SOME YEARS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, I visited Cairo as a tourist, taking the requisite camel ride to the pyramids, trying on Bedouin dresses in the souk, getting lost among the mummies in the antiquities museum. It was a short, superficial, and sensual trip, about which most of my memories are visual, including the shock of seeing blond American girl tourists in tight short shorts outside a mosque, which filled me with shame. The week before, I had flooded my downstairs neighbors by absentmindedly pulling at one of the haphazard pipes that lived on the outside of the apartment’s nineteenth-century walls, drenching the Turkish rugs that lined the stone floors, eliciting screams from below. I had no idea how to stop the water, so clueless was I to the phenomenon of central water controls in apartment buildings. I had no friends in the building to call on, and all my efforts to learn the language yielded few intelligible words as I screamed from my front door. I was dressed in my pajamas, a tank top and shorts, and terrified of running out and exposing myself that way, so I stood for a while before the pipe, trying to hold it together with my hands as the water belted me like a hose. I was lonely and clumsy, wreaking havoc on things I knew nothing about. There was no worse feeling in a foreign country; it was easy for such small, manifestly human events to take on heavy symbolic significance. Random things said to me on a touristic visit seemed weighted with significance, too, as when, one evening in Cairo, a young activist told me he admired the Turks because “they built their Metro themselves.”
We were walking through the center of the city at night, the streets empty, craning to admire the marble colonial facades that had survived the fires of the late colonial era and the poverty of Mubarak’s. The Egyptian activist had been in jail before for criticizing the regime. The Turks didn’t have foreigners build their Metro for them, he said. I was not sure that was true, but I got the point; Turkey was seen as a more independent country, a country that built itself. Yet, at the time, I didn’t know what this statement meant in the Egyptian context, or what it meant more broadly. My understanding of global economic systems was still so limited that instead I was surprised the Egyptians did not build their Metro themselves—who else would have done it? (The French, and others.) We Westerners talked of Istanbul’s sea views. Egyptians spoke of its metros.
Turkey was in fact building more metros, more bridges, more airports, more office parks. By the time of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Istanbul’s city limits were exploding with development, office towers shooting up as if in some real-time video sequence. Turkish friends saw the European side of Istanbul from a boat on the Bosphorus and noted how striking this new stock-market-graph skyline was, how there used to be hills carpeted green here and poofs of trees there. Everywhere there was the knocking of hammers and hum-screeching of saws; festivals and biennials; decrepit buildings sandblasted into hotels overnight. Western cities, cowering shamefully from the financial crisis, suddenly, according to countless travel articles, seemed places of the past—the new world was east.
That time in Turkey was exuberant, people and places came alive as if they had been mummified in the amber of Kemalism and now were free again. The old Ottoman bank building in my former neighborhood, the bank receipts and handwritten notes of Armenians and Greeks collecting dust in its basement, was turned into a multimillion-dollar art space called Salt, where Arabic script had been carved into the marble: “He who earns money is God’s beloved servant.” Its founder, Vas?f Kortun, told me the Turks didn’t know their own history, and now they had the means and freedom to discover it; Kortun put on exhibits about Armenian photographers, the 1980 military coup, defunct leftist literary magazines. “In New York it feels like the best years are behind us,” a woman from New York said. “In Istanbul it feels like the best years are yet to come.” Turkish friends counseled caution. “Many of the reasons the West thinks a place like Istanbul is optimistic is linked to the idea of private money achieving things,” one artist told me. “Yes, private money is doing things right now, but it’s too early to know whether it will benefit artists. It hasn’t been tested. If Western history is a guide, it will find that in capitalist societies, consumer culture is not a way to find new ways of living. For this Istanbul could be interesting. We’re a very young country. And when you’re young you tend to believe in ideals.”
There was a disconcerting paradox at the heart of Turkey’s prosperity, which was achieved to a large degree because the government was selling off all the country’s public works companies. In the shadows, in vastly complicated and inscrutable judicial maneuverings and police actions, the optimism of democratic beginnings was being steadily undermined by a leader both insecure and arrogant. The Gülenist allies of the government that had come to dominate the judiciary had been mounting aggressive cases against secularists, and countless journalists and military officers once associated with the old secularist regime languished in jail. The Gülen movement had seeped into the police force and intelligence departments and was wiretapping everyone’s phones. The AK Party seemed to be taking control of every institution in the country, just as Rana had warned.
Yet to the outside world, Erdo?an equaled stability. Turkey looked good. In fact, in the eyes of policy makers and journalists, Erdo?an’s Turkey had gone from being the secular model for Iraq before the invasion to an Islamic-democratic model for the entire Arab world: some religion, some democracy, some investment-fueled economic growth. Pundits called it the Turkish model, an example of an Islamic country that managed to become democratic. But the analysis hinged on multiple false assumptions. Turkey had always been, and still was, an authoritarian country with democratic electoral processes. Unlike the Arab world, Turkey was never colonized by foreign powers, or humiliated by Israel, and it rarely appeared to be overly subservient to the United States. It always maintained an illusion and a narrow reality of democratic and economic participation. Even with four military coups and decades of violence, a certain confidence and pride in Turkishness prevailed. Turks had not suffered in the way the Arabs had, and it did not have the same grievances.
Before the invasion of Iraq, protests had erupted around the Arab world. The journalist Anthony Shadid said that in conversation with Arabs at that time, he rarely heard the word “freedom”; instead, Arabs talked about “justice.” I don’t think that by 2011, when Egyptians filled Tahrir Square, the Americans cheering them on knew the difference between those two words. By the time Mubarak resigned, many Americans watching from afar believed this to be a righteous conclusion to a thrilling revolution. They thought themselves the kind of people who supported democratic protest, and as I watched the Egyptians dancing in the streets I did not feel the shame I had when I saw bare, fleshy American legs outside a mosque, or that I felt while flooding my neighbor’s apartment with dirty pipe water, because in the case of the Egyptians I had not at all been conscious of the history that we shared.
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IN THE FALL OF 2011, six months after the revolution, I went to Egypt to write about the legacy of Suzanne Mubarak, Hosni’s wife and fellow dictator of thirty years. I was consumed with the narrow details of the story: Did she oppose his policies, was she an advocate for women’s rights, where was she now? I saw her as an evil woman, an easy villain. Suzanne, sequestered somewhere with Hosni and her sons, wouldn’t give me an interview, so I spent my days among her associates and antagonists. One of them I visited on a sun-dappled street in the upscale neighborhood of Mohandeseen, its weeping willow trees with limbs like ballet dancer arms sweeping the streets.
Suzanne’s right-hand woman, Farkhonda Hassan, was sitting inside the new office of the National Council for Women, which had been Suzanne’s most important initiative; the old offices on the Nile had been set on fire during the protests. Hassan was bemoaning the new space, as if a revolution hadn’t just happened.
“You should have seen our old building!” she cried. “We had three floors! They were so beautiful. And everyone had their own office.”