Revolution 2.0
Revolution 2.0
Wael Ghonim
SPECIAL PRICERevolution 2.0 is the story of Wael Ghonim’s extraordinary contribution to the Egyptian Revolution.On the 25th of January 2011, a call for people to protest against the Egyptian government appeared on Facebook.‘We are all Khaled Said’ was set up by one of the Arab world’s leading internet gurus – Wael Ghonim. He wanted it to be a focal point for ordinary Egyptians to express their anger at the killing of a young student, and transform the feeling of injustice into a peaceful protest that brought people out onto the streets of Cairo.But two days later, as the number of people in the streets grew, Wael disappeared. After 11 days in captivity, when he was finally released by Egyptian state security amid cheers and applause, he went straight on to Egyptian television to try and mobilise the people, and stood up in Tahrir Square to tell thousands of Egyptians ‘this is not the time for individuals, parties or movements. It’s time for all of us to say one thing: Egypt above all.’A visionary with a passion for computers, Wael had created one of the Arab world’s leading websites whilst still at university. Through the internet, he had met his wife, and networked with hundreds of young men and women from around the world. But in January 2011, Wael’s knowledge of technology, and his understanding of the attitudes of young people and the way they use the internet enabled him to make a lasting contribution to the future of Egypt.In Revolution 2.0 Wael gives his unique insight into Egypt’s history – how it shaped his life, and thousands like him. It introduces the problems and injustice of Egyptian politics before the revolution, and tells the full story of Wael’s journey – from We are all Khaled Said to Wael’s imprisonment by State Security, and the last triumphant days of the revolution.Hailed as a hero, but modestly rejecting the label, Wael’s determination to change the course of Egyptian history is a truly remarkable story – and testament to the ability of one man to bring people together for the cause of justice, and ultimately, freedom.
WAEL GHONIM was born in Cairo and grew up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, earning a degree in computer engineering from Cairo University in 2004 and an MBA from the American University in Cairo in 2007. He joined Google in 2008, rising to become head of marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa. He is currently on sabbatical from Google to launch a nongovernmental organization supporting education and technology in Egypt.
Dedication
To all the patriotic Egyptians, Tunisians and the
rest of the Arabs who took over the streets and
made history that inspired the world
To every brave man and woman who
made the ultimate sacrifice
To future generations, in the hope that they
will live in a free and democratic world
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1 A Regime of Fear
2 Searching for a Savior
3 “Kullena Khaled Said”
4 Online and on the Streets
5 A Preannounced Revolution
6 January 25, 2011
7 My Name Is 41
8 The Dungeon
9 A Pharaoh Falls
Epilogue
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS GREATER THAN THE PEOPLE IN POWER
Prologue
THE WORLD AROUND ME was reduced to pitch black. I could sense the deliberate use of side streets by the driver as the car traveled through Cairo at midnight. We twisted and turned many times, a technique my captors often used to disorient their victims.
On my right and left were two guards from State Security. They kept a tight grip on my handcuffed arms. I remained completely silent so as not to provoke them. They had forced my shirt up to cover my head so I could not see, and my belt was tied firmly over the shirt, around my head. One of them had pushed my head down to hide me from passing pedestrians. Everything I had been carrying had been confiscated.
Those brief moments before the car reached its destination were all too familiar. I had published the accounts of many captives of State Security. Now it was my turn. I wondered what could happen to me next, but I knew the answer: anything.
“Get out, you son of a b————,” said a loud and angry voice when we arrived. I was being pushed out of the car. My reception inside the building was harsh and mocking. I was slapped, kicked, and cursed, all accompanied by derisive laughter. It seemed as if these men enjoyed their work, or at least they did it purposefully. The laughter was part of their strategy to instill fear prior to interrogating newcomers. The most difficult thing about the slaps and kicks was their element of surprise. I had no means of anticipating any strike because I was blindfolded. When would I be hit next? From which side, on which part of me? I had no clue.
I wondered what they knew. What had I done that had given me away? Kick. Curse. My fear grew. I knew that this was what they wanted — to break me down before the interrogation. I decided to hasten things along by pretending to tremble. Yet real fear was starting to take over.
In the midst of the beating I prayed to God that he would somehow inspire my friend Najeeb, in Dubai, to change the password to the Facebook page’s e-mail account. I prayed for Najeeb to do it before the interrogation got serious. They must not know what I had done.
I wanted to see my children again.
1
A Regime of Fear
MY 2011 ARREST WAS not the first time I had encountered Egyptian State Security. One winter afternoon in 2007, I received a call from a man who presented himself as Captain Raafat al-Gohary, from the bureau in Giza, Egypt’s third largest city, which is part of greater Cairo. Needless to say, Rafaat al-Gohary was not his real name. State Security officers feared the potential wrath of citizens they interrogated and tortured, so they used pseudonyms. I greeted him calmly, attempting to hide the anxiety caused by the surprise. He said I needed to meet him for an important matter and I was to head to State Security in Dokki, a neighborhood in Giza, at eleven o’clock that night. My anxiety increased. I asked what was the matter. His response: “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll just have a chat over coffee, that’s all.” This failed to comfort me. I asked if we could reschedule, saying that I was busy with work. He refused. I wanted to play for time to try to figure out why I was being summoned, but he insisted we meet at eleven. What is the worst that can happen? I wondered. My days of activism were long over. I had never before been summoned.
Immediately after hanging up, I contacted a close friend, and we agreed that I was to call him right after the meeting ended. If he never got the call, he was to find out exactly what had happened to me, since in the past, people in a situation like mine had suddenly disappeared for days or even months after their “visit.” I decided not to tell my wife or my family anything, as I didn’t want them to panic.
I arrived at the main gate at 11 P.M. sharp. The neighborhood was quite familiar to me; my high school was literally right around the corner. At reception, after confirming that I was to meet Captain Rafaat al-Gohary, I was told to sit down and wait. Around me were at least six others. Although I didn’t speak to them, it was clear that we all shared one emotion: apprehension.
Egyptian State Security reached deep into society, involving itself in every detail of life. It thrived on the emergency law, enacted in 1958 but not enforced until after the Six-Day War in 1967, and still in effect in mid-2011. That law gives executive authorities the right to arrest, interrogate, and imprison any Egyptian for up to six months without a warrant or any legal grounds or even the right to an attorney. It also empowers the authorities to ban all types of protests as well as gatherings of any group of people without a security clearance.
The dossiers of State Security were objects of fear and ridicule. Any activist of any sort, or even anyone with considerable financial or intellectual influence, had an exhaustive dossier in his or her name at State Security, containing every detail the authorities had collected that could possibly be useful in blackmailing him or her into obedience when needed. Privacy was almost meaningless to this quintessentially Machiavellian organization. Thus, phone tapping, for instance, was a very common practice of State Security officers. Word spread that tapes documenting the infidelities of famous businessmen and public figures were stored in a room at headquarters. Ironically, officers used to advise each other not to spy on their own wives’ phones, to avoid family conflicts.
Not only did the state monitor and terrorize political opposition groups and religious activists, but its oppressive reach extended to anyone engaged in public service, including charities whose field operations were limited to empowering the poor and unfortunate. With over 40 percent of Egyptians living below the poverty line, the authorities were consistently trying to curb anyone who might mobilize the masses for a future political cause.
State Security approval was obviously a prerequisite for any senior appointment in the government. Even university teaching assistants, who are supposedly selected from among the top students of the year’s graduating class, could not be hired by the university without a security clearance proving that they were innocent of any dissident activism, political or religious.
The Egyptian regime lived in fear of opposition. It sought to project a façade of democracy, giving the impression that Egypt was advancing toward political rights and civil liberties while it vanquished any dissidents who threatened to mobilize enough support to force real change.
The Ministry of Interior was one key force of coercion. Another was the state media: terrestrial and satellite television as well as newspapers and magazines, the most famous of which were Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Gomhouriya. The regime sought to plant fear in the hearts of Egyptians from an early age. Fear was embodied in local proverbs, such as “Walk quietly by the wall (where you cannot be noticed),” “Mind your own business and focus on your livelihood,” and “Whosoever is afraid stays unharmed.” The regime’s uncompromising control also covered workers’ unions and the nation’s legislative bodies.
This all amounted to what I came to call “weapons of mass oppression.” No matter how far down we spiraled, no matter how much corruption spread, only a few people dared to swim against the current. Those who did ended up in a prison cell after an unfriendly encounter with State Security, or were subjected to character assassination in the media, or were targeted on fraudulent charges or long-ignored violations.
“Hello, Wael. Why are you giving us a hard time? Why the troublemaking?”
This, together with a faint smile, was how Captain Raafat greeted me. His air-conditioned office contained three other investigators. The room was modestly decorated with a number of books, many of which were very obviously about religion. State Security wanted everyone to believe that it had nothing against faith.
I looked at him and smiled as I responded calmly, “I don’t make trouble at all. It is you guys who give me trouble, and I have no idea why. I’m glad you called me in, so I can figure out what the problem is. Every time I travel back to Egypt my name appears on the arrivals watch list and the airport officers transfer my passport to State Security, who pulls me aside for an inspection, including a full search of my bags.”
This problem dated back to December 2001, when I returned from the United States, three months after 9/11. As I was collecting my luggage, I heard my name over the loudspeakers. I was urgently asked to return to passport control. There was also someone calling my name in person, so I showed myself to him. He took my passport and asked me to wait in front of a lounge by State Security’s airport office. After a very nerve-racking forty minutes, a detective emerged with my passport and asked me to bring my luggage in for inspection. That day I thanked God that everything turned out well. It appeared to be nothing more than a typical post-9/11 glitch. Yet every time I entered Egypt between that day and the time the revolution began, I was pulled aside. Until this day, I had never found out the reason for that.
Captain Raafat was deliberately friendly, as if we really were just having a chat. However, he was armed with pen and paper, and he carefully documented the conversation. He took time to finish recording my responses before he resumed his questions. Almost everyone from the upper or middle class who was called in for interrogation by State Security was met with this same friendly, off-the-record manner. (Poorer people were treated far more harshly.) It was transparently illegitimate.
The captain asked for my personal information: name, age, address, marital status. I answered all his questions. He asked about my wife’s full name.
“Oh, she is not Egyptian. Where is she from?”
“America,” I responded.
He wrote her full name in Arabic as I pronounced it again and asked me to verify the spelling.
“So you married an American for the citizenship, right?”
He was surprised to discover that despite my marriage in 2001, I had never applied for a green card or U.S. citizenship. “I’m a proud Egyptian and I find no reason why I should apply for any other citizenship,” I explained.
Very cynically, he replied, “And what is it exactly that you like about Egypt?”
“I’m never able to verbally express my reasons for loving Egypt, yet love for it runs in my blood,” I replied honestly. “Even my wife asks why I love my country despite all its shortcomings. I always answer that I don’t know why. You know, Captain, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, during the first thirteen years of my life, I literally used to count the days left, on a paper on my desk, before I could return home to Egypt to spend the annual vacation. And when only a few days remained, I was too excited to fall asleep at night.” I returned his cynical smile and joked, “I love it here because life lacks routine. You wake up in the morning and have no idea what the day will be like. One morning you could receive a phone call like the one I received today, asking you to report to State Security.”
He smiled while saying, “You are certainly a troublemaker.”
I saw a copy of the Holy Qur’an lying on the captain’s desk. I assumed it was there to assure anyone who sat opposite him that the captain regularly read scripture and had nothing against faith. The ruling regime was extremely apprehensive about organized religious forces in Egypt, particularly ones that concerned themselves with public affairs. Their fears were intensified when thousands of Egyptians traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. Many of those fighters, or self-proclaimed mujahideen, returned with ideologies that rejected the Arab regimes, denouncing them as heretical and treacherous tools of the West. The new ideology, and the new militants, posed a threat to the Egyptian authorities. Although the emergency law had been suspended by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1980, it was reinstated eighteen months later, following Sadat’s 1981 assassination at the hands of radical Islamists. Sadat’s assassins were apparently motivated by his crackdown on more than 1,500 political and religious activists, and also by the fact that he signed a peace treaty with Israel and emphasized it with a visit to Tel Aviv.
The influence of religious groups in Egypt increased as time went on, and their variety expanded. These groups were never homogeneous, nor did they all necessarily share the same philosophies or even objectives. They did share one thing, however: enmity toward the regime. In turn, Hosni Mubarak’s government feared them. Mubarak knew these groups could influence the Egyptian masses more than anyone else, since Egyptians tend to be religious by nature; in a Gallup poll conducted in June 2011, 96 percent of the one thousand Egyptian respondents agreed that religion played “an important role in their daily life.” Ordinary Egyptians take religious figures as role models, symbols of nobility and sincerity, values which were thoroughly lacking in many of the the public representatives of the regime. Most of the time when the regime attacked a religious group, that group’s popularity received a boost. The fact that economic conditions were stagnant or declining only magnified the effect.
State Security kept an eye on all religious speakers and scholars and even on university students who frequented mosques, not just those who were active in Islamic movements. They were careful to summon such people to their offices to ask them about their activities and even to intervene and attempt to redirect them. Occasionally, hundreds would be arrested and thrown into jail for years without explicit accusations. Behind bars, they were brutally treated and humiliated. Once released, they either became fanatics, motivated by their bad experience, or attempted to reintegrate into society and forget the past.
This, I realized, was the real reason for my interrogation. State Security wanted to know if I had any links to religious or political activism, especially now that I regularly traveled abroad and, as a result, was becoming more exposed to real democracy. It was time to create a dossier in my name that contained the details of my life for future reference.
The story of my faith dates back to high school days. I did not pray regularly before then, although I adhered to the general ethics of religion, thanks to my parents’ encouragement and because I grew up in Saudi Arabia. That country is conservative by nature, especially in Abha, a small southern city where society and culture are assumed to be less advanced than in urban centers.
One of my closest cousins, Dalia, died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of twenty-five. Her death had an impact on me, and I was moved to explore my faith, as I didn’t want to die unprepared. I listened to sermons, attended religious lessons, and read books. I felt that life was a brief test that ended at death. I started praying five times a day, on time, and often at the mosque.
At the university, I mixed with people from many religious groups and ideologies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and I joined many of their activities at the school. But I always made my own sense out of things. A famous sheikh whom I met with several times once said to me, “Your problem, Wael, is that you only follow your own logic and you don’t want to have a role model to follow.” It was hard for me to accept conventional wisdom. It was my nature to discuss any matter thoroughly before I could accept a conclusion with both heart and mind. This attitude in an eighteen-year-old is not always endearing. It was not just my age, however. Thanks to frequent exposure to global media and modern communication tools, many young Egyptians were slowly becoming empowered to make their own educated choices.
“So your dad lived in Saudi Arabia. For how many years? What are his religious and political views?” asked Captain Rafaat, who had to gather as much information as he could, not only about me but also about my family members, as part of his job.
My father is a typical hardworking Egyptian who comes from the slowly eroding middle class. Born in the 1950s, his generation sang praises to Arab nationalism and the 1952 revolution, when Egypt’s King Farouk was overthrown by a military coup and Egypt was transformed from a monarchy into a republic. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, was a government employee at the Egyptian Railways. He had seven sons, whom he struggled to raise and educate. My father, the oldest, graduated from medical school and immediately went to work for a public hospital.
After my father married my mother, in 1979, and I came along, in 1980, his salary could hardly cover our basic needs as a family, so he decided to leave for work in Saudi Arabia. It was a very tempting option for many Egyptians. The salary offered in Saudi Arabia was twenty times the amount he received at the public hospital in Egypt. Like millions of Egyptian expatriates, he hoped to save some money and then return home after a few years to start a private practice in Cairo. Egypt’s talented citizens were becoming its main export, to the country’s detriment.
Economic conditions at home were horrendous at the time. Every year tens of thousands of Egyptians applied to the green card lottery, hoping to emigrate to America. Others left for Gulf countries, Canada, or Europe, by any means possible, to look for job opportunities. The phenomenon kept increasing, and emigration became the common dream of scores of Egyptians. Those with fewer skills did not have as many options. Some were desperate enough to put their lives at risk by emigrating to Europe illegally, by boat, despite the risk of drowning. I still remember an Egyptian comedian’s response to a question about the future of the nation: “Egyptians’ future is in Canada.”
After spending only a few years in Saudi Arabia, my father, like many Egyptians, fell into the trap of Islamic private investment companies, which proliferated in the early eighties. These companies offered a huge annual return on investment that reached 30 or sometimes even 40 percent, as opposed to banks, which offered 10 percent or less. My father deposited his life savings with four of these companies to diversify his portfolio. The companies were founded by religious Egyptians who offered their services as an alternative to banks; various Islamic scholars deemed fixed interest rates to be usurious and consequently prohibited by Sharia law.
A few years after the enormous growth of these companies, the Egyptian regime decided to fight them. Among other things, it wanted to protect the interests of loyal businessmen and feared that these private asset management companies would control the economy and cripple the banks. All such companies were frozen by the state, and their founders were arrested for fraud and money laundering. Most of the money saved by my father after years of hard work in Saudi Arabia was lost, as was the money of many other middle-class Egyptians inside Egypt and abroad.
So my father decided to stay in Saudi Arabia for a much longer time than he had initially planned. Every time I asked him why we were not returning home, he would answer, “How can I provide for a family of five with a salary of a few hundred pounds that runs out by the fifth day of the month?” My father is typical of his generation. He is fun, everyone loves him, and back then he spoke about politics only through jokes that timidly criticized the ruling class. “Ignore, live, enjoy” was his philosophy. Whenever he could, he would ignore problems rather than face them. I don’t blame him; the 1952 revolution had this effect on most of his generation.
My mother, on the other hand, pressured my father every year to return to Egypt, start his private practice, and attempt to readapt to life at home. We finally decided as a family that everyone but my father (I now had a brother and a sister) would return to Egypt and that he would follow us two or three years later, when he had saved enough to start a business at home. (Unfortunately, this never actually happened, and my father still lives in Saudi Arabia.)
Captain Rafaat was not very interested in my father once he found out that he was not involved with any political or religious groups, and he quickly moved on to ask, “So, when did you return to Egypt?”
It was in 1994. I enrolled in a private school in Zamalek, near our home in Mohandeseen. Both neighborhoods are known to be among the best areas in Cairo. I was in the ninth grade at the time. The decision to return to Egypt was one of the happiest moments of my life, but it was not easy living away from my father. I was never very capable of expressing emotions. I missed him immensely and always looked forward to his visits home. When he came home for forty-five days of vacation every year, I accompanied him everywhere he went. I laughed at his constant jokes and loved his modesty and his openness toward everyone he met. Tears always came to my eyes when he was leaving to go back to Saudi.
My mother did her best to make up for Dad’s absence. She was fully devoted to raising her three children to become decent and responsible human beings, and I was impressed at how she selflessly agreed to be away from her husband in order to do so. Despite her incredibly strong character, she put her children first in every decision she made.
Fortunately, I quickly adapted at school. My best friend was a genius of a boy by the name of Moatasem. He always effortlessly came in at the top of our class. I tried competing with him during exams, but always in vain. Moatasem was extremely diligent. I scored 92.5 percent and ranked second after him in the ninth grade, which is a milestone year in our educational system, the final year before “secondary education.” Moatasem decided to transfer to a public high school, where he would enroll in classes for advanced students. He convinced me to leave our private school and go with him to Orman High School. “It will be very competitive for us in the advanced classes, and the teachers in these classes are some of the best in Cairo,” he said. These arguments were enough to convince me, but one more reason was to get to know the real Egypt and integrate with Egyptians from different backgrounds and social classes and not just those who could afford to go to private schools.
I missed the aptitude tests for the advanced classes because I was away on our annual visit to my dad in Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1995. Before I began traveling, an admissions employee at the school assured me that I would be able to take the aptitude test once I returned. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t keep his promise, so I found myself attending regular classes.
Orman High School gave me culture shock. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined or heard about public schools. Being an all-boys school, there was a constant surplus of testosterone in the air. Fighting in the school playground always ended with someone injured. There was a designated corner for smoking cigarettes, and sometimes hash. Skipping school was common, as long as you paid a toll — a bribe — to the student guarding the fence. The number of students in a single class was at least double what I had been used to, over seventy students in a space that had contained only thirty students at my previous school.
I quickly tried to reverse my decision by calling the principal at my previous school. He refused to take me back, in order to teach me a lesson: he had offered many enticements to keep me at the school when I announced my decision to transfer, including slicing my tuition fees in half. I was very stubborn and rejected all his offers, so I don’t blame him for refusing me when I suddenly tried to crawl back. Unwittingly, however, I had made one of the most important decisions of my life.
It was no easy task to cope in the new environment. Blending in was more challenging to me than performing well in class, and I regained my balance only after I began to adapt. At the beginning of my Orman experience I hated it so much. Yet at the end I loved it just as much. That school exposed me to social classes I had never mixed with. I learned how to relate to all kinds of people. I later became extremely interested in psychology and sociology, not least because of these years.
In my first year, I received my worst grades ever. The threat of failure has always motivated me to fight back. I decided to focus all my time and effort during the next year — the eleventh grade — to excel, in order to join the advanced classes with my friend Moatasem in twelfth grade, the last year at high school. Mission accomplished: after a year of very hard work, I received a grade of 95 percent and was able once again to sit at a desk with Moatasem, as we used to do in the ninth grade.
Nevertheless, no amount of success could make me forget some of the things I saw during the first two years at Orman. The teachers tried to maintain order by means of violence and beatings. In return, the students enjoyed intimidating and harassing the teachers. There were daily battles in those classrooms of seventy, among whom were a fair number of troublemakers.
Like other government employees, public school teachers in Egypt receive a monthly salary of no more than a few hundred pounds, which does not cover their basic family needs. As a result, private lessons have become teachers’ main source of income. Teachers can generate thousands of pounds by visiting students’ homes and tutoring them in a far better environment than at school. A survey carried out by the Egyptian cabinet’s Information Center in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of parents sought private lessons for their children. Many families were spending up to a third of their income on these lessons.
Like a cancer, the phenomenon of private lessons quickly spread everywhere in the country. Teachers began marketing their services on leaflets that can be found in every street of every city and town. They give themselves catchy titles like “the emperor of physics” or “the colonel of chemistry.” The real shame is that most teachers, along with the government’s textbooks, emphasize rote memorization rather than any genuine understanding. Students and parents have to find their own ways to learn how to solve problems. Many students rely on supplementary texts. Egyptians spend over one billion pounds ($200 million) every year on them. I resisted private lessons adamantly until my final and decisive year in high school, when math and chemistry were so challenging that I simply could not grasp them from the classroom instruction.
One of my elected courses was psychology. I chose to study it because, like many adolescents, I was interested in understanding human nature. I decided to take private lessons with a university instructor whom I will never forget: Mr. Ehab. We used to spend hours more than the scheduled time discussing many interesting topics. Mr. Ehab taught me how to deal with various people and situations and helped me realize that a large number of conflicts result from pure miscommunication, like what Aristotle said about the importance of defining terms to avoid unnecessary disagreement. It was quite a good experience for someone of my age.
The corrupt educational environment also encouraged cheating. Teachers who supervised without allowing cheating were described by students as “bothersome.” Some mothers used to wish that the proctors of their children’s exams would let them cheat. It is not surprising that cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections.
I graduated from high school with a total grade score of 97 percent. I was going to attend Cairo University to study engineering, but first I searched for a job. My primary reason was to pay my phone bill, which had soared for a reason my father might never have imagined: dial-up Internet access. I spent hours exploring the Internet, browsing websites and chatting anonymously with people I did not know from around the world, using mIRC (a famous chat client at the time) to make virtual friends. I remember when my dad stormed into my room during the summer after high school to express his anger at the size of the phone bill. He confiscated the computer and locked it up in a closet, explaining that I was irresponsible and that my relationship with the computer had to end. As soon as he left the house, I broke open the closet and reclaimed the computer. When he returned, I begged his forgiveness and declared that I would get a dedicated phone line and the bill would be my responsibility. Luckily, my father always tried to treat his children as responsible near-equals. He often told us to be careful what we wished for. This time, after hearing me out, he said, “As you wish.” It was the beginning of my life online, and the beginning of my financial independence, as I started earning a steady income from working in a video gaming store and as a freelance website developer.
Working and spending long hours online was a real challenge to my studies. After passing the preparatory year at the engineering school, students were expected to choose a department to enroll in. The number of seats was limited in some departments, making them very competitive. I scored badly during my preparatory year in 1998. As a result, I initially enrolled in electrical engineering instead of my first choice, computer engineering. Nonetheless, I quickly determined that I really wanted to work with computers. A friend of mine had said that if I failed my first year in electrical engineering I could submit an appeal to the dean explaining that my life’s dream was to study computer engineering, so I proceeded to Student Affairs, where I learned that my friend’s information was accurate enough but success depended on the number of transfer requests submitted.
I took the risky decision to skip that year’s exams and submit an appeal at the end of the year. As usual, my parents were surprised by my decision and tried all forms of dissuasion, but I insisted. After few months my wish came true: only one other student requested a transfer, and we were both admitted to computer engineering.
Life was different inside my new department. There were no more than forty students, and the professors and teaching assistants knew each one of us by name. I tried to compete with the top students, but I was always behind, thanks to the countless hours I spent online. I remember one teaching assistant, Ahmed, who paused during one of his lectures and singled me out. “Wael, do you understand?” When I said yes, he responded, “Thank God — then I’m confident that everyone else has understood as well.” That was one of the reasons I hated the educational system in Egypt. I was very defensive and believed that it was the system, not me, that was blocking my progress. Yet even though I was losing at school, I was winning somewhere else.
Earlier, during the summer of my preparatory year at the university in 1998, I had created a website to help Muslims network with one another. It was pretty much like a simple version of YouTube. There were three fundamental differences, however: it was a website for audio material, not video, since video quality was not as advanced as it is today; content uploading was restricted to me and a schoolmate, since the content was religious in nature; and, finally, the website administrators had to remain anonymous. The webmaster could be reached only via an e-mail address that did not include his real name. I named the website IslamWay.com.
State Security would have immediately targeted me if it had discovered that I was the creator of an Islamic website, no matter how moderate it might have been. When I received the call from Captain Rafaat, I prayed that it would have nothing to do with my IslamWay days. Luckily, he never mentioned it during the interrogation, so I didn’t either.
It wasn’t too long before IslamWay became one of the most popular Islamic destinations on the Internet. During its early years, the website contained more than 20,000 hours of audio recordings of religious sermons, lectures, and recitals of the Holy Qur’an. Over 3,000 hours of this material I had digitized myself. In addition, the website relied on more than eighty volunteers, the true identities of most of whom remain unknown to me to this day, to collect and digitize content from existing cassette tapes.
Two years after the launch, the website had strong traffic from tens of thousands of daily users. I wanted it to serve as a kind of public library featuring a complete range of moderate Islamic opinions. When the English version launched in 1999, it spread strongly among Muslims who did not speak Arabic and among others who wished to learn about the faith. The website was becoming increasingly influential.
Surprisingly, IslamWay led me to my future wife. Despite my young age, I wanted to get married. I had proposed several times to Egyptian girls whom I met online or through my network of family and friends. My proposals were always met with skepticism leading to rejection. Many families thought I was crazy to seek marriage while I was still at school, despite the fact that I was financially independent and making a decent income. Stubborn and independent-minded as ever, however, I was determined to solve my problems my own way. Somehow I settled on a solution: I decided that what I really needed was to marry a non-Egyptian who would convert to Islam. I admired the openness of American culture and the practical way in which Americans faced life’s problems — so not just any Muslim convert, an American Muslim convert. I figured that anyone who changed her faith after a period of contemplation must be someone special — in today’s hectic world, most people barely have enough time to think about the ideologies they inherit from their parents, let alone conduct comparisons with other faiths. And even fewer people, I figured, are actually able to cope with the emotional baggage that family and society throw at a person who changes her faith. There was only one difficulty: I did not know a single woman who fit this description. But I did know how I could find one: the Internet.
I first met the woman I was to marry online after reading something she wrote on the website’s discussion forum dedicated to new Muslims, where she participated frequently as she practiced the faith she had recently embraced. I reached out to her, and we began corresponding. I found her personality strong and her writing style quite appealing. Yet when I made the crazy suggestion that she visit Cairo — she lived in California — she refused. Our correspondence trailed off over time.
Not too long after, in June 2001, when I was twenty, I planned a trip to the United States in order to donate the website to a U.S.-based charity that supported Muslim communities around the globe. The site had become very successful, and it was now so large that it was beyond my capacity to keep up with its growth. I was working at least thirty hours per week, and my studies were suffering. I had received an offer in 2000, from a close friend who knew I was the owner, to buy 10 percent for $100,000. It was a huge sum for a young man, but I refused to sell. I had never intended to make money from the portal — I do not feel comfortable profiting from social activities. I always knew I wanted to donate it to a charitable organization. Now it was time to transform IslamWay into a professionally managed website, and an American Muslim charity was ready and willing to take it on. So I hopped on a plane.
During my stay, an American friend offered to introduce me to a girl whom his wife knew was looking for a Muslim husband. Fate stepped in: she was the very girl I had chatted with online for months. Weeks later, Ilka and I were married.
I did not tell my parents in advance. My mother, I knew, was especially opposed to the notion of marrying a foreigner with a culture different from ours. Two days after the wedding (attended only by my mother-in-law, two witnesses, and an imam), I called my father. To my surprise, he only scolded me in calm tones for not consulting him and my mother. I asked if he could help me by sending a few thousand dollars until I got settled, and he agreed. I asked him not to tell my mother until I found a way to break the news to her as gently as possible. But he must have thought twice about that idea. Minutes later, my mother called and unleashed her wrath at my unilateral decision. She refused to speak to me for months afterward. I would call and call, and she would hang up as soon as she heard my voice. I wrote letters, trying to appeal to her love for me. I expressed how much I loved her. I praised Ilka as gently and insistently as I could manage, stressing her good manners and other great qualities. Nothing worked.
My stay in America left a major and lasting impression. Like any Egyptian who visits the West, I was in awe of the quality of education, the respect for citizens’ rights, and the democratic process that gave people voices and allowed them to be active players in the political process. Admittedly, at my young age, I was easily impressed. I drew a conclusion that I repeated to Egyptian friends many times: “We’re being fooled in Egypt!” The thing that impressed me the most was the freedom of religious practice — the respect for religions and every human being’s right to practice his or her faith. There were many organizations that defended Muslims and their rights. They were free to criticize the American government’s policies without fear of any secret police.
Yet not everything was in favor of the United States in the comparison with Egypt. I sensed an individualism in the air that contrasted greatly with my experience back home. In Egypt, a lot of emphasis is placed on the family and on groups in general, which creates an atmosphere that engenders a sort of emotional warmth in spite of its occasional restrictiveness. On the contrary, in the States I noticed that people were on their own in many situations in which they would have enjoyed much social support if they were in Egypt. My brain was in the United States, but my heart was definitely in Egypt.
My initial plan was to stay in the States to finish my degree, because I was so impressed with American higher education. Yet I had a change of heart after 9/11. I will never forget that day. My wife and I were home, and I had woken up early and started working on my computer when, on a discussion board, I found people asking each other to turn on the TV right away. I watched flames emanating from the first World Trade Center building; we all thought at the time that a plane had accidentally crashed into the tower. I woke up Ilka to join me, and shortly after, we both screamed in horror as a second plane crashed into the other tower. I had never imagined that people who claimed to be Muslims could commit such an atrocity. The faith in which I had been raised both unequivocally prohibits the killing of innocent civilians under any circumstances and completely forbids suicide. So I was dumbfounded when I heard speculations in the media that the culprits were Muslims. Over the years I had observed various Western media outlets magnifying the acts of some crazy fanatics and portraying them as representative of Islam. If 9/11 had anything to do with Muslims, I thought, then those who had planned this monstrous murder of thousands of innocent civilians must have been thinking solely about their political ideologies and could not possibly have considered the damage they would do to the image of Islam and Muslims living in America. Or perhaps they couldn’t care less.
It wasn’t easy being an Egyptian Muslim in America during the weeks immediately following the attack. It sometimes almost felt as if my fellow Muslims and I were personally accused of this atrocious crime. In public spaces, I was keenly aware of every look of suspicion that came my way. Many of my Muslim friends suffered acts of discrimination, including brief arrests and harassment at airports. I was getting tired of being unfairly singled out and had little hope of finding a job, so I began to seriously consider returning to Egypt.
Ilka, of course, was quite attached to her home country, although she too felt alienated by the barrage of criticism of our religion that washed through many media outlets. The fact that she wore a headscarf made her conspicuously Muslim, and this made a woman’s life harder at the time. Still, she hesitated for a long time before agreeing to move to Egypt. She had left the United States only once before, on a short tourist trip to Mexico. I remember her saying to me, “I asked some friends online about Cairo, and they said the streets were filthy.”
“Yes, I must admit, some streets are dirty, but people’s hearts are clean.”
The Egyptian people are among the best-hearted and most humorous in the world. They laugh during the darkest of times and find humor in the midst of suffering. Not even sixty years of a regime of fear could change that.
After a heavy dose of persuasion, Ilka agreed, and we flew to Egypt in December 2001, three months after 9/11. I was adamant that we see my mother immediately upon our arrival. Walking into her house right after fourteen hours of flying was actually quite an experience. She was trying to hide her emotions but failed miserably. She didn’t even smile when I said hello, and when I introduced Ilka, she offered a cold greeting. Obviously she felt betrayed. Nonetheless, over time my mother could not help warming to Ilka, and she grew to love her.
Shortly after I returned to Egypt I resumed classes, but I also began searching for a job. An old friend of mine, AbdulRahman Meheilba, along with his partner, Ramy Mamdouh, was working with an Internet startup that provided e-mail services to corporate clients and individuals. Gawab.com quickly spread across the Arab world because its e-mail service supported Arabic and it offered 15 megabytes of storage space at a time when Hotmail offered only 1MB and Yahoo offered 2MB.
Because of the entrepreneurial skills I had acquired during my experience with IslamWay.com, AbdulRahman offered me a job overseeing marketing and sales. Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted. We worked hard to spread Gawab’s services further in the Arab world. Eventually we managed to reach two million users and secure sustainable revenue by selling advertisements as well as hosting e-mail solutions for businesses and other websites. As Gawab. com grew, so did my paycheck. I became responsible for a team of twelve employees who dealt with clients in different parts of the Arab world. It was fun doing business with people you never met, thanks to the Internet. The growth of the company was exciting, and so was a six-figure offer of a buyout pitched by an Arab investor.
Working at Gawab gave me my first real sense of professional responsibility. Anything related to marketing and sales came to me. I was even responsible for accounting and cash management. It seemed everything was happening at once: in addition to spending long days at Gawab and many hours studying during my final two years at the university, I had become a father: Ilka and I were blessed with a baby girl in January 2003. We argued about who would choose the name; Ilka strategically allied with my mother and eventually got her way. We gave our beautiful little girl the name Isra.
I was ecstatic about being a father. It was strange for everyone else at school, since none of them had children. In general, many colleagues found me quite strange. Some saw that I rushed into decisions and actions without fully contemplating the consequences. They were right. It is in my blood. And not just that: I have always wanted to swim against the current.
Time quickly went by; Isra turned one, and I officially became a computer engineer in June 2004. Because I was a father, I felt even more responsibility to excel, in order to provide for my family. I scored my highest grades during the last year of school, yet my overall grade of 64 percent was “unsatisfactory.”
During my work at Gawab and a few months after graduation, I decided to study for an MBA. My job put me in charge of the company’s sales and marketing, and I realized how much knowledge I needed — I could not just read a few books and get up to speed. I needed experienced mentors and a vigorous education in business. My first choice was the American University in Cairo, which has a top-quality MBA program, though it charges high tuition fees. It would mean spending over 60 percent of my annual income on my education. As far as I was concerned, the cost did not matter much, as it was an investment that I trusted would reap returns after a few short years. Yet the university made it clear that I was not a strong candidate. My undergraduate grades were not high enough.
I wrote a long letter to the university explaining the reasons behind my low grades. The general system of education in Egypt was to blame, I claimed. I had missed exams during the first year of electrical engineering, then again during the first half of the third year, when I was in the United States, which had unfairly penalized me. I also explained the distractions of my work and early marriage, and I stressed my attempts to overcome them. One of my dearest university professors, Dr. Ahmed Darwish, who was the Egyptian minister of administrative development at the time, even wrote a letter of recommendation for me.
One of the requirements for acceptance at AUC’s MBA program was to score a minimum of 500 points on the GMAT. The director of admissions told me that if I was very serious about my application, I should score higher to compensate for my low grades. She said my score should not fall below 550, the average score of their applicants. I took it as a challenge. After two months of intense preparation I scored a 680, which was very high compared to the scores of my Egyptian peers. A short while later, I was finally accepted. I pledged to the admissions office that I would prove my worth and score the highest grades in all my classes.
Two years and sixteen courses later, I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, the highest possible. I would start each workday at Gawab, travel from there to the university to attend classes, then spend long hours at the library to study. Achieving straight A’s became of the utmost importance to me, even though it would have little effect on my career. Yet I did it. My self-confidence was redeemed. I proved to myself that I was not a failure. Ilka was supportive above and beyond the call of duty and stood behind me throughout. She knew that it was my own personal challenge, and despite the fact that I spent little time with her and our daughter, she always encouraged me to keep studying and focusing on my school projects.
The experience of the MBA program at AUC was crucial. Learning the science behind marketing was key to my career progress, and later on was vital to my online activism. The combination of marketing and a concentration in finance enabled me to understand how to study market needs, design products that address those needs, and promote them to target audiences. The finance classes introduced me to the world of business; since I came from an engineering background, this taught me a lot about how to run businesses financially. Little did I know that only a few years later, all this piled-up experience would come in quite handy in promoting a product I had never seen myself marketing: democracy and freedom!
In 2005, during the first year of my MBA, I had the startup bug. It was then that I met a major Arab investor in the field of technology — a chance meeting that I attribute solely to divine assistance. Mohamed Rasheed al-Ballaa was an engineer and a major stakeholder in the National Technology Group. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, NTG is a multinational conglomerate with more than twenty specialized information and communication technology (ICT) businesses in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States. To my delight, al-Ballaa was impressed with my web experience and listened to me pitch a cars portal for the Arab world similar to AutoTrader.com. He invited me to visit his company’s branch in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the project further.
Instead of offering to finance a startup, however, al-Ballaa offered to hire me. He wanted to expand aggressively into the Internet business in multiple ways, and effectively gave me the opportunity to be part of a larger team with a mission to help what he believed would change the face of the Arab web. The offer was quite enticing, since my entrepreneurial dream would be partially fulfilled with very little financial risk and my efforts would ultimately have more impact given al-Ballaa’s ambitious vision.
After I started working at NTG, I found al-Ballaa to be a model Arab investor. He treated me like a son, to the extent that my colleagues started to refer to me jokingly as Wael al-Ballaa.
One of the companies established by NTG was Mubasher, a Middle Eastern version of Reuters and Bloomberg financial solutions, which provided Arab stock market investors with web-based screens displaying real-time prices to facilitate buying and selling decisions. Al-Ballaa knew the importance of research and economic news for investors. He asked me to take the helm in starting a Cairo-based company to support Mubasher with data and analysis. I was not yet twenty-five.
At the time I knew nothing about the media, or publishing, or even the stock market. I was so ignorant that I did not even know the difference between a stock and a bond. I began avidly reading everything I could get my hands on about stock markets, and decided to take finance-related courses in my MBA. The company was established, and I quickly assembled a team. Needless to say, I was committed to the Internet generation. Most team members were fresh graduates in business and mass communications; I much preferred them to the experienced researchers, who were nowhere near as digitally engaged.
Mohamed al-Ballaa was extremely supportive of the project’s launch, both financially and morally. When Mubasher.info was launched, it quickly became one of the main destinations for many small Arab investors seeking information and news on listed companies.
This experience had a profound effect on me. I was heading a large team of more than 120 people. We were always seeking ways to develop and innovate. I tried every possible means to motivate the team to give the company their absolute best. I constantly urged all the employees to improve their own skills and the work environment. The site had more than one million visitors per month, and its reputation spread around the globe. We launched an English version. Several international stock market websites and companies began using our portal as one of their reliable sources for news and information. As a result, the company became interested in expanding and increasing its investments in Egypt.
Mohamed al-Ballaa was in his fifties, but he had the energy of a man in his twenties. He enjoyed taking calculated risks and venturing into areas where others would seldom go. He often told me that the rapidly evolving world around us makes it difficult to formulate five-year and ten-year plans, especially in a tech-related industry. As an investor, al-Ballaa committed his capital to dozens of ventures at once, a spray-and-pray strategy, hoping that just one would strike gold and make up for losses in the other investments. This made a profound impression on me.
The Internet has been instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my character. It was through the Internet that I was able to enter the world of communications (when I was barely eighteen) and network with hundreds of young people from my generation everywhere around the world. Like everyone else, I enjoyed spending long hours in front of a screen on chat programs. I built a network of virtual relations with people, most of whom I never met in person, not even once.
I find virtual life in cyberspace quite appealing. I prefer it to being visible in public life. It is quite convenient to conceal your identity and write whatever you please in whatever way you choose. You can even choose whom to speak to and to end the conversation at any moment you like. I am not a “people person” in the typical sense, meaning that I’d rather communicate with people online than spend a lot of time visiting them or going out to places in a group. I much prefer using e-mail to using the telephone. In short, I am a real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert.
My addiction to the Internet made joining Google a dream that I fervently aspired to make a reality. I had heard a lot about how cool it was to work there. The company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became among the most influential people in the world after they developed the web’s best search engine. Employees at Google are among the happiest in the world. Their intellectual skills are respected and their innovation is appreciated. For years I persistently applied online every time there was a vacancy that matched my experience. I used to joke with my wife and friends by saying, “I want to work at Google even if I have to take a job as a tea boy.”
One of those attempts was in 2005, only a few weeks after I joined NTG. Google announced a vacancy for a consultant in the Middle East and North Africa. Without hesitation, at barely twenty-five years old, I applied. My résumé was designed to demonstrate immediately that I was crazy about the Internet.
I had doubts about getting this position, because of my age and lack of experience. The job was to develop the company’s strategy for the entire Middle East. Yet to my surprise, I received a call from Human Resources inviting me to start the interview process.
Google is unique in everything it does. Human Resources sent me some documents to read before the interviews. The entire process took a few short months. The last, and ninth, interview was with a vice president, who spoke to me from his office in London. He asked about my experience in mergers and acquisitions along with my web experience, and about my understanding of regional web issues. Although I knew that I certainly was underexperienced, I was still hopeful, because I felt that my character and Google were “plug ’n’ play.” This is why I was devastated when, two weeks later, I found out that I had not been selected. My wife was dumbfounded and could not understand why I didn’t get the job.
My desire to join Google only intensified. It was no longer a matter of employment; it was a challenge, and I was stubborn. I particularly did not want to fail at joining a company that I thought embodied who I was as a person.
In 2008 the company announced an opening for a regional head of marketing, to be based at its one-year-old branch in Cairo. It was the perfect chance, now that I had my MBA in marketing and the Mubasher experience. Of course I applied. I volunteered a study, on my own initiative, in which I explained my vision of what the company’s strategy in the region should be. My observations included technical notes on the search engine’s performance in Arabic. Then a series of interviews began: I met with seven interviewers from different countries and functions. I thought I did very well in most of the conversations. My last interview was with the VP of marketing. I still remember my answer to her question “Why do you want to join Google?”: “I want to be actively engaged in changing our region. I believe that the Internet is going to help make that happen, and working for Google is the best way for me to have a role.”
After eight months of interviews, I received an offer — I had made it to Google! I was later told by my manager that one of the senior Googlers who interviewed me described me in his evaluation sheet as “persistent and stubborn, just the type a company needs when entering a new market.”
My skills and experience were enriched by Google. And I marveled at its culture, which was all about listening to others. Data and statistics ruled over opinions. Most of the time, authority belongs to the owners of information, or as W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
Similarly impressive is the trust Google bestowed on employees, who were empowered to access a lot of internal information that other companies would normally restrict to smaller numbers of employees. Communication and sharing knowledge among employees was key to the company’s success.
Google did not rise to the peak of the tech industry by luck. Its success is all based on strategy and philosophy. Attention goes not only to employees but also to users. The company listens to its users, asks their opinions, analyzes their usage behavior, and uses this input to develop its products. Teams within the company are constantly changing and developing products using unique and innovative product development methods.
The culture of experimentation was another thing I loved about the company. An experiment is always welcome, so long as the results come quickly. In a case where there is a difference of opinion about features of a product undergoing development, the product managers and engineers will put a beta version out to a group of users. The decision will then be based on the results and feedback. Google is not afraid of failure. Failure is accepted. If a product fails, it is terminated. Simple.
What attracted me most was Google’s 20 percent rule. The company allows employees to work on whatever they please for 20 percent of their time (one day a week). This means that they are free to work on projects other than their official assignments if they want. The idea is based on the notion that people work best when they work on things they are passionate about. A host of Google’s most outstanding products were born out of the 20 percent rule, including the e-mail service, Gmail, and the largest online advertising management network, Adsense. For me, Google helped reinforce the idea that employee engagement is the most important strategy of all. The more you can get everyone involved in trying to solve your problems, the more successful you will be. I found it natural, a few years later, to apply this philosophy to political and social activism.
A year before I finally joined Google, when I sat across the desk from Captain Rafaat of State Security, he asked me many questions about my religious faith and practice but none about my Internet experience. After a few hours of interrogation, during which he found nothing to hold against me, the State Security officer seemingly decided that I was not a threat in any way to security or to the political status quo. He said that he would try to remove my name from the airport arrivals watch list after presenting a report to his superiors. I thanked him and departed, grateful that this strange day had come to a peaceful end.
If Captain Rafaat and his colleagues had spent more time thinking about the Internet than classifying Egyptians by type of religious belief, they might have been better prepared for the digital tsunami under way.
2
Searching for a Savior
I’M NOT INTO POLITICS.” I used to say this all the time, reflexively, whenever the subject came up. It was a popular stance, shared by most Egyptians. It was the result of a deeply rooted culture of fear. Anyone who dared meddle in politics, in opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), took a risk, with little hope of reaping any return. Most of us shied away, believing that we could not do anything to change the status quo.
The truth is, however, Egyptians have always expressed political opinions, but only passively. We complain about education, health care, the economy, unemployment, police brutality, bribery, and corruption, but that is as far as we once dared to go. Few would point fingers at the officials responsible, while most kept such thoughts to themselves.
Egyptians who grew up in the fifties and sixties endured the worst repression in our modern history, including arrests, torture, military trials, and other forms of oppression. Most of them chose safety over activism. Informers were so deeply planted that many Egyptians were afraid to discuss politics in public. This generation raised their children first and foremost to fear politics and State Security. Sometimes it seemed to me that we feared the wrath of the secret police more than we feared death itself.
Egyptians practically never chose a president. The dynasty of Mohamed Ali, who is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt, ruled for almost 150 years until the revolution of July 23, 1952 (in a sense, Mohamed Ali himself was installed by popular demand, when a group of prominent Egyptians insisted in 1805 that the former governor, Ahmad Khurshid Pasha, step down). From 1952 on, the military made all key decisions. The army officers who led a military coup against the ruling monarchy chose Mohamed Naguib as Egypt’s first president, transforming the nation into a republic. Two years later the Revolutionary Command Council forced him to step down, and they kept him under house arrest for the short remainder of his life. According to Naguib, this happened because he had planned to hand over control of the country to civilian leadership.
Naguib was succeeded by the extremely charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, best known for his pan-Arab nationalism. He was highly esteemed by Egyptians, although a lot of his actions actually planted the seeds of repression and autocracy. Under Nasser, democracy meant referendums on his popularity in which people voted either yes or no, and he somehow always garnered 99.9 percent of the vote. Egyptians joked about tracking down the 0.1 percent that opposed his rule.
Nasser’s vice president, Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, became president when Nasser passed away in 1970, with no help from any electoral process. A referendum confirmed him as president soon after; he received 90 percent of the votes. The same scenario occurred when Sadat appointed Mohamed Hosni Mubarak as vice president. When Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Mubarak took over. Potemkin referendums continued to provide a façade of legitimacy. The percentage of “yes” votes changed slightly over time but always remained in the 90 range:
Mubarak ruled for five terms, each of which lasted six years. His best terms were the first and second, when he released political prisoners arrested by Sadat and promised widespread reforms. He vowed to fight corruption. He also pledged not to rule for more than two terms, as the constitution required. Many political analysts believe that Mubarak did not start out as a corrupt man. But Lord Acton’s rule prevailed: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Mubarak, like the presidents before him, held almost all the reins of power in the nation. There was a parliament to issue laws and in theory to divide power with the executive, but in practice the members were kept closely dependent on the regime. Their loyalty was maintained through what came to be called the “chain of interests”: privileges and benefits were showered on any parliament member from the ruling NDP. From land to loans to immunity from arrest to (most important) influence — these members were among the country’s movers and shakers — a chain of corruption bound them tightly to the regime.
Councils in each governorate of Egypt were selected in the same manner. Known as the Local Popular Councils, they were responsible for services and policies in their respective governorates. The fortunate members who were loyal to the NDP were akin to Communist Party members in the Soviet Union: they received special privileges unavailable to others.
Little by little these privileges eroded the rule of law. The higher up in the chain you were, the less restricted you were by the law. We suffered chronic inefficiencies because of widespread bribery and corruption. The system eroded the Egyptian character. We lost our self-confidence. The phrase “There’s no hope” became customary, especially among young Egyptians. For too many of us, dreams of an apartment, a marriage, and a decent life faded. Out of hopelessness came anger. We were ripe for revolution, even when we were terrified by the idea.
When Mubarak broke his promise of a two-term presidency in 1993, state media — the only media at the time with any effective reach — portrayed him as the epitome of wisdom, the only hope for the nation. The pharaoh’s favorite cloak, “stability,” was the primary argument advanced by the official press. The president was presented as the only viable alternative to chaos. As the ancient proverb put it, “The people you know are better than the ones you don’t.”
At the turn of the millennium, and after Mubarak had had four presidential terms, the first son, Gamal Mubarak, began — cautiously — to dip his toes into political waters. Rumors were floated to test reactions to the possibility that Mubarak Junior would become president. In nearby Syria, Bashar al-Assad had succeeded his father. Why not the same for the Mubarak dynasty?
Throughout Mubarak’s reign, the most enduring and influential opposition came from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), formed in 1928. The Brotherhood’s popularity was regularly presented to the West as a scarecrow whenever Mubarak was under pressure to reform and democratize the regime. Members of the Brotherhood were widely arrested, subjected to military tribunals, and vilified in the press.
The regime played a typical tyrant’s game. It needed a bogeyman, so it both repressed and enabled the Brotherhood. Yet after years of obsession with its chosen enemy, the Mubarak regime may have become complacent about other threats. In 2004 a group of opposition activists founded the Egyptian Movement for Change, otherwise known as Kefaya, which means “enough” in Arabic. Kefaya opposed the renewal of Mubarak’s presidency for a fifth term and also rejected the attempt to transfer power to his son. The movement’s motto became “No to renewal, no to the inherited presidency.” Members of Kefaya were diverse, including dissidents, intellectuals, journalists, Internet bloggers, university students, and artists. It was the first group to openly and explicitly express opposition to Mubarak’s presidency as well as to his son’s potential candidacy. Its first major protest against the regime was on December 12, 2004 (though many of the protesters knew one another from earlier gatherings to protest Israeli strikes on the Gaza strip and the U.S. invasion of Iraq).
The regime did not crack down on Kefaya as hard as it had on the Muslim Brotherhood. The security masterminds could not imagine such a movement mobilizing significant popular support, since many of its members were intellectuals, whose discourse is not usually appealing to the masses. And the regime was right — Kefaya never achieved a broad following. Yet just by exhibiting the courage to protest, Kefaya helped tear down a psychological barrier. And by criticizing Mubarak openly — the group’s famous chant became “Down, down, Hosni Mubarak” — Kefaya members were certainly brave pioneers.
Kefaya’s courage, however, meant very little to Mubarak Junior. Gamal Mubarak was born in 1963 and graduated from high school in 1980, the year I was born. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business at the American University in Cairo. A few years later he left Egypt to work for the Bank of America in London. With a few colleagues, Mubarak then left Bank of America to set up a London-based private equity fund. Upon his return to Egypt in 1998, his political ambitions started to become more obvious, and he joined his father’s party in 2000. As the son of the pharaoh, he rapidly became a key person in the party, which he wanted to restructure and reposition. He was promoted to lead the party’s Policies Committee, the most important division of the NDP. In addition, he became the deputy secretary-general. He was the youngest man of any consequence in an aging party.
In 2004, a new cabinet composed of Mubarak Junior’s close allies was sworn in. It came to be called the businessmen’s government, because most of the ministers were rich businessmen. Mubarak nevertheless left the regime’s main pillars intact. The ministers of defense and interior affairs and the head of intelligence remained in their positions. Many Egyptians hoping for real change, including myself, were still pleased to see younger faces in government positions. The new prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, had a solid background in technology. Yet it was clear that the regime intended to groom Gamal Mubarak as the nation’s next president.
When Gamal Mubarak appeared on the Egyptian scene, I thought it was an opportunity to empower the younger generation and get rid of the old mentality that had been dragging us into the dark for ages. He seemed like a progressive person who appreciated experience and understood the youth culture better than the dinosaurs around his aging dad. The new campaigns for the party seemed to indicate a real desire for change, but later it became obvious that this was purely cosmetic — a change in the campaign but not in the product itself. Corruption was deeply rooted within the NDP, and it seems that Gamal Mubarak agreed to play by the same rules as everyone else.
The following year, 2005, owing to pressure from the international community, parliamentary elections were held under the supervision of the judiciary for the first time. Gamal Mubarak’s influence was growing. He had announced reforms within the ruling party (as head of the Policies Committee). The new cabinet was made up of his own men, not his father’s, and the party was coming under his control.
Yet the election’s first and second phases (out of three, in different locations) dealt a strong blow to the NDP. The Muslim Brotherhood gained seventy-seven seats, bringing them and other opposition groups close to having a third of Parliament’s members. If that proportion continued in the third phase, the opposition would have an effective veto over legislation. The message was clear, and alarming: many Egyptians hated the NDP and would vote for anyone who stood up to its political monopoly. In those first two phases, the state police were nowhere near as aggressive as they had been in previous elections.
In phase three, however, the regime showed its true face, blatantly rigging the results. Hundreds of polling stations were shut, and when voters protested, they were handled aggressively. The international community hardly protested, after witnessing the result of fair elections, since the West was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom many regarded as extremists. More than nine people died during phase three, and the Brotherhood won only eleven seats. The result left the MB as the only strong opposition force in Parliament, with 20 percent of the seats. Despite the fact that official NDP candidates won fewer than 40 percent of the seats, the party ended up with 72 percent representation, since many independent candidates joined the party after winning, either because they desired the personal riches associated with each loyal seat or because they were too afraid to decline, or both. It was very clear that the party needed a monopolizing majority to pass any legislation without having to negotiate with any opposition groups in the country. When the emergency state was up for its biennial renewal, the party wanted at all costs to avoid a vote against it. The regime’s chief tool of oppression could not be placed at risk.
The same year also brought yet another staged attempt to polish the regime’s image in the eyes of the international community. A presidential referendum was turned into a simulacrum of a competitive presidential election. Practically speaking, only leaders of political parties were allowed to run against Hosni Mubarak. State media at that time continued to promote the regime. Stories were written before the referendum to hail his presidential victory as a historical event: Mubarak would be the first Egyptian president to allow competition within an electoral race for presidency.
To say that the Egyptian opposition parties were weak and fragile is an understatement. They were effectively nonexistent. I always used to say that if all the non-NDP parties had united to form one group, its sum of members and supporters would have barely filled Cairo Stadium’s 80,000 seats. The regime had even created a regulatory body that had to approve all potential political parties before they could see the light of day. Ironically, it was headed by the secretary-general of the NDP. It is no wonder that almost no new parties were formed during this era of autocracy.
The 2005 elections were truly comical. One candidate promised to bring back the tarboosh, a cylindrical red hat that men wore until midway through the last century, if elected. Another candidate proclaimed that he personally would vote for Mubarak as the man most qualified for the job.
Gamal Mubarak played a prominent role in the 2005 presidential campaign, and his father appeared in public for the first time ever without his regular formal attire. He wore a tieless shirt in an attempt to look young and energetic, although he was seventy-five years old. (He had always dyed his hair black to look young, but this was a bigger change.) In addition to glowing coverage in the state’s media outlets, positive PR proliferated thanks to businessmen and shop and café owners upon direct orders from the security apparatus in different parts of the country.
Employees of the government and public sector, who amount to more than six million Egyptians, were given orders to vote for President Mubarak. The final tally was ludicrous: 88.6 percent for Mubarak. Mubarak then cracked down on the two true opponents. One was Ayman Nour, head of Al-Ghad (“Tomorrow”) Party. Nour was sentenced to five years on allegations of fraud. Similarly, Noman Gumaa, head of Al-Wafd Party, was removed from his position and expelled from the party’s headquarters. If you ran against Mubarak and you really meant it, you suffered.
We all knew it was a sham. The question was, would we put up with it?
Egypt’s economy continued to suffer despite the new cabinet’s optimistic promises. The regime had been selling off state-owned companies since the 1990s, in an attempt to privatize and vitalize major sectors of the economy. Yet the public was convinced that those deals had been corrupt, and in practice economic conditions had not improved. As a result of their incessant suffering, workers could no longer stay silent. Egypt began to witness a new wave of strikes in 2006 and 2007, in numbers of up to 26,000 protesters at a time seeking social justice. It became obvious that a snowball was gradually forming.
In 2008 workers at Al-Mahalla Textiles called a strike on April 6. This time, Internet activists decided to support the strike, following a suggestion made by a prominent dissident to spread it to all of Egypt. One of the strike’s Facebook pages attracted over 70,000 members — this at a time when most opposition demonstrations attracted barely a few hundred protesters.
Several forces helped make the April 6 strike a popular one, if not enormously so. Many groups promoted it, including Kefaya, the two opposition parties (Al-Wasat Party and Al-Karama Party), and several professional associations (the Movement of Real Estate Taxes Employees, the Lawyers’ Syndicate, the March 9 Movement of university professors, and the Education Sector Administrators’ Movement), not to mention the youth movement that had emerged online for the first time. Members of the latter group came to call themselves the April 6 Youth Movement. It was a loose coalition of many small groups.
Many Egyptians who feared protests and potential arrests found it easier to accept striking. All they had to do was skip work rather than face security forces. Yet many people were disappointed by the strike’s minimal results. There was no discernible impact on Cairo’s streets or in other big cities. Personally, I noticed some limited street activity on that day. I did not join the strike, as I was not politically active at the time, although I was happy that some Egyptians were finally speaking up for their rights. In the Mahalla, on the other hand, two worker activists were killed, and the city briefly turned into a war zone between workers and security forces. A large outdoor poster of Mubarak was pulled down and kicked by protesters. A video of this historical moment was posted on YouTube, but of course such images could never be seen in mainstream media.
Minimal or not, April 6 sent out a clear signal to everyone that the Internet could be a new force in Egyptian politics. The security force’s reaction was to develop a new division dedicated to policing the Internet. Similarly, the NDP established an “Electronic Committee” rumored to have legions of well-paid young men and women whose mission was to influence online opinion in favor of the party through contributions to websites, blogs, news sites, and social networks. Arrest orders were issued for April 6 activists, and they became fugitives. The young activist Israa Abdel Fattah was arrested on the day of the strike because she founded the largest Facebook group promoting the strike online. She was released a little over two weeks later.
I resented the regime more than ever but still wondered what I could do about it. I was not optimistic about the impact of the activists’ efforts, and I was also busy with work, where I spent all my time. Nevertheless, I was inspired by the courage of those heroes who stood up to the regime at the height of its strength. They risked their lives for the dream of change. The Egyptian revolution will remain indebted to everyone who tossed a stone into the still waters at a time when doing so risked beating and arrest, or worse.
One of the April 6 Youth Movement’s prominent young figures, Ahmed Maher, was chased by the police a few weeks after the strike. He tried to escape by car, but he was caught, beaten badly, and dragged to a State Security branch, where he was brutally tortured. Security forces were in disbelief: how had opposition youth groups emerged without any political affiliations, Islamist or other? They fell back on their usual strategy: set an example with group leaders, so that other dissidents would think twice before joining their movements.
Ahmed Maher was released days after his abduction. He headed straight to a human rights activist, who took pictures of his tortured body. Like other audacious young men, Ahmed refused to back down. He went to the media, seeking the protection of public opinion. He was right: regimes of terror cannot stand exposure.
And increasingly, technology made public exposure inevitable. Egypt has seen a significant shift in media patterns over the past decade, thanks to the rise of privately owned printed newspapers and magazines and the spread of satellite television. The private media are not as tightly controlled as the official state-owned media, but they have faced their share of manipulation. Many famous anchors and talk-show hosts have been forced out of their jobs. Still, the new private outlets have produced more even-handed stories, even though their owners tend to have strong connections to the regime.
The Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, established in 1996, also played a significant role. The channel’s talk shows offered heavy criticism of many Arab leaders. Within a few short years, Al Jazeera became the most viewed channel in Egypt and the entire Arab region. The network set an example that has been followed by many channels throughout the Middle East.
In parallel, the number of Internet users in Egypt increased rapidly, from a mere 1.5 million in 2004 to more than 13.6 million by 2008. Discussion forums, chat rooms, and blogs flourished, providing an outlet for many users to express opinions freely for the first time. State Security occasionally arrested and harassed bloggers for discussing sensitive issues and for sharing news that the regime didn’t like. Yet the number of politically focused bloggers only increased.
In the early part of the decade, I was only passively opposed to the regime, like many of my countrymen. I regularly read the opinions of the most daring opposition columnists, such as Ibrahim Eissa and Fahmy Howaidy. I closely followed the Muslim Brotherhood’s website to remain up-to-date with their news. At most, from time to time I initiated political satire of my own, anonymously circulating jokes on the Internet.
One of my jokes, in 2003, was an image satirically depicting President Mubarak’s Hotmail in-box. The unread e-mail included a message from President George Bush with the subject line “Mubarak, how can I be president for life?” Another e-mail, from his son Gamal, asked if he could inherit the presidency as Bashar al-Assad had; another was a Swiss bank statement declaring the president’s balance to be $35 million. The trash icon in this design carried the title “The People’s Demands.” This image spread like wildfire, but I carefully kept from claiming credit.
I expressed my opinion of the regime only to friends and family, and they always warned that I was asking for trouble. When the debates got heated and I was eventually asked, “So what’s the alternative?” I could only say, “Any alternative would be better than this regime.” Most people did not find this answer convincing.
The absence of alternatives was a key part of the oppressor’s master plan. Any popular figure who surfaced, presenting the remote possibility of an alternative to Mubarak’s iron rule, was swiftly denounced, defamed, or eliminated. It had happened to the former minister of defense, Mohamed Abu Ghazala, former prime minister Kamal al-Ganzoury, and the former minister of foreign affairs, Amr Moussa. A lot of Egyptians thought that these men had been forced to resign from their posts and retreat from public life because of their popularity on the street. I couldn’t agree more; Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.
We all craved an alternative. We needed a savior, and we were ready to pour our hopes onto any reasonable candidate. Finally, two years after the April 6 movement began, Egyptian activists believed they had found one.
Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei, the former chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a patriotic Egyptian who had worked in politics since he received his law degree in 1962. ElBaradei showed great skill as a diplomat. His diplomatic career began in 1964 in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with postings at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva. He rose to become special assistant to the foreign minister in 1974. He earned a law degree from New York University and then returned to the foreign ministry until 1984, when he became a legal adviser to the IAEA. In 1997 he became its director-general. ElBaradei and the IAEA received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 in recognition of efforts to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
Here was a man whom the Egyptian regime could neither eliminate nor easily tarnish. At first the regime tried to embrace him. State media hailed Dr. ElBaradei as a source of national pride. He was granted the highest state honor, the Order of the Nile, by President Mubarak in 2006. As the fourth Egyptian ever to win a Nobel Prize, he was lionized on the street.
In 2009, as his third term as director-general of the IAEA was nearing an end and he prepared to return home, ElBaradei told Egyptian newspapers that he was unhappy with the way Egypt was governed. He focused his criticism on the lack of democracy and the low levels of public health and education. Not surprisingly, he disappeared from our state-owned media.
Nonetheless, his popularity could not be easily snuffed out, thanks in part to Internet activists. A university student by the name of Mahmoud al-Hetta decided to start a Facebook group called “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011.” ElBaradei had been asked by CNN if he would run for office, and he had replied that it was premature to answer such a question. That indefinite reply left the door open, and young Egyptians began mobilizing support for him.
Many of the young people aspiring for real change in Egypt joined the Facebook group. Finally we had an answer to the question “If we don’t vote for Hosni Mubarak, who will we vote for?” Tens of thousands of users joined the Facebook group, and among them I recognized many personal friends who hitherto, like myself, had never been involved in politics. We all saw a glimmer of hope for reforming Egypt. Mahmoud al-Hetta and others used spontaneous online methods to invite ElBaradei to nominate himself for president. Shortly thereafter, the group’s popularity crossed the 100,000-member mark and ElBaradei announced his desire to play an active role in Egypt’s movement for change. His wish was for Egypt to reclaim its historic status and become a true democracy, not just a nominal one.
The Egyptian regime was taken by surprise and lost its balance. Instantly the powers-that-were launched a defamation campaign. The man who most represented our national pride was suddenly subject to a series of false accusations. In record time he was depicted as an ally of the United States, with a Western agenda, and even portrayed as the main reason for the United States’ war on Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis (ElBaradei is known for his opposition to the war on Iraq and his attempts to contain crises through diplomatic means rather than bloodshed). He was said to be a glutton for power; after three terms at the IAEA he now wanted to rule Egypt. Proponents of the regime claimed that he lacked political experience. They even started a rumor that he held Austrian citizenship (since he had lived in Vienna for many years). The absurdity reached its peak when the chief editor of the nation’s largest newspaper claimed that ElBaradei had been a failure as a schoolboy and that his grades were the worst in his class during one of his elementary school years.
The Facebook group was undaunted by these transparently absurd charges. The poet Abdel Rahman Youssef emerged as the campaign manager for the movement created by the group in an effort to try to venture out into the field. In December 2009 the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk published a long interview with ElBaradei, two months before his planned return from the IAEA. Over a span of three days, he told the reporter about his ambitions for change in his country.
The highlight of that interview was ElBaradei’s conviction that change was inevitable in Egypt. He added that he refused to run for president in a sham election, if the regime was to exploit lifeless political parties again to project Mubarak as the country’s only option. ElBaradei’s refusal to grant legitimacy to the regime was his first confrontational step. Yet the constitutional amendments that he urged as necessary before he could run for president were perceived as farfetched by most people.
As the political scene in Egypt was changing, so was my personal life. Ilka was getting very frustrated with life in Egypt. She found it impossible to drive in Cairo’s jungle of a traffic system and simply could not adapt to the pollution. She struggled with Arabic as well, and had trouble managing day-to-day activities. For these reasons, among many others, she was not happy living in Egypt, even after seven years of residency there, and my regular absence from home only served to reinforce her feelings of alienation. At the same time, Google’s Middle East team was beginning to centralize in the UAE, and it was gradually becoming more convenient for my career to move there. When I consulted Ilka, she was strongly in favor of a move. I was quite hesitant, as I preferred to stay in Egypt, yet it was becoming clear to me that this would be a selfish thing to do. Finally, in January 2010, I relocated to Google’s office in Dubai, but fortunately the nature of my work would take me to Cairo on a regular basis. Ilka was thrilled to be in Dubai, and I must say that I enjoyed it as well, although my heart remained in Egypt.
I continued to follow the heated debates back home closely. I accessed the Facebook group on a daily basis to read the discussions, but I was not yet actively involved.
Dr. ElBaradei’s return to Egypt was scheduled for February 2010. Many of the country’s political forces organized a reception for him at the airport, in the form of a few hundred activists who were willing to face the consequences of publicly opposing the regime. Several Egyptian public figures joined them, including the veteran TV presenter Hamdy Kandil, whose show had been taken off the air because of his outspoken criticism of the regime. What was new, alongside the old opposition guard, was the presence of many young people who ventured out for the first time in support of change.
I was still not ready to make a public statement by attending. I had a lot to lose. My employer, Google, was a dream company voted often to be the world’s best employer. I was responsible for Ilka, Isra, and my son, Adam, who had been born in 2008. I also believed, despite my optimistic outlook, that change in Egypt was a difficult challenge that would take time. But so as not to miss out on the chance to be an active part of the movement, I finally decided to leverage my media, marketing, and Internet experience to help develop what later became Dr. ElBaradei’s official Facebook page. My aim was to establish an ongoing communication channel between him and his supporters.
Personally, I have always hated hailing individuals as saviors, and I do not believe in magical solutions. What I do believe is that real change entails a change of policies and methods, not a mere substitution of leaders and individuals. Egypt’s salvation, in my opinion, would never come at the hands of a benevolent dictator. I might not have agreed with Dr. ElBaradei on every single issue, yet I did not hesitate to support him as a presidential candidate. My enthusiasm was for the idea rather than the person, but the only way back then was to support an idea through a person. The regime resembled a wall of steel. It had to be weakened little by little. Egyptians needed to be offered alternatives.
The thing I admired most about ElBaradei was his self-perception. He asserted repeatedly that he was not a savior and that the Egyptian people needed to save themselves. He put himself forward as only a tool in support of the cause. To me, he was a professional, well educated, someone who could speak to the ambitions of Egypt’s youth.
As an experienced Internet user, I knew that a Facebook page was much more effective in spreading information than a Facebook group. As soon as someone “likes” a page, Facebook considers the person and the page to be “friends.” So if the “admin” of the page writes a post on the “wall,” it appears on the walls of the page’s fans. This is how ideas can spread like viruses. A particular post can appear on the users’ walls to be viewed thousands, or even millions, of times. In the case of groups, however, users have to access the group to remain updated; no information is pushed out to them.
So I created a page in February, days before ElBaradei’s arrival, and I began its promotional marketing campaign. The number of fans who “liked” the page exponentially increased because of the sheer number of ElBaradei enthusiasts. I updated the page with excerpts from ElBaradei’s interviews, and I highlighted his vision for reform in Egypt as well as his emphasis on the country’s need for true democracy.
A few days after creating the page, I figured that I needed a co-admin. The nature of my work for Google required me to travel a lot, and I didn’t want the page to be dependent on my personal schedule. I noticed that one of the people on my Facebook friends list was also quite excited about ElBaradei. I had never met AbdelRahman Mansour in person, but we had been virtual friends since August 2009. AbdelRahman was a twenty-four-year-old undergraduate finishing his last year of journalism study at Mansoura University, 120 kilometers away from Cairo. His activism began when he started blogging about Egypt’s political situation. He had covered the rigging of the 2005 elections, among other crucial events at the time. I found his status updates on Facebook and Twitter to be thought-provoking. At one point, when I sent out an open invitation to all my friends to join the page, I received a message from AbdelRahman asking if I was the admin behind it. He instantly became an appropriate choice for a co-admin. On the one hand, I admired his enthusiasm and intellect, and on the other hand, he had now become one of the very few people who either knew or suspected that I had founded ElBaradei’s Facebook page. Without hesitation, AbdelRahman accepted my offer. That day would mark the beginning of a virtual working relationship that still continues today.
Naturally, it took some time to build mutual trust and understanding. Many times I would send private messages asking AbdelRahman to remove content that he posted on the page, and we would occasionally have heated discussions about such matters. Whenever push came to shove, however, I had the final say. The golden rule was to ask ourselves the following question: “Would Mohamed ElBaradei write this post himself?” This made our decision-making process much easier.
Soon after his arrival, ElBaradei met with key opposition figures. Immediately following the meeting, we were surprised to receive an announcement of the establishment of a newly formed body called the National Association for Change. The idea was to bring together everyone known to oppose the Egyptian regime. Members included the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour; the media veteran Hamdy Kandil; Dr. Mohamed Ghoneim; some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Muhamed el-Beltagy, a former MP; some political parties, like the Democratic Front, Al-Karama, and Al-Wasat parties; the Revolutionary Socialists; Egyptian Women for Change; the April 6 Youth Movement, and others. The association’s first action was to release a statement entitled “Together for Change,” or what was also known as “ElBaradei’s Seven Demands for Change”:
1 Terminating the state of emergency
2 Granting complete supervision of elections to the judiciary
3 Granting domestic and international civil society the right to monitor the elections
4 Granting equal time in the media for all candidates running for office
5 Granting expatriate Egyptians the right and ability to vote
6 Guaranteeing the right to run for president without arbitrary restrictions, and setting a two-term limit
7 Voting with the national identity card.
It was an ambitious list. It meant freeing the press; it would enfranchise eight million expatriate Egyptians; and it would help create an independent judiciary, among other spectacular achievements. The seventh demand was crucial for fair elections. The standard voting practice in Egypt was that voters were issued “electoral cards” in their respective districts. The card was required at the polling station for a voter to cast his or her vote. Since rigging was significant and consistent, most Egyptians were disinclined to obtain a card. In turn, that made rigging even easier. As a popular joke put it, we were so proud of our democracy that we even let deceased people cast votes. To demand that voting require only a national identity card was to demand free and fair elections.
The great thing about these demands was that the majority of opposition forces agreed to and supported them. Even the regime found it difficult to argue publicly against most of the seven demands. Dr. ElBaradei’s idea to issue this statement as a petition was a great one. It was an excellent new tool of pressure, and it increased the possibilities that the regime might compromise.
To collect signatures in significant numbers, the movement turned to the Internet. The petition was published online, and citizens just needed to enter their name, address, and national ID number to sign. The organizers also helped people overcome their fear by publishing the initial hundred signees, who were public figures willing to use their authentic personal information.
Fear overcame me on the first and second days of the petition. But then I entered all my personal information and signed. I was citizen number 368 to do so. My fear turned into excitement when I realized I was beginning a new phase: I now publicly opposed the regime. I had no doubt that State Security downloaded the list of signees regularly, particularly since it contained everyone’s full name, yet I was excited to be part of the growing crowd.
I was keen to meet Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, and I tried to schedule a meeting with him during my first trip back home. I sent an e-mail to the Egyptian actor Khaled Abol Naga, whom I had first met at a Google event that we organized for Orphans Day in April 2009. I had seen him endorse ElBaradei on YouTube. I explained that I wished to augment ElBaradei’s efforts with my Internet abilities. Abol Naga’s response came instantly, providing the e-mail address for Ali ElBaradei, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s brother.
I e-mailed Ali ElBaradei, introducing myself and explaining that I managed the ElBaradei Facebook page. He did not know about the page, yet he welcomed any kind of cooperation and promised to set up an appointment with Dr. ElBaradei when I was next in Cairo.
At the same time I e-mailed Mahmoud al-Hetta, who managed the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” group. We spoke on Skype when I was in Dubai and discussed how we could cooperate. I was amazed at how brave this young man was, as were the other activists who used their real names on the Internet. Yet I advised him to hide his name, as Facebook enables you to do, for the sake of the campaign’s sustainability. There was no need to publish names where State Security might see them, I said. It was a brief call, and we agreed to meet up as soon as I was in Cairo.
A couple of weeks later, on my way to meeting Mahmoud, I was paranoid. I remained afraid of State Security. When I arrived at the local café on a small side street where we had agreed to meet, I glanced left and right before I joined both Mahmoud and Abdel Rahman Youssef, the campaign manager for the movement on the ground. The poet sensed my apprehension and tried to reassure me. He argued that our work was for a just cause, and that accordingly we had nothing to hide or be afraid of. I was not convinced, and I argued back that secrecy could never harm us and might even prove beneficial to our battle for democracy at a later point in time. I also requested that both of them keep my identity concealed. We discussed the importance of breaking the psychological barrier of fear and how to campaign for the petition with the seven demands. Signees had barely reached 10,000 at the time, a number that fell significantly below our expectations. Although no clear action plan was born out of our meeting, I was nevertheless thrilled to see such zeal and enthusiasm for the cause.
On April 11, I finally had a chance to meet with Dr. ElBaradei himself. His brother informed me by e-mail of the appointment, mentioning that others would also attend. I asked him if I could invite two other people to join us; he didn’t mind. AbdelRahman Mansour couldn’t make it, as he was out of the country, so I called two other friends who were equally devoted to helping to change Egypt: an engineer, Mostafa Abu Gamra, who owns a technology company that works in content development, and Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, a senior government official working at the Ministry of Communications. I was quite excited to meet the man whom I had been independently campaigning for.
ElBaradei lives in a villa in one of the private residential compounds on the Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road. I planned to take a taxi, to avoid any potential trouble of being recognized by State Security informants via my car’s license plates. Dr. Abdel Azim, however, decided to drive and offered me a ride. ElBaradei was a prominent Egyptian figure and there should be no problem visiting him, he assured me. We met Mostafa Abu Gamra on the way, and the three of us headed off. The guards at the compound’s gates let us in without any problem.
The villa was beautifully furnished and decorated, yet it was not extravagant in any way. Some of Dr. ElBaradei’s critics claimed he lived a lavish suburban life disconnected from that of ordinary Egyptians. They had portrayed his home as a palace or fortress, with high fences, but this was not the case.
ElBaradei received us in person. Everything he said lived up to my expectations. I was worried that this might change once I offered some criticism; people’s true faces appear under criticism, not under praise. He stood among a group of his guests, which included two young film directors, some senior businessmen, and other prominent figures.
Everyone was involved in a heated debate. ElBaradei was an excellent listener, and it never felt like he was leading the discussion. On the contrary, he seemed to be seriously learning from the opinions of others — just the type of leader I felt Egyptians needed. Then I offered my criticism: I suggested that he needed to speak in a language closer to the hearts of mainstream Egyptians. The jargon of elitist intellectuals would not help our quest for popular support.
I also mentioned ElBaradei’s recently initiated Twitter account. It was new at the time, but he already had 10,000 followers. It took very little time for him to become the most followed Egyptian on Twitter. I suggested that he sometimes seemed too rushed in his posts. Some of his tweets did not sit well with activists and newspaper readers (newspapers regularly published his tweets). His great quality, if you asked me, was that he refused to be considered a savior. He believed in the nation’s youth and in their ability to bring change. I recommended that he tweet about that more frequently. Young Egyptians needed to regain their self-confidence before they could take action.
I also criticized his travels outside of Egypt during these difficult times. Many others viewed this as his worst error. Regardless of the fact that he actually had many scheduled commitments abroad, ElBaradei’s frequent travels hurt the perceived effectiveness of the campaign and gave his opponents a chance to taint him as a tool of the West, or a self-promoter who ignored his homeland.
Everyone had something to say. The two directors, Amr Salama and Mohamed Diab, thought that the seven-demands petition was inviting trouble for ElBaradei. Making it a priority and making the signees’ information publicly available at a time when dissident Egyptians were not yet ready to go public was not right, they claimed. They had a point: a vast gulf separated the total number of potential supporters and the actual signees up to that day.
On that question, however, I defended Dr. ElBaradei’s vision. I found the statement to be an excellent manifestation of the snowball effect. The daily increase in signatures, I believed, made people hopeful. It also prompted community discussions about the statement’s seven demands, adding pressure on the government to implement them.
It was a fruitful meeting that left me both optimistic and energized. I took a picture with ElBaradei and made it the profile image on my Facebook page. The caption under it said, “I am Wael Ghonim. I declare my support of Dr. ElBaradei.” The meeting had helped me partially break my own barrier of fear.
Next I created a Google e-mail group called “ElBaradei” to enable key supporters to communicate effectively. It was a closed group that could be joined only with permission from one of the moderators. I began adding people whom I knew and trusted to the group. Ali ElBaradei forwarded the e-mail addresses of his brother’s other supporters, those whom he thought would add value to the group. Discussions proliferated through this e-mail group, but fieldwork remained limited.
On ElBaradei’s Facebook fan page, both AbdelRahman and I tried hard to improve his public image in spite of the government’s vicious defamation campaigns. We searched through state press archives available online and extracted articles that praised ElBaradei’s efforts. These articles made the recent defamation look absurd: how could a “despised traitor” be a celebrated hero abroad? I found many pictures of ElBaradei with such world leaders as the American president, the French president, the German chancellor, the king of Saudi Arabia, and others. I deliberately published them to stress the fact that ElBaradei was not simply an “apolitical scientist,” as his detractors sought to portray him. AbdelRahman even translated and posted the full transcript of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which ElBaradei affirmed his loyalty and allegiance to both his country and his faith.
The core accusation of the smear campaign was that ElBaradei was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, having misled the United States into believing that Saddam Hussein secretly harbored weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were adamant about proving this to be a blatant lie. I found an online video of the UN Security Council meeting at which ElBaradei presented his report asserting that Iraq was free of any weapons of mass destruction. The report demanded more time for inspections and rejected the military intervention proposed by the United States. I added Arabic subtitles to the video and published it, hoping it would show ElBaradei’s innocence regarding allegations that he had somehow facilitated the U.S. war on Iraq.
On April 6, 2010, less than three months later, the number of members of Mohamed ElBaradei’s page exceeded 100,000. The April 6 Youth Movement also attempted to celebrate its anniversary on that day by organizing a demonstration, but the attempt failed. The security forces were watchful and well prepared.
Online, AbdelRahman and I were restrained. After all, we were writing on behalf of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei. Our language was formal. We rarely posted our personal opinions, and we were convinced that the page had to present him in a formal light. Most contributors thought that Dr. ElBaradei was personally managing the page. The experience taught me a lot. I had never before managed a Facebook page.
On April 15, I received an encouraging message from Dr. ElBaradei himself, sent through his son. He wrote: “Spent some time browsing the fanpage today. It is wonderful. Many thanks for a very creative and professional job. Keep it up.” I replied, thanking him for the support and telling him that it meant a lot to me. I cc’ed AbdelRahman Mansour in the e-mail thread and introduced him as the page’s second admin, who deserved as much recognition as I did for all his efforts.
One of the important activities I initiated on the ElBaradei page was the use of opinion polls to make decisions. Despite the fact that Internet polls are far from scientific, they still offer a good means for testing trends of opinion. Besides, in Egypt, offline opinion polls, carried out through actual interviews, were possible only with a permit from the Ministry of Interior. Needless to say, the ministry had no interest in helping political activists gather information from the public.
I located a good polling site that supported Arabic and subscribed to its services. The first poll I developed aimed to measure the page members’ level of satisfaction with Egypt’s status quo and to explore why many of them had not signed the seven-demands petition. More than 15,000 participants completed the questionnaire. I aggregated and analyzed the results, then sent a message to the e-mail group as well as to Dr. ElBaradei with many recommendations to help increase public support for the petition.
After I provided these comments, Dr. ElBaradei invited me to meet a group of young men who had been working to promote the petition. First I met Dr. Mostafa al-Nagar, who had succeeded Abdel Rahman Youssef as the general coordinator of the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” campaign. Mostafa came across as a sincere person who had a real desire for change. We became good virtual friends. We chatted online frequently about current events, encouraging each other and sharing disappointments. Mostafa was a dentist and political activist of my age who was quite dynamic, and State Security used the emergency law to arrest and detain him for his political dissidence on more than one occasion. He certainly had an abundance of street smarts, and I was admittedly lacking in that department.
We constantly argued about the role of the Internet in the process of change. He believed that the Internet was a virtual world with limited impact on reality, while I found it to be the key vehicle to bringing forth the first spark of change. The Internet is not a virtual world inhabited by avatars. It is a means of communication that offers people in the physical world a method to organize, act, and promote ideas and awareness. The Internet was going to change politics in Egypt, I wrote on Facebook and Twitter, and the 2011 elections would not be similar to those in 2005.
I will never forget the cynical remarks I received in response. A friend joked that the Egyptian regime would change the Internet before the Internet managed to change anything. Many actually believed that the regime would censor the Internet if it represented any sort of threat. Egypt would follow the Saudi Arabian example, they thought, where accessible websites are strictly controlled and citizens are unable to visit antigovernment sources. I did not agree. The Egyptian regime needed to be seen as a progressive, welcoming country to the outside world. Its economy depended in part on tourism, and the regime cared deeply about its global reputation.
Things were moving quite slowly with Dr. ElBaradei’s campaign, and most of my recommendations were not implemented. My frustration increased, particularly as the rate of new signatures dropped. Yet I separated my personal feelings from the Facebook page. There I tried to spread hope. Both AbdelRahman and I followed all of ElBaradei’s news stories and his field campaigns. We published photos of his campaign visits to places like Old Cairo and Fayoum, and we continued to write his opinions and track the number of signatures on the statement as well as expose the political situation in the country. Many comments on the page demanded that Dr. ElBaradei take more practical steps on the ground and not limit himself to Facebook and Twitter.
One of the decisive moments for me was meeting Dr. El-Mostafa Hegazy, who owns a strategic consulting firm, in his office. He invited me, Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, and other activists to talk about change in Egypt. He was against the idea that political change should be personified or reduced to a single person’s campaign for presidency. His opinion was that it was critical at this phase to focus on change as a goal in and of itself. He wanted to establish the notion that Egyptians owned their country. It would inspire resistance to injustice and corruption across the board. I remember this meeting vividly. I was arguing that promoting ElBaradei was in essence promoting change. But I also agreed with Dr. Hegazy’s opinion — before ever meeting him — that positioning ElBaradei as a savior might end up hurting the real cause. After the meeting, the words “This country is our country!” rang loudly in my ears, and they continue to do so to this very day. I wanted every other Egyptian to shout them out as loudly as they could.
A few days later we received an e-mail, in English, from Dr. Abdel Azim apologizing for not being able to continue with the political campaign for change.
Dear All,
I am very sorry to inform you that I will not be able to be engaged in any political activity related to our hope for change. My position is extremely sensitive as a senior government official.
Although this is known from the beginning, but there was a miscalculation from my side. I was having a very firm position in the last weeks that I would like to continue in this initiative, and I can and willing to resign from my job any time to be free, and actually I prepared the resignation.
Yet the equation was not that simple and my issue was very highly escalated to the extent that I heard signs of real threats of different sorts, on my well-being and on my family.
It was sad to see Dr. Abdel Azim renouncing the efforts to bring about change in Egypt, but none of us could really blame him. We knew that these threats were very serious. Witnessing this firsthand only amplified my conviction that it was very important to work anonymously as much as possible. I kept contact with Dr. Abdel Azim, and occasionally we would chat online and share our thoughts on current events.
Meanwhile, my frustration at the campaign’s pace mounted, and I finally decided to send a message to Dr. ElBaradei through his brother. I expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of his campaign and my hope that he would move faster. The movement for change needed to be more flexible and dynamic. He had greatly raised our aspirations, but now we were hungry for actual change on the ground. I expressed my astonishment that we did not meet regularly and that our communication was limited to messaging through his brother. I mentioned that I spent long hours every day promoting his ideas online and that I thought it would be fruitful if I spent at least an hour a week with him, discussing the campaign’s strategy. He responded one day later via e-mail, again through his brother. He said he understood my feelings and explained that we were living under exceptional conditions. He was doing everything he could, in spite of the legal restrictions and media assaults he regularly faced. At the time there was no legal framework for our work together, and therefore he preferred to keep our communications indirect. I saw his point, but I believed that the regime could harm us if it wanted to, without the need for legal justifications. Later I settled for meeting Ali ElBaradei in person to deliver my point of view more thoroughly.
When we met, Ali ElBaradei defended his brother. After all, Dr. ElBaradei had stated from the start that he was not a savior. We, the young people, must work harder to collect signatures for the petition, Ali argued. Although the meeting added no tangible dimension to my overall strategy, I once again felt partially relieved after expressing my opinion.
My performance at Google declined significantly during this period, but my manager was still happy. Before I got busy with ElBaradei’s Facebook page, I would sometimes spend up to fifteen consecutive hours a day finishing a project, or finalizing a marketing plan for a new product, or simply brainstorming with fellow employees on new ideas for the region. Understandably, my quarterly performance reports at Google always stated that I needed to improve my work-life balance.
Yet my wife was incredibly supportive. From the very beginning, she had known that she was marrying a workaholic who was addicted to living online. Occasionally she would remind me that I needed to give more time and attention to my family. I tried from time to time to improve, but I must admit that no matter how hard I tried, I would always relapse.
The state’s campaign to control ElBaradei’s growing popularity became fierce. Security authorities had previously issued orders that banned ElBaradei from appearing on Egyptian media. Now private television channels that had previously besieged him for interviews also kept their distance. Coverage in the print media was not as bad as on television, but ElBaradei’s news was now featured a lot less than before. Public opinion fell victim to this campaign, particularly as ElBaradei did not make a habit of refuting baseless allegations. Many Egyptians didn’t know about the media ban. The only remaining outlet was the Internet. The Twitter account was his favorite channel on which to vent, even though his follow count did not compare to the number of followers of traditional media outlets.
As the situation reached this dire point, I got an idea, inspired by a popular Google product that had been utilized by election campaigns in other parts of the world. Google Moderator is a tool that gives the user the ability to solicit questions from an unlimited number of other users and subsequently to rank these questions based on popularity votes so that they can be answered accordingly. What a cool way to democratize feedback!
I presented the concept of Google Moderator to Ali ElBaradei and explained what it could mean for the campaign. Using this service to hold an event would reach a vast number of Internet users, the majority of whom would be young people whom the NDP had never communicated with in any genuine way. Dr. ElBaradei welcomed the idea and said he was ready to implement it as soon as he came back from a trip abroad.
The initiative was announced on his Facebook page in mid-May 2010. It was called “Ask ElBaradei.” The number of fans on the page had now reached 150,000, of whom more than 2,700 participated. They posted 1,300 questions that received about 60,000 votes. It was an astonishing outpouring. Ironically and in contrast, Gamal Mubarak’s team had initiated an Internet dialogue shortly before this and asked interested people to send their questions before attending the event. Of course, it was all scripted in advance and the questions were carefully selected.
I wondered what would happen if President Mubarak were to receive questions from Internet users. Would his aides be able to accept clear and direct questions without the usual politicking and deception? The answer was obvious.
The questions for Dr. ElBaradei were profound. Many of the questions that received the highest number of votes revealed anxiety about the follow-up to the signature-collecting campaign. The most important questions were: How will the signatures collected be useful? What is Plan B, if the regime refuses nonviolent change after we collect a large number of signatures? How can we reach rural parts of Egypt to spread awareness about change? Will you take Egypt toward secular governance? What is your position on the second article of the constitution, which states clearly that the Islamic Sharia is the nation’s main source of legislation? What are the priorities of your presidential agenda? Finally, Do you eat kushari? (Kushari, made of rice, lentils, and pasta, is a very affordable and popular daily meal for many Egyptians.) It was clear that many people simply needed reassurance that ElBaradei was “one of us.”
Together with other coordinators of ElBaradei’s campaign, we filtered the questions and began searching for an interviewer who would address these questions to Dr. ElBaradei. Our search was not easy. Everyone we asked refused to play this role; some attributed it to personal reasons or prior commitments, and others said they were afraid of the consequences. In the end, we decided that the campaign’s own Mostafa al-Nagar should be the interviewer. The interview was viewed by more than 100,000 online users.
Dr. ElBaradei tried to remain optimistic in his responses. Instead of appearing frustrated at the limited number of signatures and blaming people’s passive attitudes, he spoke about proactivity and the importance of joining forces for the sake of Egypt’s future. The man was inspiring in his presentation of a better tomorrow. The regime cannot resist the people’s demands for long, he said.
Dr. ElBaradei was blessed with optimism. Every time things seemed dark, he beamed with hope and asserted that change was coming. One famous opposition journalist, known for his sarcasm, commented, “He must know something that we do not.” And it turned out that he obviously did.
ElBaradei had it right all along: we did not need a savior; we had to do this ourselves.
3
“Kullena Khaled Said”
ON JUNE 8, 2010, while browsing on Facebook, I saw a shocking image that a friend of mine had posted on my wall. The picture linked to the official Facebook account of Dr. Ayman Nour, the former presidential candidate who was a political activist. It was a horrifying photo showing the distorted face of a man in his twenties. There was a big pool of blood behind his head, which rested on a chunk of marble. His face was extremely disfigured and bloodied; his lower lip had been ripped in half, and his jaw was seemingly dislocated. His front teeth appeared to be missing, and it looked as if they had been beaten right out of his mouth. The image was so gruesome that I wondered if he had been wounded in war. But by accessing Dr. Nour’s page I learned that Khaled Mohamed Said had apparently been beaten to death on June 6 by two secret police officers in Alexandria.
My first reaction was denial. I could not believe that anyone could actually inflict such brutality on someone else. The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old from Alexandria. According to eyewitnesses, some dispute had erupted between him and the two officers, leading to their physical assault on him, which claimed the young man’s life.
I felt miserable, frustrated, and outraged. This was all the result of a political situation that rendered security forces loyal servants of an oppressive regime. Some of our law enforcement personnel had mutated into vicious monsters who were immune from punishment and prone to committing atrocities. They abandoned the Egyptian ethic of goodness that has pervaded our society for centuries.
My memory of that day is vivid. I was sitting in my small study in Dubai, unable to control the tears flowing from my eyes. My wife came in to see what was wrong. When I showed her Khaled Said’s picture, she was taken aback and asked me to stop looking at it. She left the room, and I continued to cry over the state of our nation and the widespread tyranny. For me, Khaled Said’s image offered a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition.
I could not stand by passively in the face of such grave injustice. I decided to employ all my skills and experience to demand justice for Khaled Said and to help expose his story to vigorous public debate. It was time to lay bare the corrupt practices of the Ministry of Interior, our repressive regime’s evil right hand.
The logical first idea was to publish news of Khaled Said’s murder on Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s Facebook page, whose members exceeded 150,000 at that time, but I reasoned that doing so would exploit an event of national concern for political gain. I discovered that a page had been launched under the title “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said.” I browsed among the posts on that page. It was evident that the contributors were political activists. Their discourse was confrontational, beginning with the page’s headline: “Khaled’s murder will not go unpunished, you dogs of the regime.” From experience I knew that such language would not help in making the cause a mainstream one.
I decided to create another page and to use all my marketing experience in spreading it. Out of the many options I considered for the page’s name, “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said” — was the best. It expressed my feelings perfectly. Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me. All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland. The page name was short and catchy, and it expressed the compassion that people immediately felt when they saw Khaled Said’s picture. I deliberately concealed my identity, and took on the role of anonymous administrator for the page.
The first thing I posted on the page was direct and blunt. It voiced the outrage and sadness that I felt.
Today they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.
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In two minutes’ time three hundred members had joined the page:
People, we became 300 in two minutes. We want to be 100,000. We must unite against our oppressor
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I wrote the first article on the page: “You People Deprived of Humanity, We Will Extract Justice for Khaled Said.” It was an emotional, spontaneous piece of writing. I vowed that I would not personally abandon the fight for Khaled until his attackers were punished. The response was instant, and within a single hour the number of members climbed to three thousand.
Egyptians, my justice is in your hands.
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I spoke on the page in the first person, posing as Khaled Said. What drove me, more than anything else, was the thought that I could speak for him, and if even a single victim of the regime could have the chance to defend himself, it would be a turning point. Speaking as Khaled gave me a liberty that I did not have on ElBaradei’s quasi-official page. It also had greater impact on the page’s members. It was as though Khaled Said was speaking from his grave.
Even though I was proficient at classical Arabic (al-fusHa) from my school years in Saudi Arabia, I chose to write my posts on “Kullena Khaled Said” in the colloquial Egyptian dialect that is closer to the hearts of young Egyptians. For the generation born in the eighties and nineties, classical Arabic is a language read in the newspapers or heard during news reports on television and comes across as quite formal. By using colloquial Egyptian, I aimed to overcome any barriers between supporters of the cause and myself. I also deliberately avoided expressions that were not commonly used by the average Egyptian or that were regularly used by activists, like nizaam, the Arabic word for “regime.” I was keen to convey to page members the sense that I was one of them, that I was not different in any way. Using the pronoun I was critical to establishing the fact that the page was not managed by an organization, political party, or movement of any kind. On the contrary, the writer was an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Khaled Said and motivated to seek justice. This informality contributed to the page’s popularity and people’s acceptance of its posts.
The number of responses, and the incredible speed with which they came, indicated that administering “Kullena Khaled Said” was going to take a lot more time and effort than administering the ElBaradei page. I definitely needed help, and my experience thus far with AbdelRahman Mansour made him the perfect choice. I added him as the page’s second admin. During the first few weeks AbdelRahman was quite busy with school and other commitments, but he tried his best to help whenever needed.
I closely monitored news on the case and found the prosecutor’s report that acquitted the police force. I wrote:
The prosecution issued a preliminary report that the cause of death was drug overdose. Not only have you murdered me, but you also want to stain my reputation? God will reveal the truth and repay your lack of conscience.
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Mostafa al-Nagar, ElBaradei’s campaign manager at the time, had written a moving article on his personal page entitled “We Are the Murderers of Khaled Said” after he visited Alexandria to verify the story. I published the article on my page without mentioning the writer’s name. I did not want people to make the link between al-Nagar and the page and eventually identify the anonymous administrator.
As the page’s membership base grew, so did my personal commitment. I felt the stirrings of a rare opportunity to make a difference and to combat oppression and torture. I was angry, and I was not the only one. On its first day, 36,000 people joined the page. Some of them wanted to learn more details about the case, some sought to offer sympathy and support, and others joined out of curiosity because they had received an invitation from a Facebook friend. Images of Khaled before and after the assault spread like wildfire. Similar crimes had taken place in the past, all too frequently, yet their stories had not spread too widely. It was the visual documentation of Khaled’s terrible death, along with the fact that he was from the middle class, that catalyzed this huge reaction. The image was impossible to forget, and thanks to social media, it was proliferating like crazy.
By the end of the first day there were more than 1,800 comments on the page. Some people wondered why another page had been launched when the first one, “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said,” had already reached 70,000 members. “Why not unite our efforts?” they asked. I considered joining forces and closing the page I had created. Yet the aggressive tone adopted by the first page continued to worry me.
I advertised “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said” on “Kullena Khaled Said” and declared that we all worked for a common cause. I urged people to link to the page and requested that we all coordinate our efforts. To my delight, the admins of the other page reciprocated. It was becoming obvious that this cause could unite a lot of people.
Several prominent opposition politicians publicly condemned Khaled Said’s brutal killing. Also, a public funeral for Khaled had been announced for Friday, June 11. I publicized the funeral on the page and asked that as many people as possible attend. I also posted an edited video of various acts of torture by members of the police force, in the hope that Egyptians would finally confront the dark side of the regime and realize that any one of us could be the next victim.
About a thousand people, many of them political activists, took part in the Alexandria funeral. A protest to denounce Khaled Said’s murder was also organized in Cairo by the April 6 Youth Movement, among other groups and activists. My hopes for justice were rising steadily. I asked the page members to join the protest, which was planned to take place outside the Ministry of Interior. But the security forces were prepared and decisive: they arrested many protesters and surrounded the rest with double their number of police officers, nearly making a perfect circle. From afar — as later seen in a photograph — the image was quite symbolic. It perfectly represented what the regime was doing to our country. Worse yet, the media, under the usual pressure from State Security, ignored the protest. As with many past examples of human rights abuses, the public was kept in the dark.
The media’s suppression of the physical world made the virtual world a critical alternative for promoting the cause. On the Facebook page, I began to focus on the notion that what had happened to Khaled was happening on a daily basis, in different ways, to people we never heard about. Torture is both systematic and methodical at the Ministry of Interior, I said. One of my most significant resources was the “Egyptian Conscience” blog, Misr Digital, by Wael Abbas. From 2005 to 2008, Wael Abbas actively published every torture document, image, or video that he received from anonymous sources. He was arrested several times by State Security, yet he and other brave bloggers continued to expose the horrifying violations of human rights that were taking place in Egypt.
I apologize for posting pictures of torture cases, but I swear that I had not seen most of them before. It seems I lived on another planet … A planet where I went to work in the morning and watched soccer games and sat at cafés with friends at night … And I used to think people who discussed politics had nothing better to do … But I am appalled to see a terrifying Egypt that I never knew existed … But by God, we will change it!
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I posted links to other torture videos, which were numerous and easy to find. One of them that I published on the page was removed from YouTube, I noticed, because it violated that site’s content policies. Many users had reported it as an inappropriate and gruesome video. I did not try to use my employment at Google to resist this decision in any way; my activism had to remain independent of my job.
Meanwhile, although the official press remained utterly silent about Khaled Said’s case, the Ministry of Interior began to worry about the controversy. The authorities’ first line of defense: stain Khaled’s reputation. In an unprecedented public statement, the Ministry of Interior declared that the cause of Khaled’s death was not torture but rather asphyxiation, the result of swallowing a pack of marijuana. They said the facial deformation that appeared in the widely circulated photograph was the result of an autopsy. They claimed that Khaled Said had been wanted for four different crimes: drug-dealing, illegal possession of a weapon, sexual harassment, and evasion of military service. As a main player in the state-led defamation campaign, the state-owned Al-Gomhouriya newspaper then labeled Khaled Said “the Martyr of Marijuana,” a satirical reference to the activists’ name for him, “the Martyr of the Emergency Law.”
The circumstances of Khaled Said’s death were mysterious. According to eyewitnesses, he was sitting at an Internet café when two informers attacked and beat him severely. They then dragged him to the entrance of a nearby building, where they continued to pound him until he died. The official police account alleged that he had tried to hide a pack of marijuana by swallowing it, and that he choked and died while the informers were trying to force him to spit out the pack.
The ministry’s expected support of the secret police officers’ story, along with the defamation campaign launched against Khaled, exemplified its approach in addressing its problems: never admit guilt, even by a low-level officer. The very limited number of officers who were ever convicted in cases of torture generally returned to work as soon as their prison sentences came to an end.
In response to the ministry’s statement, Khaled Said’s mother spoke to the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk and dropped a bomb: she speculated that her son was murdered for possessing a video showing a local police officer and his secret police colleagues examining and then allegedly dividing confiscated drugs and money. Soon this video, which was allegedly found on Khaled Said’s cell phone, spread on Facebook. Many of those who shared it presented it as the reason behind his death. His friends claimed that Khaled had gotten this video by hacking into an informer’s cell phone. The video showed a police officer and a few others posing in front of a pile of marijuana and carrying some cash. The officer counted the number of people present and then counted the money and was seemingly about to divide it.
I quickly posted the video, presenting it as a potential explanation for the violence inflicted on Khaled. Yet members responded with disapproval, arguing that my accusations were not supported by clear evidence. I removed the video and posted an apology. It is true that I was quick to accuse the police, and that the officer’s actions in the video could have been interpreted differently. The page’s members thanked me for seeking the truth and not rushing to defame the police force. Nonetheless, the video spread widely on the Internet and was seen by more than 200,000 users in a few days.
Meanwhile, Khaled Said’s family went public with a copy of the military service certificate that proved that he had completed his compulsory service, directly countering an allegation made by the Ministry of Interior. I published the certificate on the Facebook page, as well as videos of three eyewitness accounts of Khaled’s murder. One of the witnesses was the Internet café owner, who said that the two secret police officers stormed the place and viciously attacked Khaled. He said he tried to interfere but that only increased their brutality. He also asserted that he did not see Khaled insert anything in his mouth. The second video featured a young boy who saw the beating and testified that others saw it as well but were too afraid to interfere. Finally, the third witness was the porter of the building where Khaled was brutally beaten. He described the viciousness of the violence and said that the officers beat Khaled’s head against the stairs while he yelled, “I will die!” But his cries did not deter them in any way. The porter said Khaled lost consciousness and might have died at that point. The ambulance arrived minutes later to carry his body away, without any interference from the residents.
Large numbers of new members were joining “Kullena Khaled Said” at unusually fast rates. The page did not belong to any specific patron, and I was careful not to use it for the benefit of any particular political cause, even the seven-demands petition. “Kullena Khaled Said” spoke the language of the Internet generation. The tone on the page was always decent and nonconfrontational. The page relied on the ongoing contributions of its members and established itself as the voice of those who despised the deterioration of Egypt, particularly as far as human rights were concerned.
Together, we wanted justice for Khaled Said and we wanted to put an end to torture. And social networking offered us an easy means to meet as the proactive, critical youth that we were. It also enabled us to defy the fears associated with voicing opposition. The virtual world seemed further from the oppressive reach of the regime, and therefore many were encouraged to speak up. The more difficult task remained, though, which was to transfer the struggle from the virtual world to the real one.
I was skeptical about supporting demonstrations, since the first one had had a disappointingly low turnout and had met with such a determined police crackdown. Though many activists had perceived it as a success — since it challenged the might of the ministry — I knew that average young Egyptians, such as the members of the Facebook page, would be easily demoralized if they were treated in a similar manner. Being an activist himself, AbdelRahman Mansour didn’t necessarily share that view, but we eventually agreed that it was important not to put our members at any risk whatsoever. So we chose instead to identify online activities that we could promote, to instill a sense of optimism and confidence that we could make a difference, even if only in the virtual world for the time being.
The first campaign I launched suggested that members of the page change their profile pictures to an anonymously designed banner of Khaled Said, featuring him against the backdrop of the Egyptian flag, with the caption “Egypt’s Martyr.” Thousands responded positively, including personal friends who had no idea that I was the page’s founder. Yet some members ridiculed the idea, calling it a helpless tactic in the face of the Ministry of Interior’s aggression. The fact remains, however, that our cause gained significant momentum through this awareness campaign.
The strategy for the Facebook page ultimately was to mobilize public support for the cause. This wasn’t going to be too different from using the “sales tunnel” approach that I had learned at school. The first phase was to convince people to join the page and read its posts. The second was to convince them to start interacting with the content by “liking” and “commenting” on it. The third was to get them to participate in the page’s online campaigns and to contribute to its content themselves. The fourth and final phase would occur when people decided to take the activism onto the street. This was my ultimate aspiration.
I remember debating about all this with Marwa Awad, a correspondent working for Reuters. I, of course, wore my Google hat at the time, and was speaking to her solely as an Internet expert. Marwa believed strongly in the need for change, but like many other Egyptians, she did not think that online activism could create the critical mass needed on the street for achieving real results. People feared the emergency law and the threat it posed to those who opposed the regime or its practices. Yet I was convinced that we could make the leap from the virtual world to the real one. It was going to happen someday, somehow.
The page needed to speak directly to its members and convince them to be active participants, and it was also important to break free from all the barriers of fear that controlled so many of us. So I came up with an idea that served both goals: I asked members to photograph themselves holding up a paper sign that said “Kullena Khaled Said.” Hundreds of members did so, and we began to publish their pictures on the page. The images created an impact many times stronger than any words posted on the page. Males and females of all backgrounds, aged between fourteen and forty, now personified the movement. The solidarity extended to expatriate Egyptians around the world and to Arabs in many countries — even Algeria, a soccer rival that had defeated Egypt in a World Cup qualifier, leading to heavy violence breaking out among the fans and to feelings of bitterness in citizens of both nations.
Isra, my seven-year-old daughter, had seen some of Khaled Said’s photos on my laptop and asked who he was. I explained that he was a good person killed by the police. She innocently said, “Aren’t the police supposed to be good? Don’t they protect the people?”
“Yes, but some policemen in Egypt are bad,” I replied.
Later that day, Isra came to my room to show me a drawing she had made. It showed a policeman shooting at a young man carrying the Egyptian flag. She told me that the young man was Khaled Said. I hugged her and told her how much I appreciated the fact that she cared about others, and that I was proud of the way she expressed solidarity with them using her own skills. I decided to post the drawing on “Kullena Khaled Said” and wrote that our coming generations would not tolerate humiliation and torture.
One picture the page received drove this point home; a pregnant woman sent us an ultrasonographic image of her fetus with a caption that read: “My name is Khaled, and I’m coming to the world in three months. I will never forget Khaled Said and I will demand justice for his case.”
The images worked like magic. Members thanked each other for their courage and solidarity. Such admiration and instant positive interaction encouraged even more members to post their pictures. The fact that the regime had not retaliated in any way also made it easier for many people to participate. The barriers of fear were slowly being torn down.
A few days following Khaled Said’s murder, opposition newspapers and some private television channels began supporting the cause. I asked page members to apply pressure to TV talk shows. Together, we compiled the telephone numbers of the different talk shows and posted them on the page. I encouraged everyone to call in and demand that show hosts discuss the case of Khaled Said. Earlier, some shows had attacked Khaled, while others had tried to remain neutral. A few had supported his cause, and we were hoping they would now increase in number.
The controversy grew. On June 15, Egypt’s public prosecutor transferred the case to special prosecution and ordered a second autopsy to confirm the cause of death. This decision amounted to a small victory for our cause and only served to excite us.
At about that time I noticed an outbreak of comments on the page attacking Khaled, calling him the Martyr of Marijuana, an addict, and a drug dealer. It was such a strong and sudden trend that I decided to investigate. As expected, I discovered that the Electronic Committee of the NDP was behind it. The committee was attempting to convince people that the regime was not responsible for Khaled’s death and that he was a dishonorable and unworthy human being. Yet we stayed focused. We were not going to allow such below-the-belt tactics to diminish our enthusiasm and passion for this just cause. It was clear that many page members felt the same way.
Mohamed, 26, Alexandria: How about if we all gather along the Alexandria coast on Friday? We would face the sea with our backs to the street holding hands in silent expression of our disapproval of the injustice inflicted upon Khaled Said. We should try to cover the stretch between the Alexandria Library and Muntazah. It’s not a demonstration, but a silent expression of disapproval.
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This idea was sent to the page’s e-mail account from Mohamed Eisa, whose full name I did not want to publish on the page so as to avoid endangering his life. I found his suggestion to be very reasonable. A silent demonstration was proactive but not provocative. The general reaction to the idea was positive, and most of the members’ comments expressed agreement. I announced the date and time for the following Friday and asked for all suggestions that would help bring the idea to fruition.
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Wael Ghonim
SPECIAL PRICERevolution 2.0 is the story of Wael Ghonim’s extraordinary contribution to the Egyptian Revolution.On the 25th of January 2011, a call for people to protest against the Egyptian government appeared on Facebook.‘We are all Khaled Said’ was set up by one of the Arab world’s leading internet gurus – Wael Ghonim. He wanted it to be a focal point for ordinary Egyptians to express their anger at the killing of a young student, and transform the feeling of injustice into a peaceful protest that brought people out onto the streets of Cairo.But two days later, as the number of people in the streets grew, Wael disappeared. After 11 days in captivity, when he was finally released by Egyptian state security amid cheers and applause, he went straight on to Egyptian television to try and mobilise the people, and stood up in Tahrir Square to tell thousands of Egyptians ‘this is not the time for individuals, parties or movements. It’s time for all of us to say one thing: Egypt above all.’A visionary with a passion for computers, Wael had created one of the Arab world’s leading websites whilst still at university. Through the internet, he had met his wife, and networked with hundreds of young men and women from around the world. But in January 2011, Wael’s knowledge of technology, and his understanding of the attitudes of young people and the way they use the internet enabled him to make a lasting contribution to the future of Egypt.In Revolution 2.0 Wael gives his unique insight into Egypt’s history – how it shaped his life, and thousands like him. It introduces the problems and injustice of Egyptian politics before the revolution, and tells the full story of Wael’s journey – from We are all Khaled Said to Wael’s imprisonment by State Security, and the last triumphant days of the revolution.Hailed as a hero, but modestly rejecting the label, Wael’s determination to change the course of Egyptian history is a truly remarkable story – and testament to the ability of one man to bring people together for the cause of justice, and ultimately, freedom.
WAEL GHONIM was born in Cairo and grew up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, earning a degree in computer engineering from Cairo University in 2004 and an MBA from the American University in Cairo in 2007. He joined Google in 2008, rising to become head of marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa. He is currently on sabbatical from Google to launch a nongovernmental organization supporting education and technology in Egypt.
Dedication
To all the patriotic Egyptians, Tunisians and the
rest of the Arabs who took over the streets and
made history that inspired the world
To every brave man and woman who
made the ultimate sacrifice
To future generations, in the hope that they
will live in a free and democratic world
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1 A Regime of Fear
2 Searching for a Savior
3 “Kullena Khaled Said”
4 Online and on the Streets
5 A Preannounced Revolution
6 January 25, 2011
7 My Name Is 41
8 The Dungeon
9 A Pharaoh Falls
Epilogue
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS GREATER THAN THE PEOPLE IN POWER
Prologue
THE WORLD AROUND ME was reduced to pitch black. I could sense the deliberate use of side streets by the driver as the car traveled through Cairo at midnight. We twisted and turned many times, a technique my captors often used to disorient their victims.
On my right and left were two guards from State Security. They kept a tight grip on my handcuffed arms. I remained completely silent so as not to provoke them. They had forced my shirt up to cover my head so I could not see, and my belt was tied firmly over the shirt, around my head. One of them had pushed my head down to hide me from passing pedestrians. Everything I had been carrying had been confiscated.
Those brief moments before the car reached its destination were all too familiar. I had published the accounts of many captives of State Security. Now it was my turn. I wondered what could happen to me next, but I knew the answer: anything.
“Get out, you son of a b————,” said a loud and angry voice when we arrived. I was being pushed out of the car. My reception inside the building was harsh and mocking. I was slapped, kicked, and cursed, all accompanied by derisive laughter. It seemed as if these men enjoyed their work, or at least they did it purposefully. The laughter was part of their strategy to instill fear prior to interrogating newcomers. The most difficult thing about the slaps and kicks was their element of surprise. I had no means of anticipating any strike because I was blindfolded. When would I be hit next? From which side, on which part of me? I had no clue.
I wondered what they knew. What had I done that had given me away? Kick. Curse. My fear grew. I knew that this was what they wanted — to break me down before the interrogation. I decided to hasten things along by pretending to tremble. Yet real fear was starting to take over.
In the midst of the beating I prayed to God that he would somehow inspire my friend Najeeb, in Dubai, to change the password to the Facebook page’s e-mail account. I prayed for Najeeb to do it before the interrogation got serious. They must not know what I had done.
I wanted to see my children again.
1
A Regime of Fear
MY 2011 ARREST WAS not the first time I had encountered Egyptian State Security. One winter afternoon in 2007, I received a call from a man who presented himself as Captain Raafat al-Gohary, from the bureau in Giza, Egypt’s third largest city, which is part of greater Cairo. Needless to say, Rafaat al-Gohary was not his real name. State Security officers feared the potential wrath of citizens they interrogated and tortured, so they used pseudonyms. I greeted him calmly, attempting to hide the anxiety caused by the surprise. He said I needed to meet him for an important matter and I was to head to State Security in Dokki, a neighborhood in Giza, at eleven o’clock that night. My anxiety increased. I asked what was the matter. His response: “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll just have a chat over coffee, that’s all.” This failed to comfort me. I asked if we could reschedule, saying that I was busy with work. He refused. I wanted to play for time to try to figure out why I was being summoned, but he insisted we meet at eleven. What is the worst that can happen? I wondered. My days of activism were long over. I had never before been summoned.
Immediately after hanging up, I contacted a close friend, and we agreed that I was to call him right after the meeting ended. If he never got the call, he was to find out exactly what had happened to me, since in the past, people in a situation like mine had suddenly disappeared for days or even months after their “visit.” I decided not to tell my wife or my family anything, as I didn’t want them to panic.
I arrived at the main gate at 11 P.M. sharp. The neighborhood was quite familiar to me; my high school was literally right around the corner. At reception, after confirming that I was to meet Captain Rafaat al-Gohary, I was told to sit down and wait. Around me were at least six others. Although I didn’t speak to them, it was clear that we all shared one emotion: apprehension.
Egyptian State Security reached deep into society, involving itself in every detail of life. It thrived on the emergency law, enacted in 1958 but not enforced until after the Six-Day War in 1967, and still in effect in mid-2011. That law gives executive authorities the right to arrest, interrogate, and imprison any Egyptian for up to six months without a warrant or any legal grounds or even the right to an attorney. It also empowers the authorities to ban all types of protests as well as gatherings of any group of people without a security clearance.
The dossiers of State Security were objects of fear and ridicule. Any activist of any sort, or even anyone with considerable financial or intellectual influence, had an exhaustive dossier in his or her name at State Security, containing every detail the authorities had collected that could possibly be useful in blackmailing him or her into obedience when needed. Privacy was almost meaningless to this quintessentially Machiavellian organization. Thus, phone tapping, for instance, was a very common practice of State Security officers. Word spread that tapes documenting the infidelities of famous businessmen and public figures were stored in a room at headquarters. Ironically, officers used to advise each other not to spy on their own wives’ phones, to avoid family conflicts.
Not only did the state monitor and terrorize political opposition groups and religious activists, but its oppressive reach extended to anyone engaged in public service, including charities whose field operations were limited to empowering the poor and unfortunate. With over 40 percent of Egyptians living below the poverty line, the authorities were consistently trying to curb anyone who might mobilize the masses for a future political cause.
State Security approval was obviously a prerequisite for any senior appointment in the government. Even university teaching assistants, who are supposedly selected from among the top students of the year’s graduating class, could not be hired by the university without a security clearance proving that they were innocent of any dissident activism, political or religious.
The Egyptian regime lived in fear of opposition. It sought to project a façade of democracy, giving the impression that Egypt was advancing toward political rights and civil liberties while it vanquished any dissidents who threatened to mobilize enough support to force real change.
The Ministry of Interior was one key force of coercion. Another was the state media: terrestrial and satellite television as well as newspapers and magazines, the most famous of which were Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Gomhouriya. The regime sought to plant fear in the hearts of Egyptians from an early age. Fear was embodied in local proverbs, such as “Walk quietly by the wall (where you cannot be noticed),” “Mind your own business and focus on your livelihood,” and “Whosoever is afraid stays unharmed.” The regime’s uncompromising control also covered workers’ unions and the nation’s legislative bodies.
This all amounted to what I came to call “weapons of mass oppression.” No matter how far down we spiraled, no matter how much corruption spread, only a few people dared to swim against the current. Those who did ended up in a prison cell after an unfriendly encounter with State Security, or were subjected to character assassination in the media, or were targeted on fraudulent charges or long-ignored violations.
“Hello, Wael. Why are you giving us a hard time? Why the troublemaking?”
This, together with a faint smile, was how Captain Raafat greeted me. His air-conditioned office contained three other investigators. The room was modestly decorated with a number of books, many of which were very obviously about religion. State Security wanted everyone to believe that it had nothing against faith.
I looked at him and smiled as I responded calmly, “I don’t make trouble at all. It is you guys who give me trouble, and I have no idea why. I’m glad you called me in, so I can figure out what the problem is. Every time I travel back to Egypt my name appears on the arrivals watch list and the airport officers transfer my passport to State Security, who pulls me aside for an inspection, including a full search of my bags.”
This problem dated back to December 2001, when I returned from the United States, three months after 9/11. As I was collecting my luggage, I heard my name over the loudspeakers. I was urgently asked to return to passport control. There was also someone calling my name in person, so I showed myself to him. He took my passport and asked me to wait in front of a lounge by State Security’s airport office. After a very nerve-racking forty minutes, a detective emerged with my passport and asked me to bring my luggage in for inspection. That day I thanked God that everything turned out well. It appeared to be nothing more than a typical post-9/11 glitch. Yet every time I entered Egypt between that day and the time the revolution began, I was pulled aside. Until this day, I had never found out the reason for that.
Captain Raafat was deliberately friendly, as if we really were just having a chat. However, he was armed with pen and paper, and he carefully documented the conversation. He took time to finish recording my responses before he resumed his questions. Almost everyone from the upper or middle class who was called in for interrogation by State Security was met with this same friendly, off-the-record manner. (Poorer people were treated far more harshly.) It was transparently illegitimate.
The captain asked for my personal information: name, age, address, marital status. I answered all his questions. He asked about my wife’s full name.
“Oh, she is not Egyptian. Where is she from?”
“America,” I responded.
He wrote her full name in Arabic as I pronounced it again and asked me to verify the spelling.
“So you married an American for the citizenship, right?”
He was surprised to discover that despite my marriage in 2001, I had never applied for a green card or U.S. citizenship. “I’m a proud Egyptian and I find no reason why I should apply for any other citizenship,” I explained.
Very cynically, he replied, “And what is it exactly that you like about Egypt?”
“I’m never able to verbally express my reasons for loving Egypt, yet love for it runs in my blood,” I replied honestly. “Even my wife asks why I love my country despite all its shortcomings. I always answer that I don’t know why. You know, Captain, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, during the first thirteen years of my life, I literally used to count the days left, on a paper on my desk, before I could return home to Egypt to spend the annual vacation. And when only a few days remained, I was too excited to fall asleep at night.” I returned his cynical smile and joked, “I love it here because life lacks routine. You wake up in the morning and have no idea what the day will be like. One morning you could receive a phone call like the one I received today, asking you to report to State Security.”
He smiled while saying, “You are certainly a troublemaker.”
I saw a copy of the Holy Qur’an lying on the captain’s desk. I assumed it was there to assure anyone who sat opposite him that the captain regularly read scripture and had nothing against faith. The ruling regime was extremely apprehensive about organized religious forces in Egypt, particularly ones that concerned themselves with public affairs. Their fears were intensified when thousands of Egyptians traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. Many of those fighters, or self-proclaimed mujahideen, returned with ideologies that rejected the Arab regimes, denouncing them as heretical and treacherous tools of the West. The new ideology, and the new militants, posed a threat to the Egyptian authorities. Although the emergency law had been suspended by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1980, it was reinstated eighteen months later, following Sadat’s 1981 assassination at the hands of radical Islamists. Sadat’s assassins were apparently motivated by his crackdown on more than 1,500 political and religious activists, and also by the fact that he signed a peace treaty with Israel and emphasized it with a visit to Tel Aviv.
The influence of religious groups in Egypt increased as time went on, and their variety expanded. These groups were never homogeneous, nor did they all necessarily share the same philosophies or even objectives. They did share one thing, however: enmity toward the regime. In turn, Hosni Mubarak’s government feared them. Mubarak knew these groups could influence the Egyptian masses more than anyone else, since Egyptians tend to be religious by nature; in a Gallup poll conducted in June 2011, 96 percent of the one thousand Egyptian respondents agreed that religion played “an important role in their daily life.” Ordinary Egyptians take religious figures as role models, symbols of nobility and sincerity, values which were thoroughly lacking in many of the the public representatives of the regime. Most of the time when the regime attacked a religious group, that group’s popularity received a boost. The fact that economic conditions were stagnant or declining only magnified the effect.
State Security kept an eye on all religious speakers and scholars and even on university students who frequented mosques, not just those who were active in Islamic movements. They were careful to summon such people to their offices to ask them about their activities and even to intervene and attempt to redirect them. Occasionally, hundreds would be arrested and thrown into jail for years without explicit accusations. Behind bars, they were brutally treated and humiliated. Once released, they either became fanatics, motivated by their bad experience, or attempted to reintegrate into society and forget the past.
This, I realized, was the real reason for my interrogation. State Security wanted to know if I had any links to religious or political activism, especially now that I regularly traveled abroad and, as a result, was becoming more exposed to real democracy. It was time to create a dossier in my name that contained the details of my life for future reference.
The story of my faith dates back to high school days. I did not pray regularly before then, although I adhered to the general ethics of religion, thanks to my parents’ encouragement and because I grew up in Saudi Arabia. That country is conservative by nature, especially in Abha, a small southern city where society and culture are assumed to be less advanced than in urban centers.
One of my closest cousins, Dalia, died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of twenty-five. Her death had an impact on me, and I was moved to explore my faith, as I didn’t want to die unprepared. I listened to sermons, attended religious lessons, and read books. I felt that life was a brief test that ended at death. I started praying five times a day, on time, and often at the mosque.
At the university, I mixed with people from many religious groups and ideologies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and I joined many of their activities at the school. But I always made my own sense out of things. A famous sheikh whom I met with several times once said to me, “Your problem, Wael, is that you only follow your own logic and you don’t want to have a role model to follow.” It was hard for me to accept conventional wisdom. It was my nature to discuss any matter thoroughly before I could accept a conclusion with both heart and mind. This attitude in an eighteen-year-old is not always endearing. It was not just my age, however. Thanks to frequent exposure to global media and modern communication tools, many young Egyptians were slowly becoming empowered to make their own educated choices.
“So your dad lived in Saudi Arabia. For how many years? What are his religious and political views?” asked Captain Rafaat, who had to gather as much information as he could, not only about me but also about my family members, as part of his job.
My father is a typical hardworking Egyptian who comes from the slowly eroding middle class. Born in the 1950s, his generation sang praises to Arab nationalism and the 1952 revolution, when Egypt’s King Farouk was overthrown by a military coup and Egypt was transformed from a monarchy into a republic. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, was a government employee at the Egyptian Railways. He had seven sons, whom he struggled to raise and educate. My father, the oldest, graduated from medical school and immediately went to work for a public hospital.
After my father married my mother, in 1979, and I came along, in 1980, his salary could hardly cover our basic needs as a family, so he decided to leave for work in Saudi Arabia. It was a very tempting option for many Egyptians. The salary offered in Saudi Arabia was twenty times the amount he received at the public hospital in Egypt. Like millions of Egyptian expatriates, he hoped to save some money and then return home after a few years to start a private practice in Cairo. Egypt’s talented citizens were becoming its main export, to the country’s detriment.
Economic conditions at home were horrendous at the time. Every year tens of thousands of Egyptians applied to the green card lottery, hoping to emigrate to America. Others left for Gulf countries, Canada, or Europe, by any means possible, to look for job opportunities. The phenomenon kept increasing, and emigration became the common dream of scores of Egyptians. Those with fewer skills did not have as many options. Some were desperate enough to put their lives at risk by emigrating to Europe illegally, by boat, despite the risk of drowning. I still remember an Egyptian comedian’s response to a question about the future of the nation: “Egyptians’ future is in Canada.”
After spending only a few years in Saudi Arabia, my father, like many Egyptians, fell into the trap of Islamic private investment companies, which proliferated in the early eighties. These companies offered a huge annual return on investment that reached 30 or sometimes even 40 percent, as opposed to banks, which offered 10 percent or less. My father deposited his life savings with four of these companies to diversify his portfolio. The companies were founded by religious Egyptians who offered their services as an alternative to banks; various Islamic scholars deemed fixed interest rates to be usurious and consequently prohibited by Sharia law.
A few years after the enormous growth of these companies, the Egyptian regime decided to fight them. Among other things, it wanted to protect the interests of loyal businessmen and feared that these private asset management companies would control the economy and cripple the banks. All such companies were frozen by the state, and their founders were arrested for fraud and money laundering. Most of the money saved by my father after years of hard work in Saudi Arabia was lost, as was the money of many other middle-class Egyptians inside Egypt and abroad.
So my father decided to stay in Saudi Arabia for a much longer time than he had initially planned. Every time I asked him why we were not returning home, he would answer, “How can I provide for a family of five with a salary of a few hundred pounds that runs out by the fifth day of the month?” My father is typical of his generation. He is fun, everyone loves him, and back then he spoke about politics only through jokes that timidly criticized the ruling class. “Ignore, live, enjoy” was his philosophy. Whenever he could, he would ignore problems rather than face them. I don’t blame him; the 1952 revolution had this effect on most of his generation.
My mother, on the other hand, pressured my father every year to return to Egypt, start his private practice, and attempt to readapt to life at home. We finally decided as a family that everyone but my father (I now had a brother and a sister) would return to Egypt and that he would follow us two or three years later, when he had saved enough to start a business at home. (Unfortunately, this never actually happened, and my father still lives in Saudi Arabia.)
Captain Rafaat was not very interested in my father once he found out that he was not involved with any political or religious groups, and he quickly moved on to ask, “So, when did you return to Egypt?”
It was in 1994. I enrolled in a private school in Zamalek, near our home in Mohandeseen. Both neighborhoods are known to be among the best areas in Cairo. I was in the ninth grade at the time. The decision to return to Egypt was one of the happiest moments of my life, but it was not easy living away from my father. I was never very capable of expressing emotions. I missed him immensely and always looked forward to his visits home. When he came home for forty-five days of vacation every year, I accompanied him everywhere he went. I laughed at his constant jokes and loved his modesty and his openness toward everyone he met. Tears always came to my eyes when he was leaving to go back to Saudi.
My mother did her best to make up for Dad’s absence. She was fully devoted to raising her three children to become decent and responsible human beings, and I was impressed at how she selflessly agreed to be away from her husband in order to do so. Despite her incredibly strong character, she put her children first in every decision she made.
Fortunately, I quickly adapted at school. My best friend was a genius of a boy by the name of Moatasem. He always effortlessly came in at the top of our class. I tried competing with him during exams, but always in vain. Moatasem was extremely diligent. I scored 92.5 percent and ranked second after him in the ninth grade, which is a milestone year in our educational system, the final year before “secondary education.” Moatasem decided to transfer to a public high school, where he would enroll in classes for advanced students. He convinced me to leave our private school and go with him to Orman High School. “It will be very competitive for us in the advanced classes, and the teachers in these classes are some of the best in Cairo,” he said. These arguments were enough to convince me, but one more reason was to get to know the real Egypt and integrate with Egyptians from different backgrounds and social classes and not just those who could afford to go to private schools.
I missed the aptitude tests for the advanced classes because I was away on our annual visit to my dad in Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1995. Before I began traveling, an admissions employee at the school assured me that I would be able to take the aptitude test once I returned. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t keep his promise, so I found myself attending regular classes.
Orman High School gave me culture shock. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined or heard about public schools. Being an all-boys school, there was a constant surplus of testosterone in the air. Fighting in the school playground always ended with someone injured. There was a designated corner for smoking cigarettes, and sometimes hash. Skipping school was common, as long as you paid a toll — a bribe — to the student guarding the fence. The number of students in a single class was at least double what I had been used to, over seventy students in a space that had contained only thirty students at my previous school.
I quickly tried to reverse my decision by calling the principal at my previous school. He refused to take me back, in order to teach me a lesson: he had offered many enticements to keep me at the school when I announced my decision to transfer, including slicing my tuition fees in half. I was very stubborn and rejected all his offers, so I don’t blame him for refusing me when I suddenly tried to crawl back. Unwittingly, however, I had made one of the most important decisions of my life.
It was no easy task to cope in the new environment. Blending in was more challenging to me than performing well in class, and I regained my balance only after I began to adapt. At the beginning of my Orman experience I hated it so much. Yet at the end I loved it just as much. That school exposed me to social classes I had never mixed with. I learned how to relate to all kinds of people. I later became extremely interested in psychology and sociology, not least because of these years.
In my first year, I received my worst grades ever. The threat of failure has always motivated me to fight back. I decided to focus all my time and effort during the next year — the eleventh grade — to excel, in order to join the advanced classes with my friend Moatasem in twelfth grade, the last year at high school. Mission accomplished: after a year of very hard work, I received a grade of 95 percent and was able once again to sit at a desk with Moatasem, as we used to do in the ninth grade.
Nevertheless, no amount of success could make me forget some of the things I saw during the first two years at Orman. The teachers tried to maintain order by means of violence and beatings. In return, the students enjoyed intimidating and harassing the teachers. There were daily battles in those classrooms of seventy, among whom were a fair number of troublemakers.
Like other government employees, public school teachers in Egypt receive a monthly salary of no more than a few hundred pounds, which does not cover their basic family needs. As a result, private lessons have become teachers’ main source of income. Teachers can generate thousands of pounds by visiting students’ homes and tutoring them in a far better environment than at school. A survey carried out by the Egyptian cabinet’s Information Center in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of parents sought private lessons for their children. Many families were spending up to a third of their income on these lessons.
Like a cancer, the phenomenon of private lessons quickly spread everywhere in the country. Teachers began marketing their services on leaflets that can be found in every street of every city and town. They give themselves catchy titles like “the emperor of physics” or “the colonel of chemistry.” The real shame is that most teachers, along with the government’s textbooks, emphasize rote memorization rather than any genuine understanding. Students and parents have to find their own ways to learn how to solve problems. Many students rely on supplementary texts. Egyptians spend over one billion pounds ($200 million) every year on them. I resisted private lessons adamantly until my final and decisive year in high school, when math and chemistry were so challenging that I simply could not grasp them from the classroom instruction.
One of my elected courses was psychology. I chose to study it because, like many adolescents, I was interested in understanding human nature. I decided to take private lessons with a university instructor whom I will never forget: Mr. Ehab. We used to spend hours more than the scheduled time discussing many interesting topics. Mr. Ehab taught me how to deal with various people and situations and helped me realize that a large number of conflicts result from pure miscommunication, like what Aristotle said about the importance of defining terms to avoid unnecessary disagreement. It was quite a good experience for someone of my age.
The corrupt educational environment also encouraged cheating. Teachers who supervised without allowing cheating were described by students as “bothersome.” Some mothers used to wish that the proctors of their children’s exams would let them cheat. It is not surprising that cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections.
I graduated from high school with a total grade score of 97 percent. I was going to attend Cairo University to study engineering, but first I searched for a job. My primary reason was to pay my phone bill, which had soared for a reason my father might never have imagined: dial-up Internet access. I spent hours exploring the Internet, browsing websites and chatting anonymously with people I did not know from around the world, using mIRC (a famous chat client at the time) to make virtual friends. I remember when my dad stormed into my room during the summer after high school to express his anger at the size of the phone bill. He confiscated the computer and locked it up in a closet, explaining that I was irresponsible and that my relationship with the computer had to end. As soon as he left the house, I broke open the closet and reclaimed the computer. When he returned, I begged his forgiveness and declared that I would get a dedicated phone line and the bill would be my responsibility. Luckily, my father always tried to treat his children as responsible near-equals. He often told us to be careful what we wished for. This time, after hearing me out, he said, “As you wish.” It was the beginning of my life online, and the beginning of my financial independence, as I started earning a steady income from working in a video gaming store and as a freelance website developer.
Working and spending long hours online was a real challenge to my studies. After passing the preparatory year at the engineering school, students were expected to choose a department to enroll in. The number of seats was limited in some departments, making them very competitive. I scored badly during my preparatory year in 1998. As a result, I initially enrolled in electrical engineering instead of my first choice, computer engineering. Nonetheless, I quickly determined that I really wanted to work with computers. A friend of mine had said that if I failed my first year in electrical engineering I could submit an appeal to the dean explaining that my life’s dream was to study computer engineering, so I proceeded to Student Affairs, where I learned that my friend’s information was accurate enough but success depended on the number of transfer requests submitted.
I took the risky decision to skip that year’s exams and submit an appeal at the end of the year. As usual, my parents were surprised by my decision and tried all forms of dissuasion, but I insisted. After few months my wish came true: only one other student requested a transfer, and we were both admitted to computer engineering.
Life was different inside my new department. There were no more than forty students, and the professors and teaching assistants knew each one of us by name. I tried to compete with the top students, but I was always behind, thanks to the countless hours I spent online. I remember one teaching assistant, Ahmed, who paused during one of his lectures and singled me out. “Wael, do you understand?” When I said yes, he responded, “Thank God — then I’m confident that everyone else has understood as well.” That was one of the reasons I hated the educational system in Egypt. I was very defensive and believed that it was the system, not me, that was blocking my progress. Yet even though I was losing at school, I was winning somewhere else.
Earlier, during the summer of my preparatory year at the university in 1998, I had created a website to help Muslims network with one another. It was pretty much like a simple version of YouTube. There were three fundamental differences, however: it was a website for audio material, not video, since video quality was not as advanced as it is today; content uploading was restricted to me and a schoolmate, since the content was religious in nature; and, finally, the website administrators had to remain anonymous. The webmaster could be reached only via an e-mail address that did not include his real name. I named the website IslamWay.com.
State Security would have immediately targeted me if it had discovered that I was the creator of an Islamic website, no matter how moderate it might have been. When I received the call from Captain Rafaat, I prayed that it would have nothing to do with my IslamWay days. Luckily, he never mentioned it during the interrogation, so I didn’t either.
It wasn’t too long before IslamWay became one of the most popular Islamic destinations on the Internet. During its early years, the website contained more than 20,000 hours of audio recordings of religious sermons, lectures, and recitals of the Holy Qur’an. Over 3,000 hours of this material I had digitized myself. In addition, the website relied on more than eighty volunteers, the true identities of most of whom remain unknown to me to this day, to collect and digitize content from existing cassette tapes.
Two years after the launch, the website had strong traffic from tens of thousands of daily users. I wanted it to serve as a kind of public library featuring a complete range of moderate Islamic opinions. When the English version launched in 1999, it spread strongly among Muslims who did not speak Arabic and among others who wished to learn about the faith. The website was becoming increasingly influential.
Surprisingly, IslamWay led me to my future wife. Despite my young age, I wanted to get married. I had proposed several times to Egyptian girls whom I met online or through my network of family and friends. My proposals were always met with skepticism leading to rejection. Many families thought I was crazy to seek marriage while I was still at school, despite the fact that I was financially independent and making a decent income. Stubborn and independent-minded as ever, however, I was determined to solve my problems my own way. Somehow I settled on a solution: I decided that what I really needed was to marry a non-Egyptian who would convert to Islam. I admired the openness of American culture and the practical way in which Americans faced life’s problems — so not just any Muslim convert, an American Muslim convert. I figured that anyone who changed her faith after a period of contemplation must be someone special — in today’s hectic world, most people barely have enough time to think about the ideologies they inherit from their parents, let alone conduct comparisons with other faiths. And even fewer people, I figured, are actually able to cope with the emotional baggage that family and society throw at a person who changes her faith. There was only one difficulty: I did not know a single woman who fit this description. But I did know how I could find one: the Internet.
I first met the woman I was to marry online after reading something she wrote on the website’s discussion forum dedicated to new Muslims, where she participated frequently as she practiced the faith she had recently embraced. I reached out to her, and we began corresponding. I found her personality strong and her writing style quite appealing. Yet when I made the crazy suggestion that she visit Cairo — she lived in California — she refused. Our correspondence trailed off over time.
Not too long after, in June 2001, when I was twenty, I planned a trip to the United States in order to donate the website to a U.S.-based charity that supported Muslim communities around the globe. The site had become very successful, and it was now so large that it was beyond my capacity to keep up with its growth. I was working at least thirty hours per week, and my studies were suffering. I had received an offer in 2000, from a close friend who knew I was the owner, to buy 10 percent for $100,000. It was a huge sum for a young man, but I refused to sell. I had never intended to make money from the portal — I do not feel comfortable profiting from social activities. I always knew I wanted to donate it to a charitable organization. Now it was time to transform IslamWay into a professionally managed website, and an American Muslim charity was ready and willing to take it on. So I hopped on a plane.
During my stay, an American friend offered to introduce me to a girl whom his wife knew was looking for a Muslim husband. Fate stepped in: she was the very girl I had chatted with online for months. Weeks later, Ilka and I were married.
I did not tell my parents in advance. My mother, I knew, was especially opposed to the notion of marrying a foreigner with a culture different from ours. Two days after the wedding (attended only by my mother-in-law, two witnesses, and an imam), I called my father. To my surprise, he only scolded me in calm tones for not consulting him and my mother. I asked if he could help me by sending a few thousand dollars until I got settled, and he agreed. I asked him not to tell my mother until I found a way to break the news to her as gently as possible. But he must have thought twice about that idea. Minutes later, my mother called and unleashed her wrath at my unilateral decision. She refused to speak to me for months afterward. I would call and call, and she would hang up as soon as she heard my voice. I wrote letters, trying to appeal to her love for me. I expressed how much I loved her. I praised Ilka as gently and insistently as I could manage, stressing her good manners and other great qualities. Nothing worked.
My stay in America left a major and lasting impression. Like any Egyptian who visits the West, I was in awe of the quality of education, the respect for citizens’ rights, and the democratic process that gave people voices and allowed them to be active players in the political process. Admittedly, at my young age, I was easily impressed. I drew a conclusion that I repeated to Egyptian friends many times: “We’re being fooled in Egypt!” The thing that impressed me the most was the freedom of religious practice — the respect for religions and every human being’s right to practice his or her faith. There were many organizations that defended Muslims and their rights. They were free to criticize the American government’s policies without fear of any secret police.
Yet not everything was in favor of the United States in the comparison with Egypt. I sensed an individualism in the air that contrasted greatly with my experience back home. In Egypt, a lot of emphasis is placed on the family and on groups in general, which creates an atmosphere that engenders a sort of emotional warmth in spite of its occasional restrictiveness. On the contrary, in the States I noticed that people were on their own in many situations in which they would have enjoyed much social support if they were in Egypt. My brain was in the United States, but my heart was definitely in Egypt.
My initial plan was to stay in the States to finish my degree, because I was so impressed with American higher education. Yet I had a change of heart after 9/11. I will never forget that day. My wife and I were home, and I had woken up early and started working on my computer when, on a discussion board, I found people asking each other to turn on the TV right away. I watched flames emanating from the first World Trade Center building; we all thought at the time that a plane had accidentally crashed into the tower. I woke up Ilka to join me, and shortly after, we both screamed in horror as a second plane crashed into the other tower. I had never imagined that people who claimed to be Muslims could commit such an atrocity. The faith in which I had been raised both unequivocally prohibits the killing of innocent civilians under any circumstances and completely forbids suicide. So I was dumbfounded when I heard speculations in the media that the culprits were Muslims. Over the years I had observed various Western media outlets magnifying the acts of some crazy fanatics and portraying them as representative of Islam. If 9/11 had anything to do with Muslims, I thought, then those who had planned this monstrous murder of thousands of innocent civilians must have been thinking solely about their political ideologies and could not possibly have considered the damage they would do to the image of Islam and Muslims living in America. Or perhaps they couldn’t care less.
It wasn’t easy being an Egyptian Muslim in America during the weeks immediately following the attack. It sometimes almost felt as if my fellow Muslims and I were personally accused of this atrocious crime. In public spaces, I was keenly aware of every look of suspicion that came my way. Many of my Muslim friends suffered acts of discrimination, including brief arrests and harassment at airports. I was getting tired of being unfairly singled out and had little hope of finding a job, so I began to seriously consider returning to Egypt.
Ilka, of course, was quite attached to her home country, although she too felt alienated by the barrage of criticism of our religion that washed through many media outlets. The fact that she wore a headscarf made her conspicuously Muslim, and this made a woman’s life harder at the time. Still, she hesitated for a long time before agreeing to move to Egypt. She had left the United States only once before, on a short tourist trip to Mexico. I remember her saying to me, “I asked some friends online about Cairo, and they said the streets were filthy.”
“Yes, I must admit, some streets are dirty, but people’s hearts are clean.”
The Egyptian people are among the best-hearted and most humorous in the world. They laugh during the darkest of times and find humor in the midst of suffering. Not even sixty years of a regime of fear could change that.
After a heavy dose of persuasion, Ilka agreed, and we flew to Egypt in December 2001, three months after 9/11. I was adamant that we see my mother immediately upon our arrival. Walking into her house right after fourteen hours of flying was actually quite an experience. She was trying to hide her emotions but failed miserably. She didn’t even smile when I said hello, and when I introduced Ilka, she offered a cold greeting. Obviously she felt betrayed. Nonetheless, over time my mother could not help warming to Ilka, and she grew to love her.
Shortly after I returned to Egypt I resumed classes, but I also began searching for a job. An old friend of mine, AbdulRahman Meheilba, along with his partner, Ramy Mamdouh, was working with an Internet startup that provided e-mail services to corporate clients and individuals. Gawab.com quickly spread across the Arab world because its e-mail service supported Arabic and it offered 15 megabytes of storage space at a time when Hotmail offered only 1MB and Yahoo offered 2MB.
Because of the entrepreneurial skills I had acquired during my experience with IslamWay.com, AbdulRahman offered me a job overseeing marketing and sales. Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted. We worked hard to spread Gawab’s services further in the Arab world. Eventually we managed to reach two million users and secure sustainable revenue by selling advertisements as well as hosting e-mail solutions for businesses and other websites. As Gawab. com grew, so did my paycheck. I became responsible for a team of twelve employees who dealt with clients in different parts of the Arab world. It was fun doing business with people you never met, thanks to the Internet. The growth of the company was exciting, and so was a six-figure offer of a buyout pitched by an Arab investor.
Working at Gawab gave me my first real sense of professional responsibility. Anything related to marketing and sales came to me. I was even responsible for accounting and cash management. It seemed everything was happening at once: in addition to spending long days at Gawab and many hours studying during my final two years at the university, I had become a father: Ilka and I were blessed with a baby girl in January 2003. We argued about who would choose the name; Ilka strategically allied with my mother and eventually got her way. We gave our beautiful little girl the name Isra.
I was ecstatic about being a father. It was strange for everyone else at school, since none of them had children. In general, many colleagues found me quite strange. Some saw that I rushed into decisions and actions without fully contemplating the consequences. They were right. It is in my blood. And not just that: I have always wanted to swim against the current.
Time quickly went by; Isra turned one, and I officially became a computer engineer in June 2004. Because I was a father, I felt even more responsibility to excel, in order to provide for my family. I scored my highest grades during the last year of school, yet my overall grade of 64 percent was “unsatisfactory.”
During my work at Gawab and a few months after graduation, I decided to study for an MBA. My job put me in charge of the company’s sales and marketing, and I realized how much knowledge I needed — I could not just read a few books and get up to speed. I needed experienced mentors and a vigorous education in business. My first choice was the American University in Cairo, which has a top-quality MBA program, though it charges high tuition fees. It would mean spending over 60 percent of my annual income on my education. As far as I was concerned, the cost did not matter much, as it was an investment that I trusted would reap returns after a few short years. Yet the university made it clear that I was not a strong candidate. My undergraduate grades were not high enough.
I wrote a long letter to the university explaining the reasons behind my low grades. The general system of education in Egypt was to blame, I claimed. I had missed exams during the first year of electrical engineering, then again during the first half of the third year, when I was in the United States, which had unfairly penalized me. I also explained the distractions of my work and early marriage, and I stressed my attempts to overcome them. One of my dearest university professors, Dr. Ahmed Darwish, who was the Egyptian minister of administrative development at the time, even wrote a letter of recommendation for me.
One of the requirements for acceptance at AUC’s MBA program was to score a minimum of 500 points on the GMAT. The director of admissions told me that if I was very serious about my application, I should score higher to compensate for my low grades. She said my score should not fall below 550, the average score of their applicants. I took it as a challenge. After two months of intense preparation I scored a 680, which was very high compared to the scores of my Egyptian peers. A short while later, I was finally accepted. I pledged to the admissions office that I would prove my worth and score the highest grades in all my classes.
Two years and sixteen courses later, I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, the highest possible. I would start each workday at Gawab, travel from there to the university to attend classes, then spend long hours at the library to study. Achieving straight A’s became of the utmost importance to me, even though it would have little effect on my career. Yet I did it. My self-confidence was redeemed. I proved to myself that I was not a failure. Ilka was supportive above and beyond the call of duty and stood behind me throughout. She knew that it was my own personal challenge, and despite the fact that I spent little time with her and our daughter, she always encouraged me to keep studying and focusing on my school projects.
The experience of the MBA program at AUC was crucial. Learning the science behind marketing was key to my career progress, and later on was vital to my online activism. The combination of marketing and a concentration in finance enabled me to understand how to study market needs, design products that address those needs, and promote them to target audiences. The finance classes introduced me to the world of business; since I came from an engineering background, this taught me a lot about how to run businesses financially. Little did I know that only a few years later, all this piled-up experience would come in quite handy in promoting a product I had never seen myself marketing: democracy and freedom!
In 2005, during the first year of my MBA, I had the startup bug. It was then that I met a major Arab investor in the field of technology — a chance meeting that I attribute solely to divine assistance. Mohamed Rasheed al-Ballaa was an engineer and a major stakeholder in the National Technology Group. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, NTG is a multinational conglomerate with more than twenty specialized information and communication technology (ICT) businesses in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States. To my delight, al-Ballaa was impressed with my web experience and listened to me pitch a cars portal for the Arab world similar to AutoTrader.com. He invited me to visit his company’s branch in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the project further.
Instead of offering to finance a startup, however, al-Ballaa offered to hire me. He wanted to expand aggressively into the Internet business in multiple ways, and effectively gave me the opportunity to be part of a larger team with a mission to help what he believed would change the face of the Arab web. The offer was quite enticing, since my entrepreneurial dream would be partially fulfilled with very little financial risk and my efforts would ultimately have more impact given al-Ballaa’s ambitious vision.
After I started working at NTG, I found al-Ballaa to be a model Arab investor. He treated me like a son, to the extent that my colleagues started to refer to me jokingly as Wael al-Ballaa.
One of the companies established by NTG was Mubasher, a Middle Eastern version of Reuters and Bloomberg financial solutions, which provided Arab stock market investors with web-based screens displaying real-time prices to facilitate buying and selling decisions. Al-Ballaa knew the importance of research and economic news for investors. He asked me to take the helm in starting a Cairo-based company to support Mubasher with data and analysis. I was not yet twenty-five.
At the time I knew nothing about the media, or publishing, or even the stock market. I was so ignorant that I did not even know the difference between a stock and a bond. I began avidly reading everything I could get my hands on about stock markets, and decided to take finance-related courses in my MBA. The company was established, and I quickly assembled a team. Needless to say, I was committed to the Internet generation. Most team members were fresh graduates in business and mass communications; I much preferred them to the experienced researchers, who were nowhere near as digitally engaged.
Mohamed al-Ballaa was extremely supportive of the project’s launch, both financially and morally. When Mubasher.info was launched, it quickly became one of the main destinations for many small Arab investors seeking information and news on listed companies.
This experience had a profound effect on me. I was heading a large team of more than 120 people. We were always seeking ways to develop and innovate. I tried every possible means to motivate the team to give the company their absolute best. I constantly urged all the employees to improve their own skills and the work environment. The site had more than one million visitors per month, and its reputation spread around the globe. We launched an English version. Several international stock market websites and companies began using our portal as one of their reliable sources for news and information. As a result, the company became interested in expanding and increasing its investments in Egypt.
Mohamed al-Ballaa was in his fifties, but he had the energy of a man in his twenties. He enjoyed taking calculated risks and venturing into areas where others would seldom go. He often told me that the rapidly evolving world around us makes it difficult to formulate five-year and ten-year plans, especially in a tech-related industry. As an investor, al-Ballaa committed his capital to dozens of ventures at once, a spray-and-pray strategy, hoping that just one would strike gold and make up for losses in the other investments. This made a profound impression on me.
The Internet has been instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my character. It was through the Internet that I was able to enter the world of communications (when I was barely eighteen) and network with hundreds of young people from my generation everywhere around the world. Like everyone else, I enjoyed spending long hours in front of a screen on chat programs. I built a network of virtual relations with people, most of whom I never met in person, not even once.
I find virtual life in cyberspace quite appealing. I prefer it to being visible in public life. It is quite convenient to conceal your identity and write whatever you please in whatever way you choose. You can even choose whom to speak to and to end the conversation at any moment you like. I am not a “people person” in the typical sense, meaning that I’d rather communicate with people online than spend a lot of time visiting them or going out to places in a group. I much prefer using e-mail to using the telephone. In short, I am a real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert.
My addiction to the Internet made joining Google a dream that I fervently aspired to make a reality. I had heard a lot about how cool it was to work there. The company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became among the most influential people in the world after they developed the web’s best search engine. Employees at Google are among the happiest in the world. Their intellectual skills are respected and their innovation is appreciated. For years I persistently applied online every time there was a vacancy that matched my experience. I used to joke with my wife and friends by saying, “I want to work at Google even if I have to take a job as a tea boy.”
One of those attempts was in 2005, only a few weeks after I joined NTG. Google announced a vacancy for a consultant in the Middle East and North Africa. Without hesitation, at barely twenty-five years old, I applied. My résumé was designed to demonstrate immediately that I was crazy about the Internet.
I had doubts about getting this position, because of my age and lack of experience. The job was to develop the company’s strategy for the entire Middle East. Yet to my surprise, I received a call from Human Resources inviting me to start the interview process.
Google is unique in everything it does. Human Resources sent me some documents to read before the interviews. The entire process took a few short months. The last, and ninth, interview was with a vice president, who spoke to me from his office in London. He asked about my experience in mergers and acquisitions along with my web experience, and about my understanding of regional web issues. Although I knew that I certainly was underexperienced, I was still hopeful, because I felt that my character and Google were “plug ’n’ play.” This is why I was devastated when, two weeks later, I found out that I had not been selected. My wife was dumbfounded and could not understand why I didn’t get the job.
My desire to join Google only intensified. It was no longer a matter of employment; it was a challenge, and I was stubborn. I particularly did not want to fail at joining a company that I thought embodied who I was as a person.
In 2008 the company announced an opening for a regional head of marketing, to be based at its one-year-old branch in Cairo. It was the perfect chance, now that I had my MBA in marketing and the Mubasher experience. Of course I applied. I volunteered a study, on my own initiative, in which I explained my vision of what the company’s strategy in the region should be. My observations included technical notes on the search engine’s performance in Arabic. Then a series of interviews began: I met with seven interviewers from different countries and functions. I thought I did very well in most of the conversations. My last interview was with the VP of marketing. I still remember my answer to her question “Why do you want to join Google?”: “I want to be actively engaged in changing our region. I believe that the Internet is going to help make that happen, and working for Google is the best way for me to have a role.”
After eight months of interviews, I received an offer — I had made it to Google! I was later told by my manager that one of the senior Googlers who interviewed me described me in his evaluation sheet as “persistent and stubborn, just the type a company needs when entering a new market.”
My skills and experience were enriched by Google. And I marveled at its culture, which was all about listening to others. Data and statistics ruled over opinions. Most of the time, authority belongs to the owners of information, or as W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
Similarly impressive is the trust Google bestowed on employees, who were empowered to access a lot of internal information that other companies would normally restrict to smaller numbers of employees. Communication and sharing knowledge among employees was key to the company’s success.
Google did not rise to the peak of the tech industry by luck. Its success is all based on strategy and philosophy. Attention goes not only to employees but also to users. The company listens to its users, asks their opinions, analyzes their usage behavior, and uses this input to develop its products. Teams within the company are constantly changing and developing products using unique and innovative product development methods.
The culture of experimentation was another thing I loved about the company. An experiment is always welcome, so long as the results come quickly. In a case where there is a difference of opinion about features of a product undergoing development, the product managers and engineers will put a beta version out to a group of users. The decision will then be based on the results and feedback. Google is not afraid of failure. Failure is accepted. If a product fails, it is terminated. Simple.
What attracted me most was Google’s 20 percent rule. The company allows employees to work on whatever they please for 20 percent of their time (one day a week). This means that they are free to work on projects other than their official assignments if they want. The idea is based on the notion that people work best when they work on things they are passionate about. A host of Google’s most outstanding products were born out of the 20 percent rule, including the e-mail service, Gmail, and the largest online advertising management network, Adsense. For me, Google helped reinforce the idea that employee engagement is the most important strategy of all. The more you can get everyone involved in trying to solve your problems, the more successful you will be. I found it natural, a few years later, to apply this philosophy to political and social activism.
A year before I finally joined Google, when I sat across the desk from Captain Rafaat of State Security, he asked me many questions about my religious faith and practice but none about my Internet experience. After a few hours of interrogation, during which he found nothing to hold against me, the State Security officer seemingly decided that I was not a threat in any way to security or to the political status quo. He said that he would try to remove my name from the airport arrivals watch list after presenting a report to his superiors. I thanked him and departed, grateful that this strange day had come to a peaceful end.
If Captain Rafaat and his colleagues had spent more time thinking about the Internet than classifying Egyptians by type of religious belief, they might have been better prepared for the digital tsunami under way.
2
Searching for a Savior
I’M NOT INTO POLITICS.” I used to say this all the time, reflexively, whenever the subject came up. It was a popular stance, shared by most Egyptians. It was the result of a deeply rooted culture of fear. Anyone who dared meddle in politics, in opposition to the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), took a risk, with little hope of reaping any return. Most of us shied away, believing that we could not do anything to change the status quo.
The truth is, however, Egyptians have always expressed political opinions, but only passively. We complain about education, health care, the economy, unemployment, police brutality, bribery, and corruption, but that is as far as we once dared to go. Few would point fingers at the officials responsible, while most kept such thoughts to themselves.
Egyptians who grew up in the fifties and sixties endured the worst repression in our modern history, including arrests, torture, military trials, and other forms of oppression. Most of them chose safety over activism. Informers were so deeply planted that many Egyptians were afraid to discuss politics in public. This generation raised their children first and foremost to fear politics and State Security. Sometimes it seemed to me that we feared the wrath of the secret police more than we feared death itself.
Egyptians practically never chose a president. The dynasty of Mohamed Ali, who is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt, ruled for almost 150 years until the revolution of July 23, 1952 (in a sense, Mohamed Ali himself was installed by popular demand, when a group of prominent Egyptians insisted in 1805 that the former governor, Ahmad Khurshid Pasha, step down). From 1952 on, the military made all key decisions. The army officers who led a military coup against the ruling monarchy chose Mohamed Naguib as Egypt’s first president, transforming the nation into a republic. Two years later the Revolutionary Command Council forced him to step down, and they kept him under house arrest for the short remainder of his life. According to Naguib, this happened because he had planned to hand over control of the country to civilian leadership.
Naguib was succeeded by the extremely charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, best known for his pan-Arab nationalism. He was highly esteemed by Egyptians, although a lot of his actions actually planted the seeds of repression and autocracy. Under Nasser, democracy meant referendums on his popularity in which people voted either yes or no, and he somehow always garnered 99.9 percent of the vote. Egyptians joked about tracking down the 0.1 percent that opposed his rule.
Nasser’s vice president, Mohamed Anwar al-Sadat, became president when Nasser passed away in 1970, with no help from any electoral process. A referendum confirmed him as president soon after; he received 90 percent of the votes. The same scenario occurred when Sadat appointed Mohamed Hosni Mubarak as vice president. When Sadat was assassinated in 1981, Mubarak took over. Potemkin referendums continued to provide a façade of legitimacy. The percentage of “yes” votes changed slightly over time but always remained in the 90 range:
Mubarak ruled for five terms, each of which lasted six years. His best terms were the first and second, when he released political prisoners arrested by Sadat and promised widespread reforms. He vowed to fight corruption. He also pledged not to rule for more than two terms, as the constitution required. Many political analysts believe that Mubarak did not start out as a corrupt man. But Lord Acton’s rule prevailed: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Mubarak, like the presidents before him, held almost all the reins of power in the nation. There was a parliament to issue laws and in theory to divide power with the executive, but in practice the members were kept closely dependent on the regime. Their loyalty was maintained through what came to be called the “chain of interests”: privileges and benefits were showered on any parliament member from the ruling NDP. From land to loans to immunity from arrest to (most important) influence — these members were among the country’s movers and shakers — a chain of corruption bound them tightly to the regime.
Councils in each governorate of Egypt were selected in the same manner. Known as the Local Popular Councils, they were responsible for services and policies in their respective governorates. The fortunate members who were loyal to the NDP were akin to Communist Party members in the Soviet Union: they received special privileges unavailable to others.
Little by little these privileges eroded the rule of law. The higher up in the chain you were, the less restricted you were by the law. We suffered chronic inefficiencies because of widespread bribery and corruption. The system eroded the Egyptian character. We lost our self-confidence. The phrase “There’s no hope” became customary, especially among young Egyptians. For too many of us, dreams of an apartment, a marriage, and a decent life faded. Out of hopelessness came anger. We were ripe for revolution, even when we were terrified by the idea.
When Mubarak broke his promise of a two-term presidency in 1993, state media — the only media at the time with any effective reach — portrayed him as the epitome of wisdom, the only hope for the nation. The pharaoh’s favorite cloak, “stability,” was the primary argument advanced by the official press. The president was presented as the only viable alternative to chaos. As the ancient proverb put it, “The people you know are better than the ones you don’t.”
At the turn of the millennium, and after Mubarak had had four presidential terms, the first son, Gamal Mubarak, began — cautiously — to dip his toes into political waters. Rumors were floated to test reactions to the possibility that Mubarak Junior would become president. In nearby Syria, Bashar al-Assad had succeeded his father. Why not the same for the Mubarak dynasty?
Throughout Mubarak’s reign, the most enduring and influential opposition came from the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), formed in 1928. The Brotherhood’s popularity was regularly presented to the West as a scarecrow whenever Mubarak was under pressure to reform and democratize the regime. Members of the Brotherhood were widely arrested, subjected to military tribunals, and vilified in the press.
The regime played a typical tyrant’s game. It needed a bogeyman, so it both repressed and enabled the Brotherhood. Yet after years of obsession with its chosen enemy, the Mubarak regime may have become complacent about other threats. In 2004 a group of opposition activists founded the Egyptian Movement for Change, otherwise known as Kefaya, which means “enough” in Arabic. Kefaya opposed the renewal of Mubarak’s presidency for a fifth term and also rejected the attempt to transfer power to his son. The movement’s motto became “No to renewal, no to the inherited presidency.” Members of Kefaya were diverse, including dissidents, intellectuals, journalists, Internet bloggers, university students, and artists. It was the first group to openly and explicitly express opposition to Mubarak’s presidency as well as to his son’s potential candidacy. Its first major protest against the regime was on December 12, 2004 (though many of the protesters knew one another from earlier gatherings to protest Israeli strikes on the Gaza strip and the U.S. invasion of Iraq).
The regime did not crack down on Kefaya as hard as it had on the Muslim Brotherhood. The security masterminds could not imagine such a movement mobilizing significant popular support, since many of its members were intellectuals, whose discourse is not usually appealing to the masses. And the regime was right — Kefaya never achieved a broad following. Yet just by exhibiting the courage to protest, Kefaya helped tear down a psychological barrier. And by criticizing Mubarak openly — the group’s famous chant became “Down, down, Hosni Mubarak” — Kefaya members were certainly brave pioneers.
Kefaya’s courage, however, meant very little to Mubarak Junior. Gamal Mubarak was born in 1963 and graduated from high school in 1980, the year I was born. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business at the American University in Cairo. A few years later he left Egypt to work for the Bank of America in London. With a few colleagues, Mubarak then left Bank of America to set up a London-based private equity fund. Upon his return to Egypt in 1998, his political ambitions started to become more obvious, and he joined his father’s party in 2000. As the son of the pharaoh, he rapidly became a key person in the party, which he wanted to restructure and reposition. He was promoted to lead the party’s Policies Committee, the most important division of the NDP. In addition, he became the deputy secretary-general. He was the youngest man of any consequence in an aging party.
In 2004, a new cabinet composed of Mubarak Junior’s close allies was sworn in. It came to be called the businessmen’s government, because most of the ministers were rich businessmen. Mubarak nevertheless left the regime’s main pillars intact. The ministers of defense and interior affairs and the head of intelligence remained in their positions. Many Egyptians hoping for real change, including myself, were still pleased to see younger faces in government positions. The new prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, had a solid background in technology. Yet it was clear that the regime intended to groom Gamal Mubarak as the nation’s next president.
When Gamal Mubarak appeared on the Egyptian scene, I thought it was an opportunity to empower the younger generation and get rid of the old mentality that had been dragging us into the dark for ages. He seemed like a progressive person who appreciated experience and understood the youth culture better than the dinosaurs around his aging dad. The new campaigns for the party seemed to indicate a real desire for change, but later it became obvious that this was purely cosmetic — a change in the campaign but not in the product itself. Corruption was deeply rooted within the NDP, and it seems that Gamal Mubarak agreed to play by the same rules as everyone else.
The following year, 2005, owing to pressure from the international community, parliamentary elections were held under the supervision of the judiciary for the first time. Gamal Mubarak’s influence was growing. He had announced reforms within the ruling party (as head of the Policies Committee). The new cabinet was made up of his own men, not his father’s, and the party was coming under his control.
Yet the election’s first and second phases (out of three, in different locations) dealt a strong blow to the NDP. The Muslim Brotherhood gained seventy-seven seats, bringing them and other opposition groups close to having a third of Parliament’s members. If that proportion continued in the third phase, the opposition would have an effective veto over legislation. The message was clear, and alarming: many Egyptians hated the NDP and would vote for anyone who stood up to its political monopoly. In those first two phases, the state police were nowhere near as aggressive as they had been in previous elections.
In phase three, however, the regime showed its true face, blatantly rigging the results. Hundreds of polling stations were shut, and when voters protested, they were handled aggressively. The international community hardly protested, after witnessing the result of fair elections, since the West was wary of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom many regarded as extremists. More than nine people died during phase three, and the Brotherhood won only eleven seats. The result left the MB as the only strong opposition force in Parliament, with 20 percent of the seats. Despite the fact that official NDP candidates won fewer than 40 percent of the seats, the party ended up with 72 percent representation, since many independent candidates joined the party after winning, either because they desired the personal riches associated with each loyal seat or because they were too afraid to decline, or both. It was very clear that the party needed a monopolizing majority to pass any legislation without having to negotiate with any opposition groups in the country. When the emergency state was up for its biennial renewal, the party wanted at all costs to avoid a vote against it. The regime’s chief tool of oppression could not be placed at risk.
The same year also brought yet another staged attempt to polish the regime’s image in the eyes of the international community. A presidential referendum was turned into a simulacrum of a competitive presidential election. Practically speaking, only leaders of political parties were allowed to run against Hosni Mubarak. State media at that time continued to promote the regime. Stories were written before the referendum to hail his presidential victory as a historical event: Mubarak would be the first Egyptian president to allow competition within an electoral race for presidency.
To say that the Egyptian opposition parties were weak and fragile is an understatement. They were effectively nonexistent. I always used to say that if all the non-NDP parties had united to form one group, its sum of members and supporters would have barely filled Cairo Stadium’s 80,000 seats. The regime had even created a regulatory body that had to approve all potential political parties before they could see the light of day. Ironically, it was headed by the secretary-general of the NDP. It is no wonder that almost no new parties were formed during this era of autocracy.
The 2005 elections were truly comical. One candidate promised to bring back the tarboosh, a cylindrical red hat that men wore until midway through the last century, if elected. Another candidate proclaimed that he personally would vote for Mubarak as the man most qualified for the job.
Gamal Mubarak played a prominent role in the 2005 presidential campaign, and his father appeared in public for the first time ever without his regular formal attire. He wore a tieless shirt in an attempt to look young and energetic, although he was seventy-five years old. (He had always dyed his hair black to look young, but this was a bigger change.) In addition to glowing coverage in the state’s media outlets, positive PR proliferated thanks to businessmen and shop and café owners upon direct orders from the security apparatus in different parts of the country.
Employees of the government and public sector, who amount to more than six million Egyptians, were given orders to vote for President Mubarak. The final tally was ludicrous: 88.6 percent for Mubarak. Mubarak then cracked down on the two true opponents. One was Ayman Nour, head of Al-Ghad (“Tomorrow”) Party. Nour was sentenced to five years on allegations of fraud. Similarly, Noman Gumaa, head of Al-Wafd Party, was removed from his position and expelled from the party’s headquarters. If you ran against Mubarak and you really meant it, you suffered.
We all knew it was a sham. The question was, would we put up with it?
Egypt’s economy continued to suffer despite the new cabinet’s optimistic promises. The regime had been selling off state-owned companies since the 1990s, in an attempt to privatize and vitalize major sectors of the economy. Yet the public was convinced that those deals had been corrupt, and in practice economic conditions had not improved. As a result of their incessant suffering, workers could no longer stay silent. Egypt began to witness a new wave of strikes in 2006 and 2007, in numbers of up to 26,000 protesters at a time seeking social justice. It became obvious that a snowball was gradually forming.
In 2008 workers at Al-Mahalla Textiles called a strike on April 6. This time, Internet activists decided to support the strike, following a suggestion made by a prominent dissident to spread it to all of Egypt. One of the strike’s Facebook pages attracted over 70,000 members — this at a time when most opposition demonstrations attracted barely a few hundred protesters.
Several forces helped make the April 6 strike a popular one, if not enormously so. Many groups promoted it, including Kefaya, the two opposition parties (Al-Wasat Party and Al-Karama Party), and several professional associations (the Movement of Real Estate Taxes Employees, the Lawyers’ Syndicate, the March 9 Movement of university professors, and the Education Sector Administrators’ Movement), not to mention the youth movement that had emerged online for the first time. Members of the latter group came to call themselves the April 6 Youth Movement. It was a loose coalition of many small groups.
Many Egyptians who feared protests and potential arrests found it easier to accept striking. All they had to do was skip work rather than face security forces. Yet many people were disappointed by the strike’s minimal results. There was no discernible impact on Cairo’s streets or in other big cities. Personally, I noticed some limited street activity on that day. I did not join the strike, as I was not politically active at the time, although I was happy that some Egyptians were finally speaking up for their rights. In the Mahalla, on the other hand, two worker activists were killed, and the city briefly turned into a war zone between workers and security forces. A large outdoor poster of Mubarak was pulled down and kicked by protesters. A video of this historical moment was posted on YouTube, but of course such images could never be seen in mainstream media.
Minimal or not, April 6 sent out a clear signal to everyone that the Internet could be a new force in Egyptian politics. The security force’s reaction was to develop a new division dedicated to policing the Internet. Similarly, the NDP established an “Electronic Committee” rumored to have legions of well-paid young men and women whose mission was to influence online opinion in favor of the party through contributions to websites, blogs, news sites, and social networks. Arrest orders were issued for April 6 activists, and they became fugitives. The young activist Israa Abdel Fattah was arrested on the day of the strike because she founded the largest Facebook group promoting the strike online. She was released a little over two weeks later.
I resented the regime more than ever but still wondered what I could do about it. I was not optimistic about the impact of the activists’ efforts, and I was also busy with work, where I spent all my time. Nevertheless, I was inspired by the courage of those heroes who stood up to the regime at the height of its strength. They risked their lives for the dream of change. The Egyptian revolution will remain indebted to everyone who tossed a stone into the still waters at a time when doing so risked beating and arrest, or worse.
One of the April 6 Youth Movement’s prominent young figures, Ahmed Maher, was chased by the police a few weeks after the strike. He tried to escape by car, but he was caught, beaten badly, and dragged to a State Security branch, where he was brutally tortured. Security forces were in disbelief: how had opposition youth groups emerged without any political affiliations, Islamist or other? They fell back on their usual strategy: set an example with group leaders, so that other dissidents would think twice before joining their movements.
Ahmed Maher was released days after his abduction. He headed straight to a human rights activist, who took pictures of his tortured body. Like other audacious young men, Ahmed refused to back down. He went to the media, seeking the protection of public opinion. He was right: regimes of terror cannot stand exposure.
And increasingly, technology made public exposure inevitable. Egypt has seen a significant shift in media patterns over the past decade, thanks to the rise of privately owned printed newspapers and magazines and the spread of satellite television. The private media are not as tightly controlled as the official state-owned media, but they have faced their share of manipulation. Many famous anchors and talk-show hosts have been forced out of their jobs. Still, the new private outlets have produced more even-handed stories, even though their owners tend to have strong connections to the regime.
The Al Jazeera satellite TV channel, established in 1996, also played a significant role. The channel’s talk shows offered heavy criticism of many Arab leaders. Within a few short years, Al Jazeera became the most viewed channel in Egypt and the entire Arab region. The network set an example that has been followed by many channels throughout the Middle East.
In parallel, the number of Internet users in Egypt increased rapidly, from a mere 1.5 million in 2004 to more than 13.6 million by 2008. Discussion forums, chat rooms, and blogs flourished, providing an outlet for many users to express opinions freely for the first time. State Security occasionally arrested and harassed bloggers for discussing sensitive issues and for sharing news that the regime didn’t like. Yet the number of politically focused bloggers only increased.
In the early part of the decade, I was only passively opposed to the regime, like many of my countrymen. I regularly read the opinions of the most daring opposition columnists, such as Ibrahim Eissa and Fahmy Howaidy. I closely followed the Muslim Brotherhood’s website to remain up-to-date with their news. At most, from time to time I initiated political satire of my own, anonymously circulating jokes on the Internet.
One of my jokes, in 2003, was an image satirically depicting President Mubarak’s Hotmail in-box. The unread e-mail included a message from President George Bush with the subject line “Mubarak, how can I be president for life?” Another e-mail, from his son Gamal, asked if he could inherit the presidency as Bashar al-Assad had; another was a Swiss bank statement declaring the president’s balance to be $35 million. The trash icon in this design carried the title “The People’s Demands.” This image spread like wildfire, but I carefully kept from claiming credit.
I expressed my opinion of the regime only to friends and family, and they always warned that I was asking for trouble. When the debates got heated and I was eventually asked, “So what’s the alternative?” I could only say, “Any alternative would be better than this regime.” Most people did not find this answer convincing.
The absence of alternatives was a key part of the oppressor’s master plan. Any popular figure who surfaced, presenting the remote possibility of an alternative to Mubarak’s iron rule, was swiftly denounced, defamed, or eliminated. It had happened to the former minister of defense, Mohamed Abu Ghazala, former prime minister Kamal al-Ganzoury, and the former minister of foreign affairs, Amr Moussa. A lot of Egyptians thought that these men had been forced to resign from their posts and retreat from public life because of their popularity on the street. I couldn’t agree more; Mubarak was so paranoid that anyone he perceived as competent became a threat to him.
We all craved an alternative. We needed a savior, and we were ready to pour our hopes onto any reasonable candidate. Finally, two years after the April 6 movement began, Egyptian activists believed they had found one.
Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei, the former chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is a patriotic Egyptian who had worked in politics since he received his law degree in 1962. ElBaradei showed great skill as a diplomat. His diplomatic career began in 1964 in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with postings at the United Nations in New York and in Geneva. He rose to become special assistant to the foreign minister in 1974. He earned a law degree from New York University and then returned to the foreign ministry until 1984, when he became a legal adviser to the IAEA. In 1997 he became its director-general. ElBaradei and the IAEA received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 in recognition of efforts to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world.
Here was a man whom the Egyptian regime could neither eliminate nor easily tarnish. At first the regime tried to embrace him. State media hailed Dr. ElBaradei as a source of national pride. He was granted the highest state honor, the Order of the Nile, by President Mubarak in 2006. As the fourth Egyptian ever to win a Nobel Prize, he was lionized on the street.
In 2009, as his third term as director-general of the IAEA was nearing an end and he prepared to return home, ElBaradei told Egyptian newspapers that he was unhappy with the way Egypt was governed. He focused his criticism on the lack of democracy and the low levels of public health and education. Not surprisingly, he disappeared from our state-owned media.
Nonetheless, his popularity could not be easily snuffed out, thanks in part to Internet activists. A university student by the name of Mahmoud al-Hetta decided to start a Facebook group called “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011.” ElBaradei had been asked by CNN if he would run for office, and he had replied that it was premature to answer such a question. That indefinite reply left the door open, and young Egyptians began mobilizing support for him.
Many of the young people aspiring for real change in Egypt joined the Facebook group. Finally we had an answer to the question “If we don’t vote for Hosni Mubarak, who will we vote for?” Tens of thousands of users joined the Facebook group, and among them I recognized many personal friends who hitherto, like myself, had never been involved in politics. We all saw a glimmer of hope for reforming Egypt. Mahmoud al-Hetta and others used spontaneous online methods to invite ElBaradei to nominate himself for president. Shortly thereafter, the group’s popularity crossed the 100,000-member mark and ElBaradei announced his desire to play an active role in Egypt’s movement for change. His wish was for Egypt to reclaim its historic status and become a true democracy, not just a nominal one.
The Egyptian regime was taken by surprise and lost its balance. Instantly the powers-that-were launched a defamation campaign. The man who most represented our national pride was suddenly subject to a series of false accusations. In record time he was depicted as an ally of the United States, with a Western agenda, and even portrayed as the main reason for the United States’ war on Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis (ElBaradei is known for his opposition to the war on Iraq and his attempts to contain crises through diplomatic means rather than bloodshed). He was said to be a glutton for power; after three terms at the IAEA he now wanted to rule Egypt. Proponents of the regime claimed that he lacked political experience. They even started a rumor that he held Austrian citizenship (since he had lived in Vienna for many years). The absurdity reached its peak when the chief editor of the nation’s largest newspaper claimed that ElBaradei had been a failure as a schoolboy and that his grades were the worst in his class during one of his elementary school years.
The Facebook group was undaunted by these transparently absurd charges. The poet Abdel Rahman Youssef emerged as the campaign manager for the movement created by the group in an effort to try to venture out into the field. In December 2009 the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk published a long interview with ElBaradei, two months before his planned return from the IAEA. Over a span of three days, he told the reporter about his ambitions for change in his country.
The highlight of that interview was ElBaradei’s conviction that change was inevitable in Egypt. He added that he refused to run for president in a sham election, if the regime was to exploit lifeless political parties again to project Mubarak as the country’s only option. ElBaradei’s refusal to grant legitimacy to the regime was his first confrontational step. Yet the constitutional amendments that he urged as necessary before he could run for president were perceived as farfetched by most people.
As the political scene in Egypt was changing, so was my personal life. Ilka was getting very frustrated with life in Egypt. She found it impossible to drive in Cairo’s jungle of a traffic system and simply could not adapt to the pollution. She struggled with Arabic as well, and had trouble managing day-to-day activities. For these reasons, among many others, she was not happy living in Egypt, even after seven years of residency there, and my regular absence from home only served to reinforce her feelings of alienation. At the same time, Google’s Middle East team was beginning to centralize in the UAE, and it was gradually becoming more convenient for my career to move there. When I consulted Ilka, she was strongly in favor of a move. I was quite hesitant, as I preferred to stay in Egypt, yet it was becoming clear to me that this would be a selfish thing to do. Finally, in January 2010, I relocated to Google’s office in Dubai, but fortunately the nature of my work would take me to Cairo on a regular basis. Ilka was thrilled to be in Dubai, and I must say that I enjoyed it as well, although my heart remained in Egypt.
I continued to follow the heated debates back home closely. I accessed the Facebook group on a daily basis to read the discussions, but I was not yet actively involved.
Dr. ElBaradei’s return to Egypt was scheduled for February 2010. Many of the country’s political forces organized a reception for him at the airport, in the form of a few hundred activists who were willing to face the consequences of publicly opposing the regime. Several Egyptian public figures joined them, including the veteran TV presenter Hamdy Kandil, whose show had been taken off the air because of his outspoken criticism of the regime. What was new, alongside the old opposition guard, was the presence of many young people who ventured out for the first time in support of change.
I was still not ready to make a public statement by attending. I had a lot to lose. My employer, Google, was a dream company voted often to be the world’s best employer. I was responsible for Ilka, Isra, and my son, Adam, who had been born in 2008. I also believed, despite my optimistic outlook, that change in Egypt was a difficult challenge that would take time. But so as not to miss out on the chance to be an active part of the movement, I finally decided to leverage my media, marketing, and Internet experience to help develop what later became Dr. ElBaradei’s official Facebook page. My aim was to establish an ongoing communication channel between him and his supporters.
Personally, I have always hated hailing individuals as saviors, and I do not believe in magical solutions. What I do believe is that real change entails a change of policies and methods, not a mere substitution of leaders and individuals. Egypt’s salvation, in my opinion, would never come at the hands of a benevolent dictator. I might not have agreed with Dr. ElBaradei on every single issue, yet I did not hesitate to support him as a presidential candidate. My enthusiasm was for the idea rather than the person, but the only way back then was to support an idea through a person. The regime resembled a wall of steel. It had to be weakened little by little. Egyptians needed to be offered alternatives.
The thing I admired most about ElBaradei was his self-perception. He asserted repeatedly that he was not a savior and that the Egyptian people needed to save themselves. He put himself forward as only a tool in support of the cause. To me, he was a professional, well educated, someone who could speak to the ambitions of Egypt’s youth.
As an experienced Internet user, I knew that a Facebook page was much more effective in spreading information than a Facebook group. As soon as someone “likes” a page, Facebook considers the person and the page to be “friends.” So if the “admin” of the page writes a post on the “wall,” it appears on the walls of the page’s fans. This is how ideas can spread like viruses. A particular post can appear on the users’ walls to be viewed thousands, or even millions, of times. In the case of groups, however, users have to access the group to remain updated; no information is pushed out to them.
So I created a page in February, days before ElBaradei’s arrival, and I began its promotional marketing campaign. The number of fans who “liked” the page exponentially increased because of the sheer number of ElBaradei enthusiasts. I updated the page with excerpts from ElBaradei’s interviews, and I highlighted his vision for reform in Egypt as well as his emphasis on the country’s need for true democracy.
A few days after creating the page, I figured that I needed a co-admin. The nature of my work for Google required me to travel a lot, and I didn’t want the page to be dependent on my personal schedule. I noticed that one of the people on my Facebook friends list was also quite excited about ElBaradei. I had never met AbdelRahman Mansour in person, but we had been virtual friends since August 2009. AbdelRahman was a twenty-four-year-old undergraduate finishing his last year of journalism study at Mansoura University, 120 kilometers away from Cairo. His activism began when he started blogging about Egypt’s political situation. He had covered the rigging of the 2005 elections, among other crucial events at the time. I found his status updates on Facebook and Twitter to be thought-provoking. At one point, when I sent out an open invitation to all my friends to join the page, I received a message from AbdelRahman asking if I was the admin behind it. He instantly became an appropriate choice for a co-admin. On the one hand, I admired his enthusiasm and intellect, and on the other hand, he had now become one of the very few people who either knew or suspected that I had founded ElBaradei’s Facebook page. Without hesitation, AbdelRahman accepted my offer. That day would mark the beginning of a virtual working relationship that still continues today.
Naturally, it took some time to build mutual trust and understanding. Many times I would send private messages asking AbdelRahman to remove content that he posted on the page, and we would occasionally have heated discussions about such matters. Whenever push came to shove, however, I had the final say. The golden rule was to ask ourselves the following question: “Would Mohamed ElBaradei write this post himself?” This made our decision-making process much easier.
Soon after his arrival, ElBaradei met with key opposition figures. Immediately following the meeting, we were surprised to receive an announcement of the establishment of a newly formed body called the National Association for Change. The idea was to bring together everyone known to oppose the Egyptian regime. Members included the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour; the media veteran Hamdy Kandil; Dr. Mohamed Ghoneim; some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Muhamed el-Beltagy, a former MP; some political parties, like the Democratic Front, Al-Karama, and Al-Wasat parties; the Revolutionary Socialists; Egyptian Women for Change; the April 6 Youth Movement, and others. The association’s first action was to release a statement entitled “Together for Change,” or what was also known as “ElBaradei’s Seven Demands for Change”:
1 Terminating the state of emergency
2 Granting complete supervision of elections to the judiciary
3 Granting domestic and international civil society the right to monitor the elections
4 Granting equal time in the media for all candidates running for office
5 Granting expatriate Egyptians the right and ability to vote
6 Guaranteeing the right to run for president without arbitrary restrictions, and setting a two-term limit
7 Voting with the national identity card.
It was an ambitious list. It meant freeing the press; it would enfranchise eight million expatriate Egyptians; and it would help create an independent judiciary, among other spectacular achievements. The seventh demand was crucial for fair elections. The standard voting practice in Egypt was that voters were issued “electoral cards” in their respective districts. The card was required at the polling station for a voter to cast his or her vote. Since rigging was significant and consistent, most Egyptians were disinclined to obtain a card. In turn, that made rigging even easier. As a popular joke put it, we were so proud of our democracy that we even let deceased people cast votes. To demand that voting require only a national identity card was to demand free and fair elections.
The great thing about these demands was that the majority of opposition forces agreed to and supported them. Even the regime found it difficult to argue publicly against most of the seven demands. Dr. ElBaradei’s idea to issue this statement as a petition was a great one. It was an excellent new tool of pressure, and it increased the possibilities that the regime might compromise.
To collect signatures in significant numbers, the movement turned to the Internet. The petition was published online, and citizens just needed to enter their name, address, and national ID number to sign. The organizers also helped people overcome their fear by publishing the initial hundred signees, who were public figures willing to use their authentic personal information.
Fear overcame me on the first and second days of the petition. But then I entered all my personal information and signed. I was citizen number 368 to do so. My fear turned into excitement when I realized I was beginning a new phase: I now publicly opposed the regime. I had no doubt that State Security downloaded the list of signees regularly, particularly since it contained everyone’s full name, yet I was excited to be part of the growing crowd.
I was keen to meet Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, and I tried to schedule a meeting with him during my first trip back home. I sent an e-mail to the Egyptian actor Khaled Abol Naga, whom I had first met at a Google event that we organized for Orphans Day in April 2009. I had seen him endorse ElBaradei on YouTube. I explained that I wished to augment ElBaradei’s efforts with my Internet abilities. Abol Naga’s response came instantly, providing the e-mail address for Ali ElBaradei, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s brother.
I e-mailed Ali ElBaradei, introducing myself and explaining that I managed the ElBaradei Facebook page. He did not know about the page, yet he welcomed any kind of cooperation and promised to set up an appointment with Dr. ElBaradei when I was next in Cairo.
At the same time I e-mailed Mahmoud al-Hetta, who managed the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” group. We spoke on Skype when I was in Dubai and discussed how we could cooperate. I was amazed at how brave this young man was, as were the other activists who used their real names on the Internet. Yet I advised him to hide his name, as Facebook enables you to do, for the sake of the campaign’s sustainability. There was no need to publish names where State Security might see them, I said. It was a brief call, and we agreed to meet up as soon as I was in Cairo.
A couple of weeks later, on my way to meeting Mahmoud, I was paranoid. I remained afraid of State Security. When I arrived at the local café on a small side street where we had agreed to meet, I glanced left and right before I joined both Mahmoud and Abdel Rahman Youssef, the campaign manager for the movement on the ground. The poet sensed my apprehension and tried to reassure me. He argued that our work was for a just cause, and that accordingly we had nothing to hide or be afraid of. I was not convinced, and I argued back that secrecy could never harm us and might even prove beneficial to our battle for democracy at a later point in time. I also requested that both of them keep my identity concealed. We discussed the importance of breaking the psychological barrier of fear and how to campaign for the petition with the seven demands. Signees had barely reached 10,000 at the time, a number that fell significantly below our expectations. Although no clear action plan was born out of our meeting, I was nevertheless thrilled to see such zeal and enthusiasm for the cause.
On April 11, I finally had a chance to meet with Dr. ElBaradei himself. His brother informed me by e-mail of the appointment, mentioning that others would also attend. I asked him if I could invite two other people to join us; he didn’t mind. AbdelRahman Mansour couldn’t make it, as he was out of the country, so I called two other friends who were equally devoted to helping to change Egypt: an engineer, Mostafa Abu Gamra, who owns a technology company that works in content development, and Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, a senior government official working at the Ministry of Communications. I was quite excited to meet the man whom I had been independently campaigning for.
ElBaradei lives in a villa in one of the private residential compounds on the Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road. I planned to take a taxi, to avoid any potential trouble of being recognized by State Security informants via my car’s license plates. Dr. Abdel Azim, however, decided to drive and offered me a ride. ElBaradei was a prominent Egyptian figure and there should be no problem visiting him, he assured me. We met Mostafa Abu Gamra on the way, and the three of us headed off. The guards at the compound’s gates let us in without any problem.
The villa was beautifully furnished and decorated, yet it was not extravagant in any way. Some of Dr. ElBaradei’s critics claimed he lived a lavish suburban life disconnected from that of ordinary Egyptians. They had portrayed his home as a palace or fortress, with high fences, but this was not the case.
ElBaradei received us in person. Everything he said lived up to my expectations. I was worried that this might change once I offered some criticism; people’s true faces appear under criticism, not under praise. He stood among a group of his guests, which included two young film directors, some senior businessmen, and other prominent figures.
Everyone was involved in a heated debate. ElBaradei was an excellent listener, and it never felt like he was leading the discussion. On the contrary, he seemed to be seriously learning from the opinions of others — just the type of leader I felt Egyptians needed. Then I offered my criticism: I suggested that he needed to speak in a language closer to the hearts of mainstream Egyptians. The jargon of elitist intellectuals would not help our quest for popular support.
I also mentioned ElBaradei’s recently initiated Twitter account. It was new at the time, but he already had 10,000 followers. It took very little time for him to become the most followed Egyptian on Twitter. I suggested that he sometimes seemed too rushed in his posts. Some of his tweets did not sit well with activists and newspaper readers (newspapers regularly published his tweets). His great quality, if you asked me, was that he refused to be considered a savior. He believed in the nation’s youth and in their ability to bring change. I recommended that he tweet about that more frequently. Young Egyptians needed to regain their self-confidence before they could take action.
I also criticized his travels outside of Egypt during these difficult times. Many others viewed this as his worst error. Regardless of the fact that he actually had many scheduled commitments abroad, ElBaradei’s frequent travels hurt the perceived effectiveness of the campaign and gave his opponents a chance to taint him as a tool of the West, or a self-promoter who ignored his homeland.
Everyone had something to say. The two directors, Amr Salama and Mohamed Diab, thought that the seven-demands petition was inviting trouble for ElBaradei. Making it a priority and making the signees’ information publicly available at a time when dissident Egyptians were not yet ready to go public was not right, they claimed. They had a point: a vast gulf separated the total number of potential supporters and the actual signees up to that day.
On that question, however, I defended Dr. ElBaradei’s vision. I found the statement to be an excellent manifestation of the snowball effect. The daily increase in signatures, I believed, made people hopeful. It also prompted community discussions about the statement’s seven demands, adding pressure on the government to implement them.
It was a fruitful meeting that left me both optimistic and energized. I took a picture with ElBaradei and made it the profile image on my Facebook page. The caption under it said, “I am Wael Ghonim. I declare my support of Dr. ElBaradei.” The meeting had helped me partially break my own barrier of fear.
Next I created a Google e-mail group called “ElBaradei” to enable key supporters to communicate effectively. It was a closed group that could be joined only with permission from one of the moderators. I began adding people whom I knew and trusted to the group. Ali ElBaradei forwarded the e-mail addresses of his brother’s other supporters, those whom he thought would add value to the group. Discussions proliferated through this e-mail group, but fieldwork remained limited.
On ElBaradei’s Facebook fan page, both AbdelRahman and I tried hard to improve his public image in spite of the government’s vicious defamation campaigns. We searched through state press archives available online and extracted articles that praised ElBaradei’s efforts. These articles made the recent defamation look absurd: how could a “despised traitor” be a celebrated hero abroad? I found many pictures of ElBaradei with such world leaders as the American president, the French president, the German chancellor, the king of Saudi Arabia, and others. I deliberately published them to stress the fact that ElBaradei was not simply an “apolitical scientist,” as his detractors sought to portray him. AbdelRahman even translated and posted the full transcript of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which ElBaradei affirmed his loyalty and allegiance to both his country and his faith.
The core accusation of the smear campaign was that ElBaradei was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, having misled the United States into believing that Saddam Hussein secretly harbored weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were adamant about proving this to be a blatant lie. I found an online video of the UN Security Council meeting at which ElBaradei presented his report asserting that Iraq was free of any weapons of mass destruction. The report demanded more time for inspections and rejected the military intervention proposed by the United States. I added Arabic subtitles to the video and published it, hoping it would show ElBaradei’s innocence regarding allegations that he had somehow facilitated the U.S. war on Iraq.
On April 6, 2010, less than three months later, the number of members of Mohamed ElBaradei’s page exceeded 100,000. The April 6 Youth Movement also attempted to celebrate its anniversary on that day by organizing a demonstration, but the attempt failed. The security forces were watchful and well prepared.
Online, AbdelRahman and I were restrained. After all, we were writing on behalf of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei. Our language was formal. We rarely posted our personal opinions, and we were convinced that the page had to present him in a formal light. Most contributors thought that Dr. ElBaradei was personally managing the page. The experience taught me a lot. I had never before managed a Facebook page.
On April 15, I received an encouraging message from Dr. ElBaradei himself, sent through his son. He wrote: “Spent some time browsing the fanpage today. It is wonderful. Many thanks for a very creative and professional job. Keep it up.” I replied, thanking him for the support and telling him that it meant a lot to me. I cc’ed AbdelRahman Mansour in the e-mail thread and introduced him as the page’s second admin, who deserved as much recognition as I did for all his efforts.
One of the important activities I initiated on the ElBaradei page was the use of opinion polls to make decisions. Despite the fact that Internet polls are far from scientific, they still offer a good means for testing trends of opinion. Besides, in Egypt, offline opinion polls, carried out through actual interviews, were possible only with a permit from the Ministry of Interior. Needless to say, the ministry had no interest in helping political activists gather information from the public.
I located a good polling site that supported Arabic and subscribed to its services. The first poll I developed aimed to measure the page members’ level of satisfaction with Egypt’s status quo and to explore why many of them had not signed the seven-demands petition. More than 15,000 participants completed the questionnaire. I aggregated and analyzed the results, then sent a message to the e-mail group as well as to Dr. ElBaradei with many recommendations to help increase public support for the petition.
After I provided these comments, Dr. ElBaradei invited me to meet a group of young men who had been working to promote the petition. First I met Dr. Mostafa al-Nagar, who had succeeded Abdel Rahman Youssef as the general coordinator of the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” campaign. Mostafa came across as a sincere person who had a real desire for change. We became good virtual friends. We chatted online frequently about current events, encouraging each other and sharing disappointments. Mostafa was a dentist and political activist of my age who was quite dynamic, and State Security used the emergency law to arrest and detain him for his political dissidence on more than one occasion. He certainly had an abundance of street smarts, and I was admittedly lacking in that department.
We constantly argued about the role of the Internet in the process of change. He believed that the Internet was a virtual world with limited impact on reality, while I found it to be the key vehicle to bringing forth the first spark of change. The Internet is not a virtual world inhabited by avatars. It is a means of communication that offers people in the physical world a method to organize, act, and promote ideas and awareness. The Internet was going to change politics in Egypt, I wrote on Facebook and Twitter, and the 2011 elections would not be similar to those in 2005.
I will never forget the cynical remarks I received in response. A friend joked that the Egyptian regime would change the Internet before the Internet managed to change anything. Many actually believed that the regime would censor the Internet if it represented any sort of threat. Egypt would follow the Saudi Arabian example, they thought, where accessible websites are strictly controlled and citizens are unable to visit antigovernment sources. I did not agree. The Egyptian regime needed to be seen as a progressive, welcoming country to the outside world. Its economy depended in part on tourism, and the regime cared deeply about its global reputation.
Things were moving quite slowly with Dr. ElBaradei’s campaign, and most of my recommendations were not implemented. My frustration increased, particularly as the rate of new signatures dropped. Yet I separated my personal feelings from the Facebook page. There I tried to spread hope. Both AbdelRahman and I followed all of ElBaradei’s news stories and his field campaigns. We published photos of his campaign visits to places like Old Cairo and Fayoum, and we continued to write his opinions and track the number of signatures on the statement as well as expose the political situation in the country. Many comments on the page demanded that Dr. ElBaradei take more practical steps on the ground and not limit himself to Facebook and Twitter.
One of the decisive moments for me was meeting Dr. El-Mostafa Hegazy, who owns a strategic consulting firm, in his office. He invited me, Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, and other activists to talk about change in Egypt. He was against the idea that political change should be personified or reduced to a single person’s campaign for presidency. His opinion was that it was critical at this phase to focus on change as a goal in and of itself. He wanted to establish the notion that Egyptians owned their country. It would inspire resistance to injustice and corruption across the board. I remember this meeting vividly. I was arguing that promoting ElBaradei was in essence promoting change. But I also agreed with Dr. Hegazy’s opinion — before ever meeting him — that positioning ElBaradei as a savior might end up hurting the real cause. After the meeting, the words “This country is our country!” rang loudly in my ears, and they continue to do so to this very day. I wanted every other Egyptian to shout them out as loudly as they could.
A few days later we received an e-mail, in English, from Dr. Abdel Azim apologizing for not being able to continue with the political campaign for change.
Dear All,
I am very sorry to inform you that I will not be able to be engaged in any political activity related to our hope for change. My position is extremely sensitive as a senior government official.
Although this is known from the beginning, but there was a miscalculation from my side. I was having a very firm position in the last weeks that I would like to continue in this initiative, and I can and willing to resign from my job any time to be free, and actually I prepared the resignation.
Yet the equation was not that simple and my issue was very highly escalated to the extent that I heard signs of real threats of different sorts, on my well-being and on my family.
It was sad to see Dr. Abdel Azim renouncing the efforts to bring about change in Egypt, but none of us could really blame him. We knew that these threats were very serious. Witnessing this firsthand only amplified my conviction that it was very important to work anonymously as much as possible. I kept contact with Dr. Abdel Azim, and occasionally we would chat online and share our thoughts on current events.
Meanwhile, my frustration at the campaign’s pace mounted, and I finally decided to send a message to Dr. ElBaradei through his brother. I expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of his campaign and my hope that he would move faster. The movement for change needed to be more flexible and dynamic. He had greatly raised our aspirations, but now we were hungry for actual change on the ground. I expressed my astonishment that we did not meet regularly and that our communication was limited to messaging through his brother. I mentioned that I spent long hours every day promoting his ideas online and that I thought it would be fruitful if I spent at least an hour a week with him, discussing the campaign’s strategy. He responded one day later via e-mail, again through his brother. He said he understood my feelings and explained that we were living under exceptional conditions. He was doing everything he could, in spite of the legal restrictions and media assaults he regularly faced. At the time there was no legal framework for our work together, and therefore he preferred to keep our communications indirect. I saw his point, but I believed that the regime could harm us if it wanted to, without the need for legal justifications. Later I settled for meeting Ali ElBaradei in person to deliver my point of view more thoroughly.
When we met, Ali ElBaradei defended his brother. After all, Dr. ElBaradei had stated from the start that he was not a savior. We, the young people, must work harder to collect signatures for the petition, Ali argued. Although the meeting added no tangible dimension to my overall strategy, I once again felt partially relieved after expressing my opinion.
My performance at Google declined significantly during this period, but my manager was still happy. Before I got busy with ElBaradei’s Facebook page, I would sometimes spend up to fifteen consecutive hours a day finishing a project, or finalizing a marketing plan for a new product, or simply brainstorming with fellow employees on new ideas for the region. Understandably, my quarterly performance reports at Google always stated that I needed to improve my work-life balance.
Yet my wife was incredibly supportive. From the very beginning, she had known that she was marrying a workaholic who was addicted to living online. Occasionally she would remind me that I needed to give more time and attention to my family. I tried from time to time to improve, but I must admit that no matter how hard I tried, I would always relapse.
The state’s campaign to control ElBaradei’s growing popularity became fierce. Security authorities had previously issued orders that banned ElBaradei from appearing on Egyptian media. Now private television channels that had previously besieged him for interviews also kept their distance. Coverage in the print media was not as bad as on television, but ElBaradei’s news was now featured a lot less than before. Public opinion fell victim to this campaign, particularly as ElBaradei did not make a habit of refuting baseless allegations. Many Egyptians didn’t know about the media ban. The only remaining outlet was the Internet. The Twitter account was his favorite channel on which to vent, even though his follow count did not compare to the number of followers of traditional media outlets.
As the situation reached this dire point, I got an idea, inspired by a popular Google product that had been utilized by election campaigns in other parts of the world. Google Moderator is a tool that gives the user the ability to solicit questions from an unlimited number of other users and subsequently to rank these questions based on popularity votes so that they can be answered accordingly. What a cool way to democratize feedback!
I presented the concept of Google Moderator to Ali ElBaradei and explained what it could mean for the campaign. Using this service to hold an event would reach a vast number of Internet users, the majority of whom would be young people whom the NDP had never communicated with in any genuine way. Dr. ElBaradei welcomed the idea and said he was ready to implement it as soon as he came back from a trip abroad.
The initiative was announced on his Facebook page in mid-May 2010. It was called “Ask ElBaradei.” The number of fans on the page had now reached 150,000, of whom more than 2,700 participated. They posted 1,300 questions that received about 60,000 votes. It was an astonishing outpouring. Ironically and in contrast, Gamal Mubarak’s team had initiated an Internet dialogue shortly before this and asked interested people to send their questions before attending the event. Of course, it was all scripted in advance and the questions were carefully selected.
I wondered what would happen if President Mubarak were to receive questions from Internet users. Would his aides be able to accept clear and direct questions without the usual politicking and deception? The answer was obvious.
The questions for Dr. ElBaradei were profound. Many of the questions that received the highest number of votes revealed anxiety about the follow-up to the signature-collecting campaign. The most important questions were: How will the signatures collected be useful? What is Plan B, if the regime refuses nonviolent change after we collect a large number of signatures? How can we reach rural parts of Egypt to spread awareness about change? Will you take Egypt toward secular governance? What is your position on the second article of the constitution, which states clearly that the Islamic Sharia is the nation’s main source of legislation? What are the priorities of your presidential agenda? Finally, Do you eat kushari? (Kushari, made of rice, lentils, and pasta, is a very affordable and popular daily meal for many Egyptians.) It was clear that many people simply needed reassurance that ElBaradei was “one of us.”
Together with other coordinators of ElBaradei’s campaign, we filtered the questions and began searching for an interviewer who would address these questions to Dr. ElBaradei. Our search was not easy. Everyone we asked refused to play this role; some attributed it to personal reasons or prior commitments, and others said they were afraid of the consequences. In the end, we decided that the campaign’s own Mostafa al-Nagar should be the interviewer. The interview was viewed by more than 100,000 online users.
Dr. ElBaradei tried to remain optimistic in his responses. Instead of appearing frustrated at the limited number of signatures and blaming people’s passive attitudes, he spoke about proactivity and the importance of joining forces for the sake of Egypt’s future. The man was inspiring in his presentation of a better tomorrow. The regime cannot resist the people’s demands for long, he said.
Dr. ElBaradei was blessed with optimism. Every time things seemed dark, he beamed with hope and asserted that change was coming. One famous opposition journalist, known for his sarcasm, commented, “He must know something that we do not.” And it turned out that he obviously did.
ElBaradei had it right all along: we did not need a savior; we had to do this ourselves.
3
“Kullena Khaled Said”
ON JUNE 8, 2010, while browsing on Facebook, I saw a shocking image that a friend of mine had posted on my wall. The picture linked to the official Facebook account of Dr. Ayman Nour, the former presidential candidate who was a political activist. It was a horrifying photo showing the distorted face of a man in his twenties. There was a big pool of blood behind his head, which rested on a chunk of marble. His face was extremely disfigured and bloodied; his lower lip had been ripped in half, and his jaw was seemingly dislocated. His front teeth appeared to be missing, and it looked as if they had been beaten right out of his mouth. The image was so gruesome that I wondered if he had been wounded in war. But by accessing Dr. Nour’s page I learned that Khaled Mohamed Said had apparently been beaten to death on June 6 by two secret police officers in Alexandria.
My first reaction was denial. I could not believe that anyone could actually inflict such brutality on someone else. The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old from Alexandria. According to eyewitnesses, some dispute had erupted between him and the two officers, leading to their physical assault on him, which claimed the young man’s life.
I felt miserable, frustrated, and outraged. This was all the result of a political situation that rendered security forces loyal servants of an oppressive regime. Some of our law enforcement personnel had mutated into vicious monsters who were immune from punishment and prone to committing atrocities. They abandoned the Egyptian ethic of goodness that has pervaded our society for centuries.
My memory of that day is vivid. I was sitting in my small study in Dubai, unable to control the tears flowing from my eyes. My wife came in to see what was wrong. When I showed her Khaled Said’s picture, she was taken aback and asked me to stop looking at it. She left the room, and I continued to cry over the state of our nation and the widespread tyranny. For me, Khaled Said’s image offered a terrible symbol of Egypt’s condition.
I could not stand by passively in the face of such grave injustice. I decided to employ all my skills and experience to demand justice for Khaled Said and to help expose his story to vigorous public debate. It was time to lay bare the corrupt practices of the Ministry of Interior, our repressive regime’s evil right hand.
The logical first idea was to publish news of Khaled Said’s murder on Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s Facebook page, whose members exceeded 150,000 at that time, but I reasoned that doing so would exploit an event of national concern for political gain. I discovered that a page had been launched under the title “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said.” I browsed among the posts on that page. It was evident that the contributors were political activists. Their discourse was confrontational, beginning with the page’s headline: “Khaled’s murder will not go unpunished, you dogs of the regime.” From experience I knew that such language would not help in making the cause a mainstream one.
I decided to create another page and to use all my marketing experience in spreading it. Out of the many options I considered for the page’s name, “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said” — was the best. It expressed my feelings perfectly. Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me. All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland. The page name was short and catchy, and it expressed the compassion that people immediately felt when they saw Khaled Said’s picture. I deliberately concealed my identity, and took on the role of anonymous administrator for the page.
The first thing I posted on the page was direct and blunt. It voiced the outrage and sadness that I felt.
Today they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.
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In two minutes’ time three hundred members had joined the page:
People, we became 300 in two minutes. We want to be 100,000. We must unite against our oppressor
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I wrote the first article on the page: “You People Deprived of Humanity, We Will Extract Justice for Khaled Said.” It was an emotional, spontaneous piece of writing. I vowed that I would not personally abandon the fight for Khaled until his attackers were punished. The response was instant, and within a single hour the number of members climbed to three thousand.
Egyptians, my justice is in your hands.
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I spoke on the page in the first person, posing as Khaled Said. What drove me, more than anything else, was the thought that I could speak for him, and if even a single victim of the regime could have the chance to defend himself, it would be a turning point. Speaking as Khaled gave me a liberty that I did not have on ElBaradei’s quasi-official page. It also had greater impact on the page’s members. It was as though Khaled Said was speaking from his grave.
Even though I was proficient at classical Arabic (al-fusHa) from my school years in Saudi Arabia, I chose to write my posts on “Kullena Khaled Said” in the colloquial Egyptian dialect that is closer to the hearts of young Egyptians. For the generation born in the eighties and nineties, classical Arabic is a language read in the newspapers or heard during news reports on television and comes across as quite formal. By using colloquial Egyptian, I aimed to overcome any barriers between supporters of the cause and myself. I also deliberately avoided expressions that were not commonly used by the average Egyptian or that were regularly used by activists, like nizaam, the Arabic word for “regime.” I was keen to convey to page members the sense that I was one of them, that I was not different in any way. Using the pronoun I was critical to establishing the fact that the page was not managed by an organization, political party, or movement of any kind. On the contrary, the writer was an ordinary Egyptian devastated by the brutality inflicted on Khaled Said and motivated to seek justice. This informality contributed to the page’s popularity and people’s acceptance of its posts.
The number of responses, and the incredible speed with which they came, indicated that administering “Kullena Khaled Said” was going to take a lot more time and effort than administering the ElBaradei page. I definitely needed help, and my experience thus far with AbdelRahman Mansour made him the perfect choice. I added him as the page’s second admin. During the first few weeks AbdelRahman was quite busy with school and other commitments, but he tried his best to help whenever needed.
I closely monitored news on the case and found the prosecutor’s report that acquitted the police force. I wrote:
The prosecution issued a preliminary report that the cause of death was drug overdose. Not only have you murdered me, but you also want to stain my reputation? God will reveal the truth and repay your lack of conscience.
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Mostafa al-Nagar, ElBaradei’s campaign manager at the time, had written a moving article on his personal page entitled “We Are the Murderers of Khaled Said” after he visited Alexandria to verify the story. I published the article on my page without mentioning the writer’s name. I did not want people to make the link between al-Nagar and the page and eventually identify the anonymous administrator.
As the page’s membership base grew, so did my personal commitment. I felt the stirrings of a rare opportunity to make a difference and to combat oppression and torture. I was angry, and I was not the only one. On its first day, 36,000 people joined the page. Some of them wanted to learn more details about the case, some sought to offer sympathy and support, and others joined out of curiosity because they had received an invitation from a Facebook friend. Images of Khaled before and after the assault spread like wildfire. Similar crimes had taken place in the past, all too frequently, yet their stories had not spread too widely. It was the visual documentation of Khaled’s terrible death, along with the fact that he was from the middle class, that catalyzed this huge reaction. The image was impossible to forget, and thanks to social media, it was proliferating like crazy.
By the end of the first day there were more than 1,800 comments on the page. Some people wondered why another page had been launched when the first one, “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said,” had already reached 70,000 members. “Why not unite our efforts?” they asked. I considered joining forces and closing the page I had created. Yet the aggressive tone adopted by the first page continued to worry me.
I advertised “My Name Is Khaled Mohamed Said” on “Kullena Khaled Said” and declared that we all worked for a common cause. I urged people to link to the page and requested that we all coordinate our efforts. To my delight, the admins of the other page reciprocated. It was becoming obvious that this cause could unite a lot of people.
Several prominent opposition politicians publicly condemned Khaled Said’s brutal killing. Also, a public funeral for Khaled had been announced for Friday, June 11. I publicized the funeral on the page and asked that as many people as possible attend. I also posted an edited video of various acts of torture by members of the police force, in the hope that Egyptians would finally confront the dark side of the regime and realize that any one of us could be the next victim.
About a thousand people, many of them political activists, took part in the Alexandria funeral. A protest to denounce Khaled Said’s murder was also organized in Cairo by the April 6 Youth Movement, among other groups and activists. My hopes for justice were rising steadily. I asked the page members to join the protest, which was planned to take place outside the Ministry of Interior. But the security forces were prepared and decisive: they arrested many protesters and surrounded the rest with double their number of police officers, nearly making a perfect circle. From afar — as later seen in a photograph — the image was quite symbolic. It perfectly represented what the regime was doing to our country. Worse yet, the media, under the usual pressure from State Security, ignored the protest. As with many past examples of human rights abuses, the public was kept in the dark.
The media’s suppression of the physical world made the virtual world a critical alternative for promoting the cause. On the Facebook page, I began to focus on the notion that what had happened to Khaled was happening on a daily basis, in different ways, to people we never heard about. Torture is both systematic and methodical at the Ministry of Interior, I said. One of my most significant resources was the “Egyptian Conscience” blog, Misr Digital, by Wael Abbas. From 2005 to 2008, Wael Abbas actively published every torture document, image, or video that he received from anonymous sources. He was arrested several times by State Security, yet he and other brave bloggers continued to expose the horrifying violations of human rights that were taking place in Egypt.
I apologize for posting pictures of torture cases, but I swear that I had not seen most of them before. It seems I lived on another planet … A planet where I went to work in the morning and watched soccer games and sat at cafés with friends at night … And I used to think people who discussed politics had nothing better to do … But I am appalled to see a terrifying Egypt that I never knew existed … But by God, we will change it!
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I posted links to other torture videos, which were numerous and easy to find. One of them that I published on the page was removed from YouTube, I noticed, because it violated that site’s content policies. Many users had reported it as an inappropriate and gruesome video. I did not try to use my employment at Google to resist this decision in any way; my activism had to remain independent of my job.
Meanwhile, although the official press remained utterly silent about Khaled Said’s case, the Ministry of Interior began to worry about the controversy. The authorities’ first line of defense: stain Khaled’s reputation. In an unprecedented public statement, the Ministry of Interior declared that the cause of Khaled’s death was not torture but rather asphyxiation, the result of swallowing a pack of marijuana. They said the facial deformation that appeared in the widely circulated photograph was the result of an autopsy. They claimed that Khaled Said had been wanted for four different crimes: drug-dealing, illegal possession of a weapon, sexual harassment, and evasion of military service. As a main player in the state-led defamation campaign, the state-owned Al-Gomhouriya newspaper then labeled Khaled Said “the Martyr of Marijuana,” a satirical reference to the activists’ name for him, “the Martyr of the Emergency Law.”
The circumstances of Khaled Said’s death were mysterious. According to eyewitnesses, he was sitting at an Internet café when two informers attacked and beat him severely. They then dragged him to the entrance of a nearby building, where they continued to pound him until he died. The official police account alleged that he had tried to hide a pack of marijuana by swallowing it, and that he choked and died while the informers were trying to force him to spit out the pack.
The ministry’s expected support of the secret police officers’ story, along with the defamation campaign launched against Khaled, exemplified its approach in addressing its problems: never admit guilt, even by a low-level officer. The very limited number of officers who were ever convicted in cases of torture generally returned to work as soon as their prison sentences came to an end.
In response to the ministry’s statement, Khaled Said’s mother spoke to the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk and dropped a bomb: she speculated that her son was murdered for possessing a video showing a local police officer and his secret police colleagues examining and then allegedly dividing confiscated drugs and money. Soon this video, which was allegedly found on Khaled Said’s cell phone, spread on Facebook. Many of those who shared it presented it as the reason behind his death. His friends claimed that Khaled had gotten this video by hacking into an informer’s cell phone. The video showed a police officer and a few others posing in front of a pile of marijuana and carrying some cash. The officer counted the number of people present and then counted the money and was seemingly about to divide it.
I quickly posted the video, presenting it as a potential explanation for the violence inflicted on Khaled. Yet members responded with disapproval, arguing that my accusations were not supported by clear evidence. I removed the video and posted an apology. It is true that I was quick to accuse the police, and that the officer’s actions in the video could have been interpreted differently. The page’s members thanked me for seeking the truth and not rushing to defame the police force. Nonetheless, the video spread widely on the Internet and was seen by more than 200,000 users in a few days.
Meanwhile, Khaled Said’s family went public with a copy of the military service certificate that proved that he had completed his compulsory service, directly countering an allegation made by the Ministry of Interior. I published the certificate on the Facebook page, as well as videos of three eyewitness accounts of Khaled’s murder. One of the witnesses was the Internet café owner, who said that the two secret police officers stormed the place and viciously attacked Khaled. He said he tried to interfere but that only increased their brutality. He also asserted that he did not see Khaled insert anything in his mouth. The second video featured a young boy who saw the beating and testified that others saw it as well but were too afraid to interfere. Finally, the third witness was the porter of the building where Khaled was brutally beaten. He described the viciousness of the violence and said that the officers beat Khaled’s head against the stairs while he yelled, “I will die!” But his cries did not deter them in any way. The porter said Khaled lost consciousness and might have died at that point. The ambulance arrived minutes later to carry his body away, without any interference from the residents.
Large numbers of new members were joining “Kullena Khaled Said” at unusually fast rates. The page did not belong to any specific patron, and I was careful not to use it for the benefit of any particular political cause, even the seven-demands petition. “Kullena Khaled Said” spoke the language of the Internet generation. The tone on the page was always decent and nonconfrontational. The page relied on the ongoing contributions of its members and established itself as the voice of those who despised the deterioration of Egypt, particularly as far as human rights were concerned.
Together, we wanted justice for Khaled Said and we wanted to put an end to torture. And social networking offered us an easy means to meet as the proactive, critical youth that we were. It also enabled us to defy the fears associated with voicing opposition. The virtual world seemed further from the oppressive reach of the regime, and therefore many were encouraged to speak up. The more difficult task remained, though, which was to transfer the struggle from the virtual world to the real one.
I was skeptical about supporting demonstrations, since the first one had had a disappointingly low turnout and had met with such a determined police crackdown. Though many activists had perceived it as a success — since it challenged the might of the ministry — I knew that average young Egyptians, such as the members of the Facebook page, would be easily demoralized if they were treated in a similar manner. Being an activist himself, AbdelRahman Mansour didn’t necessarily share that view, but we eventually agreed that it was important not to put our members at any risk whatsoever. So we chose instead to identify online activities that we could promote, to instill a sense of optimism and confidence that we could make a difference, even if only in the virtual world for the time being.
The first campaign I launched suggested that members of the page change their profile pictures to an anonymously designed banner of Khaled Said, featuring him against the backdrop of the Egyptian flag, with the caption “Egypt’s Martyr.” Thousands responded positively, including personal friends who had no idea that I was the page’s founder. Yet some members ridiculed the idea, calling it a helpless tactic in the face of the Ministry of Interior’s aggression. The fact remains, however, that our cause gained significant momentum through this awareness campaign.
The strategy for the Facebook page ultimately was to mobilize public support for the cause. This wasn’t going to be too different from using the “sales tunnel” approach that I had learned at school. The first phase was to convince people to join the page and read its posts. The second was to convince them to start interacting with the content by “liking” and “commenting” on it. The third was to get them to participate in the page’s online campaigns and to contribute to its content themselves. The fourth and final phase would occur when people decided to take the activism onto the street. This was my ultimate aspiration.
I remember debating about all this with Marwa Awad, a correspondent working for Reuters. I, of course, wore my Google hat at the time, and was speaking to her solely as an Internet expert. Marwa believed strongly in the need for change, but like many other Egyptians, she did not think that online activism could create the critical mass needed on the street for achieving real results. People feared the emergency law and the threat it posed to those who opposed the regime or its practices. Yet I was convinced that we could make the leap from the virtual world to the real one. It was going to happen someday, somehow.
The page needed to speak directly to its members and convince them to be active participants, and it was also important to break free from all the barriers of fear that controlled so many of us. So I came up with an idea that served both goals: I asked members to photograph themselves holding up a paper sign that said “Kullena Khaled Said.” Hundreds of members did so, and we began to publish their pictures on the page. The images created an impact many times stronger than any words posted on the page. Males and females of all backgrounds, aged between fourteen and forty, now personified the movement. The solidarity extended to expatriate Egyptians around the world and to Arabs in many countries — even Algeria, a soccer rival that had defeated Egypt in a World Cup qualifier, leading to heavy violence breaking out among the fans and to feelings of bitterness in citizens of both nations.
Isra, my seven-year-old daughter, had seen some of Khaled Said’s photos on my laptop and asked who he was. I explained that he was a good person killed by the police. She innocently said, “Aren’t the police supposed to be good? Don’t they protect the people?”
“Yes, but some policemen in Egypt are bad,” I replied.
Later that day, Isra came to my room to show me a drawing she had made. It showed a policeman shooting at a young man carrying the Egyptian flag. She told me that the young man was Khaled Said. I hugged her and told her how much I appreciated the fact that she cared about others, and that I was proud of the way she expressed solidarity with them using her own skills. I decided to post the drawing on “Kullena Khaled Said” and wrote that our coming generations would not tolerate humiliation and torture.
One picture the page received drove this point home; a pregnant woman sent us an ultrasonographic image of her fetus with a caption that read: “My name is Khaled, and I’m coming to the world in three months. I will never forget Khaled Said and I will demand justice for his case.”
The images worked like magic. Members thanked each other for their courage and solidarity. Such admiration and instant positive interaction encouraged even more members to post their pictures. The fact that the regime had not retaliated in any way also made it easier for many people to participate. The barriers of fear were slowly being torn down.
A few days following Khaled Said’s murder, opposition newspapers and some private television channels began supporting the cause. I asked page members to apply pressure to TV talk shows. Together, we compiled the telephone numbers of the different talk shows and posted them on the page. I encouraged everyone to call in and demand that show hosts discuss the case of Khaled Said. Earlier, some shows had attacked Khaled, while others had tried to remain neutral. A few had supported his cause, and we were hoping they would now increase in number.
The controversy grew. On June 15, Egypt’s public prosecutor transferred the case to special prosecution and ordered a second autopsy to confirm the cause of death. This decision amounted to a small victory for our cause and only served to excite us.
At about that time I noticed an outbreak of comments on the page attacking Khaled, calling him the Martyr of Marijuana, an addict, and a drug dealer. It was such a strong and sudden trend that I decided to investigate. As expected, I discovered that the Electronic Committee of the NDP was behind it. The committee was attempting to convince people that the regime was not responsible for Khaled’s death and that he was a dishonorable and unworthy human being. Yet we stayed focused. We were not going to allow such below-the-belt tactics to diminish our enthusiasm and passion for this just cause. It was clear that many page members felt the same way.
Mohamed, 26, Alexandria: How about if we all gather along the Alexandria coast on Friday? We would face the sea with our backs to the street holding hands in silent expression of our disapproval of the injustice inflicted upon Khaled Said. We should try to cover the stretch between the Alexandria Library and Muntazah. It’s not a demonstration, but a silent expression of disapproval.
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This idea was sent to the page’s e-mail account from Mohamed Eisa, whose full name I did not want to publish on the page so as to avoid endangering his life. I found his suggestion to be very reasonable. A silent demonstration was proactive but not provocative. The general reaction to the idea was positive, and most of the members’ comments expressed agreement. I announced the date and time for the following Friday and asked for all suggestions that would help bring the idea to fruition.
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Wael Ghonim
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежная религиозная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: SPECIAL PRICERevolution 2.0 is the story of Wael Ghonim’s extraordinary contribution to the Egyptian Revolution.On the 25th of January 2011, a call for people to protest against the Egyptian government appeared on Facebook.‘We are all Khaled Said’ was set up by one of the Arab world’s leading internet gurus – Wael Ghonim. He wanted it to be a focal point for ordinary Egyptians to express their anger at the killing of a young student, and transform the feeling of injustice into a peaceful protest that brought people out onto the streets of Cairo.But two days later, as the number of people in the streets grew, Wael disappeared. After 11 days in captivity, when he was finally released by Egyptian state security amid cheers and applause, he went straight on to Egyptian television to try and mobilise the people, and stood up in Tahrir Square to tell thousands of Egyptians ‘this is not the time for individuals, parties or movements. It’s time for all of us to say one thing: Egypt above all.’A visionary with a passion for computers, Wael had created one of the Arab world’s leading websites whilst still at university. Through the internet, he had met his wife, and networked with hundreds of young men and women from around the world. But in January 2011, Wael’s knowledge of technology, and his understanding of the attitudes of young people and the way they use the internet enabled him to make a lasting contribution to the future of Egypt.In Revolution 2.0 Wael gives his unique insight into Egypt’s history – how it shaped his life, and thousands like him. It introduces the problems and injustice of Egyptian politics before the revolution, and tells the full story of Wael’s journey – from We are all Khaled Said to Wael’s imprisonment by State Security, and the last triumphant days of the revolution.Hailed as a hero, but modestly rejecting the label, Wael’s determination to change the course of Egyptian history is a truly remarkable story – and testament to the ability of one man to bring people together for the cause of justice, and ultimately, freedom.