THREE

EGYPT

The Players

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

—FRENCH PHILOSOPHER JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

As long as we are suffering economically and politically in the Muslim world, God will be the solution.

—EGYPTIAN ANALYST AHMED FAKHR

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the political forces in the Middle East can be divided into three broad categories. The brave Egyptian activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim—an academic who was among the first to study the jihadists in the 1980s and then went on to found a democracy center, for which he was imprisoned three times, ironically sometimes with the jihadists—calls them the three “crats”: theocrats, democrats, and autocrats. I went to see representatives of all three in Egypt to discuss their visions of the future and how they planned to achieve them.

I started with the Muslim Brotherhood, because the theocrats are the most energetic political force in Egypt.

The Brotherhood’s neatly efficient headquarters is in a residential apartment that overlooks a row of leafy palm trees along the banks of the Nile. The movement was outlawed in 1954. It was still illegal more than a half century later, so the only signpost was a small white board with blue letters that had been attached to the frame of the door. Even it, I was told, was a fairly recent addition.

Visitors are asked to take off their shoes at the door. “We pray on this rug,” explained a greeter, politely. He was wearing natty suspenders but no tie. Like almost everyone in the bustling office, he had a bruiselike mark on his forehead, the sign of a devout Muslim who prays several times a day by getting down on his knees, bending over, and pressing his head against the floor in a sign of submission. Islam, literally, means submission, as in to God.

The headquarters is one of the few smoke-free environments in Cairo, a city where people still puff away in elevators, public transportation, shops, movie houses, and government offices. Members of the Brotherhood do not smoke or drink alcohol because they harm the body—“God’s gift,” the greeter explained.

The apartment-office is a deceptively modest facility for the most organized political movement in the Middle East and, almost certainly, in the wider Islamic world.¹ It was founded in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, a disillusioned twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher, whose first followers were six disgruntled workers in the Suez Canal Company. Eight decades later, the Brotherhood had spawned eighty-six branches and affiliates in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Most Islamic political groups are a by-product, directly or indirectly, of Banna’s unlikely little band.

Hamas originally emerged in 1987 as the militant Palestinian wing of the Brotherhood, whose branch in Syria had become so strong by 1982 that former President Hafez al Assad launched a military crackdown against its stronghold in Hama, killing tens of thousands of people and leveling whole sectors of the city.

Given the Brotherhood’s controversial history, some affiliates have taken different names. The Islamic Action Front became Jordan’s largest opposition group during the kingdom’s first elections for parliament, after a twenty-two year hiatus, in 1989. The Iraqi Islamic Party was the most significant Sunni political group to run in Iraq’s 2005 elections.

Prominent Arab politicians as well as notorious extremists got their feet wet politically in Egypt’s Brotherhood before moving on to lead their own groups. Yasser Arafat joined when he was an engineering student at Cairo University in the 1950s, before he founded Fatah and took over the Palestine Liberation Organization. Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue, Ayman al Zawahiri, was a teenager when he signed up, but he left in the late 1970s to join the more militant Islamic Jihad and then, in the 1990s, to merge forces with Osama bin Laden. Fathi Shikaki joined during his years as a medical student in Egypt in the 1970s, but reportedly left out of frustration at its limited action agenda and founded the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the 1980s.

The Muslim Brotherhood—or Ikhwan, as it is known in Arabic—is still strongest, however, in Egypt, its birthplace.

In Cairo, appointments often happen on Middle East time, meaning late, but I was ushered into the office of Mohammed Habib precisely at the appointed hour.

Habib is the second in command to the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide. His life is a microcosm of the recent Brotherhood experience. He served in parliament; he also served three stints in prison.

A tall man, Habib was wearing a blue and white pinstripe shirt and had a short, well-groomed beard. His glasses had rims at the top but not along the bottom. Habib started out as a geology professor who specialized in detecting geological data from satellite images. He still occasionally lectures.

“No, no, I’m not a cleric,” he said, laughing. “Most of us here now are professionals—doctors or engineers or professors.” He volunteered that he had done geological research at the University of Missouri at Rolla in the late 1970s.

Although his hair is white and thinning at the top, Habib represents the young guard or more moderate wing of the religious movement. He is middle-class, educated, courteous, articulate, and passionately devout while also experienced with the outside world.

The Brotherhood first moved into mainstream politics through men like Habib. In the early 1980s, Brothers who were doctors, lawyers, journalists, engineers, and other white-collar professionals started winning elections to lead Egypt’s unions. Unions are called syndicates in Egypt; they had traditionally been dominated by secular leftist, nationalist, or liberal activists. The movement made the formal leap in 1984. Under cover of a legal centrist party, the Brotherhood ran its first candidates for parliament and won a token presence of eight seats. It ran again, in an alliance with liberal and labor parties, in 1987 and won thirty-six seats. Habib was one of the big winners.

The Brotherhood’s presence in mainstream politics has been growing ever since, in fits and starts.

In 2005, although still illegal, the Brotherhood ran again. This time, it exceeded all projections. Eighty-eight of its candidates, running as independents, won twenty percent of the seats in the People’s Assembly. It was the largest victory by any group against the ruling party since Egypt became a republic in 1952. The Ikhwan had redefined Egypt’s political spectrum.

The Muslim Brotherhood was suddenly the main duly elected opposition party.

And the numbers were misleading: The Brotherhood actually won more than one half of the seats it contested. It put up only 161 candidates for the 444-seat assembly, and it stayed away from many races with high-profile politicians from the ruling National Democratic Party.

The Ikhwan’s real strength is one of the most debated topics in Egypt.

The Brotherhood clearly has a critical advantage over all other opposition parties. “President Mubarak has closed down so much that there are only two platforms left for political activism—his National Democratic Party and the mosque,” said Hisham Kassem, the editor of Egypt’s first independent daily newspaper, who lost as a secular candidate for parliament in 2000. “And he can’t close the mosques, so the Muslim Brotherhood effectively has thousands of general assemblies once a week.”

Egyptians are a deeply religious people, both Muslims and Coptic Christians. Faith provides a sense of reason and a comfortable rhythm in difficult Egyptian life.

It is visible in Cairo taxis, in the miniature shrines built on the dashboards, or the “I rely on God” bumper stickers, or the lists of “The Ninety-nine Names of God” dangling from the rearview mirrors. It is audible in the lilting Muslim call to prayer chanted from thousands of mosque muezzins or interrupting programs on state-controlled television five times a day. It is evident in the standard response to statements on virtually anything from the weather and marriage prospects to politics—inshallah, or “God willing.”

For almost 1,000 years, Cairo has been the world’s largest Muslim city and its most important center of Islamic learning at Al Azhar, the oldest university in the Islamic world. Egypt has also produced the two most famous (and rival) new Muslim televangelists—the charismatic young modernist Amr Khaled on Iqra satellite television and the older and fierier Sheikh Mohammed al Qaradawi on al Jazeera.

More important to the shift in Egypt’s political winds was the economic crisis of the 1990s, which produced what Egyptians dubbed their “Gulf-ization” period. Between 1989 and 1996, up to seven million Egyptians were driven to find work in conservative Persian Gulf countries. Egyptian officials told me they realized what was going on when the government could not keep teachers; some three million left Egypt.² Most Egyptians eventually came back, with new money but also often with conservative Gulf ways that were best reflected at home by the Muslim Brotherhood. The experience left a particularly deep impact on Egypt’s middle class, the cornerstone of any society’s political system.

The tide had turned so much that Habib predicted his movement could win sixty percent of the seats in a free election—if the Muslim Brotherhood could fairly compete for every seat.

Several Egyptian analysts disagreed. They countered that the highly organized Brotherhood mobilized all the votes it could get in the 2005 election and still did not attract the silent majority—more than seventy-five percent of Egyptian voters—who were not motivated enough to go to the polls to cast ballots for anyone.

Some cynics also argued that the movement put up only 161 candidates for the 2005 election because it had no other viable nominees.

The election proved the movement’s weakness rather than its strength, Kassem, the editor of The Egyptian Today, told me. “Look, in 2005, it had been trying to get to power for almost eighty years,” he said. “I would have trouble hiring someone who took that long to make an impact.”

But Habib claimed that the number of candidates was a calculated decision. The Brotherhood’s go-slow strategy, he said, sought to produce gradual change rather than radical upheaval.

“Our approach, our plan, our vision has adopted the slogan: participation, not overpowering,” Habib explained, sitting at a desk covered with neat stacks of books and papers. “We know the Egyptian regime does not want us, and they are holding on tight to their seats of power. No one wants to provoke or confront the regime on that point.”

In the early twenty-first century, the Brotherhood has evolved in its discourse and strategy, if not its goals. The Ikhwan’s original creed projected radical transformation. “God is our purpose, the Prophet our leader, the Koran our constitution, jihad our way, and dying for God’s cause our supreme objective.”³

The motto is still in its official literature. But a simplified and vaguer version—“Islam is the solution”—has been used for public consumption in recent years. The movement talks less about jihad and theocratic rule, too.

Indeed, when the new class of Brotherhood members showed up for parliament in 2006, its early focus was not on stereotypical issues associated with Islamic rule, such as banning alcohol or imposing Islamic dress on women. They instead went after a government decision to let a retired French aircraft carrier loaded with tons of asbestos sail through the Suez Canal en route to India, where it was to be disassembled for scrap metal. A Brotherhood politician angrily warned of the environmental hazards to Egypt.⁴

To call for a chance to speak in the People’s Assembly, legislators have to wave a copy of Egypt’s constitution at the parliamentary speaker. With eighty-eight members, the Brotherhood delegation literally began a wave of challenges about reform issues that secular parties had been unable or unwilling to tackle. Persistently and sometimes noisily, they demanded answers on the use of torture. They called for a status report on more than 15,000 political prisoners. They pressed for an end to emergency law. They urged judicial independence and freedom of speech for journalists reporting on government corruption. They called for term limits on the presidency. They appealed for the rights to assemble and associate.⁵

In one session, Brotherhood parliamentarian Hussein Ibrahim scolded the regime for its human-rights record, noting “horror stories about torture in police stations, cases in which prisoners have disappeared from jails, and innocent citizens have been forced to admit to crimes they didn’t commit.”⁶

The disciplined movement also prodded parliament’s work ethic, notably its high absenteeism. All eighty-eight Brotherhood members attended all sessions, all the time, Egyptian analysts told me. Votes can be called at any time, without a quorum, so ruling-party legislators were suddenly forced to attend more often for fear of what laws might get passed without them.

During my visit to Brotherhood headquarters, Habib insisted that the Brotherhood understood the pragmatic realities of twenty-first-century politics. The Ikhwan had made a full commitment to work within the system, he said.

“We can now say that for decades we have accepted democracy,” he told me. “We approve multiple parties on the political arena, and this reflects a change or an evolution in our way of thinking about political life.

“We approve the peaceful transfer of power. And we declare as well that the people are the source of authority, that people have the right to choose their leader, and that people are the ones to choose their candidates. The people are the ones who have the right to choose the program that they see fit for them, politically, economically, and socially.”

The source of authority is a central issue as Middle East societies begin the process of change, particularly as Islamist groups reconfigure the political spectrum. Is it God? Or is it the people? The answer will define the next stage of political development.

When pressed, Brotherhood officials still fudge the answer.

“We need to make a distinction between Western-style democracy and the kind of democracy we believe in,” Habib said. “We believe that ballot boxes must be transparent. And we believe in state institutions with real separation of authority between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

“But democracies can look different from place to place,” he added.

“For us, we want whatever laws are passed to be in keeping with Islamic Sharia.”

Like many Muslim countries, Egypt already requires laws to be compatible with Sharia. The Brotherhood has done little to specify how strict it wants those laws to be. But it has indicated some limits. In a press conference after the 2005 election, Habib argued that Egyptians should have the right to vote for presidential candidates from parties other than the ruling National Democratic Party. But he also declared that all presidential candidates had to be Muslim—in a country where ten percent of the population is Coptic Christian and Muslim-Christian suspicions run deep. “If we are to apply the Islamic rule, which says that non-Muslims cannot have guardianship over Muslims, then a Christian may not be president,” he told reporters.⁷

For now, the movement emphasizes peaceful transformation. Its public literature warns, “Ruling a totally corrupt society through a militant government overthrow is a great risk.”⁸

“We are against revolutions in general and definitely against chaos,” Habib told me. “We are also against using armed struggle for change and military coups. No, no, we prefer peaceful change through constitutional and legal channels. There’s no violence in our ideology.”

That was not always true. The Brotherhood has evolved through at least three phases since 1928. Launched in the Suez Canal port of Ismailya, it was initially a grassroots religious and social reform movement with small but ambitious outreach programs. It spent the first decade penetrating Suez cities and then Cairo. In a precise formula, each new branch established an identical set of institutions that included an office, a mosque, a school, a workshop, and a sporting club.

The utopian goal was to create Muslim societies, the seeds for creation of a different kind of state. Founder Hassan al-Banna invoked Islam as a way both to lead one’s life and to rule a nation, as in the faith’s early days. “My brothers,” Banna told his new followers, “you are a new soul in the heart of this nation to give it life by means of the Koran.”⁹

But in the 1940s and 1950s, the Brotherhood entered a militant second phase. Angered by the monarchy, heavy British influence in Egypt, and Banna’s thwarted attempts to run for parliament, the movement bred an extremist wing known as the “the specialists” or “the secret apparatus,” which launched sporadic waves of attacks on both domestic and foreign targets. After four hits on British occupation forces in 1946, Brotherhood gunmen then assassinated the Egyptian judge who convicted their brethren for the violence. Its most brazen act was the assassination of Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud Nokrashi after he charged the movement was plotting to topple the monarchy and ordered it to dissolve.¹⁰

Three months later, Banna was gunned down on a Cairo street, in apparent retaliation.

In 1954, two years after the monarchy was toppled, President Nasser charged the Brotherhood was trying to assassinate him, too. He jailed thousands of Muslim Brothers.

The Brotherhood now tries to distance itself from past violence and its extremist offshoots across the Middle East. “The two incidents that happened during Banna’s time—Nokrashi and the judge—were two individual acts conducted by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they were carried out without the knowledge of Banna and condemned by Banna at the time,” Habib said, dismissing his organization’s responsibility.

“As for the attempt to assassinate Nasser,” he added, “this was a play, an act, which was orchestrated by Nasser himself to get rid of the leaders of the Ikhwan and to detain tens of thousands of them so that he was alone in power.”

Yet that period of militancy has had an enduring impact well into the twenty-first century and well beyond Egypt. Among those jailed in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb, arguably the most influential ideologue that the Brotherhood—or any modern Islamic group—has ever produced. Decades later, al Qaeda’s first angry treatise in 1998 against the United States and its Arab allies borrowed heavily from Qutb’s work.

Ironically, Qutb had been radicalized in the United States. A midlevel Ministry of Education official in Cairo, he had been dispatched to do graduate work from 1948 to 1950 at a small teachers’ training college that later became the University of Northern Colorado. But the American experience had repelled Qutb because of what he viewed as excesses and materialism.

In a 1951 essay he wrote upon his return to Cairo, “The America I have Seen,” Qutb expressed disgust at everything from racism to the water wasted on big American lawns, from the sexuality expressed on the dance floor to the physicality of sports matches.

America’s primitiveness, he wrote, “can be seen in the spectacle of the fans as they follow a game of football…or watch boxing matches or bloody, monstrous wrestling matches…. This spectacle leaves no room for doubt as to the primitiveness of the feelings of those who are enamored with muscular strength and desire it.”

Qutb lived in Greeley, Colorado. Named after newspaper editor and Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley, the conservative community was founded by an agriculture editor on Greeley’s New York Tribune who wanted to set up a utopian society in America and carefully sorted through applications to decide who would be invited to settle in Greeley. The town was established in the nineteenth century on the principles of temperance, religion, and family values.¹¹ Even in the mid-twentieth century, when Qutb attended college in Greeley, alcohol was banned, and public entertainment was limited largely to church socials.

But the Egyptian found decadence even in this reserved environment. He wrote,

They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.

He was scathing about American women.

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.¹²

Of his American experience, Qutb concluded, “Humanity makes the gravest of errors and risks losing its account of morals if it makes America its example.”

After Qutb returned to Egypt, he joined the Brotherhood and quickly became its most prominent author. He continued to write even after he was imprisoned in 1954, raging at the illegitimacy of modern societies, American and Arab alike, for barbarous ignorance comparable to the uncivilized period before Islam.

In his book Milestones, Qutb called on the faithful to topple illegitimate regimes and create pure Islamic states to free mankind “from every authority except that of God.”¹³

Qutb was released in 1964 after a decade in prison, only to be arrested again eight months later for preaching the same radical doctrine. This time, he was sentenced to death.

The government offered clemency if he recanted his call for a militant jihad to topple the Egyptian regime. Colleagues urged him to accept, and many at the time thought he would. But in the end, he refused to back down. In 1966, Qutb was hanged for treason.

Qutb’s influence proved even greater after his death. His writing inspired young activist Ayman al Zawahiri as well as a new generation of Egyptian militants in groups such as Islamic Jihad. His appeal crossed sectarian and ethnic lines as well as national borders. His thinking influenced Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1960s and 1970s in the run-up to Iran’s Shiite revolution. Like Qutb, Khomeini warned against what he called “Westoxication,” or poisoning of the spirit by lax Western morality.

After Qutb’s execution, his brother Mohammed left Egypt to teach in the more hospitable climate of Saudi Arabia. Among his students at King Abdul Azziz University in the 1970s was Osama bin Laden.¹⁴

Qutb’s ideas have since been adopted by militants as far afield as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. They remain popular in the twenty-first century. When I travel in the Middle East, one of the things I always do is stop in local bookstores or libraries to see if Qutb’s works are available. Usually they are.

The Brotherhood’s third phase began in the 1970s, after President Sadat released many of the thousands who had been imprisoned along with Qutb. “History evolves gradually, but I can say 1974 and 1975, when Sadat allowed a greater climate of freedom on the campuses and around Egypt,” Habib told me, “that was the turning point of our Islamic work.”

The Brothers gradually—and somewhat reluctantly, at first—began to absorb a younger generation. The movement was reenergized by student activists who ran for leadership roles on university councils and by professionals like Habib. The movement also began to emphasize again the kind of social outreach programs initiated by founder Hassan al-Banna.

The Brotherhood, in effect, tried to build a state within a state.

In the late 1980s, I visited a complex built around a Cairo mosque by a Brotherhood sympathizer. The three-story stone building in the al-Duqqi neighborhood included a clinic, an elementary school, a small library, and a rooftop observatory to explore the heavens. The classrooms were full. A long line waited to see a doctor; the basic charge was fifty cents a visit. Medical staff at the clinic told me they treated more than 200,000 patients a year.

Egypt soon had hundreds of clinics and schools operated by Islamic groups or individual sympathizers.¹⁵ The Brotherhood does not discuss specific numbers, since any facility with a formal connection to an outlawed movement can be closed down by the state. And some have been.

“Schools are under a lot of scrutiny,” Habib told me. “Many of the education organizations have been dissolved because of regime harassment. But you could say we still have tens of thousands of students and many Islamic health organizations.”

In a country with seventy-six million people, most of whom live on a narrow strip of fertile land along the meandering Nile River, the Brotherhood’s social services reach only a small minority of Egyptians, analysts in Cairo told me. Yet the Ikhwan’s services are reliable, they conceded, and even Egyptians who did not vote for them believe the movement sincerely intends to help people.

After a devastating Cairo earthquake in 1992, the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups were the first to respond with food, blankets, and welfare for thousands of victims left homeless. Engineers put up temporary shelter; medical staff treated the injured. The Ikhwan also gave a thousand dollars to each family to rebuild. The government’s reaction was belated and limited.¹⁶

In 2006, I again visited facilities unofficially linked to the Brotherhood. The Islamic Medical Organization operated a three-story hospital with an outdoor staircase in Talbeye, a poor area near the Pyramids that has dusty, garbage-strewn streets traveled mainly by donkey carts and battered old taxis. There was no other government or private facility anywhere nearby.

In the whitewashed emergency room, a clean but bare-bones facility, a large sign printed on pink paper read, “The idea of the organization is to get closer to God through medical work. The organization facilitates the means of diagnosis for every patient who needs it, regardless of his financial ability, social status, or medical condition, without discrimination because of color, gender or faith.”

A calendar on the wall nearby sounded a less ambiguous note: “Islam is the solution.”

The hospital staff included gynecologists, pediatricians, cardiologists, ophthalmologists, general surgeons, dentists, and others. The basic fees were all under three dollars. Once a week, a sign on the bulletin board next to the reception desk advertised, the facility offered free diabetes testing.

The state within the state continued to grow. And tensions between the Brotherhood and the Egyptian government deepened.

Habib’s first stint in prison was not long after he returned from studying in the United States. In 1981, facing internal opposition to his peace treaty with Israel, President Sadat ordered a sweep of more than 1,500 religious activists, both Muslims and minority Coptic Christians.¹⁷

“I am dealing with fanaticism,” Sadat said in an angry three-hour speech to justify the controversial crackdown. “This is not religion. This is obscenity.” He charged that a sophisticated conspiracy was trying to destroy his authority.¹⁸

“Don’t fear that we will have a Khomeini here,” Sadat announced at a press conference, referring to the father of Iran’s revolution two years earlier.¹⁹ Less than a month later, Sadat was gunned down by extremists from Islamic Jihad.

Habib was not charged with anything. He was released five months later. Six years later, he won a seat in parliament.

The Brotherhood leader’s second arrest was at the hands of President Mubarak in 1995, when he was charged with belonging to a banned organization that called for the overthrow of the state. Habib was tried by a military court under provisions of emergency law. He served the full five-year sentence.

“The real reason for my arrest was that I was going to be nominated again for parliament. So,” Habib said, with an ironic little laugh, “the government eliminated my opportunity to run again, because now I’ve been convicted of a crime.”

His third stint was fourteen months, from 2001 to 2002. Again, Habib was not charged. Egyptian dissidents jokingly refer to open-ended imprisonment without trial as preemptive “just-in-case detentions.”

Habib was still in prison on September 11, 2001, when al Qaeda pilots flew suicide missions into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During our conversation, I noted that al Qaeda’s ideological chief was Ayman al Zawahiri, another Egyptian, whose early training was with the Brotherhood. And the mastermind of the attacks was Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian.

“I was very saddened and upset,” Habib replied. “I couldn’t imagine that human beings who have a brain could carry out such acts, regardless of the extent of enmity they felt. Immediately, I thought we should stand against these actions, no matter who did them. They contradict Islam.”

The Brotherhood’s deepening involvement in politics has exposed cracks among Islamist groups—and fierce condemnation from militants.

Zawahiri lashed out at the group that first attracted him to politics—for being “duped, provoked and used.” In one of the periodic videotapes delivered from his place in hiding, he warned,

My Muslim nation, you will not enjoy free elections, protected sanctity, accountable governments and a respectable judiciary unless you are free from the crusader-Zionist occupation and corrupted regimes. This will not be fulfilled by any means other than Jihad.²⁰

Yet the Brotherhood’s position on the use of violence remained two-faced. Its leaders still supported what they call “acts of resistance” by Hamas against Israel and by Iraqi insurgents against American troops.

I asked Habib if the Brotherhood now accepts Israel’s right to exist, given Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist in 1988. Every Brotherhood official I spoke to refused to use the word Israel and instead referred to the Jewish state as “the Zionist entity.”

“We should leave this up to the people. If the people say it stays, it stays, no problem,” he replied. “We don’t want to impose anything on the Palestinian or Egyptian people.

“But, personally,” he added, “I consider the Zionist entity as an occupier of Muslim land. There has to be a formula where people live in peace. I don’t know what the formula is now. But, no, for us, they live in our country.”

Habib was particularly bitter about what happened after Hamas’s election in 2006. “The United States and Western countries are known for their double standards in evaluating democracy,” he said. “Domestically, they practice true democracy. But abroad, they practice it only to the extent that it serves their interests. That’s why they are doing their best to undermine Hamas’s victory. These countries will continue to support corrupt regimes as long as their interests are served.”

He was even more scathing about America’s intervention in Iraq. In a 2004 interview with the television station run by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Habib had said suicide bombings “redeem self-confidence and hope, because a nation that does not excel at the industry of death does not deserve life.”²¹

When he spoke to me, an American journalist, in 2006, he was more restrained, but just as angry.

“The United States has violated international laws and returned the world to the laws of the jungle,” he said, jabbing his finger in the air as two deep scowl lines creased his forehead.

“We know that the United States is not a charity organization. It has its interests, but instead of attempting to truly spread democracy, look what it did to Iraq!” he said, getting angrier. “What happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is a mark of shame.”

In a view widely shared in Egypt, Habib reflected, “The United States after 9/11 has adopted a new strategy to establish an empire. It wants to control the Middle East. It’s working on redrawing the Middle East map.”

I asked Habib about the Brotherhood’s own strategy for the future. The movement’s literature lists six broad objectives, each one building on the previous step. Leaders deny that they want to convert Egypt into a theocracy led by clerics. Yet its platform is ambitiously theocratic.

The Brotherhood’s first goal is to build the Muslim individual—“the brother or sister with a strong body, high manners, cultured thought, ability to earn, strong faith, correct worship, conscious of time, of benefit to others.”

The second is to foster practicing Muslim families.

The third is to create an Islamic society.

The fourth is to build an Islamic state.

The fifth is to create a caliphate, “basically a shape of unity between Islamic states.”

The last one is “mastering the world with Islam.”

In the twenty-first century, the Brotherhood appears to be about halfway down its list.

I asked Habib what a twenty-first century caliphate, or a government representing God’s will on earth, would eventually look like. Ironically, on this issue, the United States is something of a model.

“We hope that one day there are states like the United States. Each will have its own laws and leaders and army and everything,” he responded. “But there should be a common constitution and character and border. A federal government like the United States is a very nice example, or what the European Union wants to achieve, where its member countries have their own parliaments and laws but with binding overall policies.”

I asked him what the United States of the Islamic world would include and how big it would be. He took off his glasses and put them on his desk.

“Look,” he said, “The world is moving toward large bodies. It’s like the United States trying to create a larger body in a transatlantic alliance. There’s the G-8 group of industrialized nations. There are the Asian tigers.

“So why shouldn’t there be another big body created here, too, to complement the others?” he said.

“Of course, the Arab world is one phase,” he added. “The Islamic world is a bigger and more comprehensive phase. We know this project will take time.”

 

Among the three “crats,” the democrats are the weakest—and at the greatest disadvantage. Unlike the theocrats and the autocrats, they are having to build from scratch.

On International Students Day, February 21, 2006, I took a taxi to Cairo University to watch a demonstration organized by Kefaya, the new democracy movement whose name means “Enough.” I could hear it blocks away, and when I arrived, the scene outside the campus entrance had combustible potential.

A tight ring of shoulder-to-shoulder riot police with body shields, face masks, and batons encircled the unarmed protesters. There were at least ten police for every demonstrator. Two dozen large armored vans with little grill-covered windows were positioned nearby, in case of mass arrests. Plainclothed security officials, some with conspicuous cameras, were on the perimeter.

To the rhythm of a pulsating drum, the Kefaya protesters shouted one provocative chant after another, in unison, under the direction of white-haired Kamal Khalil. He and his battery-operated loudspeaker had become fixtures at many rallies.

“Down, down with Hosni Mubarak,” they yelled.

“State Security, you’re the dogs of the state,” they shouted. “Why the security? Are we in prison?”

To the police, they turned and taunted, “What are you afraid of? Come join us.”

“Open up. Open up. Freedom of thought, freedom for the nation!” they cried.

Inside the tall iron campus gates, a second demonstration was underway, creating a clashing cacophony of chants.

Three weeks earlier, an aging and packed Egyptian ferry had sunk in the Red Sea. More than 1,000 Egyptians had drowned with it. It was the worst maritime disaster in the country’s history. Many of the victims were poor laborers coming home from jobs in Saudi Arabia. The government was still scrambling to explain what happened, why its reaction was slow and the rescue slower, why responsibility had not been assigned, and why bodies had not been found, death certificates not issued, and compensation not distributed. Meanwhile, the owner of the ferry company, who also happened to be a member of parliament’s upper house, had gone abroad—amid press speculation that he was trying to dodge investigation or recriminations.

The students had plenty of gripes, but the tragedy was a recurrent theme of their protest.

“Officials travel in limousines and airplanes, but the people take buses and die on ferries,” the students shouted.

“Why put students in prison? Put the ferry’s killers on trial!” they yelled.

“Oh Egypt, oh Egypt, we won’t get scared,” the protesters cried.

“And we won’t back down.”

“Hor-i-yya.…Hor-i-yya.…Hor-i-yya,” they chanted, in accented syllables.

“Free-dom…. Free-dom…. Free-dom.”

Since the first Kefaya rally in 2004, Egypt’s democrats had clearly found their voice. Illegal street protests became a common feature in Cairo. Kefaya’s democrats were the pioneers for a new type of movement, adding energy to stale Egyptian politics and spurring others into action too.

But by 2006, the new democrats had still not found their political mass. Hundreds had dared to show up for the two rallies in blatant violation of emergency law—but not the tens or hundreds of thousands needed to nudge, prod, pressure, or politically force the government’s hand on major reforms.

As the dramas unfolded inside and outside Cairo University’s front gate, I talked to two young women in their mid-twenties. There were at least as many Egyptians watching as participating. Both women wore modest but colorful hejab scarves; one scarf was striped and the other was a spring floral pattern.

“If these people would do something, I’d be with them all the way,” said Rebab, who wore the striped scarf. She asked that I not use her last name; as a university employee, she received a government paycheck.

“But this is all they do,” she said. “I’m divorced, and I have a six-year-old son. More than three years ago, I applied for an apartment, and still I don’t have one. I sleep on the sofa with my son in a one-bedroom apartment with my grandparents. Now, the price of sugar is going up, and our chicken is diseased,” she added, referring to the spate of avian flu chicken deaths in Egypt. “We don’t know what to eat. We can’t afford meat. It’s now forty pounds (about seven dollars) a kilo.

“I know people with apartments who applied years after I did. They have connections with the NDP,” she continued angrily, referring to the ruling party. “That’s how things get done in this country. All these people are doing,” she said pointing to the noisy protest, “is demonstrating.”

The day after the rally, I visited George Ishak, the head of Kefaya, to discuss Egypt’s new democratic movements. Ishak is a retired high school history teacher and a Coptic Christian who has snowy white hair and wire-rimmed glasses that rest on a wide nose.

Kefaya’s headquarters is a two-room office on a scruffy hall with what looked like large black skid marks along the wall. The entrance door said “Center for Egyptian Studies,” which is a cover name, because Kefaya had not been able to register as a legal group. One room had inexpensive meeting chairs that were still covered with plastic and piled on top of each other; the second room contained Ishak’s well-used desk, a single old computer, and a fax machine covered with many fingerprints. The door in between the two rooms had half of a broken pane of glass, the remaining section shaped in a menacingly sharp pointed peak.

Kefaya’s full name is the Popular Campaign for Change. It emerged, Ishak explained, in 2003 when friends with disparate political views met over a holiday meal to discuss the future and then agreed to continue talking.

“Marxists, Nasserites, liberals, Islamists—they were all in these meetings,” Ishak added. “We agreed that our country is in miserable condition and that the regime is despotic. But, after that, we had some very difficult discussions because we are not all on the same wavelength. Every week, we tried to come up with part of a statement that was acceptable to all of us. Those first seven months were very hard.”

In the end, the Kefaya “declaration to the nation” was sparse, just over one page. It was signed by 300 prominent Egyptians, including a senior Muslim Brotherhood official who had twice served in parliament.

To address its disparate membership, the manifesto had two parts. One section lambasted the “odious assault” on Iraq, the “Zionist devastation” of the Palestinians, and American designs “to recast the fate of the Arab region.” It called for mass political efforts “to ward off this peril to the survival of the Arab peoples.”²²

The second section addressed the route to democracy for Egypt. It called for the rule of law. It demanded an end to the political monopoly by the president’s party. It urged a two-term limit on the presidency. And it appealed for separation of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

The twelve-person leadership then decided Kefaya was ready to take its campaign to the streets in defiance of martial law.

“Before, talking about change was like talking to a comatose person, because the Egyptian people were basically dead,” Ishak told me, sitting behind an old desk with nothing on it. “They hadn’t talked about political issues, real issues, in more than fifty years, since the days before the republic. All they cared about was how to feed their babies and stay with their families in a safe way.

“So, we had to start a political revival—on the streets,” he said, smiling broadly. “I loved this idea. I needed to go to the streets. We all needed to go to the streets.”

The first demonstration, on December 12, 2004, was held in total silence. Over their mouths, Egyptian protesters taped yellow stickers with Kefaya, or “Enough,” written in red.

Over the next year, Kefaya’s protests expanded the political boundaries wider than at any time since the 1952 revolution. Its demonstration on May 25, 2005, to coincide with the referendum, spawned new waves of participation and new activists. Even the Muslim Brotherhood scrambled to keep up with what initially looked like a popular movement that might rival or even surpass it. For the first time, the Brotherhood also began mobilizing followers for its own demonstrations.

“We opened the doors,” Ishak said. “The barrier of fear no longer seemed so high anymore.”

Egypt’s leading blogger, Baheyya, credited Kefaya as a catalyst.

It jolted the Ikhwan behemoth out of its satisfied complacency as the prime opposition force. It infuriated police chiefs and their superiors and threatened the gerontocracy running the ‘opposition parties.’…Like the Judges Club, Kefaya confounded all its interlocutors while compelling them to radically reorder their plans.

Yet unlike the Brotherhood, Kefaya did not come up with a concrete program of action or candidates for either the presidential or parliamentary elections. Internal divisions were too deep. The movement instead urged supporters to boycott both elections in 2005—a decision that backfired.

Kefaya was unable to take the critical step from a protest movement to a political alternative or even a strong lobbying group, whether legal or not.

The movement inspired a host of offshoots: Youth for Change. Journalists for Change. Teachers for Change. Doctors for Change. Artists for Change. Lawyers for Change. And several others for change. But Kefaya itself remained something of a shell and a loose umbrella.

Kefaya reflected the core problem for nascent democratic movements throughout the region. It did not have a professional political elite. Its members were well intentioned but untrained. It had limited infrastructure—no office manager, no communications chief or equipment, no real staff. Ishak took all calls on his own cell phone. Funding depended on scanty donations. Protests relied on people who could afford—or dared—to get off work or go to jail, which was why the demonstrations usually involved the same group of people meeting up at diverse venues. And many of its most enthusiastic members were the idealistic young, who had limited clout.

“You call the Muslim Brotherhood at seven A.M., and someone answers the phone,” Ishak admitted. “You talk to the younger generation in our organization, and they don’t answer the telephone until one in the afternoon because they don’t go to sleep until after the first prayers of the day. They talk to the girls all night.”

Wael Khalil, a forty-year-old information technology specialist with short curly hair and big round eyes, was among the early Kefaya activists. He went to its first protest. I met up with him at the annual conference of Egyptian socialists, where he was an organizer. He was wearing jeans and a deep-red polo shirt.

Khalil was candid about Kefaya’s impact. “The movement is still an infant,” he told me. “We have to be patient.”

But he conceded that Kefaya was stuck. “The success of that first year is gone. Kefaya has to reinvent itself. It has to be able to say, ‘OK, Mubarak won reelection and is still in power. What role can this network of forces play now?’ If someone wants to join Kefaya, the movement has to be able to tell him what he can do.

“The problem,” Khalil said, pulling his hand through his curls,

“is that Kefaya doesn’t have an answer. Kefaya hasn’t had more success because people who are unemployed don’t see it as their beacon.”

During parliamentary elections, Khalil ended up voting for a Muslim Brotherhood candidate—partly as a protest but also because Egyptian politics offered limited alternatives.

Most of the region’s traditional opposition groups are spent forces or are losing constituents.

Egypt’s oldest opposition group is the Wafd Party. But it, too, had begun to implode politically. Its presidential candidate, Noman Gomaa, received less than three percent of the vote when he ran against Mubarak in 2005. And Wafd won only six seats in parliament.

Wafd means “delegation.” The party emerged in 1919 among liberal activists who challenged both British colonial rule and Egypt’s monarchy. It was widely popular until it was forced to disband, along with other parties, after the 1952 revolution. The New Wafd was revived in the late 1970s and, again, became the main legal opposition party. Its power brokers were merchants, middle-class professionals, landowners, and the bourgeoisie marginalized after the revolution. But it never regained its earlier standing.

In a political soap opera, the party dumped Gomaa after his humiliating defeat in the 2005 elections. Gomaa, a former dean of Cairo University’s Faculty of Law then in his seventies, refused to go quietly, however. Backed by some fifty well-armed thugs, he stormed the party headquarters in an elegant old Cairo villa to reassert his control in April 2006. The group welded the front gates shut and overwhelmed staff and journalists putting out the party newspaper. Gomaa locked himself in his old office.

For the next ten hours, the two wings of Wafd had it out. The new leadership mobilized some 500 party faithful to confront Gomaa and retake the building. His thugs responded with gunfire and Molotov cocktails, according to local press accounts. In the end, Gomaa and his accomplices surrendered. They were charged with attempted murder, possession of firearms, instigating a riot, and a host of minor offenses.²³

Wafd had never sunk so low.

One new democrat did emerge from Cairo’s turbulent elections in 2005, however. Ayman Nour is a baby-faced lawyer with a full head of dark hair and oversize glasses. He first made a name as a student activist in the 1980s. He won a seat in parliament in 1995, as the youngest member in the opposition, and again in 2000, both times for the Wafd Party.

Nour had a reputation as a feisty politician with a flair for showmanship. A champion of political prisoners, he often harangued the government about their treatment and demanded their release. During one of Egypt’s periodic bread shortages, he challenged the prime minister publicly to sample the rock-hard bread doled out to the poor.²⁴ He regularly lambasted Mubarak as an old man, isolated from voters, and ineffective in office.

But after a falling-out with Gomaa, Nour broke away and founded al Ghad, or the Tomorrow Party. After a three-year battle, Tomorrow was finally allowed to register as a legal party in 2004. Nour then began a meteoric rise as the most prominent liberal democrat in Egypt.

I did not get to see him, however. He was in prison when I was in Cairo. It was his second stint in jail. He was first picked up in January 2005 and charged with forging names on petitions required to register a political party. He recounted what happened in a column he wrote for Newsweek entitled “Letter from Prison: Did I Take Democracy Too Seriously?”

Egyptian security forces snatched me as I was leaving my seat in Parliament amid the cries of my political allies and the suspicious indifference of my opponents. I was dragged away and assigned to a new seat, at Tora prison south of Cairo. Now I sit writing by candlelight, trying to make sense of what is happening to me, my country and the Middle East.

Only 89 days before my arrest, I had celebrated the birth of my “liberal” dream: the Tomorrow Party. This project to form a new opposition group in Egypt had suffered governmental rejection for three years, and we won our license to operate only after four legal battles in court. It was a momentous achievement: ours was the first liberal party to be licensed in Egypt since the military coup of 1952. Now a white, rectangular placard is posted at Tora prison carrying my photo and the number 1387.²⁵

Nour’s arrest came shortly before President Mubarak proposed a constitutional amendment allowing multiparty elections for president. Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail, remembered the day of the announcement—and Nour’s reaction.

“Ayman was on a hunger strike, and I went to visit him, to try to convince him to stop, when he heard on the radio about the proposed amendment,” she told me. “So he immediately wrote a letter and said, ‘Give this to the party and have them approve it, and then give it to the media.’”

Nour had decided to run for president.

“I thought he was really going crazy,” she told me. “He was in prison!”

Under mounting pressure both at home and abroad, the government soon released Nour on bail—shortly after Condoleezza Rice canceled her first trip to Egypt as secretary of state to signal displeasure over the arrest.

Nour ran a quixotic campaign under the slogan “hope and change.” His platform offered Egyptians a two-year transition period. It would include an end to emergency law, release of political detainees, press freedom, an anticorruption campaign, education reform, and new laws to convert Egypt into a parliamentary republic.

Nour often spoke emotionally, occasionally breaking down from a combination of exhaustion, excitement, and behind-the-scenes harassment. Crass stories were leaked to the press, including one that his father had falsified Nour’s birth certificate to cover an illegitimate birth, a sensitive issue in Egypt. Another widespread rumor alleged that his two teenage sons played “satanic” music in a band, another sensitive issue in a deeply religious society.

“At the heart of frustration is oppression and the loss of hope,” Nour said on the day he opened his campaign. “The worst thing they stole from us is hope.”²⁶

Nour came in second out of ten candidates, at a distance, with almost eight percent of the vote.

Defiant and still facing charges, Nour then ran again for parliament. This time, he lost the seat he had held for a decade in his stronghold. His supporters charged fraud.

A month later, in December 2005, Nour was convicted on the charges of forging names on his petition to register the party. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The verdict was condemned by governments and human rights groups worldwide. The White House said it was “deeply troubled” by the trial and called on Mubarak’s government to act “in the spirit of its professed desire for increased political openness and dialogue” and release Nour.

As usual on human rights issues, Cairo had no public reply.

Nour had been in prison again two months when I arrived in Egypt, so I called on his wife. A few hours beforehand, however, I received an urgent text message from her to go instead to a Cairo district court. Ismail had just been informed that her husband was being brought from prison to face seventeen new charges.

When she arrived, however, Ismail was also told she was going to be charged with two offenses.

The court proceedings were over by the time I got there. Getting anywhere in Cairo takes a long time. But Ismail, the family lawyers, and a small crowd of supporters were standing out on the curb of the courthouse with banners. She had a bullhorn in her hand and she was shouting as loud as she could, “Down, down Hosni Mubarak. Shame on the regime! End tyranny. Freedom for all!”

Police milled around on the outskirts, and I saw a line of young thugs with truncheons walk by single-file and deploy beyond the police. Ismail continued her one-woman protest until she was almost hoarse, and then it broke up.

Nour and Ismail met when she was an editorial assistant for Newsweek in Cairo. It was a love marriage. Her first assignment for the magazine had been to profile a young opposition figure under fire. He had recently launched a campaign against torture in prison and then been roughed up. During the interview, she asked his marital status—for the article. He took it as a sign she was interested and later asked her out. They were married two years later.

Since then, they have had an unusual political partnership.

Nour and Ismail live in a large apartment in the trendy Cairo suburb of Zamalek. The living room wall has an enormous picture, in oils, at least ten feet long, of Nour talking with a handful of colleagues in the courtyard of Egypt’s parliament. There is a pool on the large rooftop terrace and, as we talked, a large fluffy cat kept circling it.

Ismail has dark hair that falls in wavy curls. She has a creamy-soft face; she once was a television presenter on a government-controlled station. But she was also edgy and drained from the courthouse experience. Suddenly she was dealing with her own legal crisis.

“You know,” she said, “I remember one of the incidents they’re now charging me with. It was two months ago, and I was beaten on the head by a policeman at a demonstration. I told Ayman I wanted to file a report, but the policeman asked Ayman not to do it. Ayman told me this man is too poor, so we didn’t do anything. And then he files a report against us!

“These are the dogs of the regime,” she said. “We should have filed a report just to protect ourselves.”

Ismail was exhausted from threatening telephone calls. “They call late at night and say, ‘If you keep talking, he will never let him out of prison. Shut up. Stay home.’

“I got a call once at midnight,” she continued. “He said, ‘If you don’t shut up, you will have a case of vice—he meant prostitution—against you.’ My parents are willing to have their daughter face any charge, but not this one. I have children. What would this do to them?

“Then there were the threats of kidnapping the kids, stopping my brother’s business. They got women on the phone who said that they had had relations with my husband, that they had a baby with him. Another time they would call and say, we know what you are doing, what you are wearing, where you are sitting.

“They do everything they can think of,” she added, “to plant fear in the hearts.”

After Nour’s election losses and arrest, the Tomorrow Party fell into disarray. It split into two factions, after one side tried to remove Nour from the leadership.

For all their problems, however, the democrats remain determined.

I asked Ismail how she could hold out any hope for political change in Egypt, given her husband’s defeat in two critical elections, his imprisonment, the collapse of the party, and the personal harassment.

“Oh, definitely, there will be change,” she said. “This culture of fear, of hidden anger, of hidden torture, of hidden suffering, of hidden everything is being shaken.

“For so long, this country was closed. People didn’t have a voice,” she said. “We may not be winning elections, but now we can challenge the system and the president in public, and be heard. We have suffered a lot, and we will suffer a lot more. But we have done a lot too.

“Nothing,” she added, “is as eternal as they once thought.”

A year later, however, her husband languished in prison, largely forgotten by the outside world and unable to connect with Egyptians. Ismail held a Tomorrow Party summit to try to rally support. Five police trucks with police in riot gear assembled outside the meeting. But only fifty people showed up.²⁷

 

Of the three “crats,” the autocrats are both the toughest and most vulnerable.

Many now recognize the new political undercurrents. They feel the pressure of satellite television, the Internet, and public opinion they can no longer easily control. For them, politics is now a game of calculating two factors—what token changes they can risk, and how much repression they can use—in the quest to hold on to power.

Before my final trip to Cairo, I made arrangements, through the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, to see Gamal Mubarak, the son of the Egyptian president. The younger Mubarak had emerged in 2000 as the young face of the regime. I wanted to talk to him about whether Egypt’s autocrats could change and, if so, how much.

A tall man in his early forties, Mubarak has a trim, athletic build. He is noted for his well-tailored suits, and he wears his dark, slightly receding hair slicked back. He is a stark contrast with his bulkier father in other ways, too. While the president was born in a village—a fact still reflected in his speech—Gamal Mubarak grew up in the presidential palace. His father worked his way through Egypt’s military academy, while Gamal Mubarak earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business from the American University of Cairo. The president did part of his pilot’s training in the Soviet Union, while Gamal Mubarak worked six years at the Bank of America branch in London and started a private equity firm before returning to take up politics.

Since Gamal Mubarak’s political debut in 2000, Egypt’s notorious political grapevine has frequently reported that he is his father’s favored political heir.²⁸

One of the major reasons the Egyptian regime appeared so brittle for so long was because President Mubarak refused to appoint a vice president—the route to the top job for all but one of Egypt’s presidents since the 1952 revolution. Mubarak balked after inheriting the presidency when Anwar Sadat was murdered in 1981. And he did not change his mind after an assassination attempt on his own life during a 1995 trip to Ethiopia or when he collapsed from illness during a nationally televised speech to parliament in 2003. He was not willing to designate a deputy or a running mate when he opened the presidency to popular elections in 2005. Nor did he budge when his health, at age seventy-eight, became the buzz of Cairo because of his frail appearance at the televised All-Africa Cup soccer championship in 2006. By then, Mubarak had become the third longest ruler in Egypt’s 6,000-year history.²⁹

Only half jokingly, Egyptians often referred to President Mubarak as “the last pharaoh” for his failure to share power or name a deputy. Many believed he was holding the position open to avoid the emergence of a rival to his son. Cairenes whispered that First Lady Suzanne Mubarak was particularly anxious to see her second son succeed her husband.

The president denied that he wanted to create a new political dynasty. “It’s nonsense,” he once huffed.³⁰ Gamal Mubarak—sometimes called Jimmy by friends—also claimed to have no presidential ambitions. “I am neither seeking nor do I wish to nominate myself,” he told Egyptian television in 2006.³¹

But almost everyone I talked to in Egypt, including government officials speaking in private, did not believe the denials. The issue had become a regular feature of the new protest rallies. Kefaya demonstrators had a sequence of rhythmic chants: “Wanted, wanted, a new president—with conditions: Not corrupt. Not a dictator. And no kids!”

“No to Hosni, No to Gamal,” they would cry.

The demise of monarchies was one of the dominant themes of the twentieth century worldwide. The Middle East’s biggest upheavals, after gaining independence from European powers, were also revolutions that toppled kings in the name of social justice. But in the twenty-first century, several Arab countries began moving to establish new dynasties: President Mubarak created prominent political space for son Gamal. Libya’s Col. Moammar Qaddafi ceded power increasingly at home and abroad to son Saif. Before his ouster, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was grooming sons Uday and Qusay. When he died in 2000, Syrian President Hafez al Assad left son Bashar in power; the originally designated heir and older son, Basil, had died earlier in a car crash. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh put son Ahmed in charge of the most powerful branch of the military.

For the regimes, the issues were ostensibly stability and continuity. But the trend emerged at a time when the systems in each capital were failing, and change was the more popular public theme.

Gamal Mubarak made his formal political debut after the 2000 parliamentary elections, in which the ruling party had the poorest showing in its history. His father brought him in as chairman of a new Policy Secretariat designed to reform and reinvigorate the National Democratic Party.

The Egyptian leader told the press it took a week of coaxing to get his son to take the job. “They told me he could help upgrade the party,” the president said. “I hope there will be forty or 100 people as active as him, so that I have a broad base of young leaders to choose from.”³²

Over the next six years, the younger Mubarak became assistant secretary-general of the ruling party. His peers took key party positions, replacing his father’s old guard. He made choreographed trips to Washington for talks with top White House, State Department and Pentagon officials. At home, he was widely photographed for the state-controlled media. And he held “Meet Gamal” town-hall meetings across the country with targeted groups, notably students and business leaders.

He struck themes of change at every stop.

“I think it’s time we stop viewing reform as something which is always imposed from outside,” he told 600 faculty and alumni at his alma mater in 2003. “We cannot claim to have achieved all our objectives, or that we are nearing the conclusion of the reform process. Much still needs to be done.”³³

A government reshuffle in 2004 led to the nickname “Gamal’s cabinet,” because the executive branch now included so many of his associates. During the 2004 party conference, his picture was emblazoned along with Egypt’s Olympic heroes on a four-sided billboard in downtown Cairo.³⁴

In 2004, a new book entitled Gamal Mubarak: Restoration of Liberal Nationalism described him as the most qualified person to be Egypt’s next leader. It was written by a university professor—and a senior member of the ruling party.³⁵

But the dead giveaway was shortly after the volatile 2005 elections, when the regime postponed city council elections for two years. The issue was not just local power; the move also made it more difficult to run for the presidency. Under the amendment proposed by President Mubarak and passed in the troubled May 25, 2005 referendum, independent presidential candidates had to have the written endorsement of at least 140 elected members of local councils as well as ninety members of the People’s Assembly—just to run. Without a new round of local elections, only the ruling party qualified.³⁶

Opposition movements quickly charged that the move was to foil any real competition to Gamal Mubarak. Even analysts on the government payroll told me they believed the often relentless government campaign against Ayman Nour was an attempt to derail a future rival to the younger Mubarak. The two men were the same age.

Nour referred to the rivalry after he lost the presidency. “I dared to challenge the pharaoh,” Nour said afterward. “And the pharaohs used to kill all the possible male heirs except their own. Mubarak wants to hand Egypt over to his own son, Gamal, and Gamal could never beat me in a free election.”³⁷

When I made the request to talk to the younger Mubarak several weeks before my trip, Egyptian officials assured me that he was quite eager to answer questions about his reform agenda. I had interviewed his father several times in Cairo and Washington over a twenty-year period, so it seemed straightforward. But as soon as I arrived in Egypt, a foreign ministry official whom I had known for two decades traveled through tortuous Cairo traffic just to tell me that, unfortunately, Gamal Mubarak was “in retreat”—no specifics, just that he would be unavailable during my entire trip.

I was instead invited to call on Osama al Baz, the longtime chief presidential adviser who studied law at Harvard, worked in the Arab-Israeli peace process dating back to the 1970s, and had become the old-guard mentor to the younger Mubarak. Baz had chaperoned him on his Washington visits.

Baz is a slight, wiry man with a thin face, graying hair, age spots, and eyebrows that arch at the very end rather than in the middle. We met in his cavernous, paneled office at the Foreign Ministry; it was decorated with fading brocade couches and a tired philodendron in a brass pot. He was dressed informally in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and no tie.

Baz promised that he would work immediately—“yes, immediately!”—to get the promised meeting back on track. But in the meantime he offered his own reflections about Gamal Mubarak and the first family’s reform agenda. He speaks with a congenial but little-tough-guy insistence that reminded me of Edward G. Robinson.

“Egypt is already in a state of transition,” Baz told me, waving his hand as if it was old news. “But you have to do it within the realm of political stability. There are peculiar conditions here. A political system depends on a country’s past, and the political and social factors at play, and a nation’s needs.

“For that reason,” he continued, “Gamal believes there’s no formula that can fit all countries at all times. You also can’t do reform overnight, in a way that will result in massive unemployment.”

Like many Arab regimes, Egypt invokes the China model, with economic reform to precede political openings, in the name of avoiding instability.

The younger Mubarak was particularly focused on issues that most affect Egypt’s youth, Baz said, such as education and employment.

Egypt’s education system was so broken in the first decade of the twenty-first century that most public schools had abridged double shifts, and some planned triple shifts to accommodate a burgeoning young population. Egypt needed to build at least 30,000 schools within the next five years just to provide enough classrooms for a single eight-hour shift, a senior official at the government’s largest think tank told me in deep frustration.

The mediocrity of Egyptian education was reflected by Cairo University, the official added. The once-noted university had dropped to twenty-eighth place in Africa, the continent with the world’s worst education system. The Cairo campus was also no longer among the top 500 universities in the world.³⁸

Egypt’s troubled economy also had to accommodate at least 800,000 new young job seekers every year—complicated by the regime’s pledge that all college graduates could get a government job. As a result, the government spent most of its revenues on security, a bloated bureaucracy to keep people employed, and subsidies for gasoline, wheat, and sugar—leaving little to invest in infrastructure, much less Egypt’s future.

Baz described Mubarak as a practical person in responding to these challenges. “He has never been a government employee; he’s not an ideologue. He doesn’t like bureaucratic formulas and ideas,” the presidential adviser explained. “He thinks bureaucrats are limited by nature, because they want to protect themselves.”

Ironically, bureaucrats were also big obstacles to Gamal Mubarak’s future. The old guard grumbled about the young Mubarak, several analysts told me, because they believed it was their turn next at the top. Key military officials felt the president should emerge from within their tradition.

Baz insisted that Gamal Mubarak was not running for the presidency, although he did leave the door quite noticeably ajar. The caveat became a common refrain in comments from other Egyptian officials, too.

“Gamal Mubarak wants only the rights of any Egyptian,” Baz said,

“and that includes the right to run for parliament, or office, or to be active within the National Democratic Party.” As if Gamal Mubarak were just any Egyptian.

As I waited to hear about the Mubarak interview, the Foreign Ministry urged me to talk to Mohammed Kamal, a young political scientist on Mubarak’s new policy committee. Kamal’s office is in a new building at Cairo University constructed out of the side of an old one. It was an Alice-in-Wonderland experience finding it. I walked down the hall of the old building, opening one classroom door after another, until I found one that instead opened up into a hallway with a whole new set of classroom doors. Then I had to find Kamal’s door. Finding my way out was just as tricky. Every door looked the same.

Kamal did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins University; his dissertation was on the role of the United States Congress in crafting foreign policy. He had a simultaneous fellowship on Capitol Hill, where he said he did work for the House International Relations Committee and Democratic congressmen Tom Sawyer of Ohio and Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut.

“I liked the Democrats,” he told me, sitting behind his desk in a white, freshly painted office. “The experience taught me a lot and helped me fine-tune my dissertation.”

Kamal, who looks a bit like the younger Mubarak but with rounder cheeks, joined the ruling party in high school. When it won only thirty-eight percent of the seats in parliament in 2000, he was one of nine young Egyptians summoned to form Gamal Mubarak’s new policy committee.

“That election was a real wake-up call,” he explained. The little group, made up of young experts who had all been educated or lived in the West, drafted a new platform for the National Democratic Party.

“The old platform places the party in the socialist camp. It contained elements of a one-party state. It identified the party as a big tent—for all ideological orientations and for all classes, rich, poor, and middle class,” Kamal explained. The revised platform redefined it as center-left and largely of the middle class.

“We’re talking free enterprise but also government that has a social responsibility towards the people, like the thinking of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair,” Kamal said.

During the process of defining a new direction for the leadership, he added, the younger Mubarak had created political space and helped to empower his generation.

“Before, the process of legislation had been dominated by old-fashioned legal scholars who lost touch with the modern world a long time ago,” Kamal explained. “Today, if you look at different departments in government, you will see people in their late thirties and early forties who are involved in key executive committees. And the influence of this group is expanding. I’m now responsible for educating members of the party politically. I am forty. I credit Gamal with doing that.”

Kamal had also been appointed to Egypt’s Shura, which translates as “consultative council”; it is the upper house of parliament. He was its youngest member.

Looking ahead, Kamal explained, Mubarak’s advisory group was working on a new antiterrorist act to replace emergency law. It was also crafting reforms to foster a multiparty system and empowerment of women. He specifically cited talk about a quota for women in parliament, a practice adopted in Iraq and the Palestinian territories and increasingly popular in dozens of developing countries.

When I asked him what kind of numbers, he suggested thirty or forty seats—or less than two percent. It was a telling sign of how little the autocrats want to change.

To get a sense of how open the ruling party would be with its rivals, I asked Kamal about the Muslim Brotherhood.

“We don’t consider the Ikhwan a terrorist organization,” he said, even though the group was outlawed. “There is a big debate about this issue, not just in Egypt, but all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. Everywhere they are moving forward and, as a political scientist, I feel it is the key to democracy development. The question is how to regulate the relationship between Islam and politics, and this debate is healthy.”

The ruling party was divided into three schools, Kamal explained. One argued that all religious parties should be banned, on grounds that they ultimately will not share power. “It’s Iran all over again. It’s one man, one vote, one time,” he said.

The second school argued that the Brotherhood was a reality and had to be recognized. “This school argues: If it walks and talks like a party, it’s a party,” Kamal explained.

“I’m somewhere in the middle, in the third camp,” he said. “Society is not ripe for creation of a party because Egypt is a conservative society—and because more people are becoming religious every day. If you allow the Islamists to establish a political party, they will undermine the development of democracy because they will dominate the discourse with their religious ideas.

“You cannot compete with the words of God or the sayings of the Prophet,” he continued. “The Islamists will try to present you as against God—and this resonates very well with people.”

Kamal then told me the story of the blue cheese. He had recently been to his local grocer in an upscale neighborhood to buy Danish blue cheese, but the grocer told him he no longer carried it. As it happened, the refrigerator door was open behind the grocer and Kamal clearly saw the cheese on a shelf. The grocer then confessed that he still had some but quickly added, in front of other shoppers, that he was preparing to return it.

The grocery encounter happened shortly after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the prophet Mohammad that triggered riots in dozens of countries on three continents. More than 100 people had died and more than 800 had been injured in protests. The Muslim grocer could not afford to be carrying anything Danish.

“This is the danger I’m talking about,” Kamal said.

“So, you can’t exclude the Islamists from the political process. The fact is, they’re there already. They need to be part of this formula but to evolve as the political system evolves—into a conservative party that believes in family values and prayers and references to religion, like the Republicans in the United States,” he said. “But the way they are today, they want a state based on religion.”

Kamal is on the most liberal fringe of the National Democratic Party and, he conceded, the younger generation faced uphill battles of its own. “Our influence is exaggerated because we are working with the president’s son. Change is not easy. There are many others in both the party and the government who have vested interests in the status quo. For them, it’s not a battle for reform, but a turf war.”

Before I left, Kamal promised that he, too, would put in an urgent call to help me get in to see Mubarak.

As I continued to wait, I went around to talk to Hala Mustafa, the glamorous editor of Democracy Review, a journal published by the government’s leading think tank. She had also been recruited to assist the new Policy Secretariat, although at the second of three levels. The inner circle had only nine members. The second had some 130 prominent younger Egyptians. And the third had around 400 people to advise Gamal Mubarak.

Mustafa is an intense woman who speaks quickly and does several things at once. She was wearing a smart gray suit with a designer scarf in bright red, yellow, and green. Her jewelry included a heart-shaped pendant and earrings, both encrusted with diamonds. She had manicured French nails, and her two-toned hair was softy coifed. She is in her midforties but looks a decade younger. On her desk was a large photograph of an attractive young woman who I initially took to be her daughter; there were six other pictures of the same person in various sizes and poses arrayed on bookshelves behind her desk. Looking closer, I realized they were all of Mustafa.

Mustafa, who did her graduate degree on Islamist movements, considers herself to be a secular, open-minded liberal. Democracy Review gives voice to a range of ideas—in Arabic and English—on the steps to democracy, press freedoms, women’s rights, grassroots movements, the role of opposition parties, and both Christian and Muslim cultures. She was never a member of the ruling party, although she received a government paycheck. And she was initially enthusiastic about Gamal Mubarak’s reform initiative.

“I eagerly embraced this whole idea of liberalizing the regime or the party from within,” she told me.

But like others I talked to, she soon became frustrated. “The first year, there was real discussion. I felt there was new space to express my pro-reform ideas. But then things began to change,” she said. Economic reform got priority, while political change was put on hold. Gradually, the most outspoken reformers were marginalized or excluded.

“The government, instead of going forward, took a step back to defend itself,” she said. “When the moment came to make a choice, the panic began.

“Then,” she added, “It became worthless to participate. It became clear that this process was only a vehicle for Gamal Mubarak’s succession.”

As she began to criticize Mubarak’s reform efforts in public and in the domestic and foreign press, Mustafa also began to receive threats. One was made in a face-to-face meeting with a representative of Egypt’s State Security. “They told me that what I was saying endangered the regime and the policy-planning project,” she recounted.

The harassment made her reluctant to openly quit Gamal Mubarak’s policy group for fear of the consequences.

“I was really worried for a period of time in 2005 about both my job security and my physical safety. Frankly, I felt hopeless,” she said.

“Now, things are a bit better. But I’ll tell you this: If they try to ride the same old political horse, they won’t get anyplace.

“That old horse,” she said, “is finished.”

The autocrats’ attempts at something new increasingly appeared to be just more of the old, as notable figures began to turn on the younger Mubarak and the reform bodies that he had launched.

The National Council for Human Rights was one offshoot of the new policy committee. It was established in 2004. It was supposed to show that the government was working harder to improve human rights.

But in the spring of 2006, the council issued a report charging that the number of detainees held without trial was instead growing—and that they were being held for longer periods of time. The regime, it added, was blatantly ignoring court orders to set many of them free. Besides the thousands in more recent detention, at least a dozen people had been held without being formally charged or tried for twelve years—since 1994. The council called the trends dangerous for the political health of the nation.³⁹

The same month, a prominent Egyptian writer did finally dare to quit Gamal Mubarak’s reform committee. Osama Harb, editor of the moderate foreign-policy journal International Politics, publicly blasted Egypt’s reform efforts as “a sham.”⁴⁰

“I fear for the future of this country,” Harb declared, “And many others share this fear.”⁴¹

Like Mustafa, Harb came under a sudden deluge of criticism in the state-controlled press. Officials suggested that he was disgruntled only because his personal political ambitions had gone unfulfilled.

Harb countered that his journal could publish criticism of governments throughout the Middle East—but not about Egypt. He could speak critically of President George W. Bush or Russian President Vladimir Putin—but not Gamal Mubarak. He could not even extricate himself from the inner circle without risk.

“It should be easy to resign, to say no,” he said. “But not here. This is Egypt.”⁴²

Over the next eighteen months, the Mubarak regime steadily tightened its squeeze against the disparate array of groups that had spawned, haphazardly, the Arab world’s most ambitious democracy movement. It also ran another round of tainted elections. Thousands were harassed or detained in the run-up to a poll for Egypt’s upper house of parliament, the Shoura Council. More than seven hundred Muslim Brotherhood members were among the many activists and dissidents locked up. Charges of using religious slogans—a new offense—were filed against seventeen of the nineteen candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood. Judges were kept away from monitoring the election.

Ghada Shahbender of “We’re Watching You” again dispatched volunteers to monitor the election. Afterward, she reported widespread ballot stuffing and bribery—even attempts to bribe her monitors. Many voters had been turned away, she reported.

“The government has reestablished the fact that elections are fraudulent,” she told reporters. “Our monitors were offered money…to go in and vote,” she said. “Outside Cairo, we had reports of very, very low participation but then full ballot boxes.” The government claimed more than 30 percent of eligible voters turned out. “We’re Watching You” estimated the turnout at only three percent.⁴³

Not surprising, President Mubarak’s ruling party won—overwhelmingly.

But a total monopoly of government apparently was not enough. In August 2007, Saad Eddin Ibrahim—the aged and ailing democratic activist who was the first to publicly criticize the meteoric rise of Gamal Mubarak—was warned not to return to Egypt for fear of once again going to jail. “Or worse,” he wrote.

In a clever legal scheme, the regime’s supporters filed more than a half dozen civil lawsuits and criminal complaints, accusing Ibrahim of everything from treason to undermining Egypt’s economic interests. One dared to charge him with harming national interests by persuading the U.S. Congress to cut back on aid to Egypt.⁴⁴

“My real crime is speaking out in defense of the democratic governance Egyptians deserve,” he wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “Sadly, this regime has strayed so far from the rule of law that, for my own safety, I have been warned not to return to Egypt. My family is worried, knowing that Egypt’s jails contain some 80,000 political prisoners and that disappearances are routinely ignored or chalked up to accidents. My fear is that these abuses will spread if Egypt’s allies and friends continue to stand by silently while this regime suppresses the country’s democratic reformers.”⁴⁵

The silence was indeed deafening. And the way was increasingly clear for the Mubarak dynasty.