Once Upon a Revolution (12 page)

Already they had been meeting every day, usually three or four times, in the green Coleman tent, or in borrowed apartments on the outskirts of Tahrir. Normally, secular Egyptian political groups detested the Muslim Brotherhood and vice versa, but there was profound trust among these young men and women despite their varied political backgrounds. On Monday, February 7, fourteen young organizers and a few of their intimates crammed together in a small room just out of earshot of Tahrir's din. Several of the leaders had just been released from detention by government security forces. One of the independents, Abdelrahman Fares, had been held over the weekend and then released blindfolded; one of the soldiers detaining him held a gun to his head and whispered, “Your life is worth less than one bullet.” Although people in the square chanted regularly, “The army and the people are one hand!” Fares reminded his colleagues, “The army is not our ally.”

The same week, several ElBaradei activists were arrested on their way back to the square from dinner. Earlier, on the very Monday that the Tahrir organizers made their union official, Moaz had been arrested crossing into the square. He affected infinite patience and told his police guard a stream of jokes. “Maybe I will stay here forever,” he said. “Maybe I will die in your office.” The officer questioned Moaz about what was happening in the square. It had been the same with all the other young people who had been detained. Who was in charge? How many Brothers? Who was paying them? “I am a simple pharmacist,” Moaz repeated. Finally, the cop changed the subject. “How much money do you have on you?” Moaz emptied his pockets. For three hundred Egyptian pounds, or about fifty dollars, the officer let him go. Moaz made it to the meeting of the core activists just in time.

That Monday night, the fourteen men and women who had converged on El Hayiss Pastries and labored together for a week and a half in Tahrir voted to band together officially. They called themselves the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. “We don't run the square,” Basem said. “But we must try to keep it focused and organized.” The name came easily. No jargon, no melodrama, no invocation of January 25. Just a straightforward explanation of who they were: young, radical, collaborative. For the sake of their dream of change, and the millions who were shaking the old
order, they wanted to keep their power and extend it. Separately, each revolutionary organization could pursue its own special causes, but when the groups spoke in unison, they would speak under the banner of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition. They would operate by consensus. The coalition would have heft because its demands would represent the most critical desires of every important group. Theirs would be the agenda that united socialist workers, bourgeois liberals, and pious Islamists.

There were only two Islamist seats on the fourteen-member council, but like everyone else, the Islamists had veto power. They wielded special influence because of the Brotherhood's resources. Basem mistrusted the Brotherhood as an organization even though he was personally fond of some of his Islamist colleagues. “You're nice people, but your fundamentalist radical ideology is bad for Egypt,” he told Moaz. For now, though, Basem and Moaz had more in common than in discord. Moaz and the other Islamist youths were running a rebellion within a rebellion. In addition to their resistance against the regime, they were defying their own autocratic bosses inside the Brotherhood by joining forces with Basem, Zyad, and the rest.

The youth of the revolution now had a name. They had a method. And they had an agenda: no negotiations until there was democracy in Egypt. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition was the first institution born of the Tahrir Revolution, and it was meant to enshrine all the values and best practices of revolutionary youth. As a collective, its founders hoped they could surpass their reach as a pastiche of motivated but narrow organizations. The crowds in Tahrir were winning, and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was going to be the vehicle through which the crowds would transcend themselves, maturing from mob to movement. The regime was terrified. Mubarak was tottering, and so was the entire deep state that had controlled Egyptian life in every conceivable way for sixty years. These young activists were as pragmatic as they were bold. They wanted to build a new society, not simply rip the head off the old one. To do it, they'd need an organization that was nimble and representative. They'd need to be able to stake out political positions quickly, and then back those positions on the street with muscle and crowds. The coalition included five groups: the youth branch of a liberal party called the
Democratic Front; a left-wing group with ties to labor called the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom; the proworker April 6 Movement; ElBaradei's supporters; and the Muslim Brotherhood Youth. There were also four independents, including Sally Moore, the only woman on the leadership committee, a Coptic Christian psychiatrist with an Irish father and an Egyptian mother.

Mubarak's prime minister sent emissaries to the square. He invited the youth leaders to meet him. But if Mubarak stayed in power, the revolutionary leaders believed, all of them would be executed or end up in prison for life. Some people in the square said there was no harm in talking to Mubarak's ministers, but the members of the new Revolutionary Youth Coalition voted unanimously that they should talk to the government only after Mubarak had stepped down.

One seat on the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was reserved for Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who had managed the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, and who had been arrested at the start of the Tahrir uprising. Wael Ghonim was a successful boy-next-door, the kind of character who made middle-class Egyptians feel safe. He had spent his life trying to avoid politics and controversy. When someone like Wael Ghonim turned to revolution, it was safe to say that the regime had lost a natural constituency. The night the coalition was formed, Ghonim was released from prison. Immediately, he appeared on a television show, condemning the regime. When confronted with photographs of people who had died in Tahrir while he was in detention, Ghonim began to weep. “I want to tell every mother and father who lost a son that it's not our fault,” Ghonim said through his tears. “It's the fault of everyone who held on to power and clung to it.” His endorsement of Tahrir swayed countless fence-sitters to visit the square for the first time, filling it with unprecedented numbers.

The coalition had other public relations weapons, such as Sally Moore, with her flowing dark hair and tightly groomed, arched eyebrows. She did a lot of television. In English, she cut a perfect figure of modernized, globalized safe revolution. In Arabic, she reassured liberal Egyptians that Tahrir Square welcomed unveiled women, Christians, and the sort of Cairenes who like to drink a Sakara beer at the Dokki Jazz Club. The
men and women from the April 6 and Justice and Freedom Movements had credibility among workers and leftists. And the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, with their scruffy facial hair, potbellies, and rhythmic speaking cadence, resonated with Islamist youth. These activists believed they knew what Egypt needed, even if most of the people in the square didn't. Tahrir's foot soldiers spoke vaguely of freedom, Islamic values, and the utopia of Egypt without Mubarak.

The coalition leaders wanted an entirely new kind of society, and they were down in the weeds with specifics from the very beginning. “The January 25 Revolution has cancelled the old social contract between the people and the regime,” the Youth Coalition wrote in its first manifesto. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition had a plan to remake Egypt. The 1971 constitution was to be suspended. New laws would guarantee freedom to organize political parties and independent labor unions. The state of emergency would be cancelled. No more military trials for civilians. In the future, there would be separation of powers, a weaker president, and a stronger parliament. Independent technocrats would govern Egypt until a new constitution could be carefully drafted. Once a credible new body had been created to oversee fair elections, the people would choose new representatives. The secret police would be disbanded and the old ruling party banned. This was a specific and comprehensive political blueprint, and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition trotted it out at every conceivable opportunity.

To some, it made them seem like nerds at a time when chanting “Mubarak is a fag!” could spark enthusiasm in the square. To others, it made the coalition leaders seem like little Mubaraks. “No one speaks for me!” several activists said. But the Revolutionary Youth Coalition was one of the uprising's best hopes. The size and bravery of the crowds elevated the people into a credible threat against the established power. Yet politics, and politics alone, could channel the gushing stream of anger into a force concentrated enough to erode old formations and sculpt new ones.

One of the main news sources for Tahrir and its supporters was a Facebook page called RSD, an Arabic acronym for Monitoring News Network,
with a logo suspiciously reminiscent of the BBC's. An old acquaintance of mine, Abdelrahman Ayyash, was editing the surprisingly thorough news coverage there. RSD precisely reflected the revolution: powered by a geyser of raw energy, it harnessed the spirited work of unpolished but talented budding journalists. Its core staff came from the Muslim Brotherhood, although at first the site claimed it was independent. RSD covered the politics and the social life of the square, which were being ignored by the entire state-run Egyptian media; a half million people were following the RSD page within a week. Ayyash and the other editors worked from wherever they could sit, on laptops with cellular connections to the internet. The site's work was uneven; untrained webmasters frequently posted and then retracted unconfirmed rumors of attacks or political developments. The operation was quintessential Tahrir: Build what you need from scratch and perfect it later.

Ayyash, too, was an exemplar of the revolution. He didn't aspire to political leadership like the men and women who had founded the Revolutionary Youth Coalition; he was a back-end operative. He came from a Brotherhood family, and at fifteen he had been hired by the organization's strongman and chief financier, Khairat el-Shater, to put together the group's English-language website. Ayyash was now twenty and studying engineering, but his real calling was building websites, generating ideas, and building networks of people. He would have been a natural among the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. In revolutionary Egypt, he was a kind of Zelig, seemingly involved in every major event and able to blend in everywhere. He had crossed into Gaza with Moaz in 2009. He had collaborated with Basem in 2010 to collect signatures for ElBaradei's petition. He appeared to know every activist and politician, and every player on the Islamist scene.

When I first met Ayyash years earlier, he was working for the Brotherhood under an alias, blogging against the regime, and in his spare time compiling humorous articles for a website about Islamophobia. He had a sharp gaze and furrowed his forehead when he concentrated. He had fantastic powers to recall names, faces, and dates. He also had a prodigious appetite; at Hardee's, he liked to garnish his burger with a hot dog. He had first been arrested in 2007 for his critical writings on the internet,
and he had periodically seen his interrogator since then. Once, the police threatened to arrest Ayyash's father to make Ayyash stop blogging. Ayyash was detained the first week of the revolution, but this time his familiar police contact released him quickly, begging Ayyash to return to his young friends and calm them down. An assistant to the prime minister had phoned Ayyash in search of any young activist willing to meet with the government. Ayyash refused but invited the aide for a tour of Tahrir Square so that he could tell the prime minister just how formidable the state's revolutionary enemies were.

Now, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the field hospital while Moaz slept a few feet away on the dispensary floor, Ayyash was feverishly editing stories, video clips, and newsfeeds. Much of it was critical of the Brotherhood, his own group. He was aghast that the Brotherhood officials had met with the regime while revolutionaries were still holding the square and refusing to negotiate. He suspected that the Brotherhood might sell out the revolution to carve its own path to power. He believed that the Brotherhood was brittle, incapable of tolerating pluralism within its own narrow and homogenous ranks. “How will they ever be able to accept pluralism in the rest of the world?” Ayyash asked rhetorically. For him, the revolution was opening the door to question not just the regime and the government, but also the organization that had provided the framework of his days and thoughts since adolescence. He would no longer limit the targets of his critical thinking.

Egyptians now occupied squares all over the country; in Suez, they had taken over the entire city and installed a “people's governor.” In Cairo, the crowds burst out of Tahrir and took over the street in front of parliament a few blocks away. Others surged north of Tahrir to the state media headquarters at Maspero. “Our mere presence here is threatening,” said the labor activist and blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah. He was encouraging demonstrators to escalate strategically every few days. But he was also spreading the word that even when Mubarak was gone, Egypt's problems would persist. State oppression, a fact of Egyptian life for centuries, wouldn't disappear along with one sagging, elderly president. There was an intricate system behind Mubarak. General Tarek, the policeman I had met at the club, might have been arrogant, but he was wise to the resilience
of the rule of the gun. Mubarak might go, but his regime would not surrender quietly.