This article is a preview from the Summer 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
Eight months ago, Ruqaya was hiding behind a wall on the edge of Cairo’s Rabaa square, her leg peppered with birdshot. The dead and dying were all around her. The square was a burning mess, armoured bulldozers shovelling aside the wreckage of wood and plastic tents. The air was thick with smoke and tear gas. Police snipers patrolled the rooftops of surrounding buildings, shooting at anything that moved. In front of Ruqaya’s hiding place, a man rose to his feet in defiance, shouting “I won’t crawl. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar!”
“After a second, I heard his brain explode from the bullet,” she says.
For six weeks after Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was removed by the military on 3 July 2013, Ruqaya had lived in the pro-Morsi protest camp that sprang up at Rabaa. By early August, there were an estimated 85,000 people with her. Many, like Ruqaya, who is just 15, were high-school or university students on their long summer holidays. They worked together in shifts, organising speakers for the main stage, cooking rotas, cleaning teams and lookouts for the edges of the camp. Though the majority of the protesters were Islamist, they saw themselves as guardians of a democratic process that the military had abused, inheritors of the mantle of the 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak. “We had the soul and the feeling of Tahrir Square again in Rabaa,” says Ruqaya. But when the authorities cleared the square at dawn on 14 August, using devastating force, some protesters responded with violence. Some 632 people, by the state’s count; up to 1,000, according to independent rights groups, were killed, eight of them police officers; at least 4,000 were injured.
Beyond the boundaries of Rabaa, the nation was divided – a bitter polarisation that persists to the present day. Most Islamists supported Morsi. Many ordinary Egyptians, spurred on by state media, were swept by an anti-Brotherhood fervour with a nationalistic rather than secular flavour. On 30 June 2013, hundreds of thousands turned out to demand the resignation of Morsi and early presidential elections. The minority of educated, secular activists who had led the revolution of 2011 were in disarray. Unable to gain popular support in a society they had little in common with after the unifying goal of Mubarak’s removal was achieved, during Morsi’s rule they were further weakened by internal divisions. Some, such as Amr el-Shobky and Hazem Abdel Azim, supported the army as a bulwark against the Muslim Brotherhood. Others who opposed both the Islamists and the military, such as Ahmed Maher and Alaa Abdel Fatah, found themselves harassed and reviled by all sides.
***
By September, street protests against the military had been effectively crushed. Since then, Egypt’s universities have become the new focus of dissent. The country has around 2.4 million students in higher education, the four largest universities in Cairo – Ain Shams, Cairo, Helwan and al-Azhar – accounting for around 700,000 between them. Al-Azhar, based on a parallel Islamic educational system, has been at the centre of protests. Only al-Azhar school pupils, like Ruqaya, can progress on to its universities, and its 120,000-strong student body in Cairo is predominantly sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi.
One is Youssof Salhen, a 21-year-old language and Islamic sciences student and member of Students Against the Coup (SAC), an umbrella protest movement he helped form during the weeks in Rabaa.
“From the beginning of the revolution in 2011, we’ve been fighting one thing, the rule of the military,” says Salhen, a slim young man with a quick smile who describes himself as an “independent Islamist”. In an overwhelmingly religious society, protesters perceive Egypt’s political dilemma as a struggle less between secularism and Islamism – as it is often framed in the west – than between authoritarian and democratic rule. “Mubarak, Sadat and Nasser were all military,” Salhen continues. Like many of the students, he says that he is not a supporter of Morsi so much as the new, democratic dispensation that he represented after decades of military-backed dictatorship. “If you want to change a government, fine, vote them out – anything other than a military coup!” he says
***
Though the military claimed that it was the mass demonstrations of 30 June 2013 that gave democratic legitimacy to Morsi’s removal, conditions for protest in Egypt are now harder than ever. Since July 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood has been declared a terrorist organisation, pro-Morsi TV channels taken off air, journalists arrested for reports deemed hostile to the state, a three-month curfew imposed on cities and an estimated 20,000 dissidents from across the political spectrum jailed. In the name of security, street protest has been criminalised and making the four-finger “Rabaa sign” (Rabaa means “fourth” in Arabic) banned. Youth activism is increasingly channelled through the universities, with students turning out every week in numbers ranging from the hundreds to the thousands.
Since this academic year began in September, a monthly average of 230 protests have been staged across 24 campuses. As protests have escalated, so has the authorities’ response, with university administrations working closely with the state. In October, the Supreme Council of Universities issued a decree banning on-campus protests against the army and police. In November, a cabinet decision gave security forces the free run of university premises, reversing a 2009 ruling that had kept them outside the gates. Tear-gassings, beatings and arrests became common, and scores of students have been expelled. The second semester, due to start in February, was delayed until March. When al-Azhar students returned, they found administrative buildings fortified against them. Human rights groups estimate that, since September, 14 students have been shot dead on campus and around 1,300 detained from various locations.
“The situation is more bloody than ever before; we’re seeing excessive attacks by police that violate international agreements on student rights,” says Amira Abdelhamid, a researcher at the Cairo-based Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression. University administrative staff have responded to criticism by claiming students are endangering themselves, staff and university property. In some instances, both they and police have accused students of being armed. Abdelhamid says there is no way to verify these claims. “There have been violations by students, but we don’t know if there is a systematic use of weapons – there are no unbiased reports,” she says. When I ask Salhen what al-Azhar students think of their administration, his face twists. “The president [Islamic law expert Osama el-Abd] was appointed by Mubarak,” he says. “The administration supported the coup, justified the murder of innocent people, invited the police on to the campus.”
The crackdown also extends to minors. Ruqaya and her 13-year-old sister were detained in January when a police street check found them carrying a camera with pro-Muslim Brotherhood images in its memory.
“I found my head under a policeman’s arm and he dragged me away,” she says. “They took us to Nasr City police station.” At the station, they were thrown into a cell with six blindfolded boys of their own age. Like the sisters, all were from al-Azhar schools. Two were taken to an adjoining room and beaten. One boy began to ask for medicine, two others to use the toilet.
“We’re not in a nursery now,” the officer told them. “If you want to die, die.”
The girls were then strip-searched and crammed into an unventilated underground cell with 30 adult women detained on criminal charges. They were held for two days before their families managed to get them released.
Many others were less fortunate. Since the start of the academic year, groups of students arrested both on and off campus have received prison sentences of up to 17 years – in one instance on 20 March, 17 al-Azhar students were sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment and a 90,000 Egyptian pound (£7,600) fine each for offences described as “rioting, damaging public property and attacking security personnel”. Dozens of others sit in prison awaiting trial, some reporting abuse and torture by police and prison staff. When I meet Salhen, he shows me the prison stamp on his arm from a visit to student friends detained indefinitely in Abu Zaabal prison in the far north of Cairo.
***
But the protests continue. One afternoon in March, female al-Azhar students meet to demonstrate against a death sentence handed to Mansoura University student Ibrahim Azab, a protest co-ordinated between universities across northern Egypt. At noon, the march of 600 girls pours out of the campus. All are veiled and about a fifth wear niqab or have Palestinian keffiyeh scarves tied bandana-style over their faces. Some are carrying drums, others vuvuzelas. Tall yellow flags with stencilled women’s faces flutter at the head of the march. “These are the faces of the martyrs and those in jail,” 22-year-old Aya, an English student, tells me.
“How many female students have been killed since August?” I ask.
She hesitates. None of the protesters believe the official figures, and in the information vacuum claims and counter-claims flourish, fuelled by social media. “Hundreds of girls were killed, and we still didn’t find many of their bodies. And who knows how many are in jail.”
Many of the girls have their own Rabaa story. Sara Youssof, 22, tells me her fiancé Karim, a fellow al-Azhar student, was shot in Rabaa and died in hospital two weeks later. Before he was wounded, he told her to take shelter in Rabaa mosque. “But I couldn’t bear to stay, because after half an hour it was full of bodies,” she says. “People were dying, gasping for breath, around me, trying to say the shahada” – the Muslim profession of faith that should be the last words of every believer. “I couldn’t believe that our own army had done this.” The experience made her determined to fight military rule. “We’ve experienced everything, we’ve lost everything,” she says. “Nothing can scare us any more. Either we’re going to achieve our aims and live free in our country, or we’re going to paradise.”
The march winds round the streets of the middle-class district of Nasr City, blocking traffic on its busy roads. There is little sign of public approval – middle-aged drivers lean impatiently on their car horns and a busload of young men crane out of the windows to film the girls on their cameraphones. The girls hold up the four-finger Rabaa sign and shout to them: “We’re doing this for you, not just for us.” Near the university gates, screams erupt. A black line of riot police are marching fast up the street towards us, swinging their batons and brandishing blunt-nosed tear-gas guns. “You’re the dogs of the state, you’re thugs,” the girls shout at them as gas canisters crack behind us. “Quick, into the university,” calls Aya. A crowd of girls surges through the gate and spills down the steep narrow staircase beyond. Several lose their footing and scream as the gas billows into the campus. Aya drops to one knee and coughs. Girls besiege the fridges at the open-air cafeteria, shouting for Pepsi, a folk remedy against the gas.
These skirmishes are repeated several times a week, but the prospect of protests spreading beyond the universities seems remote. The army is riding a wave of public acclaim. On the third anniversary of the 2011 revolution, Tahrir Square was full not of those who helped bring Mubarak down, but of army supporters calling for the presidency of military leader Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi. Like those who had voted through the army-backed constitution earlier in the month, they tended to be older – on Facebook, young activists shared a photograph of a grey-haired queue at a polling station, captioned “the shameful generation”. But Sisi’s promise of security and stability has proved alluring to Egyptians of all ages exhausted by political turbulence and economic struggle.
Since 2011, unemployment, poverty and public debt have soared and foreign investment has dried up. The tourism industry, which in 2010 contributed 13 per cent of GDP and directly or indirectly employed 15.5 per cent of the workforce, has “collapsed”, in the words of the tourism minister. A sense of political exhaustion and disillusionment reigns, with many young people who have the means to do so aiming to emigrate and start a new life far from Egypt’s chaos.
***
The Muslim Brotherhood has been held accountable for many of these systemic ills, as well as being blamed for a rash of terrorist attacks on state targets since July. The fact that Sinai-based jihadi groups have claimed many of the attacks has made little difference. Political nuance has been elided to the extent that to oppose the army takeover is now to risk being labelled a supporter of terror – clashes between students and security forces have appeared on Egyptian TV stations with the caption “Egypt fights terrorism”, further leaching public sympathy. But even many of those who identify as Islamists don’t support student protests.
“What the students are doing just isn’t pragmatic, it’s not the right time,” says 27-year-old Sherif Rihan, a Muslim Brotherhood supporter who participated in the protests against Mubarak. “They’re wasting their deaths and imprisonments. Better to wait and regroup and plan.”
To the student protesters this passive attitude is at the root of Egypt’s problems. Nineteen-year-old Belal Darder is studying languages at Ain Shams university in Cairo. A former member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, he has spent the last months circulating images of Rabaa and other abuses by the security forces, winning
fellow students to the cause. The results, he says, have been encouraging. “I’d say 50 per cent of students are protesting at Ain Shams, now. Actually 70 per cent are against the coup but 20 per cent are lazy.” In Darder’s eyes, the moribund educational system is directly linked to political dysfunction. “People aren’t interested in knowledge, they just ask – what’s going to be in the exam?” he says. “It’s all memorisation and copying. When we study literature, the professor tells us his opinions about it and then examines us on them!” He sighs. “If I want to learn I have to teach myself. And if we want anything to happen in this country, we have to do it ourselves.”
***
As the months wear on, protest is becoming a way of life for many of the students. Like Darder, Salhen is a veteran of clashes with the state. “I’ve been protesting for three years, since January 2011,” he says. Sometimes we joke that if this ends we don’t know what we’re going to do. I’m an addict, me and all my friends. We write on Facebook – I’ve been without tear gas for three days, I’m in withdrawal.” Where older protesters have flagged, the students’ youth and camaraderie will keep them going indefinitely, he says optimistically. “I’m 21, the oldest are 23 or 24, most of us 20, 19, 16 or even younger. We have already spent years of our short lives doing this, and we don’t mind if we spend the rest.”
It is these shared experiences, rather than any radical ideology, that could prove the greatest threat to the state. It was the murder of 28-year-old Khaled Said by security agents in June 2010 that shattered the illusion that ordinary citizens were safe – and eventually mobilised young middle-class Egyptians to reject Mubarak’s rule under the slogan “We Are All Khaled Said”. Now, 29 per cent of university-age Egyptians are in higher education. Almost all of them are witnessing, if not participating in, repeated violence between fellow students and security forces.
The protesters admit that their struggle has become as personal as it is political. “Our main purpose is freedom, dignity and justice of course, but it’s even more about our best friends, our teachers and members of our families who’ve been killed or imprisoned,” Salhen says. Darder agrees. “It’s hard to see your friends die and to think about dropping the cause and going back to normal life,” he says. “You saw your classmates killed or imprisoned, the police hitting girls and dragging them away to get harassed in prison. You can never forget this.”
In post-revolutionary Egypt, selective memory is encouraged. As at Cairo’s other sites of lethal state violence since January 2011 – Tahrir Square, Mohamed Mahmoud Street, Maspiro, the Republican Guards HQ – normality has washed back over Rabaa, hastened by the official clean-up operation. A ministry of transitional justice established in the aftermath of the army takeover and an official report into the killings at Rabaa have both been criticised by human rights groups as cosmetic exercises. But Egypt’s students are storing new memories of state brutality every week, and they want redress – the prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of protesters, the end of direct or indirect military rule and, for some, the return of Morsi. Beyond that, their aims are expressed in only the broadest and most generally acceptable terms – “We’re just trying to reach a civilian, democratic state,” says Salhen.
Egypt is currently preparing for another presidential election on 26 and 27 May. In campaign posters and billboards plastered over Cairo, Sisi, the leading candidate, has switched his military fatigues for tracksuits, polo shirts or stylish suits – a new look, though his platform remains undefined. Protecting the rights of minorities currently persecuted by both the state and Islamists – including gay people, Baha’i’s, Shia and atheists, as well as Egypt’s Christian community – is not on the agenda for either the military or the protesters. And in a climate where the army confiscates citizens’ legal alcohol supplies on religious grounds and Sisi displays a prayer bruise and peppers his speeches with Qur’anic quotations, secularism is unlikely to triumph either. His victory is virtually guaranteed, but the violence that has followed Rabaa may leave Egypt’s youth harder to govern than he imagines.
