Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (26 page)

A year later, when Israel pounded Lebanon with bombs, broke the roads and bridges, and crushed the economy, when the country’s Washington-backed leaders wept and begged the Bush administration to call off the attack, Washington sat back and let Israel ravage this fledgling country in the name of crippling Hezbollah.

Lebanon found itself on the wrong end of the war on terror, after all.

T
he knowledge gathered in Cairo, the things you assumed about Egypt, fell away on the long, gritty road out of town, along the Nile banks through bawling vendors and groaning minivans, over bridges wilting under the weight of steel and flesh. Cairo collapsed into fields of swamp grass and clover, resurrected itself again in spits of tenements, and finally faded behind. The road to Damanhour pressed north toward the sea, through the thick of the Nile Delta. Brilliant rice fields nourished the lumbering water buffalo, whose fleas in turn fed the white birds plucking at their hides. The road was wild, crammed with darting creatures and half-broken machines. Rolling mountains of cheap clothing rose from flatbed trucks, and workers slept, their bodies wedged into cliffs on those wobbling textile hills. Vast families crammed into the beds of pickups, punched by wind. Even the edges of the road were jammed with donkeys, goats, and camels, mopeds spitting black smoke, schoolgirls who peered owlishly from beneath the brims of head scarves. This route was unfathomably old when Napoleon limped along it, and today it still courses with traffic, with families who have ridden this road for generations, from the fabled fields of the delta to the dented, overgrown splendor of Cairo; between schools and factories, farms and slatternly inner-city markets.

There was a place where the Jeep spat out of the farmlands and into a little town too poor to pave its stretch of roadway. They’d pressed stones into the sand instead, and as we bounced and jolted our way over the rocks, fingers splayed on the ceiling, Hossam said through
chattering teeth, “Welcome to the Latin Quarter.” He said it every time, and every time, it made us laugh.

I’d hired Hossam, a bohemian city kid who moved among the intellectuals and expatriates of the Egyptian capital, as a reporter and translator. He was a stalwart socialist with a shamefaced penchant for lattes from Starbucks, music by Moby, and Scandinavian death metal bands. Sucking a ceaseless string of Marlboros, he waved his arms and rambled about how the left would eventually join ranks with the popular
Muslim Brotherhood and form an overpowering opposition bloc.

I’d snort. “If the Muslim Brotherhood take over they’ll put you against the wall,” I’d tell him, only half joking. “You know what happened in Iran.”

“I’ll be the commissar of information.” His face lit with bravado. “You’ll have all the interviews you need.”

By 2005, American enthusiasm for Arab democracy was sinking back into silence. Every time Arabs voted—in Beirut, in Gaza City, in Karbala—Islamists grew more powerful. Hezbollah and Hamas were gaining sway. Egypt, the most populous Arab country and the psychological core of the region, rippled with tension between Islam and democracy. There was only one source of serious political opposition to the Egyptian autocracy, a single party potentially strong enough to unseat the government—and that was the Muslim Brotherhood, a nonviolent Islamist movement with deep roots across Egypt. Officially, the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed, but the reality was nuanced. The government would pass through bouts of tolerance, then abruptly round up activists and raid party offices in crackdowns. Nobody stood to gain more from democratic reform than the Brotherhood, because no other force in Egypt had its legitimate popularity, the grassroots credentials, the air of moral authority. And yet the United States refused to speak with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was an unlikely stance, especially given the pro-democracy rhetoric ringing through Washington in those days. The Brotherhood is illegal, U.S. policy went, and therefore we will not recognize it. Now there would be parliamentary elections, and I would watch the race from the battleground of Damanhour.

The first night we rode the grinding road to Damanhour, I met Muslim Brotherhood candidate Gamal Heshmat. On that sharp night, the Muslim Brotherhood had called a political rally, and Heshmat would speak to his hometown. The silt of autumn dark thickened on the square. From the front row, we had a good view of a towering Koran and a podium under pictures of crossed swords. Hossam and I stood and gawked. There were hundreds of people. No, thousands. You couldn’t see the vanishing point where the faithful tapered into the night; their bodies faded down every side street and alleyway.

Hossam’s eyes swelled huge enough to reflect the moon. His swagger had melted away. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “It makes the left look like shit.”

“How many people do you think this is? It must be every man in town.”

“Yeah,” Hossam said. “Shit.”

I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking it, too: The secular, pro-democracy demonstrations we’d covered back in Cairo were nothing by comparison. A ragtag army of aging labor leaders, embattled human rights workers, scruffy bloggers, and rheumy professors would rally on a tiny scrap of stained pavement. Layers of security lined up on all sides and pressed in, plainclothes thugs bused in from the slums and uniformed conscripts in riot gear, clubs hanging from their hands. Maybe they would glower and snap photographs for bottomless security files, or maybe they would smash the demonstrators’ limbs with clubs, kick their ribs, and haul them off to prison for genital electrification and sodomy. It could go either way, any way, depending on their mood.

Now we were far from Cairo’s hallucinatory concrete forests; stars gleamed in a black sky and there unfolded a subversive force on a scale we’d never see in the capital. These men were factory workers, farmers, and fathers, not political activists. They turned up because the Muslim Brotherhood had invited them, and stood quietly, filling the streets and listening to their leaders. There were women, too, veiled, robed, and arranged in careful rows. Men and boys linked hands to form a human screen of segregation between the sexes.

They had come because, like the rest of Egypt, and like the other Arab countries beyond, these people sensed some vague change, a long-awaited political opening. That was the mood: guarded, incredulous
hope that had seeped, somehow, out of Iraq. They had heard the radical promises of American leaders—the vows to support democracy over dictatorship in the Arab world; the acknowledgments that propping up tyrants and torturers might have bred terrorism. This was brand-new rhetoric, and it made Arab potentates nervous. President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh, had gone through the charade of running for “reelection.” (He was never elected to begin with.) Before the parliamentary elections, Condoleezza Rica came to Cairo and embarrassed the Egyptian regime with an unusually sharp speech. “People will watch what happens in Egypt,” she warned. Egyptians started talking about the Americans as parents who’d just stepped out of the room, as if they might come back and give Mubarak a spanking if he didn’t behave. The Muslim Brotherhood boldly fielded dozens of candidates across the country.

A few lines from the Koran, and the speeches got started. Hossam translated, breathing the words into my ear. The men glared down; we were outsiders, whispering while the clerics spoke. Hossam sucked sharply at air and groaned. He stopped translating, raised his eyes sheepishly, and hoisted himself to his feet. Even the big shots on the stage were looking down, smiling. Hossam turned to the crowd, flashed a smile that looked more like a grimace, and raised a reluctant hand. Applause swelled. Suddenly, the same men who’d been glowering over our shoulders were smiling, reaching big paws to pump Hossam’s hand in the air, giving me approving little nods.

“What the hell was that?” I hissed.

“Don’t freak out, but they said they wanted to thank the
Los Angeles Times
for being here and for our support,” he muttered.

“Great.”

He shrugged. “They don’t understand.”

A half moon dangled from the desert sky. Women and children jostled on balconies spangled with flimsy Ramadan lanterns. A sea of faces glimmered in light from the podium. Far from the dingy Cairo offices of slick-talking Brotherhood leaders trained to say the right things to Western reporters, out of reach of the U.S. embassy, Egypt seemed to open itself. This was the Muslim Brotherhood where they had evolved organically, where it thrived unself-consciously.

Some people argue that the popularity of political Islam is exaggerated.
Others say that groups like the Brotherhood are only powerful because repressive rulers have shut down every single public platform except the mosque. But that night showed a simpler truth: These people were profoundly religious. Poor and abused, they passed faith from one generation to the next because it was the only precious thing they could bequeath. They didn’t trust the greedy, potbellied suits in the capital—those people meant corruption and sin. They rallied to the Islamists who came from their towns and mosques because they felt at home with them and recognized in their piety a reflection of their own moral values. The people weren’t stupid; they knew these Brothers represented problems, too. But this was their life, the devil they knew. I thought about the powerful Christian movements back home. Could Americans see nothing of ourselves here?

A sheikh from the ancient Al Azhar university warmed up the crowd, his voice rising and dropping in evangelical waves. He preached politics, preached Islam, preached divine intervention. He was calling down God, calling out the vote. He was magnetic.

“Corruption is a disease that has destroyed our country. Those who accept life without religion have accepted annihilation.”

“We will not compromise, we will not bow down. We’ve come to hate low voices. Every minute that passes is too much time.”

He steered his talk from heaven to earth and back again. The townspeople were instructed to bring twenty other voters to the polling stations. If the government stole the election, he pledged, the Brotherhood would go to court.

“They might mock us for it, but we’ll pray to God to send his wrath,” the cleric said. “We will shout, ‘God is on our side,’ and he will compensate us for what’s happening.”

When the candidate took the stage, a murmur passed through the crowd. Heshmat peered down through spectacles, a lone tuft of hair clinging to his shining scalp and a shabby wool blazer drooping from his shoulders.

“Who are they, and who are we?” he demanded of the crowd. “They are the princes, the sultans, they have the money. They make shows with music. They play politics but all they’re really good at is putting more brass on their shoulders.”

“The youth of this nation are just sitting in coffee shops, jumping
into boats, trying to get to Italy,” he said. “Are we a country without natural resources?”

“Yes,” I muttered to Hossam.

“Are we a country without a professional class?”

“Pretty much.”

“Are we a country of politically immature people?”

We laughed quietly.

“Are we going to take that talk from the government?” Heshmat thundered on. “How dare they say that?”

A single voice rose like a wisp of smoke from the crowd.

“
Inshallah …”
God willing.

The night exploded into voices. The men sprayed fake snow into the darkness, poked fingers to the sky, and hollered, “Victory is for Islam!” They spread out and marched aimlessly, as if it didn’t matter where they went—as if they owned the whole town, as if the vast stretches of country beyond had already fallen into their laps, a rich gift from God.

The banners passed. “Islam, we are for you.” “May you make a staircase of our skulls and go high to glory.” “If your banner gets thirsty, our youth will give their blood.”

Such a thing seemed possible in this strange witching hour, that their skulls could pile one atop the other, that they could clamor to the sky. I tried to imagine what they imagined; tried to feel the fire of faith when you had nothing else to hold.

The rally was over soon. A man from the stage gave a gentle reminder to the silent women:

“Now the sisters have to wait a bit aside until the people leave,” he said. “Then, they can leave after.”

People first
, I wrote,
women second
.

Like so many other Egyptians, Heshmat had fallen under the rapture of the Brotherhood in college. He became a doctor, and eventually wormed his way into Parliament the way everybody in the banned Brotherhood sneaks in: by running as an independent, with a wink and a nudge. Once in Parliament, he rabble-roused, holy-rolled, and generally made a nuisance of himself. He griped about corruption. He
was a driving force behind the riots over
Banquet of Seaweed
, a popular Syrian novel the Brotherhood deemed too lewd and blasphemous for Egyptian bookstores. By 2003, the government was fed up. They kicked Heshmat out of Parliament and threw him into jail for six months. Damanhour, his hometown, went crazy. Riots erupted. The army was dispatched. Young men were beaten and carted off to jail. And then, for years, bitterness festered.

This election was to be Heshmat’s comeback. The townspeople were still angry; they wanted revenge as badly as Heshmat did, maybe even more. Every man and woman I met in the streets vowed to vote for Heshmat. If the government plays any of its old tricks, they said through tight jaws, they’ll have a fight on their hands.

“They humiliated the people.” Heshmat was perched in a thinly stuffed armchair. “But now I’m even stronger. I may have lost a parliamentary seat, but I won another seat in the heart of the people.”

In his ill-lit walkup office, plastic flowers erupted from the walls and aides bent in prayer, foreheads pressed to the floor. Sitting before Heshmat, I asked the question I always asked Islamists: A lot of Egyptians worry that if the Brotherhood gets more power, you will impose
hijab
on women. This is the fear of secular and Christian Egyptians. Is it true?