Laura and I often bought our groceries at a chain store called Seoudi Market. Laura could walk there without leaving the safety of our neighborhood. Friendly deliverymen dropped off our purchases at our door, and Laura got to know them all. Then one day in late 2013 she went shopping and found a crowd of policemen outside the store. All the staff had been fired. The military had taken over the chain. Its owner was a Muslim Brother. The owner of its competitor, Metro, had connections.
On a drive to Alexandria that fall, we noticed that uniformed soldiers were running the toll road, too. The military, in the interest of security, had taken over the management and construction of all roads and bridges. The Alexandria highway tollbooth soon moved next to a military-owned gas station and rest stop, devastating the privately owned businesses at the old location. Over six months in 2014, military-owned firms received more than $1.5 billion in contracts to build apartment blocks, tunnels, roads, and many other things. These were boom times for Egyptian Army Inc.
The generals “consider Egypt a battlefield,” Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, Sisi’s trade minister, told Abigail Hauslohner of the Washington Post. “That gives the military the right of first refusal on every piece of land.”
A British friend was developing a shopping mall in Cairo, and over drinks one night he explained the system. There had been bureaucracy and baksheesh under Mubarak, of course. But now the developer was required to hire the military to build all roads, sewage or water networks, and other infrastucture. The military subcontracted the jobs to a company whose principal shareholders had heavily backed the coup (the Sawiris family). That company passed contracts on to the son of Sisi’s then–prime minister, Ibrahim Mehleb. Everyone in the chain got a cut. And it was dangerous to bring up such official corruption in public.
Mehleb, who had headed the state construction company under Mubarak, brought a long record of corruption to the prime minister’s job. Court records introduced after Mubarak’s ouster showed that Mehleb had inflated government contracts to allow the president and his family to embezzle millions for lavish purchases like five German-made refrigerators, a private office for the First Lady in a five-star hotel, several villas by the Red Sea, and a farm outside Cairo. Mehleb fled to Saudi Arabia in 2012 to avoid prosecution for corruption. He returned only when Sisi’s government named him housing minister in 2013. Sisi made Mehleb prime minister eight months later, in February 2014, his past forgotten.
Was Mehleb now brazenly steering contracts to his son? I rushed to investigate, but there was no need. His son’s firm—Rawad Construction, founded by Mohamed Mehleb—listed its government contracts and subcontracts in a prominent place on its website: a terminal for the Cairo airport; sewage and water facilities in Cairo and on the Mediterranean coast; infrastructure for a new university in Giza; a power plant in the city of Bani Suef; a wind farm near the Red Sea; and roads for a new administrative center. In a downbeat economy, the Mehlebs were soaring.
Executives of the company assured me that it was all based on merit. But Sisi had suspended the competitive bidding rules, so it was impossible to know. And there was no independent prosecutor, Parliament, or Egyptian press to investigate.
“It’s not only Mehleb’s son,” Anwar Sadat, a lawmaker and the nephew of the former president, told me. “The whole military economic empire needs oversight.” (I assumed his famous name would protect Sadat, but in 2017, the rubber-stamp Parliament voted almost unanimously to expel him, for the crime of defending the independence of nonprofits. “We saw that Sadat was working against the Parliament and against the state,” one lawmaker said, suggesting treason.)
Corruption was the price of autocracy. The Egyptian government for decades has boasted an exceptionally powerful anticorruption watchdog—the Administrative Oversight Authority. It is a military-run domestic spy agency, conducting electronic surveillance, running its own jails, and detaining suspects or even witnesses without warrants or trials. Created by Abdel Nasser to help control the civilian bureaucracy, the authority reports directly to the president. That is the catch: it makes no pretense of autonomy.
In practice, the Adminstrative Oversight Authority often charges the president’s enemies with venality while covering up for the self-dealing of his friends and family. The watchdog, in other words, is itself an instrument of corruption. Other Arab autocracies run similar systems.
The uprising of 2011 once promised an end to impunity for self-dealing. In the heady days after Mubarak’s ouster, a police officer working for the agency came forward to expose its corruption. In formal complaints and, later, in television interviews, the whistle-blower presented evidence that the agency’s chief, General Mohamed Farid el-Tohamy, was still covering up for Mubarak even after his ouster. “He is protecting the former regime” by locking the evidence in “a secret safe,” the whistle-blower, Lieutenant Colonel Moatassem Fathi, charged.
He said Tohamy had pocketed millions of dollars in gifts—really, protection money—from state-owned companies and government agencies. In return Tohamy spent as much as sixteen thousand dollars a year of the agency’s budget on presents for the defense minister and still more on gifts for Mubarak’s sons. The allegations filled the newspapers. Prosecutors opened a case. A parliamentary committee started an investigation. And Morsi replaced the sixty-six-year-old Tohamy with another general from inside the authority.
Tohamy, though, was also a mentor to Sisi. Tohamy had promoted Sisi at military intelligence and then hired one of Sisi’s sons at the Administrative Oversight Authority. The day after Sisi took over—on July 4, 2013—Tohamy made a comeback. Sisi named his old friend as the new chief of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, one of the most powerful positions in the state. With Sisi’s ear, Tohamy became one of the most influential advocates of a scorched-earth eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood. “He was the most hard-line, the most absolutely unreformed,” one Western diplomat told me. “He talked as if the revolution of 2011 had never even happened.”
The allegations against Tohamy vanished. The whistle-blower was exiled to a desk job far from Cairo. “They have got him locked in the basement,” Mohamed Ibrahim Soliman, a former housing minister incriminated by Fathi’s disclosures, told me with glee. Several politicians like Soliman who had been jailed for corruption after the uprising were soon back in business—including Ahmed Ezz, the most infamous face of the late Mubarak era. I found him back to work at an office inside the Four Seasons.
How much did corruption cost Egypt? Archaeologists had fretted after the 2011 uprising that the withdrawal of the police allowed looters to pillage ruins and excavations. But corruption continued to eat away at Egypt’s ancient patrimony after the police returned under Sisi. Western and Egyptian archaeologists spoke of the theft or mistreatment of ancient artifacts as an unreported tragedy. In 2014, Egyptian Museum workers were fixing a light fixture around the 3,300-year-old burial mask of King Tutankhamen when they accidentally snapped off his beard. Curators hastily reattached it with a form of superglue in order to cover up their error and keep the museum’s biggest draw open. A visitor noticed a sloppy ring of epoxy around the repair job, and it is unclear if King Tut’s beard will ever be the same.
A government auditor, Hisham Geneina, estimated in early 2016 that graft had cost the country $76 billion over the previous three years, mostly through the corrupt sales of government land. That was about three quarters of the annual government budget, and his estimate was surely low if you factored in the bribery, nepotism, and self-dealing at every level of the bureaucracy. Transparency International, the corruption monitor, ranked Egypt near the bottom of the Arab world, on a par with war zones like Yemen and Iraq.
Sisi took the assessment personally. He promptly fired Geneina. A court convicted Geneina of spreading false news. He was fined $2,200, sentenced to jail, and falsely attacked across the progovermment media as a secret Muslim Brother. (His sentence was suspended, stirring speculation that his conviction had been devised to snuff out political ambitions. In the run-up to Sisi’s reelection in 2018, a gang of unidentified men beat up Geneina and a few days later the police again arrested him.)
Kerry and other American officials had lost patience with Morsi for moving too slowly to reach a deal with the International Monetary Fund during his first and only year in office. Sisi openly opposed the deal and sent the IMF packing.
Why reform? The Persian Gulf monarchs could not let Sisi fail and thereby give another chance to the Muslim Brothers. The Gulf rulers appeared willing to pay anything to keep propping up their man in Cairo.
Another secretly recorded conversation captured Sisi conferring with other generals in early 2014 about how to handle one of his Persian Gulf patrons. “You tell him that we need ten to be put into the army’s account. Those ten, when God makes us successful, we will put to work for the state,” Sisi said, rattling off his demands for more cash. “We need another ten from the UAE, and an additional two cents to be put in the Central Bank, to complete the accounting for the year 2014.”
His office manager, who was another general, chuckled out loud. “Why are you laughing?” Sisi asked. “They have money like rice, man!”
Sisi sometimes lost count of it all. “No, no, no! Not eight billion dollars in six months—no!” he exclaimed in another recording. So the generals tallied it all up with him. A few billion here, a few billion there, and they realized that they had received far more—more than $30 billion.
“May God continue providing!” Sisi said.
“Amen, sir,” another general answered.
Sisi held his hand out to Washington, too. In a private meeting, he told Kerry to send “an aircraft carrier full of money,” according to several Americans present or briefed on the meeting.
But by late 2016, after his first three years in power—three times as long as Morsi held office—Sisi had made only token reforms to the economy. He continued a program begun under Morsi to use “smart cards” to track subsidized goods like fuel and flour. But without accountability or oversight, it ended up as riddled with corruption as the rest of the bureaucracy. So the military took it over, naturally.
By then, with oil prices and revenue down, even the Persian Gulf monarchs lost patience. They tempered their generosity. Dependent on their donations, Egypt’s reserves dipped dangerously. The value of the pound started to fall, and Sisi tried to prop it up through coercion alone. He decreed an artificially high exchange rate and jailed money changers who undercut it. The authorities restricted bank transfers out of the country, limited the use of Egyptian credit cards abroad, and searched luggage at the airport for any large wads of cash.
It was no use. Dollars grew scarce. Stores and factories ran short on imported goods and materials. Manufacturers laid off workers. Imports vanished from store shelves. For me, that meant doing without my preferred brands of cereal and peanut butter. For Egyptians it meant serious shortages of medicines, including antibiotics. Mothers who needed imported infant formula demonstrated in the street over a shortage, and the army brought in a supply to start handing it out. The real value of the pound fell to half the official rate and a black market in dollars flourished despite the police.
Finally, in November 2016, Sisi was forced to go back to the International Monetary Fund. The $4.8 billion bailout discussed under Morsi was no longer nearly sufficient. Egypt needed $12 billion now.
The IMF mandated a free float of the currency that cut the value of the Egyptian pound by more than half overnight. It hung at around 18 or 20 pounds to the dollar, down from about 7.5 under Morsi. In 2017, food prices were rising at a rate of more than 30 percent a year. Wages were stagnant. Unemployment was soaring. With my wallet full of dollars, I could live like a king. My Egyptian friends shook their heads in misery.
Sisi rewrote his own history. In the thirty months before the Rabaa massacre, he had often told Egyptian confidants and American officials that he was happy to be serving under a democratically elected president from the Muslim Brotherhood (as several of those confidants and officials told me at the time). After Rabaa, he insisted that he had warned all along against allowing Islamists a chance to take power.
“I always told you, Anne, that political Islam would fail,” he told Ambassador Patterson, who wrote to Washington that Sisi had never said anything of the kind.
No longer defending the earnestness of his efforts to help Morsi, Sisi hinted that he had duped the president from the start. “He underestimated me,” Sisi told the visiting American scholar Shibley Telhami in early 2014.
Mubarak, in another leaked recording of a conversation with his doctor, reassessed Sisi. “He turned out to be devious.”
Sisi spoke of himself in the third person, like a historical figure. “Sisi would never do a coop,” he told Hagel and Obama—pronouncing the p in coup d’état.
He always returned to the classic authoritarian’s refrain, that the alternative was chaos. I heard the same thing constantly from supporters of his takeover. Sisi’s first prime minister was Hazem el-Beblawi, an internationally recognized economist who had been among Egypt’s most prominent liberals. When I visited his home less than a year after the Rabaa massacre, Beblawi was sitting in an armchair by a window of his grand apartment overlooking Nasr City. A book of economics and a tobacco pipe sat on a small, round side table.
Beblawi had spoken out against the Maspero massacre and he had at least acknowledged that the death toll at Rabaa approached a thousand. I was ready to like him, and I tried to warm him up with easy questions. In your tenure as prime minister, I asked, what were you most proud of?
Clearing the Rabaa sit-in, he volunteered, without hesitation.
Really? I asked, delicately. He was proudest of the bloodshed?
Of course he knew many would die, he told me. So did Sisi. “This is the police of a country like Egypt,” Beblawi said. “I cannot say this is Denmark.”
“It is a matter of the prestige of the state,” Beblawi continued. “We are talking about a country where the state is central, and if there is a doubt about the state everything will disintegrate.” The Rabaa sit-in “was a test of whether we could have a state or not.”
Beblawi had distilled for me the ideology of the Arab deep state. Turks and Arabs have been using the term for years to describe the machinery of the permanent government—the bureaucracy, the military, the police and judges, the media, and religious establishments, and so on—long before the phrase “deep state” came into vogue under Trump in Washington. The deep state is a machine that can churn on regardless of who is supposed to be driving. As Morsi discovered.
The institutions of the Egyptian deep state seemed to me remarkably sturdy. They had survived revolutions, elections, parliaments, and presidents. The same functionaries who had welcomed me to Egypt under Mubarak had set up my meeting with Morsi, and they were still in place under Sisi. Everywhere, the same bureaucrats occupied the same desks that they had when I first arrived in Egypt.
But the philosophy of the deep state—the ideology of Arab authoritarianism—depended on the opposite premise: that the state itself is as fragile and precious as a sarcophagus under glass in the Egyptian Museum. At the slightest jolt, savagery would prevail. The prestige of the state—the awe of the state, as it was sometimes translated—was the only bulwark against chaos.
We learn in American civics class that stability rests on the rule of law, and that the law, by definition, must constrain even a president. The ideology of the deep state turned that axiom on its head. The social order was so tenuous that its guardians—the generals, the police, and the mukhabarat, the “state institutions,” in the Egyptian euphemism—must wield power without constraint. They must put themselves above the law in order to save it.
Sisi embraced the paradox the moment he removed Morsi, on July 3, 2013. He was forced to act to prevent “the collapse of the state,” he declared, and to do that he suspended a newly ratified constitution, removed a recently elected president, and ordered a blitz of extralegal arrests and censorship. He vowed to preserve the rule of law and in the process shredded it completely.
In meetings with Kerry or Obama, Sisi smiled, nodded, and seemed to agree with them. He said yes in body language, but no with his words. No, he would not free jailed Americans, or Egyptian journalists, or Brotherhood leaders. No, he would not loosen the restrictions on rights groups or political parties. He could not interfere with the sacrosanct independence of the judiciary, he insisted, convincing no one.
He acted as if the bloodshed at Rabaa had been out of his hands. “He said, ‘Yes, it is terrible. We are investigating. The police got out of control,’” Kerry later recalled. “Sometimes I thought he was genuinely trying to work through problems. . . . Other times, he was making excuses.”
Sisi, in de facto power since the coup, stood in a pro-forma presidential election in 2014. He scheduled it at the last minute, and he campaigned for only three weeks. He never bothered to attend his own rallies, nor did he spell out a platform. He was “the candidate of necessity,” as Heikal put it.
Sisi’s only opponent was a Nasserite civilian. He mostly agreed with Sisi, especially about his ouster of Morsi. But when the polls opened on May 26, 2014, a panic seized the deep state. Almost no one was voting!
At the last moment, election officials opened the polls for an extraordinary third, additional day. The prime minister declared a national holiday, canceled public transit fares, and threatened fines for nonvoters. Talk show hosts flew into hysterics. “Anybody who does not vote is giving the kiss of life to the terrorists,” one host, Mustafa Bakry, screamed. “Those who do not come out are traitors! Traitors! Traitors! They are selling out this country.”
Sisi was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote. But the independent monitors had pulled out over the irregularities, so who could be sure? A coalition led by a former intelligence officer dominated the parliamentary elections a few months later, with a platform consisting only of support, in all things, for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. (He was reelected by a similar margin in 2015 after the arrests of several possible challengers.)
What was Sisi’s vision for Egypt? At the center of the square where the Rabaa sit-in took place, Sisi erected a singular monument. Two towers of granite each angled toward the other, and in the center a flimsy-looking white ball hung suspended in the air. A plaque explained that the taller stone was the military and its shorter sibling was the police. They were two hands. The fragile white orb cupped in them was the Egyptian people.
Sisi had once told fellow military officers to think of Egyptians as children. The army is “the very big brother, the very big father who has a son who is a bit of a failure and does not understand the facts,” he told a group of senior officers, in another leaked recording. “Does the father kill the son? Or does he always shelter him and say, ‘I’ll be patient until my son understands’?”
“You want to be a first class nation?” he asked Egyptians in another conversation, this time with his journalist-confidant. “Will you bear it if I make you walk on your feet? Will you bear it when I wake you up at five in the morning every day? Will you bear cutting back on food, cutting back on air conditioners? Will you bear me removing the subsidies all at once? Will you bear this from me?”
Instead of faulting government policies, Sisi always blamed Egyptians—for their supposed lack of industry and enterprise, for their moral laxity, and for their prodigious birth rate. On the campaign trail, he complained to doctors that his government could not possibly afford to provide all Egyptians with the same standard of health care that the army provided soldiers. “Why? Because there is nothing, there is nothing!” he shouted. The doctors, he said, must work harder for less.
But if the people were the problem, government power was always his answer. Inflation? He proposed mandatory price controls and state-run factories. Energy shortages? He would force Egyptians to install energy-efficient lightbulbs in every home socket, even if he had to send government employees to screw in each one. “Sisi bulbs,” the hardware store clerk told me when I bought one (voluntarily).
“I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Sisi explained in the only television interview of his short campaign. “My program will be mandatory.”
In the economy, “the state has to be in control here,” he added, so his government would plan, choose, “and execute.”
The centerpiece of his economic program was a “new” Suez Canal—his answer to Abdel Nasser’s High Dam. Twenty thousand conscripts a year had worked for ten years to dig the original canal, completed in 1869. Sisi promised to finish his new one in a single year, no matter how much the rush cost. In September 2014, he sold $8 billion of special government bonds to the public to pay for it (with no foreign funding).
EGYPT REJOICES, EGYPT’S GIFT TO THE WORLD newspaper headlines declared when construction was finished on time in 2015. The government ordered every imam to preach a sermon comparing the new canal with a battle trench dug by the Prophet Mohamed himself. “An additional artery of prosperity for the world,” Sisi declared to an audience of ambassadors and dignitaries at the opening. Its official $8 billion price tag was roughly as much as Egypt spent that year to subsidize bread.
This “new canal,” though, was actually a parallel bypass that ran alongside only about a third of the original. It eliminated some potential bottlenecks, but not all of them. And it was unnecessary. The Suez Canal had been operating far below capacity for years. Changing trade patterns meant shipping volumes were falling. But no matter. When canal revenue continued to decline, the Egyptian news media forgot the embarrassment of Sisi’s rosy forecasts of future windfalls.
In 2016—three years after he took power, two years after his inauguration, and one year after the seating of his rubber-stamp Parliament—Sisi delivered a speech about his plan for Egypt over the next two decades. But he was still talking, now sometimes manically, about the same existential threat he had used to justify his takeover.
“Our goal is to preserve the Egyptian state,” Sisi declared, and he repeated the phrase another dozen times. “Any country’s main goal is preserving the state, preserving the state, preserving the state,” he insisted. “There are still efforts and conspiracies being carried out to bring Egypt down,” he said. “I am still talking about the national goal of preserving the state.”
Everyone knew he depended on the backing of the military council, but Sisi now warned his listeners that only he could save Egypt. “Do not listen to anyone but me,” Sisi said. “I am a man who does not lie, who does not beat around the bush, and who cares only for his country!”
He would eradicate all enemies, he repeated again. “I will wipe off the face of the earth anyone who threatens this country,” he promised. “I am telling every Egyptian listening to me now, What do you think is going on? Who are you?”
An echo: Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, Egypt’s crazy neighbor, had used the same words to challenge the Libyans rising against him in the Arab Spring revolt. Man antoum? Who are you? When revolutions were in style, I bought Man antoum T-shirts for my sons. Did Sisi intend to quote Qaddafi?
Sisi bluntly acknowledged he had no time for the democracy he once pledged to restore. “It’s still early to start practicing democracy in an open sense, where we criticize this or that, and this guy is kicked out. It’s still early days.”
Stop complaining, he told Egyptians. He would be the judge. “Will you know better than I do if this government is good or not?” he asked. Why should his ministers tolerate criticism from the public? “What do they get in return for tolerating you? What do they get in return for your attacks all day and night?”
Yet a few months later, at a youth conference in Suez in April 2017, Sisi blamed those ministers for his government’s failings. “His excellency the minister of agriculture is talking about creating ‘synergistic communities,’” Sisi said sarcastically. “Why didn’t we create them three years ago? There have been three ministers of agriculture. Why didn’t we do it?”
“People,” Sisi chided, “saying things here is one thing, but turning this talk into action is a completely different story—or else Egypt would not be so backward.”
He reminded the audience of his own unfulfilled promise to develop a million and a half acres of desert as farmland, and he again blamed his ministers. “The ministries of irrigation and agriculture would allocate the lands, allocate the water, and then retreat.” He could hardly fire them, though. “Will I let someone go who has only worked with me for five or six months? Where would my credibility be if I removed everyone who comes to work with me?” Where indeed! The crowd at the conference roared with applause.
Plenty of Egyptians told me that they were grateful for Sisi. They felt lucky not to live in the chaos of Libya, Syria, Iraq, or Yemen. That idea was a running theme of the progovernment news media. Even my former Arabic tutor, who once ranted at Mubarak’s “gang of thieves” and his brutal police, told me in 2016 that he had changed his mind. The “revolution” taught him to appreciate the police and to appreciate Sisi.
Other Egyptians, though, could only laugh at their leader. Sisi boasted of his love for Egypt at the end of one speech. “I swear to God, if I could sell myself, I would.”
An eBay listing was up within minutes: “One Egyptian president slightly used . . . May not ship to Qatar.” Bids surpassed $100,301 before eBay shut down the auction. (The author of the listing remained anonymous and presumably abroad; insulting the president is once again a jailable crime inside Egypt.)
To some Egyptians, Sisi called to mind a comic film made in Cairo in the 1980s. Its cab driver hero happened to resemble a delusional mental patient named Balaha—which is also the Arabic word for a date, as in the fruit on palm trees.
Why did you try to escape again, Balaha? an asylum guard mistakenly asked the cab driver, forcing him into the hospital. “I am not balaha!” he sputters. I am not a date!
The balaha scene lasted only minutes and contributed nothing to the plot. But Egyptians found a new nickname for their president—Balaha. By 2017, an Arab speaker searching Google for information about date fruit—“balaha”—would find only a long list of satiric web postings and videos about Sisi.
“Did you escape again, Balaha?” interviewers asked him in dubbed dialogue. “I am not Balaha!” he protested again and again. “I am not Balaha!”
When somebody comes who tries to divide you, then kill them, whoever they are,” a gray-bearded sheikh was saying. In his customary tall red fez wrapped in white—the uniform of a religious scholar trained at the Al Azhar Institute—the former Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa had come to a Defense Ministry auditorium after the Rabaa massacre to give the soldiers a religious pep talk.
Sheikh Gomaa was appointed by Mubarak in 2003, served for a decade as Egypt’s highest Muslim religious authority, and carried on a tradition of hostility to the Muslim Brotherhood that has shaped the clerical establishment since Abdel Nasser’s takeover. Now, in August 2013, Gomaa told the soldiers that the Muslim Brothers were heretics—like Kharijites, a sect notorious for its rebellion against the early Muslim caliphs. “Even with the sanctity and greatness of blood, the prophet permits us to fight this.”
“Shoot to kill,” he said, again, at these “rotten and stinking people.”
A senior scholar in the ministry of mosques took the stage and backed up Gomaa. The protesters at Rabaa were “aggressors who have to repent” and “not honorable Egyptians.” Using deadly force against them was a military duty. “The heart is at ease about this.”
Then a celebrity televangelist, Amr Khaled, reminded the soldiers that Islam obliged them to obey the orders of their commanders. “You, you conscript in the Egyptian military, you are performing a task for God Almighty!”
The military’s Department of Moral Affairs showed a video of the lectures on Islam to soldiers and riot police stationed across the country, presumably to help put to rest any moral or ethical qualms about killing their fellow Egyptians. Gomaa became an informal religious adviser to Sisi and often preached the same bloody sermon. At a Friday prayer service in early 2014, for example, he again sanctified the soldiers and police who fought that “faction of hypocrites” and “terrorists,” the Muslim Brothers. “Blessed are those who kill them, as well as those whom they kill,” he proclaimed. State television broadcast the sermon, and its cameras panned to Sisi listening attentively from the floor. This was the Islam of the deep state, and its clerics were as adept as jihadists at justifying bloodshed.
Abdel Nasser had been the first to nationalize Egypt’s Muslim religious establishment—Al Azhar, the Grand Mufti, and the ministry of mosques. It was under his rule that Egypt’s clerics had set the template for demonizing the Muslim Brothers. “Brothers of the Devil,” his sheikhs called them.
In 2011, all the highest religious authorities in Egypt had urged Muslims to shun the Tahrir Square protests against Mubarak, and in 2012, Grand Mufti Gomaa had endorsed the general running against Morsi. Air Marshal Shafik was “closer to God,” Gomaa announced. Now, after 2013, the voices of the religious establishment sometimes hailed Sisi as “a messenger of God” or “God’s shadow on earth.”
Sisi embraced the role. He pledged several times in his short campaign that part of his job would be to “present God” in the correct way to the public. He vowed to remain “alert and responsible,” to fix the errors of others about Islam. “I lead the people, so there cannot be a leadership that speaks and presents while I am sitting on the sidelines watching,” he said on the subject of preaching. The new constitution approved under Sisi at the start of 2014 was scarcely more secular than either the one passed under Morsi in 2012 or the one in place under Mubarak. The principles of Islamic Sharia were still its foundation.
After terrorist attacks against the West in 2015, Sisi made headlines around the world by calling for a “revolution” in Islam. “It is unbelievable that the thought we hold holy pushes the Muslim community to be a source of worry, fear, danger, murder, and destruction to all the world,” he told the clerics of Al Azhar in a televised speech. “You need to stand sternly.”
American commentators heralded the speech as a sign that Sisi was the long-awaited Muslim Martin Luther. George Will recommended him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Many, to my bewilderment, called him secular.
An Egyptian lawyer and television host tried to answer Sisi’s call for reform by opening a debate about the sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohamed. Misunderstandings of the sayings had justified violence, the host, Islam Beheri, contended.
The sheikhs of Al Azhar accused him of insulting Islam and insulting them, too—both crimes under Sisi’s constitution. And Sisi backed Al Azhar against the free thinker. Only Al Azhar could guide any “reform,” Sisi said, and no one could contradict it. Sisi’s government imprisoned Beheri in Tora a year for his heresy, before he was released by a presidential pardon.
When it comes to our own religion or politics, Americans and Western Europeans usually say we believe that independent reasoning and open debate are the way to reform. (Sheik Muhammad Abduh thought so as well.) But Sisi’s idea of “reform” was the Islam of the deep state: dictated from above. He banned heterodox books about Islam and imposed tight controls over Islamic teaching. He closed down twenty-seven thousand independent mosques. He forbade preaching by unlicensed imams. His government issued mandatory sermon guidelines for those still at their minbars.
“To avoid evil and please God, a person shall obey the rulers” read an official 3,100-word sermon issued for the 2016 anniversary of the Arab Spring protests. Rising up brought only “ruin and chaos,” the sermon text warned.
American Christians would riot if our government tried to control our churches. But Arab authoritarians have pushed that same top-down approach to religious “reform” for more than half a century. It has so far succeeded only in driving dissent underground, where radicalism has flourished. Will the outcome be different under Sisi?
In time I came to suspect Sisi and his supporters believed the fundamental problem was not behind the minbar at all. The problem was the people on the prayer mats. The elite distrusted Egyptian Muslims too much to allow them to consider or reject reforms for themselves.
“Religious thought, or religious discourse, is afflicted with backwardness,” Sisi’s first minister of culture, Gaber Asfour, declared in a morning television interview, throwing up his hands, as he often did, at the failings of his fellow Egyptians. “We now live in an age of backwardness.”
Tawadros II, who ascended to the Coptic papacy in 2012, preached a parallel gospel. He not only endorsed Sisi for president; Tawadros absolved the military of the Maspero massacre. The pope usually maintained that no one knew who had killed those two dozen Christians. Sometimes, though, he went as far as to blame the Muslim Brothers: he claimed that they had somehow duped the Christians into clashing with the army and then fled the scene.
“We can pray in a nation without a church,” Tawadros II said in June 2014, “but we can’t pray in a church without a nation.” It was the psalm of the deep state, trumpeted the next day on the front page of Al Ahram.
Sisi brought some boons to the church. He silenced the sectarian invective of the Salafi television preachers. After his inauguration as president, he paid a surprise visit to Mass for Coptic Christmas Eve, on January 6, 2015. Mubarak and Morsi had wished the pope Merry Christmas over the telephone and sent envoys to the service, and Morsi had attended the Mass in his capacity as a Brotherhood leader before his election. But Sisi was the first president to show up at the service.
“Let no one say, ‘What kind of Egyptian are you?’” Sisi told the worshippers. “We must only be Egyptians!” Then he left with his retinue of bodyguards before the first prayers.
In some ways, though, Christians fared worse under Sisi than they had under Morsi, in part because they became scapegoats for anger at the coup. I visited the Father Moses Church in Minya, 140 miles south of Cairo, a month after Rabaa. Its soaring sanctuary had been stripped of stained glass, icons, iron light fixtures, copper wires, and anything else the looters could steal. Attackers had built a bonfire of the pews. The high stone dome was blackened; ashes and debris covered the floor. So I joined hundreds of parishioners gathered in folding chairs in a low concrete basement. It was lit by bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, and I felt like I was praying in the Roman catacombs.
Sixty-eight-year-old Father Samuel Aziz, with a long white beard and glasses, told me he was trapped in a church office during the attack. A police commander called to offer an escort to safety, but none ever showed up. “They were too weak and outnumbered,” the priest said. A month later, he was still waiting for any police officer to visit the scene.
In the nearby town of Dalga, a mob attacked a 1,650-year-old monastery and stole icons and relics older than Islam along with a medieval baptismal font. Arsonists set fire to thirty-five homes belonging to Christians. One Christian had defended his home with a gun, and he was killed and dragged through the streets.
But the police had not shown up yet in Dalga either. Forty-seven-year-old Father Abraam Tenesa told me that “thugs” were trying to shake Christians down for protection money, like the medieval tax on Christians, jizya.
Christians complained of the same bias against them. Three months after Sisi took power, a court convicted three Christians of murdering a Muslim in the outbreak of violence that had led to the assault on the cathedral under Morsi. Each Christian was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. No Muslims were found guilty of killing any of the five Christians who had died during the fight.
Prosecutors still jailed Christians for blasphemy against Islam. A committee of Muslim scholars still censored the screening of movies. Despite a promise from Sisi, church building still required special permission from security agencies, which frequently denied it.
Worst of all, police failed to protect Christians from the rising violence against them. In May 2016, a rumor spread through the village of Karm, Minya, about a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. A mob of forty Muslims burned the Christian’s home to the ground, beat up the family, and dragged the seventy-year-old matriarch, Suad Thabet, naked through the streets. Prosecutors found insufficient evidence to charge anyone for the crimes. No wonder the Islamic State saw an easy target, declaring Christians its “favorite prey,” and started bombing churches.
When I found Father Matthias, who led the march that ended in the Maspero massacre in 2011, he told me that the soldier who had kicked and beaten him—then major Ibrahim el-Damaty—had been elevated the next year to chief of the military police under Defense Minister Sisi. “Under Sisi, pushing a priest gets you promoted right away,” Father Matthias said ruefully.
Father Filopateer, the other priest at the head of that march, told me he could no longer return to Cairo without fear of arrest for his activism.
“Life for Copts under the Muslim Brotherhood was a lot better,” Father Filopateer told me. At least then Copts had the freedom to organize and protest. “We are dealing with a dictator and he is ready to do anything to maintain his power,” he went on. “In economics, in politics, in freedom—everything is going in the wrong direction.”
The standard coup playbook calls for special tribunals to dispense with the old regime. Sisi did not bother. He designated only a circuit of existing courts where quick-ruling, anti-Islamist judges handled “terrorism” cases. No need for special rules or panels. Judges everywhere were eager to lock up anyone the police or mukhabarat hauled into the docket.
On March 24, 2014, a three-judge panel in Minya had sentenced 529 alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death, all for the killing of a single police officer during an antigovernment riot on the day of the Rabaa massacre. The trial took only two sessions, each less than an hour. More than 400 defendants were sentenced in absentia.
A month later, the same panel sentenced to death another 680 alleged Muslim Brothers, after an equally swift trial, again for the murder of a single policeman. One of the condemned was the seventy-year-old general guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Badie; he had been in Cairo on the day of the crime and no specific evidence was presented to link him to the killing. Another alleged culprit was a feeble sixty-year-old high school principal, Mohamed Abdel Wahab.
Sitting at home in his living room surrounded by several grown children, the principal said he had just returned from his retirement party when he heard the news of his conviction in absentia. “We are living in absurdity,” he said, and his children all nodded.
He had survived multiple heart surgeries. He could not walk up stairs or breathe near smoke. He pulled up his galabiya to show me surgical scars on both calves. “I am the one who broke into the police station and killed the police officer?” he asked. “Everything is a whim. There is no rule of law.”
In December, a court in Giza sentenced to death another 188 alleged Muslim Brothers (one of them a minor). The Times barely covered it. Preposterous mass death sentences had become so common they were not news anymore. The appeals process dragged out for years.
Morsi, who the military had quietly transferred to a prison in Alexandria, was sentenced to life for walking out of his brief detention during the Tahrir Square uprising. Prosecutors said Hamas, the Sunni militants in Gaza, and Hezbollah, the Shiites in Lebanon, had improbably conspired together to bust him out of prison in Cairo.
Another court convicted Morsi of committing espionage while in office as president, allegedly by sharing secrets with Qatar. A third court sentenced him to death for the killings in the brawl outside the presidential palace in December 2012, when he was far from the scene.
I assumed the appeals process would keep him from the gallows, but I wondered how a judge could keep a straight face about such ludicrous rulings. The Egyptian judiciary had prided itself for decades on its independence.
Judge Mahmoud Sherif, the general secretary of the judges club at the time of the coup, had been promoted to an office high in the justice ministry when I met him in early 2017. Sherif wore French cuffs and a European suit, and he acknowledged candidly that Morsi never controlled much—certainly not the army, police, judges, state media, the religious establishment, or the rest of the bureaucracy. But why take the chance that he might? “I don’t have to wait until he becomes a tyrant!” Sherif said.
Egypt had now cycled through three constitutions in three years—the charter in place under Mubarak, the charter approved under Morsi, and a third ratified under Sisi. Was it difficult, I asked, for the judges of Egypt to adjust so quickly to new legal frameworks? Not at all, he said. “The people chose several different constitutions. We have to obey, because we rule in their name.”
How did all the judges know that a constitution ratified only six months earlier had lost all legitimacy overnight? “When people take to the streets,” he fired back, grinning at his own rousing populism. “The power comes from the people!”
So how many of “the people” does it take? Would a few million do it? I asked, probing gently.
“We need thirty million exactly!” he answered instantly: the obviously inflated figure that government propagandists had settled on as the size of the June 30 protests against Morsi. “Not twenty-nine million, not twenty-nine and a half million!” he said, slapping his desk. “It must be exactly thirty million!”
We both burst out laughing.
Controlling the news media was a priority for the generals. After Mubarak’s ouster, “people and the media rode roughshod over us in a way that isn’t normal,” one senior military office had groused to Sisi in a private meeting before he took power. (An audio recording later leaked out.)
“Correct,” agreed Sisi, but he urged patience. “It takes a very long time until you possess an appropriate share of influence over the media,” but “we are working on this, for sure.”
Within months after his takeover, Sisi’s levers of influence were locked into place. A new law prescribed a jail sentence for any journalist who contradicted the military’s official statements about its war against “terrorism.” The owners of all the major newspapers pledged in writing not to criticize Sisi’s government during the time of crisis. Television networks suspended talk show hosts who came too close to the line. Soldiers confiscated newspaper print runs. Four years after the takeover, Egypt had become one of the world’s most aggressive jailers of journalists. More than twenty-five were behind bars.
Sisi used the media to build his own cult of personality, too. In another leaked recording, he told his office manager to be sure the news media portrayed him as a hero “on a nearly impossible mission” and “carrying the responsibility of a country in an existential crisis.” Another recording caught the office manager ensuring just that. “There is a point we want all of our media personalities on TV to debate,” he told an unnamed intermediary: questioning Sisi was a “shame” to the nation.
Criticizing Sisi—“this brave, special, free and patriotic Egyptian”—would be “slandering this beautiful thing we have found in our lives,” the office manager said, and he listed a half dozen talk show hosts who should deliver that message.
“Our dear Egyptian people, do you like this being done to the man who labored and sacrificed?” the office manager suggested. “Are you listening? Are you writing this down or not?” he interjected several times. “Stir up the people with it!”
The distortions could be mind bending. Sisi spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in October 2014, and ended his speech by chanting his campaign slogan, in Arabic, “Tahya Masr!” Long Live Egypt! Most delegates looked on in bemused silence.
But Sisi’s entourage and some Arab allies leaped to their feet chanting and applauding. Egyptian networks showed only narrowly cropped shots of the cheering. The anchors reported that the whole general assembly was acclaiming Sisi.
“LONG LIVE EGYPT” ROCKS THE ASSEMBLY! Al Ahram declared in its front-page headline.
“Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was the groom of the United Nations, and Egypt was the bride,” said Amir Adeeb, a nationalist talk show host. “A thing of genius.”
When I wrote about that misrepresentation, Al Ahram published an article saying that I, too, was applauding for Sisi. “In Kirkpatrick’s view, Sisi was able to erase the image that was in the minds of some people, that what happened in Egypt in June 2013 was a ‘coup,’ not a revolution. . . . Kirkpatrick pointed out that all the diplomats were in a state of silence and enjoyment throughout Sisi’s speech.”
So the New York Times published on its website an English translation of Al Ahram’s article about “Kirkpatrick’s view,” side by side with my original.
Al Ahram’s editors did not see the humor. Kirkpatrick “fervently defends the terrorist organization”—the Muslim Brotherhood—“and always promotes the idea that there is oppression of freedoms,” Al Ahram wrote the next day in an unusual nonretraction of its original claims.
By 2015, progovernment talk show hosts were denouncing me on air, by name, as an enemy of Egypt. One host, Osama Kamal, put up my photograph and insisted on referring to me as Kirk Douglas. Did he know that my middle name is Douglas? I worried the attention might make me a target for harassment or mob violence, and I kept my head down. (Prosecutors opened a formal case against me in 2018.)
Female foreign correspondents told me that the intelligence agencies targeted them for other abuse. A British journalist told me that while she was reporting on the first massacre after the coup, a group of men broke into her apartment. She hid in the bedroom and listened as they searched the living room and desks. But the intruders stole nothing. (Her male roommate, another journalist, was away that night.)
A few days later, a group of men sprang on her outside her apartment and grabbed her from behind. One dragged a knife over her chest and her crotch. “Do you want me to cut your breasts?” he threatened in English. “Do you want me to cut your clitoris?” Then the men ran away, without stealing anything.
A few weeks later, after the Rabaa massacre, she received an anonymous email from an account under the name “Military Military.” In broken English, it accused her of sleeping with her housemate, called him a spy, and warned that she had drawn “the people rage” by joining the “terrorist” of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We are watching all of you, counting your breath, 24/7,” the message read. “We are guardian angels. We can turn in a minute into kill devils.”
She moved in with another friend for safety. Then, on a Friday afternoon a few weeks later, a mob of a dozen men assaulted her not far from where she had been accosted with the knife. They shoved their hands inside her, and she screamed, struggled, and ran. At an army checkpoint up the street, she told me, soldiers watched and did nothing. She soon relocated out of Egypt.
I thought that the return of the police might at least better protect Egyptian women. But during the four days of demonstrations from June 30 through Morsi’s ouster, mobs had sexually assaulted at least ninety-one, according to a tally by Human Rights Watch and Nazra for Feminist Studies. At Sisi’s inauguration, in June 2014, female television correspondents covering the celebrations in Tahrir Square tried to report another wave of assaults. In at least two cases their anchors cut them off.
“They are happy,” the anchor Maha Bahnasy giggled to her correspondent. “They are having fun.”
A mobile phone video made one assault that day impossible to ignore. It showed a woman in the square naked except for a black shirt covering her shoulders. Her bottom was bruised purple and black, and men’s hands were all over her. A policeman waved his handgun, the camera moved away, and she reappeared. She was fully naked and faceup, her body limp and reddened. The hands of strangers laid her in a car.
Sisi had campaigned for president promising to restore Egypt’s “gallantry” and “manhood.” After two days of uproar over the video, state television cameras followed him into a hospital as he delivered a bouquet of red flowers to the victim. (Her face was pixilated.) “I apologize to you, and, as a state, we will not allow this to happen again,” he told her, placing his hand over his chest.
“Shame on you to let this happen,” he told Egyptians, speaking into the camera.
That apology was the extent of Sisi’s defense of women’s participation in public life. The state-sponsored National Council of Women resumed its official monopoly on women’s organizing. Mozn Hassan, the young feminist who tried to build a movement, was charged with the crime of accepting foreign donations to her nonprofit. Prosecutors froze her assets and banned her from travel. The last time I saw her, in early 2017, she was waiting to go to jail.
The new president of the National Council for Women, Maya Morsi (no relation to the former president), had no sympathy for Mozn and defended the prosecution. “Let us not judge the law!” Morsi told me. “If you know that there is a law saying ‘Don’t do this,’ would you?”
She insisted Sisi was “a savior” to the women of Egypt. She said she saw no problems at all with the way that the army and police treated women. When I asked about the virginity tests, she offered excuses. The soldiers had to follow procedure. The abuse of the Blue Bra Girl had misrepresented the true character of the noble Egyptian army.
“We saw the real Egyptian army afterward, in the second wave of the revolution, on the thirtieth of June,” she volunteered. “No one touched any woman, right?”
I was incredulous. Independent rights groups had collected the testimony of dozens of women sexually assaulted in the demonstrations that day.
Did she think there were any problems at all with the treatment of women by the army and police?
“I don’t see it.” She paused to consider. “No, I don’t see it,” she told me again.
Laura wondered at her own receding standards. She would never have agreed to move to an Arab capital on the brink of a revolution. Now bombs were going off in Cairo. The police had started arresting Western journalists. I had been labeled a terrorist sympathizer in the news media. Egyptian mothers she met at the playground took a step back at the mention of my name. But here we still were.
Maadi was shaken in the spring of 2015 by the news that an online message board used by jihadists had posted detailed instructions about how to hit a local international school. Security consultants for the international petroleum companies were buzzing about a wave of carjackings targeting SUVs (like ours). The consultants thought the militants wanted four-wheel-drive vehicles to run guns in the desert. A major energy company pulled its fleet of Land Rovers and required all employees to drive smaller cars. We canceled plans to visit the Siwa Oasis, in the western desert, and Mount Sinai, in the South Sinai. We no longer felt safe on the roads. The American embassy barred its employees from driving outside of Cairo or Sharm el-Sheikh.
When the Islamic State militants beheaded the Croatian employee of the French oil company that August, we took it as an ominous sign that they might target Westerners. The militants brought down the Russian charter jet a few months later, and they were testing attacks on tourist sites. But those worries were abstract.
More pressing was the day in early 2015 when my son Thomas stepped on a nail. He was nine years old. A flare-up of street protests had closed off the roads again, and there were reports of more shooting. Laura was afraid to take him to a hospital. She made do with a trip to a local pharmacist, who mishandled the wound. Thomas needed surgery on his foot when we got back to the States.
Most Western journalists who had covered Tahrir Square were long gone by then. Some rotated out. Others decamped for Istanbul or Beirut—cosmopolitan cities closer to the action in Syria and Iraq. We met again when I was on assignments in Baghdad or Tunis, and the conversations over drinks always turned back to the tragedy in Egypt. But Laura and I stayed.
President Obama had decided not to call Sisi’s takeover a coup to avoid a cutoff of the $1.3 billion in annual military aid. Now he may have been the last one in his administration to accept the idea of resuming it. His face-to-face meeting with Sisi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014 was a turning point. Advisers had warned Obama that Sisi could be long-winded and grandiose, even talking over former president Bill Clinton during a meeting at his foundation. So Obama tried to put Sisi on the defensive with specific demands about rights and freedoms. That is one reason he asked for the release of Mohamed Soltan, the American citizen then on a hunger strike in prison.
Officials who sat in on the meeting remember Obama as forceful and tough. But Sisi smiled, nodded, and stonewalled. He wanted to remove any irritant to their relationship, he said, but Soltan’s fate was up to the judges. Sisi kept pushing for more military aid, to fight the war on “terrorism” inside of Egypt.
“Well, that guy is never going to change,” Obama murmured to his advisers as they were leaving the room.
Intelligence agencies reported back that Sisi barely noticed the criticism. He was delighted with the attention.
Obama met with his National Security Council in the spring of 2015 about the suspended military aid. Almost all the principals now were pushing for a restart, but Obama was still against it. “I have read all the papers and I am still not convinced,” Obama told one adviser before the meeting.
The White House, too, had been lowering its standards. First it had demanded a full restoration of democracy, then the loosening of restrictions on nonprofit groups, or greater access to the North Sinai. Now Obama was asking only for the release of some political prisoners, even one American citizen. Sisi still gave nothing. (Sisi had named as his national security adviser the same Mubarak loyalist who had led the raids on the American-backed International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, the one who had trapped Sam LaHood in the U.S. embassy—Fayza Aboulnaga.)
Ambassador Robert S. Beecroft, the new envoy to Cairo, weighed in by teleconference. He emphasized the reactionary forces within Sisi’s own government—the judiciary, the religious establishment, the police, the intelligence agencies, his fellow generals, and so on. Sisi did not control the deep state, in other words. He was its instrument. Another general could replace him.
Obama was persuaded that continued pressure would gain nothing, and he called Sisi that March to announce the restoration of aid. The Egyptian military suffered almost no penalty.
Between the beheading of the Croatian and the nail in Thomas’s foot, Laura and I decided in the fall of 2015 that it was time to leave Egypt. Laura and the boys moved to London, my next posting. I filed from Cairo and Libya until a new bureau chief, Declan Walsh, took over in 2016. But unanswered questions kept pulling me back. What had come over Egypt in the summer of the coup? What happened to the young people who had filled Tahrir Square in 2011, the liberal intelligentsia that I had so admired? Some were once again bravely standing up for human rights under Sisi. But how could so many have celebrated the coup and the crackdown?
Even if liberal intellectuals did not win elections, their voices resonated in Egypt and beyond. If more had spoken out against the massacres, the military could not have claimed so successfully that its takeover was a liberal revolution or a national consensus. Washington, especially, listened to the liberals.
Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt’s most famous liberal, quit during the storming of the Rabaa sit-in. “Violence only begets violence,” he wrote in a public letter of resignation. “The beneficiaries of what happened today are the preachers of violence and terrorism, the most extremist groups.” He fled the country that day.
If ElBaradei ever took responsibility for his own role in the coup, I never heard it. Prosecutors opened a case against him for betraying the country. The news media denounced him as a traitor.
Amr Hamzawy had been virtually the lone liberal to publicly oppose the takeover as it happened. After Rabaa, prosecutors charged him with insulting the judiciary on the basis of a tweet he had written under Morsi. (It was about a court decision against the American employees of NDI and IRI.) First the authorities barred him from leaving Egypt (forcing him to cancel a lecture at Yale). Then he was threatened with jail and forced into exile.
Other “liberals” soon felt the same boot. Sisi promptly banned unauthorized street demonstrations—the tactic that had brought him to power. A crackdown on organizing threatened to extinguish every independent human rights group.
Human Rights Watch was expelled from the country. Heba Morayef, who had dined with me at the embassy iftar when I first arrived in Egypt, relocated to Tunis. Police imprisoned several of the most prominent activists linked to the Tahrir Square sit-in. The left-leaning April 6 Youth Movement was declared a terrorist organization and membership became a crime. Sisi also eventually jailed Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh—the liberal Islamist who had taken on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Private conversations no longer felt safe. A website and television show called The Black Box specialized in broadcasting telephone surveillance of liberal activists, Islamist lawyers, and others. It was almost never damning but always creepy. (Its host was elected to Parliament under Sisi.) Egyptian friends started insisting that we put our smartphones in a refrigerator whenever we talked, because even in the “off” mode they can be used as listening devices. By 2017, the Egyptian government blocked encrypted communications apps like Signal or WhatsApp. It blocked dozens of liberal or left-leaning publications and websites. An Egyptian essayist, Sara Khorshid, was briefly detained for the crime of sitting in a café with a foreigner; another patron had taken her for a spy and called the police. A member of the April 6 group was turned in by his mother.
A highly regarded liberal journalist, Ahmed Nagy, was jailed for ten months for obscenity in a literary novel. Sisi’s government cracked down on homosexuality and arrested dozens after rainbow flags were displayed at a rock concert; secret police flirted with gay men through online dating services to try to entrap them. Parliament debated criminalizing atheism. At the beginning of 2018, the scholar and former American diplomat Michele Dunne asked on Twitter, “For the umpteenth time, what would the international community have said had this happened during Morsi’s presidency?” It was a running joke in Egypt: Thank God we got rid of the Islamists.
Shaimaa el-Sabbagh was a leftist who had supported the protests against Morsi and celebrated Sisi’s takeover. She had grown up in Alexandria as the daughter of a conservative Muslim preacher and chafed against his traditionalism. “For the likes of you, wearing pants is ‘covering,’” he told her in resignation. Keeping her pants on was all the modesty he could hope for. She wore her wavy dark hair uncovered and cut above her shoulders.
By the time of the takeover, she was about thirty, married to an artist, the mother of a four-year-old son, and an accomplished poet. Most serious Egyptian poets write in formal Arabic; Sabbagh was one of the few published poets who wrote in the avant-garde style of free verse but using the colloquial Arabic of everyday life. Her poem called “A Letter in My Purse” begins:
I am not sure
Truly, she was nothing more than just a purse
But when lost, there was a problem
How to face the world without her
Especially
Because the streets remember us together
The shops know her more than me
Because she is the one who pays
She knows the smell of my sweat and she loves it. . . .
Anyway, she has the house keys
And I am waiting for her.
Sabbagh was active in a small socialist party that had backed Sisi’s takeover, imagining a more progressive Egypt. The party then endorsed Sisi on the principle that he was better than an Islamist. But on the fourth anniversary of the original uprising, January 25, 2015, Sabbagh and her friends wanted to commemorate the “martyrs” who died protesting Mubarak.
Because police would be out in force that day to ensure against any repeat, Sabbagh and about two dozen others gathered on the afternoon of January 24. They met a few blocks from Tahrir Square, armed only with flowers that they planned to lay there. They saw no reason to fear the squad of masked riot police a few feet away.
The tear gas hit them almost before they took a step. Gunshots cracked through the smoke. Sabbagh’s head tilted back. Blood streaked her cheeks. As she started to collapse, a kneeling friend grabbed her by the waist to hold her upright, his head pressed against her abdomen. He cradled her and slowly lowered her to the ground.
Dozens of people drinking coffee in nearby sidewalk cafés watched her die in the street. Photojournalists captured her killing second by second, frame by frame. The pictures spread across Facebook within hours.
Yet her friends who went to the police were detained as suspects and held overnight. An Interior Ministry spokesman declared the next day that the police could not possibly have killed her; they would never shoot at such a small crowd. The photographs and videos were “no proof at all,” General Gamal Mokhtar insisted.
“There is a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood whose entire job and concern is to fabricate photos and videos that tell people that the police are assaulting protesters—that this one is bleeding, that one is injured,” he said.
A few days later, the police arrested the deputy chairman of her political party—he had been a personal friend of Sabbagh’s—on suspicion that he had fired a concealed weapon through his jacket pocket to murder her. Progovernment newscasts were saying it was a setup to blame the police. Then a judge ordered a media blackout on news, and we heard little more about it.
I was so inured to the deaths that I barely reacted. I was at a swimming pool with my sons when I first heard of Sabbagh’s killing. I did not think it was worth interrupting a day with my family to write about the death of one more protester. Police killed at least a few almost every week—mostly Islamists, but also leftists or liberals. They killed a seventeen-year-old girl at an Islamist rally in Alexandria the same day Sabbagh died. They killed twenty more the next day, January 25, on the anniversary of the uprising. They killed a student five days later in clashes after a demonstration in the province of Sharqiya, a short drive north of Cairo. It went on and on.
But those pictures. The expression on Sabbagh’s face during her last seconds was unforgettable. So startled, so naïve.
For three years, whenever I asked an Egyptian liberal or leftist about the repression under Sisi, their answers always began the same way: with a long prologue about the culpability of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brothers should have shared more power. They should have taken on the generals. They should have governed better. They should have exited the stage before they were pushed. Sisi was the Brotherhood’s fault. Every Western diplomat and journalist in Cairo from 2013 through 2016 heard the same argument over and over. But time attenuated that explanation. No Muslim Brother held the gun that killed Shaimaa el-Sabbagh.
After four years, the answers started to change. Sisi surprised Egypt in 2016 by announcing the transfer of two empty Red Sea islands to his patron, the king of Saudi Arabia. Sisi’s fellow blood-and-soil nationalists demonstrated against the surrender of Egyptian territory, and the police started arresting and shooting them as if they had been Islamists. He had turned on his nationalist allies. I thought of the pigs in Animal Farm crushing a strike by the hens.
New evidence emerged of disorder in the regime. While an Italian trade delegation was visiting Cairo in early 2016, the body of an Italian graduate student who had been studying in Egypt, Giulio Regeni, was disovered half naked and covered in blood by the side of the Alexandria highway. One of his front teeth was missing and others were chipped or broken. His skin was pocked with cigarette burns. His back was lacerated with deep cuts. His right earlobe had been sliced off, and the bones of his wrists, shoulders, and feet were shattered. An Italian autopsy later confirmed that he had been beaten, burned, stabbed, and probably flogged on the soles of his feet over a period of four days. A broken neck finally killed him.
The police tried to put over a series of explanations. First they made up false allegations of homosexuality. Then they invented a gang that impersonated police in order to steal foreign passports. Their implausible scenarios all crumbled away. Debating which branch of the military or security services killed him and why became a gruesome parlor game among Egyptian intellectuals.
American officials in Washington and Cairo later told me that they had concluded that the intelligence service that killed Regeni did not do it on Sisi’s order. Nor did it kill Regeni to undermine Sisi. It had tortured and killed Regeni on its own authority, without asking permission. And the killers had deliberately left his body to be discovered while the Italian delegation was in Cairo, to send some kind of message.
A Western passport was no longer protection. Units of the security services believed they could kill whomever they liked. More than a year later, in 2018, the Egyptian government had not identified the unit responsible, and two American officials told me that they thought they knew a reason. Sisi’s son Mahmoud was one of three officers in the general intelligence service who might have directed the operation.
Dalia Abdel Hamid was a thirty-five-year-old researcher for a human rights group. She wore little wire glasses and had long, wavy hair, and she worked on issues that would be considered forward thinking even in New York and London, like the rights of Egyptian transsexuals.
Like most Egyptians I knew, Abdel Hamid had relatives on both sides of the culture wars. Her parents were left-leaning teachers in the state schools, and her brother was a prominent organizer of the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. But her uncle was a midlevel Brotherhood leader. After the street fighting outside the presidential palace in December 2012, Abdel Hamid refused to talk to him.
“I was so angry. I felt like they were dragging us to some kind of civil war,” she told me.
In early 2017, Abdel Hamid decided to compose a reflection for an online journal about the psychological state of her milieu—the Cairo intelligentsia, the liberals, leftists, and artists who were her community. I invited her to dinner at a Japanese restaurant popular with Egyptian liberals and Western journalists, expecting to hear the customary Brotherhood blaming.
For her, she said, the massacre at Rabaa had erased that. “It all seemed so meaningless.” Her uncle in the Brotherhood fled underground but snuck furtive visits to his sister—Abdel Hamid’s mother. Her uncle had planned to attend a secret meeting in June 2015 of fugitive Brotherhood leaders and defense lawyers at an apartment in the October 6 suburb. The police broke into the apartment and executed everyone present—at least nine people in all. Abdel Hamid’s uncle survived because he had been caught and arrested before he got there.
“So I guess I am glad he is a prisoner,” she told me. He sometimes called her from inside, and she was glad to hear from him.
She divorced her husband in the summer of 2013, and two of her close friends got divorced that year as well. She thought it was related to the depression hanging over her circle. Facebook, once the signature tool of the Tahrir Square organizers, had become a receptacle of their agony.
“My Facebook timeline starts each morning with people narrating the nightmares that they had the previous night,” she said. “‘I was running from the army,’ ‘I was in the middle of a mob sexual attack in my nightmare,’ ‘I dreamed of my imprisoned husband.’
“As the day progresses, people complain of panic attacks, anxiety attacks. ‘I am so depressed I cannot get out of the bed today.’ ‘I am so depressed I cannot move a muscle today.’ By night, they are talking about insomnia, and it starts all over again.
“All our Facebook postings now are about ‘Please free this person,’ ‘Get this prisoner to a hospital, he needs to be treated,’ ‘Allow this person out to see his dying parent and bury his dead,’ or ‘This person is eighty years old, let him out to die in dignity.’ These are now the demands of everyday Egypt.”
What were her friends doing about it? “We have all turned to personal projects. The obsessions we have developed. Cooking, children, the gym, yoga, learning a musical instrument, learning a new language, alcohol, eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia—you name it, we have it all. You want to feel that you are in control of something, if only your own body. But we are failing at this as well.
“The trauma we went through, the dead people we saw, the morgue scenes, the sexual attacks, the massacres . . .” Abdel Hamid trailed off. “On the anniversary of each incident in the revolution, Facebook turns into a war zone. ‘You did this,’ ‘You did that,’ ‘You did not join this march,’ or ‘You did not sign that petition.’ People accuse each other of stuff that happened six years ago. It is absolute madness, a manifestation of helplessness and utter defeat. We are all turning against each other, like when cocks are fighting. We are becoming so vicious to each other.”
She paused. “Everybody wants to find the point where it all went wrong,” she said, “and nobody wants to discuss Rabaa.”
I had seldom heard a Cairo liberal acknowledge that reticence. Abdel Hamid immediately changed the subject. She turned back to the feelings of her fellow activists. “We were so full of ourselves,” she said. “I think that some of us, maybe not consciously, hated that a different revolutionary faction than us”—the Muslim Brothers—“made it to power.”
She rushed through the obligatory disclaimers. “Of course, the record of the Muslim Brothers in power was so miserable. Of course, I am not defending them by any means. But we need to stop our obsession with what they did wrong. We need to look at what we did wrong.
“We forgot that these people also participated in this revolution, and they paid a price. In the early days of the revolution, in Tahrir Square, it was the Muslim Brothers who slept under the wheels of the tanks to prevent them from moving. They were there, and they were courageous. . . . I think we hated the Muslim Brothers so much that some of us thought regaining the old regime would be better than having them in power.”
Ethics, she said, was what activists and intellectuals stood for. “That summer, in 2013, we did not abide by our ethics,” she said slowly. “Consciously or not, we were so blinded by hatred . . .” She trailed off again, and tears welled up in her eyes. “See how I struggle talking about it?”
“We did not want to believe it was a coup. We thought that we would have another chance. We overestimated our power. We hated the Brothers so much. We were brainwashed by the media . . .” Another long pause.
“The defeat is so heavy, you don’t want to be accountable. It is difficult to imagine that you have something to do with this,” she acknowledged at last.
“We were non-Jews in Nazi Germany,” she continued. “We failed the test. We failed to bear witness. Ethics is our capital. When that is lost, you have nothing. You forget who you are. You can drown yourself in alcohol or Xanax or whatever you want. But this thing will keep haunting you. And sooner or later, we all arrive there.”
I left Cairo early the next morning with no plans to return.