The general prosecutor finally took action. The charges?
1.Insulting the president. Of course.
2.Insulting Islam. Sure.
3.Spreading profanity and destroying the fabric of society. I don’t even know what that is. Speaking of fabric, we do have fine Egyptian cotton, though.
4.Disturbing the social peace. Seriously, who comes up with this crap?
In Egypt, it is enough to go to the prosecutor to say that you have been psychologically affected by anything someone says or does and file a complaint. It sounds comical but in reality, if the government wants this to fly, it will fly. The accusations themselves were maddeningly vague. How do you disturb the peace? How do you destroy the fabric of society? Scissors? But believe it or not, many have been arrested on similar charges. The laws in this patriarchal society can send you to jail for simply not behaving well. Which is extremely subjective.
The one charge that I was worried about was “insulting Islam.” This was the single, most disturbing charge that could not be defended against. The people sending you to jail may not even be religious, but the charge was an amazing tool to round up the masses against someone. If you are labeled as someone who disrespects Islam it is like having an opponent with a royal flush in a game of poker. Nothing beats it, there is no trump card. This is a charge that no one would dare defend you against because it would put them in the same box of “Islam enemies.”
Soon it was all over the news. My ever-worrying mom called me in hysterics. She was afraid that police officers would take me right to jail.
An emergency meeting was called at the theater. My lawyer and partners all came to discuss what was happening.
It was a Monday. The biggest concern for my lawyer was that the police would come to arrest me in my house at night. My biggest concern was that I wouldn’t have time to write the next episode.
We decided that I shouldn’t go home that night. I would sleep at the theater and my wife would sleep over at her parents’. We thought that would buy us time to go to the general prosecutor’s office the next day willingly, with no officer putting handcuffs on me.
I met with my creative team. “Everything should go as planned,” I told them. “We have a show to shoot in forty-eight hours. Unless I don’t get back, business continues as usual.”
“Can I take your place just this week?” Khaled, one of my writers and fake correspondents, asked loudly.
“No, I should be the one who sits in his chair,” Shadi, another fake correspondent and writer, said.
Vultures were already circling!
It was good that everyone was in high spirits and willing to joke. We continued writing and researching late into the night.
I retired to my office alone. I had hardly slept, and by 7 A.M. I was up, ready to willingly turn myself in.
And then it hit me. I am in show business. Let’s make a bit out of this. I called the prop master and asked him to get the huge hat out. I would go to the general prosecutor’s office wearing that hat!
My team, upon hearing of my plan, tried to prevent me from going. “Dude, are you crazy?” they kept asking me on the phone. The arguments went back and forth. I was sticking to my decision. They could take me to court, they could investigate me, and they could issue a warrant for my arrest—but they’d do it all while I was making them the laughingstock of the country. That’s the only weapon I had.
My team arrived at the theater, but none of them walked upstairs to the offices; they all waited for me downstairs. Everyone wanted to come with me to court. I talked to them and told them that, as usual, we were stressed for time. “If they put me in jail, we will have no show,” I said, “but what would be worse is if they release me and you guys wasted time while I was gone and we air a bad show. Then they definitely will win.”
I made my way to the courthouse. Some of the technical team came along, together with Khalifa (director), Amr (producer), and Abbas (head of communications and the one who would accompany me two years later when I would flee Egypt). The four of us went in one car. Just eighteen months earlier, Khalifa and Amr were in my apartment shooting an Internet episode with a heart surgeon who, outside of his operating room, was a complete no one. Now we were the biggest news in town. We were laughing about that notion as we drove. But as we laughed we knew that it was all for show. Deep down we were terrified.
Many of the technical team followed us in separate cars. The hat was so big they had to rent it its own pickup truck! It was going to be the highlight of my entrance.
We arrived at the courthouse. The streets were packed. Hundreds of people had come out with signs and banners to support me. They were angry at the Islamic government for harassing the “joker.”
Dozens of cameras and reporters from everywhere were there too. The journalists were shouting at me for a comment as I went through the crowd of bodies. This was like the red carpet for a movie premiere, with the slight difference being that I could end up in jail. I, my crew, the reporters, the cameramen, the supporters, the haters, and the security forces were all moving together in an unconventional dance toward the doors of the courthouse.
I tried to keep the biggest smile on my face. With all these cameras, I didn’t want a single photo showing me frowning or worried. I didn’t want the Islamists to have some disparaging photo of me to put their stupid comments on. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I kept waving and smiling, holding the image of a smiling joker in the face of oppression.
As I was pushed, shoved, and herded along in the swarming mass of reporters, I could only think about those TV sheikhs celebrating the day I was “presented” to justice. They wanted to see me broken and defeated. I instructed one of the production assistants to walk behind me while he held the giant “Morsi Hat” above my head. The might of the Islamist government was instantly humiliated by a single silly prop.
I was smiling and laughing and throwing jokes and yet inside I was worried I would not sleep at home that night.
We finally reached the front door of the court. I stood on top of the stairs and put the hat on. Here I was, with a comically tall hat, talking to the crowd through a megaphone. I did a mini–standup routine right there while my fans laughed and my lawyer glared at me angrily. I was making a scene.
An officer told us to follow him to a back entrance into the court. Finally I was inside.
Court employees were coming to take photos and selfies with me as we moved, shouting at me in support. Only one woman came close to me and prayed that God would bring down his rage and vengeance on me. “May you fry in hell!” she shouted. What a good little Muslim she must be!
We arrived at the “interrogation room,” which was the office of the chief deputy of the prosecutor. The deputy asked me to sit down. He was a polite, quiet man who weighed three times more than me. In Egypt during interrogations we don’t use video cameras or audio recorders. We have the stenographer, who is designated to write down everything as fast as you say it, in the most horrible handwriting. You wonder if it could ever really qualify as evidence.
As we were about to start, several young attorneys came into the room. They were from the general prosecutor’s office. They told me they were fans of the show, and started taking photos with me. This was absolutely insane. More police officers came in, asking to take photos with me. The deputy eventually asked them to “get it over with so we can start the interrogation.”
We finally started. The deputy asked for the episodes in question so they could play them for me and ask their questions. A middle-aged guy came into the office with a few CDs. He then put one of them into an extremely outdated computer on the deputy’s desk. The computer had a Windows 95 operating system and the disks didn’t work. I was not surprised. Why would anything work in this place? I tried helping them. I asked them if they had VLC or any other updated version of media player. The whole scene was surreal. I was fucking helping them so they could play video evidence against me! At a certain point I was wonder
ing if they’d downloaded too much porn on that computer and ended up fucking it completely (figuratively speaking).
After more than forty-five minutes they gave up trying.
“Okay, so I will just assume that you know your episodes and I will say that we just played the episodes for you,” the deputy said. “So we will ask you questions based on the written script as if we played the episodes, okay?”
“Do I have another choice?”
“Not really.”
The first question was about the first charge, “insulting Islam.” Since we didn’t have any videos to play the deputy started to read the transcript from one of my episodes. It was the one in which the Islamist media were celebrating how we now had a pious Islamic president who went to mosques and led the prayers. The Islamists’ media circus was all over it, showing different photos of Morsi posing in different prayer stages. In one of our episodes we made a fake infomercial where you could win a place next to the president in a mosque of your choice if you called a certain number. The commercial showed how fast you would go to heaven with all the divine perks if you called the number, let alone the grand prize of meeting the pious president in this amazing spiritual experience.
As the deputy read the script, many in the room started laughing, which continued all throughout the interrogation.
The plan was to play it dumb. “What? Insulting Islam? Me? Never!”
In that same episode we made fun of angry sheikhs who would shout during their sermons at people attending the Friday prayer service. You see, for some reason many sheikhs liked to bring the terror of hell in the afterlife to our mortal doorstep. Imagine a pastor during a Sunday sermon shouting at the top of his lungs, telling you that God would unleash his wrath on you and throw you in a fiery pit, where your skin would melt in front of your eyes. Okay—I get it. That’s not that hard to imagine, as we have already demonstrated that radical Christians and radical Muslims are not that different. The only difference where we come from is that we do our shaming sessions on Fridays and you do yours on Sundays. Same scare tactics, different days of the week.
“How is criticizing imams alienating people from Islam considered an insult to Islam?” I asked the deputy.
“Well, many were offended by those jokes,” he answered.
“Well, many more are offended on a weekly basis with those who tell us that we are all going to hell,” I said in a slightly mocking tone. “Why not bring them here for questioning?”
My lawyer interjected and said, “My client has absolute respect for the Muslim faith and is a Muslim himself. His words were taken out of context and there is no insult to the faith here.” He then leaned on my shoulder and whispered, “This is not your theater and these people are not your audience.” Then he added firmly, “If you want to get out of here, play along, no need to make big statements. No need to be a hero.”
I regurgitated my lawyer’s statements in an almost robotic manner. “I had no ill intentions,” I said. “I respect the Islamic faith.”
The interrogation proceeded to another accusation: “insulting the president.” In one of our episodes we showed an exclusive interview with President Morsi, which he gave on the same night as the Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Because of the time difference between Cairo and L.A., the Oscars ceremony would start at 4 A.M. Cairo time. Morsi’s interview was supposed to air at 8 P.M. Word was out that he had made so many gaffes that the interview had to be edited and re-edited, which kept people waiting until it actually aired after midnight and very close to the airtime of the Oscars. We came up with the idea that Morsi wanted to compete with the viewership of the Oscars and made a whole Oscar-themed episode. Every time he would say something that was untrue, like listing false achievements of the government or any other bullshit rhetoric, I would appear after each video clip to give him an Oscar. One for best actor, best writer, best fiction, best liar, etc.
The interrogator recited the script to me (there was no video, remember?) and asked, “What did you mean when you said, ‘Oscar best actor, Oscar best director, etc.’?”
I tried explaining the idea of the Oscars ceremony and how we tried to draw similarities between the two television events.
His next question blew my mind. “What are the Oscars?”
“Excuse me?” I said in disbelief.
“What are the Oscars? Why do you consistently refer to them in the episode?”
It took me a bit of time to realize that he was not joking. Even the younger attorneys in the room from the general prosecutor’s office were stifling their giggles.
So for the next ten minutes I proceeded to try to explain what the Oscars were. After I finished he said, “So why is this funny?”
I have to say I was deeply hurt. My comedy was not appealing to him. However, trying to appeal to the humor of a man who had no point of cultural reference would have been damn near impossible. Perhaps a fart joke would have been the common denominator.
We continued with one question after the other and one accusation after the other. I continued to play dumb, denying that I was making fun of the president. But then the prosecutor asked me, “If this was not an insult, why are the people in the theater laughing?”
“I don’t know, I guess you need to go and ask them,” I answered with a smile.
This went on for six hours. Six hours of questioning my jokes and my puns. The mental gymnastics that I had to go through were excruciating.
At the end of all of this I was released on bail. In the days that followed everyone who was involved in those episodes—the producers, the owner of the channel, everyone—were all brought in to be questioned. Two days later, I did my show—re-creating all the events that led to my interrogation, including the major fiasco outside the courthouse. The joke was turned against the regime; I made a total fool out of them. Even Jon Stewart came to my defense and made a segment about this on his show.
What was really interesting, though, were the different reactions of the Islamists and the liberal media. The Islamists were asking for my head, and called for the permanent banning of my show. When I say they were “asking for my head,” I literally mean that. In the Arab world people are used to calling in to religious programs to ask for fatwas in all aspects of life. This could range from asking whether it is okay to put your money in a Western infidel bank to praying before going to the bathroom to, wait for it, whether it is haram to have a threesome with your two wives. Yes, those were actual questions on religious shows. But you can also ask if you can kill someone or not. That happened with me. A famous sheikh went on television saying that many people had called in and emailed him asking “if it is okay to kill Bassem Youssef.” What? Who asks for this shit? Instead of denouncing this, the sheikh responded, “And I told them not now.”
Others went on their shows claiming that I was originally an Israeli planted in Egypt by the Mossad. I guess that earlier talk about us being an almost-Jewish family is not too far from the truth. That of course went along with other ridiculous claims, such as me being part of the Freemasons and following the thirteenth and seventeenth protocols of the Elders of Zion. Whatever the hell that means. Also, why not the fourteenth and eighteenth protocols? Not good enough? This might sound funny and absurd, but the matter of the fact is, Egypt and the rest of the Islamic world has a history of writers, artists, and even cartoonists slaughtered by angry, jealous Muslims who acted upon a fatwa or religious incitement of hate. So you can imagine the state my wife and my parents were in.
Meanwhile, the liberal media were up in arms defending my program.
Less than eighteen months later, the Islamists who called for banning me were banned themselves under the same “rule of law.”
The “liberals” turned a blind eye as my program was eventually banned. Some of them even blessed the ban.
It’s funny (not ha-ha funny, but funny-sad) how principles and morals could be tailored as needed. I was there. I saw it happen firsthand. I saw people calling for my freedom
but later celebrating when I was shut down.
Those who called themselves liberals proved later that being well dressed, eloquent, and standing up against Islamist fascism doesn’t really mean you are a liberal. On the day of my interrogation the joke was on the Islamists. But a year later the liberals were the new joke that kept on giving.
IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE
Around March 2013 a movement sprung up out of nowhere called Tamarod, which in Arabic means “rebellion.” It appeared first as a grassroots movement, which called for Morsi to step down and for new elections to follow. These protestors demanded the constitution be rewritten and to have everyone included in writing it. The movement gave Morsi until June 30, 2013, to respond to their demands. As expected, the Islamist media lashed out. The Islamists were becoming too predictable, with their usual rhetoric and accusations of this movement being funded by the usual suspects—the Coptic Christian church, America, Israel, etc.
Morsi continued to marginalize anyone from a non-Islamic background. The Muslim Brotherhood were putting their own people everywhere. The Islamization of the state was swiftly under way. My brother worked for an oil company owned by the government. He told me that during that time Muslim Brotherhood members with no experience, talent, or skills were getting hired in all positions within the company. He said that once during a lunch hour, one of his colleagues, a Muslim Brotherhood member who had been promoted for no apparent reason, was standing with him outside the company building. He looked up and said, “In a matter of months this godforsaken company will be under control.” When my brother asked him what they were going to do with the army and the police and how they were going to control them, he answered, “No, that will take a couple of years, but eventually it will happen.”
This pattern was repeated with many different companies and mosques. The same arrogance I saw when I met al-Shater was materializing on the ground.
Revolution for Dummies Page 13
