Once Upon a Revolution Read online

  Baby Basem had been conceived in a time of faltering expectations. By the time he’d learned to walk, his parents had scaled down their hopes. They would build their home in the desert, and they would send their kids to school, but they no longer believed that Cairo would join Paris and London among world capitals, or that their sons were destined to enjoy the same upward mobility their parents had.

  In order to maintain his own family in Cairo, Basem’s father had to leave them behind in Helwan and depart once more to Saudi Arabia. He worked abroad in Jeddah for a second decade to pay for the house in Wadi Hof. It was a common trajectory for millions of Egyptians of all classes. As he grew older, Basem also mimicked his father’s studious avoidance of public life. It was, after all, the harmless and well-intentioned act of joining the Boy Scouts that had turned Mohamed Kamel into a political prisoner; the lesson was that no act was too insignificant to avoid. Basem steered clear of the student union at school.

  In 1981 President Anwar Sadat was assassinated live on television during a ceremony commemorating the October 1973 war against Israel. Hosni Mubarak had been standing beside the president. He was immediately sworn in to succeed Sadat, still spattered with his blood. Steady, handsome, and not particularly bright, Mubarak seemed at first the perfect antidote to three decades of larger-than-life dictators. Nasser had sculpted a new Egypt, which Sadat had shoved into the age of capitalism. Perhaps Mubarak, a methodical former air force general, could offer a respite so that Egyptians could catch their breath.

  In the Kamel household, the violent transfer of power—the last that Egypt would witness for three decades—was observed mostly by an absence of remark. The television stayed on after the footage of murder and pandemonium, but this was authoritarian state broadcasting, not latter-day cable; instead of news coverage, the government played a loop of patriotic music, and announced a mourning period. “No school for a week!” Basem exulted. No further political implications were discussed.

  In the popular imagination, Mubarak was a provincial buffoon, cautious and devoid of ideology. In the quintessential joke, Mubarak’s presidential limo reaches an intersection.

  “Which way shall we go, sir?” the driver inquires.

  “Which way would Nasser have turned?” Mubarak asks.

  “Always left,” comes the answer.

  “And Sadat?”

  “Always right.”

  Mubarak sighs. “Just don’t move.”

  For all his apparent mediocrity, Mubarak shrewdly solidified one-man rule. He waited until he had enough loyalists, and then, in 1987, he fired his only powerful and charismatic rival, defense minister Adel Halim Abu Ghazala. Mubarak won the trust of Washington, and in 1990 he joined the rest of the Arab world in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. With that, Egypt returned to the region’s good graces, despite its peace treaty with Israel. Stability was restored. No waves of prosperity, but no major shocks either. Mubarak’s portrait decorated billboards everywhere. His police stood at every corner. The state wanted Egyptians to know they were being watched, not because Mubarak enjoyed the power, but for the people’s own good. Basem learned that families could speak carefully at home, in private, about some of the state’s failures. Within reason and within limits. They talked about the lack of jobs and the excess of debt, but not about the fact that independent political parties had been illegal since the 1950s. They talked about the fact that certain powerful families close to the regime seemed to grow richer and richer through each period of alleged reform, but not about the glaringly obvious connection of this rotten state of affairs to the one man who now held all the power: President Hosni Mubarak.

  The second generation to come of age expecting some practical reward in exchange for the absence of political rights realized that the Arab authoritarian compact was a con. Egyptians had been told they were exchanging freedom for personal prosperity and national power. Instead, they found themselves in a Potemkin republic, crowded into unplanned apartments on narrow lanes, their grown children unemployable in Egypt whether they had a master’s degree or merely a strong back.

  Basem had grown taller than his father by the time he finished high school, but he had the same even-keeled demeanor. Together they agreed that he should seek admittance to Cairo University’s engineering faculty, even though it would require several extra years of courses and part-time work after high school. It was a sound, reasonable plan. Engineers could always find work, in Egypt or, if necessary, abroad.

  Basem loved to walk through Wust el-Balad, the historic downtown, scrutinizing the ornate turn-of-the-century buildings of old Cairo. His family’s new home, like most of modern Egypt, was an improvised necessity, built with regard only for cost. Aesthetics were a luxury. Cairo and Egypt were awash in the ugly because the ugly was cheap and practical. Nonetheless, Basem nurtured a quiet dream of everyday beauty that was in everyone’s reach. He saw glimpses of it in the elegant wall of the Citadel, a bequest of Islamic Cairo’s glory age that began in the twelfth century; in the Hanging Church in Coptic Cairo, once a Nile-side village and now a metro stop between Tahrir Square and Wadi Hof; in the pyramids; and in the carefully orchestrated container gardens that families like his cultivated on stoops and balconies barely a few meters square. He resolved to work as an architect, where at least he would control some aspect of his environment, shape some slice of Egypt, and inject a few lines of harmony and joy into the day.

  After four years of trying, Basem secured a spot studying architecture. With a prestigious trade and an apartment in the family bloc in Wadi Hof, Basem made an appealing match. He was ready to start a family. Following a common practice for marriage, he proposed to his first cousin Rasha Lutfy. Rasha loved Basem. He made her laugh, and she considered him a promising partner. She accepted immediately. After he graduated from university and finished his obligatory year of military service, the couple signed their marriage contract, moved into the first-floor flat on Street 32, and had their first child.

  Basem found a job with a firm that built hotels and other commercial buildings in the Sinai. The pay was good, it offered room for advancement, and it was scarcely a six-hour drive away. He would be able to visit his wife most weekends, a great improvement on his father’s lot a few decades earlier, when the only acceptable jobs were across the Red Sea. His dutiful course forward had been charted. With hard work and a little luck, he could expect in two more decades to be able to build another ramshackle apartment building, another hour farther out in the desert, for his own children, and, barring catastrophe, they’d be able to leapfrog up a level and become doctors.

  Mindful of his pact with Egypt to keep his head down, Basem worked every waking moment, starting in the early morning and often not stopping until midnight. He loved being in charge of every detail of a building project: the exacting plans, the demands of the client, the unpredictability of the construction. He particularly enjoyed his days on building sites, where he interacted with men of every social class and background. He had a knack for putting people around him at ease, whether it was a Cairo businessman who was financing a project, a Bedouin tribal leader from the Sinai, a fellow engineer, or one of the multitudes of foremen and workers.

  After six years of commuting from the Sinai, Basem found a job in Cairo. Each night around ten o’clock he would return home, calling first on his parents on the ground floor and then dining upstairs with his wife, who always waited for him. They had two daughters and a son. Year by year, he saved a bit of money for them and beautified the apartment room by room. At the same time, he numbly watched Mubarak’s rule descend into farce, as if it were a televised documentary about some other country.

  Across the border, Israel was crushing the al-Aqsa intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising that had started in September 2000. Egyptians marched in solidarity with the Palestinians, and Mubarak’s police roamed among them with truncheons and tear gas. University students opposed the simultaneous American invasion of Afghanistan that fall, and hundreds of
thousands joined them in the streets. Two years later, America invaded Iraq, more people filled the streets, and more riot police rained down upon them. The regime seemed willing to allow some street protests, so long as no one chanted against Mubarak; it was a kind of steam valve to release societal anger in a harmless way. No one thought about how this activity would affect the popular imagination, expanding the frontier of the possible. People saw what it looked like when they took a street, and they began to understand the elemental math of revolt and regime control. These demonstrations offered a glimpse of how an uprising might look.

  Adding to the popular sense of insult and provocation, the president was openly positioning the younger of his two sons, Gamal, to take control of the ruling party. A Westernized banker nicknamed Jimmy, the anointed heir was known to have scooped enormous amounts from the public treasury through kickbacks and corrupt privatizations of state industries. Citizens took pride in the fact that Egypt was a republic, not a Pharaonic dynasty. Yet Hosni Mubarak appeared ready to shred this last vestige of dignity, machinating to bequeath Egypt to his son as if this nation of ninety million, the wellspring of civilization, were just another banana republic. Tawreeth, the word for “inheritance,” became the call to action for a small rebellion that flourished within the shrinking middle class. Even the military and the secular elite that had most benefited from Mubarak detested the notion of hereditary rule. Since the end of the monarchy, three men had ruled Egypt, and all of them could plausibly claim to have risen on merit from poverty to the top echelons of the military, and all of them could boast passably heroic combat records.

  Who was Jimmy Mubarak? A spoiled second son who’d been given the keys to the Egyptian economy, which he had proceeded to loot with his circle of industrialist friends. Egypt’s remaining success story was the tiny plutocratic sliver of the population, the only beneficiaries of Jimmy Mubarak’s economic reforms. Rich by any country’s standards, they had fled the capital into gated communities beyond the Ring Road, their own private Cairos with unwittingly self-parodying names like Mirage City. Everything about Egypt was slowly declining, and it began to feel inevitable that Mubarak would pass the state to Gamal, leaving no possibility for a course correction.

  In 2002 an antiwar conference in Cairo brought together for the first time ideologically opposed groups that had traditionally squabbled or ignored one other. Secular and Islamist youth began talking together about Mubarak’s inequities, sparking feelings of outrage and solidarity that Mubarak’s police state had worked hard to keep from taking root. They were joined by all the major political groups in Egypt: communists, socialists, Arab nationalists, Muslim Brothers, and others. After the conference, they began to attend one another’s tiny protests. From the older elite, a small but eloquent group of judges, union leaders, intellectuals, and Brothers spoke openly against Mubarak’s plans to hand Egypt to his son. They spawned a vigorous independent judges’ movement, as well as a bold citizens’ group called Kifaya (“Enough”). Kifaya’s founders included Abdelrahman Youssef, the intellectual who later would invite Basem Kamel into the ranks of dissidents, and a who’s who of the critical elite.

  Basem admired Kifaya but never considered joining. Their protests drew no more than a few hundred people. The regime would send thousands of riot police to surround them, and the effect was smothering. Passersby couldn’t even see the protesters behind the phalanx of black-clad Central Security Forces and their Plexiglas shields. For good measure, the Security Forces would beat the protesters without provocation, chasing them away with sticks, often tearing the clothes off the women and groping them. The official Kifaya organization showed both the promise and the limitations of the Egyptian people’s opposition. Kifaya’s members bravely challenged the increasingly despotic regime, shaming Mubarak and his son by name. But they could agree on only one thing: Mubarak was evil. No common vision for the future united them. At the time, it seemed that Kifaya’s defiant message wasn’t reaching many Egyptians. The effort seemed marginal and ineffectual. But the activists had shattered taboos and glimpsed a possibility of their own power. They were learning tactics and making connections.

  Under American pressure, Mubarak allowed challengers in the 2005 presidential election. A preening lawyer and member of parliament named Ayman Nour dared to run, winning 8 percent of the vote. For his effrontery, Nour was thrown in prison on fabricated charges of forging signatures on his original campaign petitions. Harried and bruised, the Kifaya and judges’ movements seemed to fade. The streets were quiet again. But something major had shifted. Although only a tiny number of activists had taken part in the events of 2005 and 2006, a major barrier had fallen. Islamist and secular activists had become friends, and had stood together against police. When thousands of Muslim Brothers were detained in those two years, secular lawyers defended them. Connections were formed between groups such as the Revolutionary Socialists and the left-wing Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, or the liberal Democratic Front and the Muslim Brotherhood. Friendships followed. They all struggled with the question of how to secure daily bread for the overwhelming majority of Egyptians who lived week to week. They shared a growing concern over the erosion of liberties in a republic whose president had invoked a state of emergency and suspended the constitution continuously since 1967. Under perpetual military rule with emergency power, the state could detain people without charge and try civilians before military tribunals. Heavy policing limited the demonstrations, but the relationships among the protesters deepened.

  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.”