Once Upon a Revolution Read Online Free

leaders and jailed the rest. Entire categories of suspicious people were swept up, including the Islamist-infiltrated Boy Scouts. Along with thousands of teenagers, Mohamed Kamel, seventeen years old, was imprisoned without charge. That fall, Basem’s father spent thirteen days in jail, even though he had studiously avoided any kind of political activity, Islamist or secular, and he admired everything about Nasser’s project and Nasser the man. Before Nasser, such injustices and worse were routine, but Nasser was supposed to be different.
    For the Kamel family, the detention marred but did not completely shatter the idyll of the Free Officers’ reign. In 1956, Nasser was elected president, making himself a symbol of renewal for Egypt and the entire Arab world, if at a steep price. He wanted his people to believe in themselves as Egyptians and Arabs. Colonial powers had abused Egypt, and rich foreigners had enjoyed unjustifiable privileges. Nasser tapped into this very real source of resentment among the newly independent Egyptian people, stoking xenophobia and fear. He cast a net of suspicion far beyond the British colonial overseers. He confiscated the property of Jews and Greeks, treating them as a potential fifth column, and within a few years in the 1950s these vibrant minority communities all but disappeared from Egypt. Nasser spoke of conspiracies, foreign fingers, hidden hands: tropes that contaminated political thinking in Egypt long after his death.
    Still, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had made the Kamels prouder than ever before to be Egyptian. Rationing and privation contributed to new national industries. Egypt was actually building things. It required discipline and, yes, some authoritarianism, to get the right things done. Before Nasser, a tiny group of plutocrats had literally owned the nation, and he stripped away their land and confiscated their money. If they displayedany inkling of dissent, he locked them up too. Things had never been fair for the common man in Egypt, but for the first time, the rigged playing field was tilting in his direction. There was still suffering in the land, but now it was distributed more equitably. The disruption of young Mohamed Kamel’s liberty was but a flickering debit on the balance sheet of the shared national endeavor, a cost of doing business in this new Egypt. On the credit side, because Nasser democratized education, a laborer’s son like Mohamed Kamel was able to study social work and get a job at Cairo University. In 1965 he wed and bought a house in Imbaba, a pleasant if modest outlying district of Cairo on the western bank of the Nile.
    Unfortunately for Mohamed Kamel, the now-paranoid Nasser perceived a rekindled Islamist threat. His name was still on a list, a result of his brief membership in the Boy Scouts. The secret police rapped on his door a few months after he signed his marriage contract. Again Mohamed Kamel was taken to prison, again without any accusation or charge. This secular, conventional man joined thousands of other political prisoners, most of them Islamists. Thirteen days passed, like the first time. Then another thirteen. Incarcerated without trial, Mohamed Kamel’s detention stretched into a year and then more. From jail, he watched as Nasser, increasingly erratic and belligerent, readied the nation for a supposedly glorious war against Israel. A better-equipped Israel moved first, and June 1967 was a rout for Palestine, Egypt, and all the Arab nations involved.
    Nasser wasn’t a cunning genius. Charismatic and charming, the president had fallen in thrall to his own mesmerizing rhetoric. His Arab nationalism hardened into ideology, and his inspiring leadership aged into despotism. His hubris and incompetence catalyzed the war known as the Naksa , or setback, the bookend to the 1948 Nakba , or catastrophe. The setback brought some small, unintended comforts. In December 1967, thousands of political prisoners were