by Bruce Feiler
Could it be that this new revolution had roots in the earliest revolution of them all? At its core, was Revolution 2.0 really not that different from Revolution 1.0?
I decided to do what I had done a decade earlier after September 11. I would go back to the lands where civilization was born. I would turn away from the tweets and text messages and go back to the original texts that still define these countries and much of the world. I would go deep inside the oldest questions ever posed and try to figure out: Is freedom a universal right, as God suggests in the Garden of Eden? Do the forces of freedom—like Moses—really stand a chance against the forces of oppression—the pharaoh? Can the sons of Abraham—divided by faith, trapped in a cycle of violence—really live side by side in harmony?
The connection between the attacks of 2001 and the uprisings of 2011 was more than just a coincidence. Their short-term objectives were the same—the toppling of sclerotic regimes across the Middle East. The terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, after all, were hoping to compel Americans to withdraw their support for the kings and potentates across the Muslim world. Even the perpetrators were the same: The suicide bombers of 9/11, like the leaders of the uprisings of 2011, were largely drawn from well-educated, well-to-do, Westernized families.
But the messages were different. The earlier one was backward-looking; the new one forward-looking. The earlier one was designed to create restrictive, even theocratic states; the new one was designed to create open, even civil states. The earlier one was built on fear and terror; the new one on hope and opportunity.
Yet they had one more vital aspect in common: Both events were founded on the same underlying narrative. It’s the story of humanity’s relationship with the divine, and how different people interpret their God-given freedom. Osama bin Laden and the legions of Al Qaeda extremists he helped train interpret the Abrahamic tradition as justifying the use of violence to create exclusive, Islamic societies. Ahmed Maher, Wael Ghonim, and the legions of moderates, secularists, and even temperate Islamists they helped unleash interpret the same tradition as sanctioning more inclusive regimes where believers, rival believers, and nonbelievers alike can live together in a functioning society.
In effect, the two events are twin responses to the same problem: how to improve life in the Middle East. The uprisings of 2011 are the antidote to the attacks of 9/11. They are the rival narrative to the prevailing argument of the ayatollahs, the Al Qaeda operatives, the Wahhabi madrassas, the Hezbollah bombers, and the Hamas rockets: that violent extremism and religious orthodoxy are the only answers to Middle Eastern decay. In the new coalition of change, some of the voices are clearly religious; others are secular. Many in the middle are struggling to find a balance.
But in their messy, uneven, pluralist totality, the new generation of Muslim youth represent the cry of moderate Islam the West has been yearning to find for so long. How these competing constituencies in the new Middle East balance their differences—and how we in the West support them—may go a long way toward determining the prospects for interreligious harmony in the decades to come.
To understand how we respond to that call, I deeply believe we must understand how the children of Abraham view the central stories of their own identity. For nearly three thousand years, three stories have linked the peoples of the Ancient Near East: the birth of human dignity in the Garden of Eden; the shared humanity of the children of Abraham; Moses’s insistence on human freedom. A common theme among these stories is that humans have God-given rights to freedom, dignity, and justice for all, ideas that have helped animate moments of transformation from the Roman Empire, to the Reformation, to the American Revolution, to the civil rights movement, to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But for decades, many in the West believed the Muslim world was immune from these same yearnings for freedom. This view, I daresay, had become the consensus. Samuel Huntington, in his influential book The Clash of Civilizations (1996), argued that humans are irreparably divided along religious and cultural lines, and that foremost among those is a fiery chasm that separates Jews and Christians from Muslims. The reason, Huntington argued: Muslims do not share the core desires of the West; they have learned from their religion to be hostile to pluralism, individualism, and a free society. And Huntington was not alone. The West seemed to agree that the children of Islam were tribal, medieval, backwards, and content to be ruled by mind-numbing dictators propped up by the oil-loving United States.
The uprisings of 2011 killed that idea for good. The world now knows that freedom lives in the sands where it was born. But what everyone wonders is “Can freedom prevail?” Can the ideas of openness, tolerance, self-determination, and opportunity compete against the countercurrents of repression, militarism, fear, and religious orthodoxy? Can this new generation really change the world? As I set out for the region during this season of change, I hoped to answer this question: Can freedom, an idea that started in the Middle East, finally come home and save the Middle East?
Once in Cairo, I was directed not to Tahrir Square but to the headquarters of the Syndicate of Journalists, a crumbing, concrete jail of a building—eight stories tall, in that drab, khaki color favored by British colonizing armies and early desktop computers. Since the Bread Riots of 1977, the front steps of the Syndicate of Journalists has been the unlikely beating heart of freedom in the Arab world. Because the land is owned by the syndicate, the police have no authority to arrest people who gather here. The small, savvy band of protesters around Cairo knew that if they ever got into trouble they could take refuge here.
And the police knew it, too, which is why they had a saying: Protesters could assemble around 150 people on the Syndicate stairs, but if they managed to make it to the street, they would instantly become 2,000; if they could round the corner onto Champollion Street, they would gather enough momentum to become 8,000; and by the time they got to Tahrir Square, they would reach 150,000, at which point they would win. The riot police had a simple philosophy: Don’t let the revolutionaries get to Tahrir Square.
That’s why the events of January 25, 2011 were so monumental.
“Before January twenty-fifth, many people were not as comfortable, or brave, or interested in participating in the demonstrations,” said Noor Ayman Nour, a twenty-one-year-old law student and bass guitarist, the son of prominent dissidents, and one of the hunks of Tahrir Square. With his trendy glasses, Brylcreem curls, and teen-idol smile, Ayman Nour quickly became one of the public faces of the revolution. He volunteered to take me on the path to Tahrir Square to show me how the greatest night of his life almost became the last night of his life.
“We called those people the ‘Sofa Party,’ ” he continued. “They sat on the sofa and watched. But they were converted on this day. Before January twenty-fifth, people felt that if they demonstrated for the end of the regime they would be alone. But January twenty-fifth gave you this sense of community and comfort, knowing that if you walked the streets you would not be alone. There are other people who love this country as well.”
We stepped off the stairs and into the street. A candy stand sold Chiclets, Ho Hos, Snickers, and Borios, a knockoff of Oreos. As we rounded the corner, I noticed the English street sign for Champollion, the famed Egyptologist who decoded the Rosetta Stone, was spelled Shampillon. “After the revolution, we’re going to have a minister of spelling,” Ayman Nour said.
Like many of the youthful leaders of the revolution, Ayman Nour had grown up in relative privilege. But he was thrust into politics at an early age when his father, a popular parliamentarian who ran for president against Hosni Mubarak in 2005 (he garnered a heavily undercounted 8 percent of the vote), was thrown into jail. Ayman Nour was thirteen years old.
“For the four years that my father was in prison, every day I woke up to the thought, ‘Prepare yourself. You might get a phone call that your father has died.’ I went through my teenage years with this numbness. On family occasions, lots of my friends would go on
picnics. We would go see my dad in prison.”
Ayman Nour soon gravitated to a community of activists who were inspired in part by his father’s incarceration. These several dozen young people held underground strategy sessions where they scoured the Internet for details of nonviolent protests like the Otpor movement in Serbia, which helped topple Slobodan Milošević. The “Youth for Change” group eventually stumbled on the writings of Gene Sharp, a shy academic from Boston who culled lessons from Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others, into a ninety-three-page manifesto, From Dictatorship to Democracy. The book contains tips on how to organize a student sit-in, plant flowers in symbolic places, or survive a hunger strike.
Ahmed Maher, a thirty-year-old engineer who cofounded the group, tried to bring its nascent efforts to a boil in the spring of 2008 to support workers who were striking on April 6. A boyhood lover of video games, Maher started a Facebook group page to call on activists to wear black and stay home on the day of the strike. Seventy thousand people joined in three days. The “April 6 Movement,” as it was called, even created a logo—a vaguely menacing white fist in a red disk—modeled on one used in Serbia. Though only a few hundred gathered for the event outside Alexandria, the protesters battled police and toppled a billboard of President Mubarak. Two protesters were killed. Within weeks, Maher was arrested, stripped naked, and tortured; his cofounder was detained and had to swear off protests to gain her release. The movement sputtered.
“But it was still the first successful online revolt ever,” Maher later told me; “the first civil disobedience that made the Egyptian regime shake.”
Against the wishes of his wife, who was then caring for their nine-month-old daughter, Maher called for a demonstration on January 25, 2009. He chose that date because it was Police Day, a national holiday and the perfect occasion to snatch a symbolic victory from the most hated part of the regime. Again the protest failed to catch fire. He tried again on January 25, 2010. Still no luck. Each time, the Sofa Party prevailed.
But then, unexpectedly, there was a grisly breakthrough. On June 6, 2010, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Khaled Said was at an Internet café in the port city of Alexandria when police attempted to arrest him on trumped-up charges of theft and weapons possession. When officers banged his head against a marble table, the café owner asked them to step outside. It was a critical misstep, because it gave the authorities a reason to remove him from view. The police dragged Said’s body across the street, pummeled him repeatedly, and forced him to swallow a bag of hashish. He died on the spot.
The story disgusted and ignited the opposition. Maher started a Facebook group called “My name is Khaled Said.” By year’s end it had 250,000 members. Meanwhile, an anonymous administrator started another Facebook group called “We are all Khaled Said.” It had 300,000 members. Both sites were filled with video clips and newspaper accounts of police brutality, as well as a simple message: “This is your country.” Eventually Maher got an email from the anonymous administrator of the other site saying the two should cooperate.
On January 18, 2011, Maher was in Qatar at an Al Jazeera conference on digital media when he began speaking with his friend Wael Ghonim, the head of marketing of Google Middle East and North Africa. The two had met a year earlier. Bespectacled and respectable, Ghonim was another unlikely revolutionary—just a hacker trying to crack a firewall, only one erected with real firepower. Over lunch, Maher briefed Ghonim on his plans to call for a “day of revolution” on January 25, 2011. Ghonim approved, and Maher said he had to reach out to the administrator of “We are all Khaled Said” to coordinate.
“I sat down at my computer, which was right next to Wael’s,” Maher told me, “and I started to chat with the admin of the other site. I had no idea at the time that I was chatting with Wael Ghonim.”
January 25 was once more becoming the focal point of the revolutionary movement.
Champollion Street is narrow, dark, and lined with car repair shops. Ayman Nour pointed out a fast-food shop that sells kushari, the brawny Egyptian national dish comprised of rice, lentils, chickpeas, and macaroni, topped with salsa and fried onions. “Now that’s revolutionary food,” he said. “Have one of those at noon, you won’t be hungry until midnight.”
On the night of January 24, 2011, the city held its breath. Ayman Nour’s mother, Gamila Ismail, once a glamorous television host who was booted off Egyptian state television when her husband was imprisoned, was skeptical this date would be any different. “Last year we were expecting eighteen thousand,” the now-divorced activist said at an event. “We got only a dozen.”
Her son, meanwhile, was taking no chances. “That night I went shopping and saw people I didn’t know buying knee and elbow pads,” he said. “I just smiled at them, knowing we were on the same team.” He also picked up spray paint to blacken the windows of police cars and lemons to sniff for relief from tear gas. The next morning he donned what he calls his “revolution jacket.” “It’s durable,” he said, “and has lots of zippers. It’s great for hiding things.” Using more techniques he learned online, he took two cell phones, knowing that the police would confiscate one but stop looking after that. He patted the pocket over his heart. “They never look up here,” he said.
Egyptians like to sleep late, so the protests began late in the morning on Police Day. By midday, small groups began taking to the streets, first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. As the police had long feared, the crowds quickly begat more crowds. By late afternoon, tens of thousands of demonstrators were spread out across the city. “And it was not just the typical people!” said Ayman Nour. “You saw all these segments of society that never hit the streets before, calling for their rights. This is why January twenty-fifth was the best day of my entire life, even more than when Mubarak stepped down. A huge group of people, walking through the streets of Cairo, calling for something I’ve been calling for since I was thirteen. That day was definitely the rebirth of hope in Egypt.”
“So what happened to make the change?”
“Tunisia,” he said. On December 17, 2010, a young fruit vendor in rural Tunisia set himself on fire in response to years of harassment at the hands of government officials. The incident sparked weeks of demonstrations in the tiny North African country, culminating twenty-eight days later in the resignation of the president. “When President Ben Ali stepped down on January 15,” Ayman Nour said, “the Egyptian people said, ‘Wow! If a country that tiny can do it, so can we.’ ”
But if Egyptian protesters were surprised by the numbers who showed up on January 25, the police were even more so. Overstretched and underprepared, they did what authorities often do in such situations: They unfurled the full weaponry of repression. Rows of helmeted riot police paraded into the city center, security vehicles rolled in behind them, volleys of tear gas were launched. All through the evening the police tried to beat, berate, intimidate, and humiliate the protesters into submission.
By midnight, Cairo’s streets were awash in debris, dense with smoke, tense with uncertainty. But they were still full of people. The government shut off the Internet to isolate the Twitter-happy crowds. A few blocks from Tahrir, several hundred protesters stormed an abandoned police truck, tipped it over, and set it ablaze. That’s when plainclothes officers grabbed Noor Ayman Nour, battered his head and shoulders, and shoved him into a green paddy wagon. There were forty-four people piled one atop of another in a vehicle the size of an ambulance. One was praying; a number were crying.
One of the people inside was Jack Shenker, a young journalist from England. “I spotted a high-ranking uniformed officer, and shouted at him that I was a British journalist,” he later said. “He responded by walking over and punching me twice. ‘Fuck you and fuck Britain.’ ”
The van sped through the chaotic streets, careening around corners, lurching with the bruised and bloodied bodies of an astonishing cross section of the population: an old man who was taking part in his first demonstration, a young man whos
e eye was bleeding from a rubber bullet, a lawyer. “As I was being dragged into the vehicle,” the lawyer said, “a police general said to me, ‘Do you think you can change the world? You can’t! Do you think you are a hero? You are not.’ ”
But one man inside was very calm. This was not his first demonstration. This was not his first encounter with brutality. His father had been imprisoned when he was thirteen. His mother’s career had been ruined. His teenage years had been spent in a state of perpetual numbness. He had been waiting all his life for this moment. He had been waiting for any sign that the numbness might end. And he knew exactly what to do.
As that green paddy wagon lurched through the streets of Cairo, Noor Ayman Nour tugged the brass zipper above his heart, slid his hand into his pocket, and felt the cool metallic comfort of his backup cell phone. Then the twenty-one-year-old with the baby cheeks did what any boy in his situation might do.
He called his mother.
Talaat Harb Square is actually a circle. In the middle is a statue of the founder of the Bank of Egypt, and surrounding it is a cosmopolitan mix of bookstores, cafés, and political offices, including the one that once housed Ayman Nour’s father. A row of four books in the window of one shop caught my eye. Their covers showed Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Michelle Obama, and Khaled Mashal, the head of Hamas. What a perfect representation of the choice Egypt faces, I thought.
