To Vote, To Boycott, or to Fight

Medan Mesaha, I told the cab driver, headed home for the evening. Mosh 'ayza Medan Tahrir?? Wla 'Asr el Etehadya? he joked. (You're sure you don't want Tahrir Square or the presidential palace?) This was some dark humor given the current situation. I had just gotten off the phone with a friend who was on his way to the demonstrations at the presidential palace. The night before, Wednesday, the death toll there reached 6 and the number of injured around 450. These casualties were the result of factional fighting between pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators, not, as before, between the security forces and the people. As of Thursday evening, Morsi still had not appeared before the nation since the violence began, and anti-Morsi protesters were back. Their demands are the withdrawal of Morsi's constitutional declaration declaring himself extraordinary temporary powers, and the cancellation of the referendum on the Constituent Assembly's rushed draft constitution (now scheduled for Dec. 15). Seven of Morsi's inner circle of advisers, including the lone Christian, resigned as a result of Wednesday's events, saying they could not participate in a regime that caused Egyptians to shed other Egyptians' blood. I asked the taxi driver -- a white-haired man with deep-set wrinkles and an amazing ability to transition in a second from joking with me to spewing the vilest curses I've yet heard at other drivers -- what he thought of what was happening with Morsi and the palace protests. Mosh kwayyes, mosh kwayyes khales, he said briefly -- Not good, not good at all. What would be the outcome, I wanted to know. Inshallah Morsi hayemshy, he said -- God willing, Morsi will leave.

Morsi himself didn't seem ready to give in quite so quickly. Twenty-four hours after the violence escalated outside his palace, he finally gave a speech. Mostly, he condemned the use of violence, but blamed the opposition for it. He also said that a new constituent assembly will be formed if the referendum on the constitution fails on the 15th. And he proposed a dialogue with opposition leaders on Saturday, but thus far it looks like they won't take part unless more concessions are guaranteed first. Today, Friday, demonstrators will return to the palace after midday prayers. People are heartsick. That two years ago, people of all kinds stood together in Tahrir with a common goal, and now they have turned on each other. The Ikhwan have superior organization and pure numbers, while anti-Morsi forces (now largely liberal secularists and leftists) are burning with righteous fury that the revolution - their revolution - was stolen out from under their noses.

Below is what a pro-Morsi acquaintance wrote on Facebook a couple of days after Wednesday's violence. While I can't say that I agree with the Brotherhood's ideology or many of its tactics, his point about the relative numerical strength of each group should be heeded by the liberal opposition as well. The Brotherhood still, as it appeared last week, has the ability to summon militias -- it was, after all, a highly disciplined, secret organization for almost 85 years. My acquaintance wrote:
When will the secular liberals be convinced that the Islamists top them in number and mass? In the elections, they said [that the reason for Islamists' success was]: oil and sugar, heaven and hell, and religious polarization. And in the millioniyyat [marches] they said: mobilization and meals. And in the syndicates and other organizations, they said: ignorance and polarization. And in the Constituent Assembly, they said: strife, not cooperation. I'm not saying that the liberals are wrong or vice versa, but I only wish for each side to know its true strength in the street. 

On Thursday night, after speaking to my friend who was en route to Etehadya Palace, I walked around my neighborhood buying last-minute decorations and refreshments for my birthday party. It felt inappropriate to be having a party, on the one hand, but on the other I knew it would be a chance to gather with friends, at least the Americans, and talk about the unfolding events. The streets were quiet. No customers tonight, the taxi driver had told me gratefully, people are scared. At the beauty salon early that day, as I had my hair teased into a beehive for the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema theme, Al Jazeera was blasting at full volume from the small television. Aboul Fotouh, a former leading presidential contender who is considered a moderate Islamist from outside the Brotherhood, was giving an angry press conference. In it, he defended the secularists and blasted Morsi for failing to stop the bloodshed at the palace. He also went on for some time about how no Egyptian group would accept the interference of the United States -- something along the lines of 'we don't need you and we don't want you.' (Perhaps this defense is a necessary one, since the liberals are indeed subject to accusations that they are simply American agents, more interested in Western values than Islamic ones. There was a Tweet circulating on Wednesday that American dollars were found on an opposition protester -- what incriminating evidence! How ironic, since when Morsi was elected many liberals told me that the U.S. was behind him. Whichever way you slice it, when you get accused of having America on your side, you know you're screwed.) Later, at the party, I spoke with the handful of Egyptian friends who had come rather than attend the demonstrations. When we start shedding each other's blood, that's when I stop going. But others disagreed -- They're right to be there. I'll go next time. And indeed there was a next time: there have been marches of varying sizes nearly every day for the last week.

What begins to happen, though, is that yesterday's front page story is immediately superseded by today's news, and is forgotten. I can hardly remember the timeline of the last two or three weeks, save for the fact that last Wednesday was the day the six were killed. This weekend, a few cities in the Delta apparently declared that they were seceding from the nation, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the MB government's rule and driving out their regional officials. By yesterday evening, there was no further news about that phenomenon and the big story was Morsi's suggestion that he was about to impose martial law if things didn't get themselves under control fast. The military issued a statement saying it was ready to protect the nation's institutions from dangerous troublemakers aiming to sow discord. But when we woke up this morning, Sunday, all that was gone and we were reading that Morsi had agreed to make concessions to the opposition instead. That is, he has withdrawn the immensely controversial declaration of Nov. 22, which sparked the recent escalation. But, the constitutional referendum will still take place on December 15 as scheduled. If the people reject the constitution, a new Constituent Assembly will be formed within 3 months and must draft a new constitution within 6 months. Will the constitution fail, though? It still seems unlikely, especially given that the opposition is divided on whether to vote no or to boycott the referendum altogether (on the premise that voting legitimizes the regime and especially the Constituent Assembly). Personally, I think the boycott is a pretty bad idea, considering that there is no minimum participation requirement in the referendum and the country will simply move ahead with this piecemeal constitution if it gets sufficient votes.


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Celebrating the big old 23 in Cairo with good friends and good (cookie dough flavored) cake 

My surrogate Egyptian family, Yehya and Nada 

Clashes Continue

Breaking news (as of 9pm Wednesday): Clashes are going on right now outside the presidential palace in Heliopolis. A pro-Morsi march has gone sour. Morsi is silent, and IkhwanWeb is tweeting that ElBaradei and Sabbahi are responsible for inciting opposition supporters to violence. Anti-MB protesters report that pro-Morsi crowds are armed with rocks and sticks, and beat up people camped in tents outside the palace. Thirteen or seventeen people have been injured so far tonight, and two presidential aides resigned in protest.

* * * 

5 guinea! Dostor, dostor! 5 guinea! Two young men in the Gamal Abdel Nasser metro station hawked their wares: the new Egyptian constitution. Glossy copies of this fiercely contested document emerged from the presses today, after the equally controversial Constituent Assembly hurriedly cobbled it together, passed it, and presented it to President Morsi on Saturday. No matter that a referendum will be held on December 15 to seal the document with public approval. As one constitution vendor told a friend this morning, that is merely a formality -- this is the document.

When I encountered the dostor for sale, I was headed home from St. Andrew's, where I teach my world history course to teenage Sudanese refugees. Today's lesson was on the French Revolution and Napoleon. After several weeks of lessons on the European Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the exploration of the Americas -- all of which seemed incredibly remote to my students -- it was a relief to give a lesson that provided easy (if overly simplistic) parallels to something with which they were all familiar. Why did the members of the Third Estate take to the streets? Aish, horeya, adala egtama'eya --  bread, freedom, and social justice -- the slogan of the Egyptian revolution. What about the devolution of the revolution into the Reign of Terror? What happens when revolutionaries achieve their initial goal -- the overthrow of an autocracy -- and then can't agree on what should come next? None of my students are Egyptian citizens, of course, and we haven't discussed yet their views on Egyptian politics. I get the sense from our casual discussions that the most important thing is avoiding the demonstrations: who is in power does not seem to be a matter of great urgency. Two weeks ago, when we were discussing the Renaissance, I read my students an excerpt from Machiavelli's The Prince. I asked them to reflect on the famous passage suggesting that "it is better to be feared than loved" and discuss this advice in the context of our own time. What struck me was that no student chose to mention either Mubarak or Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, both autocratic and oppressive rulers (and the latter of whom is responsible for my students' existence as refugees in this country in the first place). Obama! Obama! chimed a chorus of voices when I asked them to share their answers. Everybody loves him, they don't fear him. After some aggressive prodding for a bit more subtlety, we moved on to Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi, but the discussion ended there.

Today, I was heartened by the student who came to me after class and asked for clarification on -- of all things - the execution of Louis XVI. Students rarely ask questions in class, and I often feel that I'm performing for myself. I spoke to him for a few minutes about the cleansing of what one might call the French felul. He told me he was going to do extra reading on the subject. Already floored for the day, I found another student, the most diligent of the group, waiting for me outside. I found The Prince at a bookstore in Tahrir, he told me proudly. I'm going to start reading it now. 

As I assumed the requisite corpse pose in the metro car -- all one can do to prevent asphyxiation or a nervous breakdown in the rush hour throngs -- I thought to myself how normal the abnormal has become. A fairly typical afternoon, discussing Machiavelli with teenage refugees in Cairo. A typical afternoon, reminding myself to check the news when I get home to see whether today's million-man marches to the presidential palace have led to any clashes. Or perhaps there would be another statement from the Constitutional Court, which is currently on strike to protest Morsi's decree. How have these things ceased to feel remarkable? I need to step back a bit.

Back home, I checked in with a few of my favorite news sources. Indeed, thousands of anti-Brotherhood forces were marching on the palace to protest the new constitution, the Constituent Assembly that wrote it after the withdrawal of liberals and Christians, and Morsi's regime in its entirety. Reports indicated that security forces had begun unleashing tear gas on the masses. A friend tells me now he's just arrived home from the demonstration and it was one of the biggest in a long time. Meanwhile, I read that a lawyer (albeit one who argued that a fake Mubarak was put on trial after the real one died) had lodged a complaint with the Prosecutor General accusing the three major secular opposition leaders - Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabahy, and Amr Moussa -- of espionage and sedition: Moussa had met with Tzipi Livni to "fabricate internal crises" in Egypt, and then the politicians gathered at the Wafd Party headquarters to put the "Zionist plot" into motion.

Today's news demonstrates the state of uncertainty I've been in for the last couple of weeks. What is important and what is a red herring? Events that would, in any other context, be extremely big, happen in such quick succession that it's nearly impossible to assess their magnitude before something else comes along. Depending on whom you speak to, you find dramatically divergent answers to what this all means. Is Egypt undergoing a massive crisis and authoritarian power grab? Or are the demonstrations that have occurred since the anniversary of the Mohamed Mahmoud clashes in mid-November the inevitable but minor birth pangs of newfound stability? My gut feeling is less dire than that of the secularists with whom I sympathize: I'm not sure that Morsi's fall, which some have called for, would do any group in Egypt much good beyond symbolic victory points, and could plunge the country into a true crisis of leaderlessness and strife between the pro- and anti-Ikhwan forces. (I don't think this will happen, by the way.) But will conflict escalate in the next couple of weeks before the referendum on the new constitution? That is less certain.

Saturday was what was jokingly termed in the neighborhood the "Invasion of the Beards". That is to say, the Ikhwan organized their own "million-man" gathering at Cairo University, which is not too far from home sweet Medan Mesaha. Don't go outside, texted a friend ominously, the streets are filled with beards! Many supporters of the Brotherhood, and all Salafi Muslims, the latter of whom seek to emulate the purported appearance of the first disciples of Muhammad, sport sizable beards. Liberal Muslims here, on the other hand, tend to see aggressive beard-growing as symbolic of self-righteous religiosity. The day passed without incident, though Facebook and Twitter were abuzz with videographic or anecdotal proof that the Brotherhood had bribed poor farmers from the governorates to populate the Cairo University rally. My one contact with someone who actually supports the Brotherhood, on the other hand -- a precocious 18-year-old literature student I met, strangely enough, at the U.S. Embassy screening of the West Wing -- posted a different story. When he returned from the rally that night, he wrote on Facebook [my rough translation]: We felt as we were standing there... more than 4 million people who had come to participate in deciding the fate of their country, come to prove to the whole world that we are behind our elected president and behind shari'a, come not because of money and not in rented buses,... and not because of a bottle of beer or a dose of drugs... We came to Nahda Square to realize the Nahda. [The Nahda (Renaissance) Plan was the Ikhwan's broad campaign platform.]

This giant Ikhwan rally was in a sense a response to the (equally large, perhaps) secularist rally that took place last Tuesday. While anti-Brotherhood forces had been staging a sit-in in Tahrir since at least the previous Friday, the day after Morsi issued his constitutional declaration, the Tuesday march aimed to escalate the degree of resistance. This was also the first march that I joined myself. I have always been ambivalent about attending demonstrations, for several reasons. First, safety. There have been several prominent sexual assault cases that occurred during political demonstrations here since the revolution -- this seems a greater threat than falling victim to a tear gas overdose or being pelted with rocks. Second, I do not want to saddle Egyptian friends with protecting me at a demonstration, which they would feel compelled to do (both as a woman and a foreigner, since the spy jokes and not-so-jokey jokes abound). Third, it's awkward to walk the line between observer and participant. This was especially true when I joined the liberals' march at the invitation of a group of close Egyptian friends.

I met one of the girls beforehand at an upscale coffee shop in Mohandiseen, the upper middle-class neighborhood where marchers were gathering. People were wearing sneakers, sweatshirts, polo shirts, and even a few fanny packs. Some men and children wore the cheap plastic Guy Fawkes masks that have become a phenomenon as the result of what seems to be a nationwide passion for V for Vendetta. Many of the women, disproportionate to the population, had uncovered hair. Nevertheless, the woman marching right in front of me wore a niqab, and was there without a husband, something you rarely see -- I was intensely curious. Thousands clustered around Mostafa Mahmoud mosque, some with megaphones and banners representing various liberal opposition parties. There were many young people, some younger than ourselves, but also many middle-aged people. My friend's mother, who was walking with us, turned to him in the crowd and whispered that she felt like it was January 25 again. We could see neither the beginning nor the end of the marchers as we left the mosque and set off for Tahrir. Some people emerged from the shops and restaurants that lined the route to cheer and take photos, while others waved flags from their windows. At the same time, I remember looking up at the glassed-in second story of Chicken Tikka, an Indian chain, and seeing people staring intently at their menus as thousands of demonstrators poured through the street below.

Along the march route: a homemade banner commemorating Jika, the young demonstrator killed in Mohamed Mahmoud St. anniversary clashes a week earlier.

Clap, clap, clap, horeya, clap, clap, clap, horeya, shouted the marchers around me, repeating the word for freedom. Bee'a, bee'a, ya Badie -- accusing the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood of selling out Egypt. Many of the slogans repeated during our journey to Tahrir were, like this one, attacking the administration for following the Ikhwan leadership instead of the national interest. Yasqot, yasqot hokm el-morshid! they yelled -- Down with the rule of the Supreme Guide. Just a few months ago, before the military relinquished its stranglehold on the government to Morsi's administration, the refrain of demonstrators from both within and against the Ikhwan was yasqot, yasqot hokm el-askar -- Down with military. Another familiar chant was also appropriated to the present circumstances, Aish, horeya, adala egtama'eya, the most famous rallying cry of the revolution. Aish, horeya, isqat al-ta'seeseyya! sounded again and again, Bread, freedom, and the fall of the Constituent Assembly! (This, again, reflects liberals' fury that a constitution was passed - and passed off as valid - after nearly all non-Brotherhood members of the Assembly walked out in protest that their views were not being considered.) Shave Morsi's beard and he looks like Mubarak! The people want the downfall of the regime! I am not an infidel! 

The crowd was charged with incredible momentum, a feeling that this could be the end of the Morsi regime, the beginning, even, of a second revolution. We passed the landmarks of my own average neighborhood, transformed for the day into a parade ground: Tawheed wa Nour (the Salafi department store), City Drinks, my favorite bakery. My friends pointed out, walking beside us, the famous activist Alaa Abd el Fattah, who was jailed by Mubarak and then put, as a civilian, in military court and refused to speak. By the time we crossed the Nile onto the island of Gezira, it was dark, and the exotically named dinner boats glittered on the river below. Soon enough, we'd crossed the island and arrived at the statue of Saad Zaghloul, nationalist hero of the 1919 revolution, that guards the entrance to Qasr el-Nil Bridge. His outstretched hand points across to Tahrir. Without warning, we found ourselves standing beneath a giant Egyptian flag unfurled by fellow demonstrators, and this was the way we began the final distance to the square.

I wasn't sure what to expect in Tahrir itself on a day like this. The smell of tear gas hung faintly on the bridge -- would there be more when we got to the square? Fortunately, we found out shortly that it was from a peripheral confrontation with police behind the Semiramis hotel. After crossing the bridge, the road narrowed and the crowd thickened. Thousands more were already in Tahrir, having arrived with marches from other neighborhoods of Cairo beginning around noon. The darkness was punctuated with camera flashes and bursts of fireworks. The speeches on the stage erected in the center of the square, amidst the tents of those conducting the sit-in, were furious. But the prevailing mood was strangely celebratory, perhaps because people felt again the excitement they felt on January 25 and yearned to feel again. It was a revolutionary reunion: my friends kept bumping into people they new, somehow, in the sea of thousands. We even saw a friend's middle-aged mother. I couldn't hear the speeches, but we navigated a path through the throngs and found an open spot, one of my male friends holding his hands out to the sides to prevent any harassment. Fortunately (but perhaps not surprisingly given the demographics of the crowd), we girls experienced not a single incident of even the mildest verbal harassment during the march or within Tahrir Square itself. And notably, there was not a single policeman in sight, something that must have been a political calculation. There would be no images from that night of officers in their riot gear throwing tear gas canisters, and of boys hurling rocks back at them  -- the image people here have become accustomed to. We stood in the opening we'd found and ate warm sweet potatoes from one of the galabiyya-clad street vendors. Beyond that, there was not much for us to do. After an hour, we walked home.

This is a video I took as we walked into Tahrir Square at the end of the march. The people are shouting  "Freedom, freedom, freedom." 


I was glad I had gone. While we were marching, I had tried to compare the experience with political activism back home. Egyptians, since the revolution, don't go to the streets to protest as a symbolic gesture of objection, but empowered by the belief - and proof, in fact - that they can overthrow a government. I can't imagine, of course, thousands of middle-class, levelheaded Americans marching through the streets of Washington calling for the downfall of the U.S. government (nor, of course, would I want to). But the nascent post-revolutionary Egypt is still unstable enough that going to the streets may very well shape the entire country's direction for years to come.