Once Upon a Revolution (5 page)

On April 6, 2008, textile workers in the gargantuan factory complex in the city of Mahalla spearheaded a national strike. The police shut it down with the usual truncheons and gas. This time around, however, the strikers were politicized and streetwise, articulate about their demands, and also physically tough in battles with the police. They won public sympathy, and the state suppression was videotaped and shared online.

Egypt was controlled through a network of military and security services with anonymous leaders and black budgets. Scholars coined the term “the deep state” to describe the security leviathan that had grown unabated through three regimes. Regular Egyptians adopted it, referring sometimes with disdain and other times with pride to the deep state, an apparatus that was far more powerful than any single leader or even any single police agency or military branch. The deep state depended on America's generous underwriting. Washington sent about $2 billion a year to Cairo, most of it for the Egyptian army. The payment grew out of the first peace talks between Egypt and Israel in the 1970s. Equally important to the regime was America's political backing. President George Bush's push for democracy had become an irritant. It was US pressure that had forced Mubarak to entertain a challenger in the 2005 presidential race, and again a year later, to allow a modicum of fairness in the parliamentary elections. As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats.
It might seem like a token amount of the 444 elected representatives, but in the Egyptian context, it was an earthquake. The Brothers would have won an even greater share of parliament if the regime hadn't manipulated the second and third rounds of the voting.

Mubarak's long game was running the way he wanted. Other Arab dictators ran far deadlier states. In places such as Syria and Libya, opposition figures routinely disappeared for years or decades in regime dungeons. Critics were assassinated, their relatives suddenly stripped of their businesses. Mubarak's style was far more effective and, in a way, more subtle. His aim was to eliminate any plausible centrist alternative that stood a chance of capturing widespread sympathy. He didn't want reasonable opponents who could theoretically challenge him by winning over the plutocrats, military men, and police officials who undergirded his regime. But he saw value in keeping some extremists around so that Egyptians would remember that they could have it far worse than Mubarak. A group like Kifaya was hemmed in from the start, and many of the reformist judges were pressed into exile. The Brotherhood, on the other hand, served a purpose as the regime's foil. Known Brotherhood leaders ran for parliament as independents. The Brotherhood was legally banned, but it was tolerated and allowed to function just enough that Mubarak could hold up its leaders as bogeymen:
“Après moi le déluge,”
either this regime or a band of bearded fanatics.

Affronts piled up, great and small. The regime's premier enforcement arm, the secretive and omnipresent State Security Investigations, grew ever less restrained. The clicks of cheap surveillance were audible on phone calls. Shortages and unemployment exacerbated social tensions. Attacks against the Christian minority increased steadily, and the government never seemed to find those responsible. The Coptic Church, an Eastern Orthodox sect, offered the only organized leadership for Egypt's Christians. It represented about 10 percent of the population, but had little leverage and most always deferred to the government. Private companies had to stack their boards with members chosen by State Security. The upper echelons of the public sector were heavy with men whose only
qualification was that they were retired generals. Even in newsrooms, clinics, soup kitchens, and other places ostensibly independent from the state, State Security agents paid visits and issued commands.

Mubarak had grown brittle and intolerant, an impregnable dictator who couldn't bear the slightest criticism. Still, he had more nuance than his peers in the Arab-presidents-for-life club. Unlike Syria's al-Assad clan, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and Libya's Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi, Mubarak actually desired some trappings of a democratic society. He allowed a far more vigorous free press than any of the other dictators in the region, and the approved opposition was permitted to criticize the government so long as it avoided the president himself. Mubarak meant to keep his citizens pliant, but they grew accustomed to certain limited freedoms. When they crossed lines, however, the punishment struck decisively, as when popular newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa wrote about the rumors that Mubarak had a serious illness and promptly found himself sentenced to prison. Eventually the journalist's connections won him a pardon, but he said his sentence had “opened the gates of hell for the Egyptian press.”

This corrosive cocktail had eroded the patience of Egyptians. Policemen did nothing to unsnarl the quotidian traffic jams but constantly thrust their hands forward for bribes. Bosses connected to the ruling party sent their employees to pay their personal bills. One day a neighbor tried to sexually assault Basem Kamel's seven-year-old niece. When Basem and his brother went to the police, the officer rudely propped his bare feet on his desk, mumbling as he took the report. Eventually Basem's family arrested the perpetrator themselves and delivered him to the authorities. Thus was justice managed in Mubarak's Egypt. The government didn't serve the people; the people served the government. These depredations had been barely tolerable when the country's standard of living had actually been improving, in the 1950s and 1960s. Now the quality of life kept worsening, while the abuse remained constant.

Basem followed it all from a remove on foreign satellite networks. He digested the dissent, silently applauding it but all the while convinced of its noble futility. A mundane event jolted Basem from his personal slumber, readying him for the political awakening to come. For a decade, Basem had worked ceaselessly, forgoing weekends and holidays with his children to
push forward the family architecture business he had established. Then, in 2008, a relative died and Basem skipped work to go to the funeral. It was the first day he could remember spending without his phone. The business survived. Basem realized that he could spend time for pleasure. He took his children to the Citadel and his wife to the opera. He looked at the paintings in the Cairo Museum of Art and the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum. These diversions opened him to other thoughts he had avoided.

It was in this receptive state that he had clicked on the dissident Facebook group. Only when he joined the welcoming committee for Mohamed ElBaradei did Basem dare to believe that things could change not merely in his own life but also for all of Egypt. And he began to meet other Egyptian men and women, a small but growing phalanx of dedicated dreamers who had always believed it, or who, like Basem, were now ready to surrender to idealism. They were poor and rich, educated and self-taught, brawny and effete, secular and religious. They were the youth of the revolution (even though many, like Basem, verged on middle age), and in each setback, they discovered another incentive to act.

ElBaradei returned to Egypt after his long career abroad, and he welcomed the volunteers who had conjured up an organization for him. Basem and the others became ElBaradei's aides, raising a professional-class campaign out of a vacuum. One spring day in 2010, Basem came home long after midnight. He had been with ElBaradei. Basem's father, convinced that his son had been arrested, grew agitated and collapsed. At the hospital, the doctors said it was a stroke.

“No more politics,” Basem's mother pleaded.

“We won't discuss it anymore,” Basem said with a reassuring smile. He didn't plan to stop, but he no longer would tell his parents what he was doing. A few months later, Basem went missing again on a weekend.

“Where is your brother?” his father demanded as the family sat in front of the television.

“At work,” his youngest brother said. Just then the newscast showed a group of activists escorting ElBaradei through the provincial city of Fayoum. At the candidate's side was Basem. Mohamed Kamel, foggy since his stroke, noticed nothing. But Basem's mother did. She leaned in close to her youngest son.

“Liar,” she hissed.

In the summer of 2010, police in Alexandria beat a young man named Khaled Said to death; the kind of brutal act that had become routine long ago. There were unsubstantiated claims that he had posted an online video documenting police brutality, but later reports suggested that Khaled Said was an apolitical homebody who hung out with stoners and liked to chat online. Plenty of witnesses saw the two cops batter Khaled Said at the internet café near his apartment, and then later in the street. He might have been punished for refusing to snitch on local drug dealers. In any case, such beatings were commonplace in Egypt, although they normally didn't end with murder. The police expected to get away with it. With straight faces, they claimed that Khaled Said had choked to death trying to conceal contraband marijuana in his mouth. There had been an obscene parade of victims like him, decade after decade. But his death struck a chord because he was so manifestly neither a criminal nor a political dissident. He posed no conceivable threat. He was a middle-class boy trying to keep his head down, and that still hadn't been enough. The regime's message turned out to be that nobody was safe, even those who kept their mouths shut and followed the popular adage to avoid attention and “walk by the wall.” Egypt's middle-class youth identified overwhelmingly with Khaled Said.

The police's actions were normal for Mubarak's Egypt, but this time the response was not. A Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said drew hundreds of thousands of members. Egyptians who had avoided politics adopted the cause, joining the veterans from Kifaya, ElBaradei's campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood youth organization, and the other small but dedicated activist groups. Weekly vigils began. The Facebook page became an instant organizing tool, but the government seemed oblivious. Mohamed ElBaradei initiated a petition campaign with the almost meek demand that Mubarak's regime follow its own laws in the next election. Incredibly, a million people signed, making their names and identity numbers public; this sort of act typically led to detention. Even more surprising, the Muslim Brotherhood joined ElBaradei's effort, collecting millions more signatures. Something was shifting. People had truly had enough and were willing to take new risks in order to show it. Basem
trained volunteers to talk people into signing the petition, and went out asking himself. He was willing to sacrifice his livelihood, the cohesion of his family, and even his father's health: all the things he most valued. He was not alone. What was the point of preserving order at home and across the nation if its individual human foundations were crumbling?

Then parliamentary elections were held in the fall of 2010. The tired and ineffectual secular opposition boycotted them, invoking a storied tradition. In modern Arab history, weaker parties had often used boycotts to level the playing field, scuttling agreements, elections, regional summits, and peace talks by staying away. But it was a weapon of last resort that worked only when used sparingly, when the group doing the boycotting had enough power to confer or deny legitimacy to the more powerful.

The Muslim Brotherhood decided to participate in the elections. The regime didn't even bother to disguise its fraud, simply locking voters out of polling stations in Brotherhood areas and awarding seats to regime loyalists. The government's caprice and violence in the parliamentary elections energized Basem and his new friends. They had bigger plans than elections and new rules. They thought they could force Mubarak to fire his despised interior minister Habib el-Adly, the man in charge of the riot police and state spies who watched and constrained the people's every move. Tunisians had unexpectedly revolted in December, putting a seasoned dictator on the run and jolting the entire Arab world. National Police Day was coming up on January 25, 2011, mere weeks after Tunisia's revolution. The youth would take to the streets, circumventing police blocks, and demand the interior minister's resignation on his own day of celebration. It was at one of these planning meetings, at the house of another activist's mother, that Basem Kamel met Moaz Abdelkarim, a young Muslim Brother who had cast his lot with this new wave of creative nationalist agitators.