In less than two months, Mohamed Morsi had stepped out of obscurity to win the first fair presidential election in millennia of Arab history. His victory was the greatest achievement in the eighty-five-year history of political Islam in the Sunni Muslim world. He now presided over eighty-five million citizens, in a nation of singular significance. Would he lead toward tolerance and democracy, or tyranny and extremism? Perhaps no one could be ready for his new job. Morsi certainly was not.
He was personally unimposing. He was short and stocky. He wore square wire-rimmed glasses that slid askew on his nose. He had grown up on a small farm in the Nile Delta and become engaged in 1978 at the age of twenty-six to a sixteen-year-old first cousin—a common arrangement in rural families. He moved to the United States the same year for a doctoral program in engineering at the University of Southern California. His wife joined him two years later. They made their first home in South Central Los Angeles, spent seven years in California, and give birth to a son there. It was in the Muslim community in Los Angeles that the couple decided to join the Muslim Brotherhood. Aside from a stint teaching in oil-rich Libya to support the family, he spent the rest of his career at the university in Zagazig, not far from his birthplace.
I first met Morsi in his presidential office. He slouched down in a Louis XIV desk chair, and I tried to warm him up with friendly questions like What did he think of his California sojourn?
Morsi looked worried. “The president is not quite sure if this is relevant to the interview, or is this socializing or something like that?” his official interpreter, a Mubarak-era holdover, said.
The new president was a stranger to such rituals. Panetta, a former congressman from California, also tried to break the ice by bringing up Morsi’s history in the state. Morsi looked at him blankly. Later, he abruptly volunteered that his oldest son had been born there. “He could be president of the United States!” Morsi laughed. Panetta changed the subject.
Reassured by an adviser about my small talk, Morsi gushed with enthusiasm about his USC dissertation adviser. “Ferdinand A. Kroger—he writes it with a u, or with two dots over the o. He wrote a very big book, The Chemistry of Imperfect Crystals.”
Morsi chuckled about USC campus culture—“Go, Trojans!”—and he reminisced about Barbara Walters in the morning and Walter Cronkite at night. “And that’s the way it is!” he said, in a decent imitation.
Was there anything he admired about American culture? I expected him to pick an answer flattering to Americans and previously missing from Egypt, like freedom of conscience, equal protection under the law, or the peaceful rotation of power. No. Morsi admired American work habits and time management. “The people follow the advice of Abraham Lincoln: they go to sleep early and they wake early,” Morsi said. (He was thinking of Benjamin Franklin.) “This is because the community has a firm and serious order.”
He thought that a president should speak his national language, Arabic, but when he felt strongly about something, he switched into crisp English. When the interpreter said Morsi had “learned a lot” in the United States, Morsi quickly corrected her. “Scientifically!” Morsi interjected. What he had learned was science—just science. “I lived in America but I did not change a lot. I am Egyptian blood and flesh!”
Was there anything he disliked about life in the United States? Yes, the street gangs and violence of South Central Los Angeles. Cohabitation out of wedlock. The looser sexual mores. “I have seen a naked restaurant,” he said. He meant Hooters, an adviser explained.
Sayyid Qutb, the radical Islamist thinker, had written of his disgust at the materialism and immorality he had seen when he was a student in Washington, D.C., and Greeley, Colorado, in the middle of the twentieth century. Qutb saw a clash of civilizations. Morsi was more easygoing.
“They are living their way. I am not objecting.” He shrugged. “This is the culture.”
By then I was struggling to turn our talk back to Egypt.
In his one term in Parliament under Mubarak, Morsi had served as whip and enforcer for the Brotherhood bloc. He scolded young Brothers who wanted to ask questions or open debates. He lacked the charisma of either the power broker Shater or the liberal Aboul Fotouh. Nor had Morsi endured the long years in prison that made one a hero in an underground movement. He had done seven months in 2006, for demonstrating in support of judicial independence, and a few nights in 2011, at the start of the uprising. Morsi had turned sixty a few months later. He was ready to retire.
When the Brotherhood’s governing board wanted to name him as an understudy to Shater in the presidential race, Morsi was dead set against it. Why not shoot me first? he asked. How could he possibly stand for president if his own party had marked him as its second choice? He thought the board was miserable at politics. But Morsi was obedient. The nickname “spare tire” dogged him through his presidency.
Internal Brotherhood polling showed that only 3 percent of the voters knew who Morsi was when he entered the race on April 20, a month before the first round of voting. Only two thirds of them approved of him. The disqualification of Shater had so demoralized his campaign personnel that many refused to work for Morsi. He was short-staffed, which is how he met Wael Haddara, an Egyptian Canadian physician.
The forty-two-year-old Haddara happened to be back in Egypt for the funeral of his mother. He was a bilingual polymath (he spoke Arabic and English, with some French and German). He had grown up around the Arab region and enrolled in a Canadian university at the age of fourteen. He helped patent a new form of gene therapy before he turned twenty-one and eventually earned degrees in pharmacology, medicine, and education. He now managed a large intensive care unit in a teaching hospital in London, Ontario, and on the side wrote scholarly articles applying the ideas of Michel Foucault to medical pedagogy.
Haddara had also served on the board of the Muslim Association of Canada in the years after September 11, 2001, and as its president in 2011. He was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood but he had friends who were supporters, and in December 2011, he was asked to meet with a senior Brotherhood leader who would play a prominent role in Morsi’s campaign and administration. Expecting to be leaving Cairo shortly, he saw nothing to lose. Haddara unloaded his unvarnished assessment of the Egyptian Brotherhood.
“You are patriarchal, paternalistic, anti-Semitic, full of ambiguity, and playing games with identity,” Haddara told him. How could Egypt be an Islamic state with equal citizenship for non-Muslims? “If you really want to govern, these are the issues you have to face up to.”
“This is great!” the Brotherhood leader, Essam el-Haddad, told Haddara. “Can you write all this down for me?”
Haddara was impressed. And when Morsi was nominated later that spring, Haddara’s candid advice and experience with the news media convinced the campaign to try to enlist him. Haddara wondered why a candidate for president of Egypt might want his input.
“I have not lived in Egypt for thirty years,” Haddara told an Egyptian Canadian friend who worked on the campaign.
“There is no one else who wants to work with him,” his friend replied. “So anything you can provide would be helpful.”
“Hold your nose and swallow the medicine” was the Brotherhood’s attitude toward Morsi, Haddara later told me. “I felt sorry for him.”
As a candidate, Morsi was long-winded and uninspiring. He was all but incapable of sticking to a prepared text without meandering into circular digressions. At an engagement party for a friend’s daughter in early 2012, he mortified the non-Islamist groom by turning a toast into a political harangue.
Virtually all Egyptian politicians—Islamists, leftists, or ruling party—said things to local audiences that would appall Westerners, and Morsi was no exception. In a speech about Palestinians, he had once called Israelis “killers and vampires.” In a 2005 interview with CNN, he doubted Al Qaeda’s role in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
“An airplane or a craft just going through it like a knife in butter?” he said. “Make a fair trial. They didn’t do it. What’s going on? There is something fishy.”
This was a doctor of engineering in materials science talking. But then I was astonished at how widespread such theories were in Cairo, perhaps because Egyptians are so skeptical of their own government’s official stories. Mubarak, too, insisted that Al Qaeda had not carried out the 9/11 attacks, according to the memoirs of his last foreign minister. Mubarak did not think Al Qaeda could be that sophisticated.
Inside the Brotherhood, Morsi had sided with the conservative faction against Aboul Fotouh. Morsi told me that scholars of Islam were split over the question of whether the president must be a Muslim male. But he drew a mosque and state distinction. Legal eligibility was one thing, and his personal religious views might be another.
“I would not stop a woman from nomination,” he said. “Would I vote for her? That is something else entirely.”
To prepare for the runoff, the Brotherhood was playing up its common front with liberals against the old regime. Morsi met with a group of liberals at the Fairmont hotel in Cairo and pledged to bring in a diverse team of advisers in order to unite the “revolutionaries.” But he could seldom resist throwing red meat to the Islamist base. He led a boycott of an Egyptian mobile phone service because its founder, the Coptic Christian tycoon Naguib Sawiris, had retweeted a cartoon of Mickey Mouse in a long beard with Minnie in a full-face veil. An insult to Islam, Morsi said.
In practice, though, Morsi was more liberal than many Brotherhood leaders, possibly more liberal than most Egyptians. One young woman who worked for his campaign, Sondos Asem, told me she liked Morsi in part because he encouraged her parents to let her travel abroad alone—a step too permissive for most Egyptians, no matter how secular. He had socialized at USC in mixed-sex crowds, with uncovered Muslim women, and where alcohol was served. His young wife had worked outside their home there, and the couple had encouraged their own daughter to earn at least a bachelor’s degree in science (she married the son of another Brotherhood leader).
Haddara met Morsi as he was running out of his two-bedroom flat, in a distant suburb known as the Fifth Settlement, on the way to the first television interview of his campaign.
What would be the campaign message? Haddara asked. Morsi listed five priorities: food security, fuel security, public safety, traffic, and garbage collection; the bread-and-butter issues of common Egyptians. Rights and freedoms did not make the list, and neither did Islam nor morality.
But in front of the camera Morsi fell back on the old themes. “This is the old ‘Islam is the solution’ platform,” he said, dusting off the venerable and ambiguous slogan. “It has been developed and crystallized so that God could bless society with it.”
Moderating Morsi’s sloganeering was “a constant battle for us on the campaign team,” Haddara told me later. Morsi always asked his advisers for talking points about economics, corruption, and freedom. But during the runoff, hard-line Salafi firebrands were joining Morsi on the stump. “He would get up on the platform with these people and he was all fire and brimstone.”
“The Quran is our constitution, and Sharia is our guide!” Morsi chanted with the crowd at his first rally, in a town in the Nile Delta. “Some want to stop our march to an Islamic future, where the grace of God’s laws will be implemented and provide an honest life to all. . . . The Islamic front must unite so we can fulfill this vision!”
The night of Morsi’s election, Mayy el-Sheikh called the former deputy general guide who had picked Morsi to head the Brotherhood parliamentary bloc, Mohamed Habib. He had left the group to start his own small political party, and Mayy asked him, Does Morsi have what it takes to lead Egypt?
“No,” Habib said bluntly, “he doesn’t.”
I wondered if weakness was part of the reason the generals had allowed Morsi to win; they had disqualified so many strong contenders. Yet for a time he defied the odds.
I could hardly imagine a more humiliating inauguration. Morsi had vowed on election night to restore the disbanded Parliament and swear his oath before it. The military council forced him to take all that back. Two generals promised in a joint television interview before the inauguration that the military would remain “a trustworthy guardian,” with sweeping powers over the rest of the government.
What kind of “guardian”?
“Interpret it any way you like,” Major General Mohamed el-Assar answered.
Instead of a public ceremony, the generals made Morsi swear his oath at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, June 30, 2012, deep inside the Supreme Constitutional Court. He was forced to pay homage to the same judges who had dissolved the Parliament and plotted to steal his election.
I watched on the small screen in my office as Chief Judge Farouk Sultan lectured Morsi about the importance of the Supreme Constitutional Court and the sovereignty of the law. Morsi sat in an upright chair in a curved alcove at the front of an empty courtroom, looking like a hostage. He glowered and stared. He muttered a few dutiful words about the separation of powers. I felt embarrassed for him.
Yet the trappings of the presidency seemed to enlarge him. He climbed into the same black Mercedes limousine that had ferried Mubarak, surrounded by the same retinue of bodyguards with earpieces and sunglasses who had encircled Mubarak. Field Marshal Tantawi was still defense minister and no one thought Morsi could remove him. But even the field marshal saluted the new president.
Morsi, it turned out, had his own ideas about his inauguration. He sped from the court to a lecture hall at Cairo University, where he recited the oath with new feeling before most of the disbanded Parliament and the international ambassadors to Egypt. And he had sworn his oath a third time, unofficially, in Tahrir Square the night before. The Muslim Brothers had erected an elevated stage, and tens of thousands—including more than a few non-Islamists—had turned out to hear him.
Few Egyptians had ever seen a president in the flesh. Mubarak, scared by the assassination of his predecessor and an attempt on his life during a 1995 visit to Ethiopia, had appeared almost exclusively on state television—always surrounded by that thick curtain of bodyguards.
Now an advance man climbed onto the stage. “God is great,” he shouted, and it looked for a moment like a typical Islamist rally. Morsi, awkward as ever, clutched his prepared text in the same hand as his microphone. He paced the stage as if he were lecturing about high-temperature conductivity in aluminum oxide. He saluted a roll call of provinces, bureaucracies, and industries—the people of the media, the arts, tourism, and so on—as if he did not want to leave anyone out.
“O free world, Arabs, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, Egyptian Muslims and Christians, all citizens wherever you are, inside Egypt and abroad. We are here today to tell the whole world: these are the Egyptians; these are the revolutionaries who made this epic, this revolution. . . .”
I thought I heard something new, a different earnestness in Morsi. His speech avoided any reference to Islam or Islamic law. He paraphrased Thomas Jefferson, about martyrs whose blood “watered the tree of liberty.” He called out to political opponents, to Christians and secular Egyptians, and to resort workers or artists who feared Islamist moralizing. “Those who voted for me and those who did not—I’m for all of you, at the same distance from all.”
“I come to you as the source of legitimacy,” he said, again and again. “Everyone hears me, all the people and the Cabinet and government, army, police. There is no authority over this authority. You have the power! You grant power to whoever you choose, and you withdraw power from whomever you choose.” He insisted that no “entity” or “institution”—every listener knew he meant the military—could gainsay the popular will.
He stretched out a hand like a linebacker, pushing two startled bodyguards out of the way until he stood at the front of the stage. A few feet from the crowd, he jerked open his sport coat, and, clutching his microphone to his lapel, he bared the front of his dress shirt.
“I have nothing to protect me from any bullets,” he said. Unlike Mubarak, he wore no body armor. “I fear God almighty and after that I fear only you.”
I thought unexpectedly of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He had been speaking in Mansheya Square in Alexandria in 1954 when bullets shattered a lightbulb over his head. Glass flew around him. Some later said a dark spot appeared on his chest.
“Let them kill Abdel Nasser. What is Abdel Nasser but one among many?” he continued, without any cringe or hesitation. “Men, stay where you are! I am not dead! I am alive! And even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
It was the greatest episode of political theater in Egypt since Antony and Cleopatra. Abdel Nasser was unharmed; legend has it that the dark spot on his chest was ink from a pen. Had Morsi meant to evoke Abdel Nasser, the nemesis of Islamists everywhere?
Morsi pushed back at the generals for their evisceration of his authority in office. “I have no right to give up presidential powers and functions,” he said. “This is a contract between you and me. That is the concept of the modern state. . . . Are you ready? Will you stand by me to fully regain our rights?”
Yasmine El Rashidi, an Egyptian writer from an elite family, chronicled the period with eloquence for the New York Review of Books, and usually described the Muslim Brothers with a mixture of fear and disdain.
“Morsi won me over that day,” Rashidi wrote of Morsi’s speech in the square. “He won over my mother, too, although she’s long been wary of the Islamists. He won over many who in those moments thought he deserved a chance.”
Some of my most liberal or leftist Egyptian friends would look back on that hour in Tahrir Square as the moment when Morsi appeared to be, as he had promised, their president, too.
Washington saw a different picture. As Morsi pledged to free civilians convicted in military trials, he noticed signs in the square urging the humanitarian release of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheikh imprisoned in the United States for plotting related to the bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center.
“I will make all efforts to free them,” Morsi said, improvising again, “including Omar Abdel Rahman.”
The New York Times headline the next day read EGYPT’S NEW LEADER TAKES OATH, PROMISING TO WORK FOR RELEASE OF JAILED TERRORIST. (I did not write it.)
Morsi’s advisers cringed and clarified. He understood that the blind sheikh was a convicted criminal, not a political prisoner. No one expected his imminent release. But Americans wondered if Morsi was an amateur, an extremist, or both.
Al Ahram, the state media broadsheet, was known as the newspaper written for only one reader: the president—Abdel Nasser, Sadat, then Mubarak. Now that reader appeared to be Defense Minister Tantawi, not Morsi. Morsi tried to restore the Parliament, and Al Ahram’s front-page headline that day commended the generals for shutting it down: THE ARMED FORCES BELONG TO THE PEOPLE AND WILL REMAIN ON THE SIDE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND LEGITIMACY. A photograph depicted the defense minister towering over Morsi. A sidebar blamed Morsi for crashing the Egyptian stock market. State media ignored the lawmakers trying to reenter their offices; its television network rebroadcast a tribute to the heroics of the secret police. Speech-making aside, whoever was in charge, it was not Mohamed Morsi. I did not see how that could change.
Five weeks after the inauguration, on August 5, 2012, sixteen Egyptian soldiers manning a checkpoint in the North Sinai desert gathered at sundown for a picnic to break the Ramadan fast. Three Land Rovers came speeding out of the hills. Islamist militants fired automatic rifles out of the windows, killing all sixteen soldiers. The attackers made off with an army truck and an armored vehicle. They belonged to an underground group calling itself Ansar Beit al-Maqdis—the Partisans of Jerusalem—and they drove hard toward Israel, their true target. It was the first I had heard of Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which became important later.
Israeli air strikes made short work of the two vehicles, but the Egyptian army was humiliated. Its soldiers had failed to defend even themselves.
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi arrived at the presidential palace a week later, on August 12, for a private meeting with Morsi. Some close to Morsi would later tell me that Sisi had won the trust of the president by warning him of an assassination attempt that awaited him at a military funeral for those killed in the attack. (Morsi skipped it.) These close Morsi allies also said that Sisi brought evidence of corruption by Tantawi’s second in command, General Sami Anan.
Whatever they discussed, Morsi then called Tantawi and Anan into his office while Sisi returned to the Defense Ministry. Morsi aides in the hallways heard angry voices inside. Anan stormed out. And by that time, Sisi, back at the Defense Ministry, had finished locking down the support of the military council. (General Mahmoud Hegazy, related to Sisi through the marriage of their children, was surely a help.) A short, plump Morsi spokesman appeared on state television at 4:45 P.M. and read out a legalistic proclamation like some medieval herald. Its contents were stunning: the generals were relinquishing control of legislative authority and giving it to Morsi. Tantawi was seventy-six, Anan was sixty-four, and the spokesman announced their immediate retirement. The cameras cut to footage of Morsi swearing in a new defense minister, Sisi, aged fifty-seven, in a hasty ceremony at the presidential palace.
It was the holiest night of Ramadan, the night when the archangel Gabriel is said to have delivered the Quran to the Prophet Mohamed. Muslims celebrate it as Laylat al Qadr—the Night of Power. Morsi gave a sermonlike speech at Al Azhar and reveled in his victory.
“We go on to new horizons,” he said, “with new generations, with new blood that we have long awaited.”
No one in Washington had seen it coming, and a wave of anxiety swept the Pentagon. Some feared that Sisi was a closet Islamist. “There were worries that he was too close to Morsi,” Derek Chollet, an assistant to the secretary of defense, wrote in a memoir. “Everyone was very suspicious of him,” Chollet told me. The Pentagon, at least, still hoped Egypt’s defense minister might check its president rather than report to him.
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates rang more alarms. “Morsi never got it together with the Gulfies and the Israelis,” as Chollet said, putting it mildly.
But Ambassador Patterson knew Sisi, and she sent Washington a different warning. He was ambitious, calculating, and ruthless, she wrote. “Morsi may have bitten off more than he can chew.”
A few days later, I received a phone call from the same skinny bureaucrat who had welcomed me to Cairo. He was still in his job, and he was calling—as cheerful as ever—on behalf of President Morsi.
The president would be traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Would the New York Times like an interview before the trip? Steven Erlanger, one of the paper’s most seasoned correspondents, flew in to join me.
We met in the Ittihadiya Palace—the Unity Palace. It had been built before the First World War as a luxury hotel, designed by a Belgian architect in a combination of neo-Islamic style and Louis XIV decor. Abdel Nasser had commandeered it, and Mubarak kept it. Now Morsi, in a dark suit and a rep tie, met us in Mubarak’s old office. The new president had changed almost nothing. Oil paintings of sailboats still adorned the walls. The only change was the addition of a small plaque on the gilded writing desk. The engraving was a verse from the Quran: “Be mindful of a day on which you will return to God.”
Our conversation took place a few days after September 11, 2012. Vandals had hoisted a black jihadi flag over the U.S. embassy in Cairo during a demonstration against an American-made movie deriding the Prophet Mohamed, and their exploit in Cairo catalyzed a deadly assault the same night on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya.
Morsi had flown to Brussels that night for a meeting with the European Union. I later learned that he had videotaped a statement about the attack from the steps of his plane at the Cairo airport. He condemned the attack and pledged to secure all foreign embassies, then took off for Europe expecting the message to be broadcast on state television.
The presidential camera crew—Mubarak holdovers—had bungled the filming and failed to record his statement. Morsi did not find out until he landed the next morning. It might have been incompetence or sabotage on the part of the camera crew; that question came up often in the Morsi administration. Either way, the result was that Morsi had been strangely silent the night of the attack. He was determined to hide the screwup.
After the small talk about USC, I asked about that night: Why did he say nothing? “We needed to contain the situation and deal with it wisely,” Morsi said. “At no point was anybody in the embassy under any threat.”
Obama had recently been asked in an interview whether he considered Egypt under Morsi to be an American ally. “I don’t think we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy,” Obama said, dodging the question. “A new government that is trying to find its way.”
So we asked Morsi: Did he consider the United States an ally? “That depends on the definition of ‘ally,’” he said, chuckling. “I am trying now, seriously, to look to the future and see that we are real friends.”
The New York Times posted an audio recording of the interview on the internet, and the satirist Bassem Youssef—the self-described Jon Stewart of Egypt—replayed that answer on television as a punch line. The Islamist president was “real friends” with Washington.
I most wanted to know how Morsi had persuaded the generals to let him take real power. How did he remove Field Marshal Tantawi?
Wael Haddara had stepped in for the incompetent official interpreter, and he translated the answer: “The role of the armed forces is not a political role. Their role is to protect the borders and the institution of the state, and that is exactly what they decided to do.”
“No,” Morsi corrected, in English, “no, it is not what they decided to do.”
Haddara tried again. “And that is what happened on August 12, the armed forces assumed their role . . .”
“No,” Morsi interrupted again. They had not merely given up power; he had taken it, he insisted. “This is the will of the Egyptians through their elected president, right?
“And the armed forces are feeling very well,” he continued. “The armed forces as a whole are living at peace with themselves. The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces. Khalas.” That’s it.
“Egypt is now a real civic state. It is not theocratic. It is not military. It is a civic state, democratic, free, constitutional, lawful, modern,” he said, still speaking emphatic English. “We are behaving according to the people’s choices and will. Is this clear?”
I was dumbstruck. I knew the politician’s playbook: thank the departing official (Tantawi) for his service, nod to his desire for time with family, and maybe call his retirement a mutual decision in the public interest. Was Morsi so confident that he could toss out the script? Or so insecure that he needed to boast?
We stood up to go. Morsi was almost swaggering now. “We are talking now about seventy percent popularity. That is what is going on! That is what they are telling me!” I saw his press aides wince and try to cut him off. Two rookie mistakes: admitting that he paid attention to his internal polls, then bragging about them.
Shaking hands to say goodbye, Erlanger gently touched Morsi’s shoulder, fifty-nine-year-old journalist to sixty-one-year-old president. “You have a stressful job,” he said. “Take care of your health.”
I later learned that in Morsi’s inner circle, the remark set off an uproar. Did these American journalists know about a danger to the president’s life? Were they working with American intelligence? Could this be a threat?