Once Upon a Revolution (8 page)

Younger Brothers like Moaz regarded the Brotherhood's wait-and-see pose with distaste. When workers organized the famous Mahalla strike of April 6, 2008, they wanted to join, but the Brotherhood leaders refused. “Those people are struggling for our rights,” Moaz declared. “We should join them.” Like the secular youth, the young Brothers were beginning to grasp the possibility that the regime was not invincible; that they could have a say in their nation's fate. Moaz was arrested again in March 2010 and was severely beaten. Afterward, he wrote a detailed account on his blog, which was titled “I Love the Brotherhood, O State Security!” He advised detainees to keep careful records of their interrogations and imprisonments. “We can take our rights,” he wrote. “Once there is a revolution, all these officers will be the ones who go to prison.” Each tremor in 2010 contributed to a cascade: ElBaradei's petition, the murder of Khaled Said, the violent rebuff of striking workers. Political energy was also flowing out of the soccer fan clubs known as “ultras.” Like their counterparts around the soccer-loving world, the ultras often sought to rumble with police after matches. ElBaradei's activists and the Brothers presented millions of signatures from people willing to publish their dissent and risk official retaliation. But the regime ignored them completely.

Khaled Said's killing provided the catalyst to unify. When the news spread that police had publicly murdered this apolitical computer gamer, outraged Egyptians gathered in front of the Interior Ministry. No one organized the protest, and it drew people from across the spectrum. Basem once again defied his family, coming down with friends from ElBaradei's campaign. Moaz once again defied the orders of his superiors, alongside dozens of Muslim Brotherhood youth leaders. The veteran activists from
Kifaya and Ayman Nour's campaign showed up, along with youth groups from every political party. As usual, the police broke it up, but these youth had all seen each other on the street and realized that disparate strands were coming together. Afterward, Moaz and the other Brothers went to their leaders with a formal proposal to collaborate with all the other disenchanted Egyptians.

“We should work to topple Mubarak,” Moaz insisted.

The leaders refused. “We must be careful now,” they said.

The year ended with the wholesale fraud of the fall 2010 parliamentary elections. “Honorable citizens” materialized to attack voters with clubs and swords. Moaz filmed some of the worst abuses as part of a Brotherhood effort to document the fraud. The Brotherhood went from eighty-eight seats in parliament to zero. Mubarak's last election erased even the token representation previously achieved by the Brotherhood and the small faction of neutered but symbolically important secular opposition parties.

For more than a year, Moaz and his friends had chafed at the caution of crusty Brotherhood leaders and their refusal to boycott the sham elections. After the voting, the most dynamic among the Muslim Brotherhood youth joined young activists from secular movements at their marches and confrontations with police. Together they were lashed with canes, sprayed with tear gas, and beaten in paddy wagons and jail cells; this shared experience pointed in a direct line toward Tahrir. On Facebook they continued the conversations that began on the street and in detention. To their mutual surprise, they found an extensive common set of ideals centered on rights, economic justice, political reform, and a distinctly Egyptian freedom agenda: freedom of speech, freedom from police brutality, freedom of worship, and freedom from abject poverty. Longtime activists had already found new comrades through ElBaradei's campaign. Islamists such as Moaz found that they shared more with ElBaradei campaigners like Basem and with other secular activists than they did with their own rigid leadership. An agenda was gathering force, and, for now, it was transcending Egypt's old ideological divisions.

The dam broke all at once. Moaz and Basem, like all the rest of the agitators, expected very little on January 25, 2011. All they knew was that they were fed up and that plenty of Egyptians felt the same way. They had no idea how many others there were, or how committed, but they had caught hints at the meetings and demonstrations, at family gatherings and funerals, and in editorials, Facebook comments, tweets, and blog posts. Tunisians had risen up in December 2010 and within weeks had driven their dictator, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, out of the country. If eleven million Tunisians could depose a regime, couldn't ninety million Egyptians do the same?

In what turned out to be its final days, Egypt's regime was smug and confident. Mubarak's state had grown so remote, so casually violent, that its mechanisms of perception no longer functioned. Anger was swelling, but the regime didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. It had no plans to punish the policemen who killed Khaled Said. It had no intention of placating the population with some token gesture simply because Arabs in a nearby country had overthrown their leader. Instead, it went on with the same tricks, dispatching dollar-a-day goons to beat demonstrators. On New Year's Day a bomb ripped through a church in Alexandria, killing twenty-three. The government had failed once again to protect a vulnerable minority. Young activists from all backgrounds took to the streets in solidarity with the Christians. Several protest leaders were arrested. The police blamed a Salafi named Sayed Bilal and tortured him to death. He turned out to have no connection to the bombing. Little demonstrations flared up around the country. The Journalists Syndicate had a tall building downtown used as a meeting space and conference hall; the syndicate's leadership allowed anti-regime protests on the front steps. Moaz was among a small group attacked by police there. When he returned home, his mother said nothing, but his father fumed. “This is not a smart investment,” he told his son. “This is no way to lead a good life.”

“If we can't change our life in 2011, then I will emigrate to Canada or find a new country,” Moaz said. “If I don't speak against this regime, one day they will kill me, and nobody left will speak out.”

Alexandria had now contributed a trinity of martyrs: first Khaled Said, the secular Muslim everyman; and then the Christians, for years the
victims of state-sanctioned sectarian discrimination, blown up in their church; and finally Sayed Bilal, the pious Salafi, innocent of any offense but in thrall to a rigid and suspect faith. The state had targeted almost every kind of Egyptian. Now, in response to those crimes, a current of anger had united Egyptians across their many dividing lines in January 2011, after a decade or more of orchestrated cruelty.

Obtusely, the government elevated Police Day, scheduled for January 25, into an official national holiday. This was Mubarak's last insult. No institution was more universally detested in Egypt than the police. At a moment when the president needed to placate his enraged populace, he inflamed them. Youth of all backgrounds collaborated in the call for a national “Day of Rage,” scheduled to coincide with the ludicrous new holiday: Muslim Brothers, Salafists, labor activists from the April 6 Movement, canvassers for ElBaradei, and the administrators of the Khaled Said Facebook page, which by now had 365,000 members.

It was during this final surge of planning that Moaz and Basem met, like so many other activists who until then had been agitating in lonesome obscurity. An underground cell convened at an apartment on the west bank of the Nile. It belonged to a middle-aged communist who had taken part in the Bread Riots of 1977, when angry Egyptians demonstrated against a government move to eliminate wheat subsidies. It was perhaps the last time before 2011 that a popular outcry had managed to unnerve the regime. Her son was a thirty-year-old secular lawyer named Zyad el-Elaimy, a bear of a man who had relished fighting the police since his days at university. Zyad had maintained close friendships with the Muslim Brotherhood leaders from his student union days, and he had become a top aide to ElBaradei. Now, using methods borrowed from his mother's days as an active communist, Zyad brought together the full array of activists, who had never before worked together in a coordinated fashion.

Basem and a few others represented ElBaradei's supporters. Moaz and two others came from the Brotherhood. There were independent leftists, Islamists, and labor activists. They removed their cell phone batteries and arrived at Zyad's mother's apartment one by one so as not to attract police attention. There was much to plan and little time to socialize.
Basem had met very few Muslim Brothers, and he was struck by Moaz's singularity of focus. Moaz at first mistook Basem for a foreigner, maybe an Algerian, because of his wan complexion and light eyes, and noticed that he was much older than the other activists. He found Basem temperate and professional, and effective at keeping his colleagues on task. The activists labored to keep their expectations low, but they wanted the January 25 protest to be big. At their most unrealistic, they hoped that they could force the resignation of the hated interior minister, responsible for so much incompetence and so many deaths over his thirteen years in power. Their first challenge was summoning a crowd large enough to combat the riot police, who were well versed at dispersing gatherings before they reached a critical mass. The question was whether there were enough angry Egyptians to confront the regime in a way that would shock Mubarak and his operators.

They hit on a simple plan. They would advertise twenty protest locations all over the city, at mosques and popular meeting places. Police would gather at those spots, which would serve as decoys. Meanwhile, Basem and Moaz's cell, which included dozens of the most seasoned activists and street demonstrators, the most charismatic chant leaders, and the toughest fighters, would meet at an unannounced and most unlikely location: El Hayiss Pastries, an industrial shop in a fringe working-class neighborhood, where the streets were too narrow for police trucks and water cannons, and where no demonstration had ever taken place previously. The ploy would work only if the denizens of the neighborhood joined the call to protest. If they did, then the organizers could muster a thousand people by the time they reached the main boulevard and drew the attention of the Central Security Forces. If the residents of Bulaq Dakrour ignored the chants of Basem, Moaz, and their friends, then January 25's Day of Rage would be just one more in a long line of protests that fizzled.

The revolutionaries labored under twin fears as they converged on El Hayiss Pastries on the morning of January 25, 2011. The first was simply that they would fail, that the uprising they had announced with such fanfare would amount to nothing, and Egyptians would prove as docile as the regime said they were. The second was more vague and complex. They worried that if the public's anger were aroused, no one would be able to harness it for constructive ends. The fourteen activists who had planned the secret march out of Bulaq Dakrour represented some but not all of the activists laboring in Egypt. Basem had come to politics only recently, but others had been thinking about how to unseat Mubarak's regime for a decade or more. They included Islamists, labor activists, communists, socialists, and liberals. They weren't sure they could raise a revolution, but they were planning ahead just in case they succeeded.

This small group, almost alone among Egyptians, didn't consider politics a dirty word; they had formed a coalition with a goal of intimidating the regime and perhaps forcing the resignation of its top police official. They hoped they might prompt as many as ten thousand people to march to the city center, enough perhaps to demand Hosni Mubarak's attention. They had studied the politics of their own country and, even more assiduously, they had followed the lightning revolution in Tunisia, which had begun when a fruit peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his scales by a corrupt police officer.

Mubarak's minions were watching too, but they were unconcerned. “Egypt is a different case than Tunisia,” an Egyptian cabinet member
told the press. The regime was glib, but there was some truth to its claim. Tunisia was a tiny middle-class country. Egypt had ninety million inhabitants, most of them poor and many illiterate. Egypt's government had more people on its payroll than Tunisia had citizens. Perhaps Egypt's regime was blind to the threat against it, or perhaps it knew that deep foundations supported the tyrant at its head.