Imagining Otherwise In Egypt

Less than a month later -- on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004 -- a colleague dropped Qandil off at 3 a.m. near his home on the bustling road to the Pyramids. It was Ramadan again, the Muslim month of fasting when Cairo seems to stay up round-the-clock. A few minutes later, a car with four men barreled toward him and stopped. The men jumped out, blindfolded him and stuffed him in the back seat. The car then careened into Cairo's warrens, passing checkpoints unhindered.

"I thought I was a dead man," Qandil recalled.

During the hour-long ride, he remembered being given a clear message: "No more words about the big people," he was told. Next time he would be killed. A few minutes later, one of the men answered his cellphone. "Yes, sir," Qandil recalled him barking, as if answering an order.

The car stopped on the outskirts of the city, on the road toward Suez. Qandil said the men stripped and beat him, stole his cellphone and the equivalent of about $100, then left him lying in the desert at the side of the road. He eventually caught a ride back and later filed a complaint against the Interior Ministry, which denied any role. "It will stay forever in the court," he said glumly.

In his sparse downtown office, at the top of stone stairs, each step worn into an arched bow, the editor became angry as he recalled the incident many now see as a turning point for those frustrated by increasingly brutish repression. The government is, of course, not a democracy, he said; that implies freedom. But it's not a dictatorship, either, he added; that requires strength. "It's more like the rubble, the debris left behind," he said, his voice tinged with disgust.

'Enough, We've Had It!'

The past, sometimes imagined, haunts Cairo. From taxis outside Qandil's office, the songs of the late Abdel-Halim Hafez, with their woeful violin, drift along streets buckling under their own chaos. They mingle sometimes with the melodies of Um Kalthoum, a name usually uttered with nostalgia for the bygone era when Egypt reigned almost unchallenged in the Arab world. "Give me my freedom, set free my hands!" she sings in one popular song.

"This regime hasn't achieved anything in the last two or three decades, total stagnation in every aspect of life. You only need to walk a few minutes in the street," said Osama Ghazali al-Harb, an academic and editor who eventually resigned from the ruling National Democratic Party in protest. Frustration mounted in his voice. "Everything has deteriorated. Everything! Everything!"

In 2004, the anger of Harb, Qandil and others gave rise to a simple word: kifaya, enough. It was heard in taxis, drivers turning their engines off in the snarled and neglected streets. It was pronounced by activists enraged over the treatment of Qandil. It was whispered at the prospect of an unprecedented fifth term for Mubarak, who had once said he expected only to become head of Egypt Air or ambassador to Britain. And it was shouted at a protest that year that drew Seif, the young activist who began blogging about the demonstration, and al-Dowla, who recalled the word.

"It picked up like this," al-Dowla said, snapping her fingers. "Enough, we're fed up!" she said. "Enough, we've had it! Enough, leave us!"

The group formed during Maadi's Ramadan iftar soon became known as Kifaya. It issued its first declaration, a manifesto critical of the United States and Israel, as well as "the repressive despotism that pervades all aspects of the Egyptian political system." And on Dec. 12, 2004, the group held its first protest.

The demonstration was the first to be aimed solely at Mubarak. More than 500 men and women stood silently in front of the Supreme Court, many with yellow stickers over their mouths or on their chests. "Enough," the stickers declared in red.

"It was like I was dreaming," recalled George Ishaq, 68, a Christian high school principal who got his start as an activist during the 1956 Arab-Israeli war and soon became the group's leader. "It was the first time Egyptian people could listen to another vision."