The hotel at the top of the mountain was reachable only on foot or on the back of a mule. I was too tired to walk and chose the mule. It was strange that although I didn’t have much faith in people at that moment, I trusted this animal to carry me safely over the loose stones to the summit.
The people who ran the hotel asked what I wanted for lunch and dinner. Aside from me, the only other guests were a French couple. My room had a chair, a small table, and a bed with a couple of blankets—it was very cold in the mountains at night. There was an attached bathroom and a balcony with a dazzling view. A far-off mountain was covered in snow and ice, while the nearby peaks were brown and rocky. You could see people’s houses in the village below. The air was clear and smelled of wood smoke. I heard a rooster crowing, but no cars.
For two days I left my room only to spend time alone on the hotel terrace, which also had a magnificent view of the region. I stared into the sky while drinking cups of sweet Moroccan mint tea.
Though I’d brought my Kindle with me, I hadn’t switched it on since we’d been released from our detention in Egypt. Now I wanted to read one of the many books I’d downloaded. I charged the battery and turned it on. Then I noticed something odd. The Kindle said that I had made it to the end of Why Men Love Bitches, the book I’d mentioned to Nick, even though I had just started reading it when the intelligence service took my belongings.
There on the terrace, I burst out laughing so hard I cried. I pictured our interrogators going through the book all night, maybe expecting some juicy stories, only to find out that it was a book of advice for single women.
Nick and I returned to Cairo later that spring, two months after President Mubarak stepped down. Immigration took a long time checking my passport, but I was finally let in.
When I reached the friends’ home where I was staying, I saw that I’d received an email from Marwan: “Hi. How are you? I’m also in Cairo.” Was he tracking my movements? Was he trying to intimidate me? Did he think I would leave?
I didn’t want to spend the rest of my trip wondering. I decided to take a drastic step.
A European source had given me the name of the coordinator for security and intelligence services at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. He was one of the people who supposedly had connections to all the security services there. I decided to visit him.
In his office, I told him that, as he surely already knew, my colleague and I had been through a hellish experience in his country. “We came back because we need to finish the research for our book,” I said. “We are not hiding anything. Everybody knows we are journalists, and everybody knew this last time we were here, too.”
He nodded and asked if I wanted to smoke. I declined, but told him to go ahead. He lit a cigarette. I told him that I had received a message from my former jailer and wanted his guidance about what this could mean. He looked at me and smiled. “Maybe he just wanted to let you know that he and his friends are making sure you are safe,” he said.
“Am I safe here? Are my colleague and I safe here, or will we be targeted by your services again?”
He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “I don’t know many people who would have the guts to come here to me after an experience like the one you had.”
He stood up and excused himself, saying he had to make a phone call.
After a few minutes, he reappeared. “You are most welcome in Egypt, Miss Souad. Here is my mobile number. If you ever have any problems, call me.”
Nick and I spent the next few weeks working. We finished our book research without any interference from the security services. I never heard from Marwan again.
10
This Is Not an Arab Spring
Germany and Tunisia, 2011
Along with the rest of the world, I spent the first half of 2011 watching the Middle East erupt. In January, a month after the Tunisian fruit seller, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, triggering nationwide protests, Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali resigned after twenty-three years in office. In February, shortly after Nick and I left Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak was deposed after thirty years in power. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was battling a vigorous armed opposition in a conflict that would engulf that country. And in Syria a movement to overthrow Bashar al-Assad was beginning. The international community pledged support to the rebel groups, and the whole region was flooded with weapons.
At the beginning, I’d shared in the general optimism I’d felt among the demonstrators, whose message was, “We want a change in our country, and this is why we are protesting.” I understood their anger and their feeling that they needed to mobilize more people so that their voices and their message could be heard. For decades, the leaders of some of these countries had spoken out against monarchies, claiming to be republics or democracies. But while they might have technically been so, in reality small elites held all the power. Friends of the presidential family grew richer while others stayed poor. They might as well have been kingdoms. Moreover, some Arab leaders had underestimated the influence of social media in their countries. They did whatever they could to control the local press, but the growing availability of the Internet had given their people other sources of information and new ways to communicate.
As the revolutions unfolded, however, I grew increasingly troubled by the way the “Arab Spring” was being covered in the international press and what Western leaders were saying about it. People seemed to believe that the countries of the Middle East would now transform themselves overnight into open, Western-style democracies. In many cases, this was what the protesters said they wanted. But putting it into practice would be an immensely complicated decades-long project, which no one seemed to be talking about. I sensed that many in the West—and some in the Arab world as well—had given themselves over to magical thinking.
Sometime in late winter or early spring, I got an urgent-sounding text message from an imam in Berlin whom I’d known for a couple of years: “Salam Souad, can you call me? It’s important.”
“I see more and more young people inside my community who say they will go and fight jihad,” he told me when I reached him.
“So what’s new?” I responded. For more than a decade there had been a steady stream of young Muslim men seeking to fight in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, following the path of the September 11 attackers.
“They are not planning to go to Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he answered. “They are talking about Libya or Syria.”
“But who do they want to fight?” I asked him. “What jihad?”
“I don’t know, but there is someone here you should meet. We call him Abu Maleeq. I think his real name is Denis, but people know him as the rapper Deso Dogg.”