Once Upon a Revolution (36 page)

Liberals believed the situation had become irreversibly grave. After all the struggles of the previous two years, a single, relatively extremist faction controlled the presidency, the government's legislative powers, and the Constituent Assembly. Carried away with their power, the Brotherhood
and its allies had discarded their conciliatory rhetoric about the Islamic requirement for
shura
, or consultation, and the need to pave a durable way forward by including all Egyptians in the constitution. Instead, they were now forcing their way through with a winner-takes-all swagger. Morsi and his Islamist allies began to justify all their actions with a perverse misreading of democracy. The Brotherhood had won fair elections, they said, and now could write whatever laws it pleased, minorities be damned. They claimed the Brotherhood had the blessing of a democratic majority to do anything it wished, whether in government or in the drafting of Egypt's permanent constitution. It had no need to consult or include anyone else; the Brotherhood state had the blessing of both God and the ballot box.

In the Constituent Assembly, the Brotherhood and the even more extreme Salafis appeared completely indifferent to the rights and privileges of others: women, Christians, secular Muslims, liberals. Instead, they were moving forward with a document that would preserve centralized misrule (but now in the service of the Brotherhood), while advancing a particularly fundamentalist brand of Islam. In practice, no one was interested in negotiating the compromises necessary for a legitimate constitution. The liberals had aspired to write a document that would simply ignore the aims of Egypt's conservative, Islamic citizens, who probably made up the single largest bloc of the population. Now the Islamists held the levers, and they were going to write the constitution their way. This wasn't Philadelphia in 1787; this was the Wild West. There were manifold areas of contention, but three threatened to overwhelm the entire constitution.

First was the process itself. This constitution was supposed to be the product of negotiation among all Egypt's factions, a departure from the norm of dictatorial rule. Instead, it was being written in secret by one group alone. For many, the lack of inclusivity and transparency was as big a problem as the Brotherhood's actual policies.

The second was the military's special privileges. For decades already, its budget had been secret, and it operated without de facto civilian oversight. In exchange for allowing civilian politics to proceed, the military wanted these protections enshrined officially and permanently in the
constitution. The military would get to select its own chief and its own defense minister, who would dictate national security policy independently of the elected president. Almost everyone except the fringe revolutionaries was willing to accept this toxic demand as a necessary evil, but the liberals and the Islamists each had very different ideas about what kind of deal they wanted to make with the military in exchange for its immunity and autonomy.

This disagreement pointed to the third and final point of contention: religion. Secularists had tried once already in 2011 to circumvent the democratic process by negotiating a bill of rights in a secret deal with the military. Known as the Selmi document, this bill would have guaranteed a secular state (along with the military's special status), but the Islamists rightfully shot it down because of the unacceptable backroom manner in which it was conceived: liberal goals by illiberal means. Once they were in charge, however, the Islamists were just as undemocratic and self-serving. They ignored the few token secularists, liberals, Christians, and women in the Constituent Assembly. The Islamists made their own backroom deal with the military: the same special privileges the SCAF was always pursuing, in exchange for a new provision to define Egypt as an Islamic state that gave clerics the power to review laws, and that left little to no room for religious minorities, secular Muslims, and laws based on universal rights rather than the Koran. The reflex of both the secularists and the Islamists, when in power, was to dictate to the other side rather than negotiate. Even on so fundamental a question as the constitution and the source of all laws, the Islamists and their secular counterparts behaved like little dictators, pursuing a winner-takes-all strategy, Egypt be damned.

The crisis came to a head at the end of November. Another war had flared up in Gaza. In the past, Egypt had acted as a willing enforcer for Israel and the United States. Mubarak, Israel, and America shared a common distaste for Islamists. The Brotherhood, however, stood firmly on the other side of the conflict. The Islamist militant faction Hamas, after all, had begun in the 1980s as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a rare moment of geopolitical suspense. Would President Morsi break with the Egyptian military on a key matter of
national security policy and side with Hamas, spreading the instability from the Gaza war into Egypt? To the surprise and pleasure of the Egyptian military, the Israeli government, and the White House, Morsi took a pragmatic tack. He used his leverage over Hamas to broker a cease-fire, acting less interested in the Hamas cause than in preserving Egypt's longtime role as the regional leader and neutralizing any outside distractions to his domestic rule. President Obama rewarded Morsi with a long, friendly phone call and copious positive press. A few months earlier, Obama had snubbed Morsi's efforts to visit the White House; now he was praising Morsi as a statesman.

On November 22, basking in the glow of tacit approval from an American government that suddenly realized how much it needed him, Morsi went further than anyone had imagined he would. He issued a decree that gave him unlimited dictatorial powers, just two days after the Gaza cease-fire and just one day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cairo. Egyptians were stunned, but the US government barely uttered an objection. To all appearances, the United States had given Morsi its blessing. The president's decree concentrated all the nation's power in his hands. It took away the judiciary's power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly or the Shoura Council, the relatively impotent upper house of the legislature, which remained in place. Judicial review was gone. Morsi had assumed legislative authority already, and now he took the authority of the judiciary as well. This was more formal power than any of Egypt's dictators had ever held.

The fallout was immediate. Everyone except the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafi allies viewed Morsi's new powers as a coup against the state. His moderate advisers resigned in protest. Secularists, liberals, and nationalists who had been bickering among themselves now found common ground in opposing Morsi's new tyranny. Morsi tried to rally support. “The
felool
, remnants of the old regime, are hiding under the cover of the judiciary!” he shouted in a raspy speech. “I will uncover them!” Tragically for the prospects of consensus and democracy, he was right in his diagnosis if not in his cure. The judiciary was acting unconscionably as the long arm of the deposed regime, overturning elected institutions capriciously and thwarting reform and transition. Unfortunately,
the only solution that Morsi and the Brotherhood could concoct was to banish the entire opposition and erect their own dictatorship.

The power grab climaxed on December 1. President Morsi announced that the hallowed constitution, which was supposed to be the studied product of deliberation and consensus, would be completed that very night. Incredibly, it would be put to referendum just two weeks later. The Constituent Assembly, with only its Islamist members present, rushed through in a single all-night session more than two hundred articles meant to govern every aspect of life in Egypt. Clerics and jurists shouted down one another, inserted sloppy last-minute language, and fell asleep in an appalling spectacle that was broadcast on live television. In the past, the Islamists had argued plausibly that regardless of their faults, they were smart, competent, and had an overarching vision. This constitutional fiasco proved otherwise. The hastily drafted legal language was sloppy and prone to multiple interpretations. Clerics got their authority over lawmaking. The military got its total immunity and independence. Countless other provisions weakened the civil state. This was anything but a revolutionary constitution.

This contest for Egypt's future deranged all sides. Morsi gave screaming speeches about his legitimacy and the conspiracies of the
felool
. The secular forces, frightened into cooperating, couldn't decide whether to campaign against the constitution, seek Morsi's impeachment, or boycott all politics. Most of the anti-Morsi secular political groups united under a new banner, the National Salvation Front, but it was as illiberal as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Salvation Front rambled endlessly about the evils of Islamism, but its leaders never discussed liberties, individual rights, due process, or the primacy of elected civilians over the military. They talked only about how the Islamists were the new dictators and had to be turned back.

A week after Morsi's decree, protesters surrounded the Ittihadiya Presidential Palace. They called Morsi a new pharaoh and demanded his immediate resignation. They called his followers sheep,
khirfan
, which in Arabic rhymes with
Ikhwan
, Brothers. They were filled with righteous
indignation and hunger for vengeance. Some tried to drive a bulldozer toward the palace. Others attacked and killed Muslim Brothers who were counterprotesting in support of the president. Police stood by and let the two sides fight it out.

Morsi could have responded to the protesters' demands by reconvening the Constituent Assembly, or he could have ignored the demonstrations outside his palace. Instead, he called on the Brotherhood's supporters to gather at the palace and defend his legitimacy. It was a recipe for war. Thousands of partisans swarmed Ittihadiya. Muslim Brothers detained and beat people they suspected of
felool
or revolutionary sympathies. In tents outside the palace, Brothers tortured and interrogated activists in sessions that were videotaped and leaked. Brotherhood lawyers and presidential advisers then cleared some detainees for release; others they transferred to the police for detention. Egyptians were already veterans of all the depredations of a police state. Now they were experiencing a new abuse: makeshift torture chambers on the grounds of the president's house, staffed by members of the president's religious organization.

Moaz and Basem had both joined the first protest at Ittihadiya. Once the Brotherhood called out its thugs, Moaz left. As more and more of his friends were captured and beaten, Moaz worked the phones. He called his old contacts in the Brotherhood hierarchy, pleading for them to release the activists they had tortured. He helped secure the release of Ola Shabha, an eloquent young leftist, who appeared on television that week with her face bruised and swollen and a black eye, a living testament to the thuggishness of Morsi's presidency. “It was a big mistake,” Moaz said of the Ittihadiya clashes. “There were mistakes on both sides.” In the final count, more than ten people were killed and thousands injured.

Confident he would win the constitutional referendum, Morsi rescinded elements of his presidential decree and restored some powers to the courts. But the palace fight galvanized the secular opposition. The secular National Salvation Front briefly stopped its dithering. Mohamed ElBaradei joined forces with former presidential candidates Amr Mousa and Hamdeen Sabbahi. Most of the secular, nationalist, and liberal political parties were aboard too. Three days before the nationwide referendum on Morsi's constitution, the Salvation Front initiated a “no” campaign.
It was too late and outmatched but still managed to convince one-third of the voters to oppose the constitution. Crucially, the “no” vote won in Cairo, signaling that the Muslim Brotherhood had lost the capital.

The National Salvation Front offered a final chance for liberal redemption. Over the previous year, secular groups had failed to unify in a single coalition for the parliamentary elections, and then even more spectacularly had lost a chance to win the presidency by squabbling among themselves and splitting the secular vote. Morsi's missteps opened an opportunity. The Muslim Brotherhood had exposed itself as power hungry and eager to use violent tools of repression to silence opponents. It was mismanaging the economy, and had restored neither dignity nor law and order. The anti-Morsi forces could now unite, if they chose, and advance a positive agenda that appealed to Egypt's moderate center. There was a vast pool of citizens who identified as Islamic supporters of a secular state and had voted in the presidential race for the mild ex-Brother Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh. There were avowed secularists who ran the gamut, from outright liberals and progressives such as Basem and his friends, to right-wing authoritarians who hated Islamists but hardly qualified as democratic. Pumped with anger at Morsi's behavior, the electorate was ripe for a message of civil rights, reconciliation, and competent governance.