The main sources of information for this book were my personal experiences and interviews. Many of those I interviewed speak for themselves in the text, so I have not noted them here. Others—mainly current and former officials in Washington or political dissenters in Egypt—spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals of one kind or another. When I have relied on undisclosed sources, I have confirmed their accounts with one or more others wherever possible.
I wrote this book in part to answer questions that troubled me at the end of my time as the bureau chief in Cairo, and to do that I pursued additional reporting in both Egypt and Washington. But I have also made extensive use of my reporting in the New York Times: published articles, crates of notebooks, megabytes of digital files, and hours of audio recordings produced during my work for the paper. Where I have relied on specific reporting by other journalists, I have tried to acknowledge that in the text.
These notes are for readers with a special interest in Egypt, the Arab world, or American foreign policy. I have listed selected books or articles that I relied on for historical background or context, and I have provided names or details that I removed from the text to avoid overburdening a general reader. In a few places, I have also addressed debates of concern primarily to those who have lived through or studied these events. In transliterating Arab names, I followed no consistent rule. I tried to use the preferred spelling of the subject, the most common English spelling, or the spelling in the New York Times, for easy reference to its archives.
1: Whoever Drinks the Water
I first encountered the truism that rivers shaped the cultures of Egypt and Iraq in Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2005). A great book about the city is Cairo: The City Victorious by Max Rodenbeck (London: Picador, 1998).
I relied on two firsthand accounts of the Aswan Dam and the Suez Crisis from an Egyptian perspective: The Cairo Documents (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971) and Cutting the Lion’s Tale (New York: Arbor House, 1987), both by Mohamed Heikal. I used Eisenhower 1956 by David A. Nichols (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) as a reference for the American role. I also benefited from Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt, 1955–1981 by William J. Burns (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), who appears in these pages as a diplomat.
In 2017, the import of new Western-made drugs had recently begun to lower the prevalence of hepatitis C.
2: City of Contradictions
The blogger at the American embassy iftar was Wael Abbas; the political scientist was Maye Kassem. The newspaper columnist sentenced to jail, Ibrahim Eissa, was saved from incarceration by a presidential pardon.
Some of the background about Ahmed Ezz comes from my conversations with him after his release from prison.
Two excellent and very different histories of modern Egypt that I have consulted are The Struggle for Egypt by Steven A. Cook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil (London: Verso, 2012).
For background on the Obama administration’s approach to the Arab world before the Arab Spring, a useful starting point is The Obamians by James Mann (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012).
Three different people with very different agendas and ideologies but all with firsthand knowledge told me independently about Sisi’s warnings to the generals in 2010: Mohamed Heikal, Abdel Nasser’s propagandist and the dean of Egyptian political commentators; Hassan Nafaa, a liberal professor of political science at Cairo University; and Yasser Rizk, an Egyptian journalist close to Sisi. Nafaa is especially credible about this because he is sharply critical of Sisi. Heikal and Nafaa heard the account of Sisi’s assessment from groups of generals, including Sisi himself, in 2011, as I recount later in the book.
Heikal, who became an adviser to Sisi, told me that Sisi had asked the generals: “‘Are we ready? How do we respond to this question?’ . . . He was the one who proposed to the army that they should not back Mubarak.”
I heard the memorable phrase “irreversible decline” from Parag Khanna, a scholar of international relations.
The Egypt Human Development Report 2010, sponsored in part by the United Nations Development Programme, provided statistics on poverty in Egypt. Some official Egyptian statistics were assembled by the journalist Mohamed Aboul Gheit in the newspaper El-Masry El-Youm.
The Naguib Mahfouz novel here is Palace of Desire, the second volume of his Cairo trilogy, first published in Arabic in 1957. I read the English translation published in 1991 by the American University in Cairo.
I drew on Counting Islam by Tarek Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) for its excellent reflection on Egypt in 2010, including Ezz’s assessments. I am following the general usage of “the Washington consensus” to mean a set of prescriptions for free markets and privatizations—what critics call neoliberalism.
Sisi disclosed details about the size of the public payroll in speeches, and some of the comparisons here first appeared in “Egypt’s Failed Revolution” by Peter Hessler, in the January 2, 2017, issue of the New Yorker.
For the history of the United States and Egypt, important sources were The Cairo Documents, Cutting the Lion’s Tale, and Secret Channels (London: HarperCollins, 1996), also by Heikal; Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution by Gamal Abdel Nasser (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1956); In Search of Identity by Anwar Sadat (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Thirteen Days in September by Lawrence Wright (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Eisenhower 1956 by Nichols; The Struggle for Egypt by Cook; and most of all, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen by Kandil. I drew heavily on Kandil.
There are conflicting accounts about the details of the Free Officers’ communications with the Americans before the launch of the 1952 coup, but there is no doubt that the outreach took place, and the Free Officers correctly believed that they could enlist the United States on their side. Kandil’s Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen documented Sadat’s courtship of Henry Kissinger. Sadat said that the United States “holds 99 percent of the cards” during a March 1977 interview on CBS television and he often repeated the phrase, as the Washington Post noted in its obituary on October 7, 1981. The “God help us” comment was recounted to me by Mietek Boduszyński, a diplomat who heard it.
Hisham Talaat Moustapha was removed from prison to a hospital for health reasons after three years. He received a full pardon from President Sisi in 2017.
3: Police Day
The best account of the suicide of the fruit peddler, “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia,” was published in the January 22, 2011, issue of the New York Times by Kareem Fahim.
The organizer who told me “we always start from the elite” was Islam Lotfy. In addition to Fahim’s real-time reports, this account of January 25 is based on interviews with many of the organizers and others who marched that day. Sondos Asem was one of the Brotherhood women who believed they were first to reach the square, along with her mother, a former Brotherhood lawmaker. I was back in Cairo by the morning of January 26.
Waleed Rashed, who had predicted a revolution on the morning of January 28, gave up politics to found and sell an internet-based messenger business. The last time we talked, over coffee in 2016, he was a mentor at an “incubator” for start-ups and was founding a second company.
The number of police stations and cars burned on January 28, 2011, and the inside account of the state media, comes from Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak by Abdel Latif el-Menawy (London: Gilgamesh Publishing, 2012). Menawy was president of the news division of the state media at the time.
Michael Morrell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, reflected on the period in his memoir, The Great War of Our Time (New York: Twelve, 2015). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) set the conventionally accepted narrative of the White House debates over the uprising. His opponents in that debate say he misstated their argument. They argued in part that Mubarak’s rule was untenable regardless of the American position. The account here reflects interviews with more than a dozen people involved in all sides of that debate.
The journalist who decorated her apartment with revolutionary graffiti was Wendell Steavenson of the New Yorker. I relied on Revolution 2.0 by Wael Ghonim (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and a March 21, 2018, reflection he wrote on the website Medium. I also interviewed him in 2011 as well. “Orientalising the Egyptian Uprising” by Rabab el-Mahdi, published April 11, 2011, in the online journal Jadaliyya, dissects Western views of the Egyptian uprising.
Edward Walker was quoted in The Ghost Plane by Stephen Grey (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2006). I have also relied on Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power by my colleague Mark Landler (New York: Random House, 2016) and Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). Morrell describes his own back channels with Suleiman in The Great War of Our Time.
4: “We Don’t Do That Anymore”
The dinners with intellectuals and journalists were organized by General Mohamed el-Assar. Among the subjects discussed was General Sisi’s advice to the military council in 2010 about the likelihood of an uprising against a Gamal Mubarak succession in 2011; as noted previously, Hassan Nafaa, a liberal critical of the military, and Yasser Rizk, a promilitary nationalist close to Sisi, each independently described to me the dinners and the message about Sisi.
Tantawi’s nickname, “Mubarak’s Poodle,” was reported by American diplomats in a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks.
I learned about the improvisation of the constitutional drafting committee and its reliance on the Princeton website from a committee member who spoke on condition of anonymity. Nathan J. Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University who studies the Egyptian judiciary, has reported the reliance on the website as well. Other members of the panel, notably Tarek el-Bishry, have written about its goals. The general in charge of legal affairs who announced the rule change was General Mamdouh Shahin.
Some Egyptian liberals or leftists consider the moment of the referendum to have been the beginning of the end for the uprising because it turned Islamists and non-Islamists against one another, dividing those seeking a civilian government. Islamists campaigned for the military-backed interim charter in the hope of an early transition from military rule; some non-Islamists opposed the referendum and sought delayed elections because they believed the Islamists had a head start in organizing. The fiercest liberal critics of the Muslim Brotherhood argue that supporting the referendum amounted to collaboration with the military, swapping the Brotherhood’s support for political advantage. But it was clear to me even then that the Islamists feared the generals. The Brotherhood sought early elections to get the military out of power as soon as possible, not to collaborate with it. And the Muslim Brothers were all too confident of their long-term popularity. They did not see any electoral advantage in early elections, because they did not fear that delaying elections might allow others to catch up. Most diplomats and analysts I spoke with concur.
Some Muslim Brothers, on the other hand, argue that at least some of the liberals were not merely afraid of early elections; they dreaded any elections because they knew they would lose. But it is easy enough to understand why non-Islamists preferred a delay without resorting to such theories, and many of the people who campaigned against the referendum went on to demonstrate for a swift end to military rule. Although the referendum was the first split in the unity of the uprising; I do not credit the conspiracy theories from either side.
About the “Thursdays of concessions,” Menawy wrote in Tahrir: The Last 18 Days of Mubarak that “the tactic of announcing concessions to the public like this, the day before a protest, was widely adopted throughout the following months in Egypt, in order to mitigate the size and aggression of the coming demonstrations.”
The young woman I quote brushing back the bribe-seeking officer was Lara el-Gibaly.
The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution by Jack Shenker (New York: New Press, 2016) focuses on labor and working-class activism during the years of the uprising.
The blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy once worked as a reporting assistant for the New York Times in Cairo, long before I got there.
In the high-level American courtship of Egyptian military leaders, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Adviser Donilon each met in Washington with the military general who had been appointed to succeed Suleiman as spy chief, Murad Muwafi.
About the attack on the Israeli embassy, I interviewed many American officials, including Steve Simon, Leon Panetta, and Daniel Shapiro, then U.S. ambassador to Israel. The Egyptian journalist Heba Afify reported with me for the New York Times from outside the embassy.
The number of jihadists released by the generals appeared in “Who Let the Jihadis Out?” by Hossam Bahgat, published in the online publication Mada Masr on February 16, 2014. Supporters of the military takeover in 2013 falsely blamed Morsi for the release.
5: The First Lady and the Blue Bra
This chapter has benefited greatly from the insights and guidance of Nour Youssef and Mayy el-Sheikh. In Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), Edward W. Said wrote at length about the Western preoccupation with Arab sexuality and a Western impulse to explain Arab politics in sexual terms (anticipating the “blue balls theory” of jihad). Said famously accused the scholar Bernard Lewis of belittling the idea of an Arab “revolution” by comparing it, in sexual language, to the “rising up” of a camel.
Among other sources, I have relied here on two important biographies. One is Doria Shafik: Egyptian Feminist by Cynthia Nelson (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 1996). The other is Casting Off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi (London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2015).
The United Nations survey that assessed the prevalence of female genital mutilation was taken in 2015. It is safe to say that the rate was at least as high in 2011. More background is in Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013).
The “summer bride” deposit law was implemented by Justice Minister Ahmed el-Zind under President Sisi. It updated a seldom-enforced law that had previously required only a small token sum.
I learned about Tawfik Hamid from his book Inside Jihad: How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, and How to Defeat It (Mountain Lake Park, MD: Mountain Lake Press, 2015). The cover features a blurb from Senator John McCain.
Merna Thomas later worked for a time as a journalist for the New York Times.
The columnist Lamees Gaber was writing in the Wafd newspaper, and Khaled Abdullah spoke on television.
6: The Theban Legion
I am grateful to Mina Thabet, a former spokesman for the Maspero Youth Union, and Wael Eskandar, a liberal activist and writer, for their help and comments on this chapter. The account of the Maspero massacre here is the product of my own reporting from the scene that night, interviews with more than a dozen witnesses to the killings or participants in the march, and a review of the voluminous video footage.
Samuel Tadros, a scholar in Washington who writes about Egypt, helped put me in touch with Awad Basseet, a former editor of the Theban Legion. Basseet provided valuable perspective, helped me track down the two priests, and volunteered the conclusion that life for Egyptian Christians was better under Morsi than it was under Sisi.
Another useful account of the night of the Maspero massacre, including the allegations against Father Filopateer, is in Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
The generals who held the press conference were Adel Emara and Mahmoud Hegazy. Hegazy, related to General Sisi through a marriage of their children, later succeeded him as chief of military intelligence and then became military chief of staff.
7: “How the Downfall of a State Can Happen”
Many Egyptian liberals argue that the Muslim Brotherhood effectively collaborated with the generals by discouraging direct confrontations against military rule while the uprising still had momentum. But it is unclear if a direct confrontation in 2011 would have produced a different outcome. The Brothers’ nonconfrontational approach was an outgrowth of the group’s traditional gradualism. It may also have reflected a credible—even correct—assessment of the military’s power. In any case, the end of the story here turned out to be about conflict between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, not conspiracy or collaboration between them. In the West, I have more often heard the contention that the Muslim Brothers moved too quickly to challenge the generals, and that is certainly wrong.
General Mohamed el-Assar led a delegation to Washington in the summer of 2011, and on July 25, he told an audience at the United States Institute of Peace that “the Muslim Brothers and Salafis are components of the Egyptian people” and thus “cannot be ignored.” He added: “They have the willingness to share in the political life . . . they are sharing in good ways.”
As for the Muslim Brotherhood’s thinking during this period, Khairat el-Shater, the Brotherhood’s chief financier and strategist, had talked publicly for months about the fear of “the Algeria scenario”—an Islamist landslide in parliamentary elections in Algeria in 1991 had triggered a Western-backed coup and a decade-long civil war that killed more than two hundred thousand Algerians. The fighting gave birth to the group that later became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
I visited Shater’s office around the time of those street clashes, and one of his advisers told me that during the fighting the generals had been on the phone every day with Shater, all but baiting the Brotherhood into the streets: Are you going down yet? Are you going down now?
Arguing Islam After the Revival of Arab Politics by Nathan J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) provides an excellent analysis of the public debate in Egypt during this period. Freedom and social media made it easier than ever to argue and demonize, but the absence of a political process made resolution impossible. Division and polarization were the result. “It should be no surprise that rhetoric spins out of control if it finds no traction in policy outcomes.”
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued its Communiqué #69 on July 22, 2011. Fayza Aboulnaga, a holdover Cabinet member, had been leading an investigation of the Western funding of Egyptian nonprofits since early spring.
The military council’s “principles” for the constitution appeared under the name of one of the civilian deputy prime ministers working under them in the government, Ali el-Selmi; the principles were known as the Selmi document.
The Brotherhood leader who was jeered out of the square was Mohamed Beltagy, the one who wryly brought a bouquet of flowers to the Police Day protest on January 25, 2011. In the first days of the clashes, he apologized for the fact that the rest of the Brotherhood leadership was staying away. “You have a right to be angry,” he wrote on Twitter. “We have to reconsider our positions.”
I caught up with him as he sat in a folding chair in the dusty anteroom of the Brotherhood’s old headquarters two days after he was chased out of the square. “I thought that we should go to the square in great numbers to protect the protesters, secure the entrances, ensure the peacefulness—that we should not keep a distance,” he told me, but Shater and the other leaders saw the fighting “as an attempt to draw the Brotherhood into a made-up crisis.”
Ben Rhodes recalled writing the Thanksgiving statement and Tom Donilon’s anger. Steven Simon, the senior director for North Africa and the Middle East, described his call with Donilon; Donilon did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Several others in the Obama administration said it was not uncommon for the tone or content of White House statements to reflect differences depending on who was on duty at the time.
8: Forefathers
I am grateful to the scholar Emad Shahin for his consultation and comments on the chapters about political Islam.
This chapter is based primarily on my reporting among Egyptian Salafis in Cairo, Alexandria, Giza, and Port Said. For background, I have consulted Islam and Modernism in Egypt by Charles C. Adams (London: Russell & Russell, 1933) and Muhammad Abduh by Mark Sedgwick (London: Oneworld Publications, 2010), which are among the few good English-language biographies of Abduh.
For the context of contemporary Salafism, I relied on Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement edited by Roel Meijer (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2009) and, in that volume, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action” by Bernard Haykel.
Islam and Politics by Peter Mandaville (London: Routledge, 2014) is a terrific overview of Islamist political movements, and its author appears in these pages as an adviser to the State Department. Another useful book by someone who was in the White House during this period is The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (New York: Random House, 2012).
The title “khedive” was used by the heirs of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the founder of the modern Egyptian state, who in 1805 had established himself as the independent ruler of the Ottoman province of Egypt.
The claim that the Prophet Mohamed invented constitutional democracy is a reference to the Charter of Medina. Promulgated there by the Prophet Mohamed when he arrived from Mecca in 622, the charter guaranteed equal religious freedom and political rights to Jews and pagans as well as Muslims living in the city. Some scholars reckon it a social contract establishing a pluralist ministate, even if the Prophet Mohamed later deprecated other faiths or preached religious war.
9: Parliament Grows a Beard
In addition to Emad Shahin, Shadi Hamid read and commented on an earlier version of the short history of the Muslim Brotherhood presented here.
The most important source of history and background for this chapter is the landmark The Society of the Muslim Brothers by Richard P. Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). I have relied significantly on two more contemporary articles about the recent history: “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers” by Mona El-Ghobashy, in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (vol. 37, no. 3, August 2005) and “The Brotherhood Goes to Parliament” by Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher, in Middle East Report (no. 240, fall 2006). I also drew on “U.S. Policy and the Muslim Brotherhood” by Steven Brooke, in The West and the Muslim Brotherhood After the Arab Spring (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2013), which quoted Condoleezza Rice at the American University in Cairo. Mandaville’s book Islam and Politics is indispensable.
In discussions of the Muslim Brotherhood in this chapter and throughout, I also drew on Hasan el-Banna by Gudrun Krämer (London: Oneworld Publications, 2010); Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islam by John Calvert (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2011); A Mosque in Munich by Ian Johnson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010); A Portrait of Egypt by Mary Anne Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam Is Reshaping the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), both by Shadi Hamid; Counting Islam: Religion, Class and Elections in Egypt by Tarek Masoud (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Inside the Brotherhood by Hazim Kandil (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014); and Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days by Eric Trager (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016), among others.
Two non-Islamists whose incarceration President George W. Bush made a fuss about were Ayman Nour, a liberal politician, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an intellectual.
In 2007, Representative Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, bumped into Saad el-Katatni at the home of the United States ambassador.
General James Mattis described the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda as “swimming in the same sea” on May 14, 2015, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. He has said similar things many times. Dennis Ross’s op-ed was published in the New York Times on September 11, 2014.
The intercepted phone call between Abdel Nasser and the king of Jordan was recounted vividly in Lawrence Wright’s Thirteen Days in September.
Aboul Fotouh’s meeting in the shoe store was with Kamal al-Sananiri, a brother-in-law of the thinker Sayyid Qutb. It was described in Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh: A Witness to the History of Egypt’s Islamic Movement, 1970–1984 (Cairo: Dar el-Shorouk, 2010), his memoirs as told to Hossam Tammam. It is available only in Arabic, and I relied on Deena Adel and Mayy el-Sheikh for translation.
The best source in English for personal background of Banna is Krämer, cited above. The quotes from Banna used here come from Mitchell’s definitive early work. The main intellectual successor to Muhammad Abduh was Rashid Rida, who was a pivotal intermediary in the evolution of Islamic modernism from Abduh to Banna.
The quote about the head scarf appears in “The Metamorphosis of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers” by Ghobashy, attributed to the guidance council members Essam el-Erian and Aboul Fotouh. Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam by Anthony Shadid (London: Westview Press, 2002) is about post-Islamist politics and tells the story of the Center Party in Egypt. That was the Brotherhood breakaway party that included Essam Sultan.
10: Thug Versus Thug
The general in charge of legal affairs was Mamdouh Shahin. Youssef Sidhom was the editor of the Coptic newspaper Watani and an unofficial spokesman for the church. Outside relatively liberal areas, Aboul Fotouh performed well at the polls in only two districts: Mersa Matruh, where his old friend helped, and the North Sinai, where he told me he was the only candidate who visited. I doubt the Salafis brought him many votes.
11: The Judges Club
The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf by Nathan J. Brown (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997) is an excellent and sympathetic account of the Egyptian judiciary. This chapter has also benefited from “Independence Without Accountability: The Judicial Paradox of Egypt’s Failed Transition to Democracy” by Sahar F. Aziz, in the Penn State Law Review 101 (2016).
The account of the American side of these events is based on interviews with more than a dozen officials involved, but most spoke on condition of anonymity.
The paradigmatic example of the kind of hawkish Egyptian nationalist outraged by American democracy funding is Fayza Aboulnaga. She was the official driving the prosecution against the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. When I called her office in early 2012, the military council had assigned a general to answer her phone. President Sisi named her as national security adviser and in 2017 she was still involved in the American aid.
Steven Simon and Sergio Aguirre were the National Security Council staffers who tried unsuccessfully to work through Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton to shape a compromise with the generals about the American aid. The Foreign Ministry spokesman who complained to me that the United States had deducted the bail money from the aid payments was Ambassador Badr Abdelatty.
I heard the same account of Shater’s message to the generals from several senior figures in the Morsi campaign, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The words I am quoting here are from Wael Haddara, a Morsi adviser.
I encountered the term “judicial coup,” describing the dissolution of the Parliament, in an analysis by Nathan Brown in Foreign Policy magazine on June 14, 2012.
12: The Night of Power
Haddara’s first contact on the Morsi campaign was Khaled al-Qazzaz, a permanent resident of Canada who was married to a Canadian. His background is in education, but he worked on Morsi’s foreign policy team.
The general who spoke about the military’s role as “trustworthy guardian” was Mahmoud Hegazy, who appeared with General Mohamed el-Assar.
To clarify the chronology, Morsi’s inaugural rally in Tahrir Square was the night before his official inauguration. I described it last because it was the speech that was remembered.
The assassination attempt on Abdel Nasser in 1954 was carried out by Mahmoud Abdel Latif, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood from Imbaba, in Cairo. Some believed (and some still suspect) that Abdel Nasser staged the episode as a pretext to crush the Muslim Brothers. The scene is described in many places, including Richard P. Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) and The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
This account of Morsi’s meeting with Sisi in August 2012 is based on interviews with two people who worked in the palace at the time and on the account of a senior Muslim Brother with knowledge of the details.
The Long Game by Derek Chollet (New York: Public Affairs, 2016) recounts the Obama administration’s worries that Sisi was “too close to Morsi.”
13: A Day in Court
Another Islamist who sued Tahani el-Gebali on the basis of our article was Essam Sultan, who had also helped start the post-Islamist Center Party and disrupted the first day of Parliament.
14: President and Mrs. Morsi
The Guardian obtained a part of the commission report that Morsi tried to suppress. “Egypt’s Army Took Part in Torture and Killings During Revolution, Report Shows” by Evan Hill and Muhammad Mansour, Guardian, April 10, 2013. Ahmed Samir was the columnist in El-Masry El-Youm.
Morsi’s prime minister was Hesham Qandil. His female deputy was Pakinam el-Sharkawy, who was his chief policy adviser. His Christian deputy was Samir Morcos, who was also Morsi’s adviser on the democratic transition. I knew Sharkawy and she was influential. Morcos quit in December 2012. Morsi’s advisers told me that rival liberal or nationalist presidential candidates had rebuffed invitations to join the government. But many sincere liberals were disappointed that Morsi did not form something closer to a coalition government, and he never explained why he did not. Still, whoever the personnel, his government did not have a chance to do much.
15: Under the Cloak
The Syrian town I visited was Tilalyan.
The fifty-five-year-old Libyan voter in Benghazi was Naema el-Gheryienne.
The anti-Islamist was Mohamed Abu Hamed.
The people who told me about Shater’s reaction to Morsi’s announcement included Gehad el-Haddad and Murad Ali.
It is worth noting that Morsi’s team was right to fear that the court would dissolve the constitutional assembly. In a ruling on June 2, 2013, the court said that it would have done exactly that.
“What Makes Mohamed Morsi Tick: Is It a Time Bomb?” by Patrick Graham was published in the Globe and Mail on May 4, 2013.
The analyst who told protesters to “take to the streets and die” was Salah Eissa.
The best analysis of the 2012 Egyptian constitution in context is in Nathan J. Brown’s book Arguing Islam After the Revival of Arab Politics. Egyptian politics produced many exaggerated claims about its merits and deficiencies, and the criticisms echoed widely in the West. But readers who want to understand that debate should read Brown’s chapter titled “Arab Constitutions, the Many Voices of the Public.” The comparison of constitutional plebiscites with mass loyalty oaths was Brown’s as well.
The account here of the Sharia compromise around Article 219 is the product of my own reporting, including interviews with several liberal and Islamist members of the committee—among them Manar el-Shorbagy, a liberal political scientist at the American University in Cairo; Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and presidential candidate who dropped out at the last minute to avoid signing the compromise; and Amr Darrag, of the Muslim Brotherhood. Amr Hamzawy, a liberal former parliamentarian and political scientist, also helped inform my understanding of the constitution and the compromise. Brown’s account arrives at similar conclusions from a scholarly methodology.
The account of the Obama-Haddad meeting comes from aides on both sides, including Wael Haddara and Ben Rhodes.
16: A Rumble at the Palace
The protester whose death I asked about was Mohamed el-Gindy.
The Brotherhood leader I quote urging supporters to defend the palace was Essam el-Erian. A report by Human Rights Watch documented some of those appeals. Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud raised alarms about fornication in the tents. “Their dead are in hell” was said by Sheikh Fawzi el-Saeed.
Ola Shahba spoke in a television interview with the host Yosri Fouda.
Some critics of the Muslim Brotherhood note that in December 2012, Defense Minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi offered to host a meeting for dialogue between Morsi’s administration and its political opponents. Morsi’s spokesmen insisted that it would be a purely social event, and Sisi ultimately scrapped it. Morsi thus effectively prevented Sisi from overseeing those talks, on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent for civilian democracy if the defense minister interceded in civilian politics or put himself above the president (like the chairman of the joint chiefs mediating a deal between Democracts and Republicans). Critics of the Brotherhood cite the aborted meeting as evidence that, on at least one occasion, Morsi was the one who walked away from an invitation to dialogue.
17: Murder, Rape, Christians, and Spies
The Interior Ministry spokesman was General Osama Ismail. The paramedic trainer was Jon Porter.
The attack on the Ikhwan Online office was January 25, 2013. The break-in at Brotherhood headquarters was on December 6, 2012.
El Sayyid el-Badawi ran the Wafd party.
The statistics on blasphemy cases against Christians come from the work of Ishak Ibrahim of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
18: The View from the West
General James Mattis spoke about Otaiba in a speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, on January 23, 2015, and about Adel al-Jubeir at the Aspen Institute on July 20, 2013.
Ambassador Patterson talked with Essam el-Haddad and Khaled al-Qazzaz in March about the UAE-led push for a coup. I was allowed to make an audio recording of the briefing quoted here.
Hernando de Soto Polar was among those who told me about his work for the Brotherhood; he said he was impressed with Shater.
Flynn describes his views of political Islam and his admiration for Sisi in The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, written with Michael Ledeen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016).
The account of Ambassador James Watt’s role is based on interviews with Morsi advisers, British officials close to Watt, and members of the National Salvation Front.
General Mohamed el-Assar, who began hinting around April at the possibility of a military intervention, was also the general who, on a visit to Washington in 2011, had praised the Muslim Brotherhood for its constructive role in the transition.
European and American diplomats sometimes urged Morsi to make unilateral concessions to his opponents during this period. But his advisers say the diplomats never offered any indication that the opposition would consider any reciprocal concessions, such as recognizing Morsi’s legitimacy as president or discontinuing the calls to protest and demands for his ouster. Several diplomats involved later told me that in retrospect it was doubtful that proposed concessions from Morsi, like a change of ministers, would have made any difference.
19: A New Front
The two members of the military council who stayed in contact with the National Salvation Front were General el-Assar, who was also a liaison to the Pentagon, and General Hegazy, related to Sisi through a marriage of their children.
After Sawiris boasted to me of his role promoting the music video about Tamarrod, his spokespeople asked for a correction, claiming that he had sold off his television network. But the supposed sale turned out to be a ruse. Sawiris had faked the sale for political reasons, and years later he sold the network again, for real.
Hassan Shahin of Tamarrod was also, by coincidence, the protester who had been running near the Blue Bra Girl when she was stripped by the soldiers.
In early 2014, Mohamed Heikal recounted to me his conversations with ElBaradei and showed me a picture of Sisi delivering a birthday cake. ElBaradei has declined to speak with me since he left Cairo.
General Sisi’s office manager was General Abbas Kamel. The military’s chief of staff was General Sedki Sobhi.
Some of the leaked audio recordings or private emails cited in this book might have been obtained by one of the Egyptian intelligence agencies or a foreign intelligence agency. I have confirmed or authenticated all of them, except those few that have been so extensively reported without credible contradiction that they have become a matter of public record in Egypt. American officials with access to intelligence reporting confirmed the accuracy of the leak indicating that the UAE sent money to the Egyptian military for Tamarrod.
20: A Dutiful Son
Wael Haddara was one of two sources from the Morsi administration who described the narcotics shipment at the airport and the secret meetings inside the palace.
The quotes from Sisi at Dahshur come from “Military Messages” by Ahmed Eleiba in Al Ahram Weekly, the issue of May 16–22, 2013, and from the daily Al Ahram. Reuters reported the comments in English as well.
The two generals who contacted the members of the National Salvation Front in May were again Assar and Hegazy.
Badawi’s home was in the suburb known as October 6 City.
Two others present for the State Department meeting each independently recounted the delivery of the memorandum and Thomas Melia’s response. I have the memorandum, in Arabic and English, as it was first written in Cairo and as it was translated for delivery in Washington. But Melia does not remember receiving the memorandum or making the statements that the two others attributed to him.
21: June 30
Kerry told me his side of the Addis Ababa meeting with Morsi. Multiple close aides to Morsi described his account to me.
A few days after the Salafi-dominated Syria rally in Cairo, a mob in a village on the outskirts of the city lynched four Shiites. Rights groups argued that by attending the conference Morsi had legitimated the sectarianism rising around the region. But the connection to Morsi is indirect and remote. Shiite Muslims make up a tiny minority of Egyptians, and many Egyptian Sunnis disdain Shiites as non-Muslims. It is doubtful that outrage over the killings did much to trigger a backlash against Morsi, except perhaps in the small circle of human rights advocates.
Amr Hamzawy worried that the National Salvation Front looked obstructionist because it constantly refused to accept any of Morsi’s invitations to dialogue or negotiations. So he broke with the group to attend the Ethiopian dam meeting, and it was a fiasco.
In addition to the quoted sources, this account of the American response to the coup during its run-up is based on conversations with more than a dozen senior officials who were closely involved.
Khaled Youssef described to me his role in filming June 30.
The account of Morsi’s last days is based on extensive conversations with five people who were with him or in close contact during that period. The account of Morsi’s last conversation with Obama comes from a reliable record of the call made by people in the White House.
The observation about which governors came under attack appears in Egypt in a Time of Revolution by Neil Ketchley (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Ketchley also made the most systematic assessment of the crowd numbers.
The geriatric former premier Morsi proposed bringing back was Kamal Ganzouri.
The office manager who interrupted Morsi’s meeting with Sisi was Ahmed Abdel Atty.
22: Coup d’État
This account of the July 4 meeting at the White House is based on interviews with more than a half dozen participants. All of the quotes were confirmed by their speaker or multiple others. The quotes and statements attributed to Obama were all recounted and confirmed by several others, but not Obama himself. The quotes from Kerry and Hagel come from their own accounts to me of their statements in the meeting (and the substance was also confirmed by others).
Michael Morrell wrote in his memoir, The Great War of Our Time, that he had worried the Egyptian security services under Morsi were giving a free pass to anti-Western militants. “The military, intelligence and law enforcement communities in Egypt essentially stopped fighting Al Qaeda because they felt they had no political support,” he wrote. Al Qaeda “was establishing new footholds in the Sinai and other parts of Egypt.”
Morrell told me in an email that the Al Qaeda “foothold” he meant was Ansar Beit al-Maqdis—the group that had attacked an Egyptian military checkpoint in July 2012, before Morsi held any real power. The group’s roots among the Bedouin of the North Sinai went back a decade.
Might the Egyptian soldiers, spies, and police have stopped doing their jobs to spite Morsi? I asked.
Morrell said he trusted Egypt’s spies. “I do not believe that the security guys with whom I worked would ever willingly allow terrorism to run rampant for political reasons,” Morrell replied by email. News reports and leaked emails later suggested that after leaving the CIA, Morrell joined a firm, Beacon Global Strategies, which was paid by the UAE.
Otaiba’s meeting at the Hamilton and his messages to Blinken and Sullivan were in some of the many emails stolen from his account and leaked to the public. I have confirmed the accuracy of the content of both emails with others.
The Long Game by Derek Chollet also describes the opposition to Morsi from American allies in the region, including Israel and the Gulf monarchies. “Our other close regional partners—none of whom were sad to see Morsi go, thinking he was a stooge of Iran—were very supportive of al-Sisi,” he wrote. The idea that Morsi was a stooge of Iran was absurd, even before his stance toward Damascus. But that made his views abundantly clear. In an interview, Chollet said Israeli, Saudi, and Emirati leaders ignored evidence of the differences among Islamists—even Sunni and Shiite—because they were so committed to the idea that all were the same. “It was like cognitive dissonance,” he said.
23: Killing Themselves
The scholar who wrote about King Abdullah’s “victory lap in Cairo” is Bruce Riedel, a veteran observer of Saudi Arabia for the CIA and the White House, in his book Kings and Presidents (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2018).
The Salafi I quote attacking Christians from the podium at Rabaa was Assem Abdel Maged.
The name of the policeman whom Ebrahim el-Sheikh saw killed was Mohamed el-Mesairy.
I know that Morsi was still held inside the guard complex on July 8 from interviews with people who were detained with him as well as from an interview with a member of his immediate family.
The National Salvation Front’s spokesman on July 8 was Khalid Talima, and the television host quoted here is Youssef el-Husseini.
Mohamad Elmasry is an Egyptian American scholar of communications who has written about the Egyptian media’s portrayal of Rabaa.
24: A Lion
About Egypt’s nationalist pop songs of 2013, see “5 Pop Songs That Illustrate Egypt’s Cult of Personality” by Miriam Berger, on BuzzFeed, November 1, 2013, and “Egypt’s Musical Nationalism, and a Little George Orwell” by Maha ElNabawi, Mada Masr, August 20, 2013. The joke about the Sisi underwear was made by the journalist Tom Gara.
Heikal told me that he had advised Sisi to hold a referendum or plebiscite, in the style of Abdel Nasser. The “mandate march” was Sisi’s alternative.
Kerry visited Cairo in November 2013 and commended Sisi for following his “road map” to democracy. On June 22, 2014, Kerry thanked Egyptians for the work transitioning to democracy.
The two moderate Islamists were Abou Elela Mady, founder of the post-Islamist Center Party, and Saad el Katatni, former speaker of Parliament. The photo of the UAE foreign minister with the Tamarrod founders was published in the newspaper Youm el Saba.
25: Clearing the Square
Many journalists and rights groups confirmed that there was no safe exit from Rabaa. There was no way to move safely across the sit-in, much less in or out. Mayy and I entered and exited twice that day, and each time was terrifying. I remember passing through the medical center both times. Mayy remembers making our first entrance through a different dangerous passage and then a long search for a way to get out. Other than the path of our first entrance, our recollections differ only in a few details.
The journalist who told me he saw two guns among the demonstrators was Samer Al-Atrush of Agence France Presse. He had slept the previous night inside the sit-in and woke up there that morning.
The police general who said the demonstrators had shot first was Major General Medhat el-Menshawi, interviewed on television by Wael el-Ibrashy.
A good reference on the Rabaa massacre is the Human Rights Watch report, “All According to Plan: The Raba’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt,” published on August 12, 2014.
26: Jihadis in the White House
Three Pentagon officials confirmed hearing those jokes about the White House.
27: Retribution
Human Rights Watch documents the names and circumstances around the videos of the extrajudicial killings in the North Sinai in several reports, including: “Egypt: Videos Show Army Executions in the Sinai,” April 21, 2017.
The riot on the edge of Cairo was in El Matareya. Current and former Brotherhood leaders confirmed their numbers.
28: Deep State
For Mehleb’s role in the Mubarak corruption case, see “The Mubarak Mansions” by Hossam Bahgat, in Mada Masr, May 20, 2014.
For Anwar Sadat’s expulsion from Parliament, see “Egypt Parliament Removes Prominent Dissenter: Anwar Sadat” by Declan Walsh, New York Times, February 28, 2017. The account of corruption’s toll on Egyptian archaeological treasures is based on interviews with Monica Hanna, among others. For the gluing of King Tut’s beard, see “Egyptian Musuem Officials Face Tribunal for Damaging King Tutankhamen’s Mask” by Declan Walsh, New York Times, January 25, 2016.
For the fate of Hisham Geneina, see “Graft Fighter in Egypt Finds Himself a Defendant in Court” by Declan Walsh, New York Times, June 7, 2016.
The former intelligence officer who ran the pro-Sisi parliamentary coalition was General Sameh Seif el-Yazel.
The senior scholar in the ministry overseeing mosques who spoke with Sheikh Ali Gomaa was Salem Abdel Galil.
The 2016 Arab Spring anniversary sermon was first reported in “Egypt’s President Turns to Religion to Bolster His Authority” by Declan Walsh, New York Times, January 10, 2016.
On the Egyptian judiciary after the coup, see “Dissidence and Deference Among Egyptian Judges” by Mona el-Ghobashy, in Middle East Report (no. 279, Spring 2016).
The anchor Maha Bahnasy was on the Tahrir Channel. The anchor Moataz al-Demerdash also cut off a correspondent reporting harassment.
The account of Obama’s meeting with Sisi at the United Nations about Soltan comes from multiple Obama advisers who were present, as well as from others who were briefed after the fact. The account of the meeting about ending the suspension of military aid is based on the recollections of five people involved. Derek Chollet provides a useful account of the aid debate in The Long Game as well. In resuming the aid, the White House discontinued an unusually favorable program that allowed Egypt to draw on future aid to acquire military equipment. This program added to the difficulty of cutting off aid because American defense manufacturers expected future aid to Egypt to pay for equipment they had already sold. Israel is the only other country to receive American military aid on those terms.
Shaimaa el-Sabbagh’s poem was translated by Maged Zaher, editor and translator of The Tahrir of Poems (Seattle, WA: Alice Blue Books, 2014). It is used here with his permission.
The seventeen-year-old Islamist killed by the police on the same day as Sabbagh was Sondos Reda.
For the account of the autopsy of Giulio Regeni, see “Why Was an Italian Graduate Student Tortured and Murdered in Egypt?” by Declan Walsh, New York Times Magazine, August 15, 2017.