Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  Before we left to file our story, a couple of soldiers arrived on the square to support the democrats. They were treated as heroes, but I wondered what the reception would be like from their superiors.

  As we walked out of Tahrir, the crowds chanted, “We’re not tired … freedom isn’t free.”

  Saturday saw the first clashes in days. Police fought it out with protestors who had been blockading the Cabinet offices and who were trying to stop the new interim prime minister from getting in. A young man was run down and killed by a security vehicle.

  Despite those clashes, the crowds in the square had diminished, shrinking to a few scattered camps of hard-liners. We ventured in to gather some voices for an election preview story and found impromptu debates everywhere over whether or not to vote.

  We also unexpectedly ran into our first dicey moments of our trip. It happened during an interview with a guy named Muhammad whose English was reasonably good. He told us that he thought he would vote if it appeared to be safe, but then diverted into a rant about losing his government job. One or two men stopped to listen, and then a few more gathered until it became a small crowd. The spectators started barking at him in Arabic, voices growing louder and angrier.

  Reem tapped at my elbow and said calmly but decisively, “We should go.”

  I cut the interview short, thanked Muhammad, and motioned to Dan to move on, which we did briskly, smiling and nodding at the irate faces as the argument continued behind us.

  “What were they saying to him?” I asked Reem.

  “They said, ‘What kind of poison are you telling? Are you telling our secrets?’”

  I wondered if the hecklers were pro-regime operatives in the square to spy and stir up trouble. Or if Muhammad himself was a provocateur. So many layers to the Tahrir subculture and so hard for an outsider to understand.

  It was time to venture out of the square anyway. Reem had arranged an interview with a spokesman for the Freedom and Justice Party, which was the chosen name of the Muslim Brotherhood faction. We piled into her compact sedan and headed out into the Cairo traffic fandango.

  There were election posters everywhere. Dozens of new parties had sprung up, factions within factions. I shot a stand-up in front of one crowded wall where there was a picture of a woman running for a moderate party juxtaposed with a candidate for a group of conservative Islamists.

  I could not get over the dirt everywhere on the buildings. Almost every single one was grimy. The biggest city in the Arab world — a vast, bustling, vibrant, and fascinating place — was impossible to keep clean.

  So it was at the building where we were to meet the Muslim Brotherhood representative. The lobby was dim and ramshackle, with an old gentleman perched on a battered wooden chair — the doorman, I guessed. Reem asked him where to find our guy and he pointed us to a rickety, doorless elevator, barely visible on the other side of the lobby amid the gloom. On the way up, Reem casually reached over to Dan’s huge backpack and tucked in a couple of straps that were hanging loose and at risk of snagging on the wall.

  When Amr Darrag opened the door to his apartment, we stepped into an oasis. It was elegantly, if slightly gaudily, furnished — a metaphor for a city where the exterior view obscures an inner reality.

  Darrag spoke perfect, almost unaccented English. He had studied engineering in the U.S. at Purdue University. Clearly the Brotherhood offered this genial smooth talker to Western media as a way of putting up a moderate face for a movement that caused much unease.

  Freedom and Justice proposed that Egypt should be an Islamic state, ruled by Sharia law, but its interpretation of Sharia was unclear. It had female candidates, but ruled out having any run for president and advised the women that they would need to balance their public life with the traditional role in the home. It claimed it had reached out to Coptic Christians, an often-abused minority in Egypt, but none had agreed to run.

  The Brotherhood had played little role in the Tahrir protests, a cynical tactic in the view of their critics, who accused them of not wanting to provoke the military into delaying an election that the Brotherhood seemed poised to win.

  Darrag, himself a candidate for the Freedom and Justice Party, insisted their motives were pure. “This is the first step toward democracy, toward stability,” he said. “The elections must happen on time.”

  The West need not worry about the prospect of Islamists dominating the new Egyptian Parliament he said. “There is nothing to fear,” Darrag told me. “Egypt will not become Iran.”

  He was a charming man, though I wondered what the Freedom and Justice Party candidates were saying in Arabic to the voters in the countryside. These would be the candidates who did not go to an American university.

  Reem brought us to a nearby restaurant for lunch, a labyrinthine place where dimly lit rooms led one into the other — a design, I surmised, to limit the effects of the blistering heat that enveloped Cairo for most of the year. We passed two young women sucking on hookahs, with a guy on a laptop sitting across the table.

  Reem explained that our next interview would be in one of the nicer parts of town, and indeed it was. The building walls were more dusty than grimy. Said Sadek welcomed us into an apartment that could have easily been owned by an academic at the University of Toronto, the interior design several gradations more subdued than Darrag’s. A political scientist at the American University, Sadek had been recommended by Stu as an astute analyst, having interviewed him earlier in the year during the anti-Mubarak uprisings.

  Sadek was a reformer with a sense of humour. “The generals still believe in mummies,” he said with a rueful smile. “They’re old and out of touch with the young.”

  I asked him about the soothing words of Amr Darrag and he shook his head.

  “Religious parties should never be trusted. We have seen the examples of political Islam in the area and it’s disturbing. I don’t want to replace the military dictatorship of Mubarak with a religious dictatorship.”

  Profundity is a challenge in a two-minute news story. But I hope that at least I sounded like I knew what I was talking about in the closer for my piece that night:

  Given all the blood that has been shed over the last few days, there is much doubt that this vote can happen peacefully, and cleanly.

  As imperfect and troubled as it is, Egypt desperately needs to get its first true election right.

  We were done early enough to allow us to head to the famous Khan el-Khalili market in the heart of the city. The idea was to shoot elements for a Sunday feature on Egypt’s suffering tourist trade. In the process, it allowed us to be tourists ourselves.

  The market has been a centre for Cairene merchants for centuries and is normally a big draw for foreigners. There were plenty of people strolling the narrow streets on that Saturday night, but they seemed almost exclusively Egyptian.

  Just inside the Bab al-Badistan gate we popped into a cramped shop with multicoloured scarves hanging from every square millimetre. The owner, Ahmed Abdel Sabbour, told us that not many foreigners were coming in to buy his wares and business was off 40 percent that year.

  “In order to have tourists, you have to have security,” he told me via Reem’s translation. “And people don’t feel safe.”

  Truth was that the troubles were almost entirely centred in the district around Tahrir Square, although the market and foreign tourists had been targeted in years past.

  After our interview, I picked out a couple of scarves for Isabella and Julia with Arabic captions on them and wished Ahmed well.

  He shrugged and smiled. “Egyptians know how to be patient.”

  Back at the hotel, a couple of emails had arrived from London.

  “Julia has a stomach ache. You may have to come home early,” was the first.

  Isabella was taking Julia to a schoolmate’s birthday party that was some distance away, not easily reached by transit. A few better-heeled parents had cars, but it seemed all were full, so Isabella had to spring for an expensi
ve taxi coming and going.

  “Fucking London snobs. Don’t call us.”

  It did not take long for my absence to get to her. Every trip was an ordeal. Here I was on a journalistic adventure of a lifetime, and my family was miserable.

  The real purpose of my pitching the tourism story was our Sunday trip to Giza — I could not go to Egypt without seeing the pyramids. I had no idea that it was actually just a suburb. On a clear day you get a good look at them as you land at the airport.

  For about 4,500 years they had stood through all the travails of humanity, through empires rising and falling, to prevail as one of the great sights to see in the world. But few were seeing them these days.

  As we arrived, guys kept waving us over and knocking on the window. They were not cops or any kind of officials — just desperate locals hoping to make a few bucks. The parking lot for the pyramids was almost empty, just one lonely tour bus. As we parked, a guy in a uniform bustled over to make further demands. Reem’s voice rose as she engaged the guy. It was hard to tell exactly what was happening, but it seemed he had an issue with us parking in an empty parking lot.

  After a couple of minutes of increasingly loud Arabic, he gave up.

  Reem was beside herself. One Egyptian in six works in tourism and the industry was tanking, and here was an officious functionary complicating the lives of some of the few visitors.

  To avoid further bureaucratic hassles, we had already decided to leave the video camera back at the hotel and shoot this part of the story with the DSLR — better to look more like tourists than reporters.

  Every few steps we were accosted by the touts selling tours and camel rides, their normal persistence heightened to near ferocity by the scarcity of visitors. I had Dan point the camera at one of the first and most insistent, a guy named Walid, and I asked him the obvious: How was business?

  “Things are really fucked up,” he responded in a perfectly understandable and unusable clip. I thanked him and moved on, but he stuck to us, as did a teenage kid who had little English but plenty of opinions he wanted to share.

  Ahmed Ramadan was the first camel ride guy we approached. He helped me mount his camel, named Oscar, as I asked him the same question. Ahmed’s answer was far more nuanced.

  “In Tahrir, people die. For me, it’s just money. And money is nothing,” he said.

  Interview done, he carried on with his well-practised tourist shtick, leading Oscar to a prime spot for a photo of me riding him with the pyramids as a backdrop.

  “Okay, now put this on,” he said, handing me an Arab headdress.

  I hesitated for a moment, then thought why not and asked Dan to take another picture.

  “You sure?” he asked with eyebrows raised.

  “Yup. Do it.”

  “Okay.” Eyes rolled.

  When I hopped down he showed me the shot and I groaned with embarrassment. Truly ridiculous. Hoser of Arabia.

  Having remembered a key lesson from hazardous environment training, I had spread my wad of cash among several different pockets so as not to flash too much money at any one time.

  No matter: as soon as it came out, I resembled a rump roast dropped into a school of piranha.

  Ahmed has already agreed to $20 U.S., which I happily paid. Then, there was Walid, he of the “fucked up” clip. Twenty dollars for him. Then the kid. I proposed to just give him a couple of bucks.

  Ahmed: “Small bills too hard to change.” Another twenty flew out.

  I told Walid that he could carry on with the tour for his twenty, figuring that he would keep the other touts at bay. And so he did. Occasionally an interloper would approach but Walid protected us with the ferocity of a lion standing over a freshly killed wildebeest.

  He took us over to the Sphinx, where I spotted a rarity, a Western tourist. Jason was a Brit, although he was wearing a battered Australian hat. He was riding a horse being led by a tout. I asked him whether he was frightened to be in Cairo.

  “No, because we had two weeks of rioting in London,” he answered in a broad Cockney accent.

  It was a telling comment, but I wondered whether the audience back home would find him credible, given that it looked like he had not had a bath since he was last in earshot of Bow Bells, and his scruffy beard was braided at the chin.

  As we walked back to the car, my gaze wandered from the magnificent views above of the Great Pyramid of Cheops to the hazards of camel and horseshit on the pathway. Dan walked ahead with Walid bending his ear.

  “Did you tell Dan that you already paid him?” asked Reem, anticipating what was about to happen.

  “No. Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  I was certain Walid would hit him up for more and sure enough Dan reached into his pocket and handed over another twenty. I did not care, reasoning that would be our minor contribution to a suffering local economy.

  Walid, however, was shameless. As we shook hands to say goodbye, he asked if I also had some spare Egyptian pounds “for his children.” Our generosity (that is to say Global’s generosity) had limits, and I declined and thanked him for his assistance.

  As we drove back into the centre of Cairo, Reem was still steamed about the bureaucratic barriers we had faced, as some of the very few visitors wanting to see the pyramids that day.

  “We have huge assets and a fascinating country but no clue how to properly exploit them,” she growled. She passionately loved Egypt but like many Egyptians was maddened by it.

  It was only midday, hours before deadline, lots of time for lunch, so I asked Reem to bring us to a place where we could sample some fine traditional Egyptian food. Dan was tired (and he always admitted that his tastes ran more to Burger King anyway) so we dropped him at the hotel and headed onto the Nile island of Gezira, to the northern tip and the tony Zamalek district.

  Sequoia was a restaurant that sounded like it should be in San Francisco, but looked like it belonged in a Lawrence Durrell novel. There were no walls, no roof — just low white sofas and a view of the Nile. It was also almost deserted, with a smattering of diners.

  I told Reem to order and out came some delicious bread and dips, followed by molokheya, a kind of broth made from jute leaves, garlic, and coriander, served with chicken. It was exotic yet still accessible and tasty — but all overshadowed by the locale. Yes, that’s the Nile I was dining beside. This Foreign Correspondent thing was feeling very Foreign Correspondenty.

  Monday, the first round of voting, we drove to polling stations around the city, anticipating trouble but finding none. Lineups were long, often snaking around the block, but Egyptians appeared patient, willing to accept a wait to cast a ballot in what promised to be the first real election in their nation’s long history.

  An elegant, fiftyish woman named Magda Khalil told me, “Okay, it’s crowded. But sometimes you have to stand up for yourselves and a new generation.”

  The debate over whether to boycott seemed to have been settled, with lots of people showing up to vote. In the sham elections under Mubarak, turnout was typically around 10 percent, but predictions were that it was to rise to well about 50 percent. We came across Sammy Ibrahim, who told us he carried dual Canadian-Egyptian citizenship. Was he afraid to vote, given the troubles of the previous week?

  “No,” he said. “I’m very happy. I feel a new life is coming to Egypt.”

  The rules specifically prohibited any campaigning outside polling areas, but it was widely ignored, with the Muslim Brotherhood the most efficient violators. We spotted a place where Freedom and Justice Party operatives had set up under a tent right beside the lineup to one voting area, tapping away at laptops as they interviewed voters.

  “Nothing is perfect, but I think it will be fair enough,” said a fashionably dressed young woman named Hanaa Benhaoussie, who was standing in line.

  I wanted to get a shot of the Brotherhood operation, but the army was guarding the polling area and shooed Dan away, claiming we did not have proper permission.

  We walked a
round the corner and I suggested to him and Reem that I would stroll back with my iPhone to surreptitiously get some video. They both looked worried, but a friend of Reem’s offered to walk along with me and engage in conversation as a cover. It worked and the bored-looking soldiers never noticed. I made sure that Dan used the shaking, soft focus shot in my story, given that I had risked arrest to get it.

  Reem drove us to meet her mother, Sahar Elmougy, a prominent columnist and lecturer at Cairo University. She was also a rare breed in the Arab world: a novelist who wrote from a feminist perspective.

  In her spare, tasteful apartment she told us that she would be casting a ballot, mainly in the hope of heading off an Islamist sweep, but she considered the process little more than a rehearsal of a truly democratic process.

  “In the long run, they’re not credible elections because the people in charge of running them are murderers,” she said.

  Years later, when I sat down to write this book, I visited her website only to find that it had been hacked by someone with the nickname KkK. I wondered about her safety.

  In a continuing effort to find a Canadian angle, I reached out to Sherif and Magda Ghobrial, dual citizens who spent about half their time in Toronto and half in Cairo. Their niece, a friend from my days covering the Ontario legislature, put me in touch and we headed out to their apartment.

  The Ghobrials were Coptic Christians, a minority group that traditionally has been a favoured scapegoat during times of social unrest in Egypt. Only a few weeks earlier, dozens were massacred outside the state broadcaster’s building in Cairo for daring to protest about their churches being burned.

  Magda’s English was better and she sounded more quotable, but she was camera shy so it was left to the genial Sherif to do the interview. They had already cast their ballots, but were justifiably nervous, given their religion and recent events.

  “I’m almost sixty-five years old, but for the first time I think I have to put my vote, say my opinion,” he said.