A generation ago, Ahmed Mitwalli’s parents were Islamists in a neighborhood along the Nile once nicknamed the “Islamic Republic of Imbaba,” but their son is not, and his convictions, echoed in the cauldron of frustrations of one of the world’s most crowded quarters, suggest why the Muslim Brotherhood is not driving Egypt’s nascent revolution.
“Bread, social justice and freedom,” the 21-year-old college graduate said. “What’s religious about that?”
Egypt’s revolution is far from decided, and the Brotherhood remains the most popular and best-organized opposition force in the country, poised to play a crucial role in the transition and its aftermath, but in a neighborhood once ceded to militant Islamists, who declared their own state within a state in the early 1990s, sentiments are most remarkable for how little religion inflects them. Be it complaints about a police force that long resembled an army of occupation, smoldering class resentment or even youthful demands for frivolity, a growing consciousness has taken hold in a sign of what awaits the rest of the Arab world after the fall of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Three times more crowded than Manhattan, Imbaba offers a window on the shift away from religious fervor. A fiery preacher, derided as a drummer-turned-cleric, imposed his rule on Imbaba’s streets for years until the government drove him and his followers out after a long siege in 1992.
With US largess, the government tried to wrangle a city still not recognized on its maps back on the grid. By the accounts of residents, it failed, eventually withdrawing from a sea of resentment that neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor anyone else has managed to channel.
“The last thing youth are thinking about is religion,” said Mitwalli, who hides his cigarettes from a family where all the women wear the most conservative veil. “It’s the last thing that comes up. They need money, they need to get married, a car and they don’t have anything to do with anything else. They’ll elect whoever can deliver that.”
Though parts of Imbaba are upscale, much of it feels like the countryside washing across the pretenses of a city, unfinished red-brick buildings overlooking markets disgorged in the streets. Three-wheel buggies known as tuk-tuks, blaring the latest pop song of Amr Diab, an ageless Egyptian pop star, navigate a melange of overflowing trash bins, mannequins in the median and racks of clothes in the street.
Mubarak’s government long stigmatized neighborhoods such as Imbaba as a netherworld of crime and danger. There is that, though its people extol their own sense of community, where streets band together at the slightest provocation. When the uprising devastated the economy, vendors brought down prices to help people cope and in almost every conversation, residents, especially the young, frame their plight as us against them.
“There was no dialogue,” said Walid Sabr, a 29-year-old who works at a shoe store. “There was force and there was bullying. Dialogue with that? It’s impossible.”
“This isn’t the Jan. 25th revolution,” said Samih Ahmed, a vendor down the street, calling the uprising by its most popular name. “This is a revolution of dignity.”
Everyone in the neighborhood had a story about officials — a US$2 bribe to enter a hospital to see a relative, a US$20 fine imposed for stealing electricity, a US$10 payoff to a municipal official to get an identity card.
Sabr talked about getting arrested for trying to report a traffic accident. Ibrahim Mohamed complained that he had been thrown in jail after the police planted hashish on him. Umayma Mohamed, a 23-year-old woman carrying her three-month-old baby, begged for help in getting her brother released after a fight.
“You raise your voice and they answer by beating you,” Mohamed Ali said.
Egypt is deeply devout and imposing labels often does more to confuse than illuminate.
Amal Salih, who joined the protests against her parents’ wishes, dons an orange scarf over her head, but calls herself secular.
“Egypt is religious, regrettably,” she said.
Mitwalli wears a beard, but calls himself liberal, “within the confines of religion.”
A driver, Osama Ramadan, despises the Brotherhood, but has jury-rigged his car to blare a prayer when he turns on the ignition.
Defining sentiments is no more precise.
Youths defiant in their praise of Mubarak only last week joined the celebrations, some bringing flags and fireworks to Tahrir Square.
Residents say some of the most ardent Islamists had the best connections with the police, who sought to cultivate them as informants, but in streets suffused with trash, occasionally drawing flocks of sheep, a common refrain is that political Islam, as practiced by the Brotherhood, does not offer the kind of solutions that may decide an election.
The Islamic group, known in Arabic as Al Gamaa al-Islamiyya, waged an intermittent insurgency against the government in the 1990s and Mitwalli’s uncle was one of its leaders. He was jailed for 13 years.
A man known as Sheik Gaber belonged to the same group, and he and his followers imposed their notion of order, drawing thousands to sermons where they occasionally — and triumphantly — broadcast a tape of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981.
They arbitrated disputes and provided for the poor, while sauntering through the slum to drive away prostitutes and drug dealers, to impose the veil, to burn shops that rented Western videos and to force Christians to pay a religious tax.
An embarrassed government eventually sent in 12,000 soldiers and armored cars in a crackdown that began a six-week occupation. With the help of US aid, it flooded the neighborhood with investment for a time, paving roads and bringing sewerage, telephones and electricity. Just last year, the governor of Giza, which oversees Imbaba’s side of the Nile, pledged it would soon look like one of Cairo’s wealthier neighborhoods.
It does not. In fact, Imbaba feels overwhelmed as the rich flee to suburbs with names like Dreamland, Beverly Hills and the European Countryside, and a new government faces its predecessor’s failure to provide housing for a population where nearly seven in 10 are under the age of 34, numbers that mirror much of the Arab world.
“The youth today think this way: ‘Let me live my life today and I don’t care if you kill me tomorrow,’” said Mohammed Fathi, a 23-year-old friend of Sabr’s at the shoe store. “Next year isn’t important. All I’m thinking about is getting by today.”
In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and grim stretches of urban Iraq, populist clerics often manage to channel youthful anger, but the leadership of the Brotherhood is perhaps most distinguished for representing the demands of an aspiring middle class — it counts some of Cairo’s wealthiest among its ranks.
No one in Imbaba mentioned a religious figure as an inspiration. Asked about their choice for a new president, many shrugged or offered up Amr Moussa, the aging former secretary general of the Arab League. The biggest draw seemed to be one of Imbaba’s favorite sons, the Little Arab, a pop singer who runs a cafe on Luxor Street decorated with his own pictures.
“I don’t want to be pinned down by any political tendency,” Salih said.
It remains an oddity of the long struggle between the government and the Brotherhood that both an aging opposition and a corrupt state spoke the same language of moral conservatism. It has left Egypt more ostensibly religious over the years. Measured by sentiments in Imbaba, it may also have provoked a backlash among youth recoiling at the prospect of yet more rules promised by an even more stringent application of Islamic law.
“In my view?” asked Osama Hassan, a high school student who joined the protests in their climactic days. “We need more freedom, not less. The whole system has to change.”
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