It took a miracle for me to free myself from that loving mob. I can’t remember how I got home, and even though I was exhausted I was excited and happy. Yet, only a few months later, many of those same people would burn my pictures in the streets.
In eastern Cairo, the mood was not that festive. The sheikhs and the Islamists started a sit-in after days of praising the army. The banners that were calling America evil and imperialist in Arabic flipped overnight into posters in English asking Obama to interfere and reinstate Morsi. Islamist sheikhs shouted from the stage of the sit-in that the American Sixth Fleet is moving toward Egypt to liberate Morsi!
The non-Islamist channels—you know, those who were supposed to be liberal and secular—took over the role of the fascist Islamist channels and became fascist themselves. They called for wiping out the Islamists completely. The Islamists’ sit-in gave the liberals the fuel they needed to spread hate. Their sit-in was televised on Al Jazeera, and the people who took to the stage were a source of awe and terror at the same time. If they were not inciting hate or calling for people to go to jihad to defend Morsi or threatening to blow things up, they were telling their thousands of followers that some sheikh dreamed the Archangel Gabriel would descend from heaven and fight alongside them. How can anyone lose when the angels are on their side?
The sit-in spurred the Islamists to violently rally and kill people who were not on “God’s side.” The pro-military media incited more hate, and anyone with a beard that looked remotely “Islamic” was either harassed, arrested, or killed. As if accusations of terrorism and treason were not enough, the sex card was again used. There were “repenting witnesses” coming on national television describing how “jihad fornication” was practiced. In short, this meant that women would willingly offer themselves to the mujahideen at the sit-ins as an act of jihad. This was of course bullshit, but you even had highly educated people believing the “liberal media” when it told them that the Islamists were hiding Scud missiles in their tents. They would believe anything. When I came to America two years later and interviewed Trump supporters who believed that Obama was supervising ISIS training camps in America, I saw how fear mixed with stupidity can make you believe anything. Stupid is stupid no matter what country you’re from.
The hysteria had to end badly. And it did. Churches were burned, people were killed in the streets from both sides, and in one day alone around one thousand people were killed while dispersing from the Islamist sit-in. It was a massacre performed by the same police whom the Islamists had called upon before to wipe out their “liberal” enemies, and all of that happened under the watchful eye of the man himself, Sissi, with the military backing him all the way. The tables sure had turned.
Each Egyptian home was split between family members who cheered for the killings and others who vehemently opposed what was happening. Even within my own family I was viewed as unpatriotic for not fully supporting “our army.”
When Morsi was removed, most people, including me, were happy. They thought the army was going to host new elections and write a new constitution. The army had no intentions of ruling, Sissi had told us so. God, we were stupid. After the killings, the violence, and martial law, the army was not acting like a dad choosing sides anymore. The army was back and this time it was here to stay.
MOMMY ISSUES
There is too much infatuation with the idea that satire can make a difference, that satirists and comedians can change the way people think, that they can speak truth to power through comedy and use humor to trump fear. This is basically how we satirists sell ourselves. This is how we get invited as keynote speakers at prestigious events, get hosted on popular TV shows, and get to write books, like this one. But the truth is, sometimes we can’t even sell our cause to the people nearest to us.
When that crazy shift from being a doctor to being a satirist happened to me, my mom didn’t mind me giving up medicine as long as I would be close to her in Egypt instead of leaving for Cleveland. Middle Eastern moms like to have their friends close and their kids closer. I think many mothers are secretly mob bosses: I gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
She was happy with my webisodes, and she even asked me to teach her how to log on to the Internet so she could watch my YouTube videos. That was my first mistake. She didn’t understand the concept of Internet trolling. She didn’t understand why strangers would curse her (of course, indirectly; they were trying to insult me by cursing my mom) and she would make a huge deal out of it. But what was worse than taking those insults personally was that she took my political message personally. People always tell me that they were sure my mom was proud of me and what I did. I am sure deep inside she was proud of me, but that was always suppressed by the unrelenting anxiety she had because, as you know, as moms tend to do, they worry about us.
My mom belonged to an older generation who lived for decades under military dictatorship. That generation despised authority and yet couldn’t imagine living any other way. It was like they were in an advanced state of Stockholm syndrome. Armies in the Arab world managed to push this narrative of “all or none.” We either rule absolutely or there will be no one to protect you.
During the reign of the Muslim Brotherhood, my mom worried about me criticizing the Islamic authorities—not out of conviction but out of fear that those people would use religion to hurt me. She would spend half her time going through their Facebook pages to see how their activists were calling for killing me because I was an apostate and anti-Islamic. Telling her they were just trolls didn’t manage to make her feel any better. Every time an episode of mine was broadcast, I had to worry about two things: (1) Did people like it? and (2) Did my mom have a panic attack because of its political content? More often than not, people liked it and my mom had a panic attack.
Both my parents fell victim to the lies of the pro-military media before they became a coup. They became avid followers of our own versions of Fox and Friends. They surrendered their brains to the same vicious propaganda machine that I was working diligently to fight. They would watch my show, laugh, worry about me, and then when I visited them at home they would sit there in front of the same brainwashing media that I made fun of. They succumbed to the fear-mongering of talking heads and yet continued to laugh at them when I made fun of them on my show. My mom warned me that she would disown me if I dared to talk against the military. My mom was living proof that Egyptians held the military as holier than religion. To her, criticizing the army was a blasphemous act.
This military worship isn’t too dissimilar from when people in the States were called anti-American for disagreeing with the Iraqi War. Super-nationalists would label those who disliked the war as anti-military. And if Americans criticized the war, they were also seen as criticizing “our fine men and women in uniform who protect our country,” and they were told they should get the fuck out because they weren’t true Americans. Thankfully for you, American soldiers have yet to turn against their own country, but now you may have some perspective on how upsetting and frightening it would be if they did.
Well, back to my mother. Like many Egyptians, she hated Mubarak and she hated the military coup that brought Nasser to power in the 1950s. She somehow managed to separate those leaders and the damage they did to the country from the fact that they came from the army. As if the military were made of gnomes rather than officers, and those gnomes eventually became the dictators they pledged to hate.
When I started to protest the military crimes committed against the protestors after the coup, I would receive angry calls from my mom. We would fight on the phone every single time. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence—the same thing was happening in all of my friends’ families. There was a huge disconnect between us and our parents’ generation. The fights often turned ugly. Many of them ended with families broken over political differences. It’s like a liberal college kid living with his racist dad. Nothing good comes out of this.
Martial law was enforced after the coup, so
for a few weeks I couldn’t go back on-air. I loathed the day of my return, not just because of the dilemma I would be in by having to make fun of a very shitty situation, but also because I feared my mom’s reaction. If she was angered by my opinions in a normal conversation, how would she react to my satirical show now?
My career had already become a burden on my very patient wife. But now it was alienating many members of my family, especially the elderly, especially my mom. It got to the point where she and I just stopped talking to each other.
After more than two weeks of phone boycott, I gave her a call. It was a ten-minute call with nothing but small talk. We talked about the tree she’d planted by herself in her garden and how it suffered because of the strong wind the day before. We talked about mundane things like what she had cooked that day. We talked about my daughter, Nadia, whom I named after her as a not so secret way of earning her hard to receive approval. We talked about everything but politics. I tried hard to avoid that topic.
My show had been suspended two months earlier because of curfew enforced by the army. There was too much violence in the streets and no way to continue doing the show at that point. Maybe this was better. Maybe that reduced friction between my mom and me. I hung up with my mom, wondering what would happen to her when my show returned, if it returned. Knowing her and knowing how inflammatory she could get, I was truly worried what it would do to her, especially given her chronic high blood pressure.
The very next day after that call, I received a call from Dad.
My mom had died.
She went peacefully in her sleep. She didn’t suffer, she didn’t go through a long painful death like her own mother had, a fate she dreaded all her life. How peaceful for her and utterly devastating for us.
I only have memories of a strong and defiant mom. I recognize that not everyone can say this about their mother and I see this as a blessing. She was spared the humiliation of health deterioration and was saved from the agony of living in a country that would later persecute her son. I was spared the guilt I would have had every time my show would air, putting more pressure on our relationship. Her departure liberated her. Her absence liberated me. She was my strength, my weakness, and the only reason I would excel in something was just to make her proud of me. Even if she hid her pride under her constant worry.
I was alone in this now. Nothing really mattered after her. Even if you have your own family, when Mom is gone, she leaves a void that can never be filled. At the funeral service my dad sat next to me. He was a much more easygoing parent. He didn’t concern himself too much with what I would say on my show as long as he got his weekly free tickets. As a retired judge, that was his way to brag in front of his friends, that he could get them the hottest ticket in town. “This sadness will pass,” he told me. “You need to figure out what you want to do. I don’t envy you. Whether you choose to go back or not is up to you and I will support your decision, whatever it may be.”
I hugged him and promised that I would make him proud.
“Just make sure when you come back,” he added, “that you get me a couple of extra tickets every week. I have a few friends I owe a few favors to!”
Leave it to a satirist’s dad to make a sly joke at a funeral.
I didn’t know if I should go back on-air. With all that was happening, the thought of making fun of the new regime seemed suicidal. What should I do? I needed to ask the only person that might have the answer.
PART THREE
THE CLOWN, THE TRAITOR, THE OUTCAST
W.W.J.D.? (WHAT WOULD JON DO?)
Our supporters would praise me, and in the streets fans would come and greet me, as the man who stood against the Muslim Brotherhood. “You had a big role in this revolution,” they would tell me. “If it wasn’t for you and your show, people would not have figured them out. You showed us their true side.”
Many of the older generation would greet me and then slam me with a precautionary warning: “Now, don’t go and do the same to Sissi. He is different.”
I didn’t like that some people thought of me as a mercenary who would cherry-pick whom I used my satire on. The fact that I was an equal opportunity offender was lost on people. They liked satire as long as it was on their side.
I was a regular contributor to a weekly column in a popular newspaper called Al Shorouk. I wrote an article warning people that we were replacing religious fascism with nationalistic fascism. I was so naive to think that writing about love and coexistence, and learning from those who’d made hatred and extremism their way of life, would make people wake up and accept basic human values. You know, like being human. But people were just too angry and too on edge to accept reason, let alone satire. We were living our own version of the Roman Coliseum, where the only shout that was welcomed was “Kill, kill, kill.”
I called for a meeting with everyone involved in the show—Tarek, Amr, and the board governing our production company.
I was under so much stress trying to decide what to do next. How could I come back on-air? What could I make fun of? I couldn’t make fun of the Muslim Brotherhood anymore; they were either jailed or dead. And I would be screwed over if I remotely touched those in power now. I couldn’t even label what had happened as a coup, not even jokingly.
So I made my mind up and told them I wanted out. I didn’t want to do the show anymore. Many of the people who were waiting for the show’s return were not waiting for it as fans; they were waiting to crucify me if I said something they didn’t like.
Can you imagine a guy trying to have a political satire show in the time of Mussolini? Well, I was that idiot.
Naturally, everybody opposed my decision to retire. We had a contract with the channel. The show was the flagship product of the company and if I stopped, hundreds of people would lose their jobs. So I asked for some time to think. I went home that night and wrote an email to Jon Stewart. He was still in Jordan shooting his movie Rosewater.
“I am in deep shit, I don’t know what to do and I need to see you,” I wrote.
Jon was following the news and was checking on me regularly. He knew what I was going through. He told me to hop on the first plane to Jordan to have a chat.
Of course, I did just that. I landed in Amman, happy to see my friend. I filled him in on everything that was happening back home. He was horrified. Even he suggested that I just quit. I told him that too many people were depending on me. So he sat there silently for a while and then said, “Listen, not to compare here, but I might have gone through a similar experience. It was not an experience where we had a military regime or anything, but that whole ‘we are in a state of war’ mentality was there. Right after 9/11 we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know what to make fun of. Everything was too sensitive, every joke sounded politically incorrect. People were scared. People were confused. So we decided to write exactly what we felt. People were afraid and that was the general mode. So we made fun about the fact that we can’t make fun of that. We made fun of the fact that we were afraid to joke about anything. Maybe this could work for you. You guys are afraid of talking about the current regime so just write what you feel. If you feel the big guy is untouchable, make fun of that. Write what you feel and you will find out that the people who watch you are humans like you. They will connect, they will relate. When we tried that we were surprised that people laughed from the bottom of their hearts. They needed that, you could feel it. Your sarcasm can actually be the tool that heals the country.”
Well, shit, Jon, when you say it like that!
I asked him about the fans. I said, “There are too many people who expect a certain, directed kind of sarcasm. I feel they want me to continue making fun of people who are no longer in power. I can’t do that. It is not right. I am afraid that I will lose a lot of my fans. A lot of people will hate me when they see I went against them.”
“Well, yes, that might happen,” he replied. “So tell me, what else are you afraid of? Your safety? That they might jail you? Wh
at? What is your biggest fear?”
I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well, if they put me in jail that will make them look too stupid.”
“I agree,” he said.
“I guess it is just the fact that I might lose the popularity and the support,” I finally admitted.
“Well, my friend,” he said, “that is true courage. Standing up for what you believe might not be what the people want. You’re staying true to yourself no matter what the consequences are, though . . . that is true integrity. Bassem, remember when I visited you in Egypt? I told you that you need to ask yourself, what do you want to do? Do you want to do comedy? Or do you want to do something that lasts longer? When you answer that, you will know what to do.”
“Dude, you never fail to impress me,” I said.
“Well, I am not in your shoes, and I can’t imagine being in your position. We sometimes take freedom of speech for granted in the U.S. It is people like you that will have to carve out their own space. Whether you succeed or you fail, you have already made your mark in history.”
I realized how far I had come in only two years. And here was my idol cheering me on. His words echoed in my head: “Write what you really feel, you will find a way. If you are afraid, make fun of your fear. If you can’t speak, make fun of that.”
We hugged, bid each other farewell, and then I made my way back to Cairo, determined to follow his advice. I was worried that I would be screwed because of it.
I was right.
A LONG-AWAITED VISIT
“We are doing this,” I said to my partners in the company. “We’re going ahead with the show.”
They were thrilled that I would be back but as they wished me good luck I saw the look of here goes a dead man walking in their eyes. The hysteria in Egypt was just unbearable. No one could speak against the regime and they expected me to make fun of it? This sucked big-time.
Revolution for Dummies Page 15
