Once Upon a Revolution Read online

  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.

  Back home in Cairo, Moaz immersed himself in an Egypt apart: Brotherhood Egypt. He went to private Islamic schools run by members of the group. They were segregated by gender and were ideologically homogenous: only Brothers and fellow travelers sent their children. These young Brothers learned to see themselves as an elect group empowered by their morality, their community works, their political program, and the inviolable links connecting their usra to the umma; each Brotherhood “family” of a half dozen was connected in an unbreakable chain to the Islamic community, represented by an international confederation of Brothers under the supreme guide’s ultimate authority.

  The Brotherhood didn’t have its own high schools, however, so as teenagers, Moaz and his confederates began their encounters with the rest of Egypt. Some found the world outside the Brotherhood bewildering or offensive; Moaz found it intoxicating. He loved arguing, persuading outsiders of the Brotherhood’s views rather than discoursing comfortably with the converted. He found the presence of females pleasant rather than threatening. The world at large was a bigger stage than the Brotherhood. As a sixteen-year-old in a gargantuan public high school with nearly eight thousand students, Moaz discovered a knack for leadership and activism. He established a Muslim Brotherhood student group, which prayed together at lunchtime. He was elected vice president of the school-wide student union. It was the year 2000, and Palestinians had begun the second intifada. Anti-Israel sentiment often served as a proxy for opposition to Mubarak, who, after all, was one of the Israeli government’s most important allies. Moaz organized solidarity teach-ins about the Palestinian cause. He shared copies of Muslim Brotherhood magazines smuggled into Egypt from the Gulf. This was exactly the sort of personal political initiative that Mubarak’s regime was committed to rooting out.

  The school principal stopped Moaz one day. “One of our friends wants to ask you some questions,” he said.

  “Who is our friend?” Moaz asked, perplexed.

  “Come,” the principal said.

  They sat in his office, where a man named Khaled joined them. He was an intelligence officer from State Security Investigations, known colloquially as State Security or, in Arabic, Amn al-Dawla. The agency’s local office shared a wall with the school. It was the most important arm of the deep state for policing Egyptians.

  “I want to ask you,” the smiling officer said, “who among you prays the most?”

  The Brotherhood had coached Moaz for such an eventuality; he was to answer only “No” and “I don’t know.” With his natural affability, Moaz relaxed and threw himself with pleasure into the interrogation.

  “I don’t know,” Moaz said.

  “Why do you support the Palestinians?”

  “Because we should participate in their struggle.”

  “What is your message to the youth?”

  “We say they should improve themselves,” Moaz replied. “They should behave with ethics. They should not harass girls from the nearby school.”

  The intelligence officer turned knowingly to the principal. “This is the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. Then he turned back to Moaz. “What do you think of life in Egypt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is your father?”

  “Saudi Arabia.”

  The State Security officer gave Moaz his phone number and instructed him to come by his office for tea.

  “I will come when I have time,” Moaz said, but he never did.

  The small number of Egyptians who chose to pique the regime’s interest, such as Moaz and his fellow Brothers, came to know well the intelligence officers assigned to them. They would refer to each of them as “my security guy.” Official pressure only emboldened Moaz; he was acting not only on his own conviction and with the natural contrarian spirit of a teenager, but also he was doing the bidding of the grand organization of which he was part. He was doing God’s work and Egypt’s too. It was a righteous mix. He was every bit as politicized as Basem Kamel was muzzled. By the time the al-Aqsa intifada in Palestine was in full swing in late 2000, Moaz had been elected president of the student union. He assembled a display with photographs from his grandfather’s magazine (the era of YouTube and Photoshop was still a few years away), which he laminated so it would be harder for officials to tear them up. He brought a Muslim Brother and a sheikh from Al-Azhar University, the most eminent institution of Sunni Islamic learning in the region, to address the student body. Moaz set an Israeli flag on fire in the school hallway. With his friends, he staged a play about an Islamic leader of the resistance against French colonialists a century earlier.

  When Moaz’s father returned from Saudi Arabia for a visit, security officers seized his passport at the airport. They summoned him for a not-so-friendly conversation about Moaz. “Tell him to quit the student union,” th
ey said. An eighteen-year-old’s schoolyard protests were a matter of the highest concern for Mubarak’s State Security. Moaz and his father met with the high school’s head teacher, who laid out the options and then turned to Moaz.

  “Choose,” the teacher said.

  “I came all the way from abroad, and I tell you to be responsible!” Moaz’s father shouted.

  “I made my choice because I think it is right,” Moaz said, not budging.

  “It is Moaz’s choice,” the teacher said.

  Moaz’s father kept trying to persuade him to quit the student union, but after the showdown at the school, he realized he couldn’t force his son.

  In the spring of his senior year, Moaz tasted tear gas and blood for the first time at a Cairo University protest in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada. He was clubbed by a police conscript and got stitches in his lip. His father wanted Moaz to concentrate on his education and told him to enroll in medical school or at least the hard sciences. Moaz wanted to study law, journalism, or political science.

  “Politics leads to prison, and the media is haram,” sinful, his father said. Moaz flunked all his science classes and tried to transfer to law school. Eventually father and son reached a compromise: Moaz enrolled in a private school of pharmacy. He was invited onto a state television program meant to fan anger about the American invasion of Afghanistan. “We should ask questions about life in our own country, not about the war in Afghanistan,” Moaz said. He was ordered off the set immediately. Since the program was taped, the subversive comments made it only as far as his expanding State Security file.

  He didn’t reserve his defiance only for the regime. Moaz impishly mocked the Brotherhood’s secretive paramilitary style. At one retreat for teenage members, a senior leader delivered a pointed lesson about obedience. After a long morning of lectures, he led his charges to a table of food. Everyone began to eat. Sternly, he stopped them. “Did I say the blessing?” he asked. “Did I give you permission to eat?” Sheepishly the young Brothers apologized.

  “Now, all of you, to the pool, in your clothes!” the leader commanded. It was a cold day, and the pool was outside. All the young Brothers jumped in the water except for Moaz.

  “Why are you dry?” the incredulous supervisor demanded.

  “You only specified that we go ‘to’ the pool, which I did,” Moaz said with his infectious smile. “You did not say ‘in’ the pool.” Somehow, his reflexive subversion didn’t get him tossed from the Brotherhood as he rose up its ranks.

  As he made his way through pharmacy school, politics consumed far more of Moaz’s attention than his studies did. He joined all the antiwar protests and took part in the antiwar conferences too. When his Brotherhood supervisor allowed it, he would march and fight the police, and sit for hours with the energetic youth activists from outside the Brotherhood. He assisted the presidential campaign of Ayman Nour. With other Brotherhood youth, he stood in solidarity protests with Kifaya.

  In 2005 Moaz worked for three parliamentary candidates, including the inflammatory Salafi preacher Hazem Salah Abou Ismail, who lived a few blocks from Moaz. It struck Moaz as odd for the Brotherhood to back a cleric with such extreme views. Sheikh Hazem had made his name filing lawsuits against Egyptians he considered sacrilegious or unpatriotic, and he was forever touting esoteric conspiracies, such as his claim that the American manufacturer of the soft drink Pepsi was behind a Zionist plot, with the name Pepsi an acronym for “Pay every penny to save Israel.” Moaz began to wonder whether his Brotherhood leaders were as reasonable as they claimed.

  At the end of 2005, the most important organizers in the Brotherhood were arrested, including Khairat el-Shater, the millionaire fixer who effectively ran the organization, and Mohamed Morsi, an internal enforcer. A few thousand rank-and-file members were detained as well, and many of them were tortured and released. The whole operation seemed like a calculated oiling of the machinery, a way for State Security to signal to the Brotherhood just how much latitude it had. In the wake of the arrests, Moaz’s supervisor told him to keep a low profile, but he ignored the instruction. He continued organizing with various leftists and Islamists. He was put on probation and ordered not to speak publicly as a Brother for a year. Moaz considered the penalty a suitable recognition of his zeal.

  The supreme guide was allowed an office in a smelly first-floor walk-up in a middle-class neighborhood on the Nile island of Manial. Visiting journalists and dignitaries had to run a gamut of State Security agents, ostentatiously lounging on plastic chairs out front, and then clamber over a pile of shoes on the landing. The leadership conferred around one end of a desk while the spokesman granted interviews a few feet away. Staffers noiselessly went about their work in the same room. The government made it clear that the Brotherhood operated at the state’s pleasure. The Brotherhood’s predicament aptly captured Mubarak’s governing style: there was to be just enough freedom so that the people didn’t rebel, and never enough so that they would be able to do so if they chose. Since 1981, Mubarak had told his people they were incapable of controlling themselves. They needed him to keep the peace. Millions had believed, and now they lived in an overcrowded, underfunded republic of perhaps ninety million people, with no discernible threat to the regime and yet no discernible dividend for such a massive communal sacrifice.

  Moaz worked in a pharmacy and, during his days off, for the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guidance Bureau in Manial. His primary task was to connect with other youth groups, which often meant long hours drinking soda pop in the cafés of Boursa, a pedestrian district behind the stock exchange. In 2008 State Security ransacked Moaz’s family home at 34 Sudan Street in Mohandiseen, scattering clothes and papers all over the floor. Moaz’s mother was apoplectic over the invasion of privacy. The family owned the entire six-story building, and Moaz agreed to move to an independent apartment so that his political work wouldn’t incriminate the rest of his family.

  In December 2008, Israel launched a three-week attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. On the tenth of Ramadan, at the beginning of September 2009, Moaz traveled to Gaza in a caravan meant to demonstrate solidarity. He couldn’t escape the parallels between Palestinian life under occupation and Egyptian life under Mubarak, and even his own subjugation as a Muslim Brother to the supreme guide. “We cannot serve the organization at the expense of the organization’s principles,” Moaz told one of his traveling companions, a young Brotherhood webmaster named Abdelrahman Ayyash. This belief would come to define them both. Moaz lost count of the number of times he was detained. The Muslim Brotherhood leadership could often muster a quorum in Egypt’s infarmous Tora Prison, where all the most notorious criminals and political detainees served their time. Still, while the Brotherhood became practiced at resistance, the vast majority of Egyptians remained silent and uninvolved.

  The Brotherhood mirrored the authoritarian regime that it hoped one day to replace. Mubarak squashed the faintest hint of legitimate challenge from the secular space, while the Brotherhood hewed to the limits established for it. Eventually, the Supreme Guidance Bureau believed it would rule Egypt. Time and God were on its side. Anticipating the day when it would be legalized, the Brotherhood published a draft political platform in 2007, with several revisions in the years that followed. It offered a glimpse of how the Brotherhood would govern if it had untrammeled power. It would prohibit women and Christians from holding the Egyptian presidency, and it would empower Muslim clerics to vet laws. These views terrified secular Egyptians and irritated young Brotherhood members, including Moaz. “I have a religion,” he liked to say. “But a state cannot have a religion any more than a chair can have a religion.”

  Meanwhile, Mubarak, who turned eighty in 2008, disappeared for months at a time while undergoing medical treatment abroad, and was rumored to suffer from cancer. Generals expressed concern that Gamal would succeed his father in the presidency; they didn’t like this young businessman who had surrounded himself with corrupt magnates and, moreover
, never had served as a military officer. Interior minister Habib el-Adly controlled the police and State Security, and was beginning to be perceived as the most powerful man in Egypt. Fragmentation among the elite intimated a wider crack-up to come.

  Younger Brothers like Moaz regarded the Brotherhood’s wait-and-see pose with distaste. When workers organized the famous Mahalla strike of April 6, 2008, they wanted to join, but the Brotherhood leaders refused. “Those people are struggling for our rights,” Moaz declared. “We should join them.” Like the secular youth, the young Brothers were beginning to grasp the possibility that the regime was not invincible; that they could have a say in their nation’s fate. Moaz was arrested again in March 2010 and was severely beaten. Afterward, he wrote a detailed account on his blog, which was titled “I Love the Brotherhood, O State Security!” He advised detainees to keep careful records of their interrogations and imprisonments. “We can take our rights,” he wrote. “Once there is a revolution, all these officers will be the ones who go to prison.” Each tremor in 2010 contributed to a cascade: ElBaradei’s petition, the murder of Khaled Said, the violent rebuff of striking workers. Political energy was also flowing out of the soccer fan clubs known as “ultras.” Like their counterparts around the soccer-loving world, the ultras often sought to rumble with police after matches. ElBaradei’s activists and the Brothers presented millions of signatures from people willing to publish their dissent and risk official retaliation. But the regime ignored them completely.