Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [89]
Hossam’s eyes swelled huge enough to reflect the moon. His swagger had melted away. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “It makes the left look like shit.”
“How many people do you think this is? It must be every man in town.”
“Yeah,” Hossam said. “Shit.”
I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking it, too: The secular, pro-democracy demonstrations we’d covered back in Cairo were nothing by comparison. A ragtag army of aging labor leaders, embattled human rights workers, scruffy bloggers, and rheumy professors would rally on a tiny scrap of stained pavement. Layers of security lined up on all sides and pressed in, plainclothes thugs bused in from the slums and uniformed conscripts in riot gear, clubs hanging from their hands. Maybe they would glower and snap photographs for bottomless security files, or maybe they would smash the demonstrators’ limbs with clubs, kick their ribs, and haul them off to prison for genital electrification and sodomy. It could go either way, any way, depending on their mood.
Now we were far from Cairo’s hallucinatory concrete forests; stars gleamed in a black sky and there unfolded a subversive force on a scale we’d never see in the capital. These men were factory workers, farmers, and fathers, not political activists. They turned up because the Muslim Brotherhood had invited them, and stood quietly, filling the streets and listening to their leaders. There were women, too, veiled, robed, and arranged in careful rows. Men and boys linked hands to form a human screen of segregation between the sexes.
They had come because, like the rest of Egypt, and like the other Arab countries beyond, these people sensed some vague change, a long-awaited political opening. That was the mood: guarded, incredulous hope that had seeped, somehow, out of Iraq. They had heard the radical promises of American leaders—the vows to support democracy over dictatorship in the Arab world; the acknowledgments that propping up tyrants and torturers might have bred terrorism. This was brand-new rhetoric, and it made Arab potentates nervous. President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh, had gone through the charade of running for “reelection.” (He was never elected to begin with.) Before the parliamentary elections, Condoleezza Rica came to Cairo and embarrassed the Egyptian regime with an unusually sharp speech. “People will watch what happens in Egypt,” she warned. Egyptians started talking about the Americans as parents who’d just stepped out of the room, as if they might come back and give Mubarak a spanking if he didn’t behave. The Muslim Brotherhood boldly fielded dozens of candidates across the country.
A few lines from the Koran, and the speeches got started. Hossam translated, breathing the words into my ear. The men glared down; we were outsiders, whispering while the clerics spoke. Hossam sucked sharply at air and groaned. He stopped translating, raised his eyes sheepishly, and hoisted himself to his feet. Even the big shots on the stage were looking down, smiling. Hossam turned to the crowd, flashed a smile that looked more like a grimace, and raised a reluctant hand. Applause swelled. Suddenly, the same men who’d been glowering over our shoulders were smiling, reaching big paws to pump Hossam’s hand in the air, giving me approving little nods.
“What the hell was that?” I hissed.
“Don’t freak out, but they said they wanted to thank the Los Angeles Times for being here and for our support,” he muttered.
“Great.”
He shrugged. “They don’t understand.”
A half moon dangled from the desert sky. Women and children jostled on balconies spangled with flimsy Ramadan lanterns. A sea of faces glimmered in light from the podium. Far from the dingy Cairo offices of slick-talking Brotherhood leaders trained to say