Once Upon a Revolution (25 page)

The Maspero massacre unleashed Egyptians' most primal sectarian fears. For Christians, it changed the question from “What can this revolution bring us, as an oppressed minority?” to “Can we survive in this country?” In the immediate aftermath, everyone was sure to rage at the passive church leadership, the SCAF, the soldiers, and state television. But when the shock lifted, they would begin to ask why so many Egyptians had been willing to believe the SCAF and the TV and had rushed into the streets to beat their Christian countrymen. For Christian Egyptians and for the countless Muslims who were neither sectarian nor for military dictatorship, the national reaction would prove as troubling as the massacre itself. So many had come to the aid of the attackers rather than the victims. The Islamic leaders had kept ominously silent, clerics as well as politicians. There were no Muslim Brothers at the funerals or Salafis sympathizing in person or on TV. There was no inevitable nationwide reaction, as Moaz and all the other revolutionaries had expected. There wasn't a chorus of outrage against the authorities or a national reflex against sectarianism. There were almost no spontaneous gestures of solidarity except from the country's dwindling revolutionary community. It soon became clear that hardly anyone in Egypt empathized with those slaughtered in front of Maspero. In the first thirty-six hours, there had been almost no sign that the Egyptian people regretted what had been done in their name. The wider public's silence was the most ominous sign of all.

In the weeks that followed the massacre, Egypt went about business as usual. The organized political class rallied the cadres. Maspero hardly affected the calculations of the SCAF, the Wafd Party, the Brothers, or the Salafis. The people of Tahrir took stock as well. Egypt stood at a
fork: it could tilt toward the full-fledged revolution that the January 25 uprising had heralded but never quite wrought; or, in keeping with the normal laws of political physics, it could resume its normal course with some alterations, more continuous with its past than with the dreams of the square. One path required renewed protest on a massive scale not yet seen, drawing workers as well as Islamists. The other path led through elections, which would bring some outsiders, notably the Islamists and a contingent of secular bourgeois nationalists, into the tent where the state's goodies were dispensed. Incremental, contested reform could certainly improve life for Egypt, but that hadn't been the goal of the uprising. Its citizen-leaders had sought to write a new Arab compact, with dignity in daily life as well as before the law, where everyone took responsibility and where the government picked up the garbage and listened to the citizenry. Tahrir's highest hopes depended on citizens, and in the days after Maspero, many activists called for “the Second Revolution” and insisted that if a sectarian massacre couldn't inspire the sofa party to take action, then nothing could. The committed revolutionaries held candlelight vigils, respectfully hoisting signs that called for unity. They marched in small groups. Each foray was met with indifference or contempt. After the Maspero atrocity, the vast majority of Egyptians saw and believed the SCAF's narrative that the noble military guardians of the nation had been attacked by narrow-minded, selfish sectarian rabble-rousers, contemptible Christians demanding far more than they deserved, just like the disrespectful bohemian youth who choked Tahrir week by week.

The military had been tightening the screws of censorship already, and after Maspero, it continued to peddle a brew of lies, delusion, paranoia, and justification. General Adel Emara said it simply wasn't military doctrine to run over people, even though Egyptian police had been known to do so as a crowd-control technique. At a briefing intended to exculpate the army, Emara and another general showed the video of the predator-APC chasing down and crushing people to death. General Emara claimed that the driver was trying to escape the frightening crowd, not to kill. Of course, the general added, it was possible that a Christian fanatic had hijacked the APC and then killed his fellow marchers in order to incite anger against the SCAF. Among such claims, the military also
sprinkled dark accusations of a “hidden hand” at work, a favored rhetorical trope of Mubarak's time.

“We are not circulating conspiracy theories, but there is no doubt that there are enemies of the revolution,” General Mahmoud Hegazy said. Incredibly, the SCAF persuaded much of the public that the army and the revolution were one and the same, and that the events at Maspero somehow represented an attack by dirty hidden interests against the noble aspirations of a revolution safely prospering in the military's care. A false narrative instantaneously subsumed the truth: a parallel history written and accepted in real time while almost everybody ignored the obvious.

The massacre had unleashed something dark in public opinion. It also had unhinged many of the revolutionaries. Some members of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition blamed the CIA for the massacre. Others wondered whether it was time to plan an armed insurrection against the junta. Mina Daniel's own Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom was wracked by baying calls for violence from some members. They were so persistent that some of the revolutionary leaders thought they were plants from State Security, trying to divide the group. “The military is leading us toward fascism by manipulating minorities,” one of the few women leaders among the revolutionaries, Ola Shabha, told her fellow activists. “We can't take our eyes off the bigger issue.”

Barely anyone showed up for the vigils. Nothing came of the cry for a Second Revolution. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition had carefully assembled documentary evidence to rebut the SCAF's false narrative and expose its appalling crimes at Maspero. But only a tiny number of Egyptians exhibited any interest at that crucial point in either truth or justice. The revolution was right, but there seemed no practical way to carry its ideas forward. Maybe there never had been. Maybe the only thing that Tahrir had going for it was a naïve ideal, a cosmic long shot that had worked once, in January, kind of. Reason offered no evidence that it could work again; that belief required a leap of faith.

The revolutionary zeitgeist swung on a wild pendulum between elation and despair, but Basem Kamel was a study in steadiness. He was older and less radical than most of his fellow activists, more mainstream and well-to-do. He had risked a lot for the revolt, but his concerns were broader than the revolution alone. He cared as much about preserving Egypt as a secular state and blocking the rise of the Islamists as he did about the dream of social justice for all. He thought it shamefully naïve to ignore the political threats to freedom. Islamists and the SCAF could just as readily kill the revolution's dreams as the bullets and blades of thugs. Basem was a self-made businessman, and he brought a can-do pragmatism to his newfound career in politics. He had chosen elections as his preferred path to democracy, and he didn't intend to let anything, even the horrific massacre at Maspero, distract him from the mission.

One Friday afternoon in September, Basem gathered his family for lunch in their Helwan apartment. They saw him now only in passing, usually on Friday mornings or the rare evening he wasn't at a demonstration, a meeting, or a party event. “I'm thinking that I will run for parliament,” he said. “What is your opinion?”

His wife grimaced. “Is it necessary?”

His son, Mohammed, who was nine, whooped with joy. “I'll take your posters to school,” he said.

“Don't do it,” said Sarah, the twelve-year-old. “I don't want you to be a public figure. I don't want to hear all the lies they'll say about you.” She stormed off to her room.

“I asked you your opinion,” Basem said, following behind her, “but I insist on reasonable reasons.”

Ultimately, he did what he wanted, and his firstborn daughter grudgingly forgave him. Basem held his first campaign team meeting just a few days after the Maspero massacre, while most of his fellows from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition were still paralyzed by depression. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party decided to run Basem in the downtown district, where it was confident about winning, although the party would move him elsewhere if it made him more likely to get into parliament. Basem didn't mind the uncertainty. He was willing to start there and shift his operation wherever he was assigned. “Our office is on Parliament Street, just upstairs from the dead cow,” he told me. Some Social Democratic Party member had donated an office above a butcher's shop.

While the revolutionary youth were still trying to figure out the basic anatomy of a campaign, Basem was able to draw on the liberal elite's reservoir of funds, connections, and white-collar professionals willing to donate their time to electoral politics. Basem's brother, an engineer, would serve as his chief of staff. A successful marketing executive, Maha Abdel Nasser was already crunching the district's demographic data on her laptop. Mohamed Khalil, a businessman, was raising money, making a budget, and designing possible advertising strategies. It was almost a shock to walk into such a high-caliber campaign strategy session after all the despair among the other revolutionary youth. Basem and Maha and Mohamed Khalil considered themselves revolutionary youth, but they were twice as old as most activists, far more wealthy, and, for the most part, employed in decently paying jobs. They belonged to an entirely different stratum from Moaz, Sally, and the other leaders of the street demonstrations.

Maspero had upset them all. “Sunday was the worst day since the revolution,” Basem said as he opened his first staff meeting. “I don't know what to say. It was so dangerous to ask the Muslims to go to the streets.”

He wasn't going to let Maspero derail his campaign, however. “We're in a crunch time,” he said. “What's my plan for the next forty-five days?”

Over the next hour, they mapped it out, to the day: where Basem would pray on Fridays, which heads of families he had to visit, what
phone calls needed to be made, which neighborhoods were worth evening door-to-door campaigning. They ate peanuts from paper bags, sipped coffee, and parsed the merits of advertising Basem's campaign on car air fresheners, napkins, or candy wrappers.

“If I fail, I'm going to hang you all!” Basem joked.

The mood was jovial, confident. I felt like I was witnessing a real operation. It was hard to imagine how he could lose. There were enough secular Egyptians in Cairo to guarantee some seats to all the major non-Islamist groupings, and Basem, as one of the only candidates with Tahrir credentials, was likely to win one of them. His campaign was just as much a rehearsal for serving in parliament, which would be an uphill battle to fend off the Brotherhood and the Salafis while trying to force the junta back to its barracks.

Maha was already worried about the difficulties of getting anything useful done with a seat in parliament. “Basem's a good politician,” she said. “He's stable. He's got charisma. The problem is not the race; the problem is the winning.”

Basem's campaign meeting was the most hopeful thing I had seen in months. In a functioning democracy, it might have seemed unremarkable, but this was Egypt in 2011. In this small room in an unfinished concrete building, upstairs from four cow carcasses hanging from hooks over the sidewalk, Basem and these volunteers were flexing the idea that they would share in the power that had forever been reserved for the imperious seigneur but which was rightfully theirs. Their talk and schemes didn't have the tenor of Moaz's and Sally's morally pure revolution, or the angry second coming so desired by Mina Daniel's survivors in the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom. They were in control, they were having a bit of fun, and they expected to win more power and responsibility at every stage to come. On this day, it seemed to me, Basem had stepped onto a different track from that of his Tahrir comrades: still stoking the same flame, perhaps, but entirely at ease with the machinery of politics. Unless every single gain of the year were erased, a part of the revolution would find its way to the center of Egypt's labyrinth of power. No one could say who spoke most truthfully for Tahrir, but Basem's voice was likely to carry farthest from the square.