On the morning of the strike, “the security apparatus arrested everyone I knew,” Maher said, erasing the protest before it could start. The authorities caught up with Maher one morning soon thereafter. Unmarked cars surrounded him. Agents blindfolded Maher, tied his hands and beat him with fists and batons.
“You think you can hide from us?” an agent said. “We can make you disappear.”
Before they let him go two days later, Maher had suffered electric shock and beatings — and then the agents pivoted. “You can be head of a small political party,” a “good cop” promised. “We can be friends.”
Maher instead announced his ordeal to the world. He resumed blogging, writing about educated Egyptians who couldn’t get work because they lacked connections, about censorship, about corruption such as that which initially drove him to activism: At his first job, he was crushed to learn that his design firm’s plans for modern roads would be ignored because public contracts went to the president’s cronies.
Now, Maher watched the news from Tunisia as it hopped across hundreds of Facebook pages. He decided to capitalize on the moment, recruiting friends to help plan the first big protests in Tahrir Square, the sprawling traffic circle between Cairo’s colonial-era downtown and the banks of the Nile. They used Facebook to consult with Tunisians, learning how to defend themselves against tear gas (vinegar and Pepsi, applied to the eyes) .
It was all about momentum, Maher believed. If the crowds kept growing, the pressure on the regime would become unbearable. They picked a day to strike — Jan. 28. To disperse the police, he devised a plan to enter the square from a dozen directions.
That afternoon, a precision-choreographed procession headed toward the square, new groups joining at every turn. In Imbaba, a working-class section of mid-rise apartments, women leaned out windows banging pots and pans. Along the way, police tear-gassed the marchers, yet at each intersection, new arrivals were moved to the front to relieve those already hit with gas.
Maher stayed at the square for 18 days, on the street and at the operations center, an impossibly crammed office in an art deco building. He left only once, to see his daughter on her third birthday; on that day, police raided the operations center, arresting nearly everyone.
Night after night, Maher sat knee to knee with people from across Egypt’s invisible boundaries, Marxists and wealthy people and devout Muslim Brotherhood members.
He was surprised to see that some Islamists — which make up Egypt’s only large, organized opposition — were not radical terrorists but frustrated young men hungry for change.
“For years, the Egyptian voter only had two options — a corrupt regime or us,” said Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood youth movement. He relished walking through the crowds at Tahrir Square to see sheltered religious men in deep conversation for the first time with intellectuals, secular people and others they had formerly shunned. “Now they will have five or six choices, and they are already falling away [from the Brotherhood] in great numbers.”
Those heady days of January created a contact high of optimism. But now, as Egypt’s military rulers work toward elections, many groups that met on the square have returned to their own corners — intellectuals at smoky cafes, Islamists at their spare offices, the upper middle class at the country clubs along the Nile. Back among their own, they worry that the instability that revolution brings will prove difficult to reverse.
The Gezira Sporting Club is an oasis of green, privilege and calm — probably the only spot in Cairo where rules against honking your horn not only exist but are obeyed — across the bridge from the defiance and daring of Tahrir Square. Created by British military forces that firmed up control of Egypt in the early 1880s, the club was a place where, as a 1923 guidebook put it, “the natives are not welcomed.” Today, Egyptians run the place, but there remains an air of exclusivity. Waiters tend to parents who relax poolside as hard-driving coaches time their children’s laps.
Like many at the club, Ali Abdel Ghaffar, 42, a real estate developer, spent the revolution simultaneously cheering on the protesters and worrying if regime change might blow up his comfortable life. He went to the square once, just to see the scene, and then went home to join neighbors guarding their housing development, since the police had vanished.
Ghaffar did well under the old regime, progressing through high posts at foreign enterprises Mubarak had courted for Egypt. Ghaffar was an executive at Egyptian branches of General Motors, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Kodak.
By the time Ghaffar went out on his own, selling houses in gated communities on Cairo’s sandy edges, he was part of a system that now stands accused of corruption.
“Billions and billions were kicked back to people in the housing ministry,” Ghaffar said. “I never bribed anyone, but the culture was one of ‘baksheesh’ ” — of favoritism and bribery.
These days, “I go to work and nothing’s happening,” Ghaffar said. “No one’s coming to look at properties. There are no police. We’re trying to live our normal lives, but it’s like someone opened a smelly can of worms and now we have to deal with that.”
The poolside talk is about whether it’s safe for the kids to go to school, and about members of the Mubarak family who still come to the club, though some will no longer look them in the eye. Yet life goes on — girls who don’t cover their hair run drills on the hoops court, and girls who do chatter happily on the tetherball courts.
Ghaffar expects years of disarray, but in the end, he said, “Egypt will become another Turkey, an Islamic country that knows how to do business and be tolerant. I love Turkey. There’s beer in the pubs and moderate Muslims in the government. If it doesn’t work here, maybe we’d move there.”
Maher sees Egypt turning into a battleground — of ideas, but now also of fists and guns.
“I miss the square,” he said, and he’s determined to keep his movement alive. “We’re studying pressure groups now, looking at a group in the States. They are called the tea party.”
Fifteen hundred miles from Mohammed Bouazizi’s fruit cart, in the gentle hills above the Jordan River, a swelling tide of complaints about corruption, the secret police, rising prices and privatization of public services has led not to revolution but to a slow drip of small protests.
In Jordan, Muhammed al-Sunaid worked for years without complaint — like Bouazizi — without any prospect of improving his family’s lot. And like the Tunisian who inspired Arabs to rise up, Sunaid, who drove a bulldozer for the farm bureau, reached a breaking point.
Last spring, Sunaid, 34, traveled from his mud hut on the crest of a hill overlooking barren fields to the nearby market town of Madaba. He hoped to appeal to Jordan’s agriculture minister to consider the plight of his neighbors who pay rent of 100 dinars (about $140) a month but earn only 90 dinars.
Police blocked Sunaid before he could enter the place where the minister was to speak. As Sunaid called to the minister, he was cuffed, muzzled and hit — in front of 200 friends and neighbors.
Humiliated, Sunaid insisted on filing a complaint against the officer who hit him. Instead, he was sent to a secret court, which sentenced him to three months for insulting a public official and “causing a din that robs locals of their peace.”
When a group of retired military generals in Amman, Jordan’s sprawling, modern capital, heard about the budding revolt in the struggling countryside, they embraced Sunaid’s case, hoping it might inspire popular demand for reform.
Jordan, a country with no oil and few natural resources, “has always had poor people, of course, but the gap in incomes was nowhere near as great as now,” said Ali Habashneh, a retired general. “In recent years, the Royal Court has been closed to the people. The corruption is in plain view. We feel great danger coming.”
But Sunaid’s story, though widely told, produced no great uprising. Sunaid himself seeks only reform, not regime change. If King Abdullah II would visit the people and hear their stories, he would surely act, Sunaid said.
It is a refrain heard from the gleaming office towers of West Amman to the fraying old British colonial downtown in the city’s east, from corporate executives to the lowliest tea boy — if only the king knew what was really happening, reform would come. In the Royal Court, advisers say Abdullah is aware of the protests and plans to liberalize election laws this year, giving more power to voters.
At Amman’s small protests, that promise is denounced as inadequate, yet even the loudest protesters carve out a sacred space for the king. That reticence to criticize the monarch may reflect the fact that insulting the king is a crime in Jordan, but so is gathering a crowd without a permit, and people are increasingly brazen about breaking that law.
Jordan’s police, compared with Tunisia’s and Egypt’s, are not menacing. They hand out refreshments to protesters — juice boxes, water, nuts. In turn, protesters express fealty to the king. That reflects in part nostalgia for King Hussein, Abdullah’s father, whom many see as the creator of modern Jordan, and in part a common view of the monarchy as a deeply divided nation’s binding force.
In a country of 6 million, about half are Palestinians from the Jordan River’s West Bank and half are East Bankers, mostly of tribal background. Although many Palestinians carry Jordanian passports, few are citizens. Any discussion of expanding democracy in Jordan starts and stops with that question: What to do with the Palestinians? And then you’re on the prickly turf of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“And that is why the king is still sacred in Jordan,” said Basil Okoor, managing editor of Ammon News, a Web site that is gaining popularity — and scrutiny from state security — for its frank reporting. “We have two major identity groups and a lot of anger. The only thing that can save Jordan from a great deal of fragmentation is the monarchy. ”
Outside the Royal Palace one morning this month, hundreds of poor people appeared, taking the authorities by surprise. Traffic into Amman was snarled from every direction. Men and women in tribal garb — headdresses, long gowns and sandals, even in a cold, raw rain — pressed against each other on narrow sidewalks. Nearly everyone had a sheet of paper in hand, a photocopied application to the king.
“To His Majesty,” it said. “This subject seeks your help. My Master, I am very poor and I have a large family composed of . . .” — and then there was a blank for the supplicant to list dependents. “We have no one to supply us except God and Yourself.”
For hours, they arrived, and then cries and shouts swept through the crowd: There would be no handouts. It was all a rumor, spread the old-fashioned way. No Facebook, just gossip from people who heard from someone who knew someone who got 200 dinars (about $280) from the king.
Tafesh Hassan, a regal-looking man with sun-dried skin, raged as he recounted giving a taxi driver a quarter of his monthly disability benefit to get there.
“I cannot work,” he said, and he pulled down his pants to display a surgical scar. “Why do they humiliate and degrade us? My house has no pillars, nothing to hold it up anymore. We love the king, but those under him are corrupt. The ministers, they have no fear of God.”
A state security agent heard Hassan and chastised him: “No one in this country is poor. Everyone is taken care of by the Royal Court.”
After the agent walked away, Hassan wept. In a lowered voice, he said, “King Hussein would have come out to talk to us.”
Naziha Sawalha, 46, a widow raising seven children, paid two months’ salary for a taxi. “The whole village came, and now there is nothing,” she said.
She’s been following the news from Egypt, but she said no such uprising could happen here.
“We are under the patronage of his majesty,” she said. “The government gives us what we deserve.”
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