Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (10 page)

All was not forgiven by either side, for sure. But both felt a sense of loss.

In the end, Hamas understood that it had only achieved a military victory over Fatah. Neither party had achieved a political monopoly in either territory. Indeed, since the 2006 election, Fatah had gained politically in Gaza as life deteriorated under Hamas rule, while Hamas had made gains in the West Bank because Fatah still refused to clean up its act.
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The Palestinians have always been a harbinger of political trends in the Middle East. They showed that the Arabs did have a thirst for open political societies. And they proved that the Arabs were capable of holding robust and free multiparty elections.

But the first eighteen months of the Palestinian experiment with democracy also reflected the volatility of change and, after decades without freedom, the passions that can be unleashed in a free vote.

The Turning Points

H
owever powerful the forces of history, the precise catalysts of change are often unpredictable. So, too, are its agents.

To understand how change is picking up momentum in the Middle East, I went to see Ghada Shahbender in Cairo. At age forty-two, Shahbender was a middle-aged soccer mom with four teenagers. She had never voted, never joined a party, never even signed up for one of Egypt’s little pink voting cards. She was, in that way, typically Egyptian. By law, everyone over the age of eighteen is required to vote. But, for decades, more than seventy percent of Egyptians did not bother to cast a ballot for anything.

“I didn’t believe in Egypt’s elections or referendums—or the whole political process,” Shahbender explained the first time we met in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo in early 2006. “It was all fake.”

Yet, virtually overnight, Shahbender had become one of the new faces of change in Egypt, the most important country in the Arab world.

Egypt’s extraordinary history, its regional might, and its sheer bulk—one out of every four Arabs today is an Egyptian—make it the leading trendsetter among the twenty-two Arab countries. It is the heart and intellectual center of the Arab world, reflected in one of my favorite sayings about the region: “Books are written in Egypt, printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.”

Egypt has the clout to bestow legitimacy on any idea—and to change the direction of the region. In shaping the Middle East over the past century, Egypt rallied other Arabs to make war on Israel, but could then defy Arab sentiment to make peace with its Jewish neighbor. In shaping politics inside Arab countries for the next century, what happens among Egyptians will again have the greatest influence in defining the path and pace of change.

I called on Shahbender at an unmarked ground-floor apartment that had been converted into a makeshift office and equipped—down to the glasses—by donations from friends. She is a slim woman with an easy demeanor. Her tawny brown hair has the casually smart cut of privilege, and she was wearing a thin beige turtleneck to ward off the winter chill. We sat around an old table in the dining nook of the apartment that served as a conference area. Cradling one of the donated glasses, which was filled with a milky coffee, Shahbender told me her story as if she did not quite believe what was happening to her life.

“I graduated from university, got married, had my first child, then twins, then a fourth child, all in six years,” she explained. “I was convinced that the best thing I could do was to give these kids a good education, support my husband in his career, work hard at whatever job—I worked different jobs due to the kids—and I’d be fulfilling my parental, civic, social, and national duties.”

The turning point for her was May 25, 2005, a day that symbolized Egypt at a crossroads. Under pressure both at home and from abroad, Egypt began to dabble in the subject of political change in 2005. To start off a big election year, President Hosni Mubarak offered to let Egyptians vote on who would elect their leader—a rubber-stamp parliament, as it had been done for a half century, or the people. If the referendum passed in May, Egyptians would go to the polls in September to choose for the first time among multiple presidential candidates, and then return to the polls to elect a new parliament, in three stages based on geographic location, in November and December.

The referendum was supposed to signal Mubarak’s willingness to open up politically after twenty-four years of unchallenged rule. But the offer was not all it seemed: To nominate a presidential candidate, a party would have to already hold five percent of the seats in both houses of the People’s Assembly and to have been legal—or licensed by Mubarak’s government—for at least five years. Independent candidates would need endorsements from at least 230 elected officials. And specific quotas of support would be required from the national legislature as well as local city councils.

Most parties, including the largest opposition movement, could not meet those conditions.

So the fledgling new Egyptian dissident movement Kefaya, which means “Enough,” organized a demonstration to coincide with the May 25 referendum. Its protest in downtown Cairo was to demand more meaningful democratic reforms.

Shahbender was not interested in either the election or the protest. “I thought, ‘Really, what difference would either of these events make?’” she told me, with a shrug. “What difference could I make?” So on referendum day, she instead went to hand in her final term paper.

With her marriage failing, Shahbender had gone back to school to qualify to teach English as a foreign language. She was submitting the paper when her cell phone rang.

“It was a friend, a journalist, and she was so upset I could barely understand her,” Shahbender recalled. “She was at the Kefaya rally, and there was a lot of noise.”

The protest, her friend reported, had disintegrated into a melee. A large group of thugs had descended on the crowd, as police stood watching, and begun to beat protesters.

In Egypt, “thugs” is the widely accepted euphemism for the well-muscled young men, usually dressed in dark but informal clothing, who turn up conveniently at protests or polling stations to contain the opposition, always without leaving visible government connections. I saw them show up twice in one week at two small rallies where protesters were already grossly outnumbered by police. Some of them had short but thick truncheons in their hands. Without saying a word, the police stepped aside to let the thugs into the cordon and then watched, either ordered or mesmerized into inaction, as the thugs raised their arms and began beating people.

But the attack on May 25 was different. The thugs had gone after only the women, Shahbender’s friend told her. Females old and young had been groped, beaten, mauled, and then had their clothes ripped off. Her friend, a journalist who was covering the event, was also man-handled and hurt. Police failed to intervene even after women were dragged down the street partially unclothed.

Shahbender could only listen. “I wasn’t sure what to tell her. I had to go to a farewell lunch for the wife of the Libyan envoy to the Arab League. Many Egyptian women, educated women, working women, and ambassadors’ wives were sitting around discussing the referendum on the presidency, and they were making jokes about it.

“Then I thought of my friend at the demonstration,” Shahbender recalled, “and I left the lunch and walked through the park. It’s one of the most Egyptian parts of Cairo. You look out and see the Citadel and the City of the Dead.”

The medieval Citadel was built by Saladin, a hero for many Arabs even though he was actually a Kurd, not an Arab, born in what is today Iraq. Saladin ruled and revitalized Egypt and then forced European Crusaders to retreat from Jerusalem in the twelfth century, ending almost ninety years of Christian control of the Holy Land. For the next eight centuries, the massive walled fortress he built in Cairo continued to be the center of Egypt’s government; it remains the capital’s most prominent landmark today. In the twenty-first century, Egyptians and other Arabs also still talk about how much they need another Saladin to lead the Arab world.

The nearby City of the Dead is a cemetery, or rather several of them that have grown together to form a virtual suburb of graves and dusty mausoleum chambers. Because of Cairo’s chronic housing shortage, the City of the Dead has also become home to more than one million of the living, mainly the destitute and people who have created jobs as grave-tenders.

Together, the two landmarks represent Egypt’s former greatness and its chronic current woes.

“I was standing there, looking around, and I kept thinking: What is happening to Egypt? And why did they go after the women?” Shahbender recalled, shaking her head.

“I went home, turned on the television, and was immediately hit with the images from the demonstration. I saw one of the women dragged down the street and clothes pulled off her and onlookers doing nothing. I saw police open barricades to allow the thugs to go in,” she said, pausing in the narrative.

“Of course, it was on al Jazeera and CNN and Fox, not Egyptian television. There are so many satellite stations—thank God for the open skies. I kept switching around and seeing the same thing,” she added, pulling her hand through shoulder-length hair.

“My children were there. I turned on the Internet to see if we could get updates, and that’s when I was slapped in the face because of my children’s reaction. My daughter said, ‘Why do you get so upset? We can’t do anything about it. People are harassed every day.’ And my son Abdelazziz said, ‘Why were the women there anyway?’”

“I was very upset, really, and I told them, ‘This is a violation of our norms, values, and beliefs—and it’s on television. The entire world is watching it. It’s unacceptable. Would you accept this being done to your sister or being in her place? We sat there arguing forever,” Shahbender continued.

“And then I found myself saying, ‘Well, I
can
do something about it,’” she recalled, shrugging as if she were still not sure where the thought had come from.

The next day, the government announced that the referendum passed with over eighty percent approval—of those who had turned out to vote. It claimed that just over one half of registered Egyptian voters participated, although every Egyptian voter, nonvoter, election analyst, and foreign diplomat I talked to dismissed the official numbers and said the turnout, again, was a distinct minority. There were no independent monitors.

The referendum was supposed to mark a turning point that gave Egyptians more of a stake in politics by directly electing their president. But throughout Cairo—a city where satellite dishes crowd rooftops, bringing al Jazeera and other foreign news programs even into the City of the Dead—the public buzz was instead about the attack on Egypt’s women. The abuse had crossed a threshold.

In the end, the vote set in motion a chain of events that certainly politicized Egyptians, but not in the way Mubarak’s government intended.

Among the movements born out of the May 25 confrontation were The Street Is Ours movement and the Egyptian Mothers’ Association. The new groups called for a day of public mourning on June 1, one week after the referendum. Urging women to mass at the site of the original demonstration, the mothers dubbed their event Black Wednesday and called on everyone in Egypt to wear black to mark it. They also demanded the resignation of Egypt’s powerful interior minister, the top official in charge of both elections and internal security. Their statement was unusually blunt.

The day after the referendum, Shahbender also contacted friends to figure out what they could do too. They initially thought small, very small.

“All we wanted was a government apology for the brutality,” she told me. Piggybacking on the other movements, they set about making thousands of little white lapel ribbons to symbolize their demand.

“We said, ‘Wear your ribbons on Black Wednesday but also when you go to work or go shopping or take your kids to the zoo—whatever you’re doing and even if you’re not going to the demonstration,” Shahbender explained.

Shahbender smiled as she recalled the images. “On Black Wednesday, I put on my black dress and my white ribbon. I’d never been to a demonstration. It was a huge learning experience for me. I had to go through lines of security officers to join it,” she said. “I didn’t know how it was going to turn out—whether I’d get beaten up or whether it’d be quiet.”

“When I got in, an elderly woman turned to me and said she thought I was new and did I have 100 [Egyptian] pounds,” she recalled.

“‘Why 100 pounds?’ I asked her.”

“She told me: ‘That’s what you need for bail,’” Shahbender recalled.

“At times it was very scary, and at other moments it was exhilarating—just for the fact that 500 people bothered to show up. By our standards, that’s big.”

Emergency law, a sporadic feature of Egyptian life since 1967, has been in force continuously since the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. It is Egypt’s equivalent of martial law, and it requires any group of more than five people to get a government permit if they want to hold a meeting. The government sometimes looks the other way when events are aimed at regional crises—expressions of support for the Palestinians or against the invasion of Iraq. But any group of more than five who meets to discuss Egyptian politics faces arrest. For decades, emergency law has smothered political life in Egypt more than any other instrument of repression.

Although it was illegal, Black Wednesday went off without incident. But the next day, reality hit. “People who had supported us called and said, ‘So you haven’t gotten an apology. What are you going to do next?’ It was like they expected something from us,” Shahbender added, pushing her glasses up onto her head.