November 25, 2011
It was Friday today, and Tahrir Square was packed. It was in a mix of every mood I have seen it in over the past ten months: politically focussed, “The people want to topple the Marshal!”; carnival-like, with face painters and food stalls; determined, with tents and supplies and field hospitals; organized, with volunteers checking bags and I.D.s at the entrances; thuggish, with plenty of knots of young kids from poor neighborhoods; and creative: a new sign had been erected for Mohamed Mahmoud Street, renaming it, “The Street of the Eyes of Freedom”—a reference to the many who had lost their eyesight from police birdshot.
The army has built a wall out of concrete blocks on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Doctors in white coats stand on top, as a volunteer cease-fire line. In the streets and alleys leading up to the charred stretch where the tear gas and rocks rained over between protesters and police for five days, protesters now man barbed-wire barricades, stopping kids and passersby from coming too close and provoking the authorities. The police have withdrawn; the army has replaced them, and there is a truce. But the wall that separates the crowds on Tahrir from the Military Council is actually a gulf of generation, perception, and culture. The violence may have stopped for the moment, but the clarion call for a transfer to civilian rule has not.
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November 23, 2011
Faced with thousands on Tahrir Square, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces turned to tactics that look very much like they have been copied straight from Hosni Mubarak’s playbook. In the course of his rambling, self-justifying, calm-down-we-are-pretending-to-promise-concessions speech last night, Tantawi evoked, as his former boss once did, the spectre of foreign forces at work, agitating Egyptians in the service of their own agendas. “Some powers,” he warned ominously, vaguely, “are trying to bring down the trust between the Armed Forces and the people of Egypt, and they are targeting the fall of the Egyptian State.” A hangover from the Mubarak era is a suspicion that any foreigner could be an Israeli or a spy, especially if he or she is carrying a camera. On the square over the past couple of days, I have been increasingly stopped and questioned by protesters. Who is she? they ask my translator. What is she doing here? Get her out of here! There are foreigners creating trouble here! We stop and remonstrate and reason and usually they end up apologizing: They were only making sure—did we hear the report on state TV that three foreigners were arrested in Mohamed Mahmoud Street? We should take care! The three were foreign American University of Cairo students, and they were released, but their presence on state TV news and in the rumor mill, in these tense times, ratcheted up the xenophobia.
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November 23, 2011
For the first time since he assumed the executive position as de facto president when Mubarak fell, Field Marshal Tantawi addressed the Egyptian people yesterday. He appeared on television, seated, reading from a prepared speech. He gave as uncharismatic and flat a delivery as you might expect from a man chosen to be the Defense Minister of a dictator who had fired his predecessor for being too popular. He gave no particular concessions—elections should go ahead; a new unnamed “government of salvation” would take over in the meantime—and seemed to be appealing more to the people at home than the thousands in Tahrir Square. The transition period was very difficult, he said, and it was not easy trying to plot a way through it. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces had done its best; it had never had any intention of staying in power; SCAF and the Army existed only to serve the Egyptian people and to defend Egypt, he added. Of course, he continued, the “government of salvation” should “work in coöperation with SCAF.” He ended by saying that SCAF would be willing to transfer authority immediately, through a referendum, if needed.
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November 22, 2011
A pall of tear gas hangs over Tahrir Square. The two-dollar gas masks being hawked by entrepreneurial vendors work quite well, but many people can’t afford them and use paper surgical masks or simply wrap scarves over their faces. Everywhere there are volunteers spraying saline into protesters’ red and streaming eyes, or handing out tissues. A million-man march was called for this afternoon and, as I write, thousands are streaming into the square, forming a crowd as dense as I have seen it since the final days of the revolution in February. The crowd is thickest near the entrance to Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which runs from between the landmarks of the American University in Cairo and a Hardees restaurant to the Interior Ministry two or three blocks away. Protesters have been battling state-security police there for four days.
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November 21, 2011
Update added.
Dusk on the third day of violent clashes in Tahrir Square, and the crowd is only growing larger and more determined. The state security police have tried two or three times to take the square and have had to retreat, behind a cordon of tear gas, to the streets around the Interior Ministry, a couple of blocks away.
“Everyone is angry,” Shahira Mubarak, a young English tutor, told me. She is one of many who occupied Tahrir in February and have now returned to defend it. “You can sense it. Everyone has lost patience. The more violent they are, the more people come.”
As night fell, there were as many people on the square as I saw at the height of the revolution—tens of thousands—and as the working day ended more were arriving. Most, but not all, were young men, many with red eyes in ghostly faces, caked with the white residue of a sugar, flour, and vinegar paste applied as protection against the tear gas. Some had bandaged eyes; some construction hats. I saw one man wearing a welder’s helmet. A vendor was selling safety goggles—the kind a high-school chemistry class might use—and surgical masks. (My translator went to buy gas masks this morning. “Oh, you are the revolutionaries!’ a policeman in the shop said. My translator braced himself for a tirade, but instead the policeman embraced him: “God keep you safe! We are all with you!”
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November 20, 2011
In July, the last time there was a sit-in on Tahrir Square, the Army did not react for more than a week. Then one of the generals on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, Field Marshal Mohsen El-Fangary, gave a press conference and, from behind a podium, urged Egyptians to return home and resume their regular lives. He was clearly frustrated with the protests blocking the street and disrupting the economy, and at one point he wagged his finger, admonishing Egyptians like a school master. Everyone laughed, but the gesture became an infamous one. The image of a regime, the authorities, telling citizens what was good for them, that they knew best, had been toppled along with Mubarak. Graffiti artists lampooned Fengary and his finger on walls around Tahrir.
In the summer, the atmosphere during the Tahrir sit-in was cinema clubs and revolutionary rock concerts, and although there was plenty of anti-SCAF sentiment, there was very little consensus about what to do next. On Friday, the crowd was enormous, Islamist, determined, and their message was very focussed: the Army must hand over to civilian power by April next year. The Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist (“sharia sharia”) salafis have waited patiently for a parliamentary elections to deliver them, what most expect to be a sizable, if not majority, chunk of legitimate power. In the meantime, they have generally stayed off Tahrir, so conspicuously that it looked to many that they had made a deal with the Army. But in recent weeks SCAF has said it will retain executive control after elections are concluded in January, and have been maneuvering to impose their own candidates and template for a Constitutional committee that was originally supposed to have been chosen by the new parliament. That was the cue for a showdown between the army and the Brotherhood.
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November 18, 2011
Tahrir Square was packed Friday. The crowd was as large and dense, with as much pushing and shuffling and squeezing as I have seen since the night Mubarak fell. Most of those present were Islamists, with untrimmed beards and close-shaved mustaches, wearing white knit prayer caps or the red tarboosh and white turban of scholars from Al Azhar, Cairo’s venerable Islamic University. Many, perhaps most, had come from distant governorates, in buses organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist organizations and parties.
I had lunch in Café Riche, just off the Square, where journalists and intellectuals used to gather in the old days, when the fight was against the British and the monarchy. Naguib Mahfouz used to preside over a weekly salon, and newly released political prisoners would borrow money from the head waiter. There was a secret door behind the bar, for escapes into the alley during police raids. Writers and commentators still meet there on Fridays. As I arrived, a well-known political cartoonist with a great gray bushy beard was giving an interview to a TV reporter.
“The intellectuals have lost,” he said, as a march of chanting Islamists, fists raised, went by in the street outside on the way to Tahrir. “Look at this!”
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November 4, 2011
Here is a concise history of the Egyptian constitution since the revolution:
- On February 11th the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, announced that President Mubarak had reigned and ceded executive power to them. According to the 1971 constitution, in the absence of a President, executive power is to be assumed by the Speaker of the Parliament. Two days later, the constitution was suspended.
- At the end of March, there was a national referendum on several amendments to the (suspended) constitution that would pave the way for parliamentary and presidential elections. Egyptians voted yes to these provisions.
- Some weeks later, the SCAF announced a “constitutional declaration.” It granted a number of rights and freedoms; however, all of these could be suspended. One sweeping clause, No. 56, seemed to award legislative, executive, and judicial power to the ruling Supreme Council.
- Two days ago, the Deputy Prime Minister, Ali Al Selmi, announced a “proclamation of constitutional principles.” Article 9 reads, in part, “Only the Armed Forces has the right to discuss matters related to the Armed Forces or discuss its budget … and the President can only declare war after gaining the consent of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.” It also provides that the Military Council will appoint eighty out of a hundred members of a new constitutional assembly, and the parliament only twenty. Since SCAF has already said that it will retain executive control over the cabinet, the Prime Minister, and the budget, it's hard to see what purpose the new parliament will have.
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October 31, 2011
In Cairo, it feels like the revolution is dying by a thousand cuts. There is dismay; the news is not good. I had some friends over for dinner, and everyone had a story to tell of how the regime—the system, the police, the state security, the Information Ministry, the military establishment—seemed to be increasingly reasserting itself.
A friend who blogs by the name The Big Pharaoh told me that he was worried about the position of Christians and of threats against his business—he markets Egyptian wine. The killing of twenty-four protesters, mostly Coptic Christians, run over by Army vehicles and shot with live bullets, outside Maspiro, the state TV building, on October 9th, has put Christians on high alert. I expressed the hope (wishful optimism, perhaps) that the sectarian intermix in neighborhoods, where Christians and Muslims often live side by side, precluded any real divide or violence. No, Big Pharaoh told me. There was pressure on liquor stores in conservative neighborhoods; on the night of the Maspiro violence groups of men, heeding the call by State TV to come and protect the Army from the Copts who were “attacking it,” had targeted Copt-owned stores downtown.
Nora Soliman, who is the spokesman for the new Justice party (and furiously campaigning for parliamentary elections, now scheduled for the end of November) said she had been part of an effort to organize a poll about “transitional justice”: How did people feel about the security services, about military trials for civilians, about the court system, about corruption? But she and others had received anonymous threats “to stop this project,” she said. “It’s typical Amn Dawla.” She was referring to the security police, who, despite a rebranding (from State Security to National Security) after the revolution, remain in place. “And of course people are frightened.”
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Graffiti portrait of Mina Daniel. 
Graffiti portrait of Mikail Nabil. 
Graffiti portrait of Alaa Abd Al Fattah.
