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.