And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  So a few weeks after graduating, I embarked on the dream that began taking shape when I was a kid. I arrived in Cairo in June 1996 with two suitcases and about $2,000 in my pocket. My apartment was in a seven-story walk-up in a neighborhood called Mit Ouba on the Giza side of Cairo. It was as barren and dirty as a flophouse, with almost no furniture and nothing on the walls. Dust was everywhere, a fine dust that gets between your teeth, in your eyes and nose, the kind of dust you can’t get rid of. When I sat on the sofa, dust rose like a cloud. Several of the windows had no glass. I covered them with cardboard in my forlorn battle against the dust. And this was one of the bigger and better apartments in my building.

  President Hosni Mubarak’s state didn’t really have much reach in Mit Ouba. I never saw black government cars or soldiers or even police. The narrow alleys were filled with children and trash, piles and piles of trash. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t pick it up. Cigarette packs, empty potato chip bags, and cookie wrappers swirled in the hot, dry air. Sheep stood tethered, splotches of pink painted on their fatty tails to show they’d been inspected and deemed halal. Goats munched on plastic bags. This was the meat Egyptians could look forward to.

  The water came in a trickle because the building was only supposed to be five stories and the top two were illegal. So naturally the owner didn’t buy an extra pump to push the water up the last two flights. When the water did arrive, the pressure was insufficient to use the handheld shower piece. I had to hold it almost to the ground to get any water out of it at all.

  The building lacked central gas, and air-conditioning was an impossible dream. Everyone had a gas canister for his or her stove, and when the man who sold the canisters came by in his donkey cart, he would bang on them with a wrench. So when you heard his metal drum, you’d run downstairs and get him to install a fresh canister.

  I came into my apartment one time and found six guys from the building cooking on my stove. They didn’t even seem surprised when I walked in. They kept cooking and tactfully made something for me while I sat down at the table.

  When they’d finished cooking their meals, they cleaned the dishes, thanked me very much, and took their food back to their homes. I guess they figured that a single foreigner had gas to spare. It was actually a pleasant evening, a good opportunity for me to practice my Arabic on them. I didn’t feel as if they were exploiting me in any way; it was just the idea of borrowing salt taken one step further.

  There was no crime in Mit Ouba, which amazed me. I had a computer and a fax machine in my apartment, but I left it unlocked. Everyone in the building left his or her apartment unlocked, not that people had much to steal. I never heard of anyone being mugged. I never heard about a rape, but I wouldn’t have anyway. Victims were often married off to their attackers.

  I went out on the streets dressed as a foreigner, and my light complexion made me stand out even more. I usually had money in my pockets, certainly more money than the local guys, who had little or no money in their pockets. But I was never accosted, never threatened in any way.

  All the people in the neighborhood had debts, including me. Everyone kept a tab at the local grocery store. You paid for the canned meat (appetizingly called “luncheon meat”), cookies, oil, soap, and so on at the end of the month, or whenever the grocer decided the debt was too big for him to carry. It depended on the reliability of the customer. I usually got to around one hundred pounds, which back then was worth about $35, before the grocer started asking for money. The idea of the tab was to give people time to get over the hump until payday. If someone was late paying his debt or disputed the amount, a cleric was called in, oaths were sworn on the Koran, and the matter was settled.

  Egypt was a hard place to run, perhaps beyond the capabilities of any government. Back then around 60 million people lived on a tiny slip of green that zigzagged up the Nile River like a crack in the desert. People drank from the Nile and dumped sewage in it too. The education system was abysmal. What kept it all together was Islam. Islam was the solution, or at least that’s what the Muslim Brotherhood was selling. The Brotherhood was a political and religious organization that was officially illegal. President Mubarak let the group work in the open so the government could monitor its activities. The Brotherhood took a strict religious line and effectively ran most of the schools, factories, and trade unions. It operated a parallel government, funded with donations from its 2 million members.

  If you were a foreigner in Cairo in 1996, you could forget about privacy. You were never alone. Everywhere you went, people would come up and start talking to you. Some of it was just curiosity—about the United States and why I came to live in Egypt. Sometimes people were also trying to drum up business. If a man was a plumber, he’d talk to me for a little while, then he’d let me know if I needed a plumber, he was my guy. No one was ever hostile to me. The people were wonderfully welcoming and often invited me into their homes. These encounters taught me a lot about the country and helped me learn Arabic quickly. Within a few months I was holding basic conversations and felt comfortable with the language after the first year or so.

  The more religious people wanted to talk about Islam and invited me to convert. I became a “devout” Muslim by osmosis. I didn’t pray or believe, but in Mit Ouba you had to act Muslim. Language was culture out loud. I learned Arabic the way it was spoken in Mit Ouba. Every sentence began with “If Allah wills it” or “By the grace of Allah.” When a shopkeeper wished me salaam alaikum, “peace be with you,” I learned to answer with the forced poetry of “and peace be upon you, and the mercy of Allah and His blessings.” I mumbled “In the name of Allah” before taking a sip of water. If I hiccupped, I said, “Praise Allah.”

  For two years, I almost never spoke to an Egyptian woman, unless she sold bread or vegetables, but even those precious interactions—exchanges of produce and crumpled currency—were limited. There was never any physical contact. No hands on the shoulder, no hugs, and certainly no Parisian-style double kisses between jeune femme et homme. Even when the old, veiled woman who sold sprouting onions and parsley from a wet blanket handed me change, I was careful not to touch her fingers. The rules were clear without an explanation. I don’t know what the protocol was for sitting next to a woman. I never sat next to one.

  In college, back in the States, if I was with a group of guys and an attractive woman came into the room, her presence would change the air, change the way the men interacted with one another. That’s a good thing. It’s the spice of life. But in Egypt they were afraid of that. It was like putting a contaminant in the water. Women are Eve. Women are to be protected and also to be feared; their sexuality is dangerous and can make you have impure thoughts and act in an impure way. You can lose control.

  The result was a kind of social fraternity, a world composed almost entirely of men. In exchange for celibacy and seclusion, the fraternity was safe and even gentle. Men didn’t curse. They seldom raised their voices and were elaborately generous, especially with food. It was impossible to eat on a bus because you had to offer more than half of whatever you had to the person next to you. You were obliged to tear your sandwich and put it in his hands. He was obliged to refuse and say, “May Allah preserve you.” “May Allah preserve you,” you had to say, and close his hands around the half sandwich.

  Shortly after I arrived in Cairo, I applied for a job with the Middle East Times, a weekly owned by the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church. This good, feisty paper covered news, sports, and culture, and a page or two of society news. It was the same kind of paper that was put on our doorknob in Marrakech, but on a much smaller scale, written for diplomats, tourists, visiting businessmen, and expats.

  The Times didn’t have any openings, but the publisher said he would keep in touch. Six months later, he called me at my apartment and asked if I was looking for work. When I said yes, he invited me to his apartment that night and offered me a job. The salary was $1,000 a month, in cash. I accepted at once and asked when he wante
d me to start. “How about tomorrow?” he replied.

  When I got to the office, I quickly understood the rush. The place was virtually empty. The publisher had fired a popular editor in chief, and the staff had walked out in protest. The only people left were an Egyptian sportswriter, a few accountants and advertising managers, and a Sudanese reporter. I called all the stringers the remaining staff knew and asked them to write something, just about anything would do. Somehow we managed to put out a paper with sixteen pages, half the usual number. I stayed on as news editor and chief reporter. I started writing about Islamic groups and the Muslim Brotherhood, subjects that would define my working life for the next twenty years.

  One night, I invited a man and his son to my apartment. Before my guests arrived, I took a taxi to Zamalek, the ritzy neighborhood where most of the expats and diplomats lived. I bought imported ravioli and spent the next several hours mincing garlic and dicing tomatoes. It felt good to be doing something familiar. The falling of the knife relaxed me immensely. I bought a bottle of nice Italian olive oil for $10. It smelled clean and earthy and far from Cairo.

  My guest was a writer for a religious newspaper. He showed up with his son, who looked about six. I served them cheese ravioli in my homemade tomato sauce. I’d lived in Sicily for a year in high school. I make good sauce. It was still steaming in the plastic bowl when I brought it out. The boy was disappointed. My Arabic was just good enough so that I could follow him. He wanted meat. He thought since he was eating out, and with a foreigner, that there would be meat.

  “I want kofta,” the boy whined. In Egypt, kofta is grilled minced lamb. His father looked at him, horrified at his behavior, and tugged his arm in a way that showed he wasn’t joking.

  “Can’t you see this man is very poor? Now eat your potatoes. We’ll have kofta at home.”

  After the meal, the man thanked me with pity in his voice. He too didn’t care much for my ravioli. He barely touched them. The boy maybe took one bite. But my poverty endeared me to the writer, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He introduced me to the “family.”

  The Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters was a small apartment in El Manial, on an island straddled by the Nile near Zamalek. I waited in a big chair as fat men in oversize suits looked suspiciously at me until I was given an audience with Mustafa Mashhur, the Brotherhood’s murshid, or supreme guide. I was interviewing Mashhur for the newspaper.

  We talked about Afghanistan. He supported the Taliban, which had just taken over Kabul, but he said they were making some mistakes. Girls should be educated, but kept at home as mothers and nurturers. He told me about Jews and how their religion was holy and godly, but that as individuals they were crafty warmongers and land thieves. He said sex was good and should be enjoyed, but that veils were needed because men and women couldn’t contain their carnal natures. Female circumcision—in which a girl’s clitoris is dug out of her vagina with a razor—was good too, he said, provided it was done safely. Israel had to be destroyed, but he didn’t think Egypt should attack right away. He was an extremist preaching moderation. He supported hateful nonsense, but he always dialed it back a few degrees. It was the Brotherhood’s way of pretending—and believing—that they were moderates.

  Meeting Mashhur was my secret handshake. After that, I had access to the bureaucrats and government offices that made Cairo creak along. The men I met were all members of the Brotherhood. They were the middle managers in this country of tens of thousands of middle managers.

  Cairo was, and remains, an ugly, cement-colored, park-free city, dotted with a few bewildering, mind-expanding splendors that make the whole place manic and magical. There was always noise, dirt, and exhaust, the honking of horns and the screeching of brakes.

  My Brotherhood contacts made life easier for me. They held the ubiquitous stamp required for every inane piece of paperwork. They kept the giant logbooks in government offices. When I needed to renew my residency permit at the Mogamma, the government administration building in Tahrir Square, I didn’t have to wait in line with all the Sudanese refugees. I knew a guy who knew a guy. The Brotherhood, as the name promised, was a family. I wasn’t a relative, or even a distant cousin, but I was in its orbit. In Mafia terms, I wasn’t a wiseguy, or a made guy, but a trusted guy, a friend of the family’s.

  I became obsessed with the Brotherhood and their hit-and-run battles with the thugs from Amn al-Dawla, the State Security service. I wrote about the Brotherhood every week. The expats and diplomats loved it. I was their inside man. The members of the Brotherhood loved it too. I was their window to the outside. This was before the Internet was a big thing. I was invited to the Brotherhood’s iftar dinners, at which they broke their Ramadan fast. The Brotherhood called me whenever their members were arrested or there was a symposium at Al Shaab, a religious and socialist newspaper. Printed in blue ink, the paper ran cartoons of Jews with pointy ears, blood dripping from fangs, and swastikas on their foreheads. The Zionists had been transmogrified into National Socialists. The symposiums at Al Shaab were usually about Gaza or the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and how the West was raping both of them. America was the new crusader, blinded and tricked by Jews and their lobby in Washington.

  It wasn’t long before the government started to wonder what the hell an Arabic-speaking twenty-four-year-old American kid was doing hanging around with the Brotherhood. I was followed constantly and my phone was tapped. I could hear men listening to my conversations. They must have been smokers, judging by their coughs. Sometimes I heard clinking, like a tiny glass bell somewhere in the background. The agents from Amn al-Dawla were stirring their tea.

  I grew to hate talking to members of the Brotherhood. Their minds were a cage of their own creation. Their pronouncements were always the same. Everything wrong with Egypt and their lives was somebody else’s fault. The world wanted to keep Muslims down so they wouldn’t restore the caliphate and take over civilization again. Jews were bloodsucking cheats, scorned even by their own prophets. America was afraid of Islam’s greatness. There was a plot against Islam because the plotters knew if Allah’s will—as written down in the Koran—was truly carried out, the capitalist-Zionist system of American hegemony would be destroyed.

  The Brotherhood’s diatribes against Israel, women, gays, and the Elders of  Zion made me nauseated. Sometimes I would rush to one of the many casinos in Cairo to drink whiskey and play blackjack until dawn. I needed to escape the caged mind. I wanted to deliberately do something the Brotherhood wouldn’t like. Gambling and drinking felt like streaking through a football stadium. I made more money at the blackjack tables than I did as a journalist. I was an über-infidel, and my nose was under the Brotherhood’s tent.

  * * *

  THE BROTHERHOOD’S LOGO IS TWO crossed swords with a Koran floating between the blades. Beneath the swords is a single phrase, “And Prepare,” a quote from the Koran on “the spoils of war.” The full quote is “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows. And whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged.” The two-word slogan is an instruction to the brothers to prepare for battle against Allah’s enemies.

  By the 1990s, President Mubarak was in his late sixties and had already become an old fool. His main concern was making the army rich and loyal. He let the Brotherhood dominate the mosques. Worst of all, he let the group infect the Egyptian mind with its hateful nonsense.

  The revolution Egyptians needed wasn’t for political power and democracy, but a revolution in thinking, a revolt against the Brotherhood’s bile. Egyptians needed to strip away the conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and litany of victimization that passed for education. Sometimes I thought the only way to fix Egypt would be to drop books on it. Open the bomb doors of B-52s and let Kant and Locke, Hemingway and Gloria Steinem, rain from the heavens. But the big men
let the Brotherhood and extreme Wahhabi clerics pollute their people’s minds. It kept them angry with the West, Israel, Washington, and an international American-Zionist conspiracy instead of blaming their leaders for the nation’s pathetic performance on the global stage. The Arab world of the big men was a deliberately stupid place.

  For decades, Egypt—and every autocracy in the Middle East—was obsessed with controlling the media. Anything that had the potential to influence crowds, including newspapers and movies, was censored. I knew how rigorous the process was because I met frequently with an Egyptian censor. Every week we had to submit a proof of the Middle East Times to the censor before going to print. We had to finish writing on Wednesday night so the proof would be on the censor’s desk Thursday morning. The censor got back to us Thursday afternoon so we could make the required changes and catch a flight to Athens, where we printed the paper. The next day the newspapers were shipped back to Cairo to go on sale. We printed in Greece so the newspaper would be classified as a foreign publication. If we printed in Egypt, we would have been considered domestic press, which was even more tightly controlled.

  The censor was proud of his job and felt he was doing us a favor by allowing our little import scam. He even agreed to sit for an interview, in which he denied there was any censorship in Egypt. I ran the interview under the headline “Censor Denies Censorship in Egypt.” Luckily, he missed the irony.

  Sometimes the censor would cut a few sentences. We would fill the extra space this created by making the advertisements a little bigger. If an entire article was cut, however, we’d have to run a blank space. I thought it would be amusing to print photographs of President Mubarak in the white spaces where the articles had been removed. Not everyone got the joke. Some of my friends thought I was overcome by Egyptian patriotism. We decided instead to run a caption in the white space stating, “The article here was removed by the censor.” The censor demanded that we stop. We stopped for a few weeks, but then went back to it.