In Arabic, tahrir means “liberation,” and Tahrir Square acquired its name after the coup of 1952, which ousted King Farouk and realigned power across the Arab world. It is a vast teardrop of open space adjacent to dusty, crowded streets and the tight mass of alleys of downtown Cairo—a once grand central district that has since been left to rot as most of the élite moved out to the suburbs.
Around Tahrir are several imposing buildings, which seem almost to form a diagram of Egyptian life. At the northern end of the square is the Egyptian Museum, containing Pharaonic treasure spanning millennia. To its west is the modern slab of the National Democratic Party headquarters. South of that is the home of the Arab League, which once enshrined the hopes of the Pan-Arabist movement but is now largely considered a moribund talking shop. On the eastern side of the square is the elegant former campus of the American University in Cairo, converted in part from a palace built for a nineteenth-century Ottoman pasha. At the southern end is the Omar Makram mosque, where state funerals often occur, and the Mogamma, a dour edifice built, in the early fifties, as a gift from the Soviet Union. The Mogamma houses a vast bureaucracy—tax-evasion-investigation offices, the passport office, departments issuing drivers’ licenses and marriage licenses—whose labyrinthine tangles are notorious among Egypt’s citizenry. A block from the square, in a side street, is the American Embassy, one of the largest United States foreign missions, and a reminder of the two billion dollars of American aid, including $1.3 billion in military assistance, that flows into the country each year. Three large hotels—the Ramses Hilton, the Nile Hilton, and the Semiramis Intercontinental—surround the square, catering to some of the twelve million tourists who contribute a significant proportion to Egypt’s economy.
The concierge who showed me to my room at the Semiramis joked, “I’ve worked here for twenty years and it’s the first time anyone has asked for a city view. Always people are desperately wanting a room on the Nile.” For several days, the square had been full of crowds demanding an end to the rule of President Hosni Mubarak. From the hotel, it was possible to see smoke rising from the blackened husk of the N.D.P. headquarters, which protesters had burned on January 28th, the Friday of Rage. The building continued to smolder for two days.
On the square, there were workers from the slums with broken shoes; university professors; ex-Army officers; trendy upper-middle-class girls with long black hair and Fendi sunglasses; imams and Coptic priests; National Democratic Party members. Everyone wanted to be heard. “Please, foreign journalist?” they said, politely stopping me. “I have something to say!” I talked to one activist who worked for Vodafone. “There is a collective consciousness,” he said. “Even after the phones went off”—the regime shut down cell-phone and Internet service for several days—“there was a kind of national telepathy of where to go.” Day by day, they gathered the momentum of revolution, awed by their own defiance and wary of the tanks that had taken up residence around the perimeter of the square.__
On January 30th, I watched a column of tanks advance into the square. Protesters blocked their way while two F-16 fighter jets buzzed, loud and intimidating, overhead. “The people and the Army are one hand!” the crowd chanted, climbing on top of the tanks, scrawling “Mubarak Must Go!” on their flanks, and engaging the soldiers.
“We are your brothers,” people said.
“We will not harm you,” one soldier said.
“Will you shoot at us?” people asked. “You will shoot at us if you are given the order.”
“No,” a soldier replied. “I will never do that. Not even if I am given the order.”
In the standoff between the regime and the protesters, the Army was bound to be crucial. The Egyptian Army commands enormous respect among civilians. The military establishment has long been the most powerful institution in the country and controls not just security and defense but also a huge economic sphere, including factories and road building and housing projects. As the days passed, and the crowds on Tahrir grew and Mubarak prevaricated, I tried to make sense of the Army’s role.
There was something surreal about the tanks on the square. Few armies enjoy being sent to the streets to restore civil order, and the tanks were not accompanied by any infantry. I spoke to George Ishak, the head of the opposition movement Kefaya (the name means “enough”), who said, “I believe the military will protect us. We trust in our military a lot because we don’t have anyone else to trust.” He also wondered why the Army had not contained the protesters more effectively. “I don’t know why,” he said, “but they are a little soft—delicate.” He rubbed his finger and thumb together, as if feeling a piece of cloth. “They face people in a very gentle way.” He also said, “The military is a black box, and no one knows what happens inside.”
The following day, I overheard a conversation between members of the crowd and a lieutenant colonel standing next to a tank that was blocking the entrance road leading to the Ministry of Interior.
“How long will you be here?” they asked him
“Until you guys calm down,” he replied. He seemed a little frustrated by his deployment. “You guys are taking it too far. You’ve been silent for thirty years and for them that means that you were happy. Now you have demonstrated. You have delivered the message, but now you are going to rip the country apart.”
The soldier was upset. Perhaps he saw, as the regime was telling people on state-TV channels, a foreign and Islamist conspiracy. Someone from the crowd offered him a bottle of water.
“I want to know where all this stuff is coming from,” he said. “Where is the money coming from? In whose interest is all this?” He swept his arm toward the huge crowds in the square.
The most violent phase of the Tahrir revolution came on February 2nd, when protesters decisively held the square against crowds loyal to the regime. In the afternoon, a pro-Mubarak crowd several thousand strong pushed its way onto the square, at one point charging on horses and camels. Through the afternoon, the protesters beat the pro-Mubarak crowd back to the perimeter by running at them and hurling stones. At dusk, I saw soldiers stationed at an entrance to the square by Qasr al Nil Bridge crawl inside their tanks, which were parked between the protesters and a large pro-Mubarak crowd, and secure the hatches. The tanks formed a front line as the pro-Mubarak crowd taunted the protesters. Suddenly, stones started flying back and forth. There are nine roads and numerous alleys that lead into Tahrir Square, and almost every point of access was under siege: it seemed an impossible space to defend. Yet, over the next several hours, I watched as the protesters held the square that they had fought to occupy five days before.
The protesters quarried paving stones from the square and ripped sections of metal fencing from around a construction site, for use as shields. At times, the battle became entirely obscured in dust, and one could hear only the sound of stones plinking against the parked tanks. Burning wads of garbage skidded across the tarmac, leaving trails of flames, which the protesters tried to stamp out. At around eight o’clock, the protesters launched a thick volley of stones as covering fire for a vanguard that rushed out and chased the pro-Mubarak group around the curve of an access road and onto the street directly beneath my balcony. The pro-Mubarak group scattered, some taking cover in the entrance to a derelict building, emerging to lob burning missiles at the advancing protesters. During the next few hours, the pro-Mubarak group leaked away into the dark. The protesters quickly erected a barricade out of street signs and bits of metal fencing. Whenever a pro-Mubarak group came forward, the protesters banged on metal, to summon reinforcements from the heart of the square.
At daybreak the next morning, the square was subdued, as if people were in disbelief at what had happened. I walked onto the square past the tanks, their paint chipped where the stones had hit them. An officer, tired and unshaven, was leaning out of the top hatch, reading the morning paper and talking on his cell phone. I asked one of the soldiers why they had not intervened the night before.
“What could we do?” he said. “We’re not going to fire on people, after all. They were throwing Molotov cocktails at each other. One just happened to land on us.”
He pointed at a scorch mark.
“And what will happen today?” I asked him.
“I hope it will be quieter, peaceful,” he said, as every soldier everywhere hopes each morning. “It’s our country and we should fear for it.”
Around us, men were filling burlap sacks with paving chunks and ferrying them to the barricades, in case of new attacks. Others slept, curled up in flower beds and gutters. Many had bandaged heads or taped-up noses and were hobbling along or gingerly cradling arms held in slings. People had tied pieces of cardboard to their heads with string and were using polystyrene boxes or plastic paint buckets as helmets. At the north end of the square, by the Egyptian Museum, the battle had lasted all night and was still raging. I could see an arc of rocks rising beyond a barricade made of scrap metal and overturned burned cars.
A knot of protesters came past, jostling and shouting; an officer in the security forces had been found. “Don’t hand him over! We should keep him!” one protester shouted. “No!” someone yelled back. “We’ll tie him to the fence!” The man was hurried along, and I noticed that the protesters were careful to shield him from the beating that others in the crowd wanted to give him.
I started talking to a pharmacist who had been among the front-line medics tending to the wounded. (Pharmacists receive first-aid medical training as part of their studies.) His name was Sherif Omar and he was thirty years old, with the soft eyes and dark wavy hair of a matinée idol. His white coat was bloodstained. “I look like a butcher!” he said, and laughed. He had manned a mobile field station through the night, moving back and forth as the fighting ebbed and flowed. I asked him about numbers of wounded from the battle. “There are no statistics,” he said. “Hundreds, I can tell you. At around four or four-fifteen, our guys went on top of that bridge to get them off.” He pointed to the overpass behind the museum, which had been the last stronghold of the pro-Mubarak group. He had treated burns from Molotov cocktails and held in his arms two people who were killed by live ammunition.
As we talked, a platoon of soldiers marched past. The crowd chanted, “The people and the Army are one hand!” The slogan had become an important tenet of the revolution. The protesters seemed to be trying to chant their way out of a paradox that threatened their efforts: they were calling for the overthrow of a regime that, since its beginnings, in 1952, had been dominated by the military establishment.
As the soldiers passed by, Sherif was holding out a charred tear-gas cannister for me to see. He viewed it as evidence that many of the pro-Mubarak people were connected to the security services and had been drafted by the regime. He called them mercenaries, and said that some of those he had treated in his field hospital turned out to have police I.D.s and crisp Egyptian hundred-pound notes in their pockets.
At that moment, General Hassan al-Roweny, the commander of the Army in Cairo, marched through the barricade surrounded by soldiers and military police in scarlet berets. He came over and began to upbraid Sherif, brusquely waving his hands. He said that the protesters should leave the square, and that all this chaos was the work of foreign forces conspiring to destabilize Egypt. Sherif scoffed at this idea, and Roweny went up to a wounded protester and ripped a bandage from his head, crying, “Look, it’s just a bruise!” I saw a patch of dried blood near the man’s hairline. Roweny moved on to another man, who had a wad of cotton bandaged to a wound on his scalp, and gave another sharp tug, but the bandage would not come off, because it was stuck with dried blood. Then something strange happened. Roweny caught the man in a strangling hug and kissed him forcefully on the forehead, as if the man were a recalcitrant son whom he simultaneously loved and despaired of. Afterward, Sherif wondered, “Why was he ripping off people’s bandages? We had to put them back on again!”
I met Sherif often on the square. He told me that he was from Alexandria, and that seven or eight years ago, when he was still in college, he had decided to ignore politics. He had picked up a copy of Time and saw headlines on the Iraq War—President Bush, Israel and Palestine, terrorism. Then he realized that the magazine was from 1991. “I thought to myself, It’s the same news, it’s the same politics. It’s not going to change.” Now, sitting by a tent in the square, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people demanding an end to Mubarak’s regime, he smiled ruefully at his former apathy. “Now I have an opinion. Now I am talking about politics.”
For Sherif, the turning point had come on the Friday of Rage, when people marching to the square encountered riot police wielding batons and firing rubber bullets and tear gas. It was the first anti-regime demonstration he had been to. “Actually, I wasn’t for Mubarak leaving but for a correction of the system. I thought, Why are people being so radical?” But the police brutality that day convinced him that the regime had to go. “Everyone was gasping for air, and simultaneously they turned on the water hoses and beat us with batons. They were beating the shit out of people without even giving them a chance to retreat.” Sherif suffers from asthma, and he was choking. “I had been in the midst of tear gas for three or four hours. At some point, I couldn’t breathe or see where I was going. There was a guy in front of me who was in the same condition, and he said, ‘I think we’re going to die here today.’ I think everyone felt like that.”
In the days after the battle for the square, the Army deployed more soldiers, and secured several entrances to the square with concertina wire. It felt as if Cairo had been divided into two realities: inside the square and outside. Outside, the threat of beatings from pro-Mubarak bands lingered. News and rumors circulated that the security services had arrested several human-rights lawyers, and that activists and journalists were being detained, and having their equipment impounded, by the Army and security elements. Many people, including my translator, Mohamed El Dahshan, a journalist and dedicated Twitterer, were assaulted by vigilante groups. The groups had formed to guard their local streets at night when the police vanished after the Friday of Rage, and some of them now seemed to accept the government line that the crisis was the fault of foreign forces and people with laptops.
Inside was the Republic of Tahrir, where the protesters had established a kind of revolutionary utopia. As you came through the barricades by the Qasr al Nil Bridge, a funnel of protesters cheered and clapped and chanted, “Welcome! Welcome to the free, who have joined the revolutionaries!” The scene was indescribably moving. There was no hierarchy or formal organization on the square, and yet lines of protesters guarded the barricades while others swept the garbage into neat piles and manned the checkpoints to search people for weapons. People brought food and water and medicine into the square and gave it out for free. “We are queuing up!” one activist who had named his tent the Freedom Motel told me, incredulous at the number of people flowing into the square. “When was the last time you saw an Egyptian queuing up?” I asked one young female volunteer in a floral head scarf if she was with any particular organization. “I am with no one,” she replied simply. “I am with the people.”__
“It’s getting more complicated by the hour,” Sherif told me at one point. “The solutions we required a week ago are no longer valid. The ceiling of democracy is getting higher.” The more the regime resisted the demands of the protesters, the bolder the demands grew. After three days of protest, Mubarak had addressed the nation, and appointed Omar Suleiman, the national-intelligence chief, as Vice-President. In a second address, Mubarak promised that he would not seek reëlection in the September Presidential elections. Several people told me that they thought his concession was adequate; they had waited thirty years, they could wait another six months or so. But the violence of February 2nd, which everyone assumed was state-sponsored, destroyed people’s trust in Presidential proclamations.
Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian Ambassador to Washington until 2008, could scarcely conceal his anger when he spoke of the mobs attacking protesters. I asked him if he could be certain that the violence had been organized. He snorted: perhaps there had been genuine Mubarak supporters among them, but he was dismayed by the all-too-convenient absence of any state intervention to stop the violence. Like many Egyptians, he seemed to be struggling to make sense of the speed of events that had shaken the assumptions of the country’s élite, and he worried that national values had been eroded. “It made me question what our generation and the older generation had done,” he said. He also told me about the moment when he had realized the strength and the resolution of the young activists who initiated the protests. Early in the protests, when the regime imposed a curfew, his son and a group of friends had been on the square all day and had come back to his apartment building, just two blocks away, to rest. He had invited them all to sleep there, but they were determined to go back to the square. He reminded them that there was a curfew. “They said, ‘Who applies this curfew?’ They said this very simply and confidently, and it struck me that these kids now finally believe in the ownership of their country.”
In the square, behind a rectangle of white tarpaulin that was hung against an apartment building to make a video screen, a travel agency had been given over to opposition-party officials who came in and out of the square. Various politicians addressed the crowd—including Ayman Noor, who ran against Mubarak in the Presidential race of 2005 and was then jailed for three years—but their speeches were bland and made little impact. Most people I talked to on the square said they did not support any party.
At Friday prayer, ranks of men laid out improvised prayer mats: kaffiyehs, newspapers, an Egyptian flag, slogan placards. They wiped their hands in the dust of the destroyed paving stones, to clean them, because the Koran says that if there is no water and you are in the desert you can use sand to clean your hands before you pray. When they touched the ground with their foreheads, a little disk of dusty grit formed, stuck there by sweat. Many Egyptians are devout, but people in Tahrir tended to speculate that electoral support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the officially banned but semi-tolerated Islamist party, would be only between ten and twenty per cent.
The Muslim Brotherhood had a strong, but certainly not a majority, presence on the square. “Our strategy was going to the event but not leading it,” said Dr. Essam El-Erian, a member of the Guidance Council of the Brotherhood, when I met him in the Brotherhood’s shabby headquarters, on the third floor of a nondescript apartment building. He explained that the Brotherhood had taken a passive position so that the government could not use the movement’s involvement as an excuse to crack down. Nevertheless, he and thirty-three other Muslim Brothers were arrested two days into the protests. El-Erian has been arrested several times during his career, and once spent eight years in jail. He laughed and said that this was his shortest-ever detention. On the night of Sunday, January 30th, as the Interior Ministry appeared to cease functioning, the prison gates were left open and he walked free.
For decades, politics in the Middle East has been depicted as a choice between dictators and Islamists, and El-Erian was naturally at pains to dispel this assumption. He said that the Brotherhood would not field a candidate in the next Presidential election or contest every constituency in the parliamentary election, and spoke in vague terms of a hope that Egypt might show to the world a different style of democracy—“another moderate, tolerant model.” The Muslim Brothers I met on the square conveyed a similar message, but it was hard to know what this party—banned for more than half a century in Egypt and demonized abroad—might do if it had power. The Muslim Brotherhood has “a long-term vision of society, and it has been very consistent,” a Western diplomat told me. “Politics is just part of it.”
As the standoff continued, the protesters became entrenched and emboldened. People made a tent city out of concrete reinforcing rods and plastic sheeting; venders set up braziers for tea and hooked up yards of electrical cable to charge dozens of cell phones at a time; people rearranged the stockpiled stones to spell out anti-Mubarak slogans; new blankets were passed out. There was an abundance of homemade placards. Egyptians have a fine satirical sense; a man held up a sign that said “Leave Already, My Arms Are Tired.” But, after decades of political repression, some protesters seemed to have no idea of the sort of message most suited to being on a placard. Alongside catchy slogans were placards bearing long, bullet-pointed tracts, painstakingly written out—interminable manifestos of grievance and demands.
“There is a psychological barrier of fear in revolution,” the novelist Alaa Al Aswany told me, adding that once the barrier is broken the process is “irreversible.” Aswany, like many on the square, had suffered police harassment. Despite an international literary reputation, he has never been published by the state publishing houses or allowed on Egyptian state television, and the owner of a café where he met with young writers each week had been threatened by state security. Aswany is also a practicing dentist, and I spoke with him in his surgery, close to Tahrir Square. “The regime can’t understand that people who were fearful and scared for thirty years are no longer fearful,” he said. He told me that protesters had been teasing him about the title of one of his books, “Why the Egyptian People Do Not Revolt,” saying that he should write a sequel and call it “How the Egyptian People Revolted.” He had addressed the crowds several times. “As a writer, I have written many, many times the words ‘the people,’ but it was for the first time in my life I felt what was the meaning of ‘the people.’ ” He told me that he had been very impressed. “They are very organized, very courageous, very civilized, very caring. We eat in the demonstration every day and no one knows exactly who has brought the food. It’s like a big family. I threw a packet of cigarettes on the ground, and a seventy-year-old lady picked it up and said, ‘Dr. Alaa, please take this and go and put it in the garbage, because we are building a new country and everything should be clean.’ ”
I met an activist friend of Sherif’s named Ramy Shaath. Half Palestinian and half Egyptian, Shaath had studied war strategy at King’s College, London, and spent time in demonstrations in Lebanon and Palestine during the second intifada. His day job is as a management consultant, but he has amassed experience dealing with barricades and tear gas. “It’s a hobby,” he said, smiling. Shaath’s hobby had made him well known to the authorities. He told me that, on the Friday of Rage, when the police were overwhelmed, he had been tempted to run into the Mogamma and retrieve the security file with his name on it. “I even know which room it’s in—second floor, last on the left!”
On the Internet, Shaath and other activists gathered ideas for countering riot police. He enumerated a few improvised tactics: “How to use vinegar and onions against tear gas. Things like, Don’t use water, use Coke to wipe your eyes.” Referring to the protests in Tunisia which had recently succeeded in deposing the President there, he added, “We got a lot of ideas from Tunisia because a lot of Tunisians were contributing to the blogs.” For the first week of the protests, he had stayed at a different place every night and continually changed his cell-phone numbers. “A few days ago, I stopped,” he told me. He spread his hands out in victorious amusement at such a turn of events. “End of story. Game over. The fear is over!”
I went to see Amre Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister of Egypt. Together with Nabil Fahmy and other notables, he had joined an informal committee of “wise men” who wanted to help bring the demands of the youth and the people on the square to Vice-President Suleiman. Seventy-four years old, Moussa is vigorous, erudite, and charming. On the square, I had often heard him mentioned as a good man to lead the country. People respected him as an independent elder statesman. Moussa told me, “The square became a place that if you don’t go you have missed a historical moment.” He believed that the regime had initially tried to ride out the storm: “Perhaps some thought that those demonstrators would get tired and fade day after day, week after week, but everyone saw that yesterday there were more people than ever since it began.” Now their efforts at reform were no longer a luxury but had become a “question of necessity.”
In the days after the clashes, the Army tried to exert control. General Roweny could be seen striding up the road toward the Egyptian Museum, behind which the Army had made an impromptu headquarters. Sherif told me that the day after Roweny was tearing off bandages he returned with an Egyptian news crew and again confronted Sherif and his band of medics. He told them to go home and “end this silly business.” Sherif replied, “You call the blood of Egyptians silly business!” Roweny told Sherif that the Army was resolved to clear the square, because it wanted to resume normal traffic circulation the next day. “We can’t use violence, but we can be very tough with people,” he warned. Sherif asked what he meant by tough. “Like from a father to a child,” Roweny replied, smiling and answering questions in front of the TV cameras. Afterward, he addressed the crowds in the square, telling them, “You all have the right to express yourselves, but please save what is left of Egypt.” The crowd, cheering, responded that Hosni Mubarak should leave. Roweny abandoned his speech, saying, “I will not speak amid such chants.”
At one point, the Army tried to push a line of tanks farther into the square, near the Egyptian Museum. But the protesters staged a sit-in under the tanks. I sat down among them and talked to a man whose body was scaly with psoriasis. He came from a small village not far from Cairo and worked in a lowly capacity for the local municipality. He said that his salary of seven hundred Egyptian pounds (around a hundred and twenty dollars) was not enough to feed his family and pay for treatment for his skin complaint. He tried to explain the situation: “The Army is trying to tighten the space and get people farther into the square.” When I returned the next day, the protesters had settled in, storing sandwiches and blankets in the niches between the tank wheels and tracks, sleeping under the turrets, and praying five times a day in neat rows. When the tanks had first arrived, the protesters had eyed them like mysterious beasts; they now seemed tamed. Parents would stand their children on top of them and take photographs. The soldiers pretended not to mind this domestication.
The Army, though ostensibly neutral, was obviously invested in the status quo. After Mubarak fired most of his Cabinet, in the first days of the protests, the military establishment found itself in control of the key posts of government. Suleiman, the former head of military intelligence, was Vice-President, and Ahmed Shafik, a former head of the Air Force (as Mubarak himself was), became the new Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi remained in the position he had held for almost twenty years, Minister of Defense and Military Production. Initially, this triumvirate seemed to form a Praetorian guard around the regime; they were all military men, all in or nearing their seventies, and all close to Mubarak. At the time, the Western diplomat told me that there were no significant differences between Suleiman and his President; that the regime thought it could ride the protests out; and that Mubarak would hold fast to the idea that the protests were the work of foreign machination—“a rock-solid point of view that we have seen from him for many years.” Tantawi, the diplomat hoped, would continue to cleave to the Army’s policy of nonviolence: “Yes, he’s a product of the regime and he’s perfectly happy to arrest people, but he’s not going to shoot them.”
It now seems likely that there were always differences between the military establishment and the most loyal elements of the regime—Mubarak’s inner circle, the Interior Ministry and the police, N.D.P. strongmen, and the domestic security services. It is perhaps for this reason that, in the days that followed, the pronouncements of the military triumvirate, like the mercurial behavior of General Roweny on the square, seemed to veer between conciliation and impatient threats. After the clashes with pro-Mubarak crowds, Prime Minister Shafik apologized for the violence on national TV, and there was an effort at dialogue between the Vice-President and some of the opposition groups. But, only a few days later, Suleiman seemed to threaten a martial crackdown. At the time, it was hard to see where the balance of power lay between the regime and the security and military establishments, but throughout the protests in Cairo there were two constants that proved decisive: the Army never fired on the protesters, and it never prevented people from coming onto the square.
The military establishment had never liked Mubarak’s son Gamal, widely despised as being at the center of a group of cronies who cashed in on liberal economic reforms of the past decade. In recent years, senior officers had expressed discomfort with his implicit anointment as heir. When Mubarak appointed Suleiman as Vice-President, traditionally the position occupied by a successor, they may have been satisfied. But the crowds on the square were not, and, in the days that followed, they managed, through their numbers, and by continually reiterating their trust in the Army, to coöpt the military as a reluctant revolutionary partner.
In the second week of protests, beyond the square, Cairo returned to work. Banks reopened, and the roads resumed their customary state of honking gridlock. And yet the numbers on the square continued to grow. At lunchtime and after work, people streamed in to take part in this phenomenon of freedom. It seemed that everyone I talked to insisted that they had been there since the first day. “People are trying to join the circus,” one activist said, laughing.
Sherif went back to work, too, but returned each afternoon to his friends on the square. After his first day back in the “real world,” as he described it—wondering what the real world was anymore—he admitted that he had been “very down. It has started to settle in, all the bloodshed.” But being among his new friends—none of the volunteer medics on Tahrir had known one another before the protests—had cheered him up. “It’s amazing how peaceful it is here, and outside is all the hustle and bustle. I walked through the square, and it gives you hope, that this is not all for nothing, that something is going to happen.” He was beginning to go to activist meetings, groups of young people who had met on the square or who knew one another through the blogosphere, to discuss how to go forward. “The lack of leadership is a positive and a negative,” he had said at one point, “but it shows that this really is a revolution of the people.”
We discussed possible leaders. None of the opposition parties had been able to garner any significant support among the protesters. Most seemed well-meaning but amateurish, and were headed by an older generation. I mentioned Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who had returned to Egypt from Vienna, where he lives, and quickly became associated with the protests. Sherif, like many on the square, was unimpressed: “Baradei? Where is he? He came to the square for four or five minutes and then left. My sister says he’s on the news channels every five minutes, saying, I did this and I did that and I said all that and I predicted that. But he’s been in Vienna this whole time.”
Without a clear leader or a dominant ideology, the square had become a kind of speakers’ corner. A veiled woman told of her dream of the Prophet Muhammad circling the square; a psychiatrist held a small crowd spellbound with his theory that Mubarak was a psychopath. People pressed photocopied manifestos into my hands and asked me why President Obama was equivocating. Everyone had become an expert on the Egyptian constitution and the clauses that set the criteria for Presidential and parliamentary candidates. They talked about the Turkey model, with the military as the guarantor of the state. Sherif remarked that the square had become like a university of political science—“the rate of learning is incredible for everyone.” He wanted to be involved. “We can’t let the blood of the martyrs and the injured go to waste. They were killed for a cause, and we have to go through with it. I can’t go back to my normal life as if nothing had happened.”
Against this background of expectant fervor, on February 10th everyone—the C.I.A., CNN, the head of the N.D.P., the Egyptian Prime Minister, Barack Obama, and even the bandage-pulling General Roweny, who told the crowds, “All your demands will be met today”—believed that Mubarak would announce that he was stepping down. There was a rainstorm at lunchtime, a sign of good luck in a desert country, and afterward a rainbow came out and was tweeted all over the world.
At 10:45 P.M., Mubarak began to speak, and the crowd went quiet. Mohamed, my translator, had gone home, to attend his brother’s engagement party, and so I understood the speech largely through the crowd’s reaction to it. Mubarak’s voice echoed amid loudspeakers on the square—scratchy, low, stentorian, and occasionally inflected with a twang of feedback. People listened on cell phones, and in the tents at the center of the square dozens of heads were bent over the glow of a laptop screen. Gradually, the faces of those around me grew stony as people realized that they had heard this speech before. About halfway through, a hissing exhalation of disbelief rose up. I later found that this was at the moment when Mubarak patronizingly reminded his listeners that he had once been young himself. From then on, people stopped listening. They cradled their heads in their hands, silent with shock and despair. One by one, they held up their shoes in the air in contempt. And, when Mubarak finished speaking, there was a great roaring, defiant chant of “Leave! Leave! Leave!” They punched the air in fury. One man behind me screamed and collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. Someone standing next to me told me that his brother had been killed in the protests. People tried to console him, but he suddenly went berserk, screaming and kicking. Four or five people tried to hold him down but could not control his rage. Behind him, a man prayed with his palms made into fists.
I found Sherif by the field clinic next to the barricade. He was wearing an Egyptian-flag bandanna around his head. His expression was uncomprehending and blankly exhausted. “I’m not sure if he gets it,” he said. He was trying to fathom Mubarak’s gargantuan level of denial. “We were already celebrating and now”—he cut the air with his hand—“no one knows what’s happening.” There was a hardness in his face which I had not seen before. He advised me to stay in the hotel tomorrow. “Will it be bad?” I asked. “It’s possible, it’s possible,” he said. “I don’t know what this idiot is going to pull out of his hat.” Sherif decided to spend the night on the square.
Mubarak never actually resigned, and it was left to Omar Suleiman to announce his departure, the next day. On the square, the news was greeted with a wall of whistling cheer and a blur of flags. It was an exultant, unified joy. The traffic lights were showing all their colors simultaneously, like disco gels. Fire flares, apparently made by ignited cans of air freshener, burst in the crowd. There were no sentences, just a word—“amazing”—repeated over and over. Protesters hugged the soldiers, who climbed out of their tanks and took off their helmets to join the party. I watched someone shake the hand of an officer and proudly take a picture of his small son with the man.
Sherif was not on the square for the announcement and missed the extraordinary scenes, but he saw something ultimately more revealing. That day, crowds had marched peacefully toward the Presidential Palace, at Heliopolis, northeast of Tahrir, and Sherif decided to go there, too. At around four o’clock, a couple of hours before Suleiman’s speech, he was outside the palace, dressing a few wounds. Several tanks were stationed there, their cannons pointing in the direction of the crowd, but, as Sherif watched, the tanks turned their turrets—it seemed, he said, to happen in slow motion—so that the cannons were pointing at the palace. Then the soldiers started waving Egyptian flags and chanting with the crowd, “Egypt! Egypt! The Army and the people are one hand!”
The next morning, I sat in a café on the square, talking over the events. Everyone was reading the newspapers, and across the room I saw a news photograph of General Roweny reaching to shake the hand of another officer, against a background of the Tahrir crowd. The man with the paper said it was an old picture, from the times when the Army had first come to the square.
“Is he good?” I asked about Roweny.
“Now, yes!” the man said.
“What about before?”
He waggled his hand in equivocation and grimaced. “Who knows?”
Alaa Al Aswany had told me that he thought the Egyptian revolution would fundamentally change the Middle East paradigm of an apathetic populace oppressed by dictators and retreating into Islam. “We are seeing now the end of the post-independence dictatorships in the Arab world,” he said. “What we see now is the end of this era. Western analysts are totally confused, because it goes far beyond Mr. Mubarak. The political analysts in the West are going to have to throw away their old books.”
That afternoon, I met Mahmoud Zaher, a retired general in Egypt’s military-intelligence apparatus who now fulfilled a role whose contours he was hesitant to define. When I arrived at his home, next to a mosque in a pleasant neighborhood on the left bank of the Nile, he was praying. He was a gracious host, sitting very upright while his son, who, he told me, had been many days on the square, brought glasses of fresh orange juice and cups of Turkish coffee. When I asked questions, his answers tended to skirt specifics, forming themselves into disquisitions on theoretical matters of national history and character. A wry smile would pull in the corners of his mustache, as if he were saying, “Yes, well, of course that’s the obvious question, and I know very well what the answer is, but how can I put it?”
He was no defender of Mubarak, who he felt had “become a corrupt influence for Egypt and the reputation of the military establishment.” He was certain that until the end Mubarak had wanted to use the forces of violence and chaos—possibly by deploying the Republican Guard, which is loyal to the President rather than to the nation—in order to make a crackdown look justified. I asked him if someone in the military had “put him on a helicopter”—if the mechanics of what had occurred added up to a coup. He demurred for a moment before replying, “There is a big difference in what can be said and what must be done.” He paused. “What happened is that the very strong and legitimate desire of the people of the revolution of Egypt in this moment became inherent to the military institution.” He said that if a person “reaches a point of insensitivity and is incapable of realizing the right decision at the right time, others need to take his hand.”
He spoke of the Army as “the servant to the people and popular desire,” but he emphasized that the role of the Army in Egypt was not confined to the military sphere, that it was “politically influential and politically involved and politically distinct.” It did not seem that he wanted or expected the situation to change, and he spoke about the possibility that there might in the future be “limitations” to the Egyptian political system “which may cause some outsiders to say that our democracy is different from their democracy.” He expressed the view that whoever became President should have a military background.
On the square, throngs of people were out with brooms, jubilantly cleaning up their country. They carted away loose chunks of paving and piled up the scrap-metal frames of their tents. I saw one man carrying a black garbage bag with a sign across his chest: “Yesterday I was a demonstrator. Today I build Egypt.” I met a couple of young students from the American University in Cairo, carrying brooms. One said that she had been discussing this new community spirit with her father. “We thought people didn’t care,” she said, “and just threw their garbage on the street, but now we see that they just thought it was hopeless—why bother when it’s so dirty. Why not be corrupt when everything is corrupted. But now things have changed, and it’s a different mood overtaking. Even I can’t stop smiling myself.”
I caught up with Sherif and asked him about his group of political activists. They had decided that they would continue to meet and discuss ways in which they could help the country but wouldn’t form a political party. I asked him if he was worried that the Army might take control entirely. He said that there was bound to be chaos in the future and that friends of his had expressed concern. “But I was saying, ‘Guys, look what we have done already. There’s no impossible.’ ” Many people celebrating said that there could never be another dictator now that the public had found its political voice. “We know the way to Tahrir Square,” one told me. ♦
