In January 2010, Egyptian military intelligence chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi submitted a report to his generals, predicting that there could be protests against the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Sisi asked the military not to side with the regime if that happened. When Egyptian streets erupted into anti-Mubarak demonstrations in early 2011, the generals did exactly what Sisi said, writes David D. Kirkpatrick in his book, Into the Hands of the Soldiers. But even the generals at that time failed to foresee the eventual rise of Sisi as a strongman who would restore the military’s power in a chaotic post-Mubarak Egypt. Kirkpatrick witnessed and reported this period of mass uprising, coup and counter-coup in Egypt as the New York Times ’ Cairo bureau chief, and the book offers a first-hand account of the same.
He arrived in Cairo a few months before protests shook the Arab world. There was so much hope in the air when dictators were felled by popular anger. “They were all so heroic, so ingenious, but also so familiar. Of course we fell for them,” he writes about the Egyptian protesters. Kirkpatrick describes how people of different faiths and political ideas came together in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with one common goal — oust Mubarak. They succeeded with help from the army. But the tragedy of the Egyptian revolution was that it was more of a coup against the dictator than an actual revolution that would have recast the structures of the country’s authoritarian state.
Kirkpatrick explains why this has happened. The liberals who joined hands with the Islamists were not ready to accept Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, as President. When Morsi granted himself unlimited power in late 2012, a few months after his election, they launched massive protests, with tacit help from Sisi. The protests set the stage for the 2013 coup by Sisi against President Morsi.
If Kirkpatrick was fascinated by the revolutionary vigour of the liberals at the beginning of the protests in 2011, by 2013, their cheering for the military, even after soldiers massacred hundreds of Islamists in Cairo, “broke his heart”. By the time he left Cairo in 2015, Sisi had re-established a Mubarak-type, if not worse, regime in Egypt. Politics in Egypt has come full circle. This is not a dense historical work that offers insights into the complex actors such as the military, the Salafis, the Muslim Brothers, liberals and leftists of Egypt’s upheaval. It’s rather a journalistic chronicle of Egypt’s chaotic years. And Kirkpatrick has succeeded in telling the story of Egypt’s tragedy engagingly.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East ; David D. Kirkpatrick, Bloomsbury, ₹599.
