Berkley Center

Following the Port Said football incident two weeks ago, the American University of Cairo, along with other universities and public institutions, has called for “civil disobedience.” They hope that a mass strike will send a clear message to the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), the ruling military junta associated with the old regime. Although the plan had previously been for the military to hand over authority after the presidential elections in June, protesters are calling on SCAF to immediately relinquish its power.

Many Egyptians think that the Port Said soccer riots were a conspiracy crafted by the military to incite violence and fear among the people, thus necessitating the army’s continued rule. People argue that if the army can’t keep a soccer game safe, then how can they rule a country?

On the Wednesday following the riots, protesters began to fill Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mansour Street, demanding SCAF’s immediate removal. My hope is that more and more Egyptians side with the protesters in the wake of the tragedy at Port Said. Although their voices are the loudest, it’s clear that they are a small minority of the Egyptian populace.

As a Westerner with democracy-loving tendencies, I support the protesters’ cause. But for Egyptians who have had their lives put on hold by the revolution, continuing to believe in its movement is becoming very difficult. My sense is that the most dedicated of the remaining protesters are young people with upper or upper-middle class upbringings who can afford the luxury of free expression. If you have to choose between putting food on the table or staying in the square, it’s clear what your decision will be. The cries in Tahrir that reverberate across the Twitterverse are mostly coming from educated, upper-class, secular, liberal Cairenes: just 1 percent of Egypt’s 80 million people.

Even though Georgetown and the American embassy have told us not to go to the protests, not even to observe, part of me still wanted to go on February 11. After all, this was supposed to be the defining moment of the civil disobedience. But none of my friends wanted to go, and I decided it probably wasn’t the best idea anyway. The days leading up to February 11 were filled with a lot of uncertainty; everyone was saying, “You just don’t know what could happen.”

Such conspiracy talk is the name of the game in Egyptian politics: no one knows anything, so everyone speculates. Because we had almost a week off from school, my friends and I planned to go to Aswan and Luxor. But many in our group were nervous that the strikes could lead to a shutdown of the trains, forcing us to end up stuck in Aswan (“You just don’t know what could happen!”). So we settled on visiting Alexandria instead.

Alexandria is more conservative than Cairo. The streets were predominately filled with men, and this was the first time in Egypt that I felt conspicuously female. My female friends and I would walk past male-dominated ahwas (traditional coffee shops), and the shisha-smoking men who would all silence their conversations and actually turn their heads to stare at us. Compared to Cairo, I noticed that far more men in Alexandria had foreheads that were marked with callouses from praying, known as zabibat-al-salah, which literally translates to a “raisin” from praying. It was striking that the marks weren’t only on the foreheads of bearded, galabiyya-wearing men, but also on those of men in their twenties. Of the few women in the streets, nearly all of them were veiled, making the girls in our group stand out even more.

As Egypt’s second largest city, Alex (as some English-speaking locals fondly call it) is home to the Salafi Al-Nour Party. Islamic political groups received a great deal of attention after the 2011-2012 parliamentary elections, in which Islamists took over 70 percent of seats in the People’s Assembly. But the Islamist bogeyman that sends Egyptian secularists and Westerners into a fit of panic—“Beware of bikini bans! No more alcohol!”—needs to be seen not as a menacing or monolithic entity, but rather as an eclectic handful of players with different ideologies.

The main groups, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Salafis, are vastly different in both their beliefs and political histories. Both, however, were oppressed during Mubarak’s era and are now exercising their political muscle freely for the first time. During its years of political suppression, the MB established a humanitarian network that aided Egypt’s poorest communities, most of which were neglected by the Mubarak regime. Similarly, Salafi preachers forged a strong following through sermons to those Egyptians who were most alienated by the status quo. While secularists, liberals, and Westerners were scratching their heads wondering how the Islamists managed to sweep the elections, it wouldn’t have been a big surprise to the everyday people of Egypt who vastly outnumber the small percentage of the country’s powerful elite.