He parked his car outside his family’s old house, now a weathered brick meeting hall along a dusty road lined with vegetable and fruit stalls. Donkey carts bumped along among the cars, and date palms sheltered the lush green fields beyond. Inside the hall, photographs of his grandfather and other relatives adorned the walls. A group of middle-aged local men in brown and gray galabias stood up and addressed him with the respect due to his family: “Zakaria basha.”
A thickset butcher named Elsayed Shahba proclaimed, “What began in Cairo has echoed across the country.” He described how the town’s new “popular committee” — one of the many makeshift civil-defense forces that formed across Egypt during the revolution — protected the courthouse against a band of marauding criminals. It also warned the local member of Parliament, who belonged to Mubarak’s party, never to show his face there again. And now it was trying to reinvent the local government and its corrupt practices: training the police to treat people with respect, lecturing merchants not to gouge customers, forming subcommittees in every field. By Shahba’s account, it seemed the revolution’s ideals were already in bloom in Kafr Shukr.
But a chicken farmer named Ayman Dahroug dismissed the speech with a scornful gesture. “The truth is, there are no leaders in Kafr Shukr anymore,” he said in a loud, angry voice. “It’s only the Muslim Brotherhood that works here now.” Like others in the room, he seemed deeply anxious about the brotherhood’s rising influence. “They are in Kafr Shukr every day. They set up tents with bread, cooking oil, dried fish,” he said. “When they hear someone is sick, they bring medicines. They are at the level of the people. You say you have a popular committee, but I haven’t even heard of it. It is on Facebook, so what? Zakaria, if you want to do something here, you must be here every day like the brotherhood.”
Two other men nodded uneasily. The brotherhood was buying imported meat at a discount and selling it in town, earning goodwill among the poor, one of them said. “They are more active than ever before,” he added.
A third man, sitting cross-legged on the floor, looked at Mohyeldin pleadingly. “The revolution came, the revolution ended,” he said. “Now I want to know, who do I belong to? Everyone says it’s the revolution of youth, but it’s the revolution of everyone who suffered injustice. Now we want someone who will lead us to something correct, and we can’t find anyone.”
Mohyeldin began asking questions — about the local Islamists, the prices of food, the level of political awareness among the villagers. Each answer provoked a storm of arguments among the men, and stern warnings that the town would fall to pieces if someone did not step in and provide an alternative to the brotherhood. “The void of the Mohyeldin family is dangerous,” said Dahroug, the chicken farmer.
“I have quit my job in Cairo,” Mohyeldin said at last. “Now I am prepared to come live here all the time.”
Three months after the revolution, Egypt is in the agony of self-discovery. As other Arab revolutions founder or lapse into civil wars, Egypt has achieved far more than its young rebels ever hoped for. First, they forced out Mubarak in only 18 days. Then, with renewed protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, they rid themselves of his loyalists, including Ahmed Shafiq, the prime minister. Nominally, Egypt is being ruled by a panel of military generals, who have governed in an uneasy dialogue with the revolution’s self-appointed leaders, making concession after concession to popular demands. But protesters continue to call for deeper reforms, and workers are striking throughout the country, demanding better pay and the removal of Mubarak-era bosses. Meanwhile, many Egyptians seem eager to carry the revolutionary energy of Tahrir Square into everyday life. “I was part of the regime — I used to take bribes,” intones a man in a new public-service TV ad campaign. “But Egypt is changing, and I am changing.” Sitting in traffic, I saw bumper stickers proclaiming: “As of today, I won’t run traffic lights,” and “I will change.” Posters have appeared on walls across Cairo urging Egyptians to stop littering, stop cheating, stop putting up with police abuse and sectarian slurs.
What is most striking about all these slogans is not their civic-mindedness but their focus on individual behavior. All through the 20th century, the Arab world echoed with clarion calls based on collective struggles and identities — as Arabs, as Muslims, as tribes. The revolutions of 2011 were led by a generation that is tired of ideologies and that tends to see its own struggle in terms of more concrete personal rights and freedoms.
The struggle is far from over. The protesters who occupied Tahrir Square now talk of a sinister counterrevolution by Mubarak’s men. “Sometimes a fallen regime is even more dangerous than the old regime,” I was told by the novelist Alaa Al Aswany, who played a leading role in Tahrir Square. Many others warn of a possible takeover by Islamists, who could assume power through the ballot box only to impose an Iran-style theocracy. These fears are not groundless; there are certainly people, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, who do not want to see a popular revolution succeed. But the Islamists are also facing internal rebellions or seeking to reinvent themselves. All parties are aware that they are being watched. With Egypt’s economy in free fall, they are rightly anxious that mass hunger, rising inflation and joblessness among Egypt’s 83 million people could imperil everything they have achieved so far. Already, there are signs of slippage: a street battle in a Cairo slum on May 7, sparked by sectarian rumors, left a dozen dead and two churches in flames. Street crime and prison breaks are on the rise, the bitter legacy of a police state turned upside down. “You feel like this revolution might slip away if we don’t play it right,” said Jawad Nabulsi, another young businessman, who was blinded in one eye in the revolution and who has now set up a nonprofit in a Cairo slum.“If this model for a revolution works, people will copy it. If it doesn’t. . . .” His voice trailed off, as if the thought were too ominous to name.
On the night before Easter Sunday, a flock of reporters and TV cameras were gathered in the twilight outside St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the western Cairo district of Giza. After a 20-minute wait, a motorcade pulled up and the big man emerged, surrounded by a thick scrum of aides and local political bosses. This was no mere lawmaker or judge: the man of the hour was Maj. Gen. Tarek Mahdy, a member of the 20-member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has officially ruled Egypt since it ejected Mubarak on Feb. 11. He came to the cathedral in a display of respect for Egypt’s Christians, who are feeling vulnerable amid a spate of sectarian attacks. After shaking hands with a lineup of priests and dignitaries, General Mahdy descended the church’s red-carpeted steps to the thicket of cameras and glaring lights, a stern-looking man with bristly gray hair and a chest full of medals on his tan uniform. He and his fellow generals are now the closest thing Egypt has to an embodiment of the state, and they are treated like celebrities everywhere they go. “I am proud of the generous invitation I received from the bishop, and I am proud of the people of Egypt on the streets,” he said as a young woman held a fluffy microphone to his chin.
But minutes later, as the general retreated from the cameras to a reception room behind the church, his air of uniformed authority seemed to collapse into weary bafflement: an Arab Wizard of Oz. He sat down heavily, nudging his rectangular glasses and looking around at the paintings of Jesus and the photographs of staff-bearing Coptic bishops. An aide gestured for me to sit down next to him. “You should see the folders on my desk,” the general said to me in English. “They just pile up. A community project? We don’t know how to administer a community project!” He seemed keenly aware that he and his fellow generals were expected to somehow make manifest the popular will, and he was clearly uneasy about it. “We don’t want this situation to continue,” he said. “We want to go back to our barracks.” A delegation of young Tahrir Square protesters arrived in the room, and the general greeted them warmly. “As everybody knows, the people are the source of power, and we are deeply appreciating this fact,” he said.
Later, as I got up to leave, the general smiled and warned me not to misquote him. “Or else I will kill you,” he said with a giddy grin. “We are the power now, and no one can come after me!” Then he touched my forearm and said, as if in apology: “You see, we have not moved from past to present as fast as all that.”
In the first days after Mubarak fell, many Egyptians feared that the Supreme Council would enshrine itself as a permanent ruling junta. Instead, the generals seem anxious to please the crowd, fearful, perhaps, that they may become the next target. Egypt’s real rulers, in a sense, are the youth of Tahrir Square, whose periodic protests have continued to push the council toward greater concessions. Even the interim prime minister, Essam Sharaf, seems captive to them. After the council appointed him in March, he went straight to Tahrir Square, where crowds carried him on their shoulders as he declared, “I am here to draw my legitimacy from you.”
The protesters themselves are often represented by a handful of self-appointed tribunes, who offer their views in press conferences or in meetings with the Supreme Council. On May 7, Mamdouh Hamza, a renowned 63-year-old engineer and dissident who was a key patron for the Tahrir protesters, organized a huge conference aimed at electing a 65-member “national council” that would speak on the revolution’s behalf. About 5,000 people attended, packing two vast auditoriums in a Cairo conference hall. There was a festive atmosphere reminiscent of Tahrir Square; elderly clerics mingled with young protesters and peasants from upper Egypt as they munched sandwiches in the lobby. But the Muslim Brotherhood declined to participate, making the meeting far less representative. At one point the holiday mood shattered, as an angry middle-aged man in the lobby began shouting: “You are all traitors! This is an Islamic country!” In the end, Hamza decided to postpone forming the council.
Looming over the conference was a question that troubles many Egyptians: Who appointed Mamdouh Hamza — or anyone else, for that matter — to speak for the revolution? Isn’t that what elections are for? In a national referendum held in March, a majority of Egyptian voters chose to hold elections within a few months. Parliamentary elections are now scheduled for September, followed by presidential elections in November. Hamza and many other liberals were upset by the vote, fearing that the country was not ready for full democracy and that more secular political parties and candidates would not have time to prepare. Some have argued for the creation of an interim “presidency council” dominated by civilians that could take over the Supreme Council’s governing role. But that leaves open the question of who would choose the council. It is a paradox of Egypt’s revolution that the very people who fought so hard for democracy can now often be heard talking about the basata — simplicity — of the Egyptian people, and the need to protect them from themselves. Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, says some veterans of Tahrir Square seem to believe — like so many triumphant insurgents of ages past, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks to Muammar el-Qaddafi — that they are the revolution. “Many of these people have earned this moment,” Bahgat told me. “But their belief in the fundamentals of democracy is being tested now.”
At the root of this anxiety about elections is fear of Islamists. That fear has long been focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most organized political and social force. The brotherhood was founded in 1928 with the goal of creating an Islamic state, and many liberals view the organization’s more recent commitment to democracy with deep distrust. They are also anxious about the emergence of unrelated Islamic groups, some far more extreme than the brotherhood. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate and likely presidential candidate, wrote on his Twitter feed on May 8, “Urgent measures required to combat religious extremism and intolerance before Egypt slides into the dark ages.”
Yet the spores of revolution have infected Egypt’s Islamist movements as well. On a recent weeknight, I met Muhammad Elgeba, a 26-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member, at an office in Cairo’s Talaat Harb Square. “It’s the street with the liquor store on the corner,” he explained on the phone, a bit sheepishly, as I approached in a taxi. We first met during the height of the revolution, and now the scars on his forehead, from a tear-gas canister, were healed. Elgeba is a prominent member of what is often called the brotherhood’s “youth wing,” though it has no formal existence in the organization. His views are relatively liberal: He says the brotherhood should offer broader rights to women and be more tolerant of secular points of view. “Our thinking is along the lines of the reformists who left the brotherhood,” he told me. “But we are not leaving. We will insist on staying, and working from within.”
On this evening, Elgeba was meeting with his friend Muhammad Salah, a leftist who became his partner in a new political venture. The two men had spent the weeks since the revolution visiting 80 different popular committees in different locations across Egypt, in an attempt to form a nonideological national movement focused on common goals: improving literacy, creating jobs, changing the culture of police brutality and kickbacks. It was still a young effort, but its very existence was testament to the new currents flourishing within the brotherhood.
Elgeba and other young members have become more and more open in their challenges to the group’s still-dominant old guard. “If the Muslim Brotherhood thinks they can change Egyptian society, they are a bunch of idiots,” Elgeba said as he sat waiting for Salah, near a wall covered with photographs of workers’ protests from around the world. The office, a beat-up suite of rooms full of old newspapers and dirty teacups, was shared by a number of Cairo’s budding political factions. “What I think will happen,” Elgeba said, is that “the brotherhood will be forced to develop themselves. They won’t want to, but they will be forced to.”
In a sense, Elgeba’s revolution began long before the events in Tahrir Square. He joined the brotherhood around age 14, and like all members, his social life was highly regulated after that. The brotherhood’s structure is extremely hierarchical and disciplined. Everyone belongs to a five-member “family,” segregated by sex, that meets regularly for prayers and other social occasions. The family members closely monitor one another’s moral and spiritual lives. Each family belongs to a larger neighborhood unit called a “faction,” and so on up the ladder to the provincial and national levels, in a kind of parallel government that persisted under Mubarak, despite the group’s illegal status. Elgeba spoke about the intensity of his bonds with his fellow “family” members, with whom he spends far more time than his own parents and siblings.
But after graduating from college, he grew curious about the wider world of Cairo, where he moved to take an engineering job. A friendship soon changed his life. He began following a blog by Ahmed Badawi, a young reformer and atheist who wrote with infectious passion. The two men met at a protest rally and formed an unlikely bond, getting together regularly at cafes to talk politics. In late 2010, Badawi published a book under the title “Thoughts of a Modern Egyptian Prophet.” Those words alone are an outrage to most Islamists, who reserve the word “prophet” for sacred contexts. Yet at the book-signing party, it was Elgeba who gave the introductory speech, praising his friend’s intellectual daring and intelligence. “The problem with using religion in a political context is that you end up having religion on one side, and everything else viewed as antireligious,” he told the audience. “That’s a very big problem.” Those words are anathema to the brotherhood’s founding creed, but they can be heard increasingly among its younger members.
When young protesters made plans for a demonstration on Jan. 25, Elgeba was part of a group of young brotherhood members who took part from the very start, even as the group’s leadership initially stayed away. On Jan. 28, he was at the forefront of the protesters who battled police amid clouds of tear gas on Kasr al-Nil bridge. The man standing next to him was struck in head by a tear-gas canister and killed. Elgeba, who was himself bleeding badly after something struck him in the forehead, insisted on carrying his comrade’s body to a hospital. He lay down long enough for the doctors to remove a marble-size pellet from his own forehead, then returned and spent the night in the square, faint from loss of blood. When I met him, a few days afterward, he had just been released from prison. A gang of plainclothes security men had kidnapped him, then beaten him and tortured him with electrical prods. But he was too caught up in the moment to care about his own scars. We were in a flophouse for protesters owned by a bohemian saloniste named Pierre Sioufi, and the crowd was anything but pious: young girls in vampy dresses, actors, journalists swilling Johnnie Walker. Elgeba, glancing around shyly, did not mingle. But he seemed thrilled by the eclecticism of the place. “The arrogance that exists in Egypt — both the ethical, religious arrogance and the arrogance of power — is lost when people start to deal with the other,” he said at the time, his eyes glowing with excitement. The success of the revolution has given young liberals like Elgeba a far more powerful voice within the brotherhood. After Mubarak’s fall, Elgeba told me, he received a phone call from a member of the brotherhood’s Guidance Council, asking him how he thought the group should proceed. The change is visible at the grass-roots level too. Elgeba’s “family” members, he told me, “used to emotionally abuse me. They couldn’t imagine that you can go and sit at a cafe with a Communist. Now they say, ‘I wish I had joined the movement before.’ ”
Islam Lotfi, another young brotherhood member who helped organize the first protests on Jan. 25, told me he believes the group’s whole mission has become ossified. When it was founded more than 80 years ago, he said, the brotherhood was reacting to a world that had just lost the caliphate, the old seat of Muslim temporal power in Constantinople that dissolved along with the Ottoman Empire following the First World War. The call for an Islamic state grew out of that loss. Today’s world, Lotfi said, is different. “I want to see a real vision,” he told me. “Make us compatible with the rest of our world without compromising our Islamic identity.”
The rift runs deeper. Lotfi told me he believed the younger generation is unhappy with the brotherhood’s whole paternalistic culture. “It’s the structure of obedience,” he said. “People have to move from being just foot soldiers or chess pawns. Both in the brotherhood and in Egyptian society at large, we always let others take decisions. The son lets the father decide his job. The woman lets her father choose her groom.”
Some say this generational shift of attitudes is the real root of the Arab revolutions of 2011, and may be their most lasting legacy. I heard these words again and again from young protesters, responding to Mubarak’s pleas to be treated with the respect due to a father: “He’s not my father.” These are people who think about authority in a radically different way from their parents. That generational break was audible on the day before Mubarak stepped down, when his stentorian appeals to Arab nationalism, echoing from the loudspeakers on Tahrir Square, sounded like the babbling squawk of the adults’ voices on “Peanuts” cartoons. The protesters drowned it out with their jeers.
I heard it again two weeks later in Libya, when a group of young Libyan rebels stood around a television set in a cafe. On the screen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the embattled president of Yemen, was shouting from a lectern, saying the protests against him had been planned in Washington and Tel Aviv. The Libyans burst out laughing. “Why not on Mars?” one of them said. The revolution seemed to have subtly but firmly tinctured the atmosphere across the Middle East, so that the old language, used for so many years by Arab dictators to justify their rule, suddenly sounded not just oppressive but absurd, laughable.
It is not just the Muslim Brotherhood that is affected by this sea change. A welter of Islamic groups has emerged since the revolution, many of them previously living in shadows. One of the best known is the Islamic Group, the militant faction responsible for terrorist campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s that killed hundreds of police, soldiers, civilians and foreign tourists in Egypt. Although the group renounced violence in 1997, its name still strikes fear into many Egyptians, and the U.S. government still considers it a terrorist group.
The Islamic Group’s leaders agreed to meet with me for lunch at an outdoor cafe overlooking the Nile on a breezy spring afternoon. My fixer — a liberal Cairene woman who does not wear a headscarf — clutched my arm anxiously as we approached: these men, she reminded me, probably helped plan the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Yet after we sat down, she relaxed. Unlike many hard-line Islamists, they met her gaze, shook her hand and spoke to her respectfully. One by one, the men spoke emotionally about the revelatory effect the Tahrir protests had on them. Several repeated the same phrase: “It was like a holy scene, not a human scene.” The success of the protesters’ adamantly nonviolent tactics, they said, reaffirmed their belief that the Islamic Group had been wrong to use violence in the past, not just as a matter of principle but also because violence failed to achieve any of their goals. When I asked them if they were bitter about their experience in prison, where they had all served long terms, they referred again to Tahrir Square. “We have a belief that if someone has seen heaven, and he is asked if he has known misery, he says no,” said Osama Hafez, the group’s official spokesman. “When you see a thing like this, you forget everything you suffered.”
Hafez, who has spent 20 of his 53 years in prison, is a gaunt, elfin man with a white beard. During our talk, I asked about the protests that had broken out recently in southern Egypt after the Supreme Council appointed a Christian as governor of Qena Province. Some Egyptians took the protests as a troubling sign of religious intolerance. Hafez told me he responded to the protests with an offer: “Bring the Christian governor to Minya,” he said, referring to his home province. “You can have our governor, who is a Muslim.” I asked how the Islamic Group would feel about a Christian or a woman as president of Egypt. Hafez shrugged. “If the people vote for it, we are committed,” he said. “This is democracy.” This would be a remarkable turnabout for an organization whose members once branded moderate Muslims as heretics and labeled democracy an infidel concept. Sitting a few seats down from Hafez was the man who helped arrange the meeting, a musclebound 25-year-old named Gehad Saif. When I asked him if he was a member of the Islamic Group, he laughed raucously and said: “Me? I’m a liberal! I’m corrupt! I’m a D.J.!” He then explained that he had befriended Hassan Ammar, the man sitting next to him, in Tahrir Square. The two men fought together during the “Battle of the Camels” on Feb. 2, when the protesters fought back hundreds of armed Mubarak supporters, some of them on horses and camels. When Saif discovered that Ammar was a member of the Islamic Group, he was stunned. “I told him, ‘If you are part of the Islamic Group, then I want to meet the rest of them,’ ” Saif told me. “I thought these guys were terrorists, and I discovered I am totally wrong.”
One of the most common slogans in Tahrir Square during the revolution was “bread, freedom, social justice.” The order of those words was no accident. Many of the poorer protesters who filled the square before Mubarak’s fall were much less concerned about civil liberties or cross-sectarian harmony than about sheer physical need. A few days before Mubarak fell, I sat in the 26th-floor office of Naguib Sawiris, a telecom billionaire and one of the country’s richest men. He beckoned me to the window and pointed down at the buildings burned by angry protesters the week before, and the slum of Ramlet Boulaq, not far away. “That’s why they are doing this,” Sawiris told me. “They see the nice buildings we live in, and they have to live in this.” He had a point. About 40 percent of Egyptians live on the equivalent of $2 a day or less, and those numbers may well grow in the coming months. Since the revolution, Egypt’s economy has been mired in labor unrest. Tremors of anxiety in the country’s elite have begun to turn to panic.
“It is tragic,” I was told by Osama Leheta, an owner of one of Egypt’s oldest tourism companies. “Production in Egypt has come to a near-standstill. Foreign reserves are being depleted. Our currency is under extreme pressure. You could have millions of Egyptians with no food, and they will demolish everything in their path.”
Leheta, a tall, heavyset man of 64, did well under the old regime. He lives in a well-appointed villa about an hour northwest of Cairo, and his years in Britain have given him an accent so plummy it sounds like a Monty Python satire. But like so many Egyptians, he had visceral reasons to support the revolution. A few days after the first protests started, he was sitting at home one morning when a neighbor called to warn him that escaped prisoners were massing outside the compound, which is surrounded by gates. Leheta picked up one of his hunting rifles and set off toward the main gate with his five guard dogs. What he found there shocked him: hundreds of prisoners were streaming down the main road to Cairo, some of them in trucks they had commandeered. Others were walking, looking exhausted in the morning sun. Leheta and his neighbors fired into the air at first, to keep them away from the compound. Then they began detaining them and asking them what happened. The story that emerged was amazing. The men all said they were forced to leave the prison under threat of death. Some said they were starved for two days beforehand — presumably to make them more desperate when they got out. Mubarak’s government was deliberately terrorizing the country’s suburban upper class, in a clumsy effort to make the protests look bad.
The strategy backfired badly. When I first met Leheta a few days after those events, he was still angry. We sat in his vast, dimly lighted living room, which is decorated with Persian carpets and oil paintings. A fire burned softly in an antique grate. “Absolute power corrupts, and now these young people have stood up against an oppressive system,” Leheta told me. “It’s magnificent. We, the older generation, should be ashamed of ourselves. Every single one of us was cocooned in his little hole. We were afraid.”
Less than three months later, the specter of marauding, starving criminals conjured by Mubarak’s thugs appeared to be coming true, at least in some places. The police, long reviled for their brutality under Mubarak, cower in their barracks. There were three prison breaks in Cairo in the first half of May. Meanwhile, Egypt’s economic collapse could sabotage all its democratic hopes, Leheta told me. “This caretaker government is just fighting fires; no one is thinking about the future,” he said. “Inflation is soaring to levels not seen in years. The results are going to be catastrophic. And I fear that if Egypt goes the wrong way, many other countries will go down the same path.”
Even if Egypt’s economy revives, the challenge of fighting corruption will remain. This, too, was one of the central slogans of the revolution, not just in Egypt but across the Arab world. During the two weeks I spent in Tahrir Square, virtually everyone I met had a story to tell about corruption, from the daily humiliation of police shakedowns to large-scale business fraud. One of them was a middle-aged man who works as chief of security at a small Cairo museum. He told me that Culture Ministry officials had siphoned off so much of the museum’s money that the alarms and security cameras stopped working, and a Van Gogh worth $50 million was stolen last August. “They could have fixed the security cameras for a few Egyptian pounds each,” he said with a pained smile. “But they wanted the money for themselves.” Confronting this problem is not just a matter of changing the culture. If police officers and civil servants continue to receive wages far too low to support a family, they will continue to demand kickbacks and bribes, and the societywide corruption that helped trigger the revolt will go on. Yet popular calls for more state involvement in the economy could backfire in the long term.
Many of the revolution’s prime movers are themselves deeply worried about this, including Wael Ghonim, the online organizer who became one of the revolution’s most recognizable faces. Ghonim recently announced on his Twitter feed that he was taking a long-term sabbatical from Google to “start a technology-focused NGO to help fight poverty and foster education in Egypt.”
Another one is Zakaria Mohyeldin, the young protester I followed to his family’s village in the Nile Delta. Before leaving Cairo, Mohyeldin seemed more focused on “raising political awareness,” as he put it. But that morning in Kafr Shukr, he found himself surrounded by locals warning him that bread-and-butter issues would define the revolution’s legacy. “Look, in every town there will be 10,000 who are with this party, and 10,000 with that party,” one local engineer said. “But there will be 60,000 who just want meat and cheese to be cheaper.”
Later that day, Mohyeldin spoke in amazed tones about the changes that had come over Egypt in such a short time. Two months before the revolution, he was in Kafr Shukr during the parliamentary elections, in which Mubarak’s ruling party carried out flagrant and widespread fraud. As Mohyeldin walked through town on that November day, two local men ran up to him and began boasting about how they had faked hundreds of ballots for the local candidate from Mubarak’s party. They said they had thrown an election observer out of the counting room. “It was awful,” Mohyeldin told me. “I wanted to tell them they had done something criminal.” But the candidate they had faked the ballots for was his own cousin. Mohyeldin, who loathed Mubarak’s party, winced and said nothing. To denounce the two villagers would have been an insult, a violation of village decorum.
Now his cousin is reviled in the town and no longer shows his face there. Sitting in his family’s old home, surrounded by faded ancestral photographs, Mohyeldin listened as one man after another described a town both familiar and utterly transformed. A few hours later we drove back to Cairo. The battered village roads gave way to a four-lane highway, studded with billboards advertising golf courses and gated communities built under the old regime. The traffic thickened, and soon we were on the edge of Tahrir Square, with its tangle of honking cars and barking vendors. The tent cities of the revolution were gone, the ecstatic chanting crowds long faded. But tattered banners still hung from the streetlamps and cornices. “We made the Republic of Tahrir,” one of them said. “Now let us make Egypt.”
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The New York Times Magasine
