Around March 2013 a movement sprung up out of nowhere called Tamarod, which in Arabic means “rebellion.” It appeared first as a grassroots movement, which called for Morsi to step down and for new elections to follow. These protestors demanded the constitution be rewritten and to have everyone included in writing it. The movement gave Morsi until June 30, 2013, to respond to their demands. As expected, the Islamist media lashed out. The Islamists were becoming too predictable, with their usual rhetoric and accusations of this movement being funded by the usual suspects—the Coptic Christian church, America, Israel, etc.
Morsi continued to marginalize anyone from a non-Islamic background. The Muslim Brotherhood were putting their own people everywhere. The Islamization of the state was swiftly under way. My brother worked for an oil company owned by the government. He told me that during that time Muslim Brotherhood members with no experience, talent, or skills were getting hired in all positions within the company. He said that once during a lunch hour, one of his colleagues, a Muslim Brotherhood member who had been promoted for no apparent reason, was standing with him outside the company building. He looked up and said, “In a matter of months this godforsaken company will be under control.” When my brother asked him what they were going to do with the army and the police and how they were going to control them, he answered, “No, that will take a couple of years, but eventually it will happen.”
This pattern was repeated with many different companies and mosques. The same arrogance I saw when I met al-Shater was materializing on the ground.
When you ask Egyptians about why they hated the Muslim Brotherhood enough to turn a blind eye to all the injustice and killing that happened to the Brotherhood after they were removed from power (more on that coming up), many would tell you that the Brotherhood would have done the same to us. It was more of a feeling of those people are coming to dominate us and use relgion to enslave us. Many women will tell you about how they were walking in the streets and bearded men or veiled women would shout at them, “It’s our country now and all of you will be covered soon.” It’s like when Trump supporters started cursing at people and telling them they will be deported after Trump won the election. It’s like when that guy got up on a Delta flight and shouted at everybody, “Trump is your president, all of you Hillary bitches.”
It doesn’t matter that these were isolated incidents or that the president didn’t officially endorse them. A certain atmosphere was created, and people can see the direct link to authority.
The Brotherhood had a talent of finding more and more ways to make themselves unlikable. They were like that younger obnoxious sibling who, when you tell him to leave you alone, sticks his finger as close as humanly possible to your face and proclaims, “I’m not touching you!” The Brotherhood was hated, and the worst thing they could possibly do would be to go further to the right to spite everyone. Yet that’s exactly what Morsi did. He called for a huge rally, where he gathered his supporters in the biggest sports arena in Cairo. The context for the rally was supporting people in war-torn Syria, but what we saw was different. Thousands and thousands of President Morsi supporters with banners calling for jihad, singing songs calling for jihad, and wearing green headbands, screamed that they were ready for jihad. During the speeches the thin line between jihad in Syria and jihad in Egypt disappeared. The insinuations, the references, slowly shifted from fighting God’s enemies in Syria to fighting them here in Egypt.
This looked like a heavy metal concert that had gone horribly wrong.
Even worse, Morsi sat right smack in the middle of the most right-wing, bigoted Salafi sheikhs. It was the first time that he had associated himself openly with those people in a political setting. One sheikh after another came up to the podium to give his best hate speech. It was just short of a witch-hunt party; they asked the almighty Allah to curse and strike down those planning to demonstrate on June 30. This happened while the jihad-crazed crowd cheered and the president sat there awfully silent.
Whatever attempts the Muslim Brotherhood made for over a year to convince us that they were the acceptable “light” version of political Islam went down the drain on that day. We had so much hate going around that dissing the anti-Muslim people was not enough. So they had to bring in other people to hate and call for their death just for the fuck of it. In front of everyone, including the president, a famous sheikh demanded that no Shiites be admitted into Egypt, just as relations with Iran were starting to get closer.
Wait, what?
The Salafi sheikhs sure love to spread the hate around. They hate Christians, Jews, liberals, other Muslim Sunni (whom they consider to be less pious), and they still have some leftover hate to go around for Shiites. At this point, you are probably hitting Muslim info overload and are having a hard time understanding the hate between the Sunni and Shiites.
In a nutshell, think of the Red Sox and the Yankees; now give each of them a country (Saudi Arabia and Iran); now give both of them a good amount of oil, loads of money, absolute rule by their religions, lots of weapons, hateful ideology that crosses borders, and add to that a feud that originated fifteen hundred years ago over who should be the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. That should be good enough.
We have very few Shiites in Egypt, but they’re just another minority that the extreme Sunni sheikhs (who are openly funded by the Saudis) love to shit on. So a few days after that lovely speech against Shiites, calling them “filth and unholy,” five Shiites were killed in a remote village in Egypt. I wondered, if five people were killed as a result of direct incitement of hate in a speech, what will happen to the rest of us, who oppose the Islamist regime? Would killing us be any more difficult?
Here we had a direct sectarian speech full of violent rhetoric that would rival a Nazi party rally openly calling for a Holocaust on anyone who opposed the president. If they could incite enough hate against a minority to have them killed a few days later, what would happen to the rest of the people they incited hate against if these people openly protested the dictatorship? The Brotherhood had used their militias before, they could use them again.
As June 30 approached, it was difficult to stay hopeful. And yet, something amazing occurred that made me believe there was some good in the world. No, we didn’t all suddenly get along with glitter parades in the streets and cupcakes and lollipops for everyone. However, it was the second-best thing to that: Jon Stewart came to Egypt!