Moving through Cairo, I am constantly bumping into demonstrations outside Arab embassies in support of protesters. On Tuesday, there were several hundred protesters outside the Syrian Embassy in Cairo. They chanted slogans borrowed from Tunis and Tahrir—“The people want to fell the regime!”—as well as riffs on Qaddafi’s notorious speech threatening rebels: “Sharia Sharia Dar Dar,” meaning “Street street, house house! Syria is free!” There were more specific digs, as they spotted someone on the other side of the fence: “You on the balcony! Tell us, where is Golan?” (Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967.)
In the morning, the Syrians inside the embassy had countered by blaring martial music back at the protesters; by the late afternoon the crowd had dwindled, but they were kept well entertained by Ramy Essam, the anointed singer of the revolution, who helped to defend Tahrir Square in the Battle of the Camels during the revolution and, a month ago, was detained on the square by the military and beaten with electric cattle prods. Ramy used to have long hair but the soldiers forcibly cut it; now it is short but gelled into a mohawky quiff. He’s tall and handsome and knows how to handle a guitar. He sang all his favorite anti-Mubarak songs, substituting Bashar’s name, as the crowd clapped along. “I came to stand beside the Syrian people,” he told me, “to make sure the Arab people are one hand forever.”
On the way back home I bumped into a similar crowd outside the Libyan Embassy. The Libyan diplomats had left their posts and the building was empty. Outside were Libyan exiles—expats and dissidents, including a former general who was going back to Benghazi the next day—who said they wanted to go in and hoist the revolutionary flag in place of the regime’s. An Egyptian Army A.P.C. pulled up, and an officer negotiated, saying he would take their petition to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces. The Libyans were trying to stage a sit in, stretching out blankets and lying down in the middle of the road, but the Army didn’t want traffic blocked, so there was a milling-about standoff.
The contagion of uprisings in the Middle East, it seems, is fostering a kind of popular Pan-Arabism. Egypt had the first parliament in the Arab world; it is the home of the Muslim Brotherhood and of anti-colonial movements and Nasserite nationalism. It is often said that where Egypt goes, the Arab world follows. After some decades of tamped-down intellectual activity, Cairo is regaining its position as a hub of thoughts and ideas and connections across the region.
Photograph of Ramy Essam, by Wendell Steavenson.
