Once Upon a Revolution (41 page)

For five days, Moaz had been living out of his car, driving from massacre, to clinic, to mosque, arranging clandestine meetings with friends who were on their way to prison or hoping to sneak across the border to exile. Thugs had beaten him and ripped his clothes. He was wearing a red tracksuit he had bought from a street vendor. On Saturday evening, he was stopped at yet another checkpoint, down the street from Basem's parliamentary office in Shoubra. He shuddered with fear that he would be recognized. Suddenly Moaz realized that his time was up. He had to leave Egypt. He made it through and finally drove home. There he found his mother crying. She hadn't seen him in almost a week.

“I was worried,” she said.

“I had no problems,” he said. “I was just keeping my friends company.”

“You're lying,” his mother said, holding him tight. Without discussing any of the details, they agreed it was wise for him to leave the country—and to sleep in his car, far from his family, until his departure. State Security knew the house on Sudan Street. On August 22, Moaz's brothers drove him to the airport. Moaz knew, thanks to a sympathetic contact
in the government, that he had not yet been placed on the no-fly list. He had packed a duffel bag with his most important tools: multiple laptops and tablet computers, a stack of external hard drives, and a bag of smartphones. The route to the airport took them past the sites of all the revolution's triumphs and massacres. They passed the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque, where so many promising revolutionary marches had begun. From an overpass, they looked down on Tahrir Square, and then a moment later the Coptic Hospital and the road to the Coptic Cathedral and Ministry of Defense, where revolutionary promise had first lapsed into sectarian murder. Then the airport road passed through Nasr City, near Rabaa Square and directly in front of the presidential guard barracks, where Egypt's faltering experiment with democracy had plunged to a bloody halt.

“We are living a bad dream,” Moaz said to his younger brother Bilal. Moaz was headed to Istanbul, Turkey, where he had no friends, no job, and didn't know the language. “Where am I going?”

“For now, just focus on getting out,” Bilal said.

The security officer at the airport recognized Moaz and questioned him for an hour, but his papers were in order. As much as the officer didn't like Moaz, he had to let him go.

Within weeks, he was joined by dozens of acquaintances and former Brotherhood comrades. Ayyash also managed to slip past airport security and fly to Istanbul, where, despite his tense relations with the Brotherhood, he took a job with a Brotherhood-linked website. He worked as well on medical relief for Syrian refugees and also applied to master's programs, still mindful of his dream of working as a presidential adviser.

“This is our life now,” Ayyash told me over Skype. “We will wait for another chance.”

Only a trace now remained of Tahrir's conscience. Most Egyptians applauded the bloodbath and shouted down as a traitor anyone who questioned the military government's violence. Almost alone in the secular political class, ElBaradei had spoken against the massacre at Rabaa. Even his timid critique, too late to make any difference, had disqualified him
from public life in Egypt as voices began to converge into a single horrifying chorus. The public figures critical of the coup numbered at best in the hundreds: a tiny community of conscience. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the ex-Brother, never wavered. Nor did Amr Hamzawy, the liberal academic who had refused to join the mainstream revolutionary parties at the outset in part because he recognized the tenuousness of their commitment to liberalism. Among the youth, the Revolutionary Socialists and some well-known figures such as Alaa Abdel Fattah had maintained their integrity. The April 6 Movement had succumbed briefly to el-Sisi fever but by the time of the great massacre at Rabaa Square had regained sanity. Alaa, Ahmed Maher, and some others founded a new movement called “the Way of the Revolution,” a third front between Islamist and military rule. Few people paid it any heed. This small group included the only voices raised against military rule, against the idea that the correct response to the Brotherhood's mistakes was to kill its leaders and outlaw its beliefs.

El-Sisi declared a preemptive war on terror, and jihadists obliged by providing terrorism for him to fight. Assassins tried to kill the interior minister. Suicide bombers struck for the first time in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood condemned the attacks, but it made no difference; the organization was blamed all the same.
Takfiri
jihadists from Sinai took responsibility for a series of bombings that targeted police in Cairo and other cities. In a perfect mirror image of what the Brotherhood had done when it was in charge, el-Sisi's government convened a new Constituent Assembly that completely shut out the Islamists. Led by Amr Moussa, no enemy of the
felool
, a group of fifty establishment secularists wrote Egypt's third constitution since Mubarak. This one preserved the secular nature of the state but spelled out the broadest protections yet for the military. The SCAF was snapping up lucrative contracts from the interim government, including hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects.

The military was openly pursuing naked political power and crass riches while el-Sisi's cult of personality blossomed. Anyone who didn't like it was silenced. The popular comedian Bassem Youssef, who had been hounded by Morsi's prosecutors but never taken off the air, found
his show cancelled suddenly when he mocked the public obsession with el-Sisi's manliness. Apparently it wasn't acceptable to make fun of the ladies who proclaimed they wanted to leave their husbands for el-Sisi, or the bakers who decorated their pastries with the general's portrait. The only politics allowed were el-Sisi's politics. His emerging regime enjoyed tremendous popular support. For all the state-orchestrated propaganda and anti-Islamist hysterics, the acclaim for el-Sisi was genuine. Each of his repressive measures was welcomed and applauded. After three years of disappointing leaders, Egyptians were hungry for more than just charisma: they wanted someone who could get things done, and despite his flimsy record, they thought el-Sisi could be that man.

Basem only snapped out of his lethargy in late November, when the transitional government, whose prime minister hailed from Basem's own Social Democratic Party, passed a law criminalizing protest. This was too much even for Basem and others who had been willing to team up with the military against the Islamists. He went downtown to protest the anti-protest law and narrowly escaped arrest. The last remaining activists at large were locked up, first for protesting without a permit, and then for a variety of incredible charges of fomenting violence. Alaa Abdel Fattah, Ahmed Maher from April 6, and most of the widely recognized faces of Tahrir were imprisoned, accused of undermining national security.

Zyad had been laying low since the events of the summer. His sponsor, ElBaradei, had been drummed out of politics. Zyad had always been a more pointed critic of Islamists than Basem and the other liberal revolutionaries were, but he didn't want to appear to condone the massacre at Rabaa or the restoration of military rule. He had escaped a prison sentence for his comment about the field marshal and the donkey, so now he was biding his time. He tended to some duties in the Social Democratic Party, visited his son and ex-wife, and hung out in his small bachelor apartment. When el-Sisi's constitution came up for a vote, Zyad tried to convince the Social Democratic Party to campaign against it. The protections it gave the military weren't worth any of its good points, Zyad argued. True to its liberal charter, the Social Democratic Party hosted an internal debate on whether to endorse or oppose the charter. Zyad made his case, but the party members were eager to move on and get out on
the stump; it was a chance to increase their visibility. They voted against Zyad and for el-Sisi's constitution.

Dissent was silenced at a dizzying speed, crossing boundaries that had been respected even by Mubarak, the SCAF, and Morsi. Well-known human rights activists retired or took sabbaticals. Sally left Egypt for a spell. Supporters of the revolution renewed applications to study or work abroad. El-Sisi meant to remake Egypt, and quickly. Every week, Brotherhood supporters were killed and arrested. A group of teenage girls was sentenced to eleven years in prison for protesting in support of Morsi. A team of foreign correspondents for Al Jazeera English was arrested, accused of operating a Muslim Brotherhood terrorism cell; until now foreign journalists had almost always been left alone by the state. Members of Aboul Fotouh's party who campaigned against the latest terrible constitution were arrested. Recordings of the private phone calls of activists began surfacing on proregime television channels. Some were blackmailed privately with threats that sex tapes or other embarrassing conversations would be leaked. The regime's message was clear: criticizing el-Sisi was a crime. Independent journalism was a crime. Talking to Muslim Brothers was a crime. Opposing government policies was a crime. El-Sisi would do what he could to put the revolution to an end. Among Egypt's fatigued citizens, he found millions of willing accomplices.

All that was left was to draft the revolution's obituary. Those who still dreamed of revolution sought to figure out where they had gone wrong, how they had failed to persuade enough Egyptians that liberty and security weren't mutually exclusive. Alaa Abdel Fattah sent letters from prison, which were published on the dwindling number of critical websites that remained. Moaz wrote passionate essays, which were occasionally accepted by newspapers; otherwise he posted them on Facebook. At the beginning of the revolution, Mubarak supporters had formed a group called “Please Forgive Us, O Leader,” apologizing for the Tahrir youth who were rudely disputing his rule. As el-Sisi promoted himself to field marshal and prepared his inevitable presidential campaign, Moaz recalled the firestorm that had engulfed Zyad when he likened the previous field
marshal to a donkey. Moaz penned a parody of the
felool
credo: “Please forgive us, O donkey,” he wrote, a flowery apology to beasts of burden everywhere. The craven Egyptians who were voluntarily surrendering to the yoke of military fascism, Moaz wrote, did not deserve to be compared with the oppressed but dignified donkey.

El-Sisi's constitution passed with 98 percent support in a referendum in January. Weeks of smothering propaganda had urged a “yes” vote, and the last stragglers who urged people to say no were jailed as spies, traitors, or vandals. In a vast show of force across the nation, representatives of all the different security branches surrounded polling stations, outnumbering civilians on the street at any given time by a ratio of two to one. They meant to thwart any Muslim Brotherhood protests, and also to signal to the citizenry that the deep state was in better condition than ever. “The army and the people are one hand,” banners everywhere proclaimed while sound trucks played the promilitary anthem “Bless the Hands.”

Only the details of the restoration remained to be sorted out. Field Marshal el-Sisi would assume the presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood would weather another generation underground, and Egyptians would bow again under an incompetent authoritarian government that would promise stability and growth while delivering neither. For sixty years, the generals had controlled Egypt, and they'd never managed to provide liberty, economic prosperity, or dignity. On the third anniversary of the revolution, January 25, 2014, Tahrir Square was closed to revolutionaries. Only el-Sisi supporters were allowed, and they threw a grand coronation party funded and organized by the army. First-rate sound system, banners, and refreshments. Dissenters, real or perceived, were beaten. No one had to give an order. The people were fired up enough to do it of their own accord.

Basem had given up on his bigger dreams. His architecture business had dried up. His savings would last another few months. He didn't know how long el-Sisi would permit political life to continue. His dreams of revolution had faded into something much more meager. Power lay out of reach, and so did the people. Now all that was left for him was to build something in politics that might serve the next generation: no longer the ambitious blueprint of a revolutionary architect but the workaday routine of an engineer. From now on, he was dedicated to training party
members, giving them management and logistical skills, and a curriculum in social democratic political theory that he had spent a year developing. Many of the other party leaders were lazy, turning up only to give speeches or appear on TV. Basem thought the next opportunity would come in eight years or so, when el-Sisi would be wrapping up his second presidential term. That's when a finely trained political party could compete for elections and public opinion as the Muslim Brotherhood had been able to do in the first rotation after Tahrir.