Generation Freedom

by Bruce Feiler

  I never believed the Park51 Community Center would be built on the proposed spot. As I said on the air a few minutes later, I always believed a compromise would be struck. But I still felt the episode was a positive opportunity for the interfaith movement. It elevated the conversation about interreligious cooperation to center stage in America. It reminded Americans that throughout our history, we have welcomed the outsider and befriended the stranger, sometimes first with anger and hostility, but ultimately with acceptance. The discrimination many Muslim Americans experienced in the twenty-first century was no different from what Jews faced in the twentieth century and Catholics in the nineteenth. Eventually, it, too, would pass.

  But that hopeful future seemed far away on this night. The opposition had clearly won. When Anderson Cooper asked Andy Sullivan if Imam Rauf had done anything to change his mind, Sullivan grinned confidently. “Actually, he has done more good for my movement tonight than a hundred demonstrations have done,” he said. “He shot himself in the foot so badly. You are not going to be able to chisel the smile off my face.” Asked to explain, Sullivan said Imam Rauf’s remarks about how our reaction would be taken abroad were a warning that Muslim extremists would attack us if we didn’t build the center. “It was a veiled threat.” Tallon agreed. “Isn’t that really scary, that if we don’t build this mosque, as the old expression says, there will be hell to pay?” An interfaith center built by Muslims didn’t belong in the United States at all, she said; it belonged in the Middle East. “The people in the Middle East are the ones that attacked us at Ground Zero. Why don’t they learn to be tolerant?”

  Backstage a few minutes later, I was despondent. Suddenly everything gained in the last decade seemed lost. I telephoned my wife. “We’ve hit a wall,” I said. “We’ve gone as far as we can go.” Afterward, I sat by myself. The only way we’re going to make progress, I thought, is to be met halfway by the other side. We needed some voice from the Muslim world that offered some promise of moderation, some hint they share the same belief in freedom—including freedom of religion—that Americans hold so dear.

  Two armored personnel carriers and a tank were stationed at the top of the narrow alley that led to the Church of the Two Martyrs in Soul. This part of the town was even more dilapidated than what I’d seen earlier. A goat was wandering up a short stairway into a house that had no door. Twin girls in diapers were toddling in the mud. A young soldier in forest fatigues and a red beret stopped me from entering the roadway and asked for identification. In the days since the church was destroyed, reporters had been unwelcome here. A female reporter from Time described being surrounded by young men in Muslim robes, who shouted, “Leave! Leave now! You are not allowed to pass.” Another added, “Are you Christian?” before grabbing her notebook, ripping out several pages, and forcibly marching her out of the village.

  Having been warned of this hostility, I had come prepared with special permission from the Ministry of Information back in Cairo. But while the young soldier here in Soul went to confer with his superiors, I, too, was suddenly surrounded by a group of around sixty men, all wearing cotton robes, slip-on shoes, and eager expressions. Afternoon prayers had just ended, and the assembly materialized almost instantly. I was trying to gauge their mood, which I took to be a mix of curiosity, skepticism, and hostility, when one of the men, who was around sixty, with neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and rimless eyeglasses he kept adjusting nervously, elbowed his way through the crowd and came uncomfortably close to my face.

  “I am the principal of a secondary school,” he announced proudly. “I have been a teacher of English. I am very happy to meet you.”

  He identified himself as Muslim, and I asked him to explain what led to the church burning. “We consider this a shame,” he said. “We are farmers in this town. Muslims and Christians have been living together very well here.” The boy who committed the original murder, he explained, who later became the second victim, was beloved in the town. “When the people came from the cemetery, they were very angry. A number of us tried to stop them from going to the church. I myself tried to stop them. But they were too many.”

  He said the mob walked up the street we were on, turned down the alley, and approached the building. “When they got to the church, they found papers indicating that the Christians were doing magic inside. They were casting spells on Muslims. This made everyone very angry, and they destroyed the church.”

  “But isn’t this against the teachings of Islam?” I asked. “How does the Qur’an say you should treat Christians?”

  “Islam teaches us to protect Christians,” he said. “Even if somebody came here and tried to attack a Christian, Islam orders us to stand side by side with him. In the January twenty-fifth revolution, Egyptians raised the crescent and the cross together. It was a mixed revolution.”

  “But then this church burned,” I said, “and riots in Cairo killed more people. Many people fear the revolution will bring a time when Muslims will attack Christians.”

  “You are putting this the wrong way,” he said. “The revolution was for Muslims and Christians together. We are united, believe me. Go see for yourself.”

  I said good-bye to the assembled men, and the young army officer ushered me down the alleyway, which was about ten feet wide. Tanks couldn’t have made it down here, but every wheelbarrow, donkey cart, and reed basket within a ten-mile radius was there. Hundreds of people were milling about the alleyway, lugging bricks, hammers, burned-out pieces of wood, and a steady stream of materials. I stumbled on a mound of cement bags. Each one was decorated with a drawing of the three pyramids. How lucky, I thought. If you need a logo for your Egyptian cement company, why not use the longest-standing buildings ever constructed!

  The Church of Two Martyrs is not the kind of grand, free-standing institution you might see on a town square in Europe or in a rural town in America. It’s more confined, like the kind of facility you’d see squeezed into the old city of some ancient capital. It was built of red brick, about the size and style of a small high school gymnasium. I stepped inside the sanctuary, which was mostly exposed beams and some metal joists at the moment, and that’s when I was hit by the sweet, acrid smell of charred wood. Maybe it was all the incense infused in Coptic services, but the ruins smelled fruity and sad at the same time. I rubbed my finger along a blackened wall and rubbed ash on the back of my hand. It was dense, and a little moist.

  By far the most striking thing about the church was not its appearance—it’s how crowded it was. There were dozens and dozens of men—of all ages, social classes, and faiths—laying bricks, running electrical wire, and hammering studs. Though only a week or so had passed since the fire, a massive rebuilding effort was already under way. This was clearly the miracle of Two Martyrs—how this town on the brink of religious war suddenly became a model for religious cooperation. Who pulled this off during a revolution? Or rather, was it because of the revolution that it happened in the first place?

  The person most qualified to answer that question was Dr. Hany Hanna Aziz Hanna, and I went to see him in Cairo after leaving the church. His business card is made of shiny, see-through, onionskin paper. It lists the following titles for him.

  • Member of Front Support of the Egyptian Revolution

  • Member of the Council of Trustees of the Revolution and Member of the Peer and Editing Commission on the Preparation of Its Decisions

  • International Expert in Conservation and Restoration

  • Professor, Higher Institute for Coptic Studies in Cairo

  • Writer, Egyptian and International Newspapers

  And that’s just the first five items. The card also has his photograph, which shows a serious man in the manner of a Dragnet agent, forty-five, with heavy black-rimmed glasses, dark hair, and a practical suit. Yet when I stepped into his parlor, this man who carefully considers his appearance was unshaven, droopy-eyed, and slumped. But as I soon discovered, he had good reason. All those titles on his card really
communicated one thing: He was the highest-ranking Copt in the leadership of the revolution, which means he was the person most responsible for putting an end to the violence.

  Which is exactly what he had done—at least for now.

  Dr. Hanna was a midlevel conservator in the Supreme Council of Antiquities when he got drawn into the youth movement for change in the years before the revolution. Like everyone I met who was part of the leadership, he was so consumed by its passions that it had altered his identity and sense of self. During the peak of the revolution, he spent a week at a time in Tahrir, without going home to visit his wife or three young children, who were three, eleven, and twelve. When I asked him why, he said, “Because I’m a martyr.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means since I left home for the revolution, I—and my family—consider myself a dead person. I can be killed at any time. Because I was one of the key people who organized the revolution, I would be among the first to be killed if it failed.”

  “Why not go home and live your life?”

  “Because we started something. And I am not the kind of person who starts something and stops before completing it.”

  Once the regime fell, the leaders of the revolution turned to spreading its values—particularly the searing experience of Christians and Muslims marching, planning, and praying alongside one another—to the larger society beyond Tahrir. They got their first test with Soul.

  When word of the fire at the church reached beyond Soul, the media portrayed it as rank sectarian strife. And who could blame them: A raging group of Muslims destroyed a Christian church. But those involved in the revolution—including the protesters and the army—knew better. They viewed it as a stunt by the old regime to stir up interreligious conflict, thereby justifying a counterrevolution that might return the old elite to power, albeit minus Mubarak and his sons. Dr. Hanna put this view to me directly, as had Dr. Mahmoud Sabit before him.

  “After Mubarak fell,” I said at one point in our conversation, “there was an outbreak of sectarian violence here—”

  He cut me off. “These were not sectarian incidents,” he said. “These were political incidents. The Mubarak regime was used to dividing people. These are Muslim Brotherhood, these are not. These are Copts, these are not. It was a game to make people nervous about others so they would believe they needed a strong government.”

  “So how did this work in Soul?”

  “I have the story from the people involved,” he said. “A boy and a girl had sex. In Egypt, like any country in the world, thousands of boys and thousands of girls have sex. This happened four times in this town in the last few years. So why now this incident? Why did this suddenly become an honor killing? The answer is that some members of the old regime sent provocateurs to Soul. Their goal was to take a trivial problem and turn it into a huge sectarian problem.”

  Only this time, there was a new sheriff in town, namely the military, the leadership of the revolution, and the liaison committee that bridged the two. Dr. Hanna was the key Copt in that equation, and within twenty-four hours he helped organize a massive delegation made up of Muslims, Christians, and military brass to descend on the otherwise unsuspecting town of Soul and stabilize the situation. It was Shock and Awe 2.0, only this time the bombs were packed with cooling-off sessions instead of TNT. Visitors included Dr. Biltagy from the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Mohamed Hassan from the even more fundamentalist Salafi sect of Islam, and Amr Khaled, one of the most popular preachers in the Muslim world.

  The delegation hosted a garden party at a local dignitary’s house, where Muslim and Christian representatives from each district in Soul mingled and discussed a path forward. Authorities then set up a thousand chairs in the heart of town, along with a stage, microphone, and bunting, and the visitors all made speeches to the crowd. Sheikh Khaled, often called the “Muslim Billy Graham,” admonished the residents: “My message here today for Muslims and the Christians is: Let’s be one hand. Each one of the people here in Soul has to do something. First we must each stop this problem in our own homes.” Visitors responded to Khaled’s message by chanting slogans calling for unity. By the end of the event, the military brass promised to rebuild the church in its original location. Work began the next day.

  As Dr. Hanna was telling me this story, I almost didn’t believe it. It was too good to be true. It reminded me of the Christmas Truce along the Western Front during the First World War, in which German and British soldiers swapped seasonal greetings and songs, even walked across the battlefield to exchange gifts with their enemies. Now, with sectarian blood on the streets of Soul, some of the busiest religious, political, and military leaders in the entire country had left their posts and traveled two hours south into the desert, to the Egyptian boondocks, to turn a bloody eye of interreligious tension into a shimmering rose of the revolution. Even Hollywood would tone down this story because it sounds too saccharine.

  When I asked Dr. Hanna to explain this reaction, he lifted his hands to the sky. “This is the revolution!”

  “But a revolution can’t change attitudes overnight,” I insisted.

  “Why not? Did you ever hear about a revolution in which people overturned a government and the next day cleaned the streets?”

  He was referring to the day after Mubarak fell when hundreds of protesters returned to Tahrir Square and swept up their own mess.

  “This is us,” he continued. “This is Egyptians. That night I went on state television and told the country what happened.”

  “I go on television, too, from time to time,” I said. “And if I tell the story of what happened in Soul, there will be someone sitting next to me who will say, ‘You are so naïve. The Muslim extremists are just waiting quietly, being very nice, until the proper time comes and then they will pounce, just like in Iran. This type of violence will come back, and the dream of this revolution will die.’ How would you respond to that?”

  “I would say to that other person, ‘Okay, you have a point. But what’s your advice? You suggested a problem, what’s your solution?’ Seriously, I don’t think we’re that weak. We’re not Iran. We’re not Afghanistan. We’re not Gaza. We are Egypt. We have ten million Christians living in this country. Not five hundred, or fifteen hundred. Ten million. Who is going to kill ten million people? We’re very well organized. We have history. We have culture. We have a civilization that has been here for two thousand years. We’ve spent hundreds of years living under rules by Islam. So what? If the Muslim Brotherhood takes control of Egypt, we will still live.”

  “How worried are you that this will happen?”

  “I have no fear of anything,” he said. “Whatever the Muslim Brotherhood were to bring, we already had Mubarak. I can’t believe they’ll be worse than him. The only thing I fear is if the army itself is destroyed.”

  And therein lies the future. The real story behind the church in Soul is the underlying truth behind the short-term prospects for civil society, religious coexistence, and even economic opportunity in Egypt, and with it other places in the region. The military agreed to rebuild the church, which sent the message that they wanted to maintain the movement toward a unified Egypt. They were building on the themes of the revolution, of course. It was the revolutionaries who adopted the symbol of the 1919 revolution—the union of the Muslim crescent and Christian cross—and made it a symbol of the revolution. But until democratic institutions have time to develop, that vision requires a guarantor. In Egypt, that guarantor is the military, the most dominant institution in the country. It was no surprise when Dr. Hanna told me his greatest fear: “That the army doesn’t stick by the goals of the revolution. They will either develop the country, or they will destroy it.”

  But when I asked his greatest hope, he expressed a desire that would be familiar to people of different faiths all over the world. Its roots are in the Ancient Near East, at the time when Abraham came here four thousand years ago, creating two different sons and two differe
nt traditions that are still struggling to coexist. At the end of Abraham’s life, in a little-known scene in the book of Genesis, Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, rivals since before they were born, leaders of opposing nations, come together for the first time since they were torn apart as children and bury their father. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, warriors, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers, They are mourners. And the message of that moment is as powerful today as it was forty centuries ago: Maybe it’s not the parents who will make peace.

  Maybe it’s the children.

  “I would like to see a new Egypt,” Dr. Hanna said, “with its true values and its true place in the world. I think we can be an example to other countries where Muslims and Christians live side by side. Even places where Christians are a minority. It can be done. We’re doing it in Egypt, and we have been for thousands of years. I always say, ‘Oh, Egypt, return to your noble origins. Contribute, as you once did, to the great achievements to humanity. And remember, that you are truly beautiful.’ ”

  Chapter V

  Generation Freedom

  Who are they? What do they believe? How will they change the world?

  She didn’t want to go. She’d attended too many of these demonstrations. She’d stood on the Journalists’ Syndicate’s steps too many times. She’d been disappointed on too many occasions. But something happened on January 25, 2011, that hadn’t happened in the previous six years of protests. Her daughter said she was going and asked her mom if she’d like to come along.