Once Upon a Revolution (27 page)

On principle, the Revolutionary Youth Coalition had refused to join the well-funded Egyptian Bloc. Now it was left with a pure, idealistic, and penniless parliamentary campaign. The coalition branded its slate of candidates “the Revolution Continues.” Moaz took a table beneath the vaulted ceiling at café Groppi, a now decrepit icon of Cairo's glory days, and solicited ideas from everyone he knew about how to organize a national parliamentary campaign. “Failure is close,” he said. His glasses were bent; he had sat on them. Moaz noted people's suggestions but found himself stymied. “That's a great idea,” he kept saying, “but how can we do it if we have no money?” The Revolution Continues didn't even have a few hundred dollars to rent a megaphone to mount on top of a car. Its candidates were untainted, but also unknown.

Moaz was running in his neighborhood. Although the Brotherhood had formally cut ties with him, Moaz still relied on his old Brotherhood
usra
and his friends to organize campaign events. They were going to stencil the campaign signs in Moaz's family's garage and hang them around town. Meanwhile, Khaled el-Sayyed, a chant leader from Mina Daniel's movement, was running against his old friend Zyad in the same district. They had worked together closely to plan Tahrir, but now they avoided even speaking to each other. When they buttonholed passersby on the street, the Revolution Continues candidates had more of a plea than a program. “We won't bribe you,” Khaled el-Sayyed told prospective voters in his district. “We look like you. We live like you. Vote for us.” He sounded like an angry teenager demanding respect.

Elections required an entirely different set of muscles from protests. Whatever knack young revolutionaries had for electrifying an audience at a march or a clash clearly didn't transfer to electoral politics. Now Egyptians wanted to hear a long-term plan and evidence that candidates could deliver. The revolutionaries were willing to work hard, but their genius was tactical, not strategic. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition was as ill suited to plot a grand election campaign after Tahrir as combat infantrymen would be to govern and rebuild a country they had just destroyed in an invasion. On Saturday, November 19, violence broke out on a spur street off Tahrir Square. Riot police beat a demonstrator to death, and soon an all-out battle raged between cops and demonstrators. A police
sniper was shooting people in the eyes. Tear gas wafted over the entire city center.

It was almost with relief that the revolutionary youth activists suspended their political work to rush to Mohamed Mahmoud Street and buttress the random demonstrators who had begun to fight the police over a meaningless stretch of street. The fighting was intense but bizarre because it was contained to a single city block. The army held tight control over the city, but was allowing a lethal war between police and revolutionaries on one circumscribed proving ground. The military could have cleared and sealed the area within minutes using only tear gas, stopping the battle and saving lives. In fact, it did so all around Mohamed Mahmoud whenever the fighting spilled out. But the soldiers let it rage on in one small area, cleverly calculating that it would prove a final, fatal distraction to the revolutionaries. They were right. The Revolution Continues judged it indecent to seek office while friends were dying, so Moaz and company suspended their parliamentary campaign and joined the battle. Even Basem stopped by, if only for a few hours.

The Revolutionary Youth Coalition leaders visited Mohamed Mahmoud and stood in solidarity with the motorcyclists working as volunteer ambulance drivers. “Stand your ground! Stand your ground!” Basem shouted in encouragement. Moaz treated the wounded while Sally and Zyad flushed with pride at the resilience of the young fighters. Sally's nose twitched at the tear gas. “This smell,” she said. “It reminds me of beautiful days.” But this was someone else's fight, not theirs. It was an almost nihilistic spasm of frustration and rage. The people fighting at Mohamed Mahmoud did so only because the police were there and fighting back. If the police had left, the revolutionaries would have too. This was a natural sequel to the Maspero massacre. Violence had been normalized. First they came for the Christians, and no one cared. Now they were shooting college students, teenage soccer fans, and revolutionaries in the face, and still no one cared. It would only be a matter of time before the regime would turn its guns on other, more organized competitors. Entities like the Muslim Brotherhood and the old ruling party ignored the military's murderous tendencies at their peril.

The government, it was now clear, had only been decapitated, not overthrown. Knowing what it was up against, it embarked on a long
game to outmaneuver its opponents and sometimes seemed more sure of its goal than the revolutionaries. Once Mubarak was gone, the disparate groups that had come together to oust him couldn't agree on what to do next, or how: Electoral politics or street protest? Constitution first, or elections? And what kind of society should the new Egypt be, anyway? As activists without experience, funding, or institutional power struggled to organize politically, state media filled the void, calling the revolutionaries disruptive and destructive and spoiled. The sofa party, conservative and cautious, was easily swayed, and the revolution was losing the masses. By the time of the Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud, the young activists were in a state of suspense. Would they be able to finish the revolution they had started, or would the new Egypt prove worse than the old? As exhilarating as it was, their reunion in the square also had a darker edge, one that heralded the fraying of the revolution.

Unlike partisans of the Revolution Continues, Basem didn't view this latest outbreak of violence as a pivotal litmus test. It was unfortunate, that was all. He had a major rally that night in his district, and he found it preposterous that Moaz and other comrades thought he should suspend his campaign. No one else was taking a break. Why cede the contest to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, and the old regime? Some of the voters in Shoubra, Basem's working-class district, groused about the latest events in Tahrir as they waited in a café for the candidates to speak. One flung his dominoes to the table in disgust when his friends spoke of the fighting in the city center. “Fuck Tahrir, the cunt of the mother of the revolution,” he said. “Fuck the revolution.”

Basem spoke with fluid confidence, a much more natural-sounding orator than he'd been just a few months earlier. He sought the support of women, whose rights would suffer under Islamist rule, and of people who were tired of the state's abuses. “Nothing justifies the police killing people and putting hundreds in the hospital,” Basem said. “The police are our servants, not our masters. Their time will come.” He warned his listeners about the new burdens of citizenship. “If you don't vote today,” Basem said, “you can't complain tomorrow.”

Egypt was splintering. The Muslim Brotherhood was enjoying a new alliance with old enemies in the military as the two joined in condemning the anarchists fighting on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Basem and Zyad advanced toward the prize of parliament and the possibility to shape new laws. Meanwhile, around Tahrir, the revolutionaries somehow kept fighting for days over the same block. They were completely disconnected from the rest of the country, which was applauding the SCAF's authoritarian tone and pondering whether to vote for Islamists or establishment secular candidates. Almost no one was contemplating voting for the Tahrir candidates of the Revolution Continues.

Moaz found the simple life-and-death chase in the square easier to digest than the complex realities outside. “We will have revolution after revolution, like a cascade,” he said with glee. He let himself believe that government atrocities would inevitably draw people to the streets like on January 25. But his party, al-Tayyar al-Masry, had recruited only a few dozen former Muslim Brothers, while the establishment parties were mobilizing millions of voters.

Mohamed Mahmoud itself had devolved into a weird, contained, and violent ritual. Tahrir Square was quiet, and so were all the surrounding streets. The army kept things under control everywhere except for that single block, where it left the police in charge. And so, on that one spot, wave after wave of young Egyptians expended themselves. The army could have stopped it at any time by taking over the checkpoint from the police. The protesters could have simply stood back and stopped dying. But like wasps drawn to a honey trap, they came and fell. Kids who were afraid to tell their parents they were heading to Tahrir fearlessly attacked the police. They wrote their names and birthdays on tape affixed to their chests and sleeves, so they could be identified easily if killed.

Power relies in part on the willingness to kill. In the early days of Tahrir, revolutionaries had shocked the regime with their willingness to die. They had dared the regime to kill them all, and the regime had flinched. Nearly a year later, however, the regime seemed to have shed its reluctance. The revolutionaries had changed too. Before, they had been willing to fight; now they seemed eager.

On the third day of the clashes, there was a march from Shoubra to
the square. Basem joined because he opposed the force being used by the government, although he didn't endorse the street protest itself. As he walked for three hours with people from his district, a woman confronted him.

“We stood up to the old regime. They were all dogs!” she sputtered. “Now all the political parties are the same.”

“So you have no hope?” Basem asked. “All these people in the square cannot take power. They have to elect someone.”

“Everyone is fighting for chairs,” the woman said contemptuously. “This is the worst moment in the history of Egypt.”

That was the nihilism of this incarnation of Tahrir. The SCAF was the worst group to ever rule Egypt, and yet many of the young people in Tahrir now believed that anyone willing to engage in politics against the SCAF was just as bad as the dictators. In their view, the only people who were noble were the ones rushing headlong toward violent confrontations with the police. This disregard for complexity, for political thought, for the nuances of citizenship, was just another recipe for apathy and indifference. Even if this fight won a concession from the SCAF once again, it had succumbed to a form of vanity; many of the activists in Tahrir no longer had faith in practical agents of change, only in their ability to oppose authority. To some, violence perversely brought solace.

The fights over politics seemed abstract and procedural, the odds long against radical change. To seize power in politics, one had to draft laws, raise money, and woo defectors from the military and the former ruling party. To seize a street required a more straightforward asset: great numbers of people willing to die. By the end of the five-day Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud, nearly fifty people were dead and more than three thousand wounded. It wasn't entirely in vain. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces finally set a hard deadline to surrender power to an elected president: June 30, 2012.

The day before the fall parliamentary elections, a few thousand revolutionaries huddled in Tahrir as if awaiting a miracle. Some of the most dogged campaign workers had now decided to boycott. They gave up and sat in the square. A young activist who had spent almost every week on the road for two years, first for Mohamed ElBaradei and then for the
Social Democratic Party, had impulsively decided not to vote. “I am with Tahrir,” he said. Candidates from the Revolution Continues list didn't even intend to leave the square to vote for themselves. They imagined that their boycott would somehow erase the power and legitimacy of those who would win. The revolutionaries didn't realize that they had yet to woo most Egyptians, who were still unconvinced that the January 25 moment could or should translate into anything enduring. Whatever else it meant, boycotting the election represented yet another abdication from the public sphere. The revolution felt like it was all out of ideas.

Tear gas–infused dust choked the city. Irritation lingered in the tear ducts and lungs, a hangover of violence. The late-winter sun made everything a sickly gray. Then, all at once, the sky broke open, and warm rain poured over the square, washing away the toxins. A murmur swelled from all corners, first sounding like a hum and then like a roar. Everyone was praying: “May this rain bring us blessings and not harm.” Even the secular and atheist revolutionaries were turning to one of the last forces that hadn't disappointed them: God. They needed help anywhere they could find it.