It would seem, then, that not even the worst depredations of the Mubarak regime could suppress Egypt’s economic and civic vitality. Now, after the revolution, the country’s most serious problems lie elsewhere, in the realms of education, politics, and religion, a tangled and explosive mixture that holds the potential to derail a process so well begun.
met Fady Phillip at a small but intense demonstration on the Nile embankment near Tahrir Square. A bearded cleric was speaking into two bullhorns, and several men were waving wooden crosses in the air. Off to one side, barely paying attention, stood a line of armed soldiers in camouflage fatigues. I approached a young man with a Palestinian kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders and asked him what was going on. He explained that some young Muslim men had torched a Coptic church in the Helwan district of Greater Cairo, for reasons having to do with a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. The Copts, a branch of Christianity whose presence in Egypt predates Islam, wanted to rebuild, but the authorities were dragging their feet about issuing the permits. This was, he said, deliberate discrimination.When I took out my notebook, a small crowd gathered around me, and one man started peppering me with questions:
“Where you from? Who you write for?”
Before I could properly explain, the questions turned rhetorical: “Where you think this revolution start? You think it start in Tunisia, yes?”
“So I’ve been told,” I replied lamely. Simplified accounts of the Arab Awakening usually start with the self-immolation of a humiliated Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, but I was prepared to hear another view.
“Ah, no, my friend, you are wrong,” said my interlocutor, delighted to have exposed my ignorance. “It start right here, in Egypt,” he said, pronouncing it Ezhypt, “in Alexandria.” He went on to tell me how, on New Year’s Eve, extremists had bombed a Coptic church in Alex, as everyone calls it, killing twenty-four people. Huge demonstrations followed. “Hundreds of thousands in the streets, my friend. That is where the revolution start. Do you know it? No, you do not.”
“That is because you no Egyptian,” someone else put in. “Egyptians eat beans. You no eat beans. Americans eat hamburger.” Everyone burst out laughing, and I felt like the straight man in an absurdist improv routine.
I turned to Phillip — by that time, I had his name — and said, “Look, I’d love to hear more about this, but can we go somewhere for a drink?” I figured that as a Christian he wouldn’t be offended by the suggestion.
And so began a hair-raising dash through the traffic swirling around Tahrir Square, Phillip always a few paces ahead of me. It was Friday, and another large demonstration had taken place that afternoon; now it was evening, the crowd had thinned, and the atmosphere was more relaxed. A line of skinny kids who looked about twelve years old filed by to the rhythmic beating of an oil drum. Their faces were painted red, white, and black — the colours of the Egyptian flag. “Welcome!” they shouted at me as they passed. I looked around and noticed that we were standing in the very spot where pro-Mubarak horsemen and camel drivers armed with rifles and machetes had charged the protesters back in February, triggering bloody street battles that had raged for two days. The area was now populated by street vendors selling ice water, lemonade, Egyptian flags, “I ♥ Egypt” T-shirts, lapel pins, earrings, tricolour headbands, and other souvenirs commemorating January 25, the first day of mass demonstrations. This instantaneous, exuberant commodification of an event where so many had died left me with mixed feelings.
Phillip led me through a maze of narrow streets and back alleys, until we emerged into a brightly lit pedestrian mall filled with yellow plastic tables and chairs. A waiter appeared at our side, and Phillip ordered a soft drink and a sheesha, a water pipe in which café-goers smoke tobacco cured in fruit juice. I asked for a beer. Phillip shot me a pathetic little smile that read, “You must be joking.” I pointed to a big sign over the café door advertising Stella, a local beer. “That’s just for show,” he said. I ordered coffee.
We talked for the next two hours, interrupted by a steady stream of street vendors and the waiter bringing fresh, glowing coals for the water pipe. Phillip, who is in his mid-twenties, has travelled around the United States. “People say I speak English with a southern accent,” he said, although I couldn’t detect it. He also spent five years studying Islam, he told me, so he knows what he’s talking about. His main concern, he said, is Article Two of the Egyptian constitution, which enshrines Islam as the state religion and the principles of sharia law as the basis for legislation. The article has been in place since 1971, and though it has not led to extreme punishments, such as amputations and death by stoning, it remains lodged in the constitution like a poisonous pill, waiting to be activated should Islamic fundamentalists ever seize power. “If you want to see sharia in action,” said Phillip, “look at Saudi Arabia.”
As a Christian, he was unhappy with how events were unfolding. He’d been in Tahrir Square from the beginning, but on February 1, after Mubarak promised to step down, many of the “January 25 people,” as he calls the original demonstrators, felt they had made their point and went home. The following day, Mubarak unleashed his thugs, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s oldest Islamic organization, stepped forward to take an active role in the square’s defence. Not wishing to concede ground to the Islamists, the January 25 people returned and joined in the fight. And when they had successfully secured the square, they and the Islamists demanded Mubarak’s removal. A kind of solidarity between Muslims and Copts had been forged, reflected in the T-shirts I’d seen on sale displaying the Muslim crescent and the Christian cross side by side.
“After Mubarak was knocked down, people said we’re either going into a dark tunnel, or we’re going into the sun,” Phillip said. “And according to what I’ve seen, it’s going into a dark tunnel.” It wasn’t just the continuing attacks on Christian churches; the results of the March 19 referendum worried him, too. The junta, or Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, as it likes to be called, asked Egyptians to endorse temporary changes to the constitution (Article Two was left intact), and to approve its proposal to hold elections in September in advance of a proper constitutional convention. Most of the January 25 people urged Egyptians to vote no. They argued that September elections wouldn’t give them enough time to establish new political parties, handing an automatic advantage to the better-organized political forces like the Muslim Brotherhood, which was campaigning vigorously for the yes side. Except in Greater Cairo and Alexandria, the yes vote prevailed, a result some clerics proclaimed as a victory for Islam.
To say that Phillip doesn’t trust the Islamists not to turn Egypt into a fundamentalist theocracy is an understatement. “Believe me,” he said, “I wanted Mubarak out, but I don’t want democracy.” When I asked him why, he said that in a country where 30 percent of the population is illiterate and gets most of its information from the mosque or from television, democracy could put the Islamists in power. The solution, he said, is to hand the country over to “a good, wise dictator who wants the country, not for himself, but for everyone.”
