Imagining Otherwise In Egypt

Then came the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in September 2000, its images filtering across a landscape transformed by technology and energizing older activists such as al-Dowla. Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite television network, broadcast searing footage. A boycott of U.S. and Israeli goods was spread by the most modern of means: e-mail, the Internet and cellphones. The campaign gave rise to a student movement such as Cairo had not witnessed since the turbulent 1970s. What many saw as American aggressiveness in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks propelled it forward.

"We grew up under Nasser, so Palestine was part of our psyche, if you want," al-Dowla said. "But there was this new generation, our kids who did not live this. This was the amazing thing, the new generation."

"Those were the first protests we went to," said Alaa Seif, a stocky, bespectacled 25-year-old who did poorly in school but has a knack for computers, a testiness toward authority of any kind and the cockiness that comes with youth.

It wasn't until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, however, that Seif and his wife, Manal Hassan, felt inspired. Crowds indignant at the attack and Egypt's alliance with the United States, including the passage of U.S. warships through the Suez Canal, surged into Cairo's Liberation Square, converged on the ruling party's headquarters and tried to move on the U.S. Embassy, where they were blocked by phalanxes of helmeted Central Security Forces conscripts. Seif remembered someone tearing down a banner for Mubarak. Khalil, the veteran activist, recalled the president's portrait being set on fire. As the hours passed, anti-U.S. chants melded into a chorus of protests against Mubarak's government.

"I felt if we could keep that spirit for a while, we could challenge the government," Khalil said. "The conclusions were unanimous in a sense: Let's talk about Egypt. Let's talk about dictatorship. Let's talk about Mubarak. They're part of the same story."

Birth of a Movement

For 11 years, Abul-Ela Maadi has tried to win government approval for Egypt's first Islamic, albeit moderate, political party. His shelves are cluttered with binders, packed with thousands of articles and interviews by him and his followers attempting to prove that his brand of politics has a place in the mainstream.

Fond of Pierre Cardin suits and quick to smile, Maadi is a garrulous man whose friends defy categorization: Coptic Christians, devout Muslims, leftists and followers of both Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood. For years, he invited them and others to his home, a first-floor apartment with a view of the Pyramids, to share iftar, the traditional meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast. In November 2003, 22 people from across the spectrum attended, Marxists mingling with Islamic activists. After a sumptuous meal of stuffed pigeon and a soupy dish known as mulukhiya, they sat for hours over tea, addressing the question Maadi put forward.

"What can we do?" he asked.

In the months that followed, a journalist, Abdel-Halim Qandil, and others joined the group. They came up with a name, the Egyptian Movement for Change. But the question lingered, even as protests gathered force. In time, variants of it would prove most vexing for the emerging circle of activists: What could they do to transform the talk of a salon into a politics of the street? What role would the United States play? And how would the nascent group confront a state that, in times of crisis and perceived threat, proved itself all too willing to deploy the unassailable power of its security forces?

A Brusque Warning

As early as the 1990s, Egypt's smattering of opposition newspapers had begun challenging the government. But by 2004, even as Maadi's group formed and mounting protests voiced unprecedented criticism of a figure some simply call "the big man," attacks on Mubarak were still a red line the news media had not crossed. That made the columns of Qandil, a fast-talking, ascetic-looking editor with glasses, even more striking. There was little metaphor in his writings, the usual tool of critical Arab media. Instead, in the months after the question posed at the Ramadan meeting, Qandil bluntly put to his readers the suspicions on everyone's mind: Would Mubarak do away with any pretense that he presided over a republic and pass power to his son Gamal?

In el-Arabi, a leftist opposition newspaper, Qandil suggested that father and son represented "a dual presidency."

Mubarak's powers are "God-like," he wrote, critically.