Once Upon a Revolution (35 page)

With the revolution and the regime at a temporary impasse, for the first time in his adult life, Basem took a rest. He sensed the respite wouldn't last long. At its peak, the family business had employed three Kamel brothers and a half dozen others, but a free-falling economy had eliminated almost all ABC Architecture's clients. Basem's brothers found other jobs. Ramadan began in July, and Basem slept late. In the evenings, he ate with his wife and children. He took his children to the movies, the ice-skating rink, the fun park. At Family Land in the suburb of Maadi, he sipped mango juice with his wife, Rasha, while the kids rode bumper cars.

“I can't remember the last time we spent a day like this,” Basem said.

“A long time,” Rasha said. “At first I thought life would go back to normal after the revolution. When you started building the party, I realized it never would.”

They sat comfortably in silence. “Every day I worry you'll get arrested,” Rasha confessed.

Basem raised his eyebrows.

“It's a new world,” his wife said with equanimity and a hint of a smile. “We don't know anything about what all this will bring.”

Despite all the ominous signs, Moaz felt that grand possibilities still beckoned. At last, he believed, Egypt's revolution was on track. There was a civilian president in Ittihadiya Palace, and for all the problems Moaz had with the Muslim Brotherhood, he was sure it would do a better job than Mubarak or the SCAF. New parliamentary elections were supposed to come in the fall, and Egyptians would have the chance to resolve their differences through flawed but fundamentally free politics. Flush with a sense of achievement, Moaz traveled to Syria for Ramadan to help the rebels fighting the dictator Bashar al-Assad. The Arab world was interconnected and suffered from a plague of dictators who displayed a similar contempt for the lives of their subjects. Moaz was sure that his experience as an Egyptian revolutionary could be of use to his Syrian brothers. In 2011 he had traveled on a medical convoy to Libya in the early stages of the uprising against al-Qaddhafi, and he felt a historical confluence. The Arab world was moving in concert into a new age of self-determination, with popular uprisings inevitably redrawing the blueprints of power. It seemed only natural to work in solidarity across borders with other civil society activists, providing help when possible and exchanging ideas about this bright new future.

“The revolution isn't only for making protests but also for advising other countries how to secure freedom and build better lives,” Moaz said. The Free Syrian Army had seized a sliver of territory in the north, and Moaz joined a mission organized by an international confederation of doctors, the Arab Medical Union, to help Syrian civilians, rather than militiamen, take control of the liberated areas. He joined activists in the town of Azaz, which the government bombarded daily. They were struggling to staff clinics, pick up garbage, and distribute food.

“The people with guns shouldn't be running bakeries, warehouses, cooking gas distribution,” Moaz counseled the Syrian activists.

It was his first time in a combat zone, but it didn't feel that different to him from the many battles with police. He sheltered in the basement with the few remaining doctors when the hospital in Azaz was shelled. Afterward, they zigzagged through deserted streets to pray the Eid al-Adha
prayer in the town mosque, ignoring the occasional sniper bullet.

“You won't hear the bullet that kills you,” a Syrian advised Moaz. “So relax, don't be afraid.”

The activists decided to abandon the clinic at Azaz and smuggled Moaz over the border. It was time to go home; his visa was up. The war in Syria was more sprawling and lethal than anything Moaz had encountered during the Egyptian Revolution, and he realized that his type of civilian activism would make little difference. The best he could hope to accomplish for Syria, he thought, was to raise awareness and money to help refugees. Syria's political problems seemed even more irresolvable than Egypt's. “You can choose to start a war, but you cannot choose the end,” he reflected.

He returned home to Egypt depressed and deflated, but more than ever committed to nonviolence. A psychologist friend suggested that change might shake Moaz out of his funk. He shaved his beard and resigned from the Egyptian Current Party, which had failed to sign up even three thousand members after a year of effort. Without members, money, or a clear idea, he saw no point in political parties.

For all its machinations since January 25, 2011, the military had held to only two constants: it had grabbed any authority it could, and it had exercised that authority poorly. The Egyptian public adored the military, but it was a mediocre military at best: bad at the basics, such as training conscripts and organizing battalions, and worse at everything else. While the military happily expanded its powers, it also avoided responsibility for governance and for matters like Egypt's international loans. When charged with providing basic security during the revolutionary transition, the military, uneasy and unfamiliar with filling the role of domestic police, had arrested tens of thousands of innocent people, while street crime spiraled to never-before-seen levels. The military was authoritarian and guilty of greedy overreach; it was also incompetent.

As President Morsi took over, the SCAF went about its business, confident it could simply ignore him. As Ramadan drew to a close in mid-August 2012, however, jihadists in the Sinai attacked a military base.
They killed sixteen poorly trained conscripts, stole their armored vehicles, and stormed the Israeli border. The Israelis quickly repelled the attackers, but the ineptitude of Egypt's military had been exposed publicly.

At that moment, as the SCAF was apologizing for its embarrassing failure, Morsi made his move. He fired Defense Minister Tantawi, military chief Sami Enan, and all the other top generals. The SCAF was vulnerable, and Morsi saw the opportunity to remove Mubarak's old henchmen and replace them with new officers whom he thought would be loyal to the elected president. It looked like a bold and sweeping transformation: the president righteously enforcing civilian primacy, firing the corrupt and senescent generals who had stifled Egypt as the backbone of Mubarak's regime and later as his successors.

In truth, though, the move was far less radical and significant than it appeared. The initiative to replace Tantawi and Enan came as much from the junior generals on the SCAF as it did from the new president. Morsi wanted Tantawi's inner circle gone, but so did most of the younger SCAF generals, who had chafed as their superiors lingered on for generations after retirement age. There had been no renewal in the upper ranks for two decades. Morsi's interests coincided with those of the SCAF, and he found a willing replacement for Tantawi: General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a religious man with a veiled wife and a solid record in military intelligence. El-Sisi was wily enough to prevent internal dissent in the armed forces and pious enough that Morsi considered him an ally. The SCAF generals had fumbled a lot of important decisions during their tenure as Egypt's rulers, but they had maintained a fabulous discipline in their public appearances. There were rumors that influential officers disagreed about whether the military should run the country more directly or maintain a dignified distance as the power behind the throne, but this internal struggle never filtered out to the public. The generals always presented a united front to outsiders. They did so now as well. Tantawi and Enan accepted their forced retirement with public grace, and they had cause for satisfaction: they were granted immunity from crimes committed in office. El-Sisi and the other generals on the SCAF presented the changes as an amicable shuffle, chosen by the general staff and approved by the civilian president.

At the same time, Morsi also claimed the powers of the dissolved parliament for himself. The president wanted to reassert civilian primacy, and, again, his interests on this front converged with those of the military, which wanted to take a step back from day-to-day politics. In another country, it might have been hard to imagine that any single person could temporarily hold the authority of the entire legislative branch. Under a less arbitrary system, new elections would have immediately followed the dissolution of parliament. But Egypt's rulers liked to improvise. Faceless judges had dissolved the parliament, the SCAF had claimed authority, and two months later, this awkward Brother-turned-president had reached out and taken the power of law from the SCAF. It didn't look anything like a democratic transition, but at the moment it did look like an improvement; better that unfettered, unregulated power rest with an elected civilian than with a secretive clan of violent, intolerant generals.

From that first shift in August, however, some liberals and secularists warned that Morsi was amassing his own dictatorial powers. It was already considered a poor omen that he hadn't tried to form a national unity government or a cabinet of neutral technocrats, instead preferring an ideological alliance with the Salafis to the Brotherhood's right. The new president had not yet done anything that could be construed as authoritarian, but his detractors predicted it was only a question of time. Here was one man, an alumnus of an underground authoritarian religious order, who now possessed the entire power of the executive and legislative branches of government, along with total control over the body that would write Egypt's next constitution. It was bound to go wrong, the liberals believed. Basem's colleagues in the Social Democratic Party opposed military rule, but many of them, from the moment of Mubarak's fall, had seen the SCAF as the only force that could check the Islamists. If the military retired from politics and returned to the barracks, the Social Democrats said, the Muslim Brotherhood would control everything.

In short order, their fears proved justified. Morsi began packing the government with sycophantic cronies. A trusted hack was put in charge of state television and newspapers. During the campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood had promised to avoid “culture wars” and focus on rescuing Egypt's broken economy. However, now that they were in power and
goaded by their extremist Salafi allies, the Brothers proposed banning alcohol, censoring internet pornography, and closing down the all-night cafés that had been a mainstay of Egyptian social life for centuries. The Brotherhood abandoned one of the most pressing issues of its campaign, reforming the police and Interior Ministry, for a bigger priority: using the tools of the old regime for its own ends. The Brotherhood didn't care if the police abused citizens, so long as it could insert its own loyalists into police ranks. As new cases of police brutality and torture piled up, the Brotherhood remained silent. The presidential advisers who really mattered were all Brotherhood loyalists: the prime minister, the justice minister, and the informal kitchen cabinet that helped Morsi set foreign policy. The Brotherhood's influence was so widespread that its supreme guide felt obliged to hold a press conference denying that he controlled President Morsi, only intensifying the belief that he did.

These were broken promises that very quickly merged into far greater breaches of trust. The Brotherhood wrote a parliamentary election law that gave it unfair advantage. The Supreme Court, which had final authority over election laws, requested changes. The Brotherhood made the revisions, but then refused to send them back to the court for a final review. Even more alarming to the liberals and the secularists was Morsi's stewardship of the Constituent Assembly: the hundred Egyptians tasked with writing a new charter for the country. The assembly had been formed by the now-disbanded parliament, which had been controlled by a veto-proof supermajority of Brothers and Salafis. Most of the reputable non-Islamists had already quit the Constituent Assembly in protest before Morsi was elected, including Basem's Social Democratic Party and the liberal groups that identified as revolutionary. By October, almost all the remaining non-Islamists resigned in protest from the Constituent Assembly, including conservatives representing the Coptic Church and the Mubarak-era political class. Now Morsi was acting unimpeded, in concert with the fundamentalists in the assembly.