Once Upon a Revolution (22 page)

Moataz Mahmoud was a rich man, accustomed to power and deference but also to maneuvering and manipulation. It took more than submission to obtain power in the olden days, especially in the competition for loot and local authority in Upper Egypt. He was struggling to adapt now, although he was a cynical opportunist. He had a support base among the tribes and the families that depended on him for their livelihoods, and he had a natural web of allies around the country from his class. They were trying to figure out how to play it: quiet strong-arming behind the scenes, or overt nastiness? Buy votes and pressure judges, or march down Main Street with machine guns—as Moataz Mahmoud's friend Hisham el-Sheini had recently done in Nag Hammadi? These Horreya men all came from old feudal families. For centuries, they had owned all the land. The poor, not long ago, had literally been their vassals. Today the legal relationship had been liberalized, but the web of control was not all that different. They controlled the local industry and the local police. They had more to lose from a revolution than anybody. Even a half-assed junta like the SCAF could destroy their way of life.

Their style was evolving, but the deep strategy remained the same: mobilize the privileged by appealing to their fears. Moataz Mahmoud wore a trim gray suit, a white shirt, and no tie. When he spoke, he sounded very old-school: 2005 with whiffs of 1955. “We need a national ideology,” he said. “Ours is to resist the constructive chaos mentioned by Condoleezza Rice. We want to stop the American plan to divide the Middle East and
to divide Egypt into pieces like Iraq.” Like many conspiracy-obsessed people in the region, he had seized on Rice's offhand comment from 2005, which he continued to believe revealed America's secret long-term plans. He went on about the dangers of American domination and the Islamists who were scheming to take power in Egypt and turn it into a hellish version of seventh-century Arabia, when Islam was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. “We are in a state of chaos!” he cried. “There will be a civil war when the Islamists try to impose sharia law. And now they want to strip the tribes of their power and ban us from politics.”

A bald and threatening power play was afoot. The young activist Asmaa Mahfouz had proclaimed her support for the treason law that week. She was a popular figure on YouTube and among young revolutionaries because she was a veiled believer totally committed to the principles of a secular state, and she was a compelling orator. By no means, however, was she a figure of major influence. Like the Mubarak propaganda machine, however, the Horreya Party wanted a villain, and Asmaa Mahfouz became the galvanizing scapegoat. “When Asmaa Mahfouz comes out and says that families in Upper Egypt should not be allowed to run for office, people get emotional, they get angry. They want to block the roads. I will try to calm them down,” Moataz Mahmoud said. It didn't matter that Asmaa had said no such thing; she could be blamed, and then Moataz Mahmoud could make a show of unleashing and then restraining his offended followers.

Moataz Mahmoud's father had served nearly a decade in parliament. His brother had taken over the seat in 2010. Now it was Moataz's turn. The seat, he believed, was a hereditary right, along with the family's ceramic factory and its landholdings in the city of Qena and Nag Hammadi. If they were allowed to run, he promised, the
felool
would get a third of the vote easily. I flew to Luxor the next morning with a group of Horreya Party members. All year long, people had wondered what the old regime was up to. Now one of its appendages was reemerging. The police and intelligence remained behind a curtain, along with some of the more powerful plutocrats, but these ruling party clans represented an elite whose feudal power predated the Egyptian republic and whose influence would last far longer than Mubarak's or the National Democratic Party's.

At the EgyptAir gate for the Luxor flight, it became quickly apparent who was on their way to take part in Beware the Righteous Anger of the
Said.
The Horreya Party delegates were louder than anyone else, smoked in the no-smoking areas, and wore bright tribal vests embroidered with gold thread. The flight was short, and a party employee steered us to a waiting minibus with a Persian carpet on the floor. Two twentysomething cousins from Marsa Matrouh, a coastal town between Alexandria and the Libyan border, squashed their cigarettes into the ornate pile. They spoke to each other in a staccato dialect that was unintelligible to the other Egyptians on the bus. I quickly felt like I had stumbled into a private meeting of a sinister fraternity. Their tribal name was Sanousi, and they wore sparkling white robes and impressive deep-green brocade vests. They smoked cigarette after cigarette, and then sang an ode of praise to recently martyred Libyan dictator Mu‘ammar al-Qaddhafi, a distant relative in the Sanousi clan. A popular revolt had driven al-Qaddhafi from power, and eventually his own citizens hunted him down in a ditch and killed him. His tribal kin mourned the fallen dictator. They kept rhythm with a peculiar kind of finger clicking, accomplished by feverishly striking their middle fingers against their thumbs. A middle-aged Cairene in professional dress grimaced at the tribesmen. Her name was Iman el-Bawwab, and she clearly did not relish having these crude men as her political bedfellows.

“They talk about isolating us,” AbdelShafik Sanousi said. “We are not a contagious disease.”

Atallah Hassan Atallah, the other cousin from Marsa Matrouh, leaned back in his minibus seat. “Our religion says we can marry four women,” he said, smiling lewdly.

“The Koran limits that freedom,” Iman corrected. “You can marry four only if you have the resources to take proper care of four.”

Atallah began to curse her in the Marsa Matrouh dialect, and the tribesmen laughed together. Iman and the other Cairenes on the minibus recoiled at the rudeness.

A few minutes later, Atallah leaned over to me. “You know what I was calling her?” he asked me.

“I can guess,” I said.

“I called her a cunt!” he said, and burst into laughter all over again.

It wouldn't be fair to say that this behavior represented the entire ethos of the old ruling class, but it would be dishonest to ignore the integral part it played. The lords of the old regime didn't merely tolerate abusive bullies; they depended on them as enforcers. I was suddenly in the equivalent of a private back room where the old ruling class was behaving at ease, and it was ugly. As the sun set, we pulled up to a great tent erected next to Hisham el-Sheini's estate, among the irrigated fields. Several thousand tribal notables sat in the rows of chairs. Moataz Mahmoud, clean shaven in a suit, greeted the newcomers. El-Sheini, with a walrus mustache and bald head, roamed in his flowing white galabiya, extending hospitality and kisses in every direction like a jolly chimney sweep from
Mary Poppins
.

Hisham el-Sheini was aghast at the elections, which he viewed as an attempted coup against his birthright. “This seat in parliament has been in our family for twenty-four years,” he told me. “If people here didn't like us, how would it have been stable? Why are they scared of us?”

A lighthearted sheikh from the Sinai leaned over with a bit of wordplay. “We are
ful
,” he said, meaning jasmine blossoms, “not
felool
.”

Hisham el-Sheini took the podium, gloating as he beheld the thousands of men who had accepted the free airfare. “Just by sitting here, you have scared everyone,” he said. “Just by showing your respect, everyone ran into their holes.”

The whole event appeared staged for the cameras. Men in the audience shouted or chanted only when cued. Off camera, the hosts ignored the other speakers, socializing with one another, talking on the phone, smoking, and relishing the smell of roasting meat from next door. At a signal from Hisham el-Sheini, we decamped to the yard of his three-story villa, where glistening sides of lamb lay on the tables. The flesh was moist and delicious, perfectly cooked. In tribal style, the most senior man at each table ripped off the choicest morsels of meat with his right hand and distributed them to his juniors. Only then did he eat himself. We rushed to eat and board the minivan, to catch a late-night flight back to Cairo.

At the airport, the same group reassembled, now flush with meat, exhaustion, and a sense of righteousness stoked by the rally. But the revolution
had another surprise for the
felool
. Domestic flights had been cancelled by an air traffic controllers' strike: another manifestation of the spreading labor unrest. Other passengers in the lounge waited stoically, but not the Horreya members.

“Look what the revolution brought us!” AbdelShafik Sanousi sneered, lighting a cigarette and pacing by the gate. “The revolution of workers and laborers.”

A skinny man in a suit stood up and in an even voice confronted this boor from Horreya. “This revolution brought us a lot more than that,” he said. “It brought us dignity.”

The Marsa Matrouh tribesman was shocked to find a plebeian speaking to him. He had treated the airport lounge, like the bus and the tent, as just another extension of his private domain, where his guests could speak but strangers and servants would remain silent.

“You should think about what you say,” the young man continued. “You can afford to eat, but some people cannot. This revolution was about their dignity. People like you caused this revolution.”

AbdelShafik Sanousi was the type of bully who couldn't deal with victims that fought back. “Fuck you,” he muttered in response, but he already was walking toward the café and the designated smoking area.

It was too much for Iman. First to be insulted by her fellow
felool
and now by an upstart revolutionary. “How dare you!” she screamed, striding over to the man in the suit. “You don't own the revolution.” She continued in an almost crazed vein, shouting unintelligibly at the man, who seemed torn between his desire to respond to her ridiculous arguments and his humane instinct to help her calm down. Eventually another Horreya member led Iman, weeping, away from the gate.

The flight was cancelled until the following night. Twenty-four hours later, the same cast of characters reassembled in the same small lounge at the Luxor airport. This time the civilians knew what to expect and eyed the Horreya members warily. Thirty-six hours after they'd left their homes, the regime heavies looked worse for wear, their formal attire wrinkled. At the lounge, I befriended the man with the suit, Aly Malek. He was an accountant and a Revolutionary Youth Coalition member. He told me that in Nag Hammadi, things hadn't changed as much as they
had in Cairo. “When we march, the police shut us down,” he said. “They try to intimidate us.” Hisham el-Sheini, Moataz Mahmoud, and other local enforcers had tried to incite sectarian fear between Muslims and Christians, he said, and now were manipulating their tribesmen in order to protect narrow and corrupt family enterprises.

“What brought down Hosni Mubarak could bring down these guys as well,” he said. “But it's harder for us here, because we're nonviolent and we're facing not the army or the police but the armed followers of these guys.”

A doctor sitting beside us looked up from his laptop.

“Last night I thought these guys were drunk. But look, there they are, at it again, smoking and disrespecting everybody,” he said.

A janitor from the snack bar approached AbdelShafik and pointed to the smoking area, glassed off from the rest of the gate.

“Pimps!” AbdelShafik shouted. Next to me, another traveler, a young professional with a crew cut working on a tablet computer, snapped.

“Who are you?” he screamed, jumping up and running toward AbdelShafik. “Who are you to call us pimps? This country does not need people like you!”

The janitor wasn't cowed either and piped up. “I am responsible for this place, and you cannot smoke here.”

The Sanousis, the Sinai sheikhs, and even the Cairene
felool
couldn't have looked more shocked if zombies had lurched into the airport and attacked them. Their own private nightmare was coming to life. At their rally, with the rest of Egypt weeded out, they had felt like big bosses, indomitable, the once and future masters of a meek country. But in the light of day, in a public space inhabited by actual Egyptian citizens, they were exposed as venal has-beens, with dwindling power in their hands but no legitimacy.

AbdelShafik, for a second time, retreated with his cigarette. “Fuck the coffee shop,” he said. “They're all fuckers and pimps. Long live Mubarak.”

The janitor, victorious, smiled. “Fuck Mubarak,” he said.

The Christians were marching again to Maspero, the state media headquarters. Their predicament had worsened considerably during the year after Mubarak. They had always felt vulnerable because of their small numbers and the constant attacks from Islamist extremists on their legitimacy as Egyptians. Before Nasser, Christians had figured disproportionately in the moneyed elite, but by now, second-class citizenship had long been a reality for them. They could amass financial but not political power. There were no Christians in the top echelons of the army and police. They sometimes held token positions in the government, but never was a Christian preeminent in the ruling party. Christians needed special permission to renovate churches, and that permission often wasn't granted. When they fixed falling-down structures, they frequently were accused of building them taller or bigger than before, which was against the law. Steeple height was perhaps the only construction code in Egypt that was zealously enforced. Mini-pogroms often erupted in response to rural church construction and repairs; another common trigger was rumors, usually unfounded, that priests or nuns had kidnapped a Christian woman from her Muslim husband. Meanwhile, jihadi fundamentalists killed Christians and burned churches with startling regularity. These crimes occurred several times a year, usually in some faraway village in Upper Egypt.