Once Upon a Revolution (6 page)

Moaz was cut from different cloth than Basem. His family came from a noble pedigree of Islamists. Religion and politics were their oxygen. He had grown up around men and women who tried to live the words of the
Prophet Muhammad in their daily life, through Koranic study, charity work, and political resistance against a regime that never stopped tracking and persecuting them. Their faith was profoundly humanistic and also political. In his speaking, Moaz picked up the lulling cadences of the imams who shaped his prodigious sense of moral responsibility. On his own, he sharpened a borderline-sacrilegious sense of humor. Even as a teenager, Moaz had a potbelly and dressed like an old man, in the fashion of the Brotherhood: pleated pants, plaid shirts, furry sweaters. His hair arched skyward in a pomaded bouffant, and most of the time he wore a light beard. He ambled rather than walked, like someone with arthritic hips. When he laughed, which was often, he revealed a front tooth broken in half. As the years went by, he never found time to have it fixed, even though he could afford it. He was always late, even for meetings that he requested. Sometimes Moaz would phone a day or two after failing to show up to ask a friend if he was still waiting. Unless there was a street battle, Moaz seemed incapable of rushing. He would stop to tousle the hair of the street kids and tell them jokes. He had a slight streak of vanity too. His eyeglasses were the latest model Ray-Bans, and he posted pictures of his new shoes on Facebook. For all his jocular and bumbling exterior, however, Moaz was profoundly serious about his faith and his democratic principles.

Moaz's grandfather had agitated in the 1920s alongside Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Society of the Muslim Brothers; three generations of his lineage had claimed allegiance to the secretive religious revolutionary group. The Abdelkarims' story was intertwined with Egypt's trajectory, like that of the Kamel family. But just as the Kamels were embedded in the Arab Republic of Egypt's proud tradition of secular nationalism, Moaz's family sprung from an equally proud tradition of radical religious dissidence. In modern times, Egypt has been the cradle of Arab political thought, giving the world Arab nationalism, the Muslim Brotherhood, and, later on, the extremist variant of Sunni fundamentalism known as
takfiri
jihad and the dictatorial innovation of the deep state. Moaz's family was part of the Islamist nucleus. The original Brothers worked in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia. The Canal Zone was the most strategic part of Egypt. It was a security priority for the British colonizers,
but it also housed the country's best-paid, most urbanized workers because of the canal facilities. The British maltreatment of Egyptians intersected with a population that was especially well educated and organized, ripe conditions for the emerging Brotherhood. The austere religious activists who gathered under the Muslim Brotherhood banner in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to expel the British and vanquish the secular Egyptians who served the colonials. The Brothers also proselytized for their conservative religious views: they encouraged more separation of the genders, more women wearing head scarves in a country that was fast abandoning the tradition, and Koranic study as the center of everyone's education.

The founding Brothers made education their first battleground, correctly figuring that they could change society by changing children's minds. They also opened doors by spreading their message through charity. Islamic activists delivered food to the poor and paid school fees. Their clients in turn were receptive to the Brotherhood's political message, which at its simplest promised that a return to God and the injunctions of the Koran would be good for families and good for Egypt. Moaz's grandfather Hassan Mokhtar Hilal was a journalist and a typesetter, but in the years before World War II his main political activity was painting Brotherhood slogans on walls. A popular one declared: “God helps those who help themselves.”

The Brotherhood, from its early years, vacillated between an almost bourgeois mission of communal self-improvement and a radical strain of violence. Some of its members, like Moaz's grandfather, engaged in intellectual polemics. Others concentrated on more physical action, training secret militias and assassination cells. In Canal Zone villages, Brotherhood vigilantes were known to beat collaborators and enemies. In 1948 the group's “secret apparatus” killed Egypt's prime minister. The promise of violence always hovered close to its religious rhetoric, and its insistence on an Islamic way of life left little room for the majority of Egyptians, who were Christian, agnostic, or more secular Muslims. The Kamels, for instance, were Muslims through and through; they apologized to no one for their piety, but their personal faith supported a belief in a secular, civil state as passionate as the Brothers' commitment to an exclusionary state of God.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser took over Egypt and exiled the king in
1952, he experimented with the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally. He gave the Brothers freedom to organize, and considered including them in his government. But Nasser's Free Officers and the Muslim Brotherhood were destined to clash. Both movements were authoritarian, and both claimed exclusive province over the truth. In 1953, thousands of Brothers protested outside the presidential palace. One of their leaders met in the palace with Nasser and agreed to give the president time to meet the Brotherhood's demands. He stepped out of the palace, raised one hand, and the crowd fell silent. “Let's go,” he said, and the crowd dispersed instantly. In the telling most frequently repeated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser was far more discomfited by the show of disciplined obedience than he had been by the protest.

Within months, he began to round up Muslim Brothers. A gunman tried to assassinate Nasser during a speech; the plot was pinned on the Brotherhood, and the group was banned, its leaders thrown in prison. It was never clear whether the Brothers had tried to kill Nasser or whether the president had staged the attempt to boost his own popularity and create a pretext to sideline the Brotherhood. Either way, Nasser ended open politics for a generation. Tens of thousands of Egyptians were detained, many of them Brotherhood sympathizers and many of them incidental victims, like Basem Kamel's father. Moaz's grandfather continued to write for Muslim Brotherhood newspapers until the risk grew too great and he fled Egypt, eventually settling in Kuwait in 1964. Much of the Muslim Brotherhood elite in that era took refuge in the Gulf, where they prospered economically and were allowed to organize against Nasser so long as they didn't challenge the local monarchs.

Israel's total victory over the Arab armies in 1967 discredited politicians and military leaders, prompting a region-wide depression and then introspection. Faith flourished in the aftermath. A religious awakening spread. The language of religion flowed into the ideological void left by the raw failure of Arab nationalism, and Muslim Brothers across the Arab world established themselves not only as credible community activists in their clinics and engineering offices but also as exponents of the next big idea. Islam became the new public square. Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, encouraged the Brotherhood as a counterweight to Nasser loyalists.

Moaz's grandfather returned to Egypt from his exile in 1974 with his daughter Mona Hassan Mokhtar Hilal. He had done well there writing for a Brotherhood magazine called
al-Mujtama
(
The Community
). He owned a villa in Imbaba, the same poor outlying neighborhood where the Kamel family had lived in the 1960s. A decade had ruined the place. It was barely livable, congested with with new arrivals. The Islamist elite was more upwardly mobile than its Arab nationalist counterparts. While the Kamel family had to flee Imbaba for a remote satellite community in the desert, Moaz's family was able to leap up several rungs on the status ladder. Moaz's grandfather built a spacious apartment building in central Cairo, in the elite upper-middle-class neighborhood of Mohandiseen, the Engineer's Quarter. Mohandiseen hugged the Nile, a quick drive to downtown just across the river. The neighborhood was laid out carefully with curlicue streets and tree-filled medians. His daughter finished university, worked briefly as an Arabic teacher, and then met a diligent young math teacher and Brother named Abdelkarim Abdelfattah Mohammed. The families quickly agreed on the match. Moaz's parents married in 1979. Both of them had grown up in Brotherhood families, and the secret society bound them as much as their faith. They moved immediately to Saudi Arabia, not out of economic desperation but as a financial investment, so that they could return to Egypt better equipped to secure their children's livelihoods.

Back in Egypt, things took a turn for the worse. For forty years, the Arab states had agreed that no country would make a separate peace with Israel; their only leverage came from standing together with the Palestinians. Sadat broke that understanding, and signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978. President Jimmy Carter brokered the deal, which brought Egypt solidly into the fold as an American ally. From the moment he signed the agreement on the White House lawn, Sadat was marked. The Islamists that the president had let loose now turned against him. Alumni of one of the Brotherhood's more virulent strains plotted to kill the president, and in 1981 they succeeded. The crowded defendants' cage at the trial of Sadat's assassins contained the radicals who would go on to establish al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad. Again, Islamists of all sorts were rounded up, jailed, and tortured. Moaz's grandfather was detained
briefly. Under Sadat, the Brotherhood had been tolerated but never legalized, and Mubarak instructed his police to enforce the ban with renewed vigor. Once again the Islamist elite dispersed into exile, where it thrived in business and proselytization. The Brotherhood refined its message and expanded its web of business ventures.

Members of the Brotherhood honed a particular rhetorical style during their long discussions in the diaspora and inside Egyptian prisons. They nursed grudges against the Egyptian government and polished their idea of a more perfect Muslim society, led toward grace and vitality by a pious, driven, wheeling-and-dealing vanguard. They were free among themselves to argue about the responsibilities of a Muslim, about the kind of society they should build, about the Brotherhood's policies. No matter how spirited the arguments, however, once the group reached a decision, everyone had to support it unanimously. Every year after the hajj to Mecca, Muslim Brothers who had made their annual pilgrimage to the birthplace of Islam would then gather in nearby Jeddah and debate strategy. It was like a seasonal senate for the
umma
, the community of the faithful. Moaz's father, who taught math at university in Jeddah, met daily with his
usra,
or Brotherhood family. At the individual level, every member of the Brotherhood had an
usra
and a supervisor. The “family” studied Koran together, socialized, and acted as a support group. If a Brother needed help, he could turn to his
usra
as easily as to his blood relatives.

In 1984, in a momentous shift, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt decided to engage in democratic politics by running candidates for parliament for the first time. That same year, Moaz was born. The third of six siblings, he soon learned to depend on his own
usra
. When Moaz was still learning to read as a child in Jeddah, he would meet the children of other Muslim Brothers at the mosque after school. They played together and absorbed the stories of the Koran, building the bonds and values that were expected to define a Brother for life.

The Egypt to which Moaz's family returned in 1992 was at war. Fringe radicals from the Gamaa Islamiya, or Islamic Group, were fighting a full insurgency against Mubarak's “infidel” government. The Gamaa had tried to assassinate the interior minister (the immediate predecessor
of the hated, but long-serving, Habib el-Adly) and routinely attacked government officials. In 1995 the group tried to kill Mubarak himself during a state visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. These Islamists were the political descendants of Sadat's killers; most of them had passed through the Muslim Brotherhood but had since repudiated it as too moderate. The old neighborhood where the grandfathers of Moaz and Basem both had owned houses had now declared itself “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba,” and fighters attacked any security that tried to enter.

Hosni Mubarak responded with force and guile. The military had always been dominant, but now the Egyptian president lavished resources on the police. State Security sent thousands of agents to infiltrate every single organization in the country, from prayer circles, to unions, to community groups that taught literacy. The state added hundreds of thousands of citizens to its payroll as informants. Every single residential doorman had to report to State Security about the comings and goings in his building. In every café, a state agent listened for subversion. Phone lines were tapped, and the apartments of Muslim Brothers were bugged. When a group of Brothers reserved a ballroom for an
itfar
meal to break the Ramadan fast, they found the booking mysteriously cancelled after State Security had visited the hotel.

Initially, many Egyptians welcomed the policing-on-steroids. The Islamic insurgency came to be seen as nihilistic even by Islamist sympathizers. It was poison for the tourism industry, especially after gunmen rampaged through the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor in 1997, killing sixty-two foreign tourists and Egyptians. Mubarak's police jailed radicals and dissidents of all stripes. As a warning to others, they sodomized detainees with bottles. Beatings and electric shock were a routine part of interrogation. The Islamist insurgency underscored Mubarak's greatest selling point: stability. Nobody wanted to live in a war-torn Egypt, and Mubarak promised through his longevity and his security forces to keep the country safe. Given a glimpse of the alternative by the jihadis in Imbaba, many Egyptians preferred the president's deal. By 1998, the insurgency was over, and Mubarak enjoyed a rare and final moment of popularity. Had he allowed fair and competitive elections at that point, he probably would have won. But he concluded that his state had been
too lax, and he would never again permit an opening that might allow another challenge to his rule. He kept his new police force in place to balance out the military. That way, no single security branch could mount a coup.