Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  I was invited to speak at a conference about my experience going from YouTube fame to television, and how to use the new media to convey political messages. There were representatives from all political parties in attendance. After my speech, I talked with some of the Islamist party representatives. Some were from the Muslim Brotherhood and others from the new Salafi party called Al Nour, or “the Light.” We had a long, heated discussion about whether or not we should apply Sharia Law in Egypt.

  “So give me a good reason why we should apply Sharia Law?” I questioned.

  “Well, it is proven that countries who apply Sharia Law have the lowest crime rates,” answered one Salafi.

  Now this is one of those bullshit answers you get whenever you talk with an Islamist. They are like the same people in America who argue against gun control because #GunsSaveLives. Oh really? Tell me again how a weapon with the sole purpose of injuring or killing whoever is on the other side of it is a great lifesaver.

  I responded that the lowest crime rates are in Finland, Sweden, and Singapore, and if they had up and chosen to apply Sharia Law, well, I surely hadn’t heard a thing about it. I also reminded him that sexual harassment is highest in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

  He claimed that if we were to better apply Sharia Law and, for example, punish adulterers by whipping them, we would limit the presence of brothel houses.

  “Really?” I responded. “Well, first of all, according to Sharia, the real one, you can’t convict someone for adultery unless you have four witnesses observing the whole thing from start to finish. So, presumably, the Sharia police will receive an anonymous tip. Then they will quickly move in on the brothel house and politely knock on the door. When no one answers because they are too busy discussing whether or not to perform the beast with two backs, they’ll have to kick the door down. Well, now there’s an audience. This is as good a time as any to cheat on your wife. So they patiently wait for the four officers to gather around their bed and watch them get nasty from the best possible angle? It sounds like we might as well be filming pornography.”

  He and the other fellows couldn’t come up with a counterargument. For thousands of Islamists who saw my show, it was the first time they had to face an opposing logic. Dismantling their weak narrative was like removing a single playing card from beneath their house of holy lies. This is why closed communities such as the Islamists and the military were not big fans of openly discussing their beliefs and convictions. They were running on blind faith and obedience, instead of reason and logic. And this is why both of those camps came together to crush whatever liberal movement emerged from the revolution. What came next was a page out of the shock-and-awe playbook, ISIS edition.

  WELCOME TO KANDAHAR

  JULY 2011

  It was a hot summer in Cairo.

  There’s nothing really special about that line, as it is always hot as balls in Cairo. It just felt like a poetic way to open this chapter.

  The Islamists had left the square months earlier and were now preparing for the first parliamentary election after the revolution. The non-Islamic political powers were also trying to shape up for the elections, with very little hope of winning after having that referendum (yes-versus-no vote) defeat stamped on their asses. Meanwhile, the army, the real power in the country, was operating through an interim government that watched everyone.

  Then you had the people remaining in the square. Every day the streets were blocked because of sit-ins, and every Friday there were huge demonstrations. I can’t even remember now why there were demonstrations and sit-ins, but they could’ve been for anything: police reform, minimum wages, or Rihanna canceling her tour in the Middle East. The economy was in bad shape and the traffic was only getting worse. The everyday citizen couldn’t see why the protestors continued to block downtown Cairo and cause a headache for everyone around them. They started to see the protestors’ causes as less and less important and began to correlate the worsening economy and growing traffic with the revolution. The “delinquents in Tahrir” was the new nickname bestowed on them.

  It is fascinating to follow the trail of labels the protestors of Tahrir Square were given—from “spies” to “heroes” to “revolutionaries” to “infidels” to “anarchists,” and now “delinquents.” It’s not too dissimilar from how the Occupy Wall Street protestors were viewed in New York and across America. At first, many saw them as “admirable activists” who were representative of the people, but it didn’t take long for the cause to fizzle out and for the remaining protestors to be demoted to lazy nuisances who wanted free clothes and food (and the opportunity to chant together!). The Arab Spring was now a distant memory, and the promise of a new Egypt had dematerialized, leaving only the same nightmarish life people had always had.

  There were attempts by the liberal forces to suggest and promote what they called “supra-constitution articles,” which resembled the American Bill of Rights; they wanted to introduce Egypt to absolute equality, freedom, and all that other good stuff. You might think this was something we’d all get down with, right? Ha! Both the Islamists and the army were spooked by the idea of unchecked liberty. How else could they control us without uniting behind that common enemy of “freedom of thought”? A revolution liberates the people from blind obedience, and those who want absolute control are willing to use a tank or ancient scripture to achieve it. Power at all costs.

  The Islamists made a huge fuss about it. “How can something be supra-constitutional?” they would say. “That implies it will be held higher than Sharia Law.” They argued that valuing absolute equality and absolute rights over Sharia law meant that Sharia would no longer matter. Uh-oh. That would lead to “liberal sinners” having all the freedom in the world to perform sex acts on benches, in bedrooms, under bridges, while riding bikes, or maybe while doing ballet or BASE jumping. Copulation would break out like the common cold and soon everyone would be sex zombies.

  Days and weeks on end, the Islamists aired television campaigns that pounded against the supra-constitution articles.

  “The 20 percent minority are trying to dictate what the Islamic majority should do,” their ads would espouse. “And worst of all they want to abolish Sharia.”

  This thought process reminded me of what an outspoken sheikh named Shouman had said about the movie Titanic, which I mocked on my show. He said that the reason the Titanic sank was because Kate Winslet posed nude for Leonardo DiCaprio, essentially claiming that a fictional nude portrait session caused the wrath of God to doom the (actual) entire ship and its passengers to a watery grave. For this sheikh, if God did this to the Titanic, imagine what He could do to Egypt if it abandoned the rule of Sharia.

  “Liberalism means that your mama would have to take off her hijab,” he shouted in one of his sermons. This became the most famous Internet meme in Egypt. At a different rally he shouted, “When you die and you are in your grave being questioned by angels, you will be asked about your God and how you worshiped him, your religion and how you followed it, and Sharia Law and how you defended it. Thus, voting yes in the referendum is considered a holy war to defend God and his Sharia.”

  A call was made out to all “jealous Muslims” to defend their God by taking back Tahrir Square, to protect Sharia and the beloved army from infidels. “It is time to purify the square from those drug addicts and faggots,” a prominent sheikh shouted to a crowd of Islamists before marching to Tahrir.

  On that particular day of purification the square was filled with the Islamist leaders and their goons, ones that had never stepped foot in the place because they were told by the same sheikhs months earlier when the revolution was at its peak that participation of any kind in politics is haram. But now, all of a sudden, occupying the square was a holy mission from God. Countless buses shuttled people from villages and remote rural areas to Tahrir. Not all of them were Islamist activists: many were simple peasants and workers who were responding to the call to protect their religion.

 
We had never seen the square that packed. The revolutionary songs were replaced by jihadi chants, and the Egyptian flag shared the stage with flags from Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda, in addition to photos of Bin Ladin. People watched on television with a mixture of disgust and horror: Is this why we started the revolution?

  It was a pure power flex by the Islamists. The media sarcastically called it “Kandahar Friday,” alluding to Afghanistan’s second biggest city and its radical Islamic militants, the Taliban.

  The amount of money used to mobilize all of these people was astonishing. The army seemed to turn a blind eye to the millions of dollars flown from Saudi Arabia to the Salafis. It was the same army that a couple of months earlier allowed more than three thousand jihadists to come back from Afghanistan, after more than twenty years of imposing a travel ban. It was the same army that would crack down on liberal human rights organizations that were funded through American aid, for a fraction of the money flooding in from Saudi Arabia (more on that to come).

  The same thing was happening in Syria. Bashar al-Assad, their bloody dictator, released thousands of jihadists from jail once revolution erupted there. Later, these people became the leaders of ISIS. A peaceful revolution turned into a bloody Islamic jihad. The textbook of fear is the same everywhere.

  That day in Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t have the loudest voices, but they were definitely a part of the Islamist ranks. They despised the Salafis, but they reveled in the fact that they could exploit their numbers.

  At night, the Islamic television anchors were having the holiest orgasms of their lives. They proved they could gather masses and show us, the infidels, that they were here to stay.

  The “supra-constitution articles” were scratched, of course, and with them went all the articles that protected human rights and the ability to monitor the military budget. It was obvious who the winners were that day. The Islamists had performed their version of “shock and awe,” the military received extended protection, and the revolution had lost its spark.

  Tahrir Square was officially dead.

  ISLAM IS COMING!

  Salafis despise women. This is a fact. It is the same with fanatics of any religion all over the world. Salafis who cover women in black potato sacks are no different from what the extreme Hasidic Jews do to their women. Sex is an abomination unless one can have it with four teenage brides, or an altar boy in a Catholic church . . . then it’s God’s will!

  As many parts of the world started to become more forward thinking about their treatment of women, many Arab countries appeared backward for their misogyny. So Egypt and its new parliamentary law made it mandatory for a party to put at least one woman on its ballot in each district. This was no problem for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was used to having women in their campaigns and were shrewd in using women to approach the housewives in poor areas and talk to them in order to get votes.

  The real problem was with the Salafis. They come from the same school of thought as the Saudi Wahhabis, who consider women merely walking vaginas with nothing to do but receive sex and raise children. In their ideology, women should just stay at home, and if they do get out they should do so only from extreme necessity, like shopping for the latest Victoria’s Secret collection to keep their husbands’ boners alive.

  Wahhabism is basically the most ultraconservative branch of Islam you can practice on this planet. Its practitioners are the ones who have banned women in Saudi Arabia from driving, which is not just an arbitrary decision based on blind faith and utmost stupidity. No, no, no! As a matter of fact, there are good scientific reasons for doing so, according to them—like the time a sheikh on a Saudi channel proved that women are not fit for driving because “modern science proves women who drive damage their uterus and Fallopian tubes.” Interestingly enough, modern science also proves he’s a dick.

  Another so-called Saudi, a historian and social expert, went on Lebanese TV to give us a totally different angle on this problem. He said that the main reason women don’t drive in Saudi Arabia is because cities are far apart. “What if the car breaks down and she gets raped on the highway?” he proposed.

  The female Lebanese anchor retorted, “Well, women drive in the West, why is that not a concern?”

  “For Western women rape is not a big deal,” he answered.

  “What?” the anchor asked in horror. “What do you mean it’s not a big deal?”

  “Well, in the West it is just a moral issue, but in Saudi Arabia it is a religious and social issue, it affects the whole community. Women in the West will just get over it. They don’t have our complicated religious and social matrix.”

  The female anchor couldn’t hold back her laughter. She asked, “Well, if the woman cannot drive because she would be raped, and the only way to get around is using a chauffeur, the chauffeur could still rape her, right?”

  “That is why I have suggested something, but the authorities won’t listen to me. Women should be accompanied by foreign female chauffeurs!”

  In the Wahhabi and Salafi mentalities it is haram (like everything else in the world) for men to show photos of their women. Twenty years ago it was haram to take photos in general because “you should not replicate the creation of Allah.” But since the TV star sheikhs hired professional photographers to give them professional photo shoots, they had to issue custom-made fatwas stating that it’s okay for men to do so. But now with the new parliamentary mandate, how could they have female candidates’ photos on the banners? And how could they urge millions of totally covered women who weren’t allowed to leave the house to go vote?

  To solve the first dilemma, they decided to put women in a black niqab for the picture, which really didn’t make any sense because all you could see was a face with a black ninja-like cover over it. Then they thought of something even more brilliant: to put a photo of a flower instead of a photo of a human being next to the woman’s name. Just like that.

  Then came the biggest problem of all. How could they mobilize the masses of women that were previously told to stay at home and not leave unless necessary? How could they tell them to take part in elections while the political operation was viewed as an abomination from Satan?

  The solution came in the form of women’s conferences all over the country. Now, you would think that a women’s conference would have some women speakers, right? Wrong! The left side of the audience were women all covered in black and the right side was filled with men. The women all sat quietly listening to male sheikhs deliver speeches on women’s issues. The sheikhs emphasized that women were indeed lesser than men but that they were now needed more than ever to stand beside Islam. “It is true that we had restrictions on women going to vote and being part of the political process,” one sheikh admitted, “but now it is different. There is a real danger against Islam and we should all use every possible measure to protect it. Necessities allow for trespasses.” Which is the Islamic way of saying the end justifies the means.

  Every political party had television commercials for their campaigns. Even the Muslim Brotherhood had tried to feign balanced ads, with some women wearing the hijab and others not. However, the Salafi Al Nour party had commercials of a guy with a long beard explaining to a female why choosing Al Nour is the best option; that female was only seven years old. If she was any older than that, it would have been required to pixelate her face. I’m still not sure why they didn’t just have the bearded man talking to a pretty flower. It would’ve been the start of a good hallucination scene in a cheesy independent movie.

  Another common thread on the Islamists’ channels was the new slogan by many Salafis, “Islam is coming!” Where did it go in the first place?

  In a country where more than 90 percent are Muslims and 90 percent of women are covered and mosques are more abundant that Walmarts in the States, I can assure you Islam has never left. The Brotherhood had a less hysterical, subtler message than the Salafis. They just resurrected their slogan “Islam is the solution.” We just hav
e to be closer to God and everything will be all right! Both of them were calling to make Egypt “Islamic again.” Sound familiar?

  One day I went to my hairdresser for a cut, in addition to wanting to survey the blue-collar working-class people who were his customers. “Why would you vote for the Islamists?” I asked them, telling them that mixing religion and politics was very dangerous. After a lot of bullshit excuses, one guy gave me an honest answer—not necessarily logical, but honest: “Sir, we are people entrenched in sin. We smoke, do drugs, drink alcohol, we commit all sorts of sins. We need this country to be better, and God will not allow this if we have all those sins. So maybe those pious people will lead us to become better Muslims, and God will be happier with us.”

  That logic blew my mind. So basically he was repenting for his sins by electing someone who would not just represent him in the parliament but who would represent him in heaven too! He continued to surprise me when he told me he had friends who worked as waiters in five-star hotels and coastal resorts who were not happy because they had to serve alcohol, since the consumption of it is forbidden in Islam. He told me that all of them were going to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood. People might vote for ideological reasons, emotional reasons, bullshit reasons, but only here in Egypt will people vote out of guilt.

  Election Day came, and for the first time in history women dominated the scene. The Islamists’ plan worked, and women came to defend their precious religion against whatever was out there to get it.