Let’s go back a couple of steps to before all this happened. In Egypt before 2010, Internet basically consisted of Facebook and a few YouTube videos. There was no original Arabic content on it.
It was around this time that Tarek, an old friend of mine, graduated as an engineer and became one of the first people in Egypt to start managing YouTube content. Little did he know he was jump-starting a major trend.
For whatever reason he came to me in the summer of 2010 and told me that he wanted to produce original content and use me as a host.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Well, you have a way,” he said. “When you talk, people listen. I think if I put a camera on you, people will watch.”
“You are not using me for porn, are you?”
“I wish we had the women, bro,” he answered. “I think you’re a great choice for the Internet. Also, you are my friend. So I can use you without paying you.”
I guess that settled it.
At that time, politics was really off the table. As a matter of fact, in 2001, before there was something called YouTube, a group of five young people made a video spoof of one of the most popular Egyptian war movies. People were sharing it through videotapes and CDs and hard disks. Ultimately, all five people ended up arrested and interrogated by national security officers. They were eventually let go, but only after they confirmed they were just a bunch of stupid young men who didn’t have any political agenda.
Since politics was off limits, I decided to make my video debut about a less controversial topic. Religion!
I was really asking for it.
I came up with a concept and settled on a title for the webisodes, Searching for a God. Each episode was about a religion or a cult; I would discuss and mock some of their wacko beliefs in five minutes or less.
This proves that I was ahead of Morgan Freeman by at least several years. I should sue him for stealing my idea with his new show The Story of God. Screw you, Morgan!
We shot three episodes and showed them to our friends, who loved the concept and the controversial content. I was already having dreams of fame, but at the same time was dying to work as a doctor in the States. Actually, I was dying to leave the country, and medicine was my only ticket out! So in my head I reached a fantasy compromise. I would travel to the U.S. and in a couple of years some huge TV exec would discover those episodes on the Internet and hire me as the host of a show who goes around the world to film actual cults in their native countries. I would be the Anthony Bourdain of religions: Bassem Youssef: No Revelations. End of fantasy.
We set the release date for Searching for a God for New Year’s Eve 2011. But that night, a bombing occurred outside a Coptic Christian church in the heart of Cairo. Yup, that’s how we celebrate Christmas in my part of the world. That’s why when I see Bill O’Reilly ranting for hours on end about a “war on Christmas” or the sacrilege of no red cups at Starbucks, all I can say is “Bitch, please!”
Following that explosion we decided not to release the videos on YouTube, and postponed the whole thing for a few weeks. But twenty-five days later, all of a sudden we just happened to have a revolution—you know, that little thing I started telling you about—and we lost sight of the project. There was nothing else for the next few weeks other than the events of the uprising.
A week after Mubarak stepped down, Tarek called me. “Hey, forget about Searching for a God for now. We need a new project. Let’s do something humorous and political. This is the best time for that kind of content.”
“Great!” I said. “Then I want to do something like Jon Stewart.” (Who, I should inform you, is my biggest inspiration.)
“What?” Tarek replied. “No one will get it. It won’t work. Whatever, dude, just give me some content to put up there.”
I started collecting available online material from the Egyptian mainstream media. The widespread backlash against the media rose with the release of each new YouTube video. Now that Mubarak had stepped down and the revolution had “won,” those who had originally insinuated the revolution was a conspiracy, opposed it from the beginning, or instigated hate against it found themselves on a sort of public blacklist. The hypocrisy and deception we found in those videos was unmatched. They were full of paranoia, hate, lies . . . and lots of sex!