“Was Suzanne surprised by the revolution?” I asked.
“She didn’t realize how bad things were,” Hassan said in a plaintive voice. She spoke about the revolution and its effects on her as if she were part of a company that had been downsized.
“They loved her!” she said. “Why people turn so quickly from support to extreme criticism overnight is very strange.”
The West had also celebrated Suzanne from afar. As the Mubaraks often justified their thirty years of rule by invoking the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, Suzanne presented herself as a secular-minded woman who protected women’s rights, and would counter the pernicious effects of Islamic fundamentalism. “Egyptian at Center on Rights of Women,” went one New York Times headline in 2000. But feminists I sat with in Cairo said that Suzanne had not been a champion of women. In a country where women lacked basic rights, Suzanne always stuck to a conservative platform of “family values.” (The phrase was championed by Erdo?an as well, though a Turkish feminist once told me he swiped the language from the playbook of the Republican Party of the United States.) One evening in Cairo, Nawal El Saadawi, one of Egypt’s foremost feminist activists, sat with her long, white braid in the middle of a modest apartment, surrounded by fellow activists, and told me that the Mubarak regime in fact sidelined, banned, and harassed feminist NGOs. “They really fragmented the feminist movement,” she said. The mandate of the National Council for Women—Suzanne’s organization—was to be the only representative of Egyptian women.
Dr. Amal Abdel Hadi from the New Woman Foundation spoke of Suzanne in the same way. “All the very vibrant movements were crushed, very harshly,” she said. A pattern of co-optation was established. “We worked hard on establishing the woman’s right to pass the Egyptian nationality onto their children even if their husband is not Egyptian. From the Mubaraks, there was a strong resistance. Suzanne claimed that the President said it was a national security issue, and we’ll never do that. Until the last moment they were against it.
“And then suddenly they were for it! So the law was changed. It became their victory—all the women’s organizations worked for years to bring something she had opposed, and then they took it over! If you were calling for a radical change, they opposed you. If you were going to succeed, then they appropriated it.”
Amal Abdel Hadi was describing only one aspect of the Mubaraks’ relationship to civil society. From afar, outsiders heard about the violence, about imprisonments, repression, and torture in Egypt—all of which should have been a searing enough indictment of the U.S.-backed regime. But what Abdel Hadi was elucidating were the more subtle—and to foreigners almost invisible—ways in which a dictatorship worked. Once again, as in Turkey under the Kemalists, the illusion of Westernization that the Mubaraks projected for their American patrons was the opposite of liberation.
“Suzanne wasn’t a feminist, that’s for sure,” Abdel Hadi said. “She was pro women’s rights, but she acted in a way that’s not really for women’s rights. If you dismantle the feminist movement, then women’s rights will not come to communities like ours. Feminism is not a popular issue. It needs a lot of work and it needs a real movement. She wasn’t an anti–women’s rights person. But she’s not a human rights defender. And she’s not a feminist. She was doing this as part of her personal glory.”
*
THE REVOLUTION TOOK the Mubaraks by surprise, people told me, because they saw Egypt through a gilded peephole. For them, cars were towed, walls scrubbed, flowers planted, grass grown, Egyptians bribed to smile. When Suzanne arrived at unfamiliar buildings for meetings, her staff replaced the soaps in the bathrooms. Roads in a city of clamorous traffic would be shut down for their convoys. Egyptians offered various explanations for the Mubarak psychosis—absolute power begets corruption, the oligarchs insisted they stay, the Mubaraks believed Egypt would crumble without them. On some basic level, however, all such ideas made sense and strained credulity at the same time: What kind of people, even out of self-preservation, wouldn’t notice how much they were despised?
I went to meet one of Suzanne’s family friends at his office in Zamalek. It is an upscale neighborhood with an air of colonial romance, though outside the window traffic blared as if a fleet of garbage trucks dumped their wares all at once. The man’s elegant demeanor—he was handsome, and smoked as if the cigarette were but another of his elegant appendages—was accompanied by a steadily building sense of menace in his words. Since his family had been close to the Mubaraks, I had expected that he would defend them, but he, like many others, had lived a double life: the one in which you survived under a regime, and the one in which you despised it.
“I want to emphasize that my opinion of her from what I know personally and from my dealings with her is completely different from my political opinion,” he said. “I knew her very well. She and my mother went to the same school, they remained very good friends all along. She was a very shrewd woman, serious, cultured and interested in culture, and somewhat charismatic.”
“What was important to her?” I asked.
“Housing for the poor, poverty alleviation, education for children, literacy,” he said. “I must tell you I genuinely believe she meant well, she wanted to have a better educational system and combat poverty, and she wanted to meet and talk to people, but the security measures were simply insane, which caused them to be isolated.”
“People have said that they barely knew Egyptians.”
“I must tell you, it is not the person as much as the institution,” he said. “I have seen the gradual change through the years—I have seen what they were and what they have become. It is not only them; it is this whole system that caters to godlike people—that caters to people who are worshipped.