Ahmed Seif remembers meeting Egypt’s next president before most people had even heard of him. It was Feb. 5, 2011, in the middle of a chaotic uprising against former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and less than a week before his resignation.
Seif, a leading human rights lawyer, had been arrested two days earlier in a last-gasp attempt to restore order.
He spent the next 48 hours being interrogated by middle-ranking officers in military intelligence, and by Saturday it was the turn of their boss: Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, then head of military intelligence and now the all-bets-off favorite to win the presidential elections today.
Illustration: Yusha
The encounter happened by chance. Al-Sisi was passing the lawyer and a group of other prisoners, and he asked his officers who they were.
“And they told him,” Seif said. “And [al]-Sisi started to speak [about] to what extent we should respect Hosni Mubarak and the military leadership, and how we must return to our homes and leave Tahrir Square.”
To al-Sisi’s fury, Seif answered back, telling him Mubarak was corrupt.
And then, by Seif’s account, al-Sisi “became angry, his face became red... He acted as if every citizen would accept his point and no one would reject it in public. When he was rejected in public, he lost it.”
It is not a side of al-Sisi many would recognize.
The 59-year-old emerged from the shadows of the military in 2012, after his appointment as Egyptian minister of defense by the person he would eventually oust from office, former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi.
Ever since, al-Sisi has cultivated the restrained persona of someone who speaks only when he has to.
When he announced Morsi’s removal, in a televised speech on July 3 last year, it was the first time many had heard him talk.
Until March 26, when he finally declared he was running for president, al-Sisi was defined more by what he had not yet said than what he had.
And in the campaign period since, his face — which now adorns most main roads in Cairo — has defined the landscape, but his words have not.
Apart from a handful of prerecorded interviews, he has made no public appearances, leaving aides to helm his press conferences, rallies, and even televised debates.
People who know al-Sisi say his public persona — all calmness and piety with a mixture of austerity and warmth — has been shaped by circumstances that defined him from a young age.
Al-Sisi was born in 1954, the second of eight siblings (his father later had another six children with a second wife).
He grew up in Gamaleya, the heart of old Islamic Cairo, a few dozen meters from the al-Azhar mosque, the oldest in the Egyptian capital, and closer still to Khan el-Khalili, the sprawling bazaar that most tourists visit after the pyramids.
Al-Sisi’s family worked in the bazaar.
For generations, they made and sold arabesque furnishings, seemingly to great acclaim.
His grandfather’s work is cited in a doctorate from the 1940s about ornamental style, and in the 1970s the Egytpian culture ministry presented the family with a certificate that called them the best arabesque artisans in Egypt.
Today, the family own three of the best plots in the bazaar, and al-Sisi’s cousin Ali Hamama — who has inherited the family business — likes to claim it is the only Egyptian firm that still makes arabesque in the traditional manner.
According to Hamama, the young al-Sisi worked in the shop after school.
Beneath the predictable stories of unimpeachable virtue, former neighbors and friends describe a young man who was disciplined, devout, slightly reclusive — and even a bit dull.
He grew up cheek by jowl with poorer metal-workers and affluent Western tourists. He and his siblings would study at the nearby library at al-Azhar University — an ancient institution that has historically clashed with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Al-Sisi went to bed early, walked everywhere and pumped homemade weights on the roof of his family’s home.
“I don’t think he had any interesting stories from when he was a child,” Hamama said. “He was just so serious.”
His family were considered one of the wealthiest in the area — the first to buy a Mercedes — but also one of the least assuming.
“They were very rich, but you couldn’t feel it,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, a sock-factory owner who learned to drive in the family’s fabled Merc. “They were very humble.”
Enriched by the tourist trade, the al-Sisis upped sticks in the 1980s, building their own apartment block in the classier new suburb of Nasr City.
As they moved out, “people were crying because they were so respectable,” said Hussein Ali, a businessman who bought their building in Gamaleya.
It is a backstory that has not always been portrayed so positively.
In February, the newspaper al-Watan — which had previously been supportive of al-Sisi — claimed the soldier’s inheritance and land assets totaled 30 million Egyptian pounds (US$50.5 million).
The claims were deemed so contentious that, minutes after publication, state officials contacted al-Watan, demanding the article be pulled.
The newspaper was duly reprinted without the story.
Al-Sisi has submitted a breakdown of his assets to the presidential elections commission, but it will only be made public after his election.
In the meantime his campaign team refuses to reveal his wealth.
This uncertainty has clouded al-Sisi’s image among critics, said Robert Springborg, an analyst of the Egyptian military, and a visiting war studies fellow at King’s College London.
“If he were compelled to make such a statement [now], maybe it would turn out these were all [legitimate] real estate investments. But as it stands, this statement of his wealth and the fact it was all covered up [raises] the question [of] how corrupt is he? It is a question that will hang over him, which was not the case before,” Springborg said.
When al-Sisi stepped down from the army in March, it was the first time he had not worked in a military institution in more than four decades.
Unlike his brothers — one of whom is a senior judge, another a civil servant — al-Sisi went to a local army-run secondary school.
Afterward, he trained to be an officer at Egypt’s military academy, graduating in 1977, and later married Entissar, with whom he has four children.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he rose through the ranks in the mechanized infantry brigades and was earmarked for leadership.
In 1992, he was sent to train at Britain’s military staff college in Surrey — though no one at its new incarnation in Swindon can remember him, according to the current commander.
By the final years of the Mubarak regime, al-Sisi had transferred to military intelligence — one of the opaque agencies that dissidents say hold the strings to Egyptian politics — and was already seen by contemporaries as a potential successor to then Egyptian defense minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi.
It was in the US in 2005 and 2006 that some of his political instincts were honed.
Al-Sisi was sent to the US Army War College in Virginia — another sign of his high standing within the Egyptian military — and his writings and friendships from this time provide more insight into who he is than any other period in his life.
US Colonel Stephen Gerras was his tutor, and said the pair quickly became friends after al-Sisi started to stop by his office for biweekly conversations. Gerras remembers al-Sisi as a deeply serious man who tried hard to be sociable but felt more comfortable in one-to-one conversations.
When his year-group gathered to watch the Superbowl, al-Sisi opted out and instead toured Gerras’ house with the colonel’s mother.
Spotting a series of Islamic souvenirs the colonel had brought back from Turkey, al-Sisi enthusiastically translated their Arabic text and explained to Mrs Gerras their significance.
“I don’t have any memories of him being the guy with the lampshade on his head,” said Gerras, but he does at least recall the al-Sisis turning up to fancy-dress parties. “I can picture his wife, Entissar, standing next to one of the students’ wives [who was] dressed as Cleopatra, which of course has some irony to it, and on the other side was Dorothy from Wizard of Oz.”
Al-Sisi’s time in Virginia is controversial because of an ambiguous 11-page essay he wrote there.
The paper, Democracy in the Middle East, is a confusing document.
By turns, it shows enthusiasm for democratic reforms and autocratic continuity — and has been interpreted as both supportive and critical of political Islam.
Egypt is rarely mentioned, but it is clear al-Sisi was alluding to the country’s problems.
“Those in power seem to be living in luxury, while the common man struggles to get by,” he wrote, concluding that the absence of good state education and a free press had blocked the path to democracy.
However, his awareness of these issues appeared to make him wary of ending dictatorships too soon. There were “valid reasons” not to switch to full democracy all at once; “populations need to be prepared,” a process that “will require time.”
However, paradoxically, al-Sisi also appears implicitly to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood’s right to take up political office.
Even if Islamists were not to the West’s taste, “legitimately elected parties [should] be given the opportunity to govern,” he wrote — specifically naming Hamas, and alluding elsewhere to the Brotherhood.
Later, he described the concept of the Islamic caliphate as “the ideal form of government,” and argued that a government’s executive, legislative and judicial arms should all draw on Islamic beliefs.
And as for the Brotherhood, whatever small sympathies al-Sisi may possibly have had for them in 2006 have long since vanished.
In July last year, he removed Morsi, following days of mass protests against the president’s government, and since then several thousand Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been jailed, tortured or killed — a scenario that looks set to continue.
During one of his few campaign interviews al-Sisi said: “There will be nothing called the Muslim Brotherhood during my tenure.”
It is an approach that nevertheless would have surprised observers less than two years ago. After the revolution, al-Sisi became the youngest general in the army’s leadership, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF), which ran Egypt for 18 months until Morsi’s election.
As a SCAF general, he achieved international notoriety by defending the subjection of female detainees to “virginity tests,” claiming it was to protect soldiers from allegations of rape.
However, in August 2012, he took on another role with his appointment as minister of defense after the stunning and sudden sacking of Tantawi, who had been the de facto Egyptian president after Mubarak’s fall.
For months, some wondered if al-Sisi’s outward piety had convinced Morsi of his loyalty and even sympathy.
In hindsight that analysis seems naive, given how al-Sisi had long been earmarked for the top.
However, until very late in Morsi’s presidency, it was unclear whose side al-Sisi would take in the face of mass protests.
In January last year, as unrest against Morsi continued to build, al-Sisi issued a vague warning about the collapse of the state, suggesting he was concerned about the president’s actions.
As late as May that year, al-Sisi said the army would stay out of politics: “No one is going to remove anybody, and nobody should think that the army has the solution.”
Even as it became increasingly evident that huge numbers would turn out against Morsi during planned protests on June 30 last year, al-Sisi’s intentions were still unclear.
With a week to go, he issued a statement calling for all sides to reach a compromise — and it seems that at that stage he still hoped Morsi would defuse the situation by calling for early elections.
A rambling and defiant speech from Morsi on June 26 showed this was unlikely, and the next day a senior officer outlined a scenario to the Guardian in which the army might unseat Morsi.
However, the die was still not yet cast: It was only after millions turned out on June 30 last year, and Morsi still stayed put, that al-Sisi’s plans hardened.
The president was arrested on July 3, but for months al-Sisi — keen to avoid accusations of a coup — claimed he had little intention of succeeding his former boss. An interim Cabinet was assembled which contained several liberal and left-leaning faces.
However, as summer wore on, and Egypt’s media stoked a nationalist frenzy against the Brotherhood, political moderates were squeezed out — which left more room for al-Sisi.
A turning point came on July 26, when al-Sisi asked Egyptians to back a bloody crackdown on what he called “terrorism.”
Hundreds of thousands turned out — and it became clear that al-Sisi now had a personal mandate from a significant section of the population.
Exhausted by three years of post-revolutionary chaos, ordinary people wanted a strongman to restore stability.
It nevertheless took until the end of March this year for al-Sisi to formally declare his candidacy and resign his military commission.
Military sources say he wanted to make sure his loyalists were in place before he left the shelter of the army: He is the candidate of the establishment, but behind the scenes the establishment do not all back him.
Sami Anan, his former superior in the army, mounted a short-lived rival campaign, while Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s last prime minister, was heard in a leaked recording speculating that his victory would be fixed.
Leaked recordings of al-Sisi reveal his own oscillating ideas about the presidency. In a leak from autumn last year, he wonders whether he might be allowed to return to the army should his attempt fail.
However, in another, he has no such doubts, claiming to have had visions that for more than 35 years have helped him see the future, including one in which he predicts he will be president.
As al-Sisi tells it, he dreamed he met former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who died in 1981, and told him: “I know I’m going to be the president of the republic.”
Quite what that presidency would look like remains to be seen.
His manifesto has finally been published — an aide initially claimed it was too complex to be digested all at once — but it is vague on key issues such as the reform of Egypt’s vast subsidies system.
Judging from his few campaign interviews, al-Sisi’s central belief is that Egyptians should leave their protests and picket lines, and work flat-out to restore economic and political stability. In this climate, revolutionary aspirations will probably take a back seat.
In his speech to announce his candidacy, al-Sisi focused on restoring the prestige of state institutions — mentioning democracy only once, and omitting any reference to human rights.
Analysts are divided about how much control al-Sisi has over a state apparatus with many factions and fiefdoms.
“The most outstanding feature of this moment is that nobody is in charge,” Michael Hanna, an Egypt analyst at the Century Foundation, said in March.
However, others see al-Sisi’s lack of campaigning as evidence he already feels in complete control.
According to Springborg, al-Sisi’s power is unprecedented because he has strong allies at the top of the army and each of the key intelligence services.
“The deep state has never been this totally controlled by a single person — [whether Gamal] Nasser, Sadat or Mubarak — as it is now under al-Sisi,” Springborg said. “So I think he feels invulnerable because there is no lever of power he does not have his hands on.”
Whether he can keep them there is the key question.
As interim Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nabil Fahmy said: “From 1952 to 2011, we had four presidents. From 2011 to the middle of next month we will have had four presidents. It means that Egyptians now are insistent on holding you accountable.”
Additional reporting by Manu Abdo
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