he said nothing and pleased his masters well. But when he saw the youth congregate in Tahrir Square, he felt ashamed and seized his moment. On national television, al-Tahtawi resigned his post at Al-Azhar and decamped to Tahrir. There he made no speeches but asked many questions.

When I met him, he led me to a quiet back alley. This man who had spent his entire professional life on fine upholstery and leather sofas brushed off the filthy curb with his bare hand, sat down, and said, “This will be my office now.” His demeanor said as much as his words. “Our children understood what we had forgotten,” the ambassador told me. “Now it is our turn to follow them. They might save the country that we have ruined.”

He wasn't the only mother, father, grandmother, or grandfather to enter Tahrir, head tilted in apology. They came and asked forgiveness for a lifetime of moral cowardice and for their final failed attempts at authoritarianism in the home, when they tried to prohibit their young from joining the revolution. Those parents, even more than their children, made a journey of stunning proportions out of the walled gardens of fear in which they had lived their entire lives.

Scenes of euphoria and newfound faith played out everywhere in the square. Men and women circulated in yellow construction helmets, ready to withstand barrages of rocks. Security details ran drills in the middle of the night and staffed a jail in a subway stairwell. Anonymous donors sent in sandwiches, water, cookies, and
koshari
, the traditional Egyptian poor man's dish of rice, lentils, noodles, and onions. An unemployed teacher working as part of a formal security detail told me that his best qualification as a fighter was that “I have nothing to lose.”

Ayman Abouzaid, a cardiology resident, had joined the civilian protesters who were sleeping on the tanks beside the museum, to prevent them from intruding farther into the square. Each night, soldiers fired
shots in the air and sometimes revved their tank engines. Ayman and the other men would cluster closer, daring the drivers to run them over. A light drizzle was falling, and the sun had set. Ayman wore a white medical jacket smeared with dirt. His glasses were dirty, and a bloodstained bandage was wrapped around his forehead. He had been in the square for ten days straight. “We will leave in only two situations,” he said. “When Hosni Mubarak and the National Democratic Party are judged and executed. Or we all have to be dead.”

The revolutionary youth made their headquarters in a green tent on a traffic median at the southern end of Tahrir, where Abdelkader Hamza Street led toward the Omar Makram Mosque and the American Embassy. Activists passed through the tent around the clock. Sometimes a few would curl up and nap along the edge while others sat cross-legged, smoking inside the nylon hothouse as they drafted communiqués and plotted negotiating positions to present to the public and the generals. The Islamists dressed like old men, no matter their age, in pleated pants, Oxford dress shirts, loose sweaters, and leather shoes, usually in matching earth tones. The women wore loose cloaks, or
abaya
s, and head scarves in muted grays or browns. The leftists tended to wear brighter colors and tighter clothes. When they expected a fight, everyone wore jeans, hoodies, and sneakers.

Basem was preoccupied with sustaining turnout at the square. He believed that Tahrir itself was the best recruitment tool for the revolution. He was older than most of his confederates, and he was determined to woo people from his generation. His goal was to draw as many skeptics as possible to the Republic of Tahrir, so that they would return to tell their families and neighbors that the revolution was not as dark and destructive as it was being portrayed on state television.

“Once people come here to see us and go back to the community, it changes,” a younger friend said to Basem outside the tent.

“Today,” Basem said, “I was afraid I would find the square empty.”

It was raining hard enough that the ink in my notebook ran. A child no more than ten passed out free chocolate-and-cream cookies.

“Already the youth have accomplished more than we had asked for,” Basem said. “Nobody can control the square.”

The fourteen youth leaders who had worked together on January 25 weren't trying to control the square, but they were trying to lead it; they understood that a people power movement needed an agenda and spokespeople to harness its potential. However, they also understood that the spontaneity and diversity that gave Tahrir its potency could easily prevent it from cohering behind any single leader or idea.

Even at Tahrir's pinnacle, the seeds of future divisions had already taken root. A bitter divide had sprung up between the Egyptians in the square and those outside: the revolutionaries versus the Hizb al-Kanaba, or “sofa party,” who preferred to sit at home on their couches watching government television. State newspapers published unsourced accounts of cars with diplomatic license plates cruising through the square, with mysterious figures handing out cash from the windows. State television announcers delivered fabricated reports that the people in Tahrir Square were, in fact, being paid by European governments and Israel as part of a plot against the Egyptian nation. The perks of being a protester supposedly included free meals from Hardee's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut, restaurants too expensive for most Egyptians. Outside Tahrir, I heard these baseless rumors repeated as fact by countless Egyptians, from the wealthy and well-read to the poor and cloistered. Inside Tahrir, in actuality, the fast-food restaurants had been shuttered since the first day of the revolt, and the protesters were living in primitive, overcrowded conditions. Such slander led to classic Egyptian humor. Protesters in Tahrir who hadn't showered in days shared bowls of
koshari
. When choosing between measly portions, they'd say, “Is this Kentucky or Hardee's?” A pair of Muslim Brothers who had slept on the dirt median for a week turned out their pockets. “I can't find my euros or shekels anywhere!” one said, laughing at his own joke.

Yet the government had successfully driven a wedge between the minority in the square and the majority at home. The people in Tahrir controlled no platform by which to address the wider public. They couldn't get a moment's airtime on state television; even regime-approved guests who mentioned Tahrir in anything but noxious terms were evicted from
the studio. International media aired sympathetic reports about the revolutionaries, so Egyptians with satellite dishes could learn about the goals of Tahrir on Al Jazeera. The elite and the open-minded were more likely to seek out and believe foreign media (whether from the Arab world, like Al Jazeera, or the West, like the BBC or CNN). The majority, however, watched the monotonous false reports on state television or read the propaganda published in the most widely circulated newspapers, also run by the government. I heard some activists debate whether they should storm the state television headquarters a few hundred yards north of Tahrir in the squat fortress-like Maspero Building, its curved façade hulking like an alien bunker above the Nile. They dismissed the notion as impossible; there were dozens of army tanks surrounding the complex. They also thought it would be futile to take Maspero even if they could, since the government had alternate broadcasting venues. But that thinking signaled a failure of verve and imagination. Had the revolutionary youth taken over state television on January 28, they might have been running the country now. Instead, they fought a war of attrition for public opinion, using the platforms of family dinner tables, Twitter, and Facebook against the state's vast broadcast and print conglomerates. The revolutionaries had no way to make their case to the masses of their peers. To some extent, they gave up from the start, figuring that the constituents of the sofa party had never made a difference in the past and wouldn't in the future. Contempt for the majority, poured into the revolution's foundation, would weaken it in later stages.