By early Friday afternoon, a small scrum of screamers had gathered in Tahrir Square. But the group was hardly big enough to disrupt traffic. An even smaller bunch congregated near the Mogamma, the government’s main administrative office. A very dirty bearded man was going back and forth between the two yelling “Down with Morsi!” He was slurring his words in a way that suggested mental illness. The more stable elements in the crowd carried banners indicating a range of enthusiasms, from secular democracy to rights for Coptic Christians. One sign featured a hammer and sickle.
At around 2:15, on schedule, a group carrying pro-Morsi signs showed up. After minutes of shouting, the fighting began: First a few rocks were thrown, then there was a stampede as the anti-Morsi crowd fled toward Talaat Harb Square. I watched both sides yanking flagstones out of the sidewalks and smashing them to make rocks small enough to throw but big enough to crack skulls.
The violence ended within 10 minutes. At one point I counted seven stones in midair – which by Tahrir standards made the day’s violence just a bit of lighthearted skirmishing. You can measure the intensity of fighting by watching how far down shopkeepers pull their shutters. On Friday, they reached roughly halfway to the ground, and after the first volleys, business owners emerged from under them to scowl at how the groups had chased away all their customers.
A juice vendor midway between the squares said one word to me: “baltagiya.” It means “thugs” and entered everyday vocabulary in February 2011 in reference to the government-sponsored mobs who were clubbing protesters in Tahrir. But now the vendor was wagging a finger in both directions: at the Morsi supporters occupying Tahrir to his left and at the anti-Morsi crowd in retreat around Talaat Harb to his right. Baltagiya, he said, every last one of them.
At first even Hesham couldn’t tell the crowds apart when he showed up later that afternoon. His own politics align with Morsi’s, at least provisionally, yet in the screaming pro-Morsi crowd he saw nothing but chaos and adolescent mischief. He quoted a prophecy of Muhammad to the effect that a sign of the Apocalypse would be a wave of squabbling on the streets.
What has happened since the revolution last year? One secular Egyptian not involved in last week’s protest told me that the government has intentionally tarnished the image of Tahrir by offloading trash there at night and targeting women and foreigners for groping and mugging.
If those efforts were real, they have been successful. Once a symbol of rare idealism in the Arab world, now a site of rocks thrown for unclear purposes, this square has become an altar for the dashed hopes of secularists and Islamists alike.
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Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He has lived and traveled in the Middle East for most of the last 10 years. The New York Times