I went to see Amre Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League and a former foreign minister of Egypt. Together with Nabil Fahmy and other notables, he had joined an informal committee of “wise men” who wanted to help bring the demands of the youth and the people on the square to Vice-President Suleiman. Seventy-four years old, Moussa is vigorous, erudite, and charming. On the square, I had often heard him mentioned as a good man to lead the country. People respected him as an independent elder statesman. Moussa told me, “The square became a place that if you don’t go you have missed a historical moment.” He believed that the regime had initially tried to ride out the storm: “Perhaps some thought that those demonstrators would get tired and fade day after day, week after week, but everyone saw that yesterday there were more people than ever since it began.” Now their efforts at reform were no longer a luxury but had become a “question of necessity.”

In the days after the clashes, the Army tried to exert control. General Roweny could be seen striding up the road toward the Egyptian Museum, behind which the Army had made an impromptu headquarters. Sherif told me that the day after Roweny was tearing off bandages he returned with an Egyptian news crew and again confronted Sherif and his band of medics. He told them to go home and “end this silly business.” Sherif replied, “You call the blood of Egyptians silly business!” Roweny told Sherif that the Army was resolved to clear the square, because it wanted to resume normal traffic circulation the next day. “We can’t use violence, but we can be very tough with people,” he warned. Sherif asked what he meant by tough. “Like from a father to a child,” Roweny replied, smiling and answering questions in front of the TV cameras. Afterward, he addressed the crowds in the square, telling them, “You all have the right to express yourselves, but please save what is left of Egypt.” The crowd, cheering, responded that Hosni Mubarak should leave. Roweny abandoned his speech, saying, “I will not speak amid such chants.”

At one point, the Army tried to push a line of tanks farther into the square, near the Egyptian Museum. But the protesters staged a sit-in under the tanks. I sat down among them and talked to a man whose body was scaly with psoriasis. He came from a small village not far from Cairo and worked in a lowly capacity for the local municipality. He said that his salary of seven hundred Egyptian pounds (around a hundred and twenty dollars) was not enough to feed his family and pay for treatment for his skin complaint. He tried to explain the situation: “The Army is trying to tighten the space and get people farther into the square.” When I returned the next day, the protesters had settled in, storing sandwiches and blankets in the niches between the tank wheels and tracks, sleeping under the turrets, and praying five times a day in neat rows. When the tanks had first arrived, the protesters had eyed them like mysterious beasts; they now seemed tamed. Parents would stand their children on top of them and take photographs. The soldiers pretended not to mind this domestication.

The Army, though ostensibly neutral, was obviously invested in the status quo. After Mubarak fired most of his Cabinet, in the first days of the protests, the military establishment found itself in control of the key posts of government. Suleiman, the former head of military intelligence, was Vice-President, and Ahmed Shafik, a former head of the Air Force (as Mubarak himself was), became the new Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi remained in the position he had held for almost twenty years, Minister of Defense and Military Production. Initially, this triumvirate seemed to form a Praetorian guard around the regime; they were all military men, all in or nearing their seventies, and all close to Mubarak. At the time, the Western diplomat told me that there were no significant differences between Suleiman and his President; that the regime thought it could ride the protests out; and that Mubarak would hold fast to the idea that the protests were the work of foreign machination—“a rock-solid point of view that we have seen from him for many years.” Tantawi, the diplomat hoped, would continue to cleave to the Army’s policy of nonviolence: “Yes, he’s a product of the regime and he’s perfectly happy to arrest people, but he’s not going to shoot them.”

It now seems likely that there were always differences between the military establishment and the most loyal elements of the regime—Mubarak’s inner circle, the Interior Ministry and the police, N.D.P. strongmen, and the domestic security services. It is perhaps for this reason that, in the days that followed, the pronouncements of the military triumvirate, like the mercurial behavior of General Roweny on the square, seemed to veer between conciliation and impatient threats. After the clashes with pro-Mubarak crowds, Prime Minister Shafik apologized for the violence on national TV, and there was an effort at dialogue between the Vice-President and some of the opposition groups. But, only a few days later, Suleiman seemed to threaten a martial crackdown. At the time, it was hard to see where the balance of power lay between the regime and the security and military establishments, but throughout the protests in Cairo there were two constants that proved decisive: the Army never fired on the protesters, and it never prevented people from coming onto the square.

“David believes in multiple universes—all of them lousy.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The military establishment had never liked Mubarak’s son Gamal, widely despised as being at the center of a group of cronies who cashed in on liberal economic reforms of the past decade. In recent years, senior officers had expressed discomfort with his implicit anointment as heir. When Mubarak appointed Suleiman as Vice-President, traditionally the position occupied by a successor, they may have been satisfied. But the crowds on the square were not, and, in the days that followed, they managed, through their numbers, and by continually reiterating their trust in the Army, to coöpt the military as a reluctant revolutionary partner.

In the second week of protests, beyond the square, Cairo returned to work. Banks reopened, and the roads resumed their customary state of honking gridlock. And yet the numbers on the square continued to grow. At lunchtime and after work, people streamed in to take part in this phenomenon of freedom. It seemed that everyone I talked to insisted that they had been there since the first day. “People are trying to join the circus,” one activist said, laughing.

Sherif went back to work, too, but returned each afternoon to his friends on the square. After his first day back in the “real world,” as he described it—wondering what the real world was anymore—he admitted that he had been “very down. It has started to settle in, all the bloodshed.” But being among his new friends—none of the volunteer medics on Tahrir had known one another before the protests—had cheered him up. “It’s amazing how peaceful it is here, and outside is all the hustle and bustle. I walked through the square, and it gives you hope, that this is not all for nothing, that something is going to happen.” He was beginning to go to activist meetings, groups of young people who had met on the square or who knew one another through the blogosphere, to discuss how to go forward. “The lack of leadership is a positive and a negative,” he had said at one point, “but it shows that this really is a revolution of the people.”

We discussed possible leaders. None of the opposition parties had been able to garner any significant support among the protesters. Most seemed well-meaning but amateurish, and were headed by an older generation. I mentioned Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who had returned to Egypt from Vienna, where he lives, and quickly became associated with the protests. Sherif, like many on the square, was unimpressed: “Baradei? Where is he? He came to the square for four or five minutes and then left. My sister says he’s on the news channels every five minutes, saying, I did this and I did that and I said all that and I predicted that. But he’s been in Vienna this whole time.”

Without a clear leader or a dominant ideology, the square had become a kind of speakers’ corner. A veiled woman told of her dream of the Prophet Muhammad circling the square; a psychiatrist held a small crowd spellbound with his theory that Mubarak was a psychopath. People pressed photocopied manifestos into my hands and asked me why President Obama was equivocating. Everyone had become an expert on the Egyptian constitution and the clauses that set the criteria for Presidential and parliamentary candidates. They talked about the Turkey model, with the military as the guarantor of the state. Sherif remarked that the square had become like a university of political science—“the rate of learning is incredible for everyone.” He wanted to be involved. “We can’t let the blood of the martyrs and the injured go to waste. They were killed for a cause, and we have to go through with it. I can’t go back to my normal life as if nothing had happened.”

Against this background of expectant fervor, on February 10th everyone—the C.I.A., CNN, the head of the N.D.P., the Egyptian Prime Minister, Barack Obama, and even the bandage-pulling General Roweny, who told the crowds, “All your demands will be met today”—believed that Mubarak would announce that he was stepping down. There was a rainstorm at lunchtime, a sign of good luck in a desert country, and afterward a rainbow came out and was tweeted all over the world.

At 10:45 P.M., Mubarak began to speak, and the crowd went quiet. Mohamed, my translator, had gone home, to attend his brother’s engagement party, and so I understood the speech largely through the crowd’s reaction to it. Mubarak’s voice echoed amid loudspeakers on the square—scratchy, low, stentorian, and occasionally inflected with a twang of feedback. People listened on cell phones, and in the tents at the center of the square dozens of heads were bent over the glow of a laptop screen. Gradually, the faces of those around me grew stony as people realized that they had heard this speech before. About halfway through, a hissing exhalation of disbelief rose up. I later found that this was at the moment when Mubarak patronizingly reminded his listeners that he had once been young himself. From then on, people stopped listening. They cradled their heads in their hands, silent with shock and despair. One by one, they held up their shoes in the air in contempt. And, when Mubarak finished speaking, there was a great roaring, defiant chant of “Leave! Leave! Leave!” They punched the air in fury. One man behind me screamed and collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. Someone standing next to me told me that his brother had been killed in the protests. People tried to console him, but he suddenly went berserk, screaming and kicking. Four or five people tried to hold him down but could not control his rage. Behind him, a man prayed with his palms made into fists.

I found Sherif by the field clinic next to the barricade. He was wearing an Egyptian-flag bandanna around his head. His expression was uncomprehending and blankly exhausted. “I’m not sure if he gets it,” he said. He was trying to fathom Mubarak’s gargantuan level of denial. “We were already celebrating and now”—he cut the air with his hand—“no one knows what’s happening.” There was a hardness in his face which I had not seen before. He advised me to stay in the hotel tomorrow. “Will it be bad?” I asked. “It’s possible, it’s possible,” he said. “I don’t know what this idiot is going to pull out of his hat.” Sherif decided to spend the night on the square.

Mubarak never actually resigned, and it was left to Omar Suleiman to announce his departure, the next day. On the square, the news was greeted with a wall of whistling cheer and a blur of flags. It was an exultant, unified joy. The traffic lights were showing all their colors simultaneously, like disco gels. Fire flares, apparently made by ignited cans of air freshener, burst in the crowd. There were no sentences, just a word—“amazing”—repeated over and over. Protesters hugged the soldiers, who climbed out of their tanks and took off their helmets to join the party. I watched someone shake the hand of an officer and proudly take a picture of his small son with the man.

“If you didn’t want to feel inferior to your classmates, you shouldn’t have gone to such a good school.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Sherif was not on the square for the announcement and missed the extraordinary scenes, but he saw something ultimately more revealing. That day, crowds had marched peacefully toward the Presidential Palace, at Heliopolis, northeast of Tahrir, and Sherif decided to go there, too. At around four o’clock, a couple of hours before Suleiman’s speech, he was outside the palace, dressing a few wounds. Several tanks were stationed there, their cannons pointing in the direction of the crowd, but, as Sherif watched, the tanks turned their turrets—it seemed, he said, to happen in slow motion—so that the cannons were pointing at the palace. Then the soldiers started waving Egyptian flags and chanting with the crowd, “Egypt! Egypt! The Army and the people are one hand!”

The next morning, I sat in a café on the square, talking over the events. Everyone was reading the newspapers, and across the room I saw a news photograph of General Roweny reaching to shake the hand of another officer, against a background of the Tahrir crowd. The man with the paper said it was an old picture, from the times when the Army had first come to the square.

“Is he good?” I asked about Roweny.

“Now, yes!” the man said.

“What about before?”

He waggled his hand in equivocation and grimaced. “Who knows?”

Alaa Al Aswany had told me that he thought the Egyptian revolution would fundamentally change the Middle East paradigm of an apathetic populace oppressed by dictators and retreating into Islam. “We are seeing now the end of the post-independence dictatorships in the Arab world,” he said. “What we see now is the end of this era. Western analysts are totally confused, because it goes far beyond Mr. Mubarak. The political analysts in the West are going to have to throw away their old books.”

That afternoon, I met Mahmoud Zaher, a retired general in Egypt’s military-intelligence apparatus who now fulfilled a role whose contours he was hesitant to define. When I arrived at his home, next to a mosque in a pleasant neighborhood on the left bank of the Nile, he was praying. He was a gracious host, sitting very upright while his son, who, he told me, had been many days on the square, brought glasses of fresh orange juice and cups of Turkish coffee. When I asked questions, his answers tended to skirt specifics, forming themselves into disquisitions on theoretical matters of national history and character. A wry smile would pull in the corners of his mustache, as if he were saying, “Yes, well, of course that’s the obvious question, and I know very well what the answer is, but how can I put it?”