Once Upon a Revolution (29 page)

“Who's in charge?” asked a woman clutching a bag of posters. Moaz was nowhere to be found; he was running late for his own event. He made it after a half hour.

“Dude, you said five minutes!” said his childhood friend and erstwhile campaign manager.

He blamed the traffic. “It's Egypt,” Moaz said haplessly. “What can I do?”

Moaz also was running security for a January 25 anniversary march. He met some of his team in Tahrir at the Belady Café, an upscale establishment replete with faux vintage photos of January 25 that marketed itself as the new revolutionary hangout. On state TV, we could hear an announcer heaping scorn on the upcoming anniversary marches. “These rabble-rousers want to burn down the country,” he said. Moaz had tried to persuade the revolutionary groups and the Brotherhood to have a single, unified stage in Tahrir. He had failed. He was recruiting as many strong, athletic people as he could to provide security on January 25. He was afraid of thugs. “The revolution started with a few tiny protests, and in the end, there will be nothing left of it but a few tiny protests,” he said.

Across town at the Golden Tulip Flamenco Hotel in Zamalek, the twenty-two elected members of the Social Democratic Party were plotting their legislative agenda. They spent the entire day in a conference room upholstered in burgundy velour. Late on Saturday evening, they unveiled it to the world. Only a half dozen reporters were interested enough to show. Basem and his colleagues waited an hour, but there were no more comers. Their performance was a harbinger of the embarrassment to come inside parliament. Each elected member of parliament gave a short, vacuous speech with no specifics. None of them listened when the others spoke. The gossiping delegates were so loud that the reporters had to move closer to the front to hear the vapid presentations. “We want to help the poor,” they all said.

A few reporters asked pointed questions. Each time the candidate deferred: “Basem will take that question. He is our revolutionary.” When Basem's turn came, he walked through the audience, handing out papers with every official's personal cell phone number and email. The others didn't look so happy about it. That day, Basem changed his profession on Facebook from “architect” to “politician.”

During the campaign, Basem had shaken fifty thousand hands. He rarely saw his children anymore, and his wife was usually asleep by the time he got home and fell into bed. He had spent the last two months canvassing his working-class district, and he felt acutely the difference between the clear, revolutionary agenda of his old Tahrir comrades and the spectrum of overlapping, sometimes contradictory interests of his constituents. The most pressing problems remained simple to describe and nearly impossible to solve: unemployment, rising food and fuel prices, inadequate housing. Questions of politics and rights felt secondary to the Egyptian majority struggling every day with individual poverty and a broken national economy. When Basem asked about politics in Shoubra, some people simply wanted a new president elected, with no more protests in the meantime. Others wanted the military to stand down immediately. Many Christians were more concerned about the Islamist surge than about the junta's powers. Few evinced sympathy for the revolutionary youth. The previous week a Kazeboon! team had set up a screening on a Shoubra street, and irritated neighbors cut off its electricity; they didn't want to hear any complaints about the army. Basem invited the Kazeboon! team to plug into his district office on the main avenue and project its videos against the wall.

A year in, Basem said, the revolutionaries had achieved symbolic victories by putting Mubarak on trial and holding elections. People had stopped being afraid, but the system that controlled them remained obstinately in place. Parliament and his own election notwithstanding, Basem said, street demonstrations remained the only tool by which people could affect the government, but even the effectiveness of protest was in question now. On January 25, 2012, Egypt would celebrate the one-year anniversary of its uprising, but it wasn't just the Revolutionary Youth Coalition planning a commemoration in Tahrir. So were the Muslim
Brotherhood and the SCAF. With everyone claiming the revolution, it was hard to agree on what, if anything, it meant.

“It's not clear to me what people want,” I said.

“It's not clear to me either,” Basem said. “That is the problem.”

At ten o'clock, early in the morning for these late-rising revolutionaries, Egypt's first meaningful parliament since World War II was sworn in. It was a Monday, just two days before the anniversary of January 25. The inaugural session was a balm to some and a source of rage to others. For the Islamists, who had won a commanding majority, it was a victory and vindication. The new parliament wouldn't end their struggle, but it marked a sea change in their political status. For the hard-left revolutionaries such as Sally, the new parliament meant nothing; they had boycotted the vote. Today they would protest an assembly they considered powerless, packed with fools, chauvinists, and religious obscurantists. In the middle fell those like Basem, who believed that politics and revolution were not mutually exclusive. They were conflicted, for they knew that a hall full of Salafis and Muslim Brothers would be unlikely to organize sustained resistance against the military junta or to showcase clever consensual lawmaking. Nonetheless, they believed in the democratic process. To them, the seating of parliament marked a decisive, if tainted, step toward rule of law.

Zyad made a symbolic walk through Tahrir Square to the swearing-in. Over his untucked shirt, he wore a sash that read, “No to military trials.” All the Social Democrats would wear them, an affirmation of their revolutionary pedigree. “I'm from here,” he said, pointing at the square. Then he pointed at the gates of parliament. “Not from there. The street for me is the most important thing.” A street vendor shouted at him, “Don't forget the poor!” We walked through a maze of barbed wire and concrete barriers, a new martial geography designed to make downtown protests impossible. He walked along the same route he had taken nine months earlier to vote in the constitutional referendum, when the possibilities for Egypt and the revolution had seemed so much happier. He morosely passed a crowd of Muslim Brothers who were singing and waving carnations; today marked an outright victory for them. “The people want God's law!” the Islamists chanted.

It took all day for the speaker to swear in the 508 members. All over the country, Egyptians watched on television. When it was Basem's turn, he spoke the oath: “I swear to uphold the law and the constitution.” Before the speaker could cut him off, he added his own extra twist: “And I swear to continue the revolution.”

Immediately, the Muslim Brotherhood stepped from the ranks of underground opposition into a state of intoxicated power. No sooner had the members of parliament taken their oaths than the Brothers sidelined everyone who opposed them. There wouldn't be any legislating by consensus or even minority consultation. The Brothers and the Salafis installed supermajorities on every committee. The chamber they envisioned would have no meaningful minority power.

It rained overnight before the revolution's anniversary on January 25, leaving puddles everywhere. Some of the streets leading to Tahrir were flooded ankle-deep with water from sidewalk to sidewalk: makeshift reflecting pools. Cold humidity sapped the city.

This was the Brotherhood's celebration. Whereas the original January 25 marches emerged more or less spontaneously, the first anniversary was an exercise in organized power. After dawn prayers, tens of thousands of well-instructed Muslim Brothers took to Tahrir. They were polite and impeccably dressed, and all elaborated on the same talking points.

For the Muslim Brotherhood, all was not won, but Egypt was heading in its direction. For the revolutionary youth, all was not lost, but little had been achieved. A secretive and repressive junta had succeeded Mubarak, and now two mammoths sat astride Egypt: the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Moaz and his peers felt an urgent need to rejuvenate a stalled revolution. Should the January 25 anniversary be a celebration or a protest? On this semantic hook hung the future of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the revolutionaries.

All the original revolutionaries were marching on Tahrir to re-create the feeling of the year before. Zyad and Moaz marched from the same mosque where they had gathered on January 28, 2011. Ayyash marched from Café Riche in Talaat Harb Square, five minutes away. Basem
and Sally joined a march that began outside Basem's parliamentary office in Shoubra. In a gesture of tribute and unity, the Coptic Maspero Youth Union had built a thirty-foot-tall obelisk out of lacquered canvas stretched on a wooden frame, on which its members had carefully painted the name of every martyr of every persuasion since January 25, 2011. As he walked, Basem chatted with constituents about the Brotherhood's alarming behavior in parliament. Moaz and the other ex–Muslim Brotherhood Youth patrolled the march perimeter, making sure no one harassed the women. This was a march for all the revolutionary youth, no matter their affiliation or sect, the last place where dissident Brothers and secular liberals still worked in tandem.

The different branches of the march united and crawled up Talaat Harb Street, but when the revolutionaries reached Tahrir, the square was already full to capacity with Muslim Brothers and Salafis. Rainwater blocked the way forward where the street met the square. The memorial obelisk was stalled. The march stopped. The crowd was so densely packed, it was hard to move in any direction.

“I have an announcement!” Basem said in a mock-serious announcer's voice. “We did all this to fill the square. The square is full! So I will go to the party headquarters, make some phone calls, and take a nap before my flight.” He was traveling to Ethiopia that night to try to negotiate a fair system to share the Nile's water with the countries upstream from Egypt.

Another hour passed before the rest of the somber revolutionaries picked their way into the square, where they were swallowed by throngs of jubilant Islamists. By sunset, they finally managed to erect their memorial to the martyrs on a barren patch of dirt in the roundabout at the center of Tahrir. It faced an enormous banner on the Muslim Brotherhood's stage: “The Victory of the January 25 Revolution.”

The Brothers partied in Tahrir for the rest of the week. By Friday, the revolutionary youth could not mask their disgust. The Brotherhood's dutiful millions had boxed them out of their own uprising. Paramilitary Brothers sprouted all over downtown like muscle-bound mushrooms after a rain. Their tight T-shirts showcased their bouncer's chests, and they had the uninflected facial expressions of the riot policeman or thug, only slightly less mean and dumb, or perhaps merely less practiced. Outside
parliament, they formed a cordon to distance protesters from the new Brotherhood members of parliament. In Tahrir, they created a buffer around the Brotherhood stage. By Friday, they proved necessary. The Brotherhood's celebratory crowds had dwindled, and the revolutionaries were commemorating their Friday of Rage from a year earlier. The Brotherhood's festivities made an irresistible target.

Moaz and hundreds of the original revolutionary youth marched across the Qasr el-Nil bridge toward Tahrir. They had prayed at noon at the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque in Mohandiseen and had retraced their pivotal January 28 march route. They stopped by the stone lions on the bridge, where a year earlier the police had drenched them with fire hoses while they prayed. Here they had conclusively overrun the brutish cops. Now they met no resistance, but ahead lay what many considered their new enemy: the Brotherhood. Today they were technically allies, but these youth felt a special resentment for the Islamists in the square. The regime was the enemy they'd expected to fight. The Brotherhood, they thought, should have been on their side, on the people's side.

“Fuck the mothers of the Brothers,” one said. Moaz, whose mother was one of those being insulted, wore a manic frozen grin. “This is a revolution, not a party!” the revolutionaries chanted. They were like somnambulists retracing a path that once had led them to glory.

When they reached the square, they swarmed in front of the Brotherhood's stage like angry drunks. “Leave, traitors, the square is ours, not yours!” they sang. Hundreds of burly Brothers linked arms. People waved their shoes at the leader behind the microphone. Then someone actually tossed one onto the stage. More projectiles followed: water bottles, corncobs, garbage. The man on the stage droned on. Someone shimmied up the lamppost and began worrying the electric wire until he pulled it free. He had cut power to the sound system. Now the Brother onstage was barely audible. The crowd grew rowdier. Some kids now held rocks. Another brandished a broken bottle. “This is crazy,” someone next to me said.

“Liars!” the crowd shouted. “Sellouts! Leave!”

“You can't make us leave,” the Brother onstage said smugly. “We are the real revolution.”