Once Upon a Revolution (21 page)

One could imagine Egypt gathered like an extended family in its mansion the day after the patriarch's death. Everyone scheming, chaos coursing below the surface, but open conflict still just over the horizon. In September the SCAF was focused on the established quantities: in private meetings, generals sought understandings with leaders from the Muslim Brotherhood and from all the known liberal parties. Bolder forces were beginning to assert themselves: on the left, new labor, tired of impossibly low wages and the sycophantic leadership of their state-selected unions; and on the right, the Salafi Islamists, charismatic theocrats with dreams of a literal faith imposed on a wayward society.

Workers on strike all over the country had prosaic concerns. They were lucky to be employed but were forced to support families on $100 or $200 a month. They didn't disparage the revolutionary youth and their preoccupation with deracinating the
nidham
, or the system, but they
wanted a “Revolution of the Hungry,” not a political one. “The workers aren't afraid of being dragged before military courts,” Kamal Khalil told me. He led the Workers Democratic Party and all along had argued that without mass strikes, Egypt's oppressive martial system would remain intact. “If the strikes are strong, the military won't be able to stop them.”

Teachers across the country were on strike, threatening not to begin the school year. They wanted an end to the feudal system that paid them $100 a month and encouraged them to supplement their income by withholding instruction in the classroom and charging extra for it in private after-school tutorials. In Mahalla, where years before Tahrir Square the textile workers had scaled the wall of fear, independent unions now demanded regime change. Outside the defunct parliament, hundreds of striking bus drivers demanded better wages, showing every passerby the pay stubs in their hands that chronicled their subsistence. Even more than the habitual Tahrir protesters, these workers were aware that the SCAF had formally criminalized all strikes and demonstrations with a rarely enforced March 2011 decree. The workers knew that they, more than the students and the political activists, faced the risk of arrest or loss of livelihood. They wanted more money, and they also wanted more dignity, symbolized by their demand for uniforms. A young driver showed me his monthly haul: $60, significantly lower than the average Egyptian monthly income of $270. A veteran nearly twice his age teased him: “Work another nineteen years like me, and you'll get up to a hundred twenty dollars.” “Wages and prices are out of balance in Egypt,” said Adel Mahmoud, a driver with a missing front tooth and a soft, diffident voice. “We're just demanding our bread.”

The Salafis, meanwhile, were agitating for a “Revolution of God.” They spoke in more urgent, aggressive tones than either the secular workers or the faithful Muslim Brothers. A special level of repression had been reserved for Egypt's Salafis under the old regime, and not without reason: their ranks had spawned an international elite of jihadi extremists. Fanatical Egyptian Salafis had murdered President Anwar Sadat; they had helped found and lead al-Qaeda; they had led an overt war against the Egyptian state in the 1990s; and they had surfaced in violent plots and movements around the world. Unleashed into politics by the Tahrir
Revolution's clean slate, Salafi preachers and leaders careered into the political arena with the wind of millions of animated, passionate, and maximalist followers at their backs. If Egypt was in the throes of a family succession, the Muslim Brotherhood would have been the patient elder son who had served his apprenticeship and was sure that if he was willing to wait and show respect, he would succeed the father. The Salafi movement was the youngest sibling: perhaps a little more sharp and clever than the older brothers, and definitely at the peak of his physical vigor. In the hotheaded tradition of youth, he interpreted the world in absolutes and was willing to use force in service of his ardent ideals.

Their presidential contender was Sheikh Hazem Salah Abou Ismail, who preached on television and every Saturday night at his neighborhood mosque in Dokki, the West Cairo neighborhood. He drew thousands of young male followers so inspired by his words that they identified themselves as Hazemoon, partisans of Hazem, which had an added ring because it also meant “the determined ones.” To the alarm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian liberals alike, the man's candidacy was viable; there were scenarios in which this antediluvian cleric could succeed Mubarak. Sheikh Hazem was the kind of guy who could be found on YouTube decrying modern women gone wild or suggesting that if Egyptians saved their change and planted crops in the desert, their beggared nation could become economically self-sufficient in a couple of years.

Hazem Salah was fat, with a beatific smile and a ragged Salafi beard, and he said all the kinds of things that drove liberals into an anticlerical frenzy and made incremental Islamists like the Muslim Brothers terrified that they would lose all the most fervent religious youth to irresponsible fundamentalist clerics. He drove his followers to ecstasy. His central slogan declared simply, “By sharia, we shall live with dignity.” Sharia, the Islamic law, meant something different to every individual Muslim; the call to sharia was vague, allowing some observers to think that Hazem Salah was appealing to widely shared Islamic values and others to believe he was calling for the restoration of the caliphate, the leader of the faithful who had presided over the Islamic empire in its early centuries. His followers had adapted the revolutionary chant to call for Islamic law rather than system change. Unlike most political figures, there was
nothing mealymouthed about Hazem Salah. He wanted Egypt's social mores restored to those of the seventh century, but he also spoke forcefully against the military's abuse of power, and constantly demanded the lifting of the state of emergency. In September many secular liberals were saying that a period of semiauthoritarian transition under military rule would be better than a democracy that brought Islamists to untrammeled power. Hazem Salah, by contrast, unequivocally condemned state torture, detentions, and military trials of civilians.

He walked into his weekly confab in Dokki at the end of September after nightfall, holding a yellow wildflower in his hand. The men mobbed and kissed him. He walked slowly to the front of the mosque, sat by the
minbar
, or pulpit, and spoke without a break for nearly three hours. There was a crisis, he said, and no time for the faithful to stop to wait for clarity. It was a time for action, a decisive time. He made his case quietly, and his audience strained for every word. In every speech and at every meeting, Hazem Salah invoked a state of religious emergency. There was no message with which to better rally the youth. “We are the most humiliated of nations, but Islam has raised us high,” he said. He scorned those afraid to take sides, or those like President Barack Obama, “who have completely submitted to the Jews and the Zionist lobby.”

“Don't wait for an order,” he warned. “This time is crucial. Wash well, pray well. Every man must prepare himself to raise the flag of reform.” The ranks of the Hazemoon were growing more quickly than any other political current.

The parallel ferment among the workers and the Salafis discomfited not only the military wardens but also their would-be replacements in the revolutionary mainstream. The Brotherhood and the liberals both wanted to supplant the old order yet retain much of its machinery. Real revolutionaries, however, were baying for blood, and they sought a much more anarchic reinvention of Egypt, with little concern for procedural niceties like the law.

Worry had only grown among the revolutionaries. The government had set a date for elections: November 28, two months away. Time was winding
down, and none of the revolutionaries seemed prepared. Field Marshal Tantawi had released what looked like a campaign video of himself strolling about downtown Cairo. The
felool
had emerged from behind the curtain, announcing new political parties composed of former leaders from Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. The old bosses were running for their old seats in parliament. The Salafis and the Muslim Brothers were spreading the message that the secular parties would spit on custom and force humiliating, godless, libertine lifestyles on the conservative folk of Egypt.

Nasser Abdel Hamid, a Revolutionary Youth Coalition leader from Mahalla, received a spate of threats after attracting thousands to a campaign rally there. Sally wouldn't even consider running: her dual nationality would make her a target for xenophobic attacks. Moaz was despondent. Two months before the election, there was no revolutionary platform to speak of, no unified group of candidates who had real constituencies and who could honestly be described as representing both Islamist and secular Egyptians. “It's a disaster,” he said as he tried to organize the parliamentary campaign from a table at the Costa Café. “How do they organize campaigns in the US?”

Perhaps eager to forestall new protests, the generals announced a series of minimal but important concessions. Parliament would convene in January on an accelerated timetable rather than later in the spring. Members of political parties would be allowed to stand for independent seats, vastly curtailing the advantage of the ex–regime figures. Emergency rule would be suspended during elections, but not ended. Military trials for civilians would be curtailed. In exchange, the generals convinced a host of established party leaders to sign a document endorsing the SCAF's good faith.

But as soon as the signatures were published, the politicians realized that they looked like fools. At a moment of power, civilian politicians had forced the SCAF to compromise. As if they regretted backing the junta into a corner, the same leaders had then signed a meaningless document that made them sound like toady courtiers. The SCAF said it would continue military trials “for those matters covered by military law,” which in Egypt could mean anything; and it had refused to implement the
“treason law” that would ban former National Democratic Party officials from running for office for a period of five years. Within hours, at least two party leaders rescinded their signatures, but it was too late: the document was all over Facebook, and everyone knew that its significance was only symbolic.

The symbolism was this: the old men who led Egypt's political parties, even its revolutionary parties, didn't have the balls to stand up to the SCAF generals on an entirely ceremonial matter when they found themselves face-to-face in the same room, pressured by a coot in uniform blabbing about the national interest. At best, the political leadership looked like amateurs. “It's like the guy who throws the bones to the dogs,” Moaz scoffed. “They will get all busy with the bones and forget that behind these bones is a lot of meat. The bones are the elections. The meat is the power to control the state.”

At its most elemental, state control was exerted town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood, by local bosses whose power had survived across generations and regimes. They usually controlled the police, the criminals, and the major businesses in their sphere. For some time, word had circulated in Upper Egypt that the old regime henchmen had emerged from hiding. An activist from the hamlet of Nag Hammadi told me that the area's old dynasty had officially registered a new political vehicle, the Horreya, or Freedom, Party. According to the activist, the top families in Nag Hammadi made their money from construction and gunrunning, and for decades had maintained a lock on the local parliament seats and the police chief's office. Tahrir Square had some say over Egypt's narrative, but not over its machinery, which remained the supreme power in the rural communities where two-thirds of the population lived.

Moataz Mahmoud, the head of the Horreya Party, wanted as much press as possible for his
felool
revival. He was handing out free plane tickets to anyone who wanted to fly to Luxor and drive another hour to Nag Hammadi, where he was holding a national rally. He had money and an office that hummed with efficiency. The party's chief of staff was a retired police general. Most of the staff and candidates already had careers in parliament, the police, or the military. Revolutionaries were calling for the revival of an old “treason law,” which they thought could be used to
bar senior members of the old ruling party from running for election. The Horreya Party took this as a clarion call. What about
their
rights as
felool 
? They called their event “Beware the Righteous Anger of the
Said
,” the colloquial name for Upper Egypt. Even though the treason law was a theoretical prospect, the entitled stalwarts of the old regime were beginning to fear for their survival. If they couldn't get a sliver of parliament, they would become even more vulnerable. They feared for the fortunes they had amassed through patronage; for the illegal enterprises that continued to enrich them; for the fiefdoms they controlled in the provinces, free from any state oversight; and for their own liberty, which in a just society would be imperiled by inevitable, and deserved, trials and prison terms.