Ruqayah crouched behind a sandbag wall, blinking away the sweat running into her eyes. The sun was directly overhead and the acrid smell of burning plastic stung the back of her throat. Shouts and screams rose thinly over gunfire, helicopter rotors and the rumble of armoured bulldozers.
It was the middle of August 2013, soon after the Eid feast that marks the end of Ramadan, and the security forces were clearing the huge protest camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Their tens of thousands of inhabitants were demonstrating against the removal of the president, Mohamed Morsi, in a military coup at the beginning of July. Beside Ruqayah huddled another teenage girl and a young man, pressed as close as they could get to the rough hessian of the sandbags. To the side, sprawled on the concrete with blood pooling around them, lay the bodies of two men who had been shot dead by police snipers.
“Don’t move until I tell you. Then, run,” the man told the two girls. Ruqayah nodded silently and waited, closing her eyes, clasping the other girl’s hand, for the brief silence that meant the shooters were reloading. She knew to bend double and run in zigzags to make herself a harder target. When she opened her eyes she saw other people – adults, teenagers and small children – crouching in the angle of walls, against cars, behind rough barricades of paving stones, anything that would protect them from the gunfire coming from the square and the snipers on the rooftops around them. Then one man, bearded and strongly built, stood up and spread his arms wide in defiance, facing the square.
“I won’t crawl,” he shouted. “Allahu Akbar!” Ruqayah squeezed her eyes shut again, but she heard his skull shatter as the sniper’s bullet struck.
“Now!” the young man told them and they dashed behind him, weaving left and right, for the shelter of a side street. Ruqayah was just 15, wiry and fleet, but the other girl was older and heavier. A bullet caught her in the leg and she fell as Ruqayah watched in horror. The girl crawled the last metres to them, leaving a trail of blood.
Six weeks earlier, on 30 June, hundreds of thousands of people had marched in Egypt’s major cities, demanding the resignation of their president. The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had been elected only a year earlier, in a run-off with a pro-army candidate, with 52% of the vote. At first, the anti-Morsi marches seemed like an echo of the popular demonstrations that had unseated the dictator Hosni Mubarak after three decades in power. The protesters even chanted the slogans of the 2011 revolution – “Leave, leave!”, “The people demand the fall of the regime!”. A movement named Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”), which had organised the protests, claimed to have gathered 22 million signatures for its petition demanding that Morsi resign and that a fresh presidential election be held. But while Tamarod appeared to be a grassroots organisation – its volunteers lining Cairo’s roads to collect signatures from drivers – behind the scenes, it was backed by powerful old‑regime figures in business and the military who wanted the president and the Muslim Brotherhood gone.
Egypt had been a military state since 1952, and the Brotherhood had been locked in a struggle with its rulers for almost as long. Until 2011, the organisation was banned and its members – along with anyone else suspected of sympathising with political Islam – were subject to surveillance, imprisonment, torture and even execution. The regime, led in succession by the military men Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, had reason to fear Islamists. Though the Brotherhood had renounced violence in the 1970s, in 1981 members of a jihadi group had assassinated President Sadat during a military parade barely 500m from where the Rabaa camp now stood.
Egypt’s then vice president Hosni Mubarak with Anwar Sadat at the military parade where Sadat would shortly be assassinated, October 1981. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Mubarak’s overthrow offered the Brotherhood a reprieve, and, newly legalised, it dominated the parliamentary elections of early 2012. In June that year, Morsi became Egypt’s first elected and first civilian president.
Now, the country was divided. On 30 June, as the Brotherhood’s enemies protested against Morsi and portrayed the group as fanatics intent on creating an Iranian-style Islamic state, supporters had organised their own, smaller marches in support of the president. In Cairo, these pro-Morsi demonstrations had settled at two protest camps: one at Rabaa, in the east, and one at al-Nahda Square in the west.
Ruqayah had been living in the Rabaa camp since 30 June. In 2011, she reasoned, the world had hailed the huge anti-Mubarak protests that filled Tahrir Square as an inspiring expression of freedom and democracy. After the revolution, the power should lie in the hands of the people. Why not in Rabaa too?
Some of Ruqayah’s family and friends were members of the Brotherhood, others sympathised with the organisation, and all had suffered directly or indirectly from the years of persecution. In spite of her youth, Ruqayah’s parents preferred to see their daughter stand up for justice than bow to the hated regime. The protesters at Rabaa were her people, and she felt it was her duty to help them.
With other high-school and university students, Ruqayah volunteered at the checkpoints at the camp’s perimeter, checking handbags and IDs as women entered, patting them down for hidden weapons or explosives. Her post was at the camp’s western edge.
After four chaotic days of street protests, the army finally executed what Egypt’s struggling factions had hoped or feared they would – a military coup. Ruqayah turned 15 on 3 July, the day that the army arrested Morsi and took him into custody. She was a quiet, studious girl who attended an Islamic high school, where she was trying to take her end-of-year exams while protesting. That morning, she finished her last algebra exam and went straight to work on her checkpoint. By late evening she was exhausted, but she stayed awake with the other volunteer guards to listen to the scheduled military statement on an old radio. Ruqayah wasn’t worried. Morsi was their rightful president. God would never let him be overthrown like the tyrant Mubarak.
Around Ruqayah, young men began crying to God for help. At midnight, they heard shooting in the darkness
But when she heard the chief of the armed forces General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi telling the nation that he had suspended the constitution, nominated an interim president and would schedule new elections in due course, she knew that what had happened was a coup. Around her, young men began crying to God for help. They had always seemed so strong, towering over Ruqayah and calling her “little sister”. Suddenly they looked weak and humiliated. At midnight, they heard shooting in the darkness as security forces surrounded the camp, sealing it off from the rest of Cairo. It was the first time Ruqayah had ever heard live gunfire. She dropped to her knees in fear, reciting Qur’anic verses and praying for God to protect them.
In concert with the coup, Islamist TV channels that supported the president were closed down. In the days that followed, the pro-army media broadcast endless hours of patriotic messages and vilification of Morsi and the Brotherhood. The majority of Egyptians, exhausted by 18 months of upheaval, seemed grateful for the return of the familiar certainties of military rule.
But there were many dissenters, too: among them, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamists, leftists and liberals. Not all of these groups supported Morsi – some were simply opposed to military rule or wanted to defend the democratic process. The camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda, organised and led by the Brotherhood, were their strongholds.
By early August, Rabaa was home to an estimated 85,000 protesters from across the country, housed in a hastily constructed tent city a kilometre across. They dreamed of reinstating their elected president and sending the army back to its desert barracks – and they were prepared to risk everything, with God’s help, to make that happen.
In the middle of the sit-in, I went to visit Rabaa. It was the fasting month of Ramadan and as mercilessly hot as a desert city in high summer could be. The army had blocked all the roads leading to the camp so I walked the last kilometre from the highway, skirting the tanks and weaving through the barricades the protesters had built from paving stones and bricks, until I reached the checkpoint where Ruqayah was stationed.
I had expected the mood in the camp to be sombre, but when I arrived, it was as festive as Tahrir at the height of the 2011 revolution. As I waited in the women’s line for entry, young men patrolled with backpack tank-and-hose kits, misting us with water to keep cool. The women and girls around me, all veiled and clad in heavy robes, were laughing and competing to be sprayed in the face.
Inside, the familiar intersection where I had often sat in snarled traffic was transformed. At ground level, the scale of the camp was breathtaking. Tents were neatly ranged along the centre of the street, tall square constructions of timber and blue plastic sheeting that were occupied by families lying on mats reading the Qur’an or sleeping until sunset, when they could eat and drink. On the pavements, street vendors grilled spits of chicken and sold water pistols, fruit and sunglasses. Banners proclaimed “Morsi is our legal president”, “My vote counts” and “Democracy v coup”. In front of the mosque that gave the square and the camp its name, the main stage, where a succession of speakers usually railed against the injustice of the coup, was playing Qur’anic recitation. The army’s supporters said that the camp’s residents had tortured and murdered people in the spaces under the stage, and that they kept caches of weapons and explosives there. When I climbed underneath its edge, all I could see was a dim, empty expanse of scaffolding.
The pro-Morsi protest camp at Rabaa al-Adawiya square in Cairo before the clearance. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
I sat in a homely tent with a group of women, all engineering lecturers and PhD students. They had wired electricity in from a nearby street light, set up fans and a small gas burner and hung up a neatly lettered banner reading “Engineers Against the Coup”.
“We’ll never leave,” said a dignified middle-aged woman who taught at a university in the Nile delta. “It’s a matter of our rights, dignity and democracy. Why should the army seize the country again, by force?”
“We’re ready to be martyred here,” said a younger woman. “We’d rather die free than live under this injustice. We know God will give us our rights, even if the army won’t.” The others nodded in agreement. Once you passed the checkpoints on the camp’s edge, God, not the army, was held as the supreme arbiter of earthly politics.
To the majority, Rabaa seemed trapped in time, a fragment of an unworkable past. But to Ruqayah, it was a utopia
I could never get used to hearing people talk about martyrdom. But after their long history of struggle with the state, it was a central part of the Brotherhood’s self-image. The army’s supporters said that the protesters at Rabaa and al-Nahda were actively seeking death, keeping women and children in the camps as human shields – though no one appeared to question why peaceful protesters should need “human shields” against their own security forces.
But as the weeks rolled on, it was increasingly obvious to all but the most fervent believers that Morsi was never coming back. Since the coup, the army had held him incommunicado at a secret location and the rest of the country had almost forgotten him. To the majority, Rabaa seemed trapped in time, a fragment of an unworkable past. But to Ruqayah, it was a utopia. When she looked around she saw that everything in the camp was purposeful and harmonious, from the communal kitchens to the schedule for public speakers, the construction of tents and the security details that she belonged to. She thought, as others had thought about Tahrir in 2011, that Rabaa was a miniature model of Egypt’s perfect future. To Ruqayah, Rabaa was far more beautiful than Tahrir, because it was guided by the true spirit of Islam. She knew its victory was guaranteed.
To the less idealistic, it was clear that Rabaa had a darker side. The progressive young Islamists, who managed media relations and the rota of speakers, despaired at the unreconstructed sheikhs who insisted on preaching sectarian hatred against Christians and other supposed traitors to Morsi, rather than speaking about democracy and human rights. They shared a joke on Facebook: “Please God, let these sheikhs have the honour of being martyred first.”
Though they claimed that their legitimacy stemmed from the mass protests against Morsi on 30 June, Egypt’s new military leaders had no time for public expressions of anything that threatened their own interests. The camps, they decided, would not be tolerated. Rabaa had already been encircled by the security forces, which now began to take tougher action.
On 8 July, 51 protesters were shot dead and more than 400 injured at a sit-in near the square. On 26 July, General Sisi, who had become the face of the military takeover, asked for another mass public demonstration to give him a mandate to “fight terrorism”, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in sedate marches guarded by the police and army. Street protest, the tool young people had turned to in desperation to take back power from Mubarak’s regime, had now been co-opted by the state.
“The source of legitimacy is the people,” Sisi had reflected piously in a speech at a military graduation ceremony two days earlier. “The ballot box is a means for legitimacy. If there was any other way than taking to the streets to reject [Morsi’s] legitimacy, the people would have taken it.”
He did not extend the same logic to his opponents. The day after the pro-Sisi march, around 90 unarmed pro-Morsi protesters were shot dead by security forces on a main street close to Rabaa. Before the Eid feast on 8 August, the army-appointed prime minister announced that Rabaa and its smaller twin camp at al-Nahda Square would be cleared by force.
In the early hours of 14 August, Ruqayah curled up on a blanket at her post. She had been on duty at the checkpoint without a break for two days. Before dawn, her mobile rang. “The army are breaking into the square,” her uncle shouted. “You have to get out.” Ruqayah laughed. “They say this every day, Uncle. Don’t worry about it.”
But then she heard gunfire in the distance and smelt teargas in the air. Racing back towards the square, Ruqayah saw oncoming armoured bulldozers, with blunt-nosed armoured personnel carriers behind them. She found her mother and little sister sheltering in the field hospital, a small hall close to the mosque with rudimentary facilities for treating sunstroke and flu. Reassured that they were safe, she ran back to her post at the boundary. Behind the paving-stone barricades, her fellow guards were throwing stones at a line of armoured personal carriers advancing through a choking cloud of teargas.
Then she heard the whipcrack of bullets in the air around her. As far as Ruqayah knew, everyone in the camp was unarmed, though it later emerged that 10 or 20 protesters had firearms. Minutes after the clearance began, soldiers on the ground and snipers on surrounding rooftops were using live ammunition indiscriminately against the entire camp.
The burnt-out mosque at Rabaa, the day after the clearance of the protest camp. Photograph: Ahmed Hayman/EPA
According to the security forces’ plan, the entrance where Ruqayah was stationed was supposed to be a “safe exit” for protesters. As they approached, the army vehicles blared recorded assurances that exits would be provided. Brotherhood speakers yelled from the main stage that their promises were lies. “Don’t leave!” they urged the protesters. But now it was too late. With the gunfire, gas and careering vehicles there was little chance of escape.
“Girls take cover,” the men at her post were shouting. Ruqayah refused to move. Then her friend Amro fell. For six weeks, they had worked together every day on the checkpoint. She ran forward, shouting, and the men around him parted, thinking in the confusion that a woman on the front lines must be a doctor. As she knelt beside Amro, helplessly watching the blood pumping from bullet wounds in his chest and head, she saw his eyes go blank. It was the first time she had seen someone die. It was 7am, less than an hour after the attack on the camp had begun.
By the middle of the day, Ruqayah had lost count of the number of people she had seen die. Bulldozers had pulverised their barricades, crushing people beneath them. In the late afternoon, the security forces reached the centre of the square. Special forces stormed the last of the protesters’ footholds: an empty tower block, a hospital close by, and finally the mosque and its courtyard. The mosque and hospital should have been safe. But now they were filled with the bodies of the protesters who had been shot, crushed or burned – at first a few, then hundreds, arranged in rows on the floor, their ankles, wrists and jaws bound hastily with strips of torn sheet.
At 5.30pm, there was a lull in the shooting and loudspeakers announced there was a safe exit for protesters to the west. Ruqayah met her mother, dragging her little sister by the hand, at the edge of the square. “They’re evacuating the square, they’re evacuating us, we have to leave!” her mother shouted, her face streaked with tears. When Ruqayah refused to go, her mother slapped her hard across the face. They ran out together, ducking between the soldiers. As they left, the field hospital, the main stage, the mosque and the main hospital were set on fire. Many of the bodies they held were burned.
By the end of August, Cairo was a changed city. The army had renewed the state of emergency – which Egypt had lived under almost continuously since 1967 – and imposed a strict dusk-till-dawn curfew. The Cairo I knew didn’t sleep, its streets traffic-choked and alive with workers, shoppers and families until the small hours. Now, when I landed at the airport after curfew, the streets were still and silent as my taxi carried me through the army checkpoints, where soldiers with guns and sniffer dogs loomed out of the dark to check my ID and search my bags.
Tanks and personnel carriers sat at Cairo's major intersections, their guns trained down the main streets
Coils of razor wire blocked the end of the road where I lived, and the owners of the sleazy shisha cafe on the corner, where men from the Gulf sat with heavily made-up women until dawn, had planted an Egyptian flag in the plant pot that weighed one end of the wire down. Tanks and personnel carriers sat at the intersections, their guns trained down the main streets, their crews drinking glasses of tea brought out by my neighbours. In a middle-class area, few wanted to antagonise the army.
There was no longer any of the sense of self-reliance and empowerment that had sprung up after the revolution of 2011. Then, the police had withdrawn from the streets and in each neighbourhood men had banded together to defend their own streets and houses against opportunistic crime – and to discuss politics. By autumn 2013, the country’s new rulers had banned any local organising similar to that of 2011, instructed everyone to observe the curfew and brought neighbourhoods back under police control.
The Brotherhood was officially banned, as it had been from 1954 until 2011, and its assets seized by the state. For a long time, no one was sure how many people had been killed at Rabaa and al-Nahda. “The official number of bodies that came out of Rabaa was 40-something,” the interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim told the pro-army CBC TV channel on 31 August. “The Brotherhood brought bodies from the governorates to Iman mosque to say these were people who had died in Rabaa.” The Brotherhood claimed that up to 6,000 had died. Eventually, independent human rights groups estimated that 1,000 people had been killed in central Cairo in 12 hours.
Rabaa trailed revenge in its wake. Because Copts were assumed to support the regime, Islamist gangs burned 37 churches and attacked dozens of Christian-owned schools, businesses and homes, leaving at least four dead. There were also attacks against the state. A lynch mob murdered 14 police officers in a village outside Cairo. “We will show you rage and we will make you see terrorism,” they spray-painted on the village church after burning it along with the police station. In north Sinai, militants ambushed and shot dead 25 off-duty policemen. A powerful bomb planted in central Cairo narrowly failed to assassinate the interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim, who had overseen the clearance of the camps. It was the city’s first major bombing for years, and it shook Cairenes who had prided themselves on the capital being more secure than troubled Baghdad or Damascus.
A Sinai-based jihadi group calling itself Ansar Beit el-Maqdis, Champions of Jerusalem, claimed responsibility for the attack. There was no evidence that the militants were connected to the Brotherhood. But in the sticky gloom of the curfew, with everyone confined to their homes all evening, the country was gripped by the hysteria of a witch hunt. When I turned on the TV, presenters were describing Rabaa protesters and jihadis alike as “terrorists”, “enemy agents” or simply “Brotherhood”.
Protesters in Cairo call on the military leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to run for president, March 2014. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
It was no surprise that the corrupt and conservative media was so easily controlled by the army, but I was stunned by how quickly ordinary people who so recently had seemed to support the Islamists and their vision for Egypt’s future could turn against them. “Brotherhood” had become a catch-all term synonymous with everything to be hated and feared by its opposite, “honourable citizens”. At the same time, Brotherhood supporters were exaggerating their plight online, claiming that military planes had bombed survivors, calling for bloody revenge against the regime and those – particularly Christians – who supported it.
The number of formally affiliated Muslim Brothers in Egypt was relatively small – estimates ranged from 300,000 to one million – but suspicion stretched far beyond the organisation’s official members. Making the “Rabaa sign” – a hand with four fingers held aloft, as “Rabaa” means “fourth” in Arabic – was now sufficient grounds for arrest and detention, as was sharing the sign on social media. Even using the phrase “military coup” could encourage a neighbour or colleague to report you to the police hotlines advertised on nightly news programmes – honourable citizens referred to “the 30 June revolution”.
On the annual 6 October public holiday, Tahrir Square, symbol of the uprising against Mubarak, was firmly in army hands. Tanks blocked the streets around the square and officers manned a single checkpoint entrance. Inside, vendors sold balloons, candyfloss and posters of Sisi with Nasser, Sisi with a roaring lion, Sisi with his trademark sunglasses. The military leader, invariably pictured in uniform, had become an instant icon – an action hero for men, a pin-up for middle-aged women.
“Egypt wants to say thank you to the army!” shouted an MC.
“Thank you, thank you to the army!” the crowd roared.
One man was carrying a portrait of Sisi and repeatedly kissing the general’s picture on his resolute military mouth. “I love Sisi, he saved us from the Brotherhood, from the terrorists!” he said.
But, like the endless TV programmes celebrating the military, the festivity was undermined by violence and spite. Another man danced past, thrusting a poster into my hands. When I unrolled it, I found an image of a grinning Sisi preparing to slaughter a sheep with Morsi’s head crudely Photoshopped on to it.
As the winter of 2013 wore on, the curfew was lifted but anti-Brotherhood hysteria escalated. In December, state security questioned Vodafone officials over a TV advert starring a puppet called Abla Fahita, which was thought to be sending coded messages about bombings to the Brotherhood. The same week, three journalists working for the Qatari satellite news channel al-Jazeera, two with western passports, were seized from the Marriott hotel in Cairo, and footage of their arrest was broadcast on a pro-army TV channel to a soundtrack of menacing music from the Hollywood film Thor. Qatar, where several senior members of the Brotherhood had sought refuge, was suspected of attempting to destabilise the Egyptian state.
At the beginning of 2014, the country prepared for a referendum. Ostensibly it was a vote on the new constitution drafted after Morsi’s removal, but it was widely seen as a vote on Sisi’s expected presidential candidacy. The irony of validating a military coup through the ballot box was not lost on Sisi’s opponents, who organised small street protests, though protesting was now illegal and police were ready to detain anyone whose conservative dress or demeanour even hinted that they might be an Islamist.
On the first day of voting, Ruqayah and her younger sister, along with her sister’s friend, were arrested on the street when they tried to stop police seizing two veiled young girls. At the district police station the girls were thrown into a windowless room. There were six boys already in there, sitting in a row on the floor, blindfolded with their own clothes. Ruqayah learned that they all attended Islamic schools. Ruqayah, at 15, was the oldest of them all. An officer came in to have a look at them. “Your parents haven’t done a good job, so now we’re going to bring you up properly,” he told them. “We’ll make sure you’re well behaved before you leave.” Two of the boys were taken next door and beaten for laughing together.
At nightfall, the policemen took Ruqayah, her sister and friend down to the communal cell under the police station where adult women detained on criminal charges – drug dealing, prostitution, violent crimes – were held. Below ground, there was a heavy smell of unwashed bodies. At the gate of the cell was one of the women prisoners, tasked with searching new admissions. The girls were roughly searched and stripped.
The cell they were put in was unbearably hot and airless. Thirty women were packed together in the tiny room, and most of them were smoking. The women stared at the girls, taking in their neat clothes and frightened faces. “Your dirty friends who died at Rabaa went straight to hell,” one said.
In the middle of the night, a policeman took Ruqayah upstairs for interrogation. He questioned her about her support of the Brotherhood, and read her a list of charges, which included attempting to take pictures of a military building, obstructing the referendum process and being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We’re not members,” protested Ruqayah. “We just hate injustice.”
After two days, the girls were released without charge. They knew they were the lucky ones – they had heard stories about torture and rape in the police stations and prisons. The uprising against Mubarak had been sparked by the brutality of the police, who were poorly trained and largely unaccountable. Three years later, little had changed.
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi greets Saudi Arabia’s King Salman on a visit to Egypt, April 2016. Photograph: Sherif Abdel Minoem/AP
A few days later, Ruqayah heard the referendum results on the radio – a 98% “yes” vote for Sisi’s constitution. It was like the Mubarak-era referendums that her parents had told her about, when the president would return triumphantly to office with more than 90% of the vote each time. Soon afterwards, Sisi announced he was resigning from the army in order to run for the presidency. Billboards and placards sprang up around Egypt, showing him not in his familiar uniform but in a tracksuit, polo shirt or smart suit, with a discreet prayer bruise – a mark cultivated by some devout men by pressing their foreheads hard to the ground during prayer – calculated to set housewives’ hearts aflutter.
The fall of Mubarak had brought Egyptians – liberals, Islamists, young and old – together, at least temporarily. The return of the army had set them against each other. The threat of terrorism and Islamic extremism, which the army promised to fight but had done so much to cultivate, once again justified all its excesses of repression.
Sisi became president in May 2014 with 96.9% of the vote, but his leadership brought a succession of disasters
While turning citizens against each other, the regime also attempted to project an image of unity and optimism. When I passed through it in the months after the clearance, Rabaa looked like any other of Cairo’s traffic intersections. The mosque had been hastily rebuilt and whitewashed. A billboard announced the ongoing “beautification and development of Rabaa” and a new sculpture of two crooked arms holding a marble ball rose amid the traffic. The military engineers who erected it had explained that the large arm was the army, the smaller arm was the police, and between them they held the Egyptian people.
It was soon clear how empty the army’s promise of a new dawn had been. Sure enough, Sisi became president in May 2014 with 96.9% of the vote, but his leadership brought a succession of disasters. The collapsing economy was propped up only by loans from wealthy Gulf countries. In a desperate attempt to keep the money coming, Sisi gave two strategically located Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Despite his regime having arrested 12,000 people on political charges – formulated as “membership of a terrorist group” – in 2015 alone, genuine terrorism was on the rise. The extremist group Ansar Beit el-Maqdis pledged allegiance to Islamic State, took a new name – Sinai Province – and blew a Russian airliner out of the sky.
The government, meanwhile, spent billions on a redundant extension to the Suez Canal and incinerated a group of Mexican tourists in a botched airstrike in the western desert. It was also forced to deny involvement in the murder of an Italian student whose body was found in Cairo bearing the hallmarks of security service torture. (The US, which sees Sisi as a supposed bulwark against jihadi groups, continues to supply Egypt with an annual $1.3bn of military aid.)
The last time I saw Ruqayah was in the summer of 2014, in a chain cafe in Cairo’s largest shopping mall. As the state’s persecution of its opponents became ever more systematic, it was safer to meet in such crowded, anonymous places. She repeated her account of the devastation and bloodshed she had witnessed in a soft voice, surrounded by tables of laughing teenagers and families laden with shopping bags.
Afterwards, as I watched her walking away into the milling crowds, I thought that her experiences gave the lie to the veneer of normality around us. Ruqayah was typical of the generation of young Egyptians who had led the protests of 2011 to 2013. They had seen their efforts topple one dictator, witnessed the first true elections in Egypt’s history and tasted, however briefly, freedom and self-respect. As they grew older, they would not accept the same bargain with the state – repression in exchange for apparent security and stability – that their parents and grandparents had. In trying to crush them, the army had created a timebomb. However stable the country seemed, it would not be so in the future.
This is an adapted extract from Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East, which is published by Harvill Secker
It was the middle of August 2013, soon after the Eid feast that marks the end of Ramadan, and the security forces were clearing the huge protest camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Their tens of thousands of inhabitants were demonstrating against the removal of the president, Mohamed Morsi, in a military coup at the beginning of July. Beside Ruqayah huddled another teenage girl and a young man, pressed as close as they could get to the rough hessian of the sandbags. To the side, sprawled on the concrete with blood pooling around them, lay the bodies of two men who had been shot dead by police snipers.
“Don’t move until I tell you. Then, run,” the man told the two girls. Ruqayah nodded silently and waited, closing her eyes, clasping the other girl’s hand, for the brief silence that meant the shooters were reloading. She knew to bend double and run in zigzags to make herself a harder target. When she opened her eyes she saw other people – adults, teenagers and small children – crouching in the angle of walls, against cars, behind rough barricades of paving stones, anything that would protect them from the gunfire coming from the square and the snipers on the rooftops around them. Then one man, bearded and strongly built, stood up and spread his arms wide in defiance, facing the square.
“I won’t crawl,” he shouted. “Allahu Akbar!” Ruqayah squeezed her eyes shut again, but she heard his skull shatter as the sniper’s bullet struck.
“Now!” the young man told them and they dashed behind him, weaving left and right, for the shelter of a side street. Ruqayah was just 15, wiry and fleet, but the other girl was older and heavier. A bullet caught her in the leg and she fell as Ruqayah watched in horror. The girl crawled the last metres to them, leaving a trail of blood.
Six weeks earlier, on 30 June, hundreds of thousands of people had marched in Egypt’s major cities, demanding the resignation of their president. The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had been elected only a year earlier, in a run-off with a pro-army candidate, with 52% of the vote. At first, the anti-Morsi marches seemed like an echo of the popular demonstrations that had unseated the dictator Hosni Mubarak after three decades in power. The protesters even chanted the slogans of the 2011 revolution – “Leave, leave!”, “The people demand the fall of the regime!”. A movement named Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”), which had organised the protests, claimed to have gathered 22 million signatures for its petition demanding that Morsi resign and that a fresh presidential election be held. But while Tamarod appeared to be a grassroots organisation – its volunteers lining Cairo’s roads to collect signatures from drivers – behind the scenes, it was backed by powerful old‑regime figures in business and the military who wanted the president and the Muslim Brotherhood gone.
Egypt had been a military state since 1952, and the Brotherhood had been locked in a struggle with its rulers for almost as long. Until 2011, the organisation was banned and its members – along with anyone else suspected of sympathising with political Islam – were subject to surveillance, imprisonment, torture and even execution. The regime, led in succession by the military men Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, had reason to fear Islamists. Though the Brotherhood had renounced violence in the 1970s, in 1981 members of a jihadi group had assassinated President Sadat during a military parade barely 500m from where the Rabaa camp now stood.
Egypt’s then vice president Hosni Mubarak with Anwar Sadat at the military parade where Sadat would shortly be assassinated, October 1981. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Mubarak’s overthrow offered the Brotherhood a reprieve, and, newly legalised, it dominated the parliamentary elections of early 2012. In June that year, Morsi became Egypt’s first elected and first civilian president.
Now, the country was divided. On 30 June, as the Brotherhood’s enemies protested against Morsi and portrayed the group as fanatics intent on creating an Iranian-style Islamic state, supporters had organised their own, smaller marches in support of the president. In Cairo, these pro-Morsi demonstrations had settled at two protest camps: one at Rabaa, in the east, and one at al-Nahda Square in the west.
Ruqayah had been living in the Rabaa camp since 30 June. In 2011, she reasoned, the world had hailed the huge anti-Mubarak protests that filled Tahrir Square as an inspiring expression of freedom and democracy. After the revolution, the power should lie in the hands of the people. Why not in Rabaa too?
Some of Ruqayah’s family and friends were members of the Brotherhood, others sympathised with the organisation, and all had suffered directly or indirectly from the years of persecution. In spite of her youth, Ruqayah’s parents preferred to see their daughter stand up for justice than bow to the hated regime. The protesters at Rabaa were her people, and she felt it was her duty to help them.
With other high-school and university students, Ruqayah volunteered at the checkpoints at the camp’s perimeter, checking handbags and IDs as women entered, patting them down for hidden weapons or explosives. Her post was at the camp’s western edge.
After four chaotic days of street protests, the army finally executed what Egypt’s struggling factions had hoped or feared they would – a military coup. Ruqayah turned 15 on 3 July, the day that the army arrested Morsi and took him into custody. She was a quiet, studious girl who attended an Islamic high school, where she was trying to take her end-of-year exams while protesting. That morning, she finished her last algebra exam and went straight to work on her checkpoint. By late evening she was exhausted, but she stayed awake with the other volunteer guards to listen to the scheduled military statement on an old radio. Ruqayah wasn’t worried. Morsi was their rightful president. God would never let him be overthrown like the tyrant Mubarak.
Around Ruqayah, young men began crying to God for help. At midnight, they heard shooting in the darkness
But when she heard the chief of the armed forces General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi telling the nation that he had suspended the constitution, nominated an interim president and would schedule new elections in due course, she knew that what had happened was a coup. Around her, young men began crying to God for help. They had always seemed so strong, towering over Ruqayah and calling her “little sister”. Suddenly they looked weak and humiliated. At midnight, they heard shooting in the darkness as security forces surrounded the camp, sealing it off from the rest of Cairo. It was the first time Ruqayah had ever heard live gunfire. She dropped to her knees in fear, reciting Qur’anic verses and praying for God to protect them.
In concert with the coup, Islamist TV channels that supported the president were closed down. In the days that followed, the pro-army media broadcast endless hours of patriotic messages and vilification of Morsi and the Brotherhood. The majority of Egyptians, exhausted by 18 months of upheaval, seemed grateful for the return of the familiar certainties of military rule.
But there were many dissenters, too: among them, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamists, leftists and liberals. Not all of these groups supported Morsi – some were simply opposed to military rule or wanted to defend the democratic process. The camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda, organised and led by the Brotherhood, were their strongholds.
By early August, Rabaa was home to an estimated 85,000 protesters from across the country, housed in a hastily constructed tent city a kilometre across. They dreamed of reinstating their elected president and sending the army back to its desert barracks – and they were prepared to risk everything, with God’s help, to make that happen.
In the middle of the sit-in, I went to visit Rabaa. It was the fasting month of Ramadan and as mercilessly hot as a desert city in high summer could be. The army had blocked all the roads leading to the camp so I walked the last kilometre from the highway, skirting the tanks and weaving through the barricades the protesters had built from paving stones and bricks, until I reached the checkpoint where Ruqayah was stationed.
I had expected the mood in the camp to be sombre, but when I arrived, it was as festive as Tahrir at the height of the 2011 revolution. As I waited in the women’s line for entry, young men patrolled with backpack tank-and-hose kits, misting us with water to keep cool. The women and girls around me, all veiled and clad in heavy robes, were laughing and competing to be sprayed in the face.
Inside, the familiar intersection where I had often sat in snarled traffic was transformed. At ground level, the scale of the camp was breathtaking. Tents were neatly ranged along the centre of the street, tall square constructions of timber and blue plastic sheeting that were occupied by families lying on mats reading the Qur’an or sleeping until sunset, when they could eat and drink. On the pavements, street vendors grilled spits of chicken and sold water pistols, fruit and sunglasses. Banners proclaimed “Morsi is our legal president”, “My vote counts” and “Democracy v coup”. In front of the mosque that gave the square and the camp its name, the main stage, where a succession of speakers usually railed against the injustice of the coup, was playing Qur’anic recitation. The army’s supporters said that the camp’s residents had tortured and murdered people in the spaces under the stage, and that they kept caches of weapons and explosives there. When I climbed underneath its edge, all I could see was a dim, empty expanse of scaffolding.
The pro-Morsi protest camp at Rabaa al-Adawiya square in Cairo before the clearance. Photograph: Mohammed Saber/EPA
I sat in a homely tent with a group of women, all engineering lecturers and PhD students. They had wired electricity in from a nearby street light, set up fans and a small gas burner and hung up a neatly lettered banner reading “Engineers Against the Coup”.
“We’ll never leave,” said a dignified middle-aged woman who taught at a university in the Nile delta. “It’s a matter of our rights, dignity and democracy. Why should the army seize the country again, by force?”
“We’re ready to be martyred here,” said a younger woman. “We’d rather die free than live under this injustice. We know God will give us our rights, even if the army won’t.” The others nodded in agreement. Once you passed the checkpoints on the camp’s edge, God, not the army, was held as the supreme arbiter of earthly politics.
To the majority, Rabaa seemed trapped in time, a fragment of an unworkable past. But to Ruqayah, it was a utopia
I could never get used to hearing people talk about martyrdom. But after their long history of struggle with the state, it was a central part of the Brotherhood’s self-image. The army’s supporters said that the protesters at Rabaa and al-Nahda were actively seeking death, keeping women and children in the camps as human shields – though no one appeared to question why peaceful protesters should need “human shields” against their own security forces.
But as the weeks rolled on, it was increasingly obvious to all but the most fervent believers that Morsi was never coming back. Since the coup, the army had held him incommunicado at a secret location and the rest of the country had almost forgotten him. To the majority, Rabaa seemed trapped in time, a fragment of an unworkable past. But to Ruqayah, it was a utopia. When she looked around she saw that everything in the camp was purposeful and harmonious, from the communal kitchens to the schedule for public speakers, the construction of tents and the security details that she belonged to. She thought, as others had thought about Tahrir in 2011, that Rabaa was a miniature model of Egypt’s perfect future. To Ruqayah, Rabaa was far more beautiful than Tahrir, because it was guided by the true spirit of Islam. She knew its victory was guaranteed.
To the less idealistic, it was clear that Rabaa had a darker side. The progressive young Islamists, who managed media relations and the rota of speakers, despaired at the unreconstructed sheikhs who insisted on preaching sectarian hatred against Christians and other supposed traitors to Morsi, rather than speaking about democracy and human rights. They shared a joke on Facebook: “Please God, let these sheikhs have the honour of being martyred first.”
Though they claimed that their legitimacy stemmed from the mass protests against Morsi on 30 June, Egypt’s new military leaders had no time for public expressions of anything that threatened their own interests. The camps, they decided, would not be tolerated. Rabaa had already been encircled by the security forces, which now began to take tougher action.
On 8 July, 51 protesters were shot dead and more than 400 injured at a sit-in near the square. On 26 July, General Sisi, who had become the face of the military takeover, asked for another mass public demonstration to give him a mandate to “fight terrorism”, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in sedate marches guarded by the police and army. Street protest, the tool young people had turned to in desperation to take back power from Mubarak’s regime, had now been co-opted by the state.
“The source of legitimacy is the people,” Sisi had reflected piously in a speech at a military graduation ceremony two days earlier. “The ballot box is a means for legitimacy. If there was any other way than taking to the streets to reject [Morsi’s] legitimacy, the people would have taken it.”
He did not extend the same logic to his opponents. The day after the pro-Sisi march, around 90 unarmed pro-Morsi protesters were shot dead by security forces on a main street close to Rabaa. Before the Eid feast on 8 August, the army-appointed prime minister announced that Rabaa and its smaller twin camp at al-Nahda Square would be cleared by force.
In the early hours of 14 August, Ruqayah curled up on a blanket at her post. She had been on duty at the checkpoint without a break for two days. Before dawn, her mobile rang. “The army are breaking into the square,” her uncle shouted. “You have to get out.” Ruqayah laughed. “They say this every day, Uncle. Don’t worry about it.”
But then she heard gunfire in the distance and smelt teargas in the air. Racing back towards the square, Ruqayah saw oncoming armoured bulldozers, with blunt-nosed armoured personnel carriers behind them. She found her mother and little sister sheltering in the field hospital, a small hall close to the mosque with rudimentary facilities for treating sunstroke and flu. Reassured that they were safe, she ran back to her post at the boundary. Behind the paving-stone barricades, her fellow guards were throwing stones at a line of armoured personal carriers advancing through a choking cloud of teargas.
Then she heard the whipcrack of bullets in the air around her. As far as Ruqayah knew, everyone in the camp was unarmed, though it later emerged that 10 or 20 protesters had firearms. Minutes after the clearance began, soldiers on the ground and snipers on surrounding rooftops were using live ammunition indiscriminately against the entire camp.
The burnt-out mosque at Rabaa, the day after the clearance of the protest camp. Photograph: Ahmed Hayman/EPA
According to the security forces’ plan, the entrance where Ruqayah was stationed was supposed to be a “safe exit” for protesters. As they approached, the army vehicles blared recorded assurances that exits would be provided. Brotherhood speakers yelled from the main stage that their promises were lies. “Don’t leave!” they urged the protesters. But now it was too late. With the gunfire, gas and careering vehicles there was little chance of escape.
“Girls take cover,” the men at her post were shouting. Ruqayah refused to move. Then her friend Amro fell. For six weeks, they had worked together every day on the checkpoint. She ran forward, shouting, and the men around him parted, thinking in the confusion that a woman on the front lines must be a doctor. As she knelt beside Amro, helplessly watching the blood pumping from bullet wounds in his chest and head, she saw his eyes go blank. It was the first time she had seen someone die. It was 7am, less than an hour after the attack on the camp had begun.
By the middle of the day, Ruqayah had lost count of the number of people she had seen die. Bulldozers had pulverised their barricades, crushing people beneath them. In the late afternoon, the security forces reached the centre of the square. Special forces stormed the last of the protesters’ footholds: an empty tower block, a hospital close by, and finally the mosque and its courtyard. The mosque and hospital should have been safe. But now they were filled with the bodies of the protesters who had been shot, crushed or burned – at first a few, then hundreds, arranged in rows on the floor, their ankles, wrists and jaws bound hastily with strips of torn sheet.
At 5.30pm, there was a lull in the shooting and loudspeakers announced there was a safe exit for protesters to the west. Ruqayah met her mother, dragging her little sister by the hand, at the edge of the square. “They’re evacuating the square, they’re evacuating us, we have to leave!” her mother shouted, her face streaked with tears. When Ruqayah refused to go, her mother slapped her hard across the face. They ran out together, ducking between the soldiers. As they left, the field hospital, the main stage, the mosque and the main hospital were set on fire. Many of the bodies they held were burned.
By the end of August, Cairo was a changed city. The army had renewed the state of emergency – which Egypt had lived under almost continuously since 1967 – and imposed a strict dusk-till-dawn curfew. The Cairo I knew didn’t sleep, its streets traffic-choked and alive with workers, shoppers and families until the small hours. Now, when I landed at the airport after curfew, the streets were still and silent as my taxi carried me through the army checkpoints, where soldiers with guns and sniffer dogs loomed out of the dark to check my ID and search my bags.
Tanks and personnel carriers sat at Cairo's major intersections, their guns trained down the main streets
Coils of razor wire blocked the end of the road where I lived, and the owners of the sleazy shisha cafe on the corner, where men from the Gulf sat with heavily made-up women until dawn, had planted an Egyptian flag in the plant pot that weighed one end of the wire down. Tanks and personnel carriers sat at the intersections, their guns trained down the main streets, their crews drinking glasses of tea brought out by my neighbours. In a middle-class area, few wanted to antagonise the army.
There was no longer any of the sense of self-reliance and empowerment that had sprung up after the revolution of 2011. Then, the police had withdrawn from the streets and in each neighbourhood men had banded together to defend their own streets and houses against opportunistic crime – and to discuss politics. By autumn 2013, the country’s new rulers had banned any local organising similar to that of 2011, instructed everyone to observe the curfew and brought neighbourhoods back under police control.
The Brotherhood was officially banned, as it had been from 1954 until 2011, and its assets seized by the state. For a long time, no one was sure how many people had been killed at Rabaa and al-Nahda. “The official number of bodies that came out of Rabaa was 40-something,” the interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim told the pro-army CBC TV channel on 31 August. “The Brotherhood brought bodies from the governorates to Iman mosque to say these were people who had died in Rabaa.” The Brotherhood claimed that up to 6,000 had died. Eventually, independent human rights groups estimated that 1,000 people had been killed in central Cairo in 12 hours.
Rabaa trailed revenge in its wake. Because Copts were assumed to support the regime, Islamist gangs burned 37 churches and attacked dozens of Christian-owned schools, businesses and homes, leaving at least four dead. There were also attacks against the state. A lynch mob murdered 14 police officers in a village outside Cairo. “We will show you rage and we will make you see terrorism,” they spray-painted on the village church after burning it along with the police station. In north Sinai, militants ambushed and shot dead 25 off-duty policemen. A powerful bomb planted in central Cairo narrowly failed to assassinate the interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim, who had overseen the clearance of the camps. It was the city’s first major bombing for years, and it shook Cairenes who had prided themselves on the capital being more secure than troubled Baghdad or Damascus.
A Sinai-based jihadi group calling itself Ansar Beit el-Maqdis, Champions of Jerusalem, claimed responsibility for the attack. There was no evidence that the militants were connected to the Brotherhood. But in the sticky gloom of the curfew, with everyone confined to their homes all evening, the country was gripped by the hysteria of a witch hunt. When I turned on the TV, presenters were describing Rabaa protesters and jihadis alike as “terrorists”, “enemy agents” or simply “Brotherhood”.
Protesters in Cairo call on the military leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to run for president, March 2014. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
It was no surprise that the corrupt and conservative media was so easily controlled by the army, but I was stunned by how quickly ordinary people who so recently had seemed to support the Islamists and their vision for Egypt’s future could turn against them. “Brotherhood” had become a catch-all term synonymous with everything to be hated and feared by its opposite, “honourable citizens”. At the same time, Brotherhood supporters were exaggerating their plight online, claiming that military planes had bombed survivors, calling for bloody revenge against the regime and those – particularly Christians – who supported it.
The number of formally affiliated Muslim Brothers in Egypt was relatively small – estimates ranged from 300,000 to one million – but suspicion stretched far beyond the organisation’s official members. Making the “Rabaa sign” – a hand with four fingers held aloft, as “Rabaa” means “fourth” in Arabic – was now sufficient grounds for arrest and detention, as was sharing the sign on social media. Even using the phrase “military coup” could encourage a neighbour or colleague to report you to the police hotlines advertised on nightly news programmes – honourable citizens referred to “the 30 June revolution”.
On the annual 6 October public holiday, Tahrir Square, symbol of the uprising against Mubarak, was firmly in army hands. Tanks blocked the streets around the square and officers manned a single checkpoint entrance. Inside, vendors sold balloons, candyfloss and posters of Sisi with Nasser, Sisi with a roaring lion, Sisi with his trademark sunglasses. The military leader, invariably pictured in uniform, had become an instant icon – an action hero for men, a pin-up for middle-aged women.
“Egypt wants to say thank you to the army!” shouted an MC.
“Thank you, thank you to the army!” the crowd roared.
One man was carrying a portrait of Sisi and repeatedly kissing the general’s picture on his resolute military mouth. “I love Sisi, he saved us from the Brotherhood, from the terrorists!” he said.
But, like the endless TV programmes celebrating the military, the festivity was undermined by violence and spite. Another man danced past, thrusting a poster into my hands. When I unrolled it, I found an image of a grinning Sisi preparing to slaughter a sheep with Morsi’s head crudely Photoshopped on to it.
As the winter of 2013 wore on, the curfew was lifted but anti-Brotherhood hysteria escalated. In December, state security questioned Vodafone officials over a TV advert starring a puppet called Abla Fahita, which was thought to be sending coded messages about bombings to the Brotherhood. The same week, three journalists working for the Qatari satellite news channel al-Jazeera, two with western passports, were seized from the Marriott hotel in Cairo, and footage of their arrest was broadcast on a pro-army TV channel to a soundtrack of menacing music from the Hollywood film Thor. Qatar, where several senior members of the Brotherhood had sought refuge, was suspected of attempting to destabilise the Egyptian state.
At the beginning of 2014, the country prepared for a referendum. Ostensibly it was a vote on the new constitution drafted after Morsi’s removal, but it was widely seen as a vote on Sisi’s expected presidential candidacy. The irony of validating a military coup through the ballot box was not lost on Sisi’s opponents, who organised small street protests, though protesting was now illegal and police were ready to detain anyone whose conservative dress or demeanour even hinted that they might be an Islamist.
On the first day of voting, Ruqayah and her younger sister, along with her sister’s friend, were arrested on the street when they tried to stop police seizing two veiled young girls. At the district police station the girls were thrown into a windowless room. There were six boys already in there, sitting in a row on the floor, blindfolded with their own clothes. Ruqayah learned that they all attended Islamic schools. Ruqayah, at 15, was the oldest of them all. An officer came in to have a look at them. “Your parents haven’t done a good job, so now we’re going to bring you up properly,” he told them. “We’ll make sure you’re well behaved before you leave.” Two of the boys were taken next door and beaten for laughing together.
At nightfall, the policemen took Ruqayah, her sister and friend down to the communal cell under the police station where adult women detained on criminal charges – drug dealing, prostitution, violent crimes – were held. Below ground, there was a heavy smell of unwashed bodies. At the gate of the cell was one of the women prisoners, tasked with searching new admissions. The girls were roughly searched and stripped.
The cell they were put in was unbearably hot and airless. Thirty women were packed together in the tiny room, and most of them were smoking. The women stared at the girls, taking in their neat clothes and frightened faces. “Your dirty friends who died at Rabaa went straight to hell,” one said.
In the middle of the night, a policeman took Ruqayah upstairs for interrogation. He questioned her about her support of the Brotherhood, and read her a list of charges, which included attempting to take pictures of a military building, obstructing the referendum process and being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We’re not members,” protested Ruqayah. “We just hate injustice.”
After two days, the girls were released without charge. They knew they were the lucky ones – they had heard stories about torture and rape in the police stations and prisons. The uprising against Mubarak had been sparked by the brutality of the police, who were poorly trained and largely unaccountable. Three years later, little had changed.
Abdel Fatah al-Sisi greets Saudi Arabia’s King Salman on a visit to Egypt, April 2016. Photograph: Sherif Abdel Minoem/AP
A few days later, Ruqayah heard the referendum results on the radio – a 98% “yes” vote for Sisi’s constitution. It was like the Mubarak-era referendums that her parents had told her about, when the president would return triumphantly to office with more than 90% of the vote each time. Soon afterwards, Sisi announced he was resigning from the army in order to run for the presidency. Billboards and placards sprang up around Egypt, showing him not in his familiar uniform but in a tracksuit, polo shirt or smart suit, with a discreet prayer bruise – a mark cultivated by some devout men by pressing their foreheads hard to the ground during prayer – calculated to set housewives’ hearts aflutter.
The fall of Mubarak had brought Egyptians – liberals, Islamists, young and old – together, at least temporarily. The return of the army had set them against each other. The threat of terrorism and Islamic extremism, which the army promised to fight but had done so much to cultivate, once again justified all its excesses of repression.
Sisi became president in May 2014 with 96.9% of the vote, but his leadership brought a succession of disasters
While turning citizens against each other, the regime also attempted to project an image of unity and optimism. When I passed through it in the months after the clearance, Rabaa looked like any other of Cairo’s traffic intersections. The mosque had been hastily rebuilt and whitewashed. A billboard announced the ongoing “beautification and development of Rabaa” and a new sculpture of two crooked arms holding a marble ball rose amid the traffic. The military engineers who erected it had explained that the large arm was the army, the smaller arm was the police, and between them they held the Egyptian people.
It was soon clear how empty the army’s promise of a new dawn had been. Sure enough, Sisi became president in May 2014 with 96.9% of the vote, but his leadership brought a succession of disasters. The collapsing economy was propped up only by loans from wealthy Gulf countries. In a desperate attempt to keep the money coming, Sisi gave two strategically located Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Despite his regime having arrested 12,000 people on political charges – formulated as “membership of a terrorist group” – in 2015 alone, genuine terrorism was on the rise. The extremist group Ansar Beit el-Maqdis pledged allegiance to Islamic State, took a new name – Sinai Province – and blew a Russian airliner out of the sky.
The government, meanwhile, spent billions on a redundant extension to the Suez Canal and incinerated a group of Mexican tourists in a botched airstrike in the western desert. It was also forced to deny involvement in the murder of an Italian student whose body was found in Cairo bearing the hallmarks of security service torture. (The US, which sees Sisi as a supposed bulwark against jihadi groups, continues to supply Egypt with an annual $1.3bn of military aid.)
The last time I saw Ruqayah was in the summer of 2014, in a chain cafe in Cairo’s largest shopping mall. As the state’s persecution of its opponents became ever more systematic, it was safer to meet in such crowded, anonymous places. She repeated her account of the devastation and bloodshed she had witnessed in a soft voice, surrounded by tables of laughing teenagers and families laden with shopping bags.
Afterwards, as I watched her walking away into the milling crowds, I thought that her experiences gave the lie to the veneer of normality around us. Ruqayah was typical of the generation of young Egyptians who had led the protests of 2011 to 2013. They had seen their efforts topple one dictator, witnessed the first true elections in Egypt’s history and tasted, however briefly, freedom and self-respect. As they grew older, they would not accept the same bargain with the state – repression in exchange for apparent security and stability – that their parents and grandparents had. In trying to crush them, the army had created a timebomb. However stable the country seemed, it would not be so in the future.
This is an adapted extract from Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East, which is published by Harvill Secker
