The crowds on the street in Egypt over the past days have been overwhelming—they have numbered in the millions. Waving flags and tooting whistles, trumpeting vuvuzelas, drumming and shouting and chanting and honking and singing—Tahrir reached such a noisy level of jubilation that people were joking, “Did Egypt win the World Cup?” Walking among them, dodging fireworks, it felt upside down: a popular protest to oust President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was democratically elected, in which, since Monday, the military has taken the side of the protesters. From one perspective, what is happening in Egypt represents an extraordinary repudiation of political Islam. From another, it is an outright military coup—a repudiation of the process of politics itself. Whatever the air of joyousness, dozens of people have died across the country. The danger did not dissipate with the announcement by the military, on Wednesday night, that Morsi was not President any longer and that the Constitution had been suspended.
The crowd in Tahrir has been varied: families, including women; people with prayer calluses and Afros, some wearing plastic sandals and others Gucci sunglasses; farmers and accountants. But there’s no doubt that there are many from the middle-class “couch party”: people who were more or less O.K. with Mubarak, who tend to trust the Army, and who had not been out to protest before. Police were hoisted onto shoulders. Overhead, military helicopters dropped flags for the cheering masses. On TV—the military had taken control of state media—aerial footage of the immense throngs played on a loop to a soundtrack of martial victory music.
On Monday, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, issued an ultimatum: the two sides, government and opposition, had forty-eight hours to come up with a compromise plan or else the military would step in with its own “roadmap.” The crowds on the street went wild, taking it as a sign that they had already won. But this was also very clearly a coup. (Twitter captured the national sense of humor—only Egyptians could announce a coup forty-eight hours in advance!) As much as the generals say they are honoring the will of the people, they engineered a showdown, and got one. The Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters, if outnumbered, were also gathering in the streets. Among the anti-Morsi crowds that kept coming, to fill practically every square and intersection in the country, people seemed to think that the Army was not like it had been before, that it was not the Army of Hosni Mubarak and military trials. Sisi would not “sit on the chair”—that is, take the throne.
Morsi addressed the nation at 11:30 P.M. on Tuesday. He spoke with passion, sometimes with anger, and he was defiant. He used the word “legitimacy” so many times that it began to sound like a fist thumping on the table. He reiterated that he was democratically elected—and that was that. It was the feloul, he said, the remnants of the old régime and the deep state, who were taking advantage of the protests for their own schemes. He complained that the bad economy—a major complaint against him—was the fault of the previous government. He might have been right about all of that. But he did not directly address the public’s grievances, other than with a brief aside about a possible reconciliation committee or amendments to the Constitution and getting the youth involved. None of that was new: the opposition—itself fractious and divided—has thrown up its hands at these kind of pluralistic assurances. He did not mention the protests. It was as if he was living in a parallel universe, shut in a room where his own arguments bounced off the walls and echoed back to him.
I remember attending demonstrations last December outside the Presidential Palace which were organized to protest a unilateral declaration by Morsi that paved the way for the Brotherhood to ram through a contentious Constitution. Morsi has admitted that he made mistakes over the past year. But Egyptians are also reacting to the tone and tenor of his administration, which has been high handed: trying to close shops at 10 P.M. because people should be fresh for the morning prayer (Cairo is the city that never sleeps, where there are still traffic jams at 2 A.M., and where Internet usage peaks at 12.45 A.M.); prosecuting journalists for insulting the President; calling people who don’t agree “infidels.” Little legislation has passed. And everywhere there is concern about the weakness of the economy. This is what is uniting the forces of youth and revolution, feloul remnants, Christians, Army and police officers, and the middle class. The crowds turned on the Brotherhood with the cry: “Erhal!” (“Leave!”)
But across the river at Cairo University, another vast crowd, not as big but certainly numbering in the hundreds of thousands, was equally jubilant and staunch in its support for Morsi. Morsi’s only option, shorn of control over the police and the Army, was to get his people onto the streets in response. Guns were appearing on the edges of the crowd and at 2 A.M. I got a text from a friend on the streets: “It’s happening! Semi-automatics everywhere!”
The approach of the deadline on Wednesday brought a rash of rumors: senior Brotherhood members had been placed under travel bans, the Army had dictated a headline to the state newspaper calling for resignation, the bodyguards of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide had been arrested. When I visited the pro-Morsi rally in Nasr City this afternoon, the atmosphere was impassioned and worried. The men I talked to (I saw only three women in an hour there) were very careful not to criticize the Army, but their trepidation seemed only to belie their desperation. “Tell people to come out and support us!” one man said, almost plaintively. Many were wearing crash helmets and swinging bamboo sticks, but they were friendly, shielding me with an umbrella against the sun. “This is the last moment to save our Islamic project” one man told me. Others talked about fighting for democracy. Another said, “Do you know what its like to stand here all alone, with no one beside you?” As we talked, the Army convened a meeting of different political parties to which the Brotherhood refused to attend.
An hour later I was in Tahrir Square when a giant cheer went up at an unconfirmed rumor that Morsi had been put under house arrest. They cheered the tanks in the streets, too, and, after nightfall, there was utter jubilation as Sisi came on television to announce that the Morsi administration had come to an end. Adly Mansour, the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court, would be Egypt’s interim leader. The public didn’t know where Morsi was or what the Brotherhood would do. As I walked through the crowd in Tahrir, I could still see the old scrim of anti-military graffiti from a year ago, underneath the portraits of new martyrs.
Photograph by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty.
