Once Upon a Revolution (18 page)

On the last Friday in May, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition organized its first million-man march in Tahrir without any help from the Islamists. The coalition was determined to prove that it could assemble a crowd even without Muslim Brothers, but it won only a Pyrrhic victory, filling the crowd but exposing its divisions. Speakers screamed from five competing platforms. There were dozens of different messages. The only thing everyone agreed on was that Mubarak should go on trial. Moaz was proud that hundreds of Brotherhood youth had attended, heeding the call of the breakaway al-Tayyar al-Masry faction rather than the command of the supreme guide.

Despite its tiny number of recruits, al-Tayyar had managed security for the protest, which was called “the Friday of the Second Revolution.” Basem saw danger in the incoherence. “Everyone still wants to have his own stage,” he said. “We have to make dialogue between all of us to decide on what we need.” Basem wanted the law to come first: a bill of rights that would protect the Egyptian people from any surge by powerful forces: the Islamists, the military, the old regime. The old energy was gone. Basem, Moaz, and the rest of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition hoped they could reinvigorate the same people who had filled Tahrir from January 25 to February 11. This time around, though, the protest felt like a party, with ice-cream cones, cotton candy, and garbage underfoot. Even the songs lacked punch. The anthem of the eighteen days was a guttural ballad directed at Mubarak by the folk singer Ramy Essam, entitled “Leave!” Now Ramy sang new words to the same tune: “Civil state! Civil state!” It didn't rouse the crowd.

For the first time, the liberals in the revolution, people such as Basem and Zyad, imagined that they might have more in common with the military than with the civilian Islamists. Liberals were asking for a delay in the
elections: they wanted more time to prepare so that they could compete fairly with the Islamists, and they wanted to enshrine protections in the constitution for a civil, not religious, state
before
the Muslim Brotherhood gained a foothold in government. Uncomfortably for Basem, many of the young activists revealed a disturbingly uncritical love for the military.

A small minority understood that the transition was fixed in favor of the army and the old elite, and that even the slightest reform faced an uphill battle. But the more dreamy masses thought they already had reached the promised land, and had simply to choose their preferred way. Egypt was in ferment, with everyone dreaming of an ideal constitution and convinced that, in a few short months, a relatively painless transition would be over. A sterling new ideal would be established for the Arab world by the trailblazing Egyptians. Libya and Syria were rising up against their dictators, which many Egyptians interpreted as proof that a revolutionary Egypt was leading the Arab world again. It felt like things were changing. Even the SCAF generals were on Facebook. Egypt seemed dynamic, influential, important. Revolutionaries were barraged with invitations to travel abroad and lecture about their experiences. Free trips were on offer around the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Moaz joined a caravan of volunteers to deliver medical supplies to Benghazi, where the Libyans welcomed them as inspirational brothers in revolution. Basem was headed to Holland to meet with Social Democrats from around the world. Moaz was planning a trip to Germany for a conference about nuclear energy. Zyad was invited to a film festival in Germany and a junket in Italy. Muslim Brothers were being dispatched around the world to refresh old ties and construct new ones. Ayyash's mentor had meetings in Japan, Europe, and the Maghreb region of North Africa.

It was a time for dreamers. Some of Egypt's great minds were imagining a constitution of remarkable simplicity, brief and enduring, that could inspire the entire Arab world with its recipe for freedom, rights, responsibilities, and—at long last—accountable governance. Some of Egypt's bravest citizens were putting their bodies on the line to force power into the hands of the people. And some of Egypt's smartest bureaucrats were scheming to keep everything the way it had been. In this contest, the bureaucrats
had an advantage: they were veterans, with experience running the machinery of state and managing its millions of minions. And, Tahrir notwithstanding, they were still in control.

The deep state seeped to the surface on June 28, in a rare display of its surviving powers. Families of some January 25 martyrs staged a commemoration, which was broken up by hecklers. Many believed they were provocateurs sent by State Security. The families went to Tahrir, where, to everyone's shock, they met the riot police, unseen since January 28. With batons whirling and shields raised, the uniformed men charged elderly men and women who were already grieving children killed six months earlier. Tear gas wafted over downtown, and dozens were wounded. Fighting raged for a day. A policeman removed his shirt and danced through the melee, twirling two swords. He was clearly taunting the victims, but no one could make sense of the whole affair. Why had the riot police returned suddenly? Who was in charge? Was this part of the deep state's comeback? Or was it a feint in some power struggle between the army and the police, a message to the SCAF that it would have to bring its Interior Ministry colleagues aboard?

The Revolutionary Youth Coalition had to respond to the riot police's attack but had no idea how. Its leaders were all the more confounded because many people had applauded the police; at least, they said, the government was restoring order. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf invited the Revolutionary Youth Coalition to his house for dinner and asked what he should do. Moaz, Zyad, and Sally joined a delegation of seven, and they offered the prime minister a blueprint: He had to stop military trials for civilians, get the Mubarak trial started immediately, and pay compensation to the families of the January 25 martyrs. He had to fire the leaders of the police and purge the lower ranks, and get rid of all the Mubarak-era holdovers in his cabinet. If the military junta blocked any of these moves, he could simply resign, his honor intact.

The leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition knew they had to regain the initiative, and they understood that they weren't going to get anywhere through a sympathetic but weak prime minister. Only one
thing had worked for them in the past: big crowds in the street. Even though they recognized that this had fast become a limited, even counterproductive, tactic, it was to Tahrir that they turned again. July 8 would be the “Friday of Determination,” and if they wanted it to be big, they'd need a simple agenda. For hours they argued in a tiny, smoky borrowed office downtown.

Most of the leaders around the table were men who talked out of turn and rarely took their eyes off their smartphones. Sally chaired the discussion, struggling to keep it moving. She desperately wanted a plan that would bring the disparate revolutionary groups back into harmony: a massive protest on July 8, followed by a serious conference to unite everyone around a lowest-common-denominator demand for justice and a transition to civilian rule.

“What will our titles be?” someone asked.

“Which party gets to host the conference?” added someone else.

Zyad was scrolling through Facebook on his BlackBerry. He had decided he most definitely would run for parliament, and he was already figuring out a campaign team. He looked up only when he couldn't find a lighter. He was clearly annoyed by the petty interests of his colleagues, although he himself was barely paying attention to the crisis at hand.

“We need an agenda,” he said.

“We need to sound like we're all on the same page,” Sally said. “We should talk in public only if it's about things we've agreed on.”

“If it gets out that we're having problems working together, it will look like the revolutionary forces are fighting with each other,” Zyad said. “Let's concentrate on making this Friday go well, and afterward we can think about the long term.”

The revolution's internal bickering had long been public knowledge; most of the personal feuds spilled quickly onto Facebook and the pages of liberal newspapers and websites. The state exacerbated the divisions by establishing a barrage of ersatz youth fronts that confused the public and irritated the revolutionaries. The fake groups had unknown numbers and intentionally similar names, like the Revolution Coalition, the Union of Revolutionary Youth, the Front for Youth of the Revolution, and so on. Revolutionaries also suffered from continuing slander in the state
media. Activists were still depicted as drug users, foreign agents, sexually promiscuous, or gay. Anti-Christian sentiment and xenophobia were rising; I had been arrested one afternoon downtown by passing citizens convinced that I was an Israeli spy. Sally was constantly under suspicion because of her mixed parentage. During Tahrir, she had spoken on television as Sally Moore, the Irish-Egyptian. Now she was Sally Toma, Egyptian, and she avoided speaking English in public.

Although its leaders seemed to focus on the coalition less and less by the week, its success mattered to all the youth groups. Tahrir Square, where the coalition had been formed, was the one place where they all came together, the one place that was home for Islamist and secular revolutionaries alike. The coalition's loyalty to revolution was unquestionable. In practice, however, the revolutionary leaders behaved like teenage boyfriends with noble intentions and truncated attention spans. Sally was the one who stitched together the group, ushering the meetings along, emailing around the minutes, wringing consensus out of their brains. “You are like little boys,” Sally complained. “Every six hours, we accomplish five minutes of productivity.”

After many hours of meetings, the coalition finally settled on a protest agenda, and it drafted a public apology entitled “Revolution First.”

“We apologize to the Egyptian Revolution, the revolution's martyrs, and the Egyptian people for engaging in debate between Constitution First and Elections First that divided the political scene in Egypt, when we should have paid attention to the security issue,” their statement read. “We support a sit-in at Tahrir Square, but only if there is a consensus among the political groups and parties.”

The solution was elegant, if facile: Forget about the ideological divisions and political mess and focus on something everybody wanted to see: Hosni Mubarak on trial. The Brotherhood agreed to join the revolutionaries for one day in Tahrir, but for its own interests; the organization wanted to make sure the military didn't postpone the elections that the Brotherhood intended to win. Sure, the whole point of a revolution was to install a new kind of government and to reinvent the relationship between ruler and subject. But that was complicated. Hanging Mubarak would be simple.

An angry crowd filled Tahrir on July 8. The mood veered between jubilant and bloodthirsty. Orderly Muslim Brothers milled about the square, but in unison at sunset, they all filed out. The square remained half full, and Basem glared darkly at the retreating Brothers. “The Islamists are no longer interested in revolutionary unity, but we will keep trying,” he said. People were in the square because they didn't have any idea what else to do. Lost, without a sense of purpose, thousands simply lay down to sleep that night in Tahrir. The next morning, they were still there. They declared a popular occupation of the square and swore to stay put until the government relented to their revolutionary demands. They numbered just a few thousand, but they were enough to close Cairo's central square to traffic. They erected tents with hand-lettered signs and swore to stay put until their demands were met. Tahrir looked like a squatters' camp. No one wanted to look like a coward, so the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition got their own tents too. At a crucial moment, not a single one of them was willing to voice the opinion that a summertime Tahrir sit-in was a bad idea.

Almost instantly, the little remaining public sympathy for the revolution dissipated. The revolutionaries were snarling city traffic. To make matters worse, they had blockaded the Mogamma, an imposing hive of government offices that dominated the southern end of Tahrir, where citizens went for most of their paperwork. The revolutionaries were trying to attract attention but instead irritated fellow citizens who were no less victims of the Egyptian state than the people in the square. Zyad knew from the start that the revolutionaries were wasting precious goodwill, but he was powerless to convince the Tahrir hard-liners to go home. The pragmatists from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had little influence over the activists occupying the square, who sank deeper into a state of revolutionary fervor and paranoia about threats from the deep state. It never crossed their minds that the SCAF would bottle up the revolutionaries in Tahrir and ignore them, leaving the activists themselves to alienate the Egyptian public without any help from the authorities.