The Revolution: Report From Literary Egypt

We went because we believe in freedom of speech,” says Karam Youssef in her office at the back of Kotob Khan, her bookshop in al-Maadi, a leafy suburb eight miles south of Cairo along the Nile River. “It was the best day in my life, to be honest.” With her slight frame, black pixie haircut, button-down cotton shirt, and khaki pants, Youssef doesn’t look like a street fighter, but in the spring of 2011, the bookseller spent several weeks battling government supporters in Tahrir Square. “My husband [Ahmed Abou Zeid, an independent filmmaker] was injured when a rubber bullet struck him above the eye.” 

Youssef joined thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square with hope that President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster would lead to greater freedom of expression, but now she’s worried that the Arab Spring of 2011—known in Egypt as the January 25th Revolution—will result in increased censorship and repression. Shortly after her husband was injured, Youssef noted that the protests were beginning to be dominated by men with a religious agenda, and she abandoned the square. “Egyptians as a society, they are moderate; they aren’t fanatics,” she says. “But now it seems like maybe there is more fanaticism. This current is strong, and we didn’t know about it.”

Youssef’s father died when she was young, and her mother, widowed at age twenty-eight, was an elementary school teacher who encouraged her daughter to read and taught her to be independent—but not too independent. When Youssef earned academic scholarships to universities in the United Kingdom, her mother balked, and Youssef settled for a school in Cairo. After college, she dreamed of making documentaries for TV and radio, but lacked the resources and connections for the mandatory internship and took a job with AT&T (which became Lucent, then Alcatel-Lucent). In twelve years she worked her way up from administrative assistant to manager before switching to Hewlett-Packard. By 2006, she had saved enough to start something of her own (“something to do with culture and books,” she says) and she opened a bookstore and started a publishing house.

At Kotob Khan, floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves lined with books fill two back rooms and surround a front café area; posters and black-and-white photos of famous authors hang in the spaces between the shelves. In addition to offering a selection of classic and contemporary authors in English—from Gore Vidal to Knut Hamsun--and two rooms of Arabic titles, Youssef screens films here, hosts writing workshops, and sponsors concerts. Her publishing arm focuses on printing works of local poetry and literary fiction and translating into Arabic foreign works she admires. “We were happy for three to four years,” she says, “then I started to find out about my society and how corrupt it is.” 

Former dictator Mubarak is widely credited with relaxing censorship laws, but corruption and religious extremism undermined these advances. In 2010, an official visited Youssef’s store looking for bribes. In the past, they had given him what he asked for, but this time she said, “Enough,” and rebuffed him. A short time later, she received an unexpected call from her printer, who was in the midst of preparing an Arabic edition of Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by the Anglo-Pakistani author Tariq Ali. (The book, the first in a series of five, is about the fall of Moorish southern Spain in 1492 to the Christian forces of Ferdinand and Isabella.) “I’m sorry, I cannot print this for you,” she recalls being told. A scene depicting young men bathing together in a hammam, a public bath, while reading poetry might get him into trouble, he said. 

“The evening of the same day, January 17, 2011,” Youssef says, “a guy came into the bookstore and said, ‘Your bookmark is haram [sinful].’ It has Islamic calligraphy and English script, and I’ve got a fatwa [a ruling on a point of Islamic law] from al-Azhar [Cairo’s eleven-hundred-year-old religious university] that it is haram.”

Eleven days later, on January 28, she and her husband joined the protesters in the square. 

Since the revolution, business has plummeted; English book sales to tourists and expatriate customers that subsidized her other activities have fallen by 60 percent. “The margin of Arabic books is very limited,” she says during our interview, which took place last August. “Embassies are telling people not to come. They kidnap tourists—Americans—in the Sinai all the time. There’s no police. It’s a big mess.”

During the early days of the revolution, Youssef noticed an increase in sales of writing about revolutions and change. People bought books about Che Guevera, Communism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the U.S. Constitution, about “the state of law and what it means when you say somebody is liberal.” But those sales have faded. “The country is exhausted now,” Youssef says. “We went out for freedom and justice, and we got the Muslim Brothers running the country. And to them, we are the enemy. And I may be the first thing they turn against.”

After our meeting, I return to my pension in Cairo’s historic downtown. The roundabouts and avenues here are lined with beautiful but crumbling Haussmann-style buildings built during the nineteenth-century reign of Isma’il Pasha. Naguib Mahfouz and Alaa al-Aswany, two of Egypt’s most famous authors, have written tales about this neighborhood, and as I walk its streets, I remember the pages of their novels. At 34 Talaat Harb Street, I pause to admire the Greek Revival bust above a door tucked into a neoclassical lintel nearly hidden under signs announcing travel agencies, trading companies, doctors, and professionals; this building, with its sixth-floor row of Roman columns, balconies with iron railings, open interior stairs and nonfunctioning wooden elevator with brass fittings, is the setting of al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (American University in Cairo Press, 2005), a novel about contemporary Egyptians—about once-prosperous Europhiles, immoral millionaires, devout doormen, and a host of other characters. 

Continuing east, I pass the palatial neo-Mamluk building that houses the Museum of Islamic Art and cross the street into the narrow alleys of Islamic Cairo. 

Winding my way to the eleven-hundred-year-old al-Azhar Mosque, built during the Fatimid Caliphate, I scoot between crawling traffic and enter the Khan el-Khalil, pass hawkers eager to entice me into shops selling mother-of-pearl furniture and brass serving plates, and eventually leave the tourist section for alleys choked with pedestrians shopping for spices, cloth, produce, appliances, flatware, furniture, and a thousand other items. 

This is the neighborhood of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (Doubleday, 1990), the first novel in his Cairo trilogy; it is the story of the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, a man of contrasts and contradictions—a stern and severe figure in his home, a gregarious and profane raconteur in his shop, a singer and carouser in the apartment of the plump singer who is his mistress. 

Backtracking west toward Tahrir Square and the Nile, the streets grow uncharacteristically quiet. It’s the third week of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month when Muslims abstain from food, drink, and sex during daylight hours; the populace is enjoying their monthlong holiday. At Tahrir, the protesters are taking a break, but the violence of the revolution is still on display. 

The headquarters of the former ruling party, a fifteen-story monolith situated between the Egyptian Museum (home to mummies and Pharaonic treasures) and the Nile, is a ransacked, burned-out hulk; the roads leading into the adjacent Garden City neighborhood are barricaded by nine-foot walls of concrete blocks put up by the authorities to keep out the protesters. One barrier beside the padlocked entrance to the old American University of Cairo campus has had its cinderblocks pushed apart, and I climb through and continue down the street, past a bustling government ministry fronted by clusters of security officers by the door and a uniformed military guard holding the handles of a fifty-caliber machine gun atop an armored vehicle in the street.

Elaborate graffiti—of Mubarak as a monster and the newly elected President Mohamed Morsi looking calm and charismatic, of hijab-covered grandmothers cheering on gun-waving protesters, of a spray-painted computer power button and beneath it the Arabic words “the people,” and countless other symbols and sayings—covers the walls of the buildings throughout the district. 

A few tilting tents with political banners draped over them are still pitched in the center of Tahrir (which is technically a midan or circle, not a square). Here I find a trio of crop-bearded, stern-looking men in their early thirties dressed in soccer sweat suits and flip-flops. They claim underemployment and blame it on the economy, then offer me tea despite the Ramadan prohibitions against eating food or drinking liquids. If Karam Youssef appeared an unlikely street fighter, these men, scarred and unshaven, look better suited to the task. 

It’s early August and over a hundred degrees in the shade; there’s no relief from the brittle air, not even after I thank the men for their hospitality and head over to one of the bridges overlooking the muddy, swirling Nile.

A few hours later, evening comes; the minarets of Cairo’s many mosques ring with the Maghrib, the evening call to prayer, and the Cairenes of the downtown awaken and spill out onto the streets to snack, socialize, and shop. Talaat Harb Square, where my hotel is located, becomes a madhouse of honking cars, frustrated drivers, and swarming pedestrians; vendors cover the sidewalks, spreading out rows of cheap sandals, shoes, toys, sunglasses, underwear, slacks, shirts, pots, glasses, and watches; boys help their merchant-fathers by climbing atop chairs and shouting to draw attention to their goods; mothers in hijabs form an inadvertent blockade in front of a shop having a sale; little kids weave in and out of the press dodging cars and people; traffic cops on the street corners look mild and unconcerned (it’s the holiday season, and anyway, their ability to scare the citizenry disappeared thirteen months ago); somebody lights a string of firecrackers; somebody else sends up a bottle rocket.

I weave through the crowd to meet up with Muhamed “Nebo” Abdelnaby, a short story writer, novelist, and translator, in the Greek Club, a semiprivate salon located on the second floor of another dusty and beautiful nineteenth-century building. It’s the only place that serves alcohol to locals during Ramadan, Nebo says. The Greek Club has twelve-foot ceilings and arched lintels between paneled columns; a pair of pocket doors opens onto a room with glassed-in bookshelves and more tables. Tall windows are shuttered and curtained. We’re at a wooden four-top against the paneled back wall, watching as artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, and lawyers (a creative profession in Mubarak’s Egypt) fill the tables of the club. It’s nearing midnight.

“We call it ‘the Society,’” Nebo says, and he nods at the people around us. 

Of modest stature, with delicate features and slender, black-framed, tinted glasses, Nebo is thirty-five but looks younger. He has an easy, mischievous smile and occasionally marks his points with hand gestures. He calls polite greetings to one table after another: to a crowd of attractive young people in casual clothes—some of the men with ponytails, some of the women in sleeveless tops—and to a table of middle-aged journalists with unshaven faces in suits without ties. He appears to be on a first-name basis with half the room, which, at this point in the evening, numbers about fifty.

The new president, Morsi, received his PhD from the University of Southern California, and I assume this crowd was also educated in the West until Nebo begins to describe his childhood. His illiterate father moved from the countryside, abandoning a peasant’s life for a factory job in the workers’ suburb of Shubra al-Kheima, in the early 1970s. When Nebo was five, his parents enrolled him in a religious school. They weren’t particularly religious, he says, but the public kindergartens only accepted kids aged six and older. After that, much of Nebo’s childhood was devoted to memorizing the Koran and other religious texts. “It helped me be strong in the Arabic language,” he says and sips his beer. 

When he was twelve, he fell in love with the twin pillars of Egyptian literature: Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, and Yusuf Idris, a novelist, short story writer, and playwright. “I began to imitate them,” he says. He commingled the high language of his religious studies and the structure and plotting of books by the famous writers and, at eighteen, won a national contest sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. His collection was published, and he was sent on a ten-day trip to Rome. “Beginner’s luck,” he says with a soft smile.

Since graduating from a religious university with degrees in English and translation, his writing voice has evolved, he says. His subsequent stories and novels weave the colloquial Arabic of the streets with the formal language of the classroom and the mosque. “The colloquial language changes every day,” he says. “The street language can enrich the old language.” Now his influences include Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago, Juan José Millás, and Paul Auster. “I often feel like I have something in common with Paul Auster, more so than with my neighbor. We are all writers, one family scattered all over the world.”

He lives with his parents, which is typical among unwed adults in the Middle East; they are aging, and he looks after them. He writes in the early mornings, visiting cafés for privacy. “My father doesn’t understand what I do, really,” he says quietly, “but they tell the neighbors I’m writing stories like Naguib Mahfouz, whom they know from TV and movies.” 

One of his publishers invited him to the Frankfurt Book Fair where he had conversations with Western booksellers, writers, and critics. Too often, he felt like the Westerners he met wanted him to fulfill their preconceived notions of what an Egyptian writer should be. “They don’t want us to be experimental; they don’t want us to be a little bit crazy; this is for their writers.”

I ask him about the impact of the January 25th Revolution on writers in Egypt, and he criticizes publishers who have been releasing imperfect books about the Arab Spring, hoping the topic will appeal to customers even if the writing is poor; then he grows nostalgic. “We had some wonderful nights in Tahrir Square,” he says. “It was big. Like an explosion: Boom.” He makes a mushroom cloud with his hands. “We have not the right to lose hope.”

Things might grow more conservative in Egypt for a time, but Nebo, an avant-garde writer raised in an Islamic school, has a laissez-faire attitude about the prospect of increased censorship. He points out that he can always self-publish on the Internet. “For the first time, people speak about everyday problems frankly,” he says. “If the Egyptian people want to try the Islamic parties, let us try it. Maybe this will last for some years, but nothing lasts forever.”

It’s after three when I return to my hotel and fall into bed. Below my window on Talaat Harb Square, the shouting, fireworks, and horns of the nocturnal crowds continue; they intrude on my dreams until the call of the muezzin from the minarets announces the Fajr, the dawn prayer, then the streets grow quiet as the daytime abstinence begins.

I return to Egypt nine weeks later, in early October. President Morsi has wrestled power from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and his Muslim Brotherhood party is firming up control. On the ride from the airport, I sit in my taxi on the highway, frozen in traffic for an hour. Five thousand Ultras—soccer hooligans who fought against Mubarak supporters during the January 25th Revolution—are marching on the Presidential Palace and creating a massive traffic jam. Seventy-five Ultras were killed in riots at a football match last February, and the group wants justice. 

Eventually the traffic eases, and I drop my luggage at my pension on Talaat Harb and walk a block to meet Fatma El-Boudy, the owner of Al-Ain publishing house, at Café Riche, an airy, wood-paneled café that was the center of fashionable and literary Cairo for much of the twentieth century and now has returned to prominence due to its proximity to Tahrir Square. At the end of the dining area, a television beside the manager’s desk provides updates on the protests and warns that larger gatherings are scheduled for tomorrow in Tahrir. “During the January 25th Revolution, the people used to come here to eat, to have a beer, and then continue,” El-Boudy recalls. “The lucky ones had a chair.”

Sixty years ago, this area, running east from Tahrir, was the Champs-Élysées of Cairo’s belle epoque downtown, and Café Riche was its most popular meeting spot. Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian chanteuse, whose reputation in Egypt is difficult to imagine—try picturing Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Elvis, and Maria Callas all rolled into one person—was a regular at Café Riche. So was Naguib Mahfouz, who drank his daily two half-finjans of Turkish coffee at the café. King Farouk, the Egyptian monarch, met his second wife here, perhaps while Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser drank cardamom-scented coffee at a nearby table and plotted the coup that would end Farouk’s reign. Even the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said frequented this neighborhood during his childhood and describes it in his memoir. 

“This is the heart of my job,” ElBoudy says, waving with her cigarette at the people around her. The mother of two grown daughters is wearing a ruffled white-and-black blouse, a dark blazer, and oversized black-and-white pearls; a bejeweled pin shaped like a thrush adorns her lapel; she chain- smokes Marlboros. “I’m very alert to what is going on in my country. As you can see, I know many people and many people know me. My publishing is not separate. It’s a flesh-and-blood thing.”

Seated at the table with us is a civil rights lawyer in a red tie with a bushy goatee; the Sudanese head of a Jordanian think tank in a blue jacket; an Egyptian specialist in religious movements wearing black-framed glasses and an open-necked shirt; and El-Boudy’s editor, a thirtysomething poet named Tamer Afeefy, who hands me a paperback copy of his collection. El-Boudy introduces me to a poet at a neighboring table and explains that there is a short song or poem at the beginning and end of Egyptian soap operas. “He writes those,” she says.

Al-Ain began in 2000 as a publishing house for books about popular science, explains El-Boudy, who has a PhD in biochemistry. Her early successes were a book about the human genome and a translation of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It wasn’t until 2005 that Al-Ain’s list expanded into literary fiction after El-Boudy befriended the late Tayeb Salih, the Sudanese novelist, and secured the Egyptian rights to A Season of Migration to the North. “It’s not enough to say he is a good writer,” she says. “He has created the most important novel in fifty years.”

I ask her if she is worried that the new administration will bring additional censorship. “I publish many books against the Muslim Brotherhood,” she says. Her science books can’t help but offend the creationist stance of Muslim conservatives, but she’s also published outright attacks on the religious group. “One book is called Secularism Is the Solution, instead of the Muslim Brotherhood’s saying, ‘Islam is the solution,’” she says.

She explains, with help from the intellectuals around us, that the Muslim Brotherhood, once it has cemented its grip on the presidency, will turn its attention to the ministries that oversee human rights, journalism, and the media. Already El-Boudy has been surprised by how many of her fellow publishers are announcing their Islamic loyalties. “More and more are revealing their stripes. There are more and more Islamic publishers.”

El-Boudy publishes sixty titles a year with a standard first printing of a thousand copies; she distributes these to the approximately thirty branches of the three main booksellers in Egypt, as well as a few independent stores like Kotob Khan and her own bookstore located on Talaat Harb Square; she also sells to shops in Lebanon, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and the Emirates. Once published, she submits her books to contests, hoping to win recognition and publicity for the titles and their authors.

Although she is not pleased with the current threat of censorship, she is undaunted. “I’ve got no social commitments,” she says. “My daughters are married; I can go where I want and do what I want to do. I’ve got no responsibilities. My mother died; I’m divorced. It gives me the freedom and time to create.”

The next day is Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. On Tahrir Square, in the morning, I watch two thousand protesters, upset because the president is only appointing members of the Muslim Brotherhood to his government, set up a stage and put up banners. I wander back to the Café Riche and join the lawyer from El-Boudy’s evening table for a breakfast of falafel, bread, white cheese, and beans. A friend comes in with news, and the lawyer tells me that members of the Muslim Brotherhood have arrived in the square: They ripped down the anti-Morsi banners and tried to tear down the stage; there was fighting.

My phone rings; it’s El-Boudy, who was supposed to meet us here. “I’ve heard there are thousands gathering in Tahrir. The traffic could be bad. How does it look? Should I come in?” I confirm that there’s been fighting, and we agree that she should stay home for the day.

“I think I’ll go back to the square,” I tell the lawyer.

He nods. “Yeah, it’s a good opportunity for you.”

The number of people in the square has doubled in the hour since I left; now, there are four or five thousand; they’ve spilled out from the sidewalks and grassy midan onto the paved traffic circle. New banners are up, facing the old; the largest is black with three-foot-high Arabic script proclaiming: Justice. A couple hundred people on a corner across from the Metro begin chanting anti-Morsi slogans, then they wade into the larger mass. Men are lying in the street chalking ornate slogans on the tarmac while cars, buses, and taxis honk at them and edge around; two small girls, ages four or five, wearing little Palestinian kaffiyeh head scarves, stand on a subway grate holding a sign that says in Arabic: “The system is killing me; my blood is cheap for you.” A man with a cart is selling lemonade; another sells seeds. I wade into the crowd, take pictures, and eventually emerge by a T-shirt vendor across from the Egyptian Museum. The vendor tells me he’s from Aqaba, a city in Jordan, three hours from where I live; he warns me to be careful. “You’re a foreigner; you should leave the square.” Beside us, on the sidewalk in front of a café, middle-aged men in traditional dishdasha robes sit in small groups. They aren’t drinking tea; mostly they stare at their feet and appear to be waiting. I cross the street to the road that fronts the museum; it’s blocked by museum guards with machine guns—the museum was ransacked during the January 25th Revolution—who glance at my foreign face and let me pass. 

Fifteen minutes later, there’s a rolling cheer, a wave of sound like the bellow in a stadium after the home team scores, and four hundred men sprint out of Tahrir, past the eastern side of the museum, followed by a cloud of rocks arcing overhead, then another mob of five hundred men chases after them. The pursuing bunch stops and forms a line across the street; some hold squares of cardboard over their heads; a few wear split buckets or other helmetlike contraptions. They hold the line for fifteen minutes or so, tossing rocks, absorbing rocks, picking up new rocks and throwing them again; then there’s a roar from my left, and the men in front of me turn and run. The original four hundred return on the attack; they surge forward, forming little scrums around a couple of guys who didn’t run away fast enough. Shoving becomes shouting becomes punching. 

The guards beside me maintain their posts but look nervous. A dozen middle-aged men and women—the women in hijabs and conservative clothing, the men in dishdashas and Muslim caps—emerge from the sidewalk to our right and ask the guards if they can pass in order to escape the fighting. The guards hesitate; the women plead, and they’re allowed to pass. I follow them past the museum then circle around behind it and make my way back to my hotel.

Two hours later I’m on the second floor balcony of my pension overlooking Talaat Harb Square, drinking tea with the short story writer Mohammed Abu il Dahab and watching groups assemble beneath us. They gather in hundred-person formations, rectangular phalanxes, like Elks getting ready to enter a Fourth of July parade, then they raise their banners and disappear down Talaat Harb Street toward Tahrir.

I ask Abu il Dahab if the politics and protests are affecting his writing. “A critic last Monday said he wanted to kill himself [after reading my latest novel]. He asked, ‘Why is it so depressing?’” the writer says while sipping his tea and smoking a Pharaoh-brand cigarette. “He said that I am a good writer, but in this book, I made the art dirty. He said I have to respect the religion more than this.”

Abu il Dahab is a social worker at a mental hospital in Banha City, about twenty-eight miles north of Cairo. He grew up in the area and remembers aspiring to be a screenwriter when he was eleven or twelve, but then he read one of Naguib Mahfouz’s story collections at age fifteen and everything changed. “This book changes many things [for me]: about how to be a writer, about how to see the world. It made sure for me that I have to be a writer.”

He began to read the canon of Egyptian writers and was most affected by Edwar al-Kharrat, who is the “only writer, in my opinion, who combines ammiyya [the colloquial Arabic that is spoken on the street and changes from region to region] and fusha [the classical Arabic that is read and written across the Middle East].” He credits the work of al-Kharrat with helping him solidify his ideas about how to write. “I found my voice,” he says. He was twenty years old. 

There’s a shout from Talaat Harb, and we glance down to watch twenty men shuffle into the square carrying an injured man. They lay him on the sidewalk and crowd around. The man is bleeding from a head wound. Someone produces a gauze bandage; someone else begins to wrap his head. 

“I have seven books,” Abu il Dahab says. “The most important thing that affected me was a death. In my first six books, in all my books, death is the major theme: death, death, death.”

Abu il Dahab is from a family of limited means, and he met a girl from Alexandria, from a family unknown to his clan. Forsaking tradition, he ran away with her to Cairo where they moved “from hotel to hotel to flat,” he says. “One day, she called the elevator and opened the door, but the elevator wasn’t there, and she fell: five stories.” Her name was Suhayleh. “Her name occurs again and again in my books,” he adds.

He remarried, this time to his cousin. It was a match his family approved of, but it didn’t last. After three years, she grew sick of him spending four hours a day reading books or writing on his computer. She wanted a child and blamed him for their failure to conceive; eventually, she divorced him. “But during that time, I wrote very many short stories and sent them to many journals and magazines,” he says.

We leave my pension and Talaat Harb, and Abu il Dahab leads me through Old Cairo, weaving down side streets and through squares to a basement bar: two rooms, a TV, some tables, a bathroom. We order Egyptian Stella beers and sit in the back and talk, while cockroaches dart along the brick wall beside us. He tells me about a television interview he sat for a month ago when he accused other contemporary writers of lying about their support for the political changes taking place in the country. “What’s Egypt going to do now? We don’t know what’s in the future. Now our future lies with the Ikhwan Musliman [the Muslim Brothers].” He describes a plan he has heard about that will place an Islamic cultural center at the heart of every city; the way he describes it makes it sound like an Orwellian attempt to monitor cultural activities and censor books on a local level.

We finish our beers and venture out to an outdoor restaurant serving kushari, the Egyptian street food that mixes noodles, rice, chilies, tomatoes, and other ingredients. “Things will become hard for writers who write like me,” Abu il Dahab says. “Many of my friends and I wrote in, you can say, a free way about sex, religion, politics. It seems like in these days to come, this will be difficult.”

The following evening I return to al-Maadi for a final meeting with Karam Youssef at Kotob Khan. I get off a packed subway train from Tahrir Square and take a taxi to her bookstore to sit surrounded by wooden bookshelves and the bright spines of books. The Vulcan features of Naguib Mahfouz stare down from a poster; from hidden speakers, Bob Dylan is singing with his customary moral certainty.

Youssef introduces me to three writers—a young female short story writer, Eman Abdel Rehim, and two male novelists, Mohamed Rabie and Al Taher Sharkawy—but for the next fifteen minutes she barely allows them to get a word in edgewise. She wasn’t in the square yesterday, but her friends were, and they updated her by cell phone. After pitched battles that led to more than a hundred injured, the anti-Morsi forces succeeded in driving the Muslim Brotherhood members out of the square. “They hit me. Do you think I am going to take it?” she says, speaking, at least this time, metaphorically. “What we discovered in the last few weeks is, maybe, we overestimated them. Yesterday, we saw signs that we were blowing them out of proportion. We went out yesterday, and we can go out next week and the week after.” She waves her fist; she’s sorry she wasn’t there, sorry she missed the fight.

The writers in front of her listen quietly. Abdel Rehim is a merchandiser for a company that exports ready-made clothes to American stores; Rabie is a civil engineer; Sharkawy is the editor of a children’s magazine and the manager of a newspaper. Change and conflict figure prominently in all their work. Rabie was in Riyadh during the Gulf War in the 1990s, and Abdel Rehim also spent years in Saudi Arabia before returning to Cairo as a fifteen-year-old. For Sharkawy, the conflict is more internal. He was educated in religious schools in a community north of Cairo, and he says he had to fight against self-censorship, but eventually he succeeded in putting his own misgivings to rest. “There is nothing in Islam to stop a creator from his creativity,” he says. “On the contrary, poets in the Abbasid period [the Islamic golden era that lasted from 750 to 1258] were very respected by the khalifa and the sultan because they had a connection with unseen powers. As a creator, you have a right to go through all the taboos and break them in order to study them.”

He is fearful of the turn he has seen in the January 25th Revolution, fearful that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis—the most conservative Muslim political group—will begin to dictate their religious opinions to the population as a whole. “I fear that there is a group that thinks they have the correct interpretation of Islam; I fear that there will be a conflict between my opinion, my fiction, and the ‘correct’ opinion. They think their leaders never make mistakes, that things are ‘sacred’ and cannot be debated.”

The religious turn of the revolution troubles all of them. Recent events have caused Rabie so much stress that it has become hard for him to write; his current novel is three months behind schedule. Abdel Rehim has begun a short story about a civil war in Egypt. “War is becoming part of daily life,” Youssef says.

She has seen Salafis recently appointed to government posts, and she’s begun to hear talk about “cleaning” the films shown in movie theaters, and “cleaning” literature and fiction. Her voice rises as she points out that the works of Kate Chopin and James Joyce were once censored in the United States but liberal-minded people overcame the forces of conservatism and intolerance. 

“This country cannot be ruled by Muslims,” she says forcefully. “We will not be Saudi. We will not be Pakistan. We have a big diversity. You cannot do this to Egyptians!”

Postscript: Since October 2012, clashes between secular groups and President Morsi’s Islamist supporters have grown fiercer and larger. The situation escalated in November when Morsi fired a top judge and granted himself additional powers, a move that caused his opponents to compare him to the ousted dictator Mubarak. Despite opposition from women’s groups and secularists, a new constitution championed by Morsi was approved by a national vote on December 22. On the streets, secular disapproval caused protesters to torch the offices of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party in the cities of Suez and Alexandria. In Cairo, Karam Youssef joined protesters in Tahrir Square. “Egypt has been and will always be the Beacon of the Middle East and the Arab world,” she writes. “We will accomplish our revolution no matter how long it takes.” 

Stephen Morison Jr. is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. He has reported on the literary communities of Afghanistan, China, Jordan, Myanmar, Vietnam, and North Korea. He lives in Madaba-Manja, Jordan.