Once Upon a Revolution (2 page)

Revolutions are violent. They create, they destroy, and often they do not end well. It is often said that they eat their children, like Cronos the Titan in Greek mythology. The end of the Cold War misled us into thinking revolutions were romantic affairs. Gentle transitions with names such as the Velvet Revolution accompanied the fall of the Iron Curtain, but they weren't really revolutions: the old rulers more or less agreed to move on when the Soviet Union collapsed, surrendering their power structures intact to new, liberal custodians. But real revolutions aren't courtships; they are wars, sibling rivalries resolved by murder. Real revolutions challenge everything. They shake the foundations of power, and power clings tenaciously. Often the old ways win. Or the revolutionaries prevail but, like the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins and the ayatollahs, create new horrors to replace the old.

Egypt's revolution erupted into the open in 2011, and it will take decades to conclude. Perhaps the best analogue is the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. It was easy to kill King Louis XVI but much harder to build a republic; it took eighty years and three tries before the idea really stuck. Egypt's uprising showed us the limits of a leaderless revolution: “people power” at its purest. The cell that prompted January 25 and formed the heart of Tahrir was obsessed with unity and legitimacy. Revolutionaries were determined not to replace Mubarak with another dictator. They wanted to topple a tyrant, not take his place. Young leaders at Tahrir believed they could avoid the corruption that usually comes with power, so they attempted a revolution without any of the usual political gambits. They didn't try to take over the government's television stations or any ministries. They didn't revolt inside an army barracks, or infiltrate the police, or establish underground cells, or get explosives training. They didn't have the bloodthirsty hearts of the Bolsheviks who seized Russian factories, or the French who stormed the Bastille. For revolutionaries, they were excessively respectful, moderate, and inclusive: so
much so that they composed a beautiful paean to incremental change, consultation, and transparency without actually changing that much of Egypt's system of governance. It quickly became evident that even with the noblest sentiments, a reluctant revolutionary fails easily, outmaneuvered and shunted aside by any Machiavelli.

The Tahrir leaders did, however, invent a completely new approach to political life in Egypt and the Arab world, one that will produce consequences for generations to come. Their idea was that a state could be governed fairly by its own people, with limited power given to elected officials, equal justice for everyone, and an economy that allowed the rich to make their money while taking care of the poor. Their idea was that apparently powerless citizens can organize to overthrow a tyrant who appears all-powerful. The Tahrir revolutionaries killed the lie that people are sheep and the best government they deserve is an ironfisted tyrant who will keep them alive. No Arab leader can again take the population's consent for granted.

Tahrir formed only one political vehicle that included revolutionaries and moderates, secular activists and Islamists: the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, which tried to conduct politics in the name of the youth revolt. From the start, it was fractured by some of the same forces that prompted the original uprising. Members suffered from paranoia about infiltration and surveillance. The religious and secular members never fully trusted each other. Xenophobia had permeated Egypt even before the revolt and grew more pronounced afterward. Most significantly, its rulers had managed a delicate trick. They had convinced the public that the military men in charge were selfless stewards of the national interest, while the politicians who sought to challenge them were self-serving careerists. Decades of steady propaganda portrayed all politics as selfish, and inimical to enlightened governance. That attitude outlasted the revolution, and street activists derided any would-be leaders as power grubbers. The harder the revolutionary youth leaders worked to advance the revolution's aims, the less respect they commanded on the street.

Fearful of alienating the public, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition never decided on an ultimate aim. Did it want to topple the military regime behind Mubarak, creating a true republic where the popular vote
trumped the military and plutocracy? Or was it only fighting for mild improvements to elections and the balance of power between the president and the parliament? Ultimately, did the youth of Tahrir want reform or revolution? They never could agree. As a result, organized, richly staffed power centers like the army and the Muslim Brotherhood were able to emerge strongest from Egypt's revolutionary transition.

Tahrir Square seized imaginations far beyond the Arab and Islamic world. The original uprising in January 2011 appealed to a universal desire to root for the underdog, to believe that a group of ordinary people armed with nothing but their determination and a few paving stones could bring down an implacable police state. For an instant, the revolt seemed to have a storybook ending: the tyrant flees the palace, the people demand justice, the poor and hungry embark on a renaissance. Then the Tahrir Revolution became, in its next chapter, a coming-of-age narrative about the difficulty of transforming idealism into practice; about how much easier it is to break something down than to build it up; about dreams, politics, and compromise; and about how an early victory can mask a harder fight ahead.

Like the revolution they embody, the two characters at the heart of this story make imperfect decisions and sometimes tragic mistakes. However, they pursue a dream with undeniable bravery, and in good faith. We can admire and learn from them even when they disappoint. It will take decades to assess the legacy of the revolutionaries of 2011. They could not immediately persuade a majority of their fellow citizens, but still they altered the course of a nation. Naysayers should remember that a revolution remains a revolution even if it fails. And they should remember too what happened to the children of Cronos after he swallowed them: they grew strong in his belly until his sixth child, Zeus, escaped his father's jaws, liberated his siblings, and overthrew the Titans.

Basem Kamel counted himself young and lucky: only forty years old and awash in comfort by Egypt's meager standards. He had spent a decade commuting to work six hours away from Cairo. Now he worked in the same city as his wife and three children. The roof and walls around them were paid for, and he had enough for his children's school fees. This was the bounty of Basem Kamel. Egypt was on the verge of revolution, as it had been for as long as modern history had been recorded, but the revolution never came. There were occasional mirages, such as 1952, when the Free Officers expelled Egypt's foreign masters but then enslaved it under an indigenous military dictatorship. Congenitally good-humored and conditioned like most Egyptians to laugh at frustration and ill fortune, Basem would tell his children, referring to his reserves of good cheer rather than money, “We are rich!” His father was the son of a peasant laborer who had fought his way into the middle class, earning enough at a secure university job to build a five-story apartment block for his children an hour's drive from downtown Cairo.

At architecture school, Basem had studied with the pioneers of contemporary Arab aesthetics. He designed ecological dwellings inspired by Egypt's native flora and landscape: modern homes with echoes of the mud hut, the papyrus reed, the desert slope. No one wanted to build them, so Basem settled for the kind of architecture that earned a living wage: cheap, ugly concrete blocks as tall and densely packed as the authorities would allow. He confined his artistic pursuits to watching television specials on Vincent van Gogh and Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect.

He took pride in showing up early for meetings, which made him an oddity in Egypt. He strode rather than walked, erect, with an expression of purpose. Basem was taller and slimmer than most men. He cropped his goatee and receding head of hair to the same stubble length, accentuating his oversized oval head. Because of his light skin and soft hazel-brown eyes, people sometimes mistook him for a foreigner. On special occasions he went tieless, wearing fine shirts with the tails fluttering out, a blazer over his jeans, and, weather permitting, loafers without socks. Basem looked the part, but it didn't change the fact that upward mobility had ended for the Kamel family in 1980, as it had for most of Egypt. As an adult, Basem Kamel toiled sixteen hours a day at the architecture firm that he'd founded and that supported most of his extended family. He worked longer hours than his father, though the family's standard of living had distinctly fallen a notch.

One day in 1999, a worker fell from the second-floor scaffolding at a construction site that Basem was supervising in the Sinai. The man's head was mangled; his spine broken. At the hospital, the doctors refused to treat the worker unless Basem paid in advance out of his own pocket. Wheelchair-bound, the laborer never was able to work again. There was no social security, no state pension, so he fed his family by begging. He was Basem's age, hardworking, with children. “If this happened to me, what would I do?” Basem thought. “What would happen to my kids? One accident, and my family would become beggars too.” President Hosni Mubarak had possessed all power for nearly two decades. If such a fragile thread separated a bread-winning man from utter destitution, then Mubarak was responsible, and Mubarak had failed. He had to go, and after the accident, Basem was willing to say so to his workers and friends. So long as he never did anything about it, his feeble protest went unpunished.

With a preemptive expectation of defeat, Basem Kamel watched on television in 2005 when a group of Egyptians organized under the Kifaya banner to say “Enough!” and voice their disgust with Mubarak. “They seem like fine people,” he told his wife as they sat beneath the low ceiling of their sitting room. “I respect them. But don't they realize that they cannot change anything? This system is too strong.” Five years later, he read
in the newspaper that Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize–winning diplomat, was pondering a return to Egypt to run for president against Mubarak. Basem had hardly remembered that the renowned Arab statesman was Egyptian. Maybe ElBaradei had the stature to make something happen in Egypt. After midnight, when he had dined with his wife after a long day with clients at a building site, Basem turned to the internet. He grew excited as he read. He found a Facebook group that was preparing for ElBaradei's return, but not at ElBaradei's request. These Egyptians were taking their own initiative. The organizer was a well-known intellectual named Abdelrahman Youssef, son of the megacelebrity television preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi. This Abdelrahman Youssef was famous in his own right for his poetry, for openly taking on Mubarak, and for breaking with his own father to criticize the Muslim Brotherhood.

Basem skulked on the Facebook group, reading the postings with growing alacrity. The members weren't cloaked in anonymity. They clearly didn't care that the ubiquitous secret police could read their subversive critiques and plans. One day the ElBaradei group advertised a meeting in a downtown office. Intrigued, Basem sent a short message to the online administrator.

“Is it safe?” he asked.

The reply was terse. “The country is dying,” Abdelrahman Youssef wrote back. “Do as you see fit.”

No entreaties, no assurances. Basem thought of his father, whose advice had never wavered over the decades. “Think of your work and nothing else,” Basem's father always told his children. “Politics and activism lead only to prison.”

For his entire life, Basem had embarked on his projects wholly or not at all. With method and devotion, he had courted his first cousin and childhood playmate; he had ascended to a respectable position as an architect and developer; and he had brought three children to the cusp of adulthood. He didn't want to jeopardize all those accomplishments. Nor, however, did he want to pass to his children an eroding Egypt and an example as passive as that of his own father. As he pondered the online Facebook message from a man he had never met, Basem Kamel grew pregnant with the secret: The country is dying. Do what you must. Do
what you must. Forty years of frustration crystallized in a day. All at once, Basem could not imagine forgoing the meeting and its inevitable chain of consequences. For he had never done anything by the teaspoon. And now, he knew, he would do this. For four decades, he had devoted his entire life to securing a single acre for his family. For one probably hopeless meeting, Basem Kamel could easily end up like countless other Egyptians before him: in prison, unemployable, and useless to his family. But the opportunity had beckoned for something greater than this pittance on the fringes of Cairo: a real inheritance for his children, an Egypt that belonged to them or, failing that, a father who dared object to a dreary lifetime of defeat. He told his plan only to his youngest brother, so someone would know where to start looking if Basem never came home.