• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 381 0

in Cairo, the things you assumed about Egypt, fell away on the long, gritty road out of town, along the Nile banks through bawling vendors and groaning minivans, over bridges wilting under the weight of steel and flesh. Cairo collapsed into fields of swamp grass and clover, resurrected itself again in spits of tenements, and finally faded behind. The road to Damanhour pressed north toward the sea, through the thick of the Nile Delta. Brilliant rice fields nourished the lumbering water buffalo, whose fleas in turn fed the white birds plucking at their hides. The road was wild, crammed with darting creatures and half-broken machines. Rolling mountains of cheap clothing rose from flatbed trucks, and workers slept, their bodies wedged into cliffs on those wobbling textile hills. Vast families crammed into the beds of pickups, punched by wind. Even the edges of the road were jammed with donkeys, goats, and camels, mopeds spitting black smoke, schoolgirls who peered owlishly from beneath the brims of head scarves. This route was unfathomably old when Napoleon limped along it, and today it still courses with traffic, with families who have ridden this road for generations, from the fabled fields of the delta to the dented, overgrown splendor of Cairo; between schools and factories, farms and slatternly inner-city markets.

There was a place where the Jeep spat out of the farmlands and into a little town too poor to pave its stretch of roadway. They’d pressed stones into the sand instead, and as we bounced and jolted our way over the rocks, fingers splayed on the ceiling, Hossam said through chattering teeth, “Welcome to the Latin Quarter.” He said it every time, and every time, it made us laugh.

I’d hired Hossam, a bohemian city kid who moved among the intellectuals and expatriates of the Egyptian capital, as a reporter and translator. He was a stalwart socialist with a shamefaced penchant for lattes from Starbucks, music by Moby, and Scandinavian death metal bands. Sucking a ceaseless string of Marlboros, he waved his arms and rambled about how the left would eventually join ranks with the popular Muslim Brotherhood and form an overpowering opposition bloc.

I’d snort. “If the Muslim Brotherhood take over they’ll put you against the wall,” I’d tell him, only half joking. “You know what happened in Iran.”

“I’ll be the commissar of information.” His face lit with bravado. “You’ll have all the interviews you need.”

By 2005, American enthusiasm for Arab democracy was sinking back into silence. Every time Arabs voted—in Beirut, in Gaza City, in Karbala—Islamists grew more powerful. Hezbollah and Hamas were gaining sway. Egypt, the most populous Arab country and the psychological core of the region, rippled with tension between Islam and democracy. There was only one source of serious political opposition to the Egyptian autocracy, a single party potentially strong enough to unseat the government—and that was the Muslim Brotherhood, a nonviolent Islamist movement with deep roots across Egypt. Officially, the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed, but the reality was nuanced. The government would pass through bouts of tolerance, then abruptly round up activists and raid party offices in crackdowns. Nobody stood to gain more from democratic reform than the Brotherhood, because no other force in Egypt had its legitimate popularity, the grassroots credentials, the air of moral authority. And yet the United States refused to speak with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was an unlikely stance, especially given the pro-democracy rhetoric ringing through Washington in those days. The Brotherhood is illegal, U.S. policy went, and therefore we will not recognize it. Now there would be parliamentary elections, and I would watch the race from the battleground of Damanhour.

The first night we rode the grinding road to Damanhour, I met Muslim Brotherhood candidate Gamal Heshmat. On that sharp night, the Muslim Brotherhood had called a political rally, and Heshmat would speak to his hometown. The silt of autumn dark thickened on the square. From the front