Once Upon a Revolution Read Online Free Page A

released, among them Mohamed Kamel. He had spent two years, ten days, and seven hours in detention. “I do not like Nasser,” he told his wife when he came home, bristling with rage. Uttered only in private to his family, those words were as close as he came to rebellion.
    Basem, the Kamels’ second child and second son, was born in 1969. His father’s job teaching social work was secure and respectable, but the wages penurious: one hundred Egyptian pounds a month. He could make ten times that a short ferry ride away in Saudi Arabia, where the oil money flowed, and the kingdom needed fellow Arabs to staff its new hospitals, universities, and ministries. So he joined the exodus of Egyptian workers to Saudi, moving his family to Jeddah and following Egypt’s decline from abroad. Just fifty-two years old, Nasser died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1970, and despite everything that had happened to him at Nasser’s hands, Mohamed Kamel wept. The dictator who twice had thrown him in prison also had ended generations of poverty in his family. “I hate him, but I respect him,” Mohamed Kamel said to his wife. “At least he cared about us.” He repeated those words many times in the decade that followed, most of which he spent with his family in Saudi Arabia.
    Basem Kamel recorded his first memories in Jeddah. As an Egyptian kid in a Saudi public school, the boy was well aware of his status as an outsider and a guest. Mostly he played with the other Egyptian kids. From as far back as he could remember, he had been told that the family’s sojourn in Saudi Arabia was temporary, a necessity so that ultimately they could live comfortably back home in Cairo. He didn’t think too much about the Saudi system, which offered its citizens no political rights or freedoms but tremendous economic security. At the time, as a child, he didn’t think much either of the fact that his father couldn’t make ends meet in Egypt but, with the same set of skills, could earn a comfortable living across the border. Working in Saudi Arabia was a blessed opportunity, not a sacrifice; plenty of Egyptians didn’t have a marketable trade that could command such a decent salary abroad. Even as a little boy, Basem absorbed his father’s work ethic: no drama, no fuss, set your goals, and then do whatever’s necessary to achieve them. Basem never had to be reminded to do his homework.
    During the decade that the Kamels spent in Saudi Arabia, Egypt whipsawed in the charge of its second charismatic despot in a row. Anwar Sadat unleashed the Islamists against the Nasserists, unreconstructed nationalists who yearned for the days of Nasser; they wrecked each otherwhile Sadat emerged the stronger. The new president spun Egypt forward with a policy called infitah , or “opening”: opening the Egyptian economy to capitalism, and opening political life, tentatively, to competition. Sadat’s turn away from a state-controlled economy created new wealth for the country, but mostly to the benefit of a microscopic new elite. He befriended Washington and made peace with Israel, enraging a citizenry that had been primed with nationalism for generations. He gave the people a tiny glimpse of what it felt like to speak out: one student leader who challenged Sadat at a public debate in the 1970s used the moment as a presidential campaign plank in 2012. Sadat wheeled and wheedled, running circles around Egyptian political bosses who thought they’d found a pliant puppet after the uncontrollable Nasser.
    After a decade in Saudi Arabia, the Kamels had eked out enough to return home in 1980 and establish a beachhead. Cairo had metamorphosed while they were away. Millions of peasants without money or opportunity had overwhelmed the city. They occupied all available space, building coffin-shaped apartment blocks on slivers of irrigated cropland around the capital. Cairo’s outskirts merged with the