Once Upon a Revolution (3 page)

“The country is dying,” he said. “I will do what I must.”

The grievance that smoldered almost imperceptibly for four decades before bursting forth to consume Basem Kamel began with the simplest of swindles: a promise of prosperity in exchange for submission. The Kamel family was one of millions that followed Egypt's mercurial arc from subjugated colony to independent nation. In less than a century, Egypt ricocheted between extremes. It fought its way out of British tutelage, and shot from subjugated third world poverty to liberation. An industrial boom wrenched the population away from feudal farming and spawned a period of great expectations. Basem's father, Mohamed Kamel, considered the routine humiliations a reasonable price to pay for his five children's passage out of rural poverty and into the university-educated middle class. It was too late for Mohamed Kamel to change his ways when he realized that he had assumed far too much of the burden of submission, while the masters of Egypt had enjoyed the prospering in his stead. But his children had taken note and quietly, steadily raged. The pattern repeated in household after household: a series of frissons that collectively gathered enough force to shrug off a regime. A molten seam of anger festered beneath Egypt's crust, waiting to gush forth.

Mohamed Kamel was born in 1937, the same year as the coronation of the teenage King Farouk I. Farouk ate oysters by the hundred in a well-lit palace while his subjects endured the bombardments of World War II in hunger and darkness. Indifferent to the miserable conditions of most
Egyptians, the British colonials reveled in the grand bars of Cairo and Alexandria. A tiny number of landowners and foreigners reaped all the profits from the cotton fields and the Suez Canal. Most Egyptians nursed their ambitions and grudges in the shadow of stifling inequality. Unable to share in the riches of the delta farmland, the Kamels moved to Bulaq Aboul Ela, an impromptu neighborhood full of new arrivals on the edge of downtown Cairo. Mohamed Kamel's uneducated father angled his way into a job at the Ministry of Health as the assistant to an X-ray technician, enabling him to send the children to school. Around him, Egypt spun fast. It joined the first of many wars against Israel in 1948. The loss was searing and seminal, but it forged a group of confident officers led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser. They rejected the inequality and corruption that characterized Farouk's reign, in which major decisions were increasingly outsourced to foreign advisers while the royal family's fortune grew. The young officers ousted King Farouk in 1952, and then, a few years later, the British.

These new rulers called themselves the Free Officers; they were military men with efficient minds. At first they were preoccupied not with ideology but with tangible goals, many of them linked with harnessing and redistributing Egypt's wealth to the benefit of people like the Kamels and the rest of the neglected citizenry. They suspended the corrupt parliament and outlawed the bombastic political parties. Nasser favored neither East nor West in the Cold War. He galvanized the region with a call for unity and Arab nationalism, although in his political calculations he always put Egypt first. The Arab world had nothing to be ashamed of, and Nasser proudly feted its riches in rousing speeches. It had vast natural resources and hardworking people. Egypt's economy was equal to Italy's and South Korea's, and no less promising. With self-reliance and common sense, Egypt and Egyptians would take a seat at the world's table. The teenage Mohamed Kamel felt intuitively the promise of this modern age, in which men weren't consigned to till someone else's fields or labor at a day rate. He studied assiduously and joined the Boy Scouts to deepen his self-reliance, even though he was a secular nationalist and most of the other scouts were Islamists.

This new Egypt that Nasser was building was a wondrous thing. On
a command from Cairo, irrigation canals extended across the delta. The state laid dams in the Nile River, drew subdivisions in the desert, built factories the sizes of cities. There was no room in this project for critical voices. The Muslim Brotherhood alone had survived Nasser's rise independent of his control. The young dictator instinctively understood that any competition posed a threat, so two years after taking power, he did his best to excise the Brotherhood from Egypt. He executed some of its leaders and jailed the rest. Entire categories of suspicious people were swept up, including the Islamist-infiltrated Boy Scouts. Along with thousands of teenagers, Mohamed Kamel, seventeen years old, was imprisoned without charge. That fall, Basem's father spent thirteen days in jail, even though he had studiously avoided any kind of political activity, Islamist or secular, and he admired everything about Nasser's project and Nasser the man. Before Nasser, such injustices and worse were routine, but Nasser was supposed to be different.

For the Kamel family, the detention marred but did not completely shatter the idyll of the Free Officers' reign. In 1956, Nasser was elected president, making himself a symbol of renewal for Egypt and the entire Arab world, if at a steep price. He wanted his people to believe in themselves as Egyptians and Arabs. Colonial powers had abused Egypt, and rich foreigners had enjoyed unjustifiable privileges. Nasser tapped into this very real source of resentment among the newly independent Egyptian people, stoking xenophobia and fear. He cast a net of suspicion far beyond the British colonial overseers. He confiscated the property of Jews and Greeks, treating them as a potential fifth column, and within a few years in the 1950s these vibrant minority communities all but disappeared from Egypt. Nasser spoke of conspiracies, foreign fingers, hidden hands: tropes that contaminated political thinking in Egypt long after his death.

Still, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had made the Kamels prouder than ever before to be Egyptian. Rationing and privation contributed to new national industries. Egypt was actually building things. It required discipline and, yes, some authoritarianism, to get the right things done. Before Nasser, a tiny group of plutocrats had literally owned the nation, and he stripped away their land and confiscated their money. If they displayed
any inkling of dissent, he locked them up too. Things had never been fair for the common man in Egypt, but for the first time, the rigged playing field was tilting in his direction. There was still suffering in the land, but now it was distributed more equitably. The disruption of young Mohamed Kamel's liberty was but a flickering debit on the balance sheet of the shared national endeavor, a cost of doing business in this new Egypt. On the credit side, because Nasser democratized education, a laborer's son like Mohamed Kamel was able to study social work and get a job at Cairo University. In 1965 he wed and bought a house in Imbaba, a pleasant if modest outlying district of Cairo on the western bank of the Nile.

Unfortunately for Mohamed Kamel, the now-paranoid Nasser perceived a rekindled Islamist threat. His name was still on a list, a result of his brief membership in the Boy Scouts. The secret police rapped on his door a few months after he signed his marriage contract. Again Mohamed Kamel was taken to prison, again without any accusation or charge. This secular, conventional man joined thousands of other political prisoners, most of them Islamists. Thirteen days passed, like the first time. Then another thirteen. Incarcerated without trial, Mohamed Kamel's detention stretched into a year and then more. From jail, he watched as Nasser, increasingly erratic and belligerent, readied the nation for a supposedly glorious war against Israel. A better-equipped Israel moved first, and June 1967 was a rout for Palestine, Egypt, and all the Arab nations involved.

Nasser wasn't a cunning genius. Charismatic and charming, the president had fallen in thrall to his own mesmerizing rhetoric. His Arab nationalism hardened into ideology, and his inspiring leadership aged into despotism. His hubris and incompetence catalyzed the war known as the
Naksa
, or setback, the bookend to the 1948
Nakba
, or catastrophe. The setback brought some small, unintended comforts. In December 1967, thousands of political prisoners were released, among them Mohamed Kamel. He had spent two years, ten days, and seven hours in detention. “I do not like Nasser,” he told his wife when he came home, bristling with rage. Uttered only in private to his family, those words were as close as he came to rebellion.

Basem, the Kamels' second child and second son, was born in 1969. His father's job teaching social work was secure and respectable, but the wages penurious: one hundred Egyptian pounds a month. He could make ten times that a short ferry ride away in Saudi Arabia, where the oil money flowed, and the kingdom needed fellow Arabs to staff its new hospitals, universities, and ministries. So he joined the exodus of Egyptian workers to Saudi, moving his family to Jeddah and following Egypt's decline from abroad. Just fifty-two years old, Nasser died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1970, and despite everything that had happened to him at Nasser's hands, Mohamed Kamel wept. The dictator who twice had thrown him in prison also had ended generations of poverty in his family. “I hate him, but I respect him,” Mohamed Kamel said to his wife. “At least he cared about us.” He repeated those words many times in the decade that followed, most of which he spent with his family in Saudi Arabia.

Basem Kamel recorded his first memories in Jeddah. As an Egyptian kid in a Saudi public school, the boy was well aware of his status as an outsider and a guest. Mostly he played with the other Egyptian kids. From as far back as he could remember, he had been told that the family's sojourn in Saudi Arabia was temporary, a necessity so that ultimately they could live comfortably back home in Cairo. He didn't think too much about the Saudi system, which offered its citizens no political rights or freedoms but tremendous economic security. At the time, as a child, he didn't think much either of the fact that his father couldn't make ends meet in Egypt but, with the same set of skills, could earn a comfortable living across the border. Working in Saudi Arabia was a blessed opportunity, not a sacrifice; plenty of Egyptians didn't have a marketable trade that could command such a decent salary abroad. Even as a little boy, Basem absorbed his father's work ethic: no drama, no fuss, set your goals, and then do whatever's necessary to achieve them. Basem never had to be reminded to do his homework.

During the decade that the Kamels spent in Saudi Arabia, Egypt whipsawed in the charge of its second charismatic despot in a row. Anwar Sadat unleashed the Islamists against the Nasserists, unreconstructed nationalists who yearned for the days of Nasser; they wrecked each other
while Sadat emerged the stronger. The new president spun Egypt forward with a policy called
infitah
, or “opening”: opening the Egyptian economy to capitalism, and opening political life, tentatively, to competition. Sadat's turn away from a state-controlled economy created new wealth for the country, but mostly to the benefit of a microscopic new elite. He befriended Washington and made peace with Israel, enraging a citizenry that had been primed with nationalism for generations. He gave the people a tiny glimpse of what it felt like to speak out: one student leader who challenged Sadat at a public debate in the 1970s used the moment as a presidential campaign plank in 2012. Sadat wheeled and wheedled, running circles around Egyptian political bosses who thought they'd found a pliant puppet after the uncontrollable Nasser.

After a decade in Saudi Arabia, the Kamels had eked out enough to return home in 1980 and establish a beachhead. Cairo had metamorphosed while they were away. Millions of peasants without money or opportunity had overwhelmed the city. They occupied all available space, building coffin-shaped apartment blocks on slivers of irrigated cropland around the capital. Cairo's outskirts merged with the center, swallowing the once-isolated suburbs. Along the grand avenues radiating from Tahrir Square, the art deco façades crumbled while the sidewalks, no longer graced with municipal maintenance, buckled and cracked. With nowhere else to channel people, government planners turned to the vast desert plateau southeast of Cairo. The royal family had built its summer dwelling there in the village of Helwan because of the fair breeze. The British had added an observatory. But Cairo was growing too quickly to leave this wondrous escarpment unmolested. Helwan became a factory zone, and around it sprang up military bases, worker hostels, and, finally, subdivisions for the lower middle class. One of these was called Wadi Hof, an inhospitable triangular spit of land between a highway, an army camp, and a factory. It seemed at the end of the earth, but in Wadi Hof's fresh air and open vista, the Kamels saw their chance. They purchased Plot 56 on Street 32 in the empty new subdivision. A fifteen-minute walk led to a train track, and from there one could ride to downtown Cairo in an hour. With unbelievable speed, roads were paved, empty spaces filled in, and families like the Kamels, year by year, added floors
to their homes until they reached the new development's zoning limit of five. This was what passed as achieving the middle-class dream. The Kamels planted an olive tree and a grape arbor in the backyard, which was just large enough for a dozen children to play tag.