The last two Presidents of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi, have both been tried on criminal charges, one after the other, in a converted lecture hall at the Cairo Police Academy. The academy is in the far eastern suburbs of the capital, near the summit of a long hill that rises from the Nile Valley into the desert. Beyond this area, the landscape is desolate—nothing but sand and rubble for seventy miles until the Suez Canal. The isolation is the reason that the trials have been held here. Ever since the Tahrir Square movement began, on January 25, 2011, Egypt has suffered from waves of instability, and the authorities fear that a trial involving a former President might become the target of protests or terrorist attacks. The Police Academy is well secured, with a high brick-and-concrete wall topped by metal spikes, razor wire, and towers with armed guards. Even if somebody were to breach this barrier, he’d still have to travel another half mile across the sprawling campus in order to reach the building that hosts the trials.
The auditorium was converted for the Mubarak case. After the initial protests at Tahrir, Mubarak was forced to resign, in February of 2011, and later that summer he was put on trial for crimes that ranged from corruption to inciting violence. He was sentenced to life in prison, but his lawyers appealed, and the case is ongoing. In 2013, after Morsi was removed from office by the military, and charged with his own set of crimes, he was naturally tried in the same venue. But, after more than two years of Presidential trials, the courtroom lacks any marker of its new function or status. The judge and other officials sit at a long desk, and behind them a wood-panelled wall rises more than twenty feet high. This space is blank: no sign, no inscription, no national seal. There isn’t an Egyptian flag anywhere in the room. Two crude metal cages have been installed in part of the auditorium, to hold the accused during hearings. The only words in the front of the room consist of an engraving on the judge’s desk: “Justice is the Foundation of Governing.”
For a visitor who arrives in this featureless courtroom, having travelled to the edge of the desert, there’s a strong impression of frontier justice. The court appears makeshift; the actors seem to improvise. There are no nameplates for the judge and other officials, and the various legal teams are not seated in defined areas. Most security personnel are not in uniform, and many of them chain-smoke. The auditorium’s floor slopes steeply, which means that much of the audience and the accused look down on the judge. Nobody is allowed to bring a camera, an audio recorder, or a cell phone into the courtroom, and foreign journalists can’t be accompanied by translators. Family members of the accused have been barred from attending. Ostensibly, these restrictions are for reasons of security, but they also serve to limit the material that gets out. All digital recordings are made and controlled by the state, which thus far has released only a few selected clips from Morsi’s appearances.
In January, while the court was between sessions, Egypt celebrated the third anniversary of Tahrir. By now, it’s hard to define the original event—whether it was a revolution or a coup, whether it’s dead or alive. Egypt’s new constitution, which was approved by more than ninety-eight per cent of voters in a referendum earlier this year, includes a preamble that describes the movement as the “January 25-June 30 Revolution.” The second date refers to the nationwide protests against Morsi that were organized last year by a group that called itself Tamarrod—“Rebellion”—and which persuaded the military to step in. Since then, the security forces have engaged in an increasingly vicious crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization of which Morsi had been a leader, and a series of terrorist attacks have targeted police and military officers. Along the way, there’s a sense that history is being revised. “I’m seeing a trend to eliminate the idea of January 25th,” Hussein Gohar, one of the leaders of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, told me recently. “Maybe in another hundred years people will read that there was a conspiracy to take power or divide Egypt, and then the military sorted it out. January 25th will cease to be the revolution, and June 30th will become it. Unless there’s a third wave.”
If a third wave is to rise, its leaders will have to be very brave. Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Minister of Defense, who forced Morsi from office, is expected to become the next President. Since the coup, he has developed the image of a populist, drawing on the tradition of Gamal Abdel Nasser and other military leaders. In recent months, a number of activists who played a major role in the events of 2011 have been imprisoned. The only two political parties that managed to lead the country in the past decade have been banned. Of the ten or so candidates who were prominent in the early stages of Egypt’s first democratic Presidential election, in the spring of 2012, three are now in prison, one is in exile, and another is dead. Not one is President. Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, Egypt has held seven national votes, but the country still does not have a single official at any level who was democratically elected.
The last Egyptian voted into office was Morsi, and after the coup he was not seen in public for four months. He was held at an undisclosed location, and then, in the first week of November, he reappeared in the makeshift courtroom at the Police Academy. Dressed in a dark suit without a tie—he had refused to wear the traditional all-white prison garb—he stood in one of the metal cages and shouted angrily at the judge. “This court, with all due respect to the members, does not have jurisdiction over the President of the Republic!” he yelled. “This coup is a crime and treason!” In the audience, a number of Egyptian journalists shouted back, “Death penalty! Death penalty!” Angry arguments broke out between groups of lawyers; at one point, a woman took off her shoe and tried to attack somebody from Morsi’s legal team. The judge didn’t have a gavel, and every time the chaos erupted he pounded the desk with the flat of his hand, like a substitute teacher on a bad day. After a couple of hours, he adjourned the session.
By the time of Morsi’s second appearance, in the last week of January, a layer of soundproof glass had been added to the cages. Along with the former President, twenty-one other men were scheduled to be tried, most of them leaders of the Brotherhood. When I walked into the courtroom, a security official was explaining the remodelling to a group of Egyptian journalists.
“There’s a metal screen, and then there’s glass,” the official said, tapping the glass through one of the screens. “Then there are more metal bars behind that.”
“How many layers of glass?”
“One only.”
The journalists scribbled in their notebooks. Soon they stood up to watch while the twenty-one accused men, chanting political slogans, entered the larger of the two cages. The glass was effective—all we could hear was a muffled roar. The men turned and sat with their backs to the court, and they saluted with four fingers, the gesture that has come to represent Rabaa, the site of the sit-in where, last August, hundreds of Morsi supporters were massacred by security forces. In court, a few journalists responded by holding up two fingers in a victory symbol. Directly in front of me, a reporter with a shaved head stood with his pinkie and forefinger upraised, like a metalhead making the sign of the Devil. The rumble behind the glass grew louder, until a plainclothes security official—more than fifty had been posted around the room—came over and told the reporter to stop antagonizing the men.
“These are terrorists!” the reporter said. “I’m not afraid of terrorists!”
I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars. He had been the secretary of the Brotherhood’s political party, and he was famous for fiery speeches. At times, he had been accused of inciting violence, and last July, after the coup, he made a notorious remark on camera about a recent series of terrorist attacks in the Sinai Peninsula. “We don’t control everything on the ground, but what’s happening in Sinai, as a response to this military coup, will stop the second Sisi announces that he has stepped back from this coup,” Beltagy said. Many Egyptians believed that this statement meant that the Brotherhood was sponsoring terrorism, although there has been no evidence of this and the group has repeatedly condemned such acts. Nevertheless, in December the government officially designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Over the years, I had seen Beltagy at a number of events and, at the end of 2011, I interviewed him in his office. That was during the transition period after Tahrir, when the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, was running the country, and Beltagy was campaigning for a seat in the first post-revolution parliament. There were already signs of tension with the military, and I asked Beltagy if he believed that the authorities would allow the parliament to function if the Brotherhood won a majority. “Any attempt to turn the parliament into a façade—it’s unacceptable,” he said, and he emphasized that the military wouldn’t fight on this point. “They can’t go into conflict with the people,” he said. “When there’s pressure, they will respect it.”
In the short term, Beltagy was right—he won the seat, the Brotherhood gained a majority in parliament, and Morsi took the Presidency. But the military was only one of many institutions that had long mistrusted the Brotherhood. The first parliament was soon dissolved by a court order, and then, in November of 2012, Morsi issued a Presidential decree that temporarily granted him powers beyond the reach of any court. He claimed that this was to prevent the judiciary from interfering in the drafting of a new constitution, but it also inspired protesters to hold a sit-in outside the Presidential Palace. The next day, the protesters were attacked by a well-organized group of Morsi supporters, who quickly cleared the site. As the evening continued, an escalating series of counterattacks left eleven people dead and more than seven hundred injured, with casualties sustained on both sides. Among the dead was El-Husseini Abu Deif, a thirty-three-year-old journalist, who had been shot at close range while filming the fight. Abu Deif had been a constant presence during Tahrir, and he was known to be critical of the Brotherhood; a number of his colleagues believed that he had been the victim of a targeted killing. It was one of many incidents that turned the private media strongly against the Brotherhood. At Morsi’s first court appearance, some reporters carried pictures of Abu Deif, and civil lawyers representing the Journalists’ Syndicate formally requested that Morsi be sentenced to death by hanging.
The atmosphere in the Police Academy courtroom also reflected long-standing tensions between the Brotherhood and the judiciary. After Morsi’s Presidential decree, in 2012, more than thirty Egyptian courts, including the nation’s highest judicial body, went on strike. In response, Morsi rushed to hold a referendum on a new constitution, which included an amendment that would have forced the retirement of more than half the judges on the Supreme Constitutional Court. This clash with the judiciary continued to the end of his Presidency, and, since then, the violence had further hardened everybody involved. Beltagy’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Asmaa, was killed at Rabaa. Like so many tragic events of the post-Tahrir period, Asmaa el-Beltagy’s death has been the subject of conspiracy theories, although it has the distinction of being captured on video. There’s a clip on YouTube: a young woman stands at the edge of a crowd, listening to a sheikh preach a sermon. The scene is calm; no shots are being fired, and nobody is running. And then the girl drops as suddenly as if she had lost all control of her legs. She was shot in the chest, apparently by a sniper; no bystanders were injured. There was speculation that Asmaa was targeted in revenge for her father’s words and actions, including the role he allegedly played in organizing the attack at the Palace.
Asmaa el-Beltagy died on an operating table at a Rabaa field clinic, and there’s a video of that, too. Even at the end, the pretty young woman is modestly covered in a red-patterned hijab, her face is pale, and she murmurs, “Ye Allah!,” in a faint voice. Her eyes look calm. That YouTube clip has been viewed more than five hundred thousand times. No one has been charged with the crime.
In the courtroom, Beltagy caught my eye from inside the cage, and began to make a series of exaggerated gestures. We had met only once, so I was sure that he didn’t recognize me, but he must have focussed on my face because there were no other foreigners nearby. He drew a hand across his mouth to show that he had been silenced. Then he patted his back and turned away from the judge—boycott. Clenched fists, crossed arms—military. Thumbs down, hands atop the shoulders—oppression. He repeated the gestures, smiling broadly. In an awful way, there was something clownish about the figure: dressed all in white, locked in a soundproof cage, smiling and miming as if he were playing some twisted game of charades.
After a while, he jotted something on a piece of paper and held it up. A security officer quickly stepped over to block the view. In front of me, the Egyptian reporter with a shaved head took out a piece of paper and wrote two big capital letters, in English: “C C”—shorthand for Sisi. The reporter grinned at Beltagy and held the paper above his head, like a kid taunting a monkey at the zoo.
Just before eleven o’clock, Morsi appeared. This time, he had been forced to wear white, and he was escorted into the smaller cage, where he stood alone. Until now, the judge had not switched on the microphone that connected to the cages. He pushed a button on his desk, and for the first time we heard the voices of the accused men. They chanted:
The judge hit the button again, and the room went quiet.
For the rest of the session, that was the pattern: the judge opened the mike, the men shouted, and almost immediately they were cut off. The first time Morsi was asked a question, he called out that he was the legitimate President of Egypt. “Who are you, man?” Morsi yelled.
“I am the president of Egypt’s Criminal Courts,” the judge said. His name was Shaaban al-Shamy, and he was a heavyset, tough-looking man who seemed to enjoy his power over the courtroom. After Beltagy refused to respond to a court request, the judge peered into the cage and said, “I can see you—why aren’t you answering?” When a member of Morsi’s defense team asked an aggressive question, the judge suggested in a deadpan voice that he might toss the lawyer into the cage.
Morsi and most of the others faced multiple charges, and today’s hearing concerned a prison break that had occurred during the first week of the revolution. The Tahrir protests had initially been against police brutality—January 25th is National Police Day—and, as the movement quickly gained momentum, the Mubarak regime arrested Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders on trumped-up charges. It was an old strategy: the government hoped to make the Brotherhood a scapegoat for the unrest. But this time it turned out to be an enormous miscalculation. In the beginning, the Brothers had not officially joined the Tahrir movement, a reluctance that later was held against them by other activists. But the arrest of the Brotherhood’s leadership helped galvanize the group, and all members were instructed to join the Tahrir demonstration on January 28th. Their presence and discipline proved to be critical in the chaotic days that followed.
During that period, security forces often attacked demonstrators, and police stations and prisons became targets for angry mobs. Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders were held at the Wadi el-Natroun Prison, which is about sixty miles north of Cairo, on the desert highway that leads to Alexandria. On the evening of the twenty-eighth, men with automatic weapons and heavy construction machinery breached the prison walls and freed the inmates—more than eleven thousand. Casualties were low, because most of the officers had abandoned their posts. After Morsi escaped, he made an excited call by satellite phone to an Al Jazeera news channel, to explain that he and the other Brotherhood leaders were leaving because the jail had become dangerous. “I speak to the whole world!” he said. “We did not escape. If there is an Egyptian official who would like to contact us, we are here.”
Morsi never made another public statement about the event. Hassan Karim, one of Beltagy’s lawyers, told me that the prison break had been organized by relatives and friends of common criminals inside. In any case, Morsi’s escape wasn’t particularly unusual in the context of the revolution: many political prisoners, ranging from former parliamentarians to Salafi Islamists, were set free during the unrest. And Morsi had spent all of two days in Wadi el-Natroun.
But last June, while the Tamarrod campaign was building, stories about the prison break started to emerge. On June 23rd, a week before the anti-Morsi demonstrations, a court in Ismailia ordered an investigation into the charge that some Brotherhood members had conspired with Hamas and Hezbollah to storm Wadi el-Natroun. The court didn’t mention Morsi, but that week, when I visited the Tamarrod headquarters near Tahrir Square, I noticed that somebody had decorated a wall with a picture of Morsi behind sketched-in bars. An inscription read, “Wanted: Escaped from Prison.” At the time, it struck me as strange—there were many reasons for people to be unhappy with the President, but I had never heard anybody complain about the prison break.
Even now, there are other charges that seem more plausible. Morsi and Brotherhood leaders have been accused of inciting violence during the Palace protests, where some of the evidence was collected by respected lawyers and human-rights activists who began working on the case as events unfolded. Ragia Omran, a coördinator for the Front to Defend Egypt’s Protesters, and a recent recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, has filed one case on behalf of some of the forty-nine citizens who were wrongfully detained and interrogated, and, in many instances, tortured. She told me that there is strong evidence that some Brotherhood members directed the detentions and interrogations.
But the case regarding the prison break seems absurd. In court, the trial began with an official reading a twenty-three-minute statement that claimed that eight hundred members of Hamas and Hezbollah helped coördinate the attack on the prison, after entering Egypt illegally. In addition to Morsi and the other Egyptians, more than seventy Palestinians were being tried in absentia, and all of them had been charged with “carrying out a plot to bring down the Egyptian state and its institutions.” (They were also accused of stealing chickens from the prison storehouse.) Hamas and Hezbollah have issued statements strongly denying the foreigners’ involvement. One of the accused, Hassan Salama, has been in an Israeli prison since 1996. Another Palestinian, Shady El-Sanea, had been dead for more than two years by the time he allegedly helped organize the prison break—he was killed on the first day of the Gaza War, in 2008. But such abuse of history seems almost the point. The case undermines the narrative of Tahrir as a home-grown movement, and links the Brotherhood to foreign agents. In effect, the state is trying to do what it failed to do three years ago: to pin the chaos of the revolution on the Brotherhood.
Near the end of the court session, Beltagy began shouting and pounding on the cage, and the judge pressed the button. “We want to talk!” Beltagy said loudly. “We have demands! We are deprived here! This is political revenge!” He continued, “So if there were eight hundred Hamas and Hezbollah members who crossed the border and came from Sinai to Cairo, and caused all of this to happen, then was it a revolution or was it a military occupation?”
The prosecution’s lawyer said calmly, “By responding to the allegations, Beltagy is acknowledging the case.” The judge hit the button—silence—and a number of journalists applauded. But now Beltagy was enraged. He ran to the front of the cage and climbed up the metal bars, to get closer to the microphone that was set into the ceiling. The cage rattled; Beltagy was yelling to have the mike turned on. Finally the judge pressed the button.
“From January 25th to January 30th, was that a revolution or a military occupation?” Beltagy shouted.
“I don’t talk about politics,” the judge said.
“This isn’t politics!”
They went back and forth a few times, until the judge hit the button once more. There was laughter in the audience when he made a gesture like a man brushing away a fly.
On January 25th, the third anniversary of Tahrir, I went to the Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque, in the Cairo neighborhood of Mohandiseen. Since 2011, the square in front of the mosque has been a popular starting point for marches that continue across the Nile to Tahrir. But this also means that security forces have established a more or less permanent presence near the mosque. When I arrived, police officers with weapons had been stationed all around the square, and more than a dozen armored personnel carriers had been parked at key intersections. Soldiers in desert camouflage sat atop the A.P.C. turrets, rifles in hand, watching protesters arrive.
By one o’clock, a few hundred people had gathered in the square, and they began to chant. But they were splintered into different groups. One pro-Morsi faction shouted, “Down with military rule!” and “The people want to overthrow the regime!” Nearby, members of the activist groups April 6 and the Revolutionary Socialists began to chant against the military and the Brotherhood—“The revolution continues!” was one of their calls. Others stood silent on the peripheries. I struck up a conversation with a pair of young bystanders; one was a computer programmer named Hisham, who lived nearby. He and his friend had come to watch the protest. “I’m not going to participate,” Hisham told me. “But I’m sympathetic.”
He told me that he had voted for Morsi. “I regret it,” he said. “He was a bad President. But he shouldn’t have been removed that way.” He continued, “Morsi is finished—I want something different. But not this military rule.”
I asked what the alternatives might be, but, before he could answer, shooting broke out. Later, some Cairo newspapers reported that Brotherhood supporters had antagonized soldiers by flashing the Rabaa symbol. One paper claimed that a protester fired the first shot, but I saw no weapons in the crowd. They had been chanting for all of ten minutes. And there was no warning—the troops didn’t advance their positions, and nobody got on a loudspeaker and called for the square to be cleared. There wasn’t even an initial volley. The gunfire came in a cascade; most of it was bird shot, but there was also the roar of Kalashnikovs and the heavy percussion of assault rifles launching tear-gas cannisters. People began screaming, and Hisham shouted, “Run!”
The security forces seemed to be aiming above our heads. I was running with the crowd, away from the square, and I looked to my left and saw a soldier on an A.P.C. firing his weapon into the sky. This is usually the pattern at protests that end in gunfire, but in a number of instances security forces have lowered their weapons and killed people. I was running on a bad foot—I had injured a ligament a few weeks before—and I slowed to a walk once I thought we were out of range. But then I heard bird shot ripping through the leaves of a tree overhead, so I started running again. I turned down the first side street where troops weren’t stationed. A protester staggered down the middle of the road, bleeding from the head—he must have been hit by bird shot. Some locals stood near the entrance of a building, and I asked them if I could sit down.
“Get out of here!” one man said angrily. “Why do you Brotherhood people come here and cause trouble?”
I told him that I was a journalist and that my foot was injured, but the man pushed me in the chest. “Get out!” he said.
The others didn’t look happy—traditionally, Egyptians don’t respond this way to a foreigner who is alone and hurt. But nobody said anything as I limped away. In the past year, there have been a number of shootings in Mohandiseen, including fatalities, and locals were clearly traumatized. It’s a modern, middle-class neighborhood—the name means “engineers”—and violence feels shocking in such a place. But the worst fighting in Cairo tends to occur in relatively affluent areas. All of Egypt’s political disturbances, from Tahrir to Tamarrod to the current round, have been led by members of the intelligentsia and the middle class, which is common in any revolution. The Brotherhood’s leadership is dominated by engineers, doctors, and scientists, while many young liberal activists come from élite families. The military is a staunchly middle-class institution. One of the great ironies of today’s Cairo is that the best way to avoid political violence is to go to the ashwa’iyet—the slums. Residents there enjoy talking about politics, like most Egyptians these days, but after three years of instability they are rarely very inspired or active. The slums are also poorly policed, which, in the post-coup climate, is perversely reassuring. The most dangerous thing you can do in Egypt these days is stand around a police station. Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the Sinai-based group that has claimed responsibility for the biggest recent terrorist attacks, has repeatedly issued warnings to citizens to stay away from police stations and military sites. The day before the anniversary of Tahrir, the group detonated a car bomb that destroyed the façade of the police directorate in eastern Cairo. The attack had been scheduled for six-thirty on a weekend morning, apparently to reduce civilian casualties. (Four people died, and dozens were injured.) The explosion was so powerful that it rattled the windows of my apartment, more than three miles away.
After the protest in Mohandiseen, I limped down the street until I met a friendly banker and a retired military engineer who let me sit next to their building. The banker brought me a chair and a glass of water, and I sat and waited for the shooting to die down. Both men spoke good English; the engineer had spent some time in Fort Worth. It was the kind of conversation that I often had with educated Cairenes, except that today we were interrupted periodically by volleys of gunfire. The police were pursuing protesters down the side streets, arresting them under a new law that prohibits demonstrations without prior approval.
The conversation turned to China, where I used to live. I mentioned that, in spite of the heavy-handed things that the Communists did, at least they had responded to the Tiananmen Square massacre by training security officials in the use of nonviolent methods to disperse the thousands of demonstrations that occur every year. “Nothing has changed here,” the banker said, looking disgusted. If anything, it had got worse—I had never attended a protest that was set upon so quickly and so violently. Later, when I contacted Hisham, I learned that his companion had fallen and broken his foot while trying to flee, and they had seen several people who had been shot. There were dozens of arrests and at least one death. And yet Mohandiseen barely made the news. Across Egypt, more than sixty people died in political violence on January 25th, and by now it was hard to claim that this anniversary commemorated the beginning of a real revolution. It still felt like Police Day.
The general mood among Cairenes who were active in Tahrir is that this is the lowest point since the start of the Arab Spring. But most still believe that the revolution is ongoing, and they take heart from the fact that, if nothing else, vast numbers of Egyptians have become politically aware and engaged. And this is true—people all over the country discuss politics with an openness that wasn’t possible under Mubarak, and they have gained confidence from the experience of removing two unpopular leaders through mass protests. But the longer I live in Egypt the warier I am of this surge into political life. Observers tend to focus on inspiring examples: the young activist who wants freedom, the uneducated slum dweller who joins a march in the name of social justice. The truth is that these elements can’t be separated from other trends that are less encouraging. The climate that creates politicized activists also creates a politicized judiciary, a politicized police force, and a politicized military. It means that a religious organization like the Brotherhood attempts to seize control of the country. It means that the Pope of the Coptic Church and the Grand Imam of the Al Azhar Mosque stand onstage with Sisi when he announces the removal of an elected President. It means that supposedly impartial journalists shout “Death penalty!” at a man in a cage.
In the late nineteen-sixties, Samuel P. Huntington, the American political scientist, who wrote “Political Order in Changing Societies,” characterized such a situation as “praetorian”—a fundamentally unstable state in which “participation in politics has outrun the institutionalization of politics.” When a weak state lacks established political parties and other institutions that handle the give-and-take of governance, the result is a series of clumsy maneuvers by ill-prepared players. In Huntington’s view, there’s no essential difference between students taking to the streets, a court cancelling a parliament, and a military staging a coup. (“Each social force attempts to secure its objectives through the resources and tactics in which it is strongest.”) In this regard, Egypt’s challenge is especially great, because two of the most powerful forces, the military and the Islamists, have always been suspicious of formal politics and parties. The same is true of many activists. In June of last year, when Tamarrod was preparing its protest, organizers were adamant that they had no interest in traditional politics. “There should be no parties,” Karim el-Masry, a twenty-seven-year-old lawyer who was one of the Tamarrod leaders, told me the week before the protest. “We’re just Egyptians. We don’t want to divide the country.”
At times, the act of following Egyptian politics seems almost cruel—it’s like watching a lightning-fast sport played very badly, with every mistake reviewed in excruciating slow motion. When I sat in the Police Academy courtroom, and looked into the cage, I recognized men and remembered conversations that made me wince. There was Hazem Farouk Mansour—in 2011, when he was running for parliament, I mentioned to him that some people distrusted the Brotherhood. “You are right to think like that,” he told me. “We have been underground for eighty years. When I speak to you now and I am under the light, then you can know me well.” Now he was sitting in the cage near Sobhi Saleh, who had been having his shoes shined in the members’ lounge of the Egyptian parliament when I last talked with him. That was mid-March of 2012, when the Brotherhood still claimed that it wouldn’t field a Presidential candidate, in order to demonstrate a willingness to share power. I had asked Saleh if the Brothers might change their minds. “Never,” he said. “Never. We will not nominate somebody.” Eight days later, when I posed the same question to Rashad El-Bayoumi, one of the members of the Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau, the message had shifted. “We said that we may be obligated, or that things can push us to run for the Presidency,” Bayoumi told me. Later that week, the Brothers officially entered the race, and in May I attended a Morsi rally in Ismailia. A Salafi preacher named Safwat Hegazy warmed up the crowd. “As for the fears that the Brothers want to take over the government—” Hegazy said, pausing for effect. “Yes, we do want everything! We want the parliament! We want the President! We want the cabinet and the ministries!” He shouted, “The majority should have power! The minority opinions are not allowed to argue!” Now this scourge of minority rights was locked in the soundproof cage, along with Bayoumi and all the rest.
There are signs of hubris with Sisi, too. After the coup, even Egyptian liberals tended to be supportive, in part because they believed that Sisi had no plan to seek the top office. But something changed toward the end of last year. Since Morsi’s removal, it’s been easier to track such trends on the street, because both the private and the state media have sounded essentially the same notes, which are then echoed by the public. At the beginning of winter, I started having a wide range of conversations in which people mentioned the same fact: that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had formerly been a general, so there was a precedent for a military leader’s being elected to the top office in a democracy. Usually, I said something to the effect that the American analogy wasn’t perfect—for one thing, Ike hadn’t tossed Harry S. into a cage—but the talk shows seemed to be pushing this idea.
I suspected that Sisi hadn’t originally planned to become President, just as I suspected that the Brotherhood hadn’t originally planned to field a candidate. But when a country suffers a lack of political authority, the vacuum at the top sucks in anybody who draws close. And leaders feed off the crowd as much as they direct it. During Morsi’s year in office, as he made dangerous enemies of key institutions, he periodically called on supporters to demonstrate in the streets, as if this would give him the legitimacy to continue. For months, Sisi has been gauging the public mood in similar ways. “If I nominate myself, there must be a popular demand,” he said, in early January. It was made clear to the Egyptian people that, if they turned out in high numbers and voted for the new constitution, they were encouraging Sisi to run.
Many seem to think that this dynamic is democratic. When the Brotherhood was in office, its members talked obsessively about “the ballot box,” using their electoral success to justify any action. After the Army removed Morsi, it released footage and estimated numbers of Tamarrod protesters, to show that it was following the people’s will. But leaders are also tempted to tap into the worst instincts of the mob. The decision to clear Rabaa probably had much to do with public pressure—the six-week-long sit-in was held in a middle-class area whose residents had been furious about the disruption. Afterward, these people, many of whom had witnessed the terrible bloodshed firsthand, tended to be the biggest apologists for the massacre.
In such a climate, it’s hard for fledgling political organizations to mature. Eight months after the Tamarrod protests, when I again talked to Karim el-Masry, he spoke vaguely about the group’s plans to eventually form a political party. “We emerged from the street,” he said. “We emerged from the people. Wherever they go, we are part of them.” I asked for details about the party’s future goals and principles, but he said that the direction had to come from the grass roots. “Whatever the people choose, whatever they want, we will do,” he said.
For leaders who try to harness the energy on the streets, the task is all but impossible, because of the volatility of public opinion. Last spring, support for the Brotherhood vanished so quickly that many of its leaders didn’t seem to realize what was happening. Although Sisi is by far the most popular figure in the country, I already sense a slight dip in enthusiasm. The country’s economic problems are severe and getting worse; last week, the Prime Minister and his cabinet resigned, partly in response to a series of strikes by government workers. At this point, Sisi’s value lies entirely in his popularity—he’s not a general who won a war, or a politician who succeeded in a previous office. It’s remarkable how little is known about the man. He has yet to announce his candidacy, and he has given no details about policy plans or economic ideas. Politically speaking, he remains as featureless as the desert outside the capital. He has arrived atop the crowds, and the crowds will determine whether he stays. “Here people really have a role,” Ahmed Ragab, a young investigative reporter at Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of the country’s most influential private newspapers, told me. “Even the leaders fear the people, so the leaders have to feed that fear.”
Ragab believed that the charges against Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders were so ridiculous, in part, to give the state some flexibility. He explained that in the future, if the political winds change and the authorities decide to reconcile with the Brotherhood, the cases can easily be thrown out of court. In the meantime, though, the public mood is crucial. “You know what toppled Morsi—it wasn’t just the Army,” Ragab said. “It was also the people. Sisi knows very well that if he becomes President tomorrow, and the people come out in the streets again, there will be another coup, from another part of the Army.” But he didn’t mention the other possibility—that, when a President is backed by both the military and the police, a widespread protest could end like Rabaa rather than like Tahrir.
In the Police Academy courtroom, the soundproofing of the cages quickly became a focal point for the defense team. During Morsi’s third appearance in court, his lead lawyer withdrew the defense team in protest, cutting the session short. At the next hearing, another defense lawyer stood up and requested that the trial be delayed until his legal team and its clients were able to learn sign language, so they could communicate. (The judge rolled his eyes—request denied.)
On the second day of the trial, there had been a break for midday prayer, and I walked over to the front of the cage that faced the gallery. I talked with Beltagy’s lawyer, who told me that the soundproofing was both illegal and unprecedented. I mentioned this to an Egyptian television journalist, who shook her head. “There is nothing in the law that says they can’t do this,” she told me, in perfect English. “And this is not the first time that glass has been put in a cage like this. They’ve done it in Turkey.” (Not yet, it turned out—though later that same week another soundproof cage was used in a court in Azerbaijan.)
During the break, a man in a blue worker’s uniform came over and studied the cage. He stood out among the crowd of suits and ties and black legal robes—he was short, bald, and middle-aged, and his company name was stitched onto an oval patch on his breast. “You can see how they installed this, between the wires,” he told me, touching the glass. “And, up there, they joined it.” I asked him if he was there to fix it.
“Of course not,” he said. “I’m the air-conditioner repairman.”
I asked what was wrong with the air-conditioning.
“Oh, there’s no problem!” he said, looking surprised. “It’s not even on.”
This made sense—it was the last week in January. So why was he here? The court had banned cameras, voice recorders, and cell phones; the relatives of the accused weren’t allowed to attend; very few members of the foreign press had shown up. And yet the midwinter air-conditioner repairman was mingling with Egyptian journalists and Islamist lawyers. I figured I might as well get his opinion on the soundproof cage.
“I don’t think it’s right,” he said. “They should be able to speak, right?”
When the trial resumed, he took a seat in front of me. He sat there for the next two hours, listening intently. I never figured out why he had come, but I liked having him there in the journalists’ section. I had a feeling that, where Egypt was going, it needed all the good judgment it could get. ♦
