Egypt’s Latest Revolution

I first got the news while rattling down a California mountain on Wednesday. “Oh my gosh, Egypt,” I thought. “You’ve done it again.”

But that’s not what I said. What I said was, turning to my mother: “Did you hear about Egypt? They’ve had a,”—I paused, hesitant about the label favored by the media—“‘coup.’”

“Oh?” said my mother. “Didn’t they just elect a president? Democratically?”

“Yeah,” I said. There was a moment of silence. We let the confusion implicit in her question sink in.

“But you know, not everyone liked him,” I ventured, recalling the Egyptian voters I spoke with last summer in Cairo. I remembered the city’s famous epicenter of protest activity, Tahrir Square, exploding in celebration after the two-day vote. I remember watching long queues of voters snake their way through dusty voting stations. Some held their inked thumbs upright for blocks after walking away from the ballot area, as if unwilling to let the moment pass. The faces of some voters, particularly the elderly, shone with the trustfulness of a very young child. Egypt, it seemed then, was being reborn.

I spent two months in Cairo last summer and a heady 10 days reporting on the country in the company of over a dozen young Egyptians and young American reporters in October 2011. The friendships I forged with my fellow young Egyptians during that time have taught me more than anything I’ve read from “experts” on the country. Because really, no one knows what’s happening in Egypt except for Egyptians themselves. My reticence about the word “coup”—referring to the recent overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood–backed President Mohamed Morsi two years after the historic ousting of longtime leader Hosni Mubarak—comes out of a hesitancy to put loaded Western words on the Egyptian experience. After all, some Egyptians have been saying for months that the first “revolution” (their term) never really achieved its end. The kind of insider help associated with a term like “coup” may even be laughable to them. Even when the nation was in the full thrust of presidential elections, some were still saying the revolution wasn’t over. They certainly have a point when it comes to Egypt’s political situation: The military, while politically standoffish since Morsi’s election, controls the economy and involves itself in many political decisions there—just how many is a question well worth pursuing. If the military is called upon to explain their actions, they do so begrudgingly with an eye on heading off protests, it seems, rather than a practice in politics as such. In other words, for the most part, Egyptians can’t haul in a military chief and interrogate him the way legislators in the US can call generals before Congress. But this is just one example of the possible impetus behind recent events in Egypt—there are those who want to put thoroughly representative governance to the test. But there are probably just as many in the Muslim-majority nation seeking governance sensitive to Islamist interests, similar to Americans who want their country to reflect its Christian inception. Then there are probably other Egyptians that aren’t revolutionaries at all but are frustrated by Morsi’s decisionmaking and see this as their version of impeachment. Clearly, as a political instrument, the mass overthrow tactic has worked for them.

In point of fact, nation building is a bit of a rum thing. Some claim that even America is losing its grip on its most defining characteristic—democracy. Before Egypt came up, my mom and I had been talking about how pre-preprogrammed many Americans are by their own marketing; hoisted by their own petard, if you will.

The American writer and thinker Marilynne Robinson fears ideology is taking pervasive hold in our own nation, undermining a spirit of critical inquiry and civilized debate she sees as the cornerstone of American liberty. “I think it is reasonable to wonder whether democracy can survive in this [cultural and political American] atmosphere,” Robinson argued in a collection of essays published last year. “Democracy, in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement.”

This is why, when it comes to Egypt, my hopes lie the nation’s societal and artistic transformation—I’m talking about a generations-long process, yes, but one I firmly believe is under way. Even 12-year-old Egyptian boys are talking about it (and becoming an Internet sensation in China, as it happens). For Egypt, the fight’s just begun.

Speaking of which, my father and 16-year-old brother were just in Gettysburg, re-enacting the epic Civil War battle, fighting their way through the muggy East Coast heat on nothing but a bunch of stale biscuits (historically accurate down to the last crumb). Sometimes it seems like my worlds couldn’t be farther apart—my family rattles on about the most authentic 19th-century firearms as I breathlessly scroll Arabic Facebook feeds. Yet both reflect a fight for freedom that should be honored, be it the fierce rebellion of the Egyptians or the charged political theater of the reenacting Americans. In their different ways, both nations are seeking to understand themselves in order to show up honestly in relationship with their own people and other countries. Often it is something as deceptively simple as curiosity, combined with deep-seated feelings of injustice, which compel mass political action. As the little boy standing in Tahrir Square asks: “Politically speaking, where is the constitution that represents us?”