The morning after a mob attacked the Muslim Brotherhood office in Ismailia, a city on the Suez Canal, in northern Egypt, there were no police or soldiers at the site. It was early December, and a small crowd had gathered to look at the damage. The windows had been smashed, and the interior had been torched with Molotov cocktails. Bystanders said that the mob had numbered in the thousands and that the police had stood nearby and watched. Since then, nobody had secured the scene for an investigation. But that’s typical of post-revolutionary Egypt—it’s impossible to predict when the authorities will show up or how they might behave. Even the mobs can act in surprising ways. Outside the Ismailia office, they had torn down the Brotherhood slogans and banners in such a way that any image of the Koran or the word “Allah” was left intact, a sign that at least some of the vandals had been thinking about God.
The mob had also spared Egy Lab, a medical-testing company that occupied the ground floor. “Locals protected us,” Mohamed Ibrahim, a receptionist, told me. He said that four members of the Brotherhood had been beaten so badly that they had to be hospitalized. “They’ve been losing popularity,” he said. “There’s a lot of hostility, and now President Morsi is on the blacklist.”
The Muslim Brotherhood swept to power after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, in February of 2011. The Islamist organization, which had been persecuted for decades, performed well in all post-revolutionary elections, and in June of last year Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood member, became Egypt’s first democratically elected President. But recently Morsi’s actions had started to resemble the authoritarian patterns of the past regime. On November 22nd, he issued a Presidential decree that gave him broad powers beyond the reach of the judicial system. He claimed that this action was necessary to prevent the courts from dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly, which was writing Egypt’s new constitution. A previous assembly had been cancelled by the courts, but Morsi gave no evidence that this was about to happen again. After he issued his decree, the assembly rushed to finish the new constitution, despite the fact that nearly all opposition members resigned in protest. Demonstrations swelled in Cairo and other cities, with mobs attacking more than two dozen Muslim Brotherhood offices across Egypt.
In Ismailia, Ibrahim took me upstairs to the burned-out office. Two middle-aged women arrived and burst into tears. “Our place, our place where we used to meet!” a schoolteacher wailed. She wore a heavy black veil, and she said that she had been a member of the Brotherhood for twenty-five years. Ismailia has a reputation as a pro-Brotherhood town; the organization was founded here, in 1928. “The Brothers who went to prison for so many years, who suffered for decades—they never did anything like this,” she said. “They were always peaceful. God will take vengeance for this!”
An elderly cleaning woman from Egy Lab had followed the Brotherhood supporters upstairs, and now she challenged them. “Morsi should have stepped back!” she shouted. “If he had stepped back from the constitution, this wouldn’t have happened!”
“Foreign money is paying for these clashes!” the schoolteacher yelled back.
Ibrahim waited until the women had calmed down and left, and then he said, “Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are at fault. In places like this, they brainwash people.” He said that his company had warned the landlord not to rent an office to the Brothers. “We told him to kick them out,” he said. “It’s not even a legal organization.”
A few minutes later, the landlord arrived. His name was Adel Abdel Fattah, and he was dressed like an upper-class Cairene businessman, in a dark suit and a pink dress shirt. “There’s no insurance,” he said, wincing. He estimated the loss at eighty thousand dollars; he said that many people believed that Morsi should resign. Another thing he said was that the local fire department had waited about two hours before responding to the call.
During the past year, the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to win elections without confronting a central weakness: the immense distrust that it inspires among many powerful elements of Egyptian society. Such sentiments run particularly deep in the police and the Army, which have a long history of animosity toward the Brotherhood. The organization was founded by Hassan al-Banna, a devout schoolteacher, and it was dedicated to creating a more Islamic society that would topple Egypt’s colonial overlords and spark a religious renaissance across the Middle East. In the nineteen-forties, the Brotherhood sponsored a military battalion, which fought Jewish settlers in Palestine. Members also carried out a series of attacks against Egyptian officials who were complicit in British rule, including the assassination of the Prime Minister, in 1948. This act and other bombings were repudiated by al-Banna, who said of the terrorists, “They are neither Brothers, nor are they Muslims.”
The Brotherhood eventually abandoned its military activities and adopted a policy of nonviolence in Egypt. But the organization never shook the stigma of those early acts, and it was banned in 1954, which resulted in a culture of secrecy. A pattern emerged of former Brotherhood members becoming terrorists. The assassination of Anwar Sadat, in 1981, was planned and carried out by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a radical group that included ex-Brothers, and former members were among the leaders of Al Qaeda who planned the September 11th attacks. One Brotherhood offshoot became Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the elimination of Israel. Critics have described the Muslim Brotherhood as a kind of gateway drug—in its bifurcated world view, it prepares members for more radical ideas. But defenders blame Egypt’s corrupt justice system and brutal jails for having pushed some victims toward extremism.
Each of the country’s military rulers, from Gamal Abdel Nasser to Sadat to Mubarak, responded to the Brotherhood with treatment that seemed to vacillate between these polar viewpoints. At times, the Brothers were imprisoned and tortured; at other times, they were allowed to participate in some limited form of politics, as a kind of pressure valve. Nobody engaged this strategy longer than Mubarak. During his reign, most leaders of the Brotherhood were imprisoned, but they also enjoyed periods of détente, in which they gained experience in national politics. In 2005, according to government documents that have come to light since the revolution, state-security officials even negotiated a secret deal with Morsi and another Brotherhood leader. The Brothers agreed to limit the number of candidates who would compete for parliamentary seats. The deal quickly collapsed, for reasons that remain unclear, and Mubarak responded with another round of repression, imprisoning Morsi and others on trumped-up charges.
Over time, this schizophrenic strategy helped create an organization that was traumatized and isolated, but more experienced in politics than any other group that survived the revolution. The Brothers had never actually helped govern the country, but they knew how to run election campaigns, and years of effective charity work had taught them how to organize at the grassroots level. After the revolution, they founded a political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, which has shown no independence from the parent organization. Initially, they seemed intent on reassuring critics who feared a Brotherhood takeover of Egypt. The Freedom and Justice Party promised not to field a candidate for President, and said that it would contest only a third of the parliamentary seats. But both promises were quickly broken. The Party dominated Egypt’s first freely elected parliament, and, like other parties, it had fielded candidates for seats that were designated for independents. This technical violation led to the parliament being dissolved by court order—a decision that the Brothers believed was politically motivated.
By the time Morsi ran for President, the popularity of the Brotherhood had started to decline. He was a weak candidate with little charisma, and in the first round he received twenty-five per cent of the vote. But the Party conducted a smart campaign, initially playing to hard-line Islamists and then adopting a more inclusive tone for the runoff. Still, the victory left the Brotherhood in a precarious position. It controlled the Presidency and the assembly that was charged with drafting Egypt’s new constitution, but it had few supporters in the judicial system and most ministries. The organization remained illegal—to this day, the Muslim Brotherhood has not been registered in Egypt. There is no official presence in the police or the military. In both these institutions, any officer or enlisted man who is discovered to be a member of the Brotherhood will be dismissed.
The police are especially hostile to the Brotherhood. For years, the state-security apparatus targeted the banned organization, and generations of officers have been indoctrinated with anti-Brotherhood materials. Such manuals have been abandoned since the revolution, and for the first time the sons of Brotherhood members are allowed to enroll in officer-training schools, provided that they are not involved in the organization. But there’s no sense that police culture has changed significantly. “I hate all people in the Brotherhood,” one young officer candidate told me, when I met him and a couple of classmates from the training college in Cairo. “I hate the Brotherhood because they have a bad history, because they coöperated with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who killed Sadat,” he said. “And they were complicit in the old regime; they made deals. They’re like rats.”
I asked one of his classmates if members of the Brotherhood seem uncomfortable around the police. “They’re scared of us,” he said. “Because they know that when the time comes I will have the power to put them back in the place where they deserve to be—in prison.”
Since the revolution, cops have become much less visible on the streets. But Egypt remains one of the most heavily policed countries in the world, with an estimated 1.5 million security personnel, out of a population of eighty-two million. In particular, there are many questions about the new role of the notorious Amn ad-Dawla, the State Security Investigations Service. Recently, I met with Hussein Hammouda, who served in the Amn ad-Dawla for twenty-five years. He had resigned in 2008, largely because he was repelled by the torture of Islamists.
He said that friends in the service described their relationship with the Brotherhood government as being like a game of chess. “They are waiting for every move,” he said. “They don’t trust each other.” There were rumors that once the current political crisis passed Morsi planned to replace the Minister of the Interior and other key security officials, all of whom have strong links to the former regime. “The police know that there will be sacrifices,” Hammouda said. “Morsi knows that these are the people who put him in prison. And it was unjust. And Morsi is not Nelson Mandela. Morsi belongs to an in-group; it functions like a gang. All others are outsiders.” He continued, “Mandela served twenty-seven years in prison, but he was at peace with himself because he did not belong to a group like that. A group like that does not trust others. They feel they have the truth and others do not.”
At the end of November, the Muslim Brotherhood pushed the new constitution through a marathon sixteen-hour session of the constituent assembly. Former members accused the assembly of violating protocol, but Morsi announced that in two weeks the nation would hold a referendum to approve the document. The opposition organized a group called the National Salvation Front, which was led by two former Presidential candidates and Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate and former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They called for a suspension of the referendum, but Morsi held firm. In early December, protesters surrounded the Presidential Palace, in Cairo’s Heliopolis district. They established a Tahrir Square-style sit-in, erecting tents outside the palace walls.
On the afternoon of December 5th, Muslim Brotherhood supporters suddenly arrived at the palace, tearing down the tents and attacking peaceful protesters. They quickly secured the area, but soon they were attacked by new waves of demonstrators. For hours, the two factions fought with rocks and clubs, and then guns began to appear. The police finally gained control the next morning, erecting barricades around the palace. But ten people were killed and more than seven hundred injured.
The following day, the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement claiming that its supporters had responded to a breach of security. “An armed unit was arrested trying to take over the Presidential Palace,” the statement read. “They are now being questioned by the prosecution service.” In a televised address to the nation, Morsi echoed these charges of conspiracy, referring to “a fifth column.” But the Brotherhood never provided evidence of such an attack on the palace, and prosecutors made no charges. Videos showed clearly that Morsi supporters had set upon the peaceful sit-in. Soon, victims and witnesses began to appear in the media, testifying that the Islamists had detained and tortured demonstrators, trying to get them to admit to a conspiracy.
Paranoia about the authorities seemed to have been the driving force behind the Brotherhood’s actions. “We went and we saw that there was no police,” a man named Said Imam, who had joined the pro-Brotherhood side at the palace, told me through a translator. He had sustained a head injury during the fighting. Amr Darrag, the chairman of the foreign-relations committee in the Freedom and Justice Party, told me that the action had been justified by the incompetence of the security apparatus. “It’s better that this took place rather than involving the police and the Presidential guard in a massacre,” he said. “So maybe it’s for the best.” Like other Party officials, he continued to believe that there had been a conspiracy. A few days after the attack, Walid el-Badry, a Party spokesman, admitted to me that nobody had actually broken into the palace, but he said that they had heard it was about to happen.
“So we went there, and we removed the tents,” he said. “There was no violence while we removed the tents.”
“Did the protesters agree that you could take them down?” I asked.
“Of course they didn’t agree,” he said. “But those were not protesters. Those were thugs. They were people who were paid to sit in the tents. Many of them admitted to us that they were paid.”
El-Badry and others emphasized that many of the deaths and casualties had been sustained on the Brotherhood’s side. This was true—even one opposition leader told me that he was concerned that some Islamists had been wounded by gunfire, because it indicated that people had hired criminal gangs as the battle wore on. But there was no doubt that Brotherhood supporters had initiated the clashes, and its leaders seemed unable to understand why citizens were so disturbed. Untrained men had played the role of law enforcement, and they had brought back memories of the Islamist militias of old. Having maintained a stance of nonviolence through three decades of Mubarak’s repression, the Muslim Brotherhood had broken this principle within months of winning the Presidency.
The day after the fight, a mob broke into the national Brotherhood headquarters, in Mokattam, a Cairo suburb. They smashed windows and dragged out furniture and stacks of documents, setting them on fire. When I visited the following afternoon, a tall young man stood watch at the back gate, fiddling with a string of prayer beads. He had the stiff-backed posture that is characteristic of many Brothers. Broken glass littered the compound, and a pile of burned furniture stood nearby. Through a translator, I asked how many people had been in the mob.
“Fifty or sixty.”
“That’s all?”
“There were more of us,” the young man said. “There were more than four hundred Brothers here.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?”
“Because we aren’t violent.”
“Weren’t you worried about losing the documents?”
“It’s all documents that everybody knows about. We don’t hide anything.”
I walked down the street, where a watchman sat near another building. He told me that the mob had numbered in the thousands, and I mentioned the young Brother’s account. “He’s lying,” the watchman said. “I wouldn’t believe anything they say. I’m Muslim, and I would believe the Christians, but I wouldn’t believe anything the Brotherhood said.” Piles of papers were still strewn across the street, and I poked around, curious to see what the Brothers were up to in their national headquarters. For some reason, there was a lot of material about chicken feed. I found a document about removing garbage from airports. There was a report on Brotherhood activities in a place called South Daqahliya, and some pages from “The Bader Encyclopedia for the Scout Movement.” A photocopied expense sheet included receipts from a Paris restaurant called Le Flandrin, where a man named Abdel Hamid had ordered two belles soles and a half bottle of Chablis on the evening of December 22, 2010. Apparently, one Muslim Brother had been reimbursed for Chardonnay.
I left the headquarters and drove across town to the Presidential Palace. Ever since Brotherhood supporters had attacked the peaceful sit-in, the Army and the police had manned barricades of barbed wire, keeping protesters away from the building that houses Morsi’s office. I stood near the barricades for a while, listening to the chants—The people want to topple the regime!—and then, at exactly seven o’clock, the soldiers began to move.
It was clear that there had been a command for them to retreat. They were Republican Guards, administered by the Army and assigned to protect government buildings and high-ranking officials. The guards cut the barbed wire and opened the barricades, and then turned and jogged away in formation. They occupied new positions in a line along the street, rifles at their sides, like an armed escort. For a moment, the protesters seemed confused, and murmurs ran through the crowd: What’s happening? What are they doing? But the palace gates lay straight ahead, and all at once the horde charged into the empty street.
Immediately, one group separated and began spray-painting slogans and pictures onto the palace walls. Another group staked out space for a sit-in camp, and a third detachment, all young men, arranged themselves before the palace gates. To establish that this was a protest rather than an attack, they made sure that nobody breached the compound.
In Cairo, it’s common to hear people say that nothing has changed since the revolution. In many ways, this is true: there have been several elections, and a great deal of political maneuvering, but there’s still no functioning legislature. Daily life feels much the same. But for nearly two years there has been a steady stream of protests and clashes with the authorities, and during that time the participants have become so experienced that the revolution is essentially portable. It’s like a kit: all the pieces can be packed up and reassembled anywhere in the city at a moment’s notice. Young activist groups always appear with their flags, and another mainstay is the Ultras, hard-core soccer fans who beat drums and sing songs. Invariably, a poet shows up to declaim angry verses. Slogans are interchangeable: certain chants that once targeted Mubarak, and then were used against the military council that guided the post-revolutionary transition, are now aimed at Morsi.
The palace is seven miles from Tahrir, but within an hour venders appeared, selling all the staples of revolutionary activity. There were sweet-potato men, and popcorn sellers, and people roasting sunflower seeds on charcoal stoves. Women dragged around butane burners and hawked hot cups of Nescafé. They sold Egyptian flags, Palestinian scarves, gas masks, and home tear-gas remedies. High-powered green lasers went for thirty dollars each. In the nighttime clashes, one of the most eerily beautiful sights is when the police fire a tear-gas bomb and half a dozen lasers home in on the shell, tracing a bright arc in the sky so that the crowd can scatter before it lands.
You almost never see police or soldiers at a protest. They abandoned Tahrir Square after Mubarak fell, and usually cops are visible only on the peripheries of a demonstration, where the clashes occur. But at the palace the authorities were not the target, and for the first time I saw men in uniform mingling with protesters. The crowd was largely middle-class, and it contained many more women than I had seen at a Cairo demonstration. This was one of the greatest contrasts with the Islamist rallies. During this period, the pro-Morsi camp held counter-demonstrations in another part of Cairo, and they drew older crowds that were overwhelmingly male. The few women were segregated into their own section of the protest.
At the palace, some police and soldiers seemed determined to speak directly with demonstrators. A heavyset officer in his early forties was surrounded by a small crowd, and my translator and I joined them. The eagle and star on his shoulder identified him as a lieutenant colonel in the Central Security Forces, a police division. A young woman asked why there had been so many instances during the past two years of cops beating demonstrators.
“There are good people in the police, and there are bad people,” he said. “It’s just like anything else.”
She mentioned the previous year’s battles on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, near Tahrir, which had been especially bloody, with more than fifty deaths.
“Let’s not talk about that,” the officer said. “It was partly our mistake, and it was partly your mistake.”
“The Brotherhood is going to send more people to attack us,” a young man said. “Please just go and stand at the entrance to the street with six police trucks. It would be enough to stop them.”
“We can’t defend ourselves alone,” another man pleaded.
“I can’t hold a sign saying that I’m with you,” the officer said.
A young man ran past, shouting that Morsi had just stepped down. “The constitutional court forced him to resign!” he yelled. Everybody checked his phone for the news. There were often false reports at protests that Morsi had been removed, usually either by the military or by the courts. It was a kind of wishful thinking: a week earlier, I had attended an Islamist rally where somebody announced that Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, had just been assassinated, and a dozen men dropped to the ground and prostrated themselves in thanks to God. Now the officer laughed at the news about Morsi. “It’s fake,” he said. “Look, it’s Friday. The constitutional court doesn’t meet on Fridays.”
The young woman asked the officer what he thought Morsi should do. “He has to step away from the constitutional declaration,” he said.
“They don’t believe in Egypt,” she said. “They aren’t human!”
“What goes around comes around,” the officer said. “If you do something bad, it will come back to you.”
“But if they hold a referendum you know that everybody is going to say yes!”
“These protests alone aren’t going to do it,” the officer said. “You have to have a general strike. If you have a strike, it has to be everybody, like they did in Poland.”
I asked the officer why the Army had opened the barricades and allowed the crowd to surround the palace. He looked up and smiled. “I can’t tell you why,” he said. “But you should be able to understand on your own.”
Like many prominent figures in the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi was trained as an engineer, and he is the first Egyptian President without a military background. The Army tends to be less fervently anti-Brotherhood than the state-security forces, but it has always opposed Islamists, and traditionally officers have not been very devout. This has changed somewhat in recent years, as Egyptians have become outwardly more Islamic. Mohamed Kadry Said, a retired major general who works as an adviser at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a state-funded think tank, told me that nowadays most officers perform the hajj, as he had done. But it’s still rare to be very religious, and the Army promotes a moderate image. “If you are going to France or another Western country as the military attaché, and your wife wears the veil, they will let you know that either she takes it off or you don’t go,” Said told me.
The military’s relationship with democracy is also evolving. During the transition period after Mubarak resigned, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) ran the country. SCAF was clearly unprepared to deal with emboldened protesters and a newly freed media, and a series of violent clashes damaged the military’s prestige. A number of people told me that the Army no longer wants to rule on a day-to-day basis. But it also had the strange experience of overseeing the country’s first free elections and watching an old enemy come to power. In Egypt, members of the Army, like members of the police, do not have the right to vote. In the past, this rule was supposed to give the impression of neutrality, and it hardly mattered in a military dictatorship that fixed elections. But Morsi might not have won last year’s Presidential race if soldiers and police—more than two million strong—had had the franchise.
After the election, there were signs of tension between SCAF and the Brotherhood, and then, in August, a terrorist attack in Sinai killed sixteen Egyptian soldiers. This was perceived as a failure of the military, and a week later Morsi capitalized on the incident by forcing the retirement of the top two military chiefs. Soon, about two hundred high-ranking officers were also retired. Morsi appointed a fifty-seven-year-old officer named Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the new head of the military. El-Sisi was known to have Islamist sympathies, but he had been ranked lower than sixtieth in the military hierarchy, with a recent career in intelligence. “It’s not normal for the Minister of Defense to come from military intelligence,” Said told me. But whereas a commander of tanks or jet fighters knows only his own specialty, el-Sisi had handled intelligence for all units. “It’s a time for information,” Said told me. “Morsi needs to know the armed forces.”
El-Sisi’s appointment indicated that Morsi was more concerned about the possible threat of the military to his own power than he was about the threat of a foreign army. “El-Sisi has all the keys to all the doors,” Said told me. “And right now war is not tomorrow. What’s important is to know what’s happening inside Egypt.”
In the new constitution, the Brotherhood included articles that protect the military from civilian oversight. To revolutionaries, this is an insult, and it seems to reflect an agreement between the Brotherhood and the Army leaders. But there are signs that this newfound alliance doesn’t run deep. During the crisis over the constitution, el-Sisi invited Morsi and opposition leaders to an open discussion, but the Brotherhood reportedly forced the invitation to be revoked. Two weeks later, el-Sisi announced limits on the sale of land in the sensitive region of Sinai, which, according to reports, angered the Brotherhood leadership. Robert Springborg, an expert in the Egyptian military who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, told me that he believes the officers will eventually regret their agreements. “Political figures who have tried to deal with the Brothers, one by one they start with an optimistic view,” he said. “Inevitably, they are double-crossed.”
From the outside, there is something almost miraculous about the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. It has no real power base among the institutions that have always mattered in Egypt—the military, the security services, the judicial system, the media. But the Brothers have religion, they can mobilize voters, and they are seen as less corrupt than the old regime. In some ways, it’s a triumph of democracy over entrenched interests. Brotherhood leaders talk obsessively about “the ballot box,” and this seems to appeal to some Americans, who have a tendency to fetishize elections. The Obama Administration is clearly reluctant to criticize Morsi, despite the fact that Egypt receives about $1.5 billion in aid from the United States every year. “One thing we can say for Morsi is he was elected, so he has some legitimacy,” a senior Administration official told the Times at the height of the crisis.
In Egypt, many liberals believe that the U.S. supports the Muslim Brotherhood, and analysts describe this approach as pragmatic. “Until there is a new political force capable of challenging the Brotherhood, the U.S. will continue to support them,” Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid, a political scientist at Cairo University, told me. “If I were American, I would think along these lines, too.” And perhaps from the American perspective it’s adequate to have an Egyptian President who finds enemies among his own countrymen rather than among the Israelis—this, after all, was the arrangement with Mubarak for decades. In November, American officials praised Morsi for his role in mediating a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. But they had little to say when, the day after the truce was announced, Morsi issued his controversial Presidential decree. Some believe that Americans are also patient because the Brotherhood suffered terrible oppression, and is supported by many poor people. “I think there’s a lot of political correctness in it, to be honest,” Springborg told me. “There’s an analogy that this is the Jacksonian moment, the working classes finally having their moment.”
In fact, many members of the urban working class are wary of the Brotherhood, whose strongest voting base is rural. In recent months, Morsi has targeted labor unions, trying to replace their leadership, and protests have been held in industrial cities like Mahalla el-Kubra. Despite their talk of the importance of the vote, the Brothers appear to lack a deeper understanding of democracy. They haven’t attempted to gain new allies; all energy has been directed at neutralizing threats or settling old scores. In the rare cases when they have made concessions, they’ve come across as insincere. In the second week of December, Morsi rescinded many elements of his Presidential decree, as a public gesture of good will. But by that point he didn’t need these powers—the constituent assembly had finished its work.
Most troubling is the cycle of paranoia. During the recent crisis, Brotherhood leaders ranted about conspiracies, and they spoke obsessively about past oppression. These fears seemed to drive them to grab more power, as a way of protecting themselves, but every step only further antagonized their enemies. The Brothers’ dominance of the parliament and the first constituent assembly had led them to push the limits of the law, exposing themselves to court rulings; when these decisions were handed down, the Brotherhood believed that they had been targeted unfairly. The two most inflammatory actions of the recent crisis—Morsi’s decree and the attack on peaceful protestors at the palace—had been preëmptive and excessive strikes against threats that appeared to have been imaginary.
The constitution seems likely to become another weapon in this fight. “It gives a broad space for tyranny,” Gaber Gad Nassar, a member of the assembly that drafted the document, told me. He explained that, late in the process, articles began to appear that had been written by a secret subcommittee. When Nassar asked about its members, he was told that they should remain anonymous. “They said that they weren’t named because all credit should go to God,” Nassar told me. “So I told them, Are they working in God’s name, and we’re working for the Devil?”
At Cairo University, Nassar specializes in constitutional law, and he was one of the top experts on the assembly. But eventually he walked out in protest, along with about a quarter of the members, including all the Coptic Christians. Although the committee had spent nearly six months working on the constitution, some articles were changed significantly two days before the final vote, after the opposition had quit. He showed me one article that originally guaranteed equality for all citizens, preventing discrimination on the basis of “sex, or origin, or language, or religion, or belief, or opinion, or social status, or handicap.” All those clarifying details had been removed; without such protection, he noted, a law could be passed that simply identifies women or Christians as different, thus allowing for unequal treatment. Nassar also showed me an earlier draft of an article that guarantees freedom of the press. On the penultimate day, a sentence was added that specifies that the media should “serve the community” and respect “private lives” and “national security.”
“Since 1923, no constitution of Egypt has had something like that,” Nassar said. “They can use it to shut down newspapers.” When I spoke with the Freedom and Justice Party’s Amr Darrag, who had served as secretary-general of the assembly, he denied that the Brotherhood had been responsible for the added sentence. “It didn’t even come from the assembly,” he said, explaining that outside groups had been allowed to make suggestions, in the spirit of openness. “That was upon the request of the Supreme Council of the Press,” he said. He emphasized that this government organization, which advocates for journalists, had requested the change because it provides better protection for the media. But I learned that the leadership of the Supreme Council of the Press had been removed in September by a Presidential decree; now the organization is run by Muslim Brotherhood appointees. The Brotherhood had also named a new head of the Ministry of Information, which has since exercised censorship over state media channels and has attempted to shut down two private television channels that were critical of Morsi.
Nassar’s experience on the committee had convinced him that the Brotherhood was unwilling to coöperate with other groups. He believed that the organization is weak, because it lacks top-rate experts in law, politics, and economics. “This is what is standing in the way of the Brotherhood and control of the country,” he said. “They don’t have enough talent.”
A couple of days after occupying the area around the palace, some protesters erected a Museum of the Revolution in a tent. It was part of the standard kit; there was a museum just like it in Tahrir. At the palace, they wired into a nearby street lamp for electricity to illuminate the exhibits. “We have plumbers, we have electricians, we have everything,” Mohamed Ezz, a college student who was helping to curate the museum, told me.
In front of the museum, a shrine was dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution. Inside, exhibits memorialized each of the significant clashes of the past two years. In photographs of the original anti-Mubarak demonstrations, from January of 2011, there were no helmets, no goggles, no gas masks, no lasers; it felt like a glimpse of warfare during a simpler age. From there, exhibits proceeded through scenes of astonishing violence. There were photographs of people with their eyes shot out, and of cars transformed into fireballs, and of streets billowing with tear-gas smoke. Titles had the ring of epic conflicts: the Battle of the Camels, the Incident of the Cabinet, the Friday of Purging, the Incident of the Belloon Theatre.
But the museum wasn’t really about history—there was no larger narrative, only stories. You could pick any one of them and find a simple beginning: A new Prime Minister appoints his Cabinet. Protesters stage a sit-in. A rumor spreads that police are kidnapping revolutionaries. Some young men confront a cop; the cop calls for reinforcements; a boy is beaten. The fight begins, and by the time it’s over, a week later, seventeen are dead, nearly two thousand are injured, and a fire has destroyed the Institute of Egypt, an archive with priceless holdings from the late eighteenth century, including a twenty-four-volume collection commissioned by Napoleon called “La Description de l’Égypte.” That’s the Incident of the Cabinet.
With any revolution, there’s a point at which the cycle of retribution finally slows, and some of the past becomes history. Scores are left unsettled; people move on; institutions start to change. The narrative begins to make sense. In Egypt, the referendum was held peacefully in the middle of December, and the new constitution was approved by sixty-four per cent of the vote. It was an easy sell: voters were told that the constitution was essential for stability and economic recovery, and that it reflected Islamic values. Afterward, Morsi pledged to respect the opposition. “We don’t want to go back to the era of the one opinion and fabricated fake majorities,” he said.
People often predict that the Brotherhood will change in the post-revolutionary climate, but there’s no evidence that this has started to happen. Within a week of his promise to respect different opinions, Morsi filed a complaint against one of Egypt’s leading English-language newspapers, accusing it of threatening the “public peace,” and the prosecutor-general launched an investigation into a popular comedian who stood accused of insulting the President. The Brothers have taken old fears to a new position of power, and their actions tend to fulfill their enemies’ worst expectations. Instead of building trust and institutional support, they’ve placed all of their faith in the most fickle element of democracy, the ballot box. While it seems likely that the Brotherhood will continue to win elections in the near term, there are signs that electoral support has already started to slip. And the Brothers have created a climate in which powerful institutions feel threatened. The cycle continues: instead of leading the country in a clear direction, the Brotherhood makes only more stories—the Incident of the Constitution.
At the palace, the crowds steadily diminished, and there were no more clashes. It was common to hear people say that they wished the military would take over, and sometimes they even expressed nostalgia for the old regime. Protesters often stood around talking with soldiers and police. Both the Army and the police force depend heavily on conscripts, and Egyptian males without higher education have to serve in one of them for up to three years. There are many young men who have spent the entire revolution in uniform, through no choice of their own, facing off against the idealism and confusion and violence of their peers.
Late one evening, I stood nearby while a revolutionary in his early twenties talked with a soldier in a tank. The street was deserted; the soldier sat in the cockpit with the hatch open. The revolutionary looked up and mentioned a moment early in the struggle, when Mubarak had offered to hand over power after half a year, provided that the people disperse from Tahrir.
“If we had just waited six months, the way that Mubarak asked, the country would be better off today,” he said. “This is chaos.”
“But if Mubarak had stayed he would have brought in his son Gamal,” the soldier said. “That’s what scared people in the first place.”
The revolutionary said that maybe the successor would have been Omar Suleiman, a prominent general who, as Mubarak’s intelligence chief, had been notorious. “He would have done beautiful things,” he said. “I’ve lost hope in the revolution.”
“Don’t lose hope,” the soldier said.
“I’ll try not to,” the revolutionary said. “I’ll learn, I’ll continue my education.” He gestured with disgust at the sit-in tents and the spray-painted palace walls. “Protesting shouldn’t be like this. We should protest peacefully, without attacking public property.”
“You should go and tell them that,” the soldier said gently. The December wind picked up; the young man walked back to his tent, and the soldier settled into the tank’s hatch. It looked to be a long night for them both. ♦
