My Heart Breaks for Egypt

I have left Cairo, but it seems Cairo will not leave me. The truth is, my heart is breaking for Egypt.

Yesterday I wrote paragraph after paragraph of the kind of personal essay material I’ve been writing for the past year. But the poetry of it seems wrong. What is happening is horrible and there is no way to write about it “right” that isn’t simple and raw.  The whole year (the year I was in Egypt) seems pointless, wasted. It’s even more painful to watch the country fracture into smaller and smaller pieces, each calling the others traitors or infidels, when I think about the moments and hope and promise (January 25, February 11, June 30). All this “eid wahda” – “one hand” – stuff: it seems so empty now. Yes, I felt a pit in my stomach on July 3, but it didn’t seem like a point of no return. Now more than 700 people are dead in two days, and it does.

Certainly democracy is a pipe dream, but even peaceful coexistence seems far-fetched. Why would anyone think participation in the political system means anything now? There is no game in town except the army, and they will make sure that doesn’t change. In any case, it seems that no one’s hands are untarnished.

Of course, I’m no longer in Cairo. And for the first time, I am really glad I am not. It’s not the lack of security that makes me suddenly glad to be far away, but this: How can anyone go about the day with such searing divisions hanging between friends, neighbors, colleagues? Even between those so-called liberals, the kind of people I knew or who lived in my building or shopped in the same stores and ate in the same cafes: Some stand by the military and some have changed their mind. For those, I think it must be a bitter pill to swallow. But how do you just look the people around you on the street in the eye and carry on? It’s no longer just a matter of political differences, but a matter of moral conscience.

How can Egypt possibly move forward? How can anyone forgive or forget?

On Wednesday morning, I woke up early for work and scrolled groggily through Facebook statuses about beaches and babies and haircuts. Then suddenly the Arabic posts appeared, a lot of them all at once. The order had finally been executed to clear the sit-ins.

Any elegance, any grace that had attached itself to politics – the kind of healthy and hopeful protest that saw Cairokee weaving through Tahrir singing about the Voice of Freedom or ballet dancers pirouetting against the Culture Minister on a makeshift stage outside his compound – had dissolved. In its place was something ugly and divisive, mangled bodies, a video of an APC being thrust off a bridge and pelted with stones, pleas for mercy from doctors at a field hospital showered with bullets.

I saw a photo Tweeted from Mostafa Mahmoud mosque in Mohandiseen, where Morsi supporters began to reassemble after their previous camp was bulldozed. I checked the article several times – how was it possible? This was the spot where twice I had met friends as they joined the secularist protests against the Morsi regime. It was also where there was a Cilantro cafe where I’d done a Princeton interview with a well-groomed teenager with a designer purse. Nearby was the new H&M store where I’d gone shopping just before I left; the BMW showroom where Seeko and I once pretended to be customers. I tried to imagine a gun battle on the leafy streets, or empty and barricaded and covered with debris. I couldn’t.

I also heard reports of the Nahda Square sit-in being dispersed. Its human contents were spilling out – some limping and bloody, others bearing weapons – into surrounding neighborhoods. What lay between my calm pocket of Dokki and Cairo University were the Orman Botanical Gardens. I’ve written about them before -- dry, overgrown, forgotten –  and, since July 3, guarded with a tank. “Bulldozers in Orman” I read somewhere, and the flower show I went to just a few months ago floated into my mind. There were waterfalls for your backyard, exotic cactuses, and even a man with a cage full of doll-like Persian cats. Families strolled in the aisles planning their gardens in the suburbs and young guys dashed around with wheelbarrows offering to take your purchases (or you) for a ride.

I also remembered how Magdy had promised me, when I first started seeing him, that we would take a picnic to Orman. Later I reminded him, but by this point the protests had started. “Of course,” he had said, “We’ll go after the revolution.”

The relationship ended before that revolution did. Now there were guns and bulldozers.

I’ve had such a hard time reconciling these images because things like this just don’t happen in places I know. They happen far away, where anonymous people kill another anonymous people.

On July 1, the military had just made its ultimatum, and the air was tense but hopeful. Change was coming. I told Magdy I was nervous about the military’s intentions – was it really interested in democracy? I doubted it.

The only way left to go is Left, he told me. We’ve tried everything else.

Like so many people I talked to in those days, he was sure that the military had learned its boundaries. SCAF rule had been tried before, and it hadn’t worked. The people had spoken again, and this time they would be heard.

But who are the people, really? I think this latest episode has shown that the people who revolted on January 25, 2011 were not just one thing rising up in harmony against a shriveled autocracy. The harmony was, it seems, a tragic illusion that could only last so long. There is no consensus about what Egypt should be.

The devolution into smaller and smaller factions is horrible. ElBaradei leaves and is accused of being a traitor by his own Dostour Party and the Tamarod Movement – all those bright young people who led millions of people to the street and now refuse to acknowledge that the military has betrayed their ideals, defending the military’s actions with a stomach-turning absolutism. Or maybe their ideals are different than we thought.

What’s next? Baradei & his cohort have made their exit. It seems he thought this was finally his moment, after rejecting a few others. Turns out he was wrong. Likely he’ll try again later. Who else is waiting in the wings? Nobody, it seems this time. In any case, I can’t imagine there is anyone who could unite factions so rudely torn apart  

At work, I plugged in my headset and streamed OnTV, a post-revolution satellite channel that was supposed to represent the new wave of independent media. Instead, it is a new kind of propagandistic drivel. Before we could ridicule it, but now it made me nauseous. Carrying a weapon is an undemocratic act, said one of the pundits knowingly, before correcting himself to specify civilians. All these people are carrying weapons. They’re terrorists. Of course the military must respond with force. Then came the West-bashing segment, a favorite. The West wants to compare us to Rwanda! Said a voice off-screen. They issue statements comparing our clashes to the Tutus and the Hutsis, he added incredulously, mixing up the names of the tribes. Dealing with the Egyptian people as if they’re a savage people?! This is not acceptable. Ah, racism to stoke the fire.  A little later in the programming, the presenter brought up the burning of a police station in Kerdasa. A handful of conscripts were killed. There should be a public funeral for these martyrs of duty and honor! he proclaimed, lauding them for fighting attacks that were the utmost of horror and ugliness. The tagline at the corner of the screen read: The people’s word against extremism.

I had to shut it off. The whole year I lived suddenly felt like a sunny anomaly in a pressure cooker destined for incineration. Was this what lay below the surface all along, waiting for the right moment to bubble up?

As I closed my eyes to sleep, a giant airbrushed portrait of El Sisi floated before my eyes. It was unfurled – one of three – across the façade of the villa across the square from my apartment. He stared (not quite at me, but slightly averted) into the distance, his expressionless face and uniformed chest floating on an empty white background. I tried to block it out.

Goodbyes

It has been a week now since I started my new job, my new life. I'm in Atlanta -- househunting, driving to Whole Foods, and laying out my business casual attire. My job at The Carter Center was the one I wanted, and keeps me connected to Egypt. I didn't want to let go completely, but even though I sit at my desk writing memos about political protests in Tahrir and Rabaa El Adaweya and wiring money to consultants in our field office in Zamalek, in some ways I couldn't feel farther away. I put up one of my favorite posters on my desk, the pink one that reads: "Without the 'teh marbouta' [the feminine ending], the country is not whole." Beside it is the piece of white computer paper with my name written in calligraphy as a flower, a slightly crumpled memento from my day in Tripoli, Lebanon last summer. I vacillate between relief at the clean break I made with Egypt, leaving the emotions behind in my apartment on Medan El Mesaha and quickly slipping into a 9-5 routine -- and flashes of regret or anxiety that my life is suddenly so much more mundane.

The weeks before I left Egypt, I sometimes cried at night because I was worried about losing my sense of adventure. I felt the late nights in slightly seedy cafes with wisps of shisha smoke and little glass cups of tea already slipping into the past; the anticipation just before dusk as I waited for the azan to sound and the fasters tear open their plastic bags of juice; the walks across Qasr El Nil or 15 May Bridge, the Nile's grime hidden below a glistening surface. I remembered my first few months in Cairo, how I had struggled to form close friendships with other people. Now I wonder how I will ever find people again who understand me so well.

I had thought it would be more jarring, the sudden transition to America. Of course, I did marvel at the broad, sterile sidewalks (no feral kitties here), the cars gliding along in straight lines and pedestrians paused obediently at crosswalks. I was also (and still am, 10 days later) giddy about the food -- quesadillas, mac 'n cheese, apricot beer, veggie burgers -- everything seemed to take on new significance. At lunch with a friend in Washington, I gleefully photographed my dessert pizza covered in raspberries and mascarpone cheese.

The first night was fitful. I heard a plane and immediately made a sarcastic note to myself that the military was once again on an inane power trip. I dreamt of demonstrations and tanks barreling down the streets -- more dramatically, in fact, than anything I actually experienced in Cairo. Two days later, I was sitting in the shampoo chair at a hip salon in Washington. MSNBC was on, and though I could hardly hear the pundits' voices, "Cairo Clashes" was scrawled at the bottom of the screen. The day after I had returned, El-Sisi had called on Egyptians to go to the streets again to give the army a special mandate to "fight terrorism". Now those rallies, a massive celebration of the military, were underway. I remembered the party I attended before the coup, before he became a national hero, where I'd met an archaeologist who claimed to be El-Sisi's nephew, and cracked a half-smile. I dipped my head back. As the hairdresser shampooed me, I was brought back to my last couple of nights in Cairo. I had sat with Ada on the roof of El Tonsy hotel, surrounded by high-rises and a moonlit Nile, a cantaloupe shisha between us. El Tonsy and King Hotel, a few blocks away, were crappy hotels with beautiful rooftops where expats sought refuge and Stellas. We had walked afterward to City Drink, where I'd taken a drastic step and ordered kiwi juice with Snickers, rather than the usual strawberry with Snickers. My favorite juice man Noss, in his orange and blue uniform, had insisted we take a photo together. The other City Drink employees gathered around: I'd been a regular.

I'd met up with Seeko sometime toward midnight and driven to Khan El Khalili. It had the air of a circus, rippling with energy -- bright lights and fat ladies and mustachioed men thrusting their wares out into the alleys of the bazaar. I thought of my first trip, in 2006, when I'd proudly carried home a bag of dried hibiscus leaves so I could brew karkadei at home (I never did). As Seeko and I drove back through Cairo, toward Mohandiseen where I could enjoy one last order of cheese sambousek at Abu Ramez, the late-night classics were on the radio. The deep voice of Mohamed Abdel Wahab crooned into the darkness... Patience and faith are the paradise of the oppressed.

The next day, my last, I wondered what to do. I hadn't planned out a last day, and certainly not one with most of my friends evacuated and a country hanging very barely onto stability. I went to Zamalek to see Dr. Iman, the head of CASA, and my teacher Nermeen. There were no students, because they'd all been sent home. Nermeen told me about a US scheme to set up a shadow government with Morsi, warned me not to marry a Muslim man, and made me promise to watch plenty of Ramadan mosalsalat so I wouldn't forget my Arabic. I had invited my friends that evening to break their fast on a felucca. The place we usually went, Dok Dok, was in Garden City in front of the Four Seasons. But an hour or so before eftar, my friend Farag called to warn me that cars were halted on the Corniche: Morsi supporters were marching to a sit-in at the American Embassy nearby and gunshots had been heard in Tahrir not far off.

So we met in Zamalek, where things were quiet as usual. I stopped first at Zooba, purveyor of "nouveau Egyptian" fare, to pick up some pita sandwiches. When I got to the Corniche, a dozen friends were already there -- some my oldest friends (Yehya and Ryme) and others friends I'd made just in the last few weeks. There was an unusual cool breeze on the Nile as our boat puttered out from the island. I stood on the bow of the boat, dancing with my friends to Cheb Khaled and Amr Diab. I felt a sense of contentment I hadn't expected: it felt like the right time to leave, but surrounded by good friends.

Back at my apartment, Ryme and a few of her friends sat with me as I added the last few things. The memories of my dinner parties, laughs, romances flitted through my mind. They seemed far off. The life of the place was long gone -- it had seemed cavernous and empty for a while. Downstairs, Nasser was on duty, the soft-spoken, moon-faced doorman in his pressed blue uniform shirt. He had been my favorite. He stood outside as we packed my suitcases into Yehya's trunk. In his fashion, he told me quietly to travel safely, and goodbye.

From the backseat of Yehya's car, I watched the giant billboards advertising Ramadan mosalsalat fly by. This year's slogan was Ramadan kareem -- el sanadi, Ramadan dream: "Happy Ramadan -- This year, Ramadan dream." It didn't make sense, but it rhymed. As we crossed the 6 October Bridge, a crowd of young men came running in the opposite direction. A few were waving banners. What would my last night in Egypt be without driving past demonstrations? I thought. We drove on, the traffic undeterred.

My last few hours, a bit poetically, were at Yehya and Nada's. This is where I'd begun my year, and where I was ending it. We ate nuts and drank juice on the roof, and Yehya told me I had grown into a balady accent -- I spoke like a peasant, in other words.

I sailed through the airport, my overweight bags and expired visa both overlooked. The immigration officer had scowled at my residency permit, which had clearly ended on June 30 (what a day to go the Mogamma!) -- or maybe it was my Israeli stamp on the next page -- then looked up and expressionlessly told me to have a good day. At the gate, Adel Imam's series was playing. I wasn't following it, but it seemed an appropriate send-off: the ageless Egyptian megastar, impeccably toupeed, acting his way through the wee hours of the morning. Just before boarding was announced, my last dawn call to prayer sounded over the airport PA system -- Allahu akbar allaaaahu akbar! I stood up and walked onto the plane.

Dokki Walk

Going for a walk in Cairo is neither satisfying exercise nor relaxing -- the sidewalk is broken or piled with trash and prowled by mangy cats; greasy young men intercept pedestrians on motorbikes. But in going for a walk in Cairo, every step carries a memory.

Today, my second-to-last day in this city, I found myself with little to do. The cleaning lady had shuffled off in my old sandals with a bulging bag of my old clothes and encouragement to return to Egypt, with God's permission. So I decided to walk, something I never do here without a purpose, though I have often thought of it. Both in Barrytown and Princeton, walks cleared my mind; in Cairo, I worried too much about my meditative silence being broken by catcalls - Hey honey! - or simply the inconvenience of sweating through all my clothes.

I first walked south from Medan El Mesaha to the Orman Botanical Garden. I walked past Metro Supermarket and the teen shoki man with his cart of prickly pears. National security guards in black swung bags of food in anticipation of eftar. When I reached the tall, wrought iron gates of Orman, I found them shut. The road was blocked and a tank parked outside, flag flying and gun pointed up the street. Last summer, a friend from CASA had led a few of us through the park in search of the elusive hoopoe bird, which bears a certain magical significance in Arab mythology. We had found the bird, but also that most of the plants were wilted or overgrown, the lily pond clouded over with algae. Like the zoo or the buildings of downtown, Orman preserved only whispers of its former glory. This spring, I had attended the annual flower exhibition in the garden, where vendors set up tents filled with landscaping devices like fountains and waterfalls and potted fruit trees. What lay beneath was hidden.

I turned around and walked back up Mesaha Street, returning to the square. I strolled past Pizza Hut, where I had waited in front of the TV with Sarah last summer for the presidential election results to be announced. Then, Cilantro -- the upscale coffee shop where I had once sat with Adam and brainstormed a name for this blog; and then, in April, where I first met Magdy when he came to pay me to translate his screenplay.

I kept walking northward, past the rotted guava man and the basket man, past the Ramadan tent erected by Seoudi supermarket to provide for the exploding demand for dried apricots and nuts during the holiday season. Then it was Miriam and Robin's old apartment building, where we had ended the summer crouched on Oriental carpets stretched out on the roof -- looking out at the Nile, sipping Stellas, and trying to envision the year that lay ahead.

I reached Medan Galaa, where I saw the first APC roll into my neighborhood on the morning of July 3, the day the military would overthrow President Morsi. Then I crossed the bridge into Zamalek, remembering the first time I was coaxed (not unwillingly) into attending my first march back in November. Crossing the same bridge we'd been nearly caught under a huge Egyptian flag, as the crowds surged forward chanting horeya, horeya, horeya -- freedom. On the wall of the Opera complex, two slogans sat side by side. La lel felool, read one, No to the remnants of the old  (Mubarak) regime. And next to it: Erhal ya kharouf -- Get lost, you sheep. They embodied the political transformations of the last year, since I arrived in Egypt: one government abolished, then another. No slogan called for anyone in particular to take their place.

Eventually I reached the entrance to a park that faces the Opera. The gate was wide open, and I approached to purchase my ticket from one of the several men sitting idly nearby.
-La, closed, said one, making a gesture of finality.
-But the gate is wide open, sir, I pointed out.
-No, we are preparing for eftar! It is almost time!
-Sir, eftar is not for another two and a half hours. Can I please come in?
-Go to that other park over there! 

Defeated again in a typically nonsensical but perfectly friendly Cairo moment. I sat at the waterfront, looking out at the burned-out NDP building on the other side of the Nile. The feluccas sit idle, awaiting sundown so commerce could begin in earnest. A few eager couples held hands on the benches behind me. I sat for a long time -- reading, writing, thinking -- moving through the  other spaces in Cairo I knew I would miss.

A Second Ramadan, A New Regime

You know it's Ramadan in Cairo when you come home after 2 in the morning and you're not the straggler but the party pooper. Everyone else will be out until the muezzin heralds the dawn and the tables that line the streets are packed up, shops shutter, and people crawl back home to sleep. Ramadan this year has been somewhat different for me than last year -- a different set of friends, good enough language skills to watch the mosalsalat, or TV series, that come out specially for the holiday -- but the sense that every day is special is still there. Yesterday was a quintessential day (or, more properly, night) in this other city that never sleeps.

I woke up early for Ramadan, around 10:30, and went for a walk around Downtown. Tahrir Square, as I could see from afar, was still closed to traffic, with tents littering the center and tanks lined up alongside the Egyptian Museum as an imposing deterrent. At the same time, though, Downtown was doing a brisk business: the traffic was impossibly dense, as usual, shops were crowded, and the beggars were out in full force. Emerging from Shorouk bookstore in Talaat Harb Square, I noticed that a giant sign had been strung between two of the graying colonial buildings: Hayzaboon Go Home, it read (Go Home, Ogress), with a picture of the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson. I had previously asked a friend why so much hatred is directed at her personally when, after all, she is taking direction from Washington. Although I suspect it's less complicated than this, he said that she is seen as trying to give orders to Egypt, as opposed to simply announcing US positions.

Sign in Talaat Harb telling the US Ambassador to leave

 Leaving Talaat Harb, I went to meet my friend Manar and her sister in Sayyeda Zeinab. Alongside the Sayyeda mosque a dizzying market of Ramadan fawanees (lanterns) has been erected in the street. The mosque itself was bustling, and we stepped inside to see the shrine to the Prophet's granddaughter. As is typical, there is a large metal tomb with glass panels that allows visitors to see inside a coffin-like piece covered in fabric. Men enter on one side, women on the other, and they are separated by a wall. The ladies' area was very crowded, with many simply sitting on the floor praying, and others grasping the side of the tomb.

We walked from Sayyeda Zeinab to Ibn Tulun, my favorite of Cairo's mosques. Usually, it's just a few tourists there, but perhaps because of Ramadan carpets had been laid out for prayer. As we sat discussing my friends' decision to wear hijab (late and against their father's wishes until a cousin defied the family custom), a sheikh standing just a few yards away at the mihrab picked up a microphone and began the azan. These days there is no need to climb the minaret -- his voice boomed throughout the neighborhood.

With Manar at Ibn Tulun

For our final stop, we went to Masr El Qadima, the old Christian quarter. I've been many times in the past year, but this was a first for my friends who have lived their entire lives in Cairo. As we approached the Hanging Church, the bawab at the door didn't glance at me but demanded the identity cards of my scarf-wearing friends. We close at 5, he and another insisted reluctantly. You're too late. But it's only 4:30? my friend pointed out nicely. They hemmed and hawed for a while before letting us in, clearly suspicious of two Muslim girls who wanted to visit a church. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a problem in a country that publicly prides itself on religious coexistence.

I walked down the street behind the church to Darb 1718, the artists' space where I have attended many a gallery show and music festival. I was attending my first Egyptian yoga class, a bit late in the game. Lotus Studio occupies a rooftop above a gallery, nestled between pottery studios and glassworks. I took a mat and lay on my back, staring up at swaths of rainbow cloth criss-crossed over strips of blue sky. The sound of ommm from the instructor's CD blended with the voice of a sheikh somewhere down below. Perhaps he was warming up for sundown as he invoked the fatiha - the first verse of the Qur'an. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Owner of the Day of Judgment.... And there was also the occasional drone of a jet passing overhead.

I drifted in and out of consciousness during the class, running through my memories of Cairo. I had come to clear my mind, but it rushed with the people and places I would soon be leaving. It has been a week since I bought my ticket home to America, and since then I've alternated between denial, wistfulness, and resigned confidence that the time has come. In 9 days I'll be back in the States, and in 10 I will be waking up and going to work at my new office. The last two months here, since my purpose for being in Cairo ended, have been especially strange. My friends left and I made new ones. I began a new romance. The president of the country was overthrown. Picturing the very normal kind of moments I had before the sudden political upheaval seemed almost absurd.

I remembered my visit to Port Said with my roommates in mid-June. We had gone mostly because of the city's history -- both recent and distant. It was a Friday and we'd taken an early bus from Cairo, arriving just around prayer time. So we had sat at a seafood restaurant on the beach, watching families arrive with their swimming gear and umbrellas. People seemed charmed and surprised that a few tourists had made it up to their city. Since the soccer stadium massacre in February 2012, and the ongoing civil disobedience campaign that followed, Port Said has been seen by many in Cairo as a potentially dangerous outpost. Of course, it didn't used to be that way. Rudyard Kipling once said: "If you truly wish to find someone you have known and who travels, there are two points on the globe you have to but sit and wait, sooner or later your man will come there: the docks of London and Port Said." We had taken the ferry across the Suez Canal from the Port Said side of the city to the Port Fuad side, where we wandered among the old Canal Authority buildings -- neat brick rowhouses for employees, painted in lovely pastels. I found them, like other half-kept shadows of the colonial era in Egypt, a bit eerie.

Ultras graffiti (for Port Said's Masry team) 

Canal Authority houses in Port Fuad, in front of the modern flats

Then I remembered the week my friend Nav and I ironically adopted the motto YOCO - you only Cairo once. In this vein, we had taken a gay Bruneian Al Azhar student (yes, apparently these exist) and gone to the Graffiti nightclub in the Four Seasons. There were, indeed, aquariums inside, but no cover on Tuesdays. It was a strange mix of rich teenagers in Ralph Lauren and 40-year-old hotel guests nursing cocktails alone at the bar. A day or so later we had gone to the Agricultural Museum, a campus of seven or so century-old buildings laid out around a scruffy lawn. It covers topics ranging from "pharaonic agriculture" to "cotton" to "Chinese-Egyptian cooperation." This last one really threw us for a loop because it was just a collection of photographs of happy Chinese people and pieces of jade. But the main scientific museum was fascinating. Giant wooden panoramas depicted life in an Egyptian village -- in the 1950s or earlier. Statistics referred to agricultural production during the United Arab Republic, which, it should be noted, was dissolved in 1961 (though Egypt used the name for 10 more years). A yellowed placard identified a balloon-like specimen as a camel stomach, and containers of yogurt produced by the Faculty of Agriculture probably in the Nasser era looked unmoved behind glass.

Decades-old camel stomach on display at the Agricultural Museum

Beautiful display of useless information -- pests banned from Egypt in the 1960s

As the omm continued in the background, I fast-forwarded to the days just before June 30. Everything in Cairo was still in its place, people went about their daily business whether or not they planned to overthrow the government within the week. The night before the protests broke, I was on the set of the Ramadan series Al-Da'eya (The Preacher). Magdy, who was acting in it, had arranged for me and a few friends to tag along. We drove with his buddies to the outskirts of Giza, where the city ends and the villages begin. The studio, alongside one of the canals that irrigates the farms of the Delta, had erected a sha'by wedding tent (like that of my friend Sofia) -- only this one was filled with hundreds and hundreds of local extras. Styrofoam trays of fake hashish and empty Stella beer bottles were laid out before them. We were perched just outside the tent, watching the action on a monitor alongside the director. Through a crack, we could see two of the actors at a table. Eight or ten times we watched the scene repeated, the climax coming when Magdy went to the front, took the microphone, and denounced the wedding of the woman he loved to another man. However, we couldn't actually hear the dialogue: it's recorded separately, afterward. An assistant brought us mango juice, and then, when the filming was over, Magdy took us inside the tent to meet his fellow actors and a crowd of mahraganat singers in baggy jeans, baseball caps, sunglasses (one with American flag print), and lots of hair gel (remember my post about my favorite song, Haty Bosa ya Bet? This is those guys...).

On the set of Al-Da'eya, with Magdy and DJ Sadat

Bent over and grasping my knees, the yoga teacher told me my mind was wandering. I was thinking of the voice of Fairuz drowned out by the sound of jets overhead in the days after the military took over. Cairo had an emptiness then, even when people were out in the streets. It was Ramadan that changed this, and brought Cairo back to a real sense of normalcy. I ate the first night of Ramadan with Magdy's family in Maadi. His mom had prepared an Algerian specialty, sweet beef soaked in the juices of apricots, pears, and prunes.

I thought of the Muslim Brotherhood protests that had marched past my window in the last two weeks, now and again, usually not more than 75 -- but most recently as many as 300. The men marching separately from the women. I would be Skyping, or packing, and hear shouts outside. The signs are in English, as Seeko noted, things along the lines of No to the coup! He said this was because they were appealing to the outside world, not to Egyptians.

I had hosted my own eftar on Monday night. For the first time, there were only three or four Americans, and perhaps a dozen Egyptians. I had tried to make grilled fruit kebabs, with only marginal success. My Egyptian friends were horrified: You never experiment on people who are fasting! they told me.


At the end of my yoga class, I rolled up my mat and walked out into the poor neighborhood that surrounds the workshop. Skinny dogs prowl the mounds of trash that line the unpaved road. But it was dusk, and this lent the street a beauty that it rarely sees. A crescent moon had risen to its place behind the mosque across the street and people of various shapes and sizes were already seated at the long tables that wealthier people or restaurants set up outdoors during Ramadan to serve the poor. The food lay before them -- they were just awaiting the voice of the muezzin. Haram aleeky! whispered a man fixing a car, We're fasting! This is the kind of toned down verbal harassment one gets in Ramadan from men who know they should be focusing on God instead of girls.

The metro platform at Mar Girgis was nearly empty. Just the odd shuffler hurrying to food before the call to prayer. Then came the sound of the azan, and even though I wasn't fasting, a sigh of relief came over me. A train pulled up in the opposite direction - headed for Helwan. Through the windows, I saw each passenger put a plastic cup to his lips nearly in unison. They drank juice - apricot, mostly, or tamarind. As the train chugged away, a trail of plastic cups flew from the windows, floating to rest on the track.

I made my way back to Dokki for a final Yemeni dinner with my friend Chris, who is leaving for vacation in Italy. I tried to make a list of places I would miss here, and this restaurant was near the top of my list. But the night had just begun. Back in downtown, I went for the second time to a concert of the Tanbura band (see a post from February or March) -- the voice of the boisterous canal workers of Port Said. At midnight, we headed for a felucca, the sailboat kind, which drifts southward from its dock outside the Four Seasons without blasting music or flashing neon lights. Cairo looks most beautiful from a felucca by night, when both its traffic and its grime disappear.

It was an early sohour last night, before 2am, from Abu Ramez El-Soury the shawarma dealer in Mohandiseen. Seeko was weighing whether he should participate in the protests planned for today, Friday. Both sides were expected to be out, though in different places. The problem, he said, was that unlike Tahrir, the area surrounding the Ikhwan sit-in at Rabaa El Adaweya (more than two weeks now) is residential. And those residents are fed up with people eating, urinating, and throwing their trash in the streets around their homes. If they get angry enough, this could be a pretext for the military to intervene and clear everyone out. If that happens, who knows what is next. For the Brotherhood, this is the final battle, he said. 

The Army Flexes its Muscles

The marches planned for Sunday afternoon (July 7) by both sides kicked off in the early afternoon. A crowd of 150 or so Morsi supporters passed under Dokki Bridge on their way south around 1:30pm (or so I was told) and then sometime after 4pm a larger but not huge anti-Brotherhood march passed through on its way to Tahrir. Perhaps it was because many people had returned to work, confident that the regime had already changed; perhaps for others, the fear of violent clashes kept them home. As it turned out, the daytime was peaceful. I sat in my living room refreshing Twitter as usual, the TV once again tuned to OnTV (although forget trying to get any coverage of MB events there). The skies were overwhelmed however, with the blast of military jets flying in formation around the city. They seemed to have practically landed on top of my building, the noise was so loud. Some emitted trails of color -- red, white, and black, the colors of the Egyptian flag. We are large and in charge! this brash display of military force seemed to say.

The military sends a patriotic reminder (view from my living room)

I walked a few hours later the 2 blocks to the local Sudanese restaurant with my friend Chris, the sole American friend of mine left in Dokki. There were other foreigners in the restaurant as well, but I found myself being surprised by this. (What?! There are more of us here?!) After dinner, we  sat in a balady cafe nearby (on Tahrir Street) with our friend Shedid, who had scored a visa for Qatar and planned to travel soon, but suddenly decided to rent and reopen a restaurant downtown with a friend instead.

As soon as we'd ordered our tea, of course, we plunged into politics. Shedid was more skeptical of what had transpired than most of the rest of our Egyptian friends. Democracy is practice, he told us, suggesting that the country had not found its groove yet. Of course I wanted Morsi to go, he said. But I thought he should go via elections. I didn't vote for him, but a lot of people did. Shedid said he had been against Morsi's overthrow until the last speech the now-deposed president gave, in which he vowed to protect his legitimacy with blood (al-shar'eyya bel-damm). Now that was really weird, he said. Shedid and Chris agreed that most of the people out protesting were not, in fact, the poor -- the people who have not benefited from any recent regime, past or present. They were the middle class. The poor, they said, do not have the means to go out marching: if they're in the square, they are more likely there to sell flags and buttons to the protesters than anything else.

There was a small TV mounted in one corner of the ahwa, as these places are called, and it was broadcasting scenes from Tahrir Square. We noticed that the on-screen headlines and labels had been added in English as well as the original Arabic: "Tahrir Now". This was a new messaging technique, in tandem with the #notacoup Twitter & Facebook movement, to cancel out the image cast of recent events by the West. Most of the other patrons, old men, paid little attention to the screen, though -- they were far more engrossed in their backgammon matches.

We asked Shedid about the increasing xenophobia in Egypt. He shook his head and told us that there were always foreigners here, but they didn't know as much about Egypt and didn't speak Arabic very well. I had always thought of our excellent language skills as an asset in combatting stereotypes, but if people are already suspicious, he suggested, they could draw the wrong conclusions from our Arabic. (After all, who wants to learn Arabic except spies?...)

A wide-eyed young man with crooked teeth who has sitting at the table across from us motioned Chris over. Soon, we were all huddled around the same table, along with another American who had overheard us and recognized his own kind. The wide-eyed man was a diehard Tamarod supporter. This is a true revolution! he insisted, We are just in a transitional period, you'll see. He pointed to the clashes initiated by Morsi supporters since the overthrow. But you have to put yourself in the position of the Ikhwan, Shedid told him: What would you do? The guy grinned widely -- he was excited for the debate. No, no, I could never be in their position. Those guys sitting in at Rabaa El Adaweya are totally convinced! There is no way to work with them. 

It seems that no one really wants to be the one to work with 'the other side' -- and what the sides are has, of course, changed. When it was announced briefly on Saturday that El Baradei would be Prime Minister, liberals rejoiced -- and then Al Nour, the Salafi party, withdrew and refused to work with the new government. El Baradei's name was withdrawn. And then Tamarod refused to accept anyone else. Of course the pro-Morsi people refused to accept anyone at all. This kind of battle of the wills epitomizes the political process since the revolution, really. Pluralism is discussed, but no one wants to take the leap.

I woke up early the next morning, Monday, and rode with Magdy and several of his friends to Haram. In the shadow of the Pyramids, in a leafy villa inherited from his grandfather, Magdy's friend Taha has just opened a Chinese martial arts school and acupuncture clinic. The morning routine starts with qigong, which is what we had come for. The five of us spread out on the grass, the tip of the Great Pyramid peaking out behind the overgrown wall of the compound. Although the noises of the On the Run gas station next door and of a scratchily recorded call to prayer filtered in, I felt a great sense of serenity that seemed jarringly out of place with what was going on across the Nile. In about an hour, we moved through the Five Animal qigong routine, which involves stretches for various body muscles and organs repeated a few times over. Contorted into the snake, crouched on the ground with the arms stretched sideways over my head, I couldn't help smiling to myself about what an unexpected life I was living. I never imagined myself doing qigong at all, much less next to the Pyramids in the midst of a violent regime change. 

After we had finished, the guys began checking the news on their phones and the bubble was popped. Fifty-one Muslim Brotherhood supporters had been killed the night before in a single battle outside the Republican Guard compound where Morsi himself may or may not be held. Immediately everyone in the ether began pointing fingers of blame at one another. The optimists hoped that this was the worst of it, and the Ikhwan's supporters would give up and soon things would slip back to normal. The pessimists marked it the beginning of a slide to civil war. Monday morning did bring the first inklings of doubt about the military's methods (if not intentions) from some of the people who had been vigorously praising it before. One, for example, wrote on Facebook: I officially do not support either side. I cannot believe either fully, and there is too much blood. Another wrote: The SCAF has always acted in their best interest. Remember resorting to the army now will result in another decade of dictatorship. And another: What's happening now in Egypt is showing that the real dictator was never overthrown by the revolution. The army generals have been controlling this country since 1952... And today on the 7th of July the army massacred around 50 peaceful protesters of Morsi supporters and injured around 1000 under cover of completing the revolution, labeling them as terrorists and claiming to have liberated the human race, using fighter jets to draw hearts on the skies of Tahrir. And finally, another friend wrote that the overthrow of the MB regime by the army was the culmination of events beginning back in February 2011 when Mubarak stepped down. However, she asked, referring to the killings the day before, and all the other violence that had occurred in the course of the last 2.5 years: Is any one of us ready to bear the responsibility of all this blood before God? The criminal on any side should be arrested, not tortured or killed, just arrested and put to a fair civil trial. And the judiciary decides his fate, not he who carries a gun or rides a tank. 

I'm hesitant, however, to overstate the degree of doubt in the military. The prevailing sentiment is still that it and the people are "one hand." On Monday night, we drove past a line of tanks parked in Zamalek, outside the Gezira Sporting Club. There was nothing going on there, but no one could forget their presence. Other soldiers were running a roadblock in Garden City, outside the Four Seasons.

This morning I went to my favorite bakery to satisfy my craving for a hot dog croissant. (I have no idea why these do not exist in America -- they're ingenious.) The teenage girls working there asked if Miriam, a faithful customer, had finally left. When I said yes, they eyed me with pity and offered me half a warm date pastry just out of the oven. You're all alone now?! Take another! 

A few hours later, sometime mid-afternoon, I was sitting at my dining room table when I heard chanting outside. I looked out and first noticed that the villa across the square had replaced its large erhal (get lost) posters with portraits of El Sisi in his military regalia. (I have the keen sense that this is what people do when coups happen in movies! But in real life?)

In any event, what was going on outside was a pro-Morsi march -- a small, peaceful one, headed somewhere south toward Giza. I couldn't make out the slogans, besides Morsi, Morsi, but the marchers carried his picture and something along the lines of 'down with El-Sisi'. There couldn't have been more than 150 or so demonstrators, and business continued as normal around the square as they paraded by. What struck me, though, was that the march was gender-segregated: first the men, then the women, then a few families bringing up the rear. The women were all dressed in either khemar, the longer, extra-modest cousin of the hijab, or in full niqab.

Here, the beginning of the march (the men)

And here, the women, passing by the basket man underneath my window

When the chants faded, I went into the kitchen to make watermelon-mango juice. Nothing will match the fresh fruit and juices available in Cairo. I'm already having anticipatory nostalgia. 

When I went downstairs a little later for a grocery run, one of my building's security guys, a young man named Zakaria with the build of an American football player, stopped me. Did you see those crazy people?! he asked me. Those women -- he waved his hand across his face like a niqab. And they were chanting slogans against the ARMY!! Can you believe it!? I assured him I had both seen and heard them. He shook his head in disgust. 

The Aftermath

The morning after it all happened, we went outside to survey the scene. It was July 4, but the fireworks that had gone on all night were for something else. Dokki was back to normal, the streets crowded and shops open. Miriam and I walked to Versailles, the hairdresser, a few streets over, where the atmosphere was even more jovial than usual. The clients and stylists all greeted each other with open-armed congratulatory Mabrouks! and Allah yebarek feeks! -- and even Ya shabab al-sawra! (Youth of the revolution!). Over where the hair was being done, two stylishly dressed middle-aged women were indulging in a little history. Now King Farouk... da zaman gameel! said one, suggesting it was a glorious age. Zaman al-sheyaka! added the other -- the age of chicness! The first continued that she had been to Iran and everyone there was looking to Egyptian fashions. The second nodded knowingly. Alshan masr umm al donia! she said with triumph, using one of Egypt's favorite nicknames -- Because Egypt is the Mother of the World!  

Indeed it was a day of celebration for everyone who was out and about in the Mother of the World. The only person to suggest otherwise was one of the juice men at City Drink, who shook his head quietly and said: Morsi mosh khalas, Morsi isn't over yet. The young, conservatively dressed girls working in the friendly family bakery further down Tahrir St -- a shop I thought was likely to be a Brotherhood stronghold based on their aggressive broadcasting of religious channels --  told us how excited they were that the government had been overthrown. They hadn't gone to Tahrir because they, too, were afraid of harassment, but otherwise would have been thrilled. The newspaper man on the corner of Tahrir and Ali Ismail was also grinning broadly. He asked me where I was from, and I hesitated... I knew too well how all sides were casting the US as the villain in what had just occurred. I told him, though, and he didn't miss a beat. Do you think Egypt is nice? How about we switch and you stay here and I go live in America? Ah, the irony. 

Since everything seemed calm (the Brotherhood was in depressed shock over at Rabia El Adawiyya mosque in Nasr City), we decided to metro over to Abbaseyya to have our July 4 meal at our favorite Chinese restaurant there. The metro was packed as usual, and at Medan El Geish the goats and sheep marked for slaughter stood waiting as always. 

Later in the evening, friends who were being evacuated threw a hurried goodbye party. Of course, the conversation turned immediately to politics. Two Americans sitting nearby, a reporter and a PhD student, plunged into a heated "coup vs. not a coup" debate. The student thought that saying it was a coup was writing off the immense initiative of regular people in effecting change, and he found this really insulting to Egyptians. Indeed, the #notacoup campaign underway by anti-Morsi Egyptians is driven most, I think, by the fact that calling it a coup belittles people's sense of agency in bringing about the change -- regardless of the fact of the military deposing the president. Since people already think that foreign (American) hands are afraid of the will of the Egyptian people, the use of the term by foreigners seems only confirmation of their belief. The reporter, who had been in Tahrir the night of the speech, was much more critical. 

I turned to my friend Ahmed Farag, who had been with us during the speech, why people didn't seem to be more skeptical of the military's intentions. After all, many of these same people (including he) had been very active against SCAF rule during the events of late 2011. (Remember yaskot yaskot hokm el askar- Down with the rule of the military?)  The most common response I have heard to these doubts over the last few days is that the military cannot return to oppressive SCAF rule days because it has witnessed the great power that the people wield, and the people will not countenance military rule of that sort again. Farag shared my general mistrust of the military, but also stressed to me the 'importance of the streets.' This is what people will turn to again and again, he indicated, if more injustices are committed or another unsuitable government is installed, because it has been proven to work better than anything else. With one caveat: We know how to remove a bad ruler, he said, but we still have yet to figure out how to install a good one.

 I also asked him about the arrests of Brotherhood leaders and the shuttering of news channels seen as favoring the MB. The New York Times and others have suggested, I think convincingly, that these arrests could fuel a repetition of history, with the Brotherhood going back underground having seen that its attempt (if an incomplete one) at democracy ended in such failure. Farag agreed with me that the arrests were, on principle, concerning. However, he said, they were a necessary public safety measure to prevent the incitement of violence by firebrand clerics on TV or by MB leaders with keen organizing skills. Indeed many other people have also said this to me over the past few days: that by cutting off the head of the snake, the military is preventing pro-Morsi forces from carrying on a sustained, organized campaign of violence. Without leaders, they have suggested, violence cannot continue at a serious level for more than a week or two. Personally, I think these early moves will have much longer repercussions, but at least for now I seem to be very much in the minority. Then again, as an American, I have been advised to keep my mouth shut.

We sat on Will and Claire's balcony looking out at a familiar horizon. The bare outline of the Cairo Tower floated in the midnight haze, the outlines of the buildings along the Corniche not so far away barely visible. As usual, the (I'm sure unintentionally) suggestive logo of the Faisal Islamic Bank hovered before us, a glowing beacon suspended in the darkness. We found ourselves turning up the volume and singing along to Tom Petty's Free Fallin' and Old Crow Medicine Show's Wagon Wheel, a last and rather haphazard gathering of Americans sort of celebrating the 4th of July very far away from home. 

Back at our apartment, Miriam and I dozed for a few hours before the car arrived to pick her up. Two hours later, CASA came for Janelle. I answered the door to find Hany, the jolly assistant from the CASA office, ready to evacuate her. So, are you leaving, too? he asked me. No, I'm staying, I said, smiling faintly. He flashed me a big thumbs up. You are Egyptian!! he told me proudly. It was of course a compliment. (Egyptians, thrilled about what has happened but also used to a fairly high level of instability at this point, are completely bewildered as to why everyone is leaving...it must be a US government conspiracy to keep American citizens from sympathizing with the Egyptian people.) But there have been few days, in fact, when I felt less Egyptian. 

I fell back asleep and awoke around 10:45am to the drone of five military helicopters flying in formation past my bedroom window. Each dangled a large Egyptian flag. There was to be a major show of military force in the skies of Cairo that morning, and it continued at a pretty constant drum for more than 24 hours. I walked a few blocks to my friend Chris's apartment for pancakes and maple syrup. We weren't really sure what to do with ourselves but read social media. The salient thoughts in my mind were as follows:

1. As mentioned above, Islamists will decide that democracy has nothing to offer them and will return to a much more dangerous state of existence for everyone.

2. The military (any military, really) does not really have democratic interests in mind. Let's hope it is really in its interest to foster a quick transition to a good civilian government, but I think it will always make sure that people know that it is the real power broker (and could step in again if necessary). This isn't going to go away.

3. I'm perplexed as to why people are so sure that the military (with great popular support of course) deposing Morsi's government is a great victory over dependency on the West. Because while both sides cultivate anti-Western rhetoric and the US was working with the Brotherhood inasmuch as its members were the elected government of Egypt, it is the military that is the most indebted to the United States. $1.3 billion in military aid is no small potatoes. 

Later on the afternoon of the 5th, I was in the car with Magdy on the way to have dinner with his family in Maadi, in an apartment that looks out on the infamous Tora Prison (where Mubarak is imprisoned and now Brotherhood leaders are being interrogated). On the Maadi Corniche, we passed a bold display of military tanks outside the Constitutional Court where Adli Mansour had recently been sworn in as the new president. We ate rather quickly and returned to the living room, where extended family were gathered around the TV and Magdy's dad, in his galabiyya and smoking his shisha, presided over the scene. There were clashes on the 6 October Bridge. The camera was trained on a narrow part of the bridge, playing graining images of people - were they the military? the police? protesters? from which side? - running up and down and throwing rocks. Briefly, the channels shifted to the pro-Morsi gathering around Rabiat El Adawiyya to show Mohamed Badie, Supreme Guide of the MB, giving a fiery speech to his supporters. He denied that he had been arrested and refused the return of military rule. Relatives brought out cheesecake and sweets, and Magdy's mom brought out a giant cake printed with the Egyptian flag. 

After dinner, we drove Magdy's aunt to her home in Haram, where children were out in the streets playing on swings and merry-go-rounds and there was something of a carnival in the air. In Dokki, at my own apartment, the doormen had locked the front doors in the off chance that the University clashes would spread to our neighborhood. I talked with them for awhile, and they assured me that although there was darb nar ashwa'ey (random fire) in some places, Medan El Mesaha would always be safe, inshallah. They assured me that they were there to protect me. Later we passed by friends in Zamalek, which was quiet and balmy as usual. Like everywhere else, we ate nuts and fruit and watched TV. The same scenes on the 6 October Bridge, and the University, and in Alexandria, played over and over. Or perhaps they weren't the same, it was hard to say. All the little figures seemed to be moving in slow motion. 

That night, the thrum of jets soaring overhead mingled with the crackling voice of Fairuz. O Virgin Mary, she sang, you are greater than the sun and the moon, and every star moving in the orbits of the sky. And later, as we washed dishes, she wafted in again from the living room: I loved you in the summer, I waited for you in winter. Your eyes are summer, my eyes are winter. And our reunion, oh my love, is beyond summer and beyond winter. 

The next day was calm again. I have not been moving around on my own, which, added to the sudden disappearance of almost all my friends, makes me feel strangely like I have suddenly started living a life in this city totally disconnected from the one I have led for the past year. I spent the afternoon in Zamalek - eating at a gourmet burger restaurant, sitting around Costa Coffee with friends. At the burger place, a Danish TV station interviewed my Egyptian friends. They defended the army and criticized the United States. I told the reporters I was going to keep my mouth shut, however tempted I might be to speak -- the last thing anyone wants these days is American interference. 

At night, driving to Maadi again, we passed over the University Bridge, separated from the location of the clashes by the campus itself. We found the lagan sha'abeyya of Manial - self-appointed groups of youth who aim to protect their neighborhoods by night -- staked out on the bridge. They had set up a blockade with barbed wire to intimidate troublemakers and prevent men (notably, MB supporters) with weapons on motorbikes from entering the residential island of Manial. They didn't look twice at us -- I suppose we didn't look suspicious -- but they stopped some cars and peered inside, searching for weapons. 

Today, Sunday, both sides have called for demonstrations: the Muslim Brotherhood for obvious reasons, and the anti-Morsi forces to assert that they still have far superior numbers. 

Update - Early morning, July 4

I'm sitting in the midst of the kinds of things I guess expats gather around them in time of coup, the objects scattered across our living room floor by the friends and roommates who spent the day gathered around our TV waiting for events to play themselves out. There are five laptops with a tangle of crisscrossed cords, a bowl of grapes, plates scraped half-clean, the remnants of the salad I made six or seven hours ago, a bottle of gin, lemons, and a massive pile of clothes belonging to my roommate who is being evacuated from the country.

It's hard to know say what we're feeling right now. The five of us have been glued to the TV since 2 or so this afternoon. We watched hour after hour of crowds growing in Tahrir, around the Presidential Palace, by the Presidential Guard building where Morsi supposedly was, in Alexandria, and so on. OnTV wasn't showing the smaller, pro-Morsi stuff today. At some point in the evening, we started seeing photos on Twitter of the army spreading out around the city. Most photos were from the area around Maspero, the state media behemoth, which had been taken over by the army and was reportedly just playing patriotic songs (although we couldn't actually find the channel) -- as well as from the area around Cairo University where the deadly clashes had recently happened. Though there also seemed to be soldiers lined up on Dokki St. a few blocks behind my building, as well as in Medan Galaa. Word also got out that the army had put the Muslim Brotherhood's top leaders, including the president himself, under house arrest. They were banned from traveling out of the country.

Now that the initial excitement of "something big" happening -- of witnessing history being made -- has abated a little, I want to feel the same elation that my Egyptian friends feel, but somehow I feel less sure. Both my roommates and almost all of my remaining foreign friends will be gone within a day or two. CASA, Fulbright, and other programs have evacuated their students for the time being. I am suddenly keenly aware of being American, and not Egyptian. There is definitely a loneliness in this, in a way that has never affected me since I first came to Egypt. Certainly I have no warm feelings for the Muslim Brotherhood or for Morsi. He has done a terrible job, and I cannot think of anyone less appealing to vote for if I were Egyptian (except Hazem Abu Ismail and the Salafis). I would love to rejoice and feel that this is a triumph for secular liberalism over political Islam. Certainly for many people, that is indeed what this represents -- and the chance to try again to build a government that more closely resembles the noble original ideal of the January 25 revolution is one of the best things to come out of this. But somehow that just doesn't seem to tell the whole story. I feel, at the same time, frustrated with the "coup denial", accompanied by a fair dose America-bashing, that has immediately taken over during the last several hours. (Beyond this, my heart sinks when I hear reports of virginity tests being already revived by police in the Tahrir area, and the more than 90 women sexually assaulted in the square amidst today's celebration. The Brotherhood was sadly exploiting these statistics all along to portray the anti-Morsi crowd as vicious rapists, but whatever their misuse the troubling numbers stand.)

So what is all this about "coup denial"? Discussing with my friends, it seemed to us that the word for coup had been widely used in the hours leading up to the end of the ultimatum (as we increasingly began to expect it) to describe what was about to happen. After Gen. El Sisi actually gave his speech assuming transitional authority for the military and booting Morsi, the question of terminology suddenly exploded into a virtual war. One retweeted message that was passed around said:

Indeed, calling it #notacoup seems to be largely directed at the west, where people and media have been using the term pretty confidently. I don't want to be dismissive or insulting to my Egyptian friends, who are adamantly insisting that what happened is not a coup, and that the head of the Supreme Court, Adly Mansour, is taking the oath of office immediately, while the military has promised it will not govern. However "coup" has now been stigmatized by liberals and all anti-MB forces as the word used by despised western governments and the perceived western media monolith in proof of their support for the Muslim Brotherhood. MB supporters have been using the term, particularly the now famous spokesman Gehad El Haddad, who has been using the hashtag #Military_Coup in the now deposed government's messaging. 

Several representative examples of what Egyptian friends are saying on this subject:

"So now they're calling it a coup. You saw the millions... Can you call it a coup?...If it's a coup it's not a military coup. It's a popular coup supported by the military."

"It's an insult to negate the role of the second wave of the revolution instigated by an unprecedented number of protesters, following a long and purely civil campaign to collect signatures against a failing political system. The army then chose to side with the people, who had already initiated change, with the consultation of a group of moderate politicians and religious figures as well. If the army hadn't intervened, the mass protesters would've then escalated to civil disobedience and still pushed for the step down of the regime." 

"Celebrations aside, and for those who are saying it's a coup. If this is a coup, then so was February the 11th. The difference is that Mubarak had some dignity to "step down", while Morsi was too arrogant and stupid really to not concede. But in both cases, it really was the military that determined the outcome of both revolutions/uprisings. It's all about the deals, the blackmailings, the handshakes, and the agreements those in power have with the military, it's always the case. So, if this is considered a failure to the democratic process, then 2011's stepping down was never a victory. The last time, Mubarak "handed over" his powers to the military, he could've handed it over to his then-selected Vice President, or the Head of the Constitutional Court, but that wasn't the case. At least, this time around, it was clearly stated that the Armed Forces are not taking over, and the Head of the Constitutional Court is being sworn-in in an hour or less as the interim goverment's president. And a civilian "figure" was elected as the opposition's spokesperson (El-Baradei), something we lacked 2 yerears ago...so that's something. Again, the military will ALWAYS be in the scene, one way or another. Maybe what our next fight should be is how to have a government that will be responsive to its people without the need of a military intervention to contain the violence, or to fulfill its own political interests, or even to support the people...Let's work on that."

"Why we always need to justify our actions to the west. We know what we have down and we are capable of giving names and definitions for our actions better than anybody else. Please stop being euro or american centric. The western democracy is a mere invention but not the ultimate creative ruling system ever. And why to bother this time, western governments never believed that Jan 25 was a revolution. They called it a coup d'etat or uprising, bla bla bla. We ascitizens of Egypt know what we do ourselves. We break the rule and set the standards for ourselves."

On a different and much, much less common note, an Egyptian colleague of my roommate Miriam posted:

1) The fact that you like or support a coup does not stop it from being one.
2) The fact that there was popular demand for a coup does not stop it from being one.
3) The fact that power was handed by the military to an unelected civilian that no one even knows of (the head of the Constitutional Court) does not make it less of a coup.
...
7) This is in no way an attempt to undermine the achievement of the people in overthrowing a major authoritarian force in Egyptian society.

I guess my own feelings would fall closest to this last man's comments. Of course I can't say I'm angry at the Brotherhood being overthrown... the idea of living in a country ruled by people with their ideology was pretty depressing. It is amazing to see so many people out in the streets celebrating, people who feel great pride in having demonstrated their power over their country's destiny. It's mostly my unease with the warm, quick embrace of the military that is holding me back -- along with worry about what will happen in the coming weeks and months, and anxiety over whether this will genuinely lead to a liberal democracy. As foreigners not really sure how to react, and hoping that the resentment of America doesn't start reflecting on us, I think we've mostly being reacting with dry humor. We can't be out waving flags, nor are we going to be weeping over the deposed Islamists. So instead we stood at the window observing the McDonald's delivery motorbikes which were still running (nothing like a Big Mac to satiate your appetite while waiting for the military to announce that the president has been deposed!)

By the time El Sisi appeared on TV, the army was already everywhere in the city. Just after the speech started, our revolutionary friend Ahmed Farag appeared at the door -- because even in the middle of this historic moment, he wanted to check on his American friends. He had his headphones in, listening to the speech in the metro. We all listened together as a solemn-faced El Sisi in his khaki uniform announced that the military was taking responsibility for the transition period. In the background was the Grand Mufti of Al Azhar, the Coptic Pope, and a representative from Tamarod, along with several military figures. So what do you think? I asked Ahmed. What does one say? I want to rejoice. Wallahi mosh aaref - By god, I don't know.  

Down in Medan El Mesaha, cars flew by at top speed waving flags and groups of young people walked by beating drums and chanting. Fireworks exploded both on TV and down the street in Medan Galaa. The whole city lit up. It was a massive party on a scale I've never seen before. It is doubtless an exciting time, if an unsure one, where once again there is a great sense of possibility.  Let's just hope it's the possibility that the military genuinely does not want to rule, that it follows a quick path to elections, that this is a naturally rocky phase on a course to something better.

Update - 6:00pm, July 3

We're still just following the news online (I've got about 10 tabs open) and on our TV. It seems that the coup is now happening. Tanks may or may not be moving through the streets. Reports that Morsi is under house arrest, along with other Brotherhood leaders. Outside our window everything still looks normal, while the soundtrack is the wild cheers of crowds and fireworks continuing at a consistently very loud volume on the TV broadcast from Tahrir. Tahya masr, tahyr masr, they're shouting, Long live Egypt! And Erhal, erhal -- Get lost! Still haven't heard anything specific from the military. This is my first coup -- not really sure what one is supposed to feel like? Why are people just moving about their daily business in my neighborhood? 

Update - 3:30pm, July 3

We're still waiting so see what will happen this afternoon when the army's ultimatum for Morsi expires. Last night, we heard reports of gun battles on our side of the river, though not in our neighborhood, so we stayed in. Apparently 20 people were killed, mostly in the area around Cairo University where the Muslim Brotherhood was rallying its forces.

This morning, with daylight on my side, I went out to scope out the situation. There is a definite mutedness to today, though the streets are not empty. Many stores are still open and people are going about their business. I walked up to Galaa Square, where an army personal carrier was parked at the entrance to the bridge. It wasn't a huge one, and the soldiers were hanging out in the back, not particularly at attention or anything. Still, one cannot mistake a military presence when a tank rolls into your neighborhood. (Apparently they're all over the place now.) I rode the microbus down the Corniche, and people were less boisterous than usual. No one really felt like chatting or shouting.

There is an abundance of giant flags around -- stretched out on the Corniche, hanging from apartment buildings, etc. Zamalek, though, was pretty much business as usual.

Now we're back inside watching OnTV, one of the new private satellite channels formed after the revolution. The camera is trained on Tahrir, with massive crowds waiting the military's statement... while it, in turn, has said it might not issue it on time. There seems to be a sense among Egyptian friends that something will happen, under the guidance of the military, that is not strictly speaking a military coup (i.e. the military knows it can't solve all the problems facing Egypt and doesn't want that responsibility?) I don't know what this would actually mean.

What are we rooting for? Certainly I (and my fellow American friends here) have no sympathy with Morsi's bullheaded incompetence, and sympathize with the values of our liberal friends. Morsi has clearly blown it -- he didn't bring a coalition together, didn't listen or talk to anyone except his own MB folks, didn't really know how to solve any of Egypt's problems. The economy probably couldn't be helped much anyway, at least not quickly. But it's really hard to feel comfortable with the idea of a military takeover… it's true that Morsi was elected, even if the final choice between him and Ahmed Shafik was highly distasteful. Some tweet I read yesterday spoke of the "democracy of the streets" being greater than the "democracy of the ballot box." While feeling empowered to effect change is great, I can't help but feeling uneasy about the chaotic implications of that kind of mentality. 

Countdown to a Coup?

Night has fallen on Medan El Mesaha, but from our apartment we can hear a small crowd of vocal demonstrators shouting for Morsi's downfall on their way to Tahrir for the second day. Cars are driving with their hands on their horns, honking in celebration. Fireworks are going off not too far away. Not long ago, I saw a low-flying military helicopter circle just outside my building. Neighbors noticed that it - and a series of others with it - were carrying Egyptian flags over the city. Why a celebration? This afternoon, the military announced that it would step in within 48 hours to set out a "roadmap" for the country if Morsi did not respond to protestors' demands. Protestors' demands are very succinctly expressed in the word "erhal" -- in other words, Morsi gets lost or the military stages a coup. Perhaps there will be more nuance in the way things actually fall out, in the logistics or back-room dealings of such a coup. Most likely, it seems, the military will announce early elections. 

Most of yesterday was peaceful. Our own neighborhood was quiet, though we mostly stayed in and ordered Pizza Hut (besides McDonald's, the only delivery men working). We gathered in our living room, refreshing Facebook, Twitter, and watching live feeds of private satellite channels like OnTV and CBC. Mostly we saw giant crowds, both in Tahrir and around the Etehadya presidential palace, starting fairly early in the morning. In the afternoon, marches began to pick up. Our very own Medan El Mesaha had two small marches (maybe 30 people or so each), which headed north to Medan El Galaa to join the masses coming from Mohandiseen, together flooding across Qasr El Nil Bridge to Tahrir. We happened to be at the grocery store down the street when it started, and stood with our doormen observing the scene. 

-So you're not going out [to demonstrate]? I asked Nasser.

-It's not allowed. We're working, both men responded.

Nasser asked us whether we thought Morsi would go.

-The only alternative that is organized is the army, I noted.

-Exactly, he said. The army would be much better. 

-But what about the last time they were in charge? Was that really better?

-Yes, definitely. He smiled. Here in Egypt, we've gotten used to the army. They will do much better.

A widespread fondness for the military has suddenly erupted. There were reports of ebullient cheers when military headquarters circling Tahrir yesterday dropped flags on the protesters. 

While this was going on, we relocated to our friend Chris's apartment down the street, a little closer to Medan El Galaa. We climbed out his window, from where we could see the streams of demonstrators making their way toward the square. There were many women and children among them, most carried flags and red cards (giving Morsi a red card). They seemed to be converging from all directions -- south from the Corniche, from Mesaha St, and mostly from Tahrir St. Even closer to us, just across the street, was the local police station, Qism El Dokki. The officers in their white uniforms were lined up on the top of the building, an old villa, but not to offer any kind of security or even crowd control. They were there cheering on the protesters, their hands above their heads, some waving their shirts in the air.

It became clear after a while that Tahrir was saturated, and marchers were backed up all the way to Medan Galaa, right in front of  us. We walked up to Tahrir St. (not Tahrir Square) to a rooftop cafe at Tonsy Hotel. Tahrir St. still had the feel of a party, with people decked out in national colors on their way to or from the demonstrations. At Tonsy, CBC was on and the well-groomed female anchor had left the news to urge viewers to go out to protest. These are revolutionaries! she kept saying, These aren't felool! These are regular people! Please, please, go to the streets!

Tomorrow Tamarrod has called for another millioniya march, and many protesters are still camped out at Tahrir and the Presidential Palace. After that, there will be 24 hours left in the countdown to the coup...

Pizza Hut & Protests

View of Medan Galaa toward Gezira, from Chris's balcony

Friends watching the marches below

Policemen at Dokki police station cheer for demonstrators

Masses cross the bridge from Galaa on their way to Tahrir

Newspaper front page from June 30

View from my living room: one of the small marches that began at Medan Mesaha, headed for the big ones