Naglaa Ali Mahmoud was surely as surprised as anyone to find herself, at the age of fifty, the First Lady of Egypt. Raised in a poor family in the Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, she was married at the age of sixteen to a cousin ten years her elder. She followed her new husband to Los Angeles. She volunteered at the Muslim Student House at the University of Southern California, translating sermons for women interested in converting to Islam. And she knew what she was doing when she joined the Muslim Brotherhood there with her husband, she told the organization’s newspaper.
“The Brothers don’t blindfold anyone,” she said. “They told us that the path is long and full of dangers.”
California suited her; she did not want to move back to Egypt. But she had given birth to a son and a daughter—the first two of five children—and her husband wanted them to grow up Egyptian. Naglaa was independent: she managed the household alone for four years while her husband taught in Libya to earn extra money. (Such temporary migrations to oil-rich neighbors are common for Egyptians.) His earnings enabled the couple to buy a modest apartment and a Mitsubishi Lancer.
Shaimaa Morsi, their daughter, got the education her mother had missed. After an undergraduate degree from the university in Benha, she had enrolled in a doctoral program in botany at the university in Zagazig. The mother and daughter both wore a khimar—a conservative form of head scarf that leaves the face uncovered but drapes over the shoulders and down to the waist. Both women kept their maiden names after marriage; taking a husband’s family name, as Suzanne Mubarak and Jehan Sadat did, is a Western convention unusual in Egypt. In any case, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud preferred the customary nickname of an Egyptian homemaker, Um Ahmed—Ahmed’s mom, after the name of her first son. She insisted that President Morsi stay in the suburban apartment that the couple shared with their youngest son, Abdullah, and commute to the presidential palace.
“A place like the presidential palace completely isolates you,” she said in a rare interview with an Egyptian magazine. She told the magazine’s photographer that he could take her picture, “only if your photos make me look younger and a little thinner.”
Some saw Um Ahmed as an Egyptian Everywoman—socially conservative, jealous of her privacy, unashamed, and self-reliant. She could have been the mother of many young professional women in Egypt. But to the elite I lived among, she was everything they loathed about President Morsi. Jehan Sadat and Suzanne Mubarak were both half-British fashion plates with well-coifed hair and advanced degrees. How could Um Ahmed step into their high heels?
Mayy el-Sheikh and I stepped out for a latte near our office in Zamalek to sample the outrage. “If you travel to New York or wherever, people would make fun of you and say: ‘Your First Lady wears the abaya, ha ha ha,” lamented a mortified twenty-one-year-old female engineering student. “Previous first ladies used to be elegant.”
“I cannot call her a First Lady under any circumstances,” a twenty-nine-year-old male banker agreed. “She cannot be an image for the ladies of Egypt.” I wondered what the Egyptians of Zamalek thought of Mayy, in her hijab and tennis shoes.
Egyptians joked about Um Ahmed calling Um Gamal—Gamal Mubarak’s mom—to talk about housekeeping. An anti-Islamist newspaper moaned that her Islamic modesty would offend foreign leaders. “Do not look at her. Do not shake hands with her,” an editorial imagined. “A comic scenario.”
It was the symbolism of Um Ahmed—the idea of President Mohamed Morsi, what he might do rather than anything he had done—that most alarmed his critics. His style was so different. Like other educated people serious about Islam, Morsi spoke the classical Arabic of a religious scholar. Egyptians accustomed to street Arabic (or, in the elite, to English) struggled to understand him. His political speeches sometimes sounded like he was giving a Friday sermon at a mosque (he had had more practice at that). Even when he tried to set up a forum for citizen grievances, he reached for language from the early history of Islam—diwan al mathalem. After thirty years of Mubarak, it felt to some as though a pious hick had taken over the palace.
What did Morsi do in office? He had campaigned promising that a shadow government of Brotherhood experts would swoop in to remake the bureaucracy, like McKinsey consultants toting Qurans. Khairat el-Shater had worked for months on the plan, which the Brotherhood called the Renaissance Project. Members of the team expected an office in the presidential palace. I met a pair of experts working exclusively on fisheries.
Morsi pushed it all aside. His advisers told me he was waiting for a new Parliament. He also might have doubted that he had the juice. He issued only one law in his first five months as president: he barred the pretrial detention of journalists for crimes related to their work.
The Mubarak-era legal code still criminalized insults to the president. A team of lawyers working for Morsi filed lawsuits against a handful of journalists or talk show hosts. But Morsi said the suits had been filed without his knowledge and he withdrew them. No one was penalized. Anyone could tell that there was no censorship under Morsi. Criticism of the president saturated the newsstands and the airwaves. The newspapers were full of outrageous reports that Morsi was selling the Great Pyramids or the Suez Canal to Qatar, or that he was giving the Sinai to Hamas as a favor to Israel, or that some Morsi family member had enjoyed a fancy vacation. We chased all the rumors. They were all bogus.
Although the military council under Defense Minister Sisi now allowed Morsi to run the government and issue new laws, he did little to change Egypt. In December 2012, his Cabinet announced a package of tax increases—including sin taxes, such as on cigarettes and beer—but Morsi withdrew them within hours. He appointed Muslim Brothers to less than a third of his Cabinet (eleven positions out of thirty-five). He kept Mubarak-era veterans in charge of the big portfolios—defense, interior, foreign affairs, and finance. A former minister of irrigation became Morsi’s prime minister. And he named Muslim Brothers as governors of only a minority of the provinces (ten out of twenty-seven). Former generals took most of the other seventeen, just like under Mubarak. Compared with the changes in administrations after an American election, Morsi tiptoed in slow motion.
His supporters said Morsi fulfilled the letter of his campaign promises about an inclusive government. He named a prime minister from outside the Muslim Brotherhood as well as a woman and a Christian as deputies. His critics said he failed to honor the spirit of his pledges. The most notable feature of his presidency may have been his determination to ingratiate himself with the military and the police. When an independent commission reported on the killing of civilian demonstrators under military rule, Morsi buried it. His advisers said its allegations were not yet substantiated and that it included inflammatory gossip about the American embassy. But it looked like he was protecting the generals. He repeatedly thanked and flattered the police (who had twice arrested him before he took office). He even commended the police on the anniversary of the 2011 uprising against them.
A columnist in the independent El-Masry El-Youm took stock: “For eighty years, hundreds of thousands of books and articles were published about what would happen if a Brotherhood president made it to power in Egypt. It was said that veils would be required, banks would be closed, a war would be declared, and bathing suits would be banned. Today we discovered what happens when a Brotherhood president holds power. Simply nothing.”
President Obama was staying in the royal suite of the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on his way to an Asian summit. It was November 19, 2012, and Israel and Hamas had been at war for five days. Hamas rockets had killed three Israelis. Israeli air strikes had killed 150 Palestinians and devastated the cities of Gaza. Israel was calling up tens of thousands of reserve troops for a possible ground assault. I foresaw a repeat of the previous Gaza war, in 2009, which had lasted three weeks and killed 1,400 Palestinians.
But now a Muslim Brother was the president of Egypt. Morsi often pledged his commitment to the Camp David peace agreements. But in our interview he had also argued to me that Israel and the United States had failed to live up to their side. Camp David had envisioned a Palestinian state.
With Gaza under Israeli air strikes, Morsi pounded the table for Hamas and the Palestinians. “If a land invasion takes place—as Israelis have said it will—this would mean dire consequences in the region, and we could never accept that,” he thundered at a news conference. “The free world could never accept that.” Many in Washington wondered if Morsi would encourage, aid, or even arm Hamas.
Now, days later, on November 19, Obama had skipped dessert in Phnom Penh for an 11:30 P.M. phone call with Morsi; Morsi stepped out of a funeral service for his sister to take a call from Obama.
Before Morsi, Mubarak, too, had also blustered against Israel in public. But he kept an open line to his Israeli counterparts. Since the United States designated Hamas a terrorist group, the only way that Washington could negotiate with it was through Mubarak, who delegated the outreach exclusively to his spies.
Obama realized that Morsi changed the dynamic. Egypt’s generals and diplomats were still talking to Israel. But Hamas was the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, inspired by the ideas of its founder. Morsi himself was wired to Hamas.
“Morsi effectively had the Hamas guys on the other line. We were talking to people who were one degree removed from Hamas,” Ben Rhodes, who was traveling with Obama, later told me. “This was a whole new world.”
In his call with Obama that night, Morsi neither railed against Israel nor defended Hamas. He understood the Israeli perspective. He wanted only to end the fighting. Obama promised to send Clinton to Tel Aviv and get Israel to the negotiating table; Morsi pledged to bring Hamas. Obama fell asleep in the royal suite’s four-poster bed and told Rhodes to wake him up at any hour if Morsi rang back.
At 3:00 A.M. in Cambodia, Morsi called to say that Hamas was on board. The two presidents spoke again later the same day, November 20, to fill in the details—their third call in twenty-four hours and their sixth call that week.
“The cease-fire talks had been going nowhere before Morsi stepped in,” Rhodes said. “And he delivered. He kept his end of the bargain.”
He surprised even the skeptics. “It was a litmus test for Morsi, and he passed with flying colors,” Steven Simon of the National Security Council told me. “He was indispensable.”
Clinton landed in Cairo on November 21. She and the Egyptian foreign minister announced the cease-fire a few hours later, at 7:00 P.M., and she thanked Morsi “for assuming the leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace.” She made it home the next day for Thanksgiving dinner.
I expected weakness from Morsi on a critical question about Israel and the Palestinians: the tunnels used to smuggle goods and weapons into Gaza under the border from the North Sinai, past the Israeli embargo. Hamas and the residents of Gaza depended on the smuggling, and tunnel traffic had surged with the withdrawal of policing after Mubarak. Weapons from Qaddafi’s looted arsenals traveled the same route.
But when I met him, Morsi had brought up the tunnels before I could ask. “There are radical and criminal elements, and they are using these tunnels sometimes,” he told me sternly. “We destroy these tunnels these days as much as we can.”
Morsi tried to deploy the army to crush the militants in the North Sinai. Sisi refused, he later told other officers. “My mission is not to combat terrorism,” Sisi told them, and there would be “very grave dangers” of civilian casualties from an operation in the Sinai. “You would be creating an enemy against you and against your country, because there will have been bad blood between you and him.” (A recording of his private statements later leaked to the public.)
My colleague Peter Baker was traveling with Obama during the Hamas talks, and we wrote an article together about the budding friendship between the two presidents. We quoted Rhodes anonymously, saying Obama had been impressed by Morsi’s pragmatism and precision. “This was somebody focused on solving problems.”
Morsi, too, was keen on Obama. “We felt there was a high level of sincerity in trying to find a solution,” Morsi’s foreign policy adviser Essam el-Haddad told me.
The New York Times published our article on the front page the next day, Thanksgiving 2012. Obama’s national security advisers stepped up plans for Morsi to visit the White House.
“We really underestimated Morsi,” a senior American diplomat in Cairo told reporters in a briefing.
I pictured Morsi looking into the mirror in the Ittihadiya Palace. Here he was, the unassuming engineering professor, believing he had indeed become the true president of Egypt.