“There’s only so much you can do to resist that, and in thirty years you cannot, so you become so isolated, you become literally insane. Privilege comes with a wide range of people who feed it. I have never seen so much corruption and audacity, or such a widening of the gap between rich and poor, or such a horrific police state, one that only cares about the privileged, like I have seen during this regime. When was the last time they touched a car handle? When was the last time she actually saw money? Do they have a wallet? It is a life that is so corrupting. I am really blaming a culture and a system for putting unprepared people in such high positions. I don’t blame the people because they are very ordinary people.
“But when you allow your close entourage to be what it was—villains—then that says something about you. We didn’t know the magnitude of the corruption. It is horrific. Egypt became like a little farm or something, it wasn’t a state anymore. Talk to me about gas, talk to me about all these state security companies, talk to me about wheat, about petroleum—this is where money is, this is where the corruption is.”
“Do you think she approved of the violence against the protestors during the revolution?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought this kind of violence against protestors could be a solution for them to stay,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. We know the Muslim Brotherhood was subjected to the most brutal torture. It was taken for granted that the Mubaraks would run Egypt forever. They thought they were the only people holding the country together, and if they left, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over. They actually believed that, one hundred percent. I think she was a woman of duty.”
I wondered if before the revolution, he would have felt comfortable talking about them this way to a journalist.
“No, I would not feel comfortable criticizing them to a journalist. When they were upset with you, it was their bodyguards who would take care of it. It’s not them, it’s the institution. They have very innovative ways of destroying people.”
He kept saying that same thing: “It’s not them, it’s the institution.” The “institution” he conjured was one that had been built of forces enormous and historical, something beyond the Egyptian people’s control.
*
THE YEAR AFTER the regime fell in 2011, it appeared the Muslim Brotherhood was poised to take power after the country’s first democratic elections in decades, which filled many Egyptians with fear. Since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic network had functioned like a parallel society—richer members provided its poorer members with food, medicine, and clothing through annual financial donations, and millions of Egyptians sought refuge in the Brotherhood’s supportive social networks. The organization’s goal was to create, through proselytizing, a nation that fulfilled the dictates of God’s law.
When Hassan al-Banna and later Sayyid Qutb led the Muslim Brotherhood in the early to midcentury, one of their primary motivations had been to resist Western imperialism, first British, then American. These men, like many of the peoples from the countries of the former Ottoman Empire, had been dismayed by the Americans’ betrayal of the Arabs after World War I. The texts Qutb wrote in jail were radical enough that they would eventually inspire al-Qaida. For thirty years, Hosni Mubarak was able to use the Brotherhood’s existence as justification for his undemocratic policies: it was either Mubarak, a corrupt dictator who tortures and loots but accepts America’s military aid, or the Brotherhood, religious fanatics who hate Israel.
One evening, I visited one of the Brotherhood’s financiers, Hassan Malek, in Heliopolis, a neighborhood of high-end shopping malls and Italian restaurant chains, modern apartment buildings and ornate nineteenth-century villas. Under Mubarak, Malek had spent four years in “prisons not fit for animals, let alone for humans.” Inside the Malek family’s apartment, a large, brown stretch of leather on the wall had been engraved with the ninety-nine names of Allah. Malek’s twenty-six-year-old son passed out chocolates and talked about how “everyone should help their country.” His sixteen-year-old daughter shyly displayed her artwork, a portrait of a woman with long hair. Another son played peekaboo with the toddler, who ran around screaming. The Maleks gave off an earnest “ask not what your country can do for you” vibe, as if dispatched to the twenty-first century from a less cynical era.
That evening, Malek was concerned about the demands of the IMF to reform the economy, which for the Egyptians sounded in many ways like the West’s crippling economic demands in the past.
“We don’t have a preconceived position against the IMF,” he said. “But they have to listen to us. They can’t impose on us conditions that are not good for Egypt. We will deal with the Egyptian society in a transparent way. Our society should become self-reliant from now on. I believe that the West and particularly the United States furthered the injustice that befell us because they supported the regime,” he said.
“And even despite that, we are willing to turn the page completely, even with America, but under one condition: that they too change the way they deal with our country and our people.”
Those weeks, I met more leftist dissidents and Muslim Brothers imprisoned by the Mubaraks, the heads of anti-poverty NGOs and feminist NGOs, the former dean of Al-Azhar, people suing Suzanne Mubarak for illegally purchasing villas, young activists who broke from the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis who had lived in the United States, labor organizers who had been protesting long before the revolution, young women attacked in Tahrir Square. Corruption and torture and repression were common themes of our conversations, but even more prevalent were references to international economic policies. I began to know what people were about to say before they said it. Implicit in all of these statements was a recognition of American power.
We are sick of aid conditional on turning a blind eye to Israel.
They give us money and tell us what to do.
The Sinai is underdeveloped because the Camp David agreement says we can’t populate it or develop it, because that makes Israel feel safer.
The “international economic network” that forced structural reforms caused the disaster that resulted in the revolution.
Part of the revolution was because of corruption but also because of poverty.
Before structural reforms, we had a productive economy.
Foreigners are working in Egypt and sending their money abroad; we have a skilled population and nowhere to work.
We want a relationship based on fairness with Israel.
They’re taking 25 to 40 percent of our oil reserves in exchange for developing them. We don’t do it ourselves.