Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  It was really no surprise when the results came out. It was another crushing defeat for the useless, good-for-nothing liberal camp. It didn’t matter how much money they threw at their cause or how much effective campaigning they did, liberal and leftist parties were absolutely helpless. Egyptian politics was not a simple competition between ideologies; it was a competition against Allah himself.

  It didn’t matter what jokes I threw around on my program, either. Satire seemed an ineffective means to change people’s minds. After I finished the filming of an episode days after the election, my driver took me back home. He had been driving me for a few months now, and on the way to and from work we had intense discussions about politics, in which I ceaselessly explained why it was dangerous to elect people hiding behind the cloth of religion. On our way home that night, I asked him whom he voted for. “Well, for the Muslim Brotherhood, sir,” he said casually. “Let’s pray to Allah to bestow his mercy on us and reward us for that good decision. After all, they are people of God.”

  Oh, fuck me!

  THE HALAL PARLIAMENT

  With a 75 percent majority, we had a true Islamic parliament: 49 percent of the vote went to the Muslim Brotherhood and 26 percent went to the Al Nour party of the Salafis. But, as far as the parliament went, they were united. The Islamic channels were elated to talk about this monumental victory for Islam.

  On the first day of the parliament there is usually a tradition of standing up for the national anthem. Many Salafis members did not stand. And no, they did not stand to follow in the footsteps of Colin Kaepernick or Black Lives Matter or for the well-being of the oppressed and the abused. Their party leader put it this way: “It is an abomination. We only stand for Allah. The national anthem is a Western tradition. We should not abide by it.” A couple of years later this leader would be seen standing alongside the military as the national anthem played. He would also sit, fetch, and roll over whenever the military asked him to do so.

  There is another tradition in which every parliament member stands up and swears to protect the law and the constitution. It goes like this: “I swear to protect, blah-blah, and maintain, blah-blah-blah, the law, blah, country, blah, and the constitution.”

  But for the first time in history we heard it with some additional malarkey. Each Islamic member stood up, recited the pledge as is, and then added “to maintain and protect and obey the constitution in a way that does not contradict with the Sharia of Allah.”

  This made many people furious. It wasn’t that they tampered with the pledge, it was the fact that they showed their intention to interpret the law of the land through the lens of Sharia, and that religion would trump everything else.

  For my show, though, this was the joke that kept on giving. We would all jokingly swear to not drink alcohol, commit adultery, steal, or cheat “in a way that doesn’t contradict with the Sharia of Allah.” As long as you said those magic words, all bad behavior could be absolved. Underneath the jokes and smart punch lines, however, many people in my circle were scared.

  We are an interesting society. We might be religious, but we are also class conscious, and the “classy” educated circles were basically reacting to the parliament sessions like the Armageddon apocalypse.

  I used to go to a nice sports club called Gezira Club, one of those hard-to-get-in country clubs. This is where you will find people from the upper class of society and an abundance of high-class “has-beens” that might have lost their wealth but not their arrogance. An integral part of their character was the cynicism and the innate hate they had for the younger generation for the simple fact that the young presumably had more time left to live on earth. The most interesting members were the old women whose faces stopped giving a fuck and just faltered under the years of plastic surgery.

  These people at the club gathered to watch the parliament sessions with utmost disgust. They despised the fact that those fanatic zealots who came from rural areas and had absolutely no credentials other than a beard and backward dogmatic ideology were now the face of the first elected parliament. A lot of these older people blamed the younger people for the revolution, and, subsequently, the new government that came with it. This is the result of your revolution, they would shout in our faces.

  In the first week of parliamentary sessions, a well-known Islamic fanatic stood up in the middle of the session and started to recite the call to prayer. The president of the parliament was from the Muslim Brotherhood and scolded the man.

  “How could you prevent me from calling for holy prayer?” the man asked the president. “Aren’t you a Muslim?”

  “I am more Muslim than you are, but this is not the time or the place,” the head of parliament answered.

  No one would remember anything from that session other than that argument between a right-wing Islamist and an even further right-wing Islamist, so I dedicated a big chunk of my show to it. I wanted to show people that there is not just one version of Islam. And if Muslim Brotherhood leadership was not religious enough by Salafi standards, then what would that make the rest of us?

  The parliament sessions were long and boring, but we were the only ones who had a dedicated team to record and report on everything happening there. We were like the Egyptian version of C-Span.

  There were only a handful of liberal representatives in the middle of this parliamentary madness. Every time one of them spoke he was heckled and interrupted like a bad standup comedian performing for a tough crowd. There were no real discussions; the Islamists were driven like herds to the sessions to approve what was already pre-dictated by their leaders. It seemed a tight pact until the scandals started flooding in.

  ONLY GOD “NOSE”

  (OR HOW I BLEW MY SALAFI NOSE OFF)

  One of the really haram things in Islam is plastic surgery. If that is the body and face given to you, you should not interfere with God’s creation. This is very bad news for the silicone business if a true caliphate is ever established, or if that fatwa resonated around the world, it would be a disaster. I mean, one of the main reasons I watched the American show Two and a Half Men was for the endless stock of surgically enhanced women who appeared in it. (Another sentence planted by my editor, such a sexist, horrible man.)

  So what is the connection among plastic surgery, Salafi fatwas, and parliament members? Well, one of them went under the knife—and lied about it!

  The Salafi Al Nour party issued a statement about one of its parliament leaders, El Belkeemy, being “attacked and mugged” while driving his car on a highway. There were pictures of him in the hospital with his face halfway bandaged. He talked to the press, giving details of the incident, saying that gang members beat him badly and took a bag of money that belonged to his business. The idea of carrying large sums of money in a bag made it sound like he was in some wild, wild West movie. All the same, the religious Facebook pages and their media suggested that the attack was meant to scare the good people of the Al Nour party into thinking the assailants were enemies of the party (and of course of Islam). They really milked that for a few days.

  Then it all came crumbling down.

  A source in the hospital leaked documents that this was no injury resulting from an attack. It was plastic surgery for his nose. A Salafi just had a nose job. This is like people discovering that Donald Trump’s biological mother was a Mexican illegal immigrant who worked as a gay go-go dancer and never paid her federal taxes. (Oh wait, neither did Trump!)

  What made it worse was that the prime minister and the party denied the claims by the hospital and said it was all a cheap way to tarnish the Islamists’ image. When Belkeemy finally came clean, he kind of half-assed it. He said he had to do the surgery because he had a life-threatening case of sleep apnea, which again the hospital promptly refuted. The clips we used about this scandal were, needless to say, priceless. Normal people began to see that a beard was not synonymous with honesty. It was simply a patchy place to hide one’s lies.

  To be fair, the party fired
Belkeemy and said that he was not representative of the values and morals that they stood for. It was a good political move and good damage control. But the damage had already been done. And it didn’t help when a few weeks later another one of their party was caught in the middle of an “indecent act” with a woman in his car.

  These stories might sound insignificant but they are telling of the nature of these political Islam hawks, who are no different from many priests, senators, or other vocal right-wing uber-conservative personalities who use religion and tradition to win over the people and then end up caught in a sex scandal. I am looking at you, Jimmy Swaggart! (Insert crying, sweaty-face meme here.)

  Aside from the jokes their gaffes provided for our show, this Islamic parliament seemed up to the important task of getting rid of something that seemed quite dispensable. The very thing that had got them there . . . the revolution.

  A LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY JERKS

  The parliament was not just about nose jobs and stupid gaffes. This was supposedly the “revolution parliament.” The one that came after a revolution by the free will of the people. However, those people who had risen to power because of the revolution did their best to betray it every day on the job. To explain this better, let me take you back a few months to before that parliament was elected.

  When Mubarak stepped down, everyone danced and cheered and thought that the revolution was over. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not just the fact that the military and their Islamist surrogates were covertly bringing back the old regime one way or another, it was also the fact that many of the families of the young people who were killed or injured during the protests were totally ignored. No medical compensation was given, nor was there recognition of their sacrifices, which made it possible for the new regime to have their power in the first place.

  The families of those injured, killed, or just plain shamed decided to have a sit-in at Tahrir Square that continued for months, all the way up to November of the same year, 2011, when the parliamentary elections commenced.

  On a mild November night, security forces swarmed the square and attacked and arrested members of those families. Everyone was furious, and thousands of protestors fled back to the square, leading to the bloodiest clashes since the revolution had ended. Dozens were killed and many more were injured.

  As the people were killed in the square, the Islamic media and even many of the state-run media were further attacking the protestors, insinuating that they were deliberately sabotaging the parliamentary elections. What was interesting was that the Islamists, who benefited from the revolution, used the same exact negative propaganda that was used against it only a few months earlier—mainly that the protestors were “paid operatives” aiming to sabotage the country.

  Yet again, Tahrir Square was shut down due to the clashes. Not a single camera covered what was actually going on within the square. Many television crews were kicked out because of how the protestors saw these channels manipulating the truth about them.

  We decided we had to broadcast from inside the square à la The Daily Show and find a way to satirically report the situation. The problem was, we had never tried something like that before and didn’t have a regular team of correspondents like Samantha Bee or John Oliver. Also, there was a major safety concern that the crew would be subjected to a great deal of danger if they were caught between the clashes.

  So I made an executive decision and decided to go and cover it myself. My team objected because they thought it too dangerous. In the end a very limited crew accompanied me.

  “I love you as a brother,” Tarek told me. “But for absolutely selfish reasons I can’t let you go; if something happened to you our investment will be doomed,” he added jokingly.

  I appreciated the fact that I was a commodity worth protecting, but my mind was set. I knew many of the protestors personally and I saw how unfairly they were being treated in the media.

  I couldn’t tell my wife or my overly concerned mother about this as it would just add an extra unnecessary burden. As a matter of fact, while I was in the square, I had to run away from the clashes every time my mom called my cell phone to pretend to be in the office. That’s right, we are more afraid of our Middle Eastern mothers than rubber bullets!

  Tahrir Square was battered, the smell of gas so strong that I had to wear a mask even when I was more than half a mile away.

  How could I make this scene light and sarcastic?

  There were injured people who had to be carried on motorcycles all the way to makeshift clinics safely outside of the confrontation line.

  Egypt never failed to amaze me. Here you have “the state” killing and maiming its citizens through its police force, while the same “state” sent an abundant number of ambulances from the ministry of health to treat injured protestors and transfer them to state-owned hospitals. The irony was too much.

  As the cameraman and I advanced farther into the square, many people were hostile toward the camera, but when they recognized me they openly greeted us. My pro-revolution position gave me some street cred and a lot of needed protection for the crew.

  What had I gotten myself into?

  My field-reporting and stone-throwing skills were proven deficient earlier in the year. I didn’t have a script or a plan. I asked stupid questions of people who were too nice and even too naive not to take me seriously. Still to this day, I don’t know how I was not punched in the face.

  Because Egypt is a class-conscious society, as previously mentioned, I was adamant about filming beautiful, classy people: young, vibrant boys and girls who were far from thugs, but who were also just normal humans who deserved to live a productive life. As if to say “not-so-nice-looking people” deserved to die. I hate the way this world operates, I truly do.

  I interviewed doctors, protestors, volunteers, and spectators. People told me that the police had imported a new type of gas that could not be combated through the usual methods. Canisters with MADE IN THE USA stamped on them were given to me to show to the camera. Thanks, Obama?

  I interviewed young Islamists who didn’t agree with their opportunistic leaders and were there to support the protestors. I interviewed older, privileged ladies who were supposed to be at home cursing these people on the street, but instead chose to be there on their side.

  This was the closest to the “spirit of the revolution” I had seen in months.

  “Let’s wrap it up, Bassem, we have enough footage,” my producer told me.

  But I was not satisfied. We were shooting only in the middle of the square, away from the confrontation line. I wanted to show the clashes from the front. My crew objected, but I insisted we go. “It’s going to be fun,” I said, laughing, but the truth is I was freaking terrified.

  We advanced farther, and watched four people rush in the opposite direction carrying a kid younger than fifteen covering his left eye with blood gushing out. This kid, like many others, had lost an eye because of a rubber bullet. Khalifa, my director, looked at me as if to say, Dude, we didn’t sign up for this.

  I continued advancing but then stopped. The smell of gas was horrible and I was almost blinded by it. The cameraman, the director, and the producers were all tearing up and couldn’t handle the smell anymore.

  When we got back to safety, I owned up to the camera about how much of a pussy I was for not withstanding a few minutes of smelling gas while these people had been fighting through it for days.

  I wanted to reconnect with the people in the square. I wanted to show how the Muslim Brotherhood had bailed on us, all of us, but I was afraid. The popularity of the Brotherhood was massive going into the elections. And again I had this curse of appearing to be a puppet of a Christian billionaire.

  So we decided to write a rap song for the episode, dissing the Brotherhood, showing how they had always bailed on us in order to appease authority.

  This episode and the song were great hits. If we had such a thing as an Egyptian Billboard the song would
have made it to the top of the charts. People from all walks of life were worked up over the song like I’d never seen before, and were playing it in their cars and in the nightclubs. It was monumental because we showed how the old regime, the state-run media, the Islamist media, the Islamist parties, and the repressive police all sided together to work against whatever remained of the revolution.

  But only a few weeks after the Brotherhood got into the parliament, new clashes with security forces erupted downtown. More people were killed and many more were injured. I know this sounds repetitive, but try walking in our shoes for a month. It is even more depressing.

  The liberal minority in the parliament demanded an investigation and reported that police brutality, which incited the revolution to erupt in the first place, hadn’t changed a bit since the revolution.

  The Islamist members, the same ones who had suffered police brutality and persecution over the years, heckled those who spoke against police brutality. One member after another stood up to praise the minister of interior and accuse those “thugs” in the streets of trying to destabilize the country. Another Islamist member announced that he had “evidence” that all the protestors were on drugs and were paid money to disrupt the peace.

  Then came a real whopper of an announcement from the head of parliament: “The minister of interior told me that no shots were fired and that riot police forces don’t even carry shots with them.”

  Then who the fuck was shooting at us a few weeks earlier, the guys from Duck Dynasty?

  The majority clapped and cheered as if their team had scored a touchdown. Then one of the non-Islamist members stood up and announced that he had gone to investigate the scene of the clashes and had found bullet casings on the ground, which instantly proved the minister was lying. He held the bullets in his hand for the entire parliament and cameras to see.