by Bruce Feiler
Inside the paddy wagon, Ayman Nour and the forty-three other captives were increasingly desperate. The detainees had no idea where they were going or what to expect. Several people fainted; one man collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. The others ripped open his shirt and tried to steady him, but he was slipping into diabetic shock. The protesters screamed for the drivers. “Help, a man is dying!” They got no response.
At one point, the vehicle actually lunged to a stop, the door opened, and an armed police officer appeared. He called for Noor Ayman Nour to get out. As the son of a prominent dissident, Ayman Nour was considered a dangerous person to detain. But he refused to abandon his fellow passengers. “No,” he said firmly. “I’m staying.” When the officer pressed him, Ayman Nour repeated his insistence that he would not leave unless everyone was freed along with him. The other inmates burst into applause. Jack Shenker climbed over the others and urged the young activist not to pass up the opportunity. “Don’t be a hero,” he said.
“Either I leave with everyone else, or I stay with everyone else,” Ayman Nour said. “It would be cowardice to do anything else. That’s just the way I was raised.”
The police gave up, and the wagon continued its grim passage. Once the other captives realized they had an experienced hand in their midst, they asked Ayman Nour where he thought they were being taken. “I have no idea,” he said. “I’m in the dark with you.” But once they reached the outskirts of town, which he could tell by the quieter surroundings, he had an inkling.
“At that point, I actually began singing,” Ayman Nour said. “People just gave me the look of ‘What are you doing?’ I told them, ‘It’s one of two things. Either they are going to let us out in the middle of the desert to go home, so we’re celebrating in advance. Or they’re taking us to the Central Security Forces headquarters, and we’re never going to celebrate, smile, or laugh again, so we might as well smile and laugh now.”
Ayman Nour, though, had a plan. In those first moments in the paddy wagon, he had furtively telephoned his mother and described to her the vehicle they were in, and where they had been seized. With a decade of political activism behind her, Gamila Ismail knew just what to do. She telephoned her ex-husband and notified her other son, and the three hopped in three separate cars and began chasing down the security vehicle that contained her son.
At one point Ismail thought she had identified the right vehicle, and was following it through the streets. Ayman Nour asked everyone in the wagon to quiet down and whispered to his mother to honk her horn so they could tell whether she indeed had the right vehicle. She did.
But Gamila Ismail knew something her son and his fellow captives did not. They were seconds away from Central Security Forces headquarters by now. “Lots of my friends drove through that entrance and were never seen again,” Ayman Nour said. So as the wagon approached the gate, Ismail sped her car in front of the paddy wagon, swerved sideways, and blocked the entrance. As soon as she leapt from the vehicle, Ayman Nour’s brother and father swarmed toward the back door of the paddy wagon and began attacking it with crowbars.
“The truck began to rock alarmingly from side to side,” recalled Jack Shenker, “while someone began banging the metal exterior, sending out huge metallic clangs. We could make out that a struggle was taking place over the opening of the door.”
When at last the door opened, a police officer had managed to push aside Ayman Nour’s father and brother and pulled his gun, but the captives surged forward, sending him flying. One by one the protesters fled their sweaty cell. “I insisted on being the last person out,” said Ayman Nour, “because I knew there were a lot of sick and injured people. Obviously my coming out last of forty-four people was very nerve-racking for my parents. They were thinking, We just spent hours chasing the wrong truck and our son wasn’t inside!”
Once he did step into freedom, there was no celebration. His three family members quickly grabbed him and threw him inside one of their cars, along with the man who had taken the rubber bullet in his eye. They sped back to Cairo, took the victim to the hospital, and placed Ayman Nour in hiding at the home of a family friend. For the next two days he remained a fugitive. But when word began to spread that Friday, January 28, had been identified as another rally, this one a “Day of Rage,” he knew he had to join.
“Did you think the protests would succeed at that point?” By this time we had reached the end of Talaat Harb Street and were arriving at the entrance to Tahrir Square. Cairo’s largest, greatest public space was filled with palm trees and bordered by block-like government buildings. Sweeping vistas opened up before us. As a pedestrian, you mostly felt relief from the smog, the congestion, and the choking claustrophobia of all the accumulated crud. For the first time all day I noticed the sky. It was gray, but uplifting nonetheless.
“It felt like an unprecedented moment,” he said. “We didn’t know whether or not it would turn into a revolution. But we knew that after the twenty-fifth of January, nothing in Egypt would ever be the same.”
Chapter II
The Birthplace of Freedom
The Garden of Eden and the Roots of Revolution
The first time I set foot in the desert, I braced myself for the silence. I was in my mid-thirties, well-traveled, yet completely inexperienced in the arid landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. The desert would surely feel isolated, I thought, an island of serenity. But once I stepped into the Sinai Peninsula, I was amazed by the din—the wind whining through the mountains, the sand tinkling against your face, the rocks crunching beneath your feet. The desert was definitely empty, but it’s the least quiet place I’ve ever been.
The Nile is the exact opposite. As I set off one afternoon on my latest trip to Cairo in a high-masted felucca from a bustling riverbank not far from Tahrir Square, I steeled myself for a clanky, cacophonous ride. Rush hour was honking around us; the floating casinos, bowling barges, and party boats topped with neon mermaids and dolphins were just getting revved up; the pulsing pace of Africa’s largest city (15 million people and counting) was squeezing its watery aorta like a heart attack waiting to happen.
But the river was almost mute. Ten degrees cooler and a hundred decibels quieter than the city around it, the river had a cleansing breeze, a light chop, and the effortless ability to make tension melt away. In antiquity, Egypt was called the “gift of the Nile.” That gift is still giving five thousand years later.
“The Nile used to be a much stronger reference point for Egyptians,” said Mahmoud Sabit, the colorful, chain-smoking historian of modern Egypt whose mysterious, crumbling Grey Gardens–style mansion sits in the narrow stretch of land between Tahrir and the Nile. Wiry and intense, with white hair and deep-set lines across his face, he appears older than his fifty-two years. We were sailing toward the Qasr al-Nil (“Palace of the Nile”) Bridge, the chief passageway from downtown Cairo to Gezirah Island, the cultural heart of the city. “Even twenty years ago it was much more of an economic highway for barges, water taxis, and feluccas. It was like Main Street. All this traffic going to the Delta, Upper Egypt, the Mediterranean, carrying bricks, or chickens, or cows.”
“Does it still have a romantic place in people’s hearts?”
“It’s more of a psychological thing in the sense that Egyptians never let themselves get far away from the sight of the Nile. If you notice, ninety percent of Egyptians live within a few miles of the river. But I think the real attachment is atavistic. The Nile makes everything important.”
Which is why it came as no surprise that on Friday, January 28, 2011, the pivotal day in the entire revolution, the central battle between protesters and police took place over who controlled Qasr al-Nil Bridge, and with it access to the city.
We pushed off the bank. Omar, our pilot, slowly lifted the sail, then sat down and offered us a beer. Of all the Muslim countries I have visited, Egypt is among the easiest in which to find alcohol, a testament to its undercurrent of liberalism. I asked Omar how his life had c
hanged since the start of the revolution. “I feel much safer now,” he said. “I used to look over my shoulder all the time. The police used to take me away without warning, just so I would give them more money, or a free ride on the river. Now they just pass by without asking. I can sleep safely on my boat at night.”
At first glance, it might seem like a stretch to say that the Egyptian Revolution—and the entire swath of uprisings that rattled the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010—had their roots in religion. After all, most of the high-profile organizers were young, not overtly spiritual, and their language appeared to be more secular than faith-based. But look beneath the surface, and it’s easy to draw a straight line between the passionate cries for freedom across the modern Middle East and the earliest calls for freedom in the Ancient Near East. In fact, you can’t understand the current yearnings without understanding their earliest written expression, and that was in the scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths. Long before the Enlightenment, the Reformation, or even classical Rome and Greece, freedom had its earliest and most influential expression in the Hebrew Bible.
Let me explain. Today, the religions that grew out of the Bible are holy to half the humans alive. That number includes 2 billion Christians, 1.5 billion Muslims, and 14 million Jews. Those faiths have dominated Western life for more than twenty centuries, and it’s easy to think of scripture as inherently conservative, the tool of autocrats, slave masters, male chauvinists, and anyone who benefits from traditional ways of organizing society. And it’s true that the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an can be read to serve those purposes.
But long before they were co-opted by the powerful, these texts were embraced by the powerless. If anything, it’s easier to read them as revolutionary texts. As Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, wrote, “The Bible was, and probably always will be, a radical political document, testifying to the right of prophets to criticize kings, the inalienable dignity of the human person regardless of wealth and status, and most importantly for the history of freedom: a clear sense of the moral limits of power.”
Since Jews came first among the Abrahamic faiths, they were the first to use scripture to promote a radical agenda of human freedom. They didn’t have to look far. In the opening chapter of Genesis, God announces, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The significance of this formulation is hard to overstate: Humans are earthly manifestations of God. If you enslave, oppress, or in any way devalue another person, you are, by extension, doing the same thing to God.
This idea became a central theme of the Hebrew Bible. Because humans are made in God’s image, we are fundamentally free. We may live in our own times, but we also have timeless values and are entitled to eternal rights. Throughout the narrative, God’s children are constantly aspiring to achieve this ideal state of freedom.
The Bible even creates a handy vision of what that ideal world might look like. It’s called the Garden of Eden. The Bible locates Eden at the confluence of four rivers. Two of those are known—the Tigris and Euphrates. The other two—the Pishon and Gihon—are unknown, though for centuries many believed they were the Ganges and the Nile. From the beginning, Eden was more than a physical place, it was also a symbolic place. It was an ideal world where “every man shall sit under his grapevine or fig tree, and no one will make him afraid.” This notion that humans can achieve a better society was revolutionary in human history. The Bible doesn’t just articulate this notion; it invented it. Before the Bible, most religions viewed gods as standing apart from history. Afterwards, the children of Abraham saw God as being everywhere and as intervening in daily life.
And one of the ways he most frequently intervened was by toppling powerful men—from Adam to Noah to Pharaoh to Goliath to David. The Bible consistently conveys the idea that absolute power and arrogant leaders are dangerous weapons. Even more important, it tells readers they have the right—even the obligation—to stand up to those leaders.
And they listened. Early Christians looked to scripture in their fight against Imperial Rome. Faced with torture, abuse, even being fed to lions, Christians clung to the idea that all humans were created in God’s image. “I would ask you,” wrote Clement of Alexandria in the second century, “does it not seem to you monstrous that human beings who are God’s own handiwork should be subjected to another master?” Because of them, the tradition of reading scripture to argue for human liberty would always be present in the Western world. “From such beginnings,” concluded historian Elaine Pagels, “Christians forged the basis for what would become, centuries later, the Western ideas of freedom.”
But what about Muslims? What’s their relationship with freedom?
Back on the Nile, Omar was tacking to the west. He and Mahmoud Sabit were trading tales about how the revolution was already transforming Egyptian life. Omar said there was less honking in Cairo now that people were less tense. Also, groups of local citizens were banding together to run neighborhood watch programs at night. One group was even tackling one of the city’s most visible problems, traffic. They were affixing stickers to the windshields of illegally parked cars, saying, “Egypt is changing and you’re still double-parked!”
Dr. Sabit told a story about how on the night of January 25, riot police on their way home from Tahrir Square looted the lingerie store he runs near his house. “The poor men,” he said. “They had spent all night defending the regime and their only reward was a few bustiers and brassieres. I have a surveillance video with one of them holding a G-string on a bayonet.”
I had asked him to help me understand the connection between the Qur’an and freedom, and we spent a few minutes discussing the origins of Islam’s sacred text. The stories of the Hebrew Bible were written down in the mid-first millennium B.C.E. The New Testament followed around five hundred years after that, and the Qur’an another five centuries later. The timing is significant because it means Muhammad transcribed the divine words in the Qur’an at a time when the stories of the Bible were well-known in Arabia, along with a rich variety of extra-biblical legends.
The Garden of Eden was among these stories, and it appears frequently in the Muslim holy book. Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is not linear, so the story of Creation is not confined to a few chapters at the outset. Even more important, the story differs from its counterpart in Genesis in subtle yet meaningful ways. For starters, Eden is not exactly an earthly place but rather a heavenly place, a celestial paradise where God creates man and woman. In addition, Eve comes across much better in the Islamic version. Adam is the one who initiates eating the fruit against God’s orders, and God forgives both Adam and Eve for their transgression, instead of ostracizing them from Eden. Also, the Qur’anic version has no notion of original sin and no overtone of female subservience.
After God absolves Adam and Eve, he dispatches the first couple to earth as his representatives. In the hadith, the all-important commentaries gathered in the centuries after Muhammad, Adam is described as coming to rest in India, with Eve in Arabia. The two remain separate for hundreds of years, then finally find each other in Mecca, where they mate. After their union, Adam fasts for forty days, abstains from sex with Eve for one hundred years, then sets about building a sanctuary in Mecca that will be an earthly substitute for the Garden of Eden. One idea behind the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, is that all humans can return to Eden on a regular basis. Much more than Judaism and Christianity, Islam has a living, breathing manifestation of Eden built into its annual calendar.
The story has yet another ongoing potency in Islam through the power of the garden. Deserts dominate the Middle East, so it makes sense that gardens would be coveted places in Islamic culture. The word paradise even comes from the Persian word for walled orchard. A similar reverence extends to the color green. Muhammad wore a green cloak and turban; inhabitants of paradise wear it, too; and it’s the color of many bindings of the Qur’an. In the Middle Ages, crusaders avoided putting green on their coats of
arms so they wouldn’t be confused with Muslims, who often had green on their battlefield markings. And green is the most popular color in the flags of predominantly Muslim nations. It appears on the flags of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, the Maldives, Mauritania, Sudan, and Palestine. It was no accident that the first of the so-called “Twitter revolutions,” the student-led protests that grew out of the disputed election in Iran in 2009, which many see as the spark of the entire youth movement in 2011, was called the Green Revolution.
Given this ubiquity of garden imagery, I was curious if modern Muslims drew the same lessons of fundamental human dignity from the Garden of Eden story as do Jews and Christians. I asked Dr. Sabit.
“The word freedom that we’re now hearing on the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, and Damascus doesn’t have a precise equivalent in Arabic,” he said. “And I would have to say that freedom as a concept isn’t central to the Qur’an. What does have precedence—and what many Muslims mean when they cry ‘freedom’—is liberty, justice, not being a slave.”
The most basic human right in the Qur’an, he continued, is to be regarded as the pure, sanctified creation of God. As is the case in Genesis, God breathes life into humans and grants Adam and his descendants a special place in his creation. “We have bestowed blessings on Adam’s children,” says God in Sura 17 of the Qur’an. “We gave them greater advantages and exalted them above our other creatures.” Building on this basic human dignity, the Qur’an stresses that no one can deny these God-given freedoms to another person. Particular scorn is heaped on anyone who captures another human being and turns him into a slave. A hadith identifies three categories of people whom God shall oppose on Judgment Day; one is “he who enslaves a free man, then sells him and devours the money.”
