Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis Page B

Palestinians?”
    â€œBecause we should participate in their struggle.”
    â€œWhat is your message to the youth?”
    â€œWe say they should improve themselves,” Moaz replied. “They should behave with ethics. They should not harass girls from the nearby school.”
    The intelligence officer turned knowingly to the principal. “This is the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. Then he turned back to Moaz. “What do you think of life in Egypt?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWhere is your father?”
    â€œSaudi Arabia.”
    The State Security officer gave Moaz his phone number and instructed him to come by his office for tea.
    â€œI will come when I have time,” Moaz said, but he never did.
    The small number of Egyptians who chose to pique the regime’s interest, such as Moaz and his fellow Brothers, came to know well the intelligence officers assigned to them. They would refer to each of them as “my security guy.” Official pressure only emboldened Moaz; he was acting not only on his own conviction and with the natural contrarian spirit of a teenager, but also he was doing the bidding of the grand organization of which he was part. He was doing God’s work and Egypt’s too. It was a righteous mix. He was every bit as politicized as Basem Kamel wasmuzzled. By the time the al-Aqsa intifada in Palestine was in full swing in late 2000, Moaz had been elected president of the student union. He assembled a display with photographs from his grandfather’s magazine (the era of YouTube and Photoshop was still a few years away), which he laminated so it would be harder for officials to tear them up. He brought a Muslim Brother and a sheikh from Al-Azhar University, the most eminent institution of Sunni Islamic learning in the region, to address the student body. Moaz set an Israeli flag on fire in the school hallway. With his friends, he staged a play about an Islamic leader of the resistance against French colonialists a century earlier.
    When Moaz’s father returned from Saudi Arabia for a visit, security officers seized his passport at the airport. They summoned him for a not-so-friendly conversation about Moaz. “Tell him to quit the student union,” they said. An eighteen-year-old’s schoolyard protests were a matter of the highest concern for Mubarak’s State Security. Moaz and his father met with the high school’s head teacher, who laid out the options and then turned to Moaz.
    â€œChoose,” the teacher said.
    â€œI came all the way from abroad, and I tell you to be responsible!” Moaz’s father shouted.
    â€œI made my choice because I think it is right,” Moaz said, not budging.
    â€œIt is Moaz’s choice,” the teacher said.
    Moaz’s father kept trying to persuade him to quit the student union, but after the showdown at the school, he realized he couldn’t force his son.

    In the spring of his senior year, Moaz tasted tear gas and blood for the first time at a Cairo University protest in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada. He was clubbed by a police conscript and got stitches in his lip. His father wanted Moaz to concentrate on his education and told him to enroll in medical school or at least the hard sciences. Moaz wanted to study law, journalism, or political science.
    â€œPolitics leads to prison, and the media is haram, ” sinful, his fathersaid. Moaz flunked all his science classes and tried to transfer to law school. Eventually father and son reached a compromise: Moaz enrolled in a private school of pharmacy. He was invited onto a state television program meant to fan anger about the American invasion of Afghanistan. “We should ask questions about life in our own country, not about the war in Afghanistan,” Moaz said. He was ordered off the set immediately. Since the program was taped, the subversive comments made it only as far as his