Once Upon a Revolution (9 page)

Basem was nervous. The organizers were afraid they'd be arrested, so they had gone into hiding for a week. On the last night, Basem called his sister. “Kiss your daughter Noor for me,” he told her, a code that meant he would sneak into her guest room that night. Basem hadn't seen his own kids all week. In the morning, he followed the protocol they all had agreed on in their final meeting at Zyad's mother's flat. He removed the battery and SIM card from his cell phone to make himself hard to track, and then took a series of taxis and minibuses toward Bulaq Dakrour. He finally found his way to the potholed lane, hidden beneath a cloverleaf intersection, that led into the dense flank of the neighborhood. It was an area that until this day had never attracted the notice of authorities or activists. The smell of roasting butter and caramelized sugar wafted from the bakery. Trays of baklava lined the glass counters, which opened to a little tiled plaza about the size of a garage. There were no police in sight. By twos and threes, the activists drifted into the plaza, until they numbered a few dozen. Zyad arrived and pulled a bullhorn from his bag.

If Moaz represented the typical Muslim Brother and Basem the freshly politicized citizen, Zyad represented the small but boisterous clan of career leftists. In 1977 Zyad's communist mother had faced off with riot police in the Egyptian Bread Riots. His lawyer father channeled his dissent into articulate writings. Unlike most of the activists whose families pressured them to avoid politics, Zyad's family pushed him into a life of civic engagement. He studied law and led the leftist contingent on the student council. He discovered during the 2003 anti–Iraq War protests that the toughest demonstrators and the best organizers were communists, revolutionary socialists, and Islamists. He was surrounded by baying law students that year when a pair of cops lit into him, breaking his arm. Zyad wore the cast with pride. The dissident lawyers, secular and Islamist, became his closest friends. He read Marx and Lenin, and
in addition to practicing law, he established a charity to tutor children in his neighborhood. The more that Zyad thought about the inequities of Mubarak's law, the less appeal he found in doctrinaire communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat was just another dictatorship, and he became convinced that Egyptians needed to be freed from oppression as well as from poverty. He drifted toward the pragmatic center, pursuing any tactic that might work against the regime. When ElBaradei returned to Egypt, Zyad quickly became one of his most important organizers and aides. In the planning for January 25, he was the center of a group of activists from across the ideological spectrum whom he trusted and considered effective.

“Bread! Freedom! Social justice!” they chanted. (It rhymes in Arabic.) And:
“Al-shaab yurid isqat al-nidham.”
“The people demand the fall of the regime.” These were unprecedented, seditious calls; saying out loud that you wanted the fall of the regime on the morning of January 25 could quickly lead to prison. A few onlookers joined, and gradually more materialized. Within an hour, still no police had appeared, but to the pleasure of Basem, Moaz, and Zyad, about five hundred people were chanting in front of the pastry shop. At a signal from Zyad, the organizers spread up the congested lane while others took their place along the perimeter to maintain the march's cohesion and energy.
“Inzil! Inzil!”
they chanted, waving at the apartments around them. “Come down! Come down!” To their surprise, people did. They came out of their houses or up from the side streets, and they joined the march. All who saw knew it was subversion. By joining this march, they were joining a revolt.

“Come down! Come down!” they chanted, and the march swelled in size. By the time it poured out of Bulaq Dakrour and into the fancier neighborhood of Dokki, the shuddering, angry, focused mass was no longer connected directly to the fourteen men and women who had catalyzed it.

These enraged Egyptians filled the main boulevards of Giza, the half of Cairo that lay on the west bank of the Nile. In harmony, the soccer hooligans, the unemployed, the college graduates, and the activists finally met the riot police who were still puffed up with a bully's confidence. In sixty years, they hadn't met a crowd that they couldn't dispatch easily
with clubs, tear gas, and occasional assistance from paid thugs armed with guns, swords, and knives. The riot police formed neat, straight lines, blocking the avenues and bridges. Their black uniforms made them look tall, and their Plexiglas shields shimmered in the sun. Behind them, drivers eagerly revved armored paddy wagons and water cannons. From a distance, the defenses had a serene beauty, like a sentry wall snaking across the streetscape. The rulers of Egypt believed that they ruled not simply because they had power but also because they were just. The army and police conscripts reflected this misplaced moral confidence. Those who disagreed simply didn't know better, the regime believed, and they were destined to fail in any challenge to the state; the people's weakness and stupidity fed each other in a vicious circle. The state couldn't imagine a serious challenge because the state didn't believe there were any errors or defects in its ways.

The police were ready for these protesters, expecting to apply the usual deep state formula and be done in a few hours. What the conscripts couldn't see, and what their masters in the regime had yet to recognize, was the lengths to which Egyptians' frustration had soared. Moaz was not alone in his conviction that if the country didn't change now, he would have to emigrate. Basem was not the only petit bourgeois citizen to conclude reluctantly that Egypt's politics were the cause of Egypt's misery. The ultras were not the only teenagers to recognize from previous fights that one didn't need sophisticated equipment to fight back. An entire generation of electrified citizens had nothing to lose.

The serpent of marching people met the line of riot police. An extravaganza of violence followed. But history didn't repeat itself. On this day, when the police hit people, the people hit back. They were fearless and also prepared. They covered their faces with scarves soaked in vinegar to dampen the effect of the tear gas, and they tossed smoking canisters back at the police. The police fired water cannons and brandished truncheons. Protesters answered with stones. They broke through the police cordon and spray painted the windshields of the paddy wagons and cannons so that the drivers couldn't see. Each time the police repulsed the marchers, they regrouped and surged again. Egyptians watched electrified on the pan-Arabic satellite news network Al Jazeera, since state television
ignored the spectacle. As the fight continued, tens of thousands joined. The demonstrators broke through line after line of cops, making their way closer to Tahrir Square. They fought one final climactic battle at the last choke point before Tahrir: the antique two-lane Qasr el-Nil bridge, guarded by a pair of enormous granite lions left from the royal era. On the bridge, the riot police drove their trucks into the crowd, running people over. In vain, conscripts fired tear gas point-blank while others swung their sticks wildly. A group of demonstrators dropped in neat lines to the ground mid-melee to pray. The police sacrilegiously trained the water cannon on them. The demonstrators rose and kneeled, completing the full prayer. When they were done, they rushed the police and cleared them off the bridge, almost as an afterthought. This was the moment that Egypt's dictators had feared since 1952. The math was not on the side of Mubarak or his generals. If one million people convinced of their righteousness stand against your police, the only way to stop them is to kill and kill and kill until everyone dies or goes home. Not every dictator is that merciless.

During the peak of the fighting, Basem's father commanded one of his sons to go downtown, find Basem, and bring him home.

“No,” his brother replied, turning the television to a satellite channel broadcasting the battle for the Qasr el-Nil bridge live. “You must pray for him and be proud of him.”

The march filled Tahrir Square, and the police stayed away. All at once, Tahrir Square was the freest public space Egypt had known in a half century, maybe more. Dissidents, critics, and kids chanted and chatted, angry and euphoric. They had occupied Tahrir. Basem, Moaz, Zyad, and the rest of the fourteen youth activists conferred with one another and sought advice from elders who'd come to the square once the police had surrendered control. They talked to activists, lawyers, politicians, intellectuals. They had not expected to get this far, and instantly they understood that, without care, their victory would evaporate. By midnight, they had settled on a plan. They would escalate, calling for a massive nationwide “Friday of Rage” on January 28.

“The wall of fear has been broken,” they told one another, equally proud and in awe of themselves and their fellow citizens. The wall of fear
would quickly become a cliché, but it was no less true for that. The police had crumbled before common folk armed only with fury; in a single day, Egyptians had learned that it was possible to fight the regime and win. This lesson could not be untaught. Like a child who realizes that his father is an unbalanced, raving drunk, Egyptians would never again cower the same way before their state.

The revolutionaries who for so long had labored as lonely pariahs suddenly counted legions of new friends. Almost every group in Egypt that wasn't part of the state joined the groundswell for the Friday of Rage. The Muslim Brotherhood had sat out the January 25 protest despite requests from Moaz and other youth members. Now it smelled opportunity and followed out of self-interest. Basem, Moaz, and their youth cell were planning a march from the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque in Mohandiseen. This time, though, they were just one of hundreds of groups joining a national day of revolt. The Muslim Brotherhood was dispatching organizers to mosques all over the country. Middle-class kids invited friends on Facebook to join them in upscale neighborhoods, while in poorer quarters, people spread the call by word of mouth. The regime was frightened enough that, before dawn on January 28, it arrested as many known dissidents as it could, including dozens of senior Muslim Brothers. It was a sign of their disconnect from reality that the police thought the Brotherhood was leading the uprising. The inchoate revolutionary movement was led by no one, but its vanguard consisted of independent youth and small new factions operating without support from Egypt's tired old politicians.

Early in the morning on January 28, Zyad's mother fried the spicy cured beef called
basterma
with eggs for her son's team. She passed out sweaters so they wouldn't get cold during a long day of marching and fighting with police. Before noon prayers, they strolled to the mosque, just a few blocks from Moaz's house. The plaza was packed. People, mostly teenagers and folks in their twenties, had filled the fast-food chain restaurants near the mosque and then flocked there at the last minute. Basem was afraid as he approached. “What if no one shows up?” he asked
himself. Then he heard a roar: tens of thousands of voices chanting in unison, spoiling for a fight. The small demonstration on January 25, with its symbolic victory over the police and reconquest of a public space, had triggered an avalanche. The police, it turned out, were too busy to block the way to Friday prayers. There were about two million Egyptians on the Interior Ministry payroll, but it seemed that their number wouldn't suffice to control the country's streets on the Friday of Rage. Rowdy crowds had assembled at dozens of Cairo mosques and all over the nation. Normally, the regime could move police from the provinces to deal with disturbances in Cairo or Alexandria, but on the Friday of Rage, it appeared that every population center in Egypt was in revolt.

At the conclusion of prayers, the march from Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque pushed toward Tahrir with the inevitability of a tectonic shift. A concatenation of hundreds of thunderous marches rippled across Egypt. Basem, Moaz, Zyad, and their coconspirators were swept along, bobbing in the crowd. This time the battles with the police were quick and methodical. Each time riot police tried to block the march, the crowd ripped them away like weeds. Protests had engulfed Alexandria. The port city of Suez was burning. Fighting convulsed the factory and farm towns of the Nile Delta. Early in the afternoon, the outnumbered police simply gave up, leaving the streets without armed custodians for the first time since 1952. Just like that, Egypt belonged to its people. Triumphant mobs set neighborhood police stations aflame. In Tahrir, maybe a half million celebrated. This ill-groomed traffic circle, mottled with scruffy tufts of grass and flanked by concrete slab buildings and the gaping hole of a suspended construction site, would be the capital of liberated Egypt. When the military deployed that evening, it kept to the edges of the square.

Armed camps ringed Tahrir. Army tanks and armored personnel carriers sealed the busiest entrance points. Soldiers checked IDs and sent foreigners, activists, and similarly suspicious people to security agents. Inside the square, plainclothes police milled about, filming everybody with their mobile phones. They affected intimidating stares, but now they were figures of impotence, with their clenched jaws and oversized leather jackets. The people in the square no longer feared arrests and
beatings. The army's gun turrets weren't pointed at the crowds in Tahrir, although it would only take a minute to swivel them into place.