48 The New York Reviewthe Brotherhood swept the country.
The army stepped in and arrested
Morsi. His supporters refused to accept
this.
Abdel Aziz is a clinical psychiatrist
who has worked for years with victims
of state torture. She told me that her
characters were fictional but her ver-
sion of events was based on research
and firsthand accounts. She captures
the delusion, grandiosity, and bellig-
erence that were on display during the
Muslim Brotherhood sit- in. A sheikh
tells the crowds, “Let them take heed.
If anyone dares to harm our ruler, even
with a splash of water, we will respond
with a torrent of blood!” Abdel Aziz
suggests that the leadership of the
Brotherhood whipped up its base, ex-
pecting to be able to negotiate at least a
partial return to power. She shows how
some in the Islamist camp advocated
bringing in weapons (and a handful
actually did), how suspected informers
and infiltrators were treated brutally,
and how the surrounding neighbor-
hood was frightened and brought to
a standstill by the sit- in. But she also
portrays the protest as overwhelmingly
peaceful, joined by average people with
some misgivings but understandable
motivations. Aida thinks to herself:The last thing she had ever imag-
ined was that she might one day go
and protest in the street along with
thousands of other people, pro-
test about something political, but
what could one do when the ruler
had been abducted? What could
one do when he had been removed
from office and his supporters had
been humiliatingly excluded from
government?On July 24, then defense minister
Sisi asked the people of Egypt to go
into the streets to give him a mandate
to fight terrorism. “I’m asking you to
show the world,” he said. “If violence
is sought, or terrorism is sought, the
military and the police are authorized
to confront this.” On August 14, secu-
rity forces moved to clear the camp at
Rabaa, using tear gas, armed person-
nel carriers, bulldozers, snipers, and
helicopters. A report by Human Rights
Watch found that they used live am-
munition indiscriminately against the
protesters, who included women and
children. A recorded warning to leave
the square was broadcast only minutes
before the attack began, and protesters
could not find safe exits; many reported
being shot at as they tried to escape. In
the chapter she dedicates to the massa-
cre, Abdel Aziz describes Aida, whose
husband is dead, wandering the camp
in a desperate daze, unable to find her
son or a way out:Tongues of flame could be seen
from the podium area. Many of the
protesters were cowering behind
sandbags or tires that were spread
around the Space and hadn’t caught
fire yet. They thought they were
protected, but bullets went through
the tires and came out the other
side like knives cutting through
butter. The bulldozer was shovel-
ing corpses and crushing the ones
that got caught up in its tracks. The
crushing machine was working at
full strength to wipe out every trace
that might remind people of the
protest. More than forty days had
to be erased from the face of theearth. The bulldozer pushed out
the pegs of one tent, drove into an-
other and crushed what was left of
it. It did not stop for a man hidden
between the twisted chairs and the
shredded blankets. It mangled his
flesh and bones along with pots
and pans, copies of the Quran and
assorted household objects. Aida
picked up a stone from the ground
and threw it at the raging beast,
then a second stone and a third.After the clearing of the camp, the
book goes on for another sixty pages,
detailing trials, detentions, and censor-
ship, before ending abruptly.
Here Is a Body is urgent, uneven,
sprawling, and at times heavy- handed.
It is less well crafted than Abdel Aziz’s
previous novel, The Queue, a taut,
imaginative rendering of totalitarian
vertigo, whose main character, Yehya,
has been shot by security forces in a
protest referred to only as the Dis-
graceful Events. But since the authori-
ties deny that they shot protesters, they
have tampered with his medical file. He
is dying from a bullet in his gut that the
state will not acknowledge exists. Like
thousands of others, he spends days in
a mile- long line before the closed Gate,
a mysterious site of administrative au-
thority and the source of a constant
flurry of rules and regulations. It is the
only place Yehya can obtain a Certifi-
cate of True Citizenship and a permit
to get medical treatment. The book is
very good at capturing the way constant
surveillance and malicious bureaucracy
can frighten people into a state of self-
abasement and desperate hypocrisy.
Abdel Aziz began writing The
Queue in September 2012. There is
suspense in a story about the worst that
could happen; less so in a story about
the worst that has happened. In Here
Is a Body it is as if reality has flattened
imagination, as if the sheer volume of
brutality and mendacity has left the
writer no space to invent, only the con-
scientious impulse to record.
Eight policemen and at least nine
hundred people—most likely well over
a thousand—were killed at Rabaa. The
massacre was preceded by a media
campaign of fearmongering and dehu-
manization and followed by an equally
ferocious hounding of dissenting voices.
No officer or politician has ever been
held accountable for the mass murder;
even mentioning it has been criminal-
ized as a form of support for terrorism.
Rabaa is Egypt’s Tiananmen.
Given this climate, to write about
the event—even under the cover of fic-
tion—and to portray its victims sympa-
thetically is an act of courage. Abdel
Aziz had girded herself for a backlash;
instead she’s faced a deafening silence.
Certainly this is the result of censor-
ship and fear, but also of denial on the
part of much of the country’s media, in-
telligentsia, and elites, who were com-
plicit or quiescent in what happened
and have yet to reckon with it.The Egyptian activist and writer
Alaa Abd el- Fattah said of Rabaa thatthere are a lot of people who ap-
prove of it; and even more who’ve
decided to turn a blind eye even
though they don’t approve because
they’re afraid; and even more just
keeping quiet because there isn’t
anything to be done.He was one of the few who did not
keep quiet: his condemnation was
unequivocal.^2
“The break- up of Rabaa was more
terrible than anything we have ever
experienced,” Abd el- Fattah wrote at
the time. “It can only be compared to
war.... Rabaa is unique.” He blamed
the Brotherhood for creating the polit-
ical impasse of the summer of 2013; he
witnessed and condemned the violence
of its supporters. But he also empha-
sized that none of that justified Rabaa:Whatever we might say about the
crimes of Morsi and the Muslim
Brotherhood... whatever came be-
fore pales in significance.... I have
a lot to say that damns the Broth-
erhood as an organization and po-
litical Islam as an idea despite the
massacre, but I refuse to say it in
the same breath as though I need
to prove I’m against the Brother-
hood or prove my loyalty to the
nation or the revolution.He saw immediately that “the arms
that are being pointed at the Muslim
Brotherhood today will be pointed at
someone else next time; the military
are not secularists against Islamism,
the military are the old régime against
change.” The massacre was a turning
point that would define the new regime,
as well as the understanding of all that
had preceded it. By acceding to this
level of state violence, Egyptians would
lose any hope of democratic, account-
able governance. Years later Abd el-
Fattah wrote, “No one has been spared
the aftermath of Rabaa except its mar-
tyrs; even those who ignore or justify it
are paying its price today.”
A large number of Abd el- Fattah’s
newspaper columns, tweets, speeches,
Facebook posts, interviews, and com-
munications from prison, where he
has spent the majority of his days
since 2011, have been collected in You
Have Not Yet Been Defeated. It is not
available in Egypt. To read it is to be
impressed, over and over, with the writ-
er’s combination of honesty, original-
ity, and humility. It is to be amazed by
how often Abd el- Fattah is right, not in
the sense that he knows what to do, but
in the sense that he so often sees the
truth of each messy, polarizing, often
hopeless juncture. His writing is sharp
and funny, passionate and vulnerable,
straining generously to find something
useful to say.
My first memories of Alaa are from
the early 2000s, when he was a young,
friendly, confident, curly- haired activist
organizing protests against Mubarak’s
endless reign and in support of a more
independent judiciary. He was a com-
puter programmer and blogger, and
he and his wife, Manal, ran the web-
site Manalaa.net, which was a nexus
of early online activism in the country
and beyond, a platform that connected
other bloggers and spread ideas about
open- source software and citizen jour-
nalism. He writes:We came of age with the second
intifada. Took our first real steps
out into the world as bombs fell
on Baghdad. All around us, fellowArabs cried, “Over our dead bod-
ies!,” Northern allies chanted “Not
in our name!,” Southern comrades
sang “Another world is possible.”
We understood then that the world
we’d inherited was dying, and that
we were not alone.In Egypt at the turn of the century, they
longed for “one day that would end
without the suffocating certainty that
tomorrow would be exactly the same as
all the days that had come before.”When the Arab Spring exploded in
Egypt several years later, Alaa and
Manal rushed home from South Af-
rica, where they had been living. In the
first year of the Egyptian revolution,
Alaa threw himself into organizing. He
published trenchant critiques of the po-
litical transition process and proposed
ways to write a truly popular constitu-
tion, modeled on the drafting of South
Africa’s Freedom Charter. Quickly
and inevitably, he came into conflict
with the army, which was running the
country as an interim authority.
In the fall of 2011, Coptic Christians
marched against religious discrimi-
nation; the army attacked the march,
killing twenty- six protesters, yet the
authorities and the media presented it
as an attack on the army and called on
citizens to rush to the street to defend
the armed forces, leading to sectarian
clashes. Alaa, who alongside other activ-
ists spent days at the morgue convincing
the families of dead protesters to get fo-
rensic examinations of their loved ones’
bodies, was arrested and charged with
stealing and damaging military property
and assaulting a soldier; to this was later
added the charge of “murder, with the
intent to commit an act of terrorism.”
He refused to recognize the authority of
the military court before which he ap-
peared, arguing that he should be tried
in a civilian one instead. When, after
protests and pressure, the charges were
dropped and he was released, he said:We can’t celebrate that I’m getting
out innocent, we always knew it
wasn’t me that killed the people—
but the killers are still out there....
And the revolution, this revolu-
tion, will have succeeded when
General Hamdy Badeen is in cuffs
in the courtroom picking his nose
and a cylinder of cooking gas costs
five pounds.Two years later, as it ousted the Broth-
erhood from power, the military prom-
ised it would not be involved in politics.
Yet within a year General Sisi ran for
president, winning a landslide victory
practically unopposed. (The next time
he ran, in 2018, he made sure to jail
any potential competitors first.) His
regime quickly targeted all the leaders
of the “revolutionary youth,” and Alaa
was somewhere near the top of the list.
When protests were banned altogether,
he and a handful of others felt a duty
to demonstrate against the new law. He
was sentenced to five years in jail.
Much of his writing from prison is an
acknowledgment of defeat and a search
for its causes. “I think it’s an abject fail-
ure that in a moment like 2011–2012,
when [the revolution] had broad popu-
lar support, we were unable to articulate
a common dream of what we wanted in
Egypt,” he concludes. The mistake of
the revolutionaries was to become en-(^2) For more on Alaa Abd el- Fattah, see
Yasmine El Rashidi, “Egypt: Lost Pos-
sibilities,” The New York Review, No-
vember 4, 2021.
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