Egypt Feature: "The Struggle is Far from Over" (Worth)

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 27 May 2011Robert Worth writes for The New York Times:

On a recent Wednesday morning, Zakaria Moh­yeldin steered his father’s black Skoda sedan through a thick belt of Cairo traffic and drove northward into the sleepy farmland of the Nile Delta. Mohyeldin, a tall, broad-shouldered 27-year-old with a jutting chin and a thicket of jet-black hair, had just quit his job as a stockbroker trainee. The revolution was almost three months old, and the hard work was just beginning, he told me. Mohyeldin had seen his life transformed during those amazing 18 days: battling police in clouds of tear gas, ferrying food to the protesters in Tahrir Square and cheering in awe as Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh, was cast out in a youth-led revolt. Now he wanted to see what he could do to spread the revolution’s high ideals in Egypt’s agricultural heartland. And he was vaguely contemplating a political career, starting in the village of Kafr Shukr, where his grandfather, a former prime minister, was born.

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.

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