Once Upon a Revolution Read online

  At architecture school, Basem had studied with the pioneers of contemporary Arab aesthetics. He designed ecological dwellings inspired by Egypt’s native flora and landscape: modern homes with echoes of the mud hut, the papyrus reed, the desert slope. No one wanted to build them, so Basem settled for the kind of architecture that earned a living wage: cheap, ugly concrete blocks as tall and densely packed as the authorities would allow. He confined his artistic pursuits to watching television specials on Vincent van Gogh and Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect.

  He took pride in showing up early for meetings, which made him an oddity in Egypt. He strode rather than walked, erect, with an expression of purpose. Basem was taller and slimmer than most men. He cropped his goatee and receding head of hair to the same stubble length, accentuating his oversized oval head. Because of his light skin and soft hazel-brown eyes, people sometimes mistook him for a foreigner. On special occasions he went tieless, wearing fine shirts with the tails fluttering out, a blazer over his jeans, and, weather permitting, loafers without socks. Basem looked the part, but it didn’t change the fact that upward mobility had ended for the Kamel family in 1980, as it had for most of Egypt. As an adult, Basem Kamel toiled sixteen hours a day at the architecture firm that he’d founded and that supported most of his extended family. He worked longer hours than his father, though the family’s standard of living had distinctly fallen a notch.

  One day in 1999, a worker fell from the second-floor scaffolding at a construction site that Basem was supervising in the Sinai. The man’s head was mangled; his spine broken. At the hospital, the doctors refused to treat the worker unless Basem paid in advance out of his own pocket. Wheelchair-bound, the laborer never was able to work again. There was no social security, no state pension, so he fed his family by begging. He was Basem’s age, hardworking, with children. “If this happened to me, what would I do?” Basem thought. “What would happen to my kids? One accident, and my family would become beggars too.” President Hosni Mubarak had possessed all power for nearly two decades. If such a fragile thread separated a bread-winning man from utter destitution, then Mubarak was responsible, and Mubarak had failed. He had to go, and after the accident, Basem was willing to say so to his workers and friends. So long as he never did anything about it, his feeble protest went unpunished.

  With a preemptive expectation of defeat, Basem Kamel watched on television in 2005 when a group of Egyptians organized under the Kifaya banner to say “Enough!” and voice their disgust with Mubarak. “They seem like fine people,” he told his wife as they sat beneath the low ceiling of their sitting room. “I respect them. But don’t they realize that they cannot change anything? This system is too strong.” Five years later, he read in the newspaper that Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize–winning diplomat, was pondering a return to Egypt to run for president against Mubarak. Basem had hardly remembered that the renowned Arab statesman was Egyptian. Maybe ElBaradei had the stature to make something happen in Egypt. After midnight, when he had dined with his wife after a long day with clients at a building site, Basem turned to the internet. He grew excited as he read. He found a Facebook group that was preparing for ElBaradei’s return, but not at ElBaradei’s request. These Egyptians were taking their own initiative. The organizer was a well-known intellectual named Abdelrahman Youssef, son of the megacelebrity television preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This Abdelrahman Youssef was famous in his own right for his poetry, for openly taking on Mubarak, and for breaking with his own father to criticize the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Basem skulked on the Facebook group, reading the postings with growing alacrity. The members weren’t cloaked in anonymity. They clearly didn’t care that the ubiquitous secret police could read their subversive critiques and plans. One day the ElBaradei group advertised a meeting in a downtown office. Intrigued, Basem sent a short message to the online administrator.

  “Is it safe?” he asked.

  The reply was terse. “The country is dying,” Abdelrahman Youssef wrote back. “Do as you see fit.”

  No entreaties, no assurances. Basem thought of his father, whose advice had never wavered over the decades. “Think of your work and nothing else,” Basem’s father always told his children. “Politics and activism lead only to prison.”

  For his entire life, Basem had embarked on his projects wholly or not at all. With method and devotion, he had courted his first cousin and childhood playmate; he had ascended to a respectable position as an architect and developer; and he had brought three children to the cusp of adulthood. He didn’t want to jeopardize all those accomplishments. Nor, however, did he want to pass to his children an eroding Egypt and an example as passive as that of his own father. As he pondered the online Facebook message from a man he had never met, Basem Kamel grew pregnant with the secret: The country is dying. Do what you must. Do what you must. Forty years of frustration crystallized in a day. All at once, Basem could not imagine forgoing the meeting and its inevitable chain of consequences. For he had never done anything by the teaspoon. And now, he knew, he would do this. For four decades, he had devoted his entire life to securing a single acre for his family. For one probably hopeless meeting, Basem Kamel could easily end up like countless other Egyptians before him: in prison, unemployable, and useless to his family. But the opportunity had beckoned for something greater than this pittance on the fringes of Cairo: a real inheritance for his children, an Egypt that belonged to them or, failing that, a father who dared object to a dreary lifetime of defeat. He told his plan only to his youngest brother, so someone would know where to start looking if Basem never came home.

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

  3.

  ENOUGH

  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 fo
reign 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, te
ntatively, 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.