Graeme Wood : The Atlantic

What Martial Arts Have to Do With Atheism

Graeme Wood — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:00:33 GMT

A knife is seen on a street after a fight in downtown Rome in 2012. (Yara Nardi/Reuters)

Sam Harris is best known as a vocal opponent of religious faith. But he is also a student of martial arts and armed self-defense, and a practitioner of daily silent meditation.

In the May issue of The Atlantic, Graeme Wood recounts the experience of learning meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu with him. Harris is finishing his next book, Waking Up: Science, Skepticism, Spirituality, about self-transcendence in the absence of religion. Following their encounter, Wood caught up with Harris to discuss violence, faith, and meditation.

Would you rather be attacked by one person with a knife, or several unarmed individuals equally intent on killing you?

Both situations are invitations to a track meet: You want to run. One of my teachers, Mark Mikita, specializes in knife fighting, mostly derived from the Filipino martial arts, and one of his teachers told him: "If you train with me for ten years, and someone pulls a knife on you, and you just turn and run, then your training has been successful." The problems of a knife and multiple attackers are similar, in that they rarely end well for a person who is alone and unarmed.

FROM THE MAGAZINE

The Atheist Who Strangled Me

Even if you know how to defend yourself against one person, fighting several people is a hugely different situation. You could be a Golden Gloves champion, but while you confront your first attacker, you'll have one or more people taking your flank. Underestimating the gravity of this problem is one of the more dangerous illusions that martial artists acquire. It is true that uncommitted or unsophisticated attackers might approach you serially, and if you have good skills, you might prevail over one at a time. But if you're swarmed by several people at once, it becomes a problem for which no martial art has a solution. Only having a weapon makes you likely to prevail.

Similarly, a knife attack is always a disaster for an unarmed person. Somebody who gets out of 10 years in a maximum-security prison has basically gone to graduate school for shanking people. A person who is seriously intent upon killing you with a knife is not going to attack in the way you've learned to expect from martial-arts class. Most martial artists have done knife-defense drills where their partners attack in a very stereotyped way--lunging forward with a single thrust and leaving their arm out there so that you can perform the technique. This is just a pantomime of combat, and it is dangerously misleading.

It's useful to have visited these cantos of hell, however briefly, to have an intelligent understanding of the realities involved.

The reality of a knife attack is that even if you stop 50% of the thrusts and slashes, you will be taking damage with every other move. And getting cut with a knife of any size is physiologically horrible in a way that few people realize. It is arguably worse than getting shot. A bullet is a tiny ball of metal that may or may not hit something vital. Unless you're shooting someone in the brainstem or heart, you're basically waiting for blood loss to incapacitate him. A knife--especially in the hands of someone who knows how to use it--cuts through everything it touches, and it's not going to malfunction or run out of bullets. It is also much harder to wrestle a blade out of a person's hand, because you can grab a gun without getting your fingers cut off.

A book called Put 'Em Down, Take 'Em Out!: Knife Fighting Techniques From Folsom Prison is one of the scariest things I've ever read, and it put the fear of knives into me. But I also wasn't sure I wanted to be the type of person who thought about this stuff too much. I liked being able to walk around the world without imagining arterial blood spraying from my body. Does it ever bother you to think about self-defense so much?

You can think about these facts sparingly, and still be motivated by them, without being morbid. To take violence at a totally different scale: A person can read Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which describes the horrific reality of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia, put the book back on the shelf, and remember the punchline: that a full-blown nuclear war would be so unimaginably bad that it must be avoided at all costs. It's useful to have visited these cantos of hell, however briefly, to have an intelligent understanding of the realities involved. An obsession with self-defense can seem paranoid, especially if you live in a safe part of the developed world. The vast majority of us are never going to confront real violence, as long as we don't stupidly seek it out. But when you look at the statistics related to violent crime, you might be surprised to discover that it's not like worrying about a plane crash. It's more like worrying about a car accident. I've never been in a serious car accident, but I don't consider it irrational to view driving as intrinsically dangerous. Once you go down the rabbit-hole and admit that certain self-defense skills are worth having, you discover that it can be immensely fun to acquire them. The reality of what you're learning is pretty grim when you look at its possible application in the real world, and a person can certainly become slightly aberrated by spending too much time thinking about violence. But there's nothing morbid about training in the martial arts--or even with guns, knives, and other weapons.

Have you ever encountered real-world violence?

There is a shadow to false comfort, because it prevents people from dealing honestly with grief and loss.

Not in any significant way. Once, as a freshman at Stanford, I came upon three guys abusing a dog tethered to a parking meter. Unfortunately, I had spent the day drinking with friends and had about five watts of situational awareness, so I was in no condition to defend myself or the dog. But I tried to reason with them. The next thing I knew, I was coming to, after having been hit in the head. I was out of the fight before I even realized I was in it. Of course, given what I just said about the problem of multiple attackers, I'm not sure the situation would have been much different had I been sober.

You've mentioned that having a family has made you more aware of personal security. Has it had any effect on how you think about religion? Daniel C. Dennett, who as a very young boy lost his father, has said that the ability of parents to console grieving children through religion is perhaps sufficient in itself to explain the survival of religious belief.

Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences--the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion. There is no rational substitute for that consolation, and I think we atheists need to admit this.

But we can leave that aside, along with everything else we abandon in childhood, and be no poorer for it. There is a shadow to false comfort, because it prevents people from dealing honestly with grief and loss. If you really believe your loved one is on the right hand of Jesus, there is nothing to grieve for. I've heard from people who [said] the support they received from their religious friends often seemed to be a way of avoiding the reality of their suffering. To say something like, "She's in a better place" strikes me as total failure of compassion. It is a false claim to knowledge motivated by one's own fear of death--and by one's discomfort in the presence of another's pain.

There is much more wisdom and compassion in accepting the magnitude of another person's loss, and of our own inevitable losses, without pretending to know things we don't know. As a parent, it's my responsibility to equip my child to do this--to grieve when grief is necessary and to realize that life is still profoundly beautiful and worth living despite the fact that we inevitably lose one another and that life ends, and we don't know what happens after death.

Yanagi Ryuken, an aikido practitioner in Japan, managed to convince many people -- himself among them -- that he had mastered the "no-touch knockout": an ability to vanquish his opponents without even touching them. The first of these two videos, which you've featured in your essay about Brazilian jiu-jitsu, "The Pleasures of Drowning," shows Yanagi effortlessly thwarting dozens of his students as they appear to attack him:

In the second video, he confronts a martial artist not in on the delusion, and that second martial artist punches Yanagi in the face.

Yanagi's students seem to be under some kind of spell. Why would they be willing to go along with Yanagi's charade for so long? Are we seeing a phenomenon like religion?

Those videos defy description. They are the physical manifestation of the same kinds of reasoning errors and self-deception we see in religion--with the crucial difference that, in martial arts, it is possible to expose a person's misconceptions in real time for all to see. But what's amazing--and this should really worry people of faith--is that, even in the martial arts, a person can persist in delusion for decades, gather students, and become a famous master of his fake discipline without knowing that he has wandered completely out of contact with reality. This madman can't even begin to do what he thinks he can do--and what he is apparently renowned for doing--because the skill he is displaying and that his students are striving to emulate doesn't exist. The whole thing is a collective delusion. If religion were a sport, it would look like that first Yanagi Ryuken video. The second video, of course, is what science has been doing to religion, over and over, for the last few centuries.

It's a little hard to see how Yanagi's delusion got up and running, but once everyone began falling all over themselves, it is easy to see how it was maintained. Imagine it from his point of view: if you thought you might be able to knock people down at a distance, and then your students complied and fell down on cue, year after year, you might begin to believe that you really had these powers. To a lesser extent, this is a problem in many martial arts: because to train most techniques without getting hurt, you have to allow little elements of fantasy to creep in. Does poking someone in the eye really end a fight? People who have done this in combat probably know, but millions of martial artists pretend to poke each other in the eyes throughout their training, without ever knowing what would happen if they tried it for real. You can't train with real knives, because you'd get killed on the first day. So you train with plastic or rubber knives, and you begin to lose sight of just how far you've departed from realism. This happens to some degree no matter how tactically sound the instruction is.

Of course, in Yanagi's case, it is harder to see how a new student would suddenly get knocked off his feet based by virtue of his own self-deception. But there's so much social pressure to confirm the stated dogma. It's not that people need to fake these things consciously. They can be led by a stepwise process to fake it without ever having to confront the fact that they're faking. It is like faith healing or speaking in tongues. A person can be inducted into a performance by the performances of others.

You've studied with experts in martial arts, such as Ryron Gracie in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and with experts in meditation, such as Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. Do experts in these two fields have anything in common?

You can actually discover the absence of the feeling that you call "I".

Ryron strikes me as a very meditative person, although I don't know if he's practiced meditation. Some BJJ instructors are hard-charging, high testosterone, and thuggish. But Ryron is about the nicest guy you will ever meet. There's something about BJJ as a martial art that strikes a tangent to the more contemplative project of self-transcendence. In BJJ, one's ego-centric illusions get cancelled right at the outset. You can't fake being good at BJJ for even 30 seconds. As you train, you are constantly haunted by the evidence of someone else's superior skill. There's also something meditative about the experience of rolling--which is what sparring is called in BJJ--although it's by no means a straightforward way to meditative insight.

When you are in the presence of a real master of meditation, his skills are not so apparent. And if everyone around this person is behaving like he's the messiah, the room for self-deception is obvious. Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations. Nevertheless, meditation is a skill that can be taught. Self-transcendence is a repeatable experiment.

Here's one way of describing the experiment: Pay close enough attention to the nature of your own mind--to the flow of thoughts, moods, sensations, and perceptions in the present--and you can notice that the feeling of being a self, an ego, a thinker of thoughts in the midst of experience, is an illusion. Which is to say that you can actually discover the absence of the feeling that you call "I". You still have thoughts, moods, sensations, perceptions, but there it will be clear that there is no self riding around in your head owning these experiences. This is a discovery that can be made, and it's every bit as reproducible and confirmable as the proper technique for applying a triangle choke.

My own experience with meditation brought me unexpected calm and serenity. But I found that it disarmed me analytically, and banished a lot of thoughts that I usually think of as productive. Does meditation conflict with productive thinking?

No. Your mind will be active in any case, no matter how much you meditate. The goal is not to be without thought, but to be aware of the character of your experience in each moment and not suffer unnecessarily. Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault. You are thinking every moment and not aware of it, and the initial experience of anyone who seriously tries to meditate is one of discovering how incessant this cascade of thoughts is.

It's probably true that certain human accomplishments depend upon people's neurotic needs for achievement or their lust for money or power. A lot of art comes from a place of being captivated by selfish illusions. And if a person were to permanently dispel the illusion of the self, he might not write great novels or start the next Apple. Buddhahood might be incompatible with being the next Nabokov or Steve Jobs. Luckily, no one has ever had to choose between becoming a great artist or entrepreneur, or the next Buddha.

The relevant question for me is how neurotic and unhappy and self-deceived do we have to be while living productive lives. I think the general answer is, far less than most of us are.

Your career as one of the New Atheists has involved getting in what most would describe as unwinnable fights, arguing with opponents who will simply never agree with you. Most people, when confronted with maddeningly stubborn opponents, just shrug and move on. Do you think that your willingness to fight is a sign of a fundamentally unquiet mind? Maybe you need meditation more than most of us.

It's easy to misunderstand the situation - intellectually, ethically, and psychologically - from the outside. These fights are actually not unwinnable. I constantly discover what it looks like to win. It's just rarely visible to those who are watching the fight. For instance, if I do a public debate with a rabbi or a pastor or some other representative of Iron Age philosophy, I know he isn't going to change his mind while talking to me in front of a thousand people. But then I hear from those who watch these debates and have their views change completely. And this includes people who might have been just as incorrigible as my debate opponent in another context--rabbis, pastors, priests, life-long fundamentalists, etc.

Minds can change. And even whole cultures can change, radically and quickly. Once we understand human well-being better than we do and begin talking about the full range of spiritual experience in the context of a rational, empirical, evidence-based view of the universe, people will see that there really is no game worth playing that is best played in a church, synagogue, or mosque.

No one's ever accused me of being an optimist, but I think reason and intellectual honesty will win. They're just too useful.

Don't miss Graeme Wood's profile of Sam Harris in the May issue of The Atlantic.

The Disease of Jumping From the Sky

Graeme Wood — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:16:30 GMT

A history of aviation's wildest daredevils

Reuters

For a small minority of its practitioners, aviation is not a hobby or profession but a disease. In these extreme cases, the desire to be thousands of feet above the earth, rather than safely upon it, is uncontrollable, a compulsion that began in childhood. United Airlines pilot Denny Fitch told filmmaker Errol Morris that when he saw flight as a small child, "I had dry heaves, I wanted it so bad." The US Navy pilot and prisoner of war Dieter Dengler (a particularly severe case, and author of Escape from Laos) wrote that as a child in Bavaria during World War II, he watched American fighter-bombers destroy his village. Dengler's neighbors might have cursed those pilots; Dengler just wanted to be one of them.

History is littered with the corpses of these maniacs. Icarus was only the first. In 1785, the pioneer of hot-air ballooning, Jean-Francois de Rozier, filled his balloon with hydrogen gas, which held him aloft beautifully until his furnace-flame turned his balloon into an enormous bomb. In 1912, Austrian-born Franz Reichelt became obsessed with designing a parachute that pilots in the newly invented airplane could use. He tested his prototype -- a billowy cloth frame barely bigger than his body -- by jumping from the Eiffel Tower. He expected to drift down like Mary Poppins, but he sunk like a torpedo to his death on the icy Champ de Mars below.

In the last half-century or so, as the occupation of "test pilot" has become somewhat more professionalized and scientific, it has become possible for certain aviation obsessives to accomplish extraordinary feats and survive at a higher rate than their predecessors. In the last year, two repeat survivors have written improbably interesting books about their exploits.

The first, Air Force Col. Joseph Kittinger, previously wrote (with Martin Caidin) a remarkable book called The Long, Lonely Leap (1960), about his still-unbroken (until, perhaps, later this week) record for highest free-fall parachute jump, from a balloon-borne craft 103,000 feet above the surface of the earth. Kittinger was, in a sense, a Franz Reichelt of the space era, subjecting himself to immense danger to test a safety device that could potentially save the lives of other aviators. Parachutes were, in the first part of the century, woefully inadequate for combat situations. When an aircraft was shot down, the pilot needed to jump free of his plane. But in practice, Kittinger wrote, "his parachute invariably became snagged in the lacy entanglements of these old aircraft and plunged to earth trapped by the wicked combination of machine and parachute." So rather than endure just a fatal smack into the ground below, the pilot spent his final agonizing minutes tethered by his own safety device to a cartwheeling fireball of jagged metal.

Here's a newsreel of Kittinger's record-setting jump:

Kittinger pioneered testing of ejector seats to alleviate the parachute problem. But he is best known for the eponymous leap from the very edge of Earth's atmosphere, undertaken in 1960 as part of Project Excelsior. In the pre-manned-space-flight days, there remained serious doubt about whether high-altitude pilots could ever hope to survive catastrophic failure at altitude. Even if they could eject clear of their craft, they would be in a nearly airless atmosphere, with such low pressure that their blood would boil. Even if wearing pressure suits, they would fall not gently but would instead begin to spin at hundreds of rotations per minute, fast enough to knock them out or kill them. On the long leap, Kittinger and his colleagues tested stabilization parachutes, which permitted Kittinger's conscious and safe return to earth after over four minutes of free-fall.

Kittinger's present volume, Come Up and Get Me (named for his cheeky reply, when commanders on the ground ordered him to descend from 96,000 feet), is autobiography, much breezier and less ponderously written than his first book. Since his first book dealt entirely with that jump, this one functions more as a pastiche of other memories from a life spent either bored and miserable on the ground, or grinning widely up in the air.

The memoir reveals -- this should be no surprise by now -- that Kittinger was an airplane nut since childhood and followed the usual pattern of fascination with models and gliders up until his first training in the real thing. He describes a number of other test missions, including some of the first parabolic Zero-G flights, to see whether cats in mid-air orient themselves through gravitational cues or visual ones. (The latter, it turns out.) The sole intermission in the earthbound boredom is a chapter detailing his being shot down in a dogfight in Vietnam, then detained and tortured for 11 months in the Hanoi Hilton, where he was known and admired among fellow POWs as something of a hard-ass.

On release, Kittinger stayed in the Air Force just a few more years, finally retiring when warned that he would likely not get his promised command. His post-uniform life has, by his account, consisted almost entirely of going back up into the air, usually for frivolous purposes. He began a second career as a skywriter (awkwardly correcting a typo on his first assignment) and as a barnstormer or aerial acrobat. His abiding hobby is civilian ballooning, and much of the final chapters is about his landing in unexpected locations after record-setting journeys, and explaining himself to unamused US government officials, perplexed New York pig farmers, and slackjawed Italian lumberjacks -- the modern ploughmen of the Icarus story, only this time shocked to see the aviator landing safely instead of plummeting to his death.

To Virgin mogul Richard Branson, author of the last year's other big aviation-obsessive book, Kittinger is a hero. Branson himself has a subclinical case of flying mania, and in addition to owning a formidable global airline, he has undertaken multiple record-setting journeys by balloon, including the first crossing of the Pacific. His book, which unlike Kittinger's acknowledges no co-author, is a suspiciously well-researched "personal history of aviation," with emphasis on the daredevil types who have pushed the state of the art by executing deadly jumps, flights, and launches.

The result is principally a catalog of folly, the print equivalent of those black-and-white films of men bicycling toward a take-off with paper wings that crumple before they generate a single newton of lift. Most of the pure successes are well known, and some, such as the Wright brothers' lift-off at Kitty Hawk and Steve Fossett's solo unrefueled circumnavigation of the globe, are recounted here. There is also a gallery of mad but ultimately successful showmen, such as Charles Green, the London fruiterer who in 1827 rode a pony on his hot-air balloon. ("How many swigs of laudanum," Branson asks, with a hint of jealousy, "does it take before flying among the clouds on a pony sounds like a good idea?")

But the failures are the main attraction. There's Henry Tracey Coxwell, the British balloonist who ascended to 35,000 feet, a mile above the peak of Everest, without a parka, throwing pigeons out of the gondola at regular intervals in the name of science; the pigeons "dropped like stones," and Coxwell shattered a tooth shivering, narrowly avoiding death himself. Or Marty Jensen, a pilot hired by MGM to fly a lion across the country, who ended up crashing and being trapped in a small canyon with the lion. Or Leo Valentin, the French "birdman" who outfitted himself with balsa wings and jumped from progressively greater heights, reasoning that "the higher you were, the longer you had to experiment to correct a mistake." He died after a 9,000-foot fall, Branson writes, one of 71 modern birdmen killed in action; "only four survived into retirement."

As plain records of fact, Kittinger's book and Branson's more than justify themselves. But there is also the small matter of the craziness, the depths of which these two come perilously close to forgetting. Branson slips into reverie over his pleasure in being able "to take the controls of an untested plane, fly on exotic fuel, and crash a dubious and homemade flying machine" -- as if these were pleasures most readers would covet rather than avoid. The authors are like a pair foot-fetishists who write about their favorite foot-parts (curling toes! luscious bunions!) without first explaining why they have been seized by the urge to dedicate their lives to feet in general.

And so the most riveting moments are, in fact, the ones that come closest to explaining what precisely is so attractive about these dangerous and senseless undertakings. Branson writes that it is the thrill of being "supremely powerless: human chaff, borne who knows where by the wind." And Kittinger, lapsing briefly out of the hard-ass mentality of his senior officer days, quotes himself expressing a similar sentiment in 1960 to his controllers 103,000 feet below. He told them he saw "a hostile sky. As you sit here, you realize that man will never conquer space. He will learn to live with it, but never conquer it."

Kittinger and Branson both show slightly controlling, micromanager qualities here and there; Kittinger spends long sections disciplining officers who wore their hair too shaggy, and one of Branson's boastful moments is when describing how through force of will he defied airline seat-arrangement dogma and configuring Virgin's business-class cabin in a herringbone pattern rather than in parallel rows.

But for both men, being up in the air seems to have been a kind of ultimate release, a liberation from their own hard-driving selves. When they describe flight, they relish the god's-eye view. "Inside the gondola, it was perfectly still, and I could hear every word of a conversation on the ground hundreds of feet below," Kittinger writes. "It was almost as if I was momentarily immune to the laws of physics or as if I had dropped in from another dimension to spy and eavesdrop on mankind."

And yet to achieve that omnipotence they choose the only mode of aviation that makes them truly powerless. All pilots have to manage dangerous weather, and are ultimately slaves of storm systems and vicious high-altitude winds -- but none more than balloon pilots. To be as gods and mortals, all at once: perhaps that's the combination that they've spent their lives seeking, and seem to have found.

The Disease of Jumping From the Sky

Graeme Wood — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:16:30 GMT

A history of aviation's wildest daredevils

Reuters

Here's a newsreel of Kittinger's record-setting jump:

The Disease of Jumping From the Sky

Graeme Wood — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:16:30 GMT

A history of aviation's wildest daredevils

Reuters

Here's a newsreel of Kittinger's record-setting jump:

In Cairo, Two Faces of Tahrir

Graeme Wood — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:59:00 GMT

Last night, the city saw two autonomous sets of protesters: one dark, violent, and uncertain; the other light, peaceful, and committed

Reuters

CAIRO, Egypt -- Wednesday night, the light in Tahrir Square was bright enough to read by, and the crowd of demonstrators was so thin that I could sit with a book under a street-lamp for hours, my light blocked only rarely by a passerby. Three times I witnessed violence of the mildest sort. Twice, someone chucked a stone at a passing police truck (once, the stone zinged right past my head, and I had to chase grit from my hair). And once a shoving match broke out between a guy who had brought a small horse to the square (Tweeters were calling it the "Thawra Pony," or "Revolution Pony") and protesters who wanted to keep Tahrir a pony-free zone. By the end of my book, at around 10:30, the police had stopped doing drive-bys, and the Thawra Pony was still being led around the Square, seemingly without further controversy.

It hadn't been so calm for any part of that day. I'd been away for Tahrir for five months, and violence erupted late on Tuesday, as if to welcome me back. The families of those murdered in the revolution -- beaten, shot, sliced, and simply disappeared -- have been agitating for the prosecution of those responsible. On Wednesday, their protests turned sour, and Cairo erupted again into rock-throwing. This time the police (now universally called "khanzir," or "pig," by the protesters) have been more liberal in their use of tear-gas and rubber bullets.

But by evening this fighting had died down to embers, in large part because of the soccer game between the popular Zamalek and Ahly teams, a sports showdown capable of distracting Egyptians from all occasions other than their own weddings and funerals. (There were rumors that the game was going to be canceled -- a disastrous turn of events for the government, since it would have kept the Tahrir crowd big and angry all day and through the evening.) I walked around the circle and saw a level of rage that was palpable but insufficient to bring much real change. Tents went up, suggesting that their residents were planning to stay put, but there were only four of them. Souvenir stands sold postcards of Che Guevara, Yasir Arafat, and, more worryingly, Osama Bin Laden. Chants against Field Marshal Mohamed Hussain Tantawi, who as head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is the de facto ruler of Egypt, began and ended, like a wave at the soccer game that fans kept trying and failing to keep going.

What a difference, though, a block makes. To Tahrir Square's east is Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which was once the main drag of the elite American University in Cairo, whose students would toss frisbees across the road, over the rush of traffic. A little further is the Ministry of Interior -- and there the skirmishes continued, with unpredictable results.

Tahrir Square was a cathedral of light, but Mohamed Mahmoud Street remained dark and had every sign of being the front line of a danger zone. Stones and broken glass crunched underfoot, and the protesters milling in the dark were all men. When I got close I could see their faces, which looked dangerously indecisive, as if ready to be talked into doing anything at any moment, if only two or three people around them would make up their minds first. Occasionally, I'd see dozens of them run at a time -- never more than about 50 yards, and then they'd return to their positions. Several people walked around with clubs made of street-signs. Now and then someone dropped his with a clatter, but always another person picked it up.

At Mansour Street, police had formed a line, and around midnight they stood about 20 feet from this indecisive mob, their riot shields ready. The active side was the protesters': now and then someone yelled, or lit a fire on the road (a prelude to a fire-bomb strike), or threw a stone. But nothing ever happened. Some protesters -- as well as residents of the neighborhood, who wanted more than anything to keep their apartments from getting burnt down -- yelled at the rest and urged them to return to Tahrir. The protesters stayed put, milling and milling, half afraid of their potential and half thrilled by it.

When I left around 1:30 a.m., the line still held. And when I passed through Tahrir, the atmosphere of peeved solidarity remained, and the crowd looked very far from being ready to throw bombs or rocks with the intent to maim rather than menace. These were the two autonomous sets of protesters: one dark, violent, and uncertain; the other light, peaceful, and committed.

The latter was a much bigger group than the former, but also less clear in its methods. Would it have to seize and hold Tahrir again to keep pressing its demands? The dark group could throw a single Molotov cocktail and provoke a fight. (Indeed, a single member of that group could provoke a fight.) The light group prevailed on Wednesday -- so far, it seems the violence at the Interior remained minimal after I left -- but whether it will again tomorrow is anyone's guess.

In Cairo, Two Faces of Tahrir

Graeme Wood — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:59:00 GMT

Last night, the city saw two autonomous sets of protesters: one dark, violent, and uncertain; the other light, peaceful, and committed

Reuters

With Mubarak Gone, Will Egypt's Revolutionaries Divide?

Graeme Wood — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:00:00 GMT

The protests unified the opposition, but every uprising has its moderates and its radicals

CAIRO, Egypt -- Hosni Mubarak with donkey ears, Hosni Mubarak with a Hitler mustache, Hosni Mubarak as Colonel Sanders -- once the protesters started heaping on the scorn, they couldn't stop. It was a long time coming.

The only prior time I had heard anyone in Egypt express public contempt for Mubarak was in 2003, before a prosperous and well-educated audience at the American University in Cairo. Edward Said, the distinguished Palestinian-American literary critic, had just given a stirring lecture on the difficulty of life under a repressive regime, namely (of course) Israel. During the question and answer session, an American study-abroad student took the microphone to ask a question that sent such a frisson through the crowd that I doubt I am the only one who remembers it more or less verbatim. "Here in Egypt," he said, "we're living under a military dictatorship, and it looks like Hosni Mubarak wants to pass the leadership on to his son Gamal." How, he asked, could Egyptians fight back against repression?

The fear that passed through the crowd was audible, visible, palpable, and immediate. Someone yelped when the name "Gamal" was mentioned, and a professor rushed to cut off the microphone. Dissidents, including the university's own Saad Eddin Ibrahim, had been imprisoned for asking such questions. After several seconds of extreme distress -- followed by a round of light applause from students -- Said responded wanly, saying that all political regimes were inherently coercive, and yes, it's difficult, isn't it? At this point, the distressed yelps came from the students, who seemed to faint a little inside when they realized that if even Edward Said (beloved in Cairo, and with terminal leukemia, having little to lose) was too craven to support regime change, then no one would.

This weekend, men and women from that prosperous, educated class hit the streets, tidying up after the demonstrations and violence that had marred and hallowed Tahrir Square during the last two and a half weeks. One of the familiar characters of Egyptian domestic life is the zabbal, or garbage-man (usually a Coptic Christian, whose faith permits him to feed organic waste to Cairo's pigs). I lived in Cairo for two years, and no zabbal of mine ever picked up the trash in stiletto heels, or while moonlighting from his day job as a dermatologist. But in Tahrir Square this weekend, one saw miraculous things, and these were among them.

The Tahrir clean-up started before the party had even ended. Cairenes from all demographics, including the wealthy and educated, showed up in force, bearing cans of paint and push-brooms. The task was hardly thankless; some pinned signs to themselves and grinned with self-congratulation at stooping to filthy work for a country they loved. It was also totally impractical; as of late Saturday, the square still brimmed with massive crowds. Imagine trying to tidy up a Rolling Stones concert during the third verse of "Satisfaction." Two weeks earlier, the protesters had formed human chains to prevent vandals from looting the Egyptian Museum. Now they formed human chains because they had just swept and painted the curb, and weren't about to let anyone track dust onto it.

As of Sunday, the square was nearly emptied and cars were driving through all but a few of the streets. In the last day or so, the military has moved in to remove the bitter-enders, the protesters who cheered Mubarak's downfall but refused to leave until democracy, rather than a fragile military rule, had arrived. Their worry is entirely sensible: the Egyptian military never renounced Mubarak (who was, after all, one of their own); and although it pledges elections, it hasn't loosened the infamous Emergency Law or, for that matter, dismissed the government Mubarak hastily appointed two weeks ago.

There have been two groups of protesters in the square: the radicals, and the tourists. The radicals shed blood and risked everything to get rid of Mubarak, and the tourists supported them but didn't show up until the danger had passed. During the heady early days of the protests, none of the radicals indicated that they would be satisfied with anything less than democracy and the most severe justice for Mubarak and his people. Already, we've witnessed the gratifying spectacle of ex-Mubarak ministers' being denied permission to leave the country and, presumably, flee to luxurious exile. Early in the protests, Amr Bargisi warned in The Wall Street Journal that the protesters would commence a reign of terror if they won. "The next step," he said the protesters promised, "will be to knock on the doors of suburban villas and ask the owners: Where did you get the money to afford these?"

Where, then, are the Arab Jacobins, and should we fear them? The presence of elites out there, shoveling garbage with the common man, must be met with some ambivalence, I suppose: some among them are, for the moment, supporters of the revolution, and others could potentially be its victims. So far, the protesters have shown little appetite for gore and have cleared no space for a guillotine in Tahrir Square. Perhaps it is the military's role to stifle and suppress the most eager of these protesters and to allow the villa owners, many of whom have military connections, to prepare themselves for justice. The radical wing of protesters has shown little flexibility about anything so far, and eventually it will demand, in a word, satisfaction.

Photo by Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty

With Mubarak Gone, Will Egypt's Revolutionaries Divide?

Graeme Wood — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 18:00:00 GMT

'We Are Egyptians: Hold Up Your Head!'

Graeme Wood — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:35:00 GMT

Celebration and national pride overwhelm the Egyptian capital

CAIRO, Egypt -- One longs to know what finally convinced Hosni Mubarak to relinquish his office. What, as of this afternoon, did he see that he could not have seen before? By the end of January, he must have known that his people were desperate to be rid of him. By the end of last week, they showed they were prepared to fight and die. And by yesterday night, after his weird and deluded speech failed to mollify crowds and instead pumped them full of wrath, he must have known that the movement would metastasize beyond Tahrir Square, and that by staying in power he was only making things worse.

One theory: He was watching his own state television network. This afternoon around three o'clock, a crowd of about 1,000 people had the entrance of the building blocked, in an effort to send a message that could penetrate even the waxy ears of official State media. The crowd's cheers were led by a girl, no older than six, but with the lungs developed far beyond her years. Riding the shoulders of a man, probably at her father, she screamed the familiar incantations of Egyptian democracy, and the crowd screamed with her. Five minutes after she started, I saw her thwack her dad on the back, like a horse: she wanted not to face the crowd, but instead to face the M1 tanks and freshly stretched razor wire that stood between her and the state television building. If Mubarak was looking at the live raw feed from the windows of that building, he would have seen the glare of a child, fixed with bravery and loathing, and leading a crowd of thousands. How can one look back at that and continue in office is beyond me, and perhaps proved beyond him, too.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: Rage Against Mubarak's Speech
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads

Tonight, when the announcement of Mubarak's resignation percolated through Cairo's alleys, car horns confirmed the news before Twitter did. For the last several hours, the horns have not stopped. Not only in Tahrir, but also parts of Cairo so-far untouched by rioting, the refrain is "We are Egyptians: Hold up your head." This is entirely apposite, for a movement that Mubarak tried to slander as a foreign plot. But it's also something one has heard in Tahrir for many days. A man with a bandage told me he had applied for a visa to Canada but no longer had any intention of using it, because of the pride he felt in his country. Mubarak, he said, had defamed and befouled a great civilization. "Now I will never leave this place," he said. "This is my country. I finally discovered this."

"This is my country. I finally discovered this."

There are, now, few reminders of the squalid last moments of Mubarak's dictatorship. The curfew, imposed as an inconvenience to make the protests unpopular, is completely ignored. The bridges I once scurried across furtively late at night in hopes that I wouldn't be noticed and arrested, are now packed with cars and crowds, who are setting off firecrackers and engaging in light celebratory pyromania. Pieces of sheet metal crinkle underfoot: These were the barricades, now disassembled and trampled. The song of choice, played no fewer than five times in succession this evening near Talaat Harb Square, is Shadia's "Ya Habibti Ya Masr" -- "Oh Egypt, My Beloved."

And where to now? When the sun rises tomorrow on an Egypt that is so much closer to democracy, it will shine first on Sharm al Sheikh, where Mubarak fled this afternoon and is, one presumes, on the phone at this very minute to verify reports that his family assets in Swiss banks have been frozen. I've met almost no one in Tahrir willing to countenance amnesty for 30 years of corruption and tyranny, not to mention a crowning week of thuggery and murder. The crowds today are celebrating. Perhaps tomorrow will see a mass road trip to the Sinai.

Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty

'We Are Egyptians: Hold Up Your Head!'

Graeme Wood — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:35:00 GMT

Celebration and national pride overwhelm the Egyptian capital

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: Rage Against Mubarak's Speech
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads

"This is my country. I finally discovered this."

Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty

'Go Away!' Rage in Tahrir Square Against Mubarak's Speech

Graeme Wood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:30:00 GMT

The crowd came expecting to celebrate victory but left furious and defiant, as Egypt's president refuses to step down

CAIRO, Egypt -- Unless you count the dummies that they've been hanging in effigy from lampposts for the last week, the protesters in Tahrir Square have been remarkably nonviolent in the imagery they've used against Hosni Mubarak. Tonight that equanimity began melting away. Not long before Mubarak came on television to speak, two men carried into the crowd a banner depicting Mubarak as Pharaoh. In one image he wore a King Tut/Yul Brynner headdress, and in the other he was dead and mummified.

Between the two images is a Koranic verse, implying that in death, Mubarak's corpse would serve as a reminder to other tyrants:

So today We will save you in body that you may be to those who succeed you a sign.

There is an established history of comparing Egypt's secular leaders to the pharoahs. When Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated, the killer's first words after emptying his AK-47 into sadat's body were, "I have killed the pharaoh! I do not fear death!"

As Mubarak started his speech tonight, the crowd hushed and was ready to hear him out. They wanted celebration, not blood. They seemed ready to cheer and exult, and would surely have done so even if all Mubarak said was that he intended to resign immediately. He wouldnt even have had to agree to a fixed date for elections: A simple "I'm going" would have sufficed. Instead the crowd murmured in disbelief as Mubarak droned on, defiantly granting no substantive concession whatsoever.

Nervous tics in the crowd surfaced, and young mothers with toddlers up past their bedtime started packing their things in case the scene turned ugly. Tears gave way to anger in about 90 seconds, and by the end of the speech no one cared what Mubarak was saying. The protesters heard only themselves, yelling "Irhal," or "Go away."

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir

Cellphone camera flashes had been popping like fireflies through the night. Now they ceased completely, and a few people looked angry at me when I took a few shots of my own. When Nasser cracked down on dissent, Egyptians used the phrase "zuwaar nuss al-layl," or "midnight visitors," to describe the knocks at the door by secret police. Were people suddenly worried that the crackdown might happen, and that snapshots would go into a secret police scrapbook somewhere? They were certainly worried about something.

I filed out of Tahrir with a crowd that kicked up dust as it went, like a cattle stampede. By now it was nearly midnight, and many who had come to watch history being made went home filled with rage. Others, in a group of a few hundred, marched to the state TV station -- a heavily guarded building about a kilometer away -- and were, as of a few minutes ago, chanting "Irhal" so furiously that one could hear them across the Nile and up and down the corniche.

If Mubarak hadn't delayed so long, perhaps the protesters would still have had the energy to take the TV building outright. I have not seen the faces in the Square seem so bitter or fuming before; they looked like they wanted to overturn cars. Tonight was the closest Mubarak will ever get to a graceful exit.

'Go Away!' Rage in Tahrir Square Against Mubarak's Speech

Graeme Wood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:30:00 GMT

The crowd came expecting to celebrate victory but left furious and defiant, as Egypt's president refuses to step down

Between the two images is a Koranic verse, implying that in death, Mubarak's corpse would serve as a reminder to other tyrants:

So today We will save you in body that you may be to those who succeed you a sign.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/10: The Revolution's Second Act
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir

The Egyptian Revolution's Coming Second Act

Graeme Wood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:50:00 GMT

It's now on the protest movement either to take meaningful new steps or risk becoming little more than a carnival

CAIRO, Egypt -- The last week in Tahrir has taught a number of cruel lessons, chief among them that the old Marxist chronology of tragedy-then-farce is severely out of date. As my friend Graham Harman has observed, the spectacle of 21st-century camelborne cavalry charges against peaceful demonstrators is itself a blend of Pythonesque absurdity and profound evil. That tragicomedy happened in a single afternoon. What could possibly serve as a second act?

As of Monday, the Square's population had dwindled perceptibly. Now and then, one witnessed minor altercations when protesters suspected each other of infiltration. By the next day, these fears vanished -- not because of any lack of infiltrators, but because the massive crowds made policing Tahrir impossible. The Egyptian military still mans the entrances, but only halfheartedly. This weekend, one had to brave a crush of demonstrators to get inside, and endure the danger that all the pushing and shoving would knock you into a coil of concertina wire. Now, almost every entrance to the square is open, and the crowds are huge and unmanageable. Infiltrators come and go as they please.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street

These crowds are a blessing. Until recently, the government could paint the demonstrators as foreign-led subversives. Now, Egyptians know the subversion is real but homegrown. Yet increasingly, the blessing seems mixed. Of the newcomers to the square, few are hard-core revolutionaries. Instead, they are tourists from Cairo and beyond, snapping photos and gawking at the remarkable spectacle of their president ridiculed, hanged in effigy, and taunted in a venue where he was once scarcely mentioned in an unflattering way. The square was once mobilized for self-defense, and at the rattle of a piece of sheet metal, a hundred men and women would sprint toward the threat, ready to be maimed for the cause of freedom. Now it takes ten minutes to cover the same distance, and you'd have to push past vendors of popcorn and novelty sunglasses to get there.

The protesters have tried to keep momentum by spilling south toward Parliament. But Parliament is not enough, and everyone knows it. The two sites commonly mentioned for the protesters' next step are the president's palace and the state TV building, which in January was attacked but not seized. During my years in Cairo, before any of the recent troubles, the state TV building was always heavily guarded and assumed to be a vital prize for anyone attempting a coup. It remains a forbidding target, with snipers in the windows and tanks on the streets. If the protesters mobilize to march there, expect violence.

It falls now to the protesters to prove that their revolution is alive and hasn't turned into a mere carnival. Outside the square, Egyptians are complaining. The complainers include even some who regard the protesters as heroes. "They should go home. Already they've made a change, and it can't be reversed," said Wanil, an Egyptian engineer outside the square. "Mubarak got his 70 billion dollars, and maybe that's the price we pay for being too lazy to get him out of power for 30 years. But whoever is president next, if he takes even one pound, we will eat him."

Elsewhere one sees strife due to lost wages, and the inconvenience of an eight o'clock curfew. Outside the headquarters of Omar Effendi, the Egyptian version of Macy's, about a hundred men rioted because they had missed pay during store closures last week. The protesters, of course, say that the blame falls on Mubarak. They echo Trotsky, who wrote that blaming revolutionaries for economic woes is "like accusing a newborn of the birth-pangs of the mother who brought him into the world."

Is the revolution stillborn, effectively smothered by the gawking crowds of Tahrir? There is plenty of reason to doubt that it is. Reports of riots and burning government buildings elsewhere in Egypt are a sign that it lives on. One waits, though, to see whether this revolutionary baby still has enough air in its lungs to scream to have its navel-strings severed and be allowed to crawl forward. Tomorrow, after Friday prayers, will be an interesting time.

Photo by Getty

The Egyptian Revolution's Coming Second Act

Graeme Wood — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:50:00 GMT

It's now on the protest movement either to take meaningful new steps or risk becoming little more than a carnival

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/7: Mistrust Spreads
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street

Photo by Getty

Mistrust Spreads Among Egypt's Protesters: A Day and Night in Tahrir

Graeme Wood — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:45:00 GMT

As circumstances on the ground shift less rapidly, the protest movement now faces subtler threats, with dissent and subversion becoming major preoccupations

CAIRO, Egypt -- There is trouble in paradise, and its name is fitna. At 2 a.m. yesterday in Tahrir Square, a brawl erupted near the Iberia Airlines office. It was not a fair fight: A crowd ganged up on one middle-aged man who had remarked loudly that he thought the anti-regime coalition was going to fall apart because of religious differences (devout vs. secular, Christian vs. Muslim). Another man overheard him, told him to shut up, and gathered a crowd first to shout him down and then shove him around. The first man gave up and skulked off, eventually scowling alone on the pavement, with his back against the stone wall of a travel agency, his arms hugging his sweater and his hands and face pelted with cold rain. The crowd yelled after him: "Fitna! Fitna! Fitna!" -- an Arabic word with a long history and a complicated English meaning, a cross between "strife," "disagreement," "discord," or "sedition." Or in plain English: "Why can't we all just get along?"

The situation among Egypt's protesters now shifts not by the minute or hour but by the day. With this new metabolism, the protest movement is having to deal with threats more subtle than flying bricks. Dissent and subversion are major preoccupations: There are signs of jitters, even paranoia. Foreigners now have to prove their identity as members of the press, and protesters identifying themselves as members of the movement's "security" team approach in the square to demand a reporter's identity documents. Until recently, this happened only on the outside.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'

After the fitna man walked away fuming, Muhammad Mamdouh voiced a suspicion. "He may have been sent here by [Vice President Omar] Suleiman," he said, referring to the Egyptian spymaster now assumed to be running the country. Mamdouh observed that until that day, the military hadn't allowed any food sellers in, and everyone had to pack in his own bread, spreads, and tubs of the Egyptian pasta-rice-tomato melee known as koshary. "Why till now don't you see the sellers? [Suleiman] introduced them to make crowds gather around them, to let things like this happen." He said he thought the man was a Mubarak agent, sent to make divisive comments in crowds and undermine the revolution. So now in addition to Molotov cocktails, the protesters must deal with the koshary threat.

Time is only partially on the protesters' side. They are, on the one hand, still wholly defiant, and if anything more resolved than on Friday. Ahmed, 24, repeated a line that I heard at least half a dozen times during a night in the square: "Half a revolution is like suicide," he said. If they leave now, the government will renege, and the protesters will begin to disappear in the night. He said he abandoned a lucrative perfume shop in 6 October City to be here, and now that he has seen fighting he has no fear. "When the police come, their first bullet makes you scared," he said. "But the second bullet, you catch it." He clawed once at the air, plucking an imaginary bullet from its path, like Mr. Miyagi catching a fly.

But with time, the protesters are having to develop systems for managing not only spies and perceived spies, but legitimate dissent in their midst. Around midnight, a group convened near the Arab League to produce propaganda videos. About half a dozen young organizers, more than half of them chic young women, sat in the middle of a crowd of about 40, reading out the concerns that they had heard on state media and inviting members of the crowd to respond by speaking to their cameras and producing videos that would later appear on YouTube. The meeting was a mess, with nearly all voices rendered inaudible by crosstalk. In the middle of filming, a man broke into the circle and screamed curses at them for bothering with this exercise while neglecting the core work of manning the barricades and watching for the next attack. Was this fitna? The crowd seemed unsure. Some applauded.

Now tasting disunity, demonstrators have to police themselves in case one faction decides to open negotiation with the government.

The men at the barricades have not had to repel a serious attack since Thursday night. Since "Bloody Wednesday" (as the protesters now call it), they have worked out simple systems of communication to tell each other when there's a threat nearby (whistle for more help, bang metal when you think you see something, wave your hands above your head to tell the incoming crowd that the situation is controlled). Alarms went out twice that night -- both times when the army turned over the ignition of the tanks near the Egyptian Museum, presumably to inch a little closer to the square and encroach on the protesters' space. Both times, a crowd gathered to sit in front of the tanks. After the second time, a few protesters just decided to spend the night curled in among the tanks' sprockets and treads, their bodies interlaced so that even a slight movement by a tank would grind them up. At four in the morning, these protesters were snoring. The tanks haven't been turned on since.

Even with the worries, an atmosphere of jubilation and tranquility rules the square. During the day, men, women, and even small children give speeches at the podium at Tahrir's eastern edge, near the Hardee's restaurant that has been converted into a potable water station. During the night, the podium hosted oud players and singers who performed well past three in the morning. Protesters have used the stones they stockpiled near the barricades to write out messages on the ground. One says "GO AWAY," but in mirror-writing. I asked one of the men who arranged it why it was backwards. "Well," he said with a shrug, "Mubarak doesn't seem to understand it when we write forwards."

Some are calling this love-in "the Republic of Tahrir," which captures well the other-worldliness of the place -- of Egypt but not in it, a most serene independent state whose laws and freedom stopped at the barricades. But the Tahrir Republic doesn't quite deserve the name yet. The protesters in Tahrir have so far gotten along swimmingly because their hatred of Mubarak has united them. Now, both on the ground in Tahrir and in politics beyond, they are beginning to taste disunity, and to police themselves in case one faction decides to open negotiation with the government.

Whether that self-policing will graduate to the level of more over suppression of dissent is not yet clear. There would be a poetic injustice in seeing the movement fray because it failed -- just as Egypt as a whole has failed -- to contain and manage dissenters and spies. (Our point exactly, Suleiman might say, with a dishonest sneer. Perhaps you'd like a side-order of order with your chaos?) There is still precious little evidence that there is much dissent of any kind in the Republic of Tahrir, which means it still functions admirably as an anarcho-commune, rather than as a republic. But the dissent will come.

I asked Mamdouh, the man who posited the koshary conspiracy, whether there might be any irony in a democratic movement beginning to shout down open debate. "No," he corrected me. "Tuesday was democracy," he said, referred to the day before the violence, when crowds thronged peacefully and in huge numbers to demand Mubarak's ouster. "Wednesday was war. And now, any opinion is allowed -- but just no pro-Mubarak." He made sense. Eventually, democracy will require the protesters to embrace fitna, rather than stamp it out. But that moment hasn't yet arrived.

Photo by Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty

Mistrust Spreads Among Egypt's Protesters: A Day and Night in Tahrir

Graeme Wood — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 15:45:00 GMT

As circumstances on the ground shift less rapidly, the protest movement now faces subtler threats, with dissent and subversion becoming major preoccupations

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/4: Reenergized and Ready in Tahrir
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'

Now tasting disunity, demonstrators have to police themselves in case one faction decides to open negotiation with the government.

Reenergized Protesters Ready to Keep Fighting Off Attacks in Tahrir Square

Graeme Wood — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:15:00 GMT

With Mubarak's supporters bearing down for another round of assaults, demonstrators have found new strength in singing, dancing, and prayer

CAIRO, Egypt -- The demonstrators have been calling today "the day of departure" for Hosni Mubarak and, with their mission complete, presumably for themselves, too. Many protesters have been in Tahrir Square for as long as a week -- exhausted from stress, from having to sleep body-to-body on cold pavement and patchy grass, and from having to improvise (with miraculous effect) a static defense strategy against an enemy with virtually limitless supply lines.

And yet today it seemed as if many of the protesters want never to leave. The atmosphere a few days ago was doomed but resolute, like the last days of the Alamo. Now it was ecstatic, with an optimism that seemed wholly warranted. "We understand Mubarak's strategy, and we reject him," a young man who spent five days in the square told me. "This is a place of liberation [tahrir], not negotiation. Over our dead bodies." Two days ago those last words might have been sounded prophetic, but now they sounded merely figurative.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets

Cairenes poured into the square from several directions and in enormous numbers. The most heavily trafficked entry point, Kasr el Nil bridge, had multiple orderly queues, hundreds of yards long, with a wide cross-section of Egyptian society. Until late yesterday, the bridge was held by the Mubarak supporters. This morning, the only sign that the Mubarakites had been there was the disrepair of the base of the statue in the center of Opera Square, at the far end of the bridge from Tahrir. The stone had been broken up for throwing. Now those chunks of pink granite are stockpiled in Tahrir near the protesters' barricades, ready as ammunition against the next attack.

"This is a place of liberation, not negotiation. Over our dead bodies."

Using a tape measure and chalkmarks on the ground, the protesters organized themselves into neat lines for Friday prayer. So many newcomers appeared in the prayer lines that the bandaged heads were in the minority, although many still wore the headgear -- including hardhats and hunting caps -- that protected them as they dodged rocks yesterday. I asked a man with a thick callous on his forehead (a zabiba or "raisin," developed from years of placing one's forehead on the ground to pray) how he kept performing ritual ablutions without water. He said that when you're away from water and engaged in a just or holy cause, you can clean yourself not with water but with tayammum, the ritual striking of the earth with the palms. The cause of unseating Mubarak easily qualified, he said.

After prayers, the heads popped up like a hundred thousand jack-in-the-boxes, and fists pumped in the air to the chant of "Leave!" Next came a rendition of "My Country, My Country, My Country," the national anthem.

Mahmoud Awad, 35, approached me after prayers, with a forwardness that probably served him well in his former business as one of Tahrir Square's famously pushy tour guides. He wanted to go on the offensive, and said he wouldn't be satisfied even if Mubarak left. What he wanted was justice. "We will follow him everywhere. We will trap him," Awad said. "He stole our dreams, and we will never let him go."

The hatred is of course mutual. A café manager chased me out through his doors a few minutes ago in Zamalek, because a crowd of Mubarakites was on its way through to meet up with another Mubarakite group in Mohandiseen, and he wanted to shutter the business until they passed. Mohandiseen is on the other side of the Nile, in a business-dominated area with relatively strong Mubarak support. So far, Mubarakites have barely arrived at Tahrir to begin the day's attacks. When they arrive, they will find an opposing force that is physically, materially, and spiritually resupplied, and harder to dislodge than it has ever been.

Photo by AFP/Getty

Reenergized Protesters Ready to Keep Fighting Off Attacks in Tahrir Square

Graeme Wood — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 15:15:00 GMT

With Mubarak's supporters bearing down for another round of assaults, demonstrators have found new strength in singing, dancing, and prayer

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets

"This is a place of liberation, not negotiation. Over our dead bodies."

Why I Was Dragged Through the Street by an Egyptian Mob

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:40:00 GMT

As the regime plays up the supposed role of "foreign agendas" behind the protests, Mubarak supporters' attacks become more indiscriminate

CAIRO -- Egypt's cryptic new vice president, Omar Suleiman, is a man who chooses his words cautiously, if it counts as caution not to speak much at all. So when he said this afternoon that "foreign agents" might have instigated the demonstration against his boss Hosni Mubarak, he probably knew the consequences of his word choice. Today Egyptian state TV called out some of the enemy by name, positing a conspiracy between the Muslim Brotherhood (a major Egyptian element in the protests) and Qataris, who fund the pro-protester network Al Jazeera.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets
2/2: The Fight in Tahrir Square

This morning I discovered other elements to this sinister imaginary cabal. At around eleven o'clock, after a walk around the area of downtown north of Tahrir, I got into a cab and headed toward the Nile. Three times I found the road blocked by armed men demanding to see my passport, and twice they let me through with the usual apology for having to waylay me. On the third of these, the man roared with delight at seeing my foreign passport and began flipping through it, his eyes drawn first to the stamps with Arabic script. He called over others, and within seconds at least a dozen men in plain clothes surrounded me, two locking my arms behind my back, another threading his fingers tightly through a beltloop, and all the rest hooting with delight at having caught a real Iranian spy.

I have an Iranian stamp, a tourist visa from 2009. Like the United States, Iran includes a photo of the visa-holder on the visa itself. So they saw the visa, with all my biographical details and my photo and "Islamic Republic of Iran," and thought they were looking at the passport information page of an Iranian citizen. Pretty soon I was being dragged through the street like a deformed farm animal, and the people around me were yelling "Iranian! Iranian!" while I cried out in my best English in protest. We passed two cafés, and no one even bothered to take a shisha pipe out of his mouth to inquire about me.

Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists.

The men ultimately delivered me to a government building on the Nile, where a man in a police uniform spoke English and confirmed that I was either a native English speaker with an accent appropriate to his nationality, or an Iranian with an unusually effective ESL teacher. He guessed the former and let me go, but not before telling me by way of apology that there are "foreign people in the crowds who want to create danger and kill Egyptians." He said roadblocks and crowds along the corniche were advised to hunt down "Iranians, Hizbullah, Qataris, Hamas, and" -- because why not? -- "Israelis."

I suppose this list of suspects has some logic to it. Iran hates Egypt enough to have named a main Tehran thoroughfare after Khaled El Islambouli, the Egyptian artillery officer who gunned down Mubarak's predecessor Anwar Sadat (and injured Mubarak in the process). Qatar's Al Jazeera is indeed pro-demonstration. And Egypt is no friend of Hamas.

In any case, the net is wide, and purposefully so. Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists. A stroll down the corniche has never been so frightening.

Photo: Getty Images

Why I Was Dragged Through the Street by an Egyptian Mob

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 21:40:00 GMT

As the regime plays up the supposed role of "foreign agendas" behind the protests, Mubarak supporters' attacks become more indiscriminate

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos on the Streets
2/2: The Fight in Tahrir Square

Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists.

In any case, the net is wide, and purposefully so. Foreigners are under attack, not just journalists. A stroll down the corniche has never been so frightening.

Photo: Getty Images

'It Erupted Into a Full-Scale Medieval Battle': Interview From Cairo

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:10:00 GMT

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell interviews Wood on Wednesday evening, early Thursday morning in Egypt

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

See Woods's dispatches from the scene:

'It Erupted Into a Full-Scale Medieval Battle': Interview From Cairo

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:10:00 GMT

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell interviews Wood on Wednesday evening, early Thursday morning in Egypt

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

See Woods's dispatches from the scene:

Order vs. Chaos on the Streets of Cairo

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 12:34:24 GMT

Regular Egyptians will soon face a choice: help Mubarak or help the demonstrators?

CAIRO, Egypt -- When I arrived at Cairo's international airport on Tuesday afternoon, I had to break curfew to get downtown. Curfew was three in the afternoon, which at this time of year is exactly when the afternoon sun starts hitting the dusty buildings at an angle that makes them glow instead merely look grimy.

My driver, who offered me hashish and Doritos (in that order) yelled "foreigner!" at the army's first checkpoint, and the soldiers let us pass. For the next two minutes, we sped along at an extraordinary pace: No cars were on the road, and if we continued unobstructed it seemed like we might get downtown, and within an easy walk of the protests, in just ten minutes or so--a speed I would have thought impossible in Cairo without chartering a helicopter. Instead, an army checkpoint stopped and redirected us through a labyrinth of backstreets, with each city-block applying a form of impromptu traffic direction that reminded me of Baghdad in 2004. Neighborhood men of all ages had constructed roadblocks, and they interrogated every driver.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/2: The Battle in Tahrir Square

The first man I saw carried the type of samurai sword known as a "wakizashi," and his four friends had long metal bars, like bo staffs, which they banged on the road to make us aware of their presence, in case four men with medieval weaponry were not attention-grabbing enough on their own. They talked to me, asked if I was Egyptian, and let me go without any difficulty at all. This scene repeated itself roughly three dozen more times between Heliopolis and downtown, and the traffic wardens apologized to me nearly every time for the inconvenience. Near Al Azhar University, a man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver--probably recently purchased from the kitchenware section of Khan al Khalili market--smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

I do not recall ever being so pleased to be surrounded by blade-wielding Arab vigilantes. The smile, I thought, was telling. Many people have told me that they are angry at having to stay up all night with weapons, just to keep basic peace in their neighborhoods after the flight of the police Friday. But the smile of Mr. Cleaver told a different story. He seemed to enjoy being responsible for his area's safety, and pleased to be allowed to dispense justice there more responsibly than anyone in uniform had for quite some time. He was the place where the buck stopped and, if the buck wasn't careful, got ruthlessly chopped into many smaller bucks. His might not have been the role he wanted every day, but it evidently pleased him in the moment.

A man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

These encounters happened mostly on Cairo's backstreets. If Tahrir Square is Cairo's heart, those backstreets are the capillaries snaking through Heliopolis, Nasr City, Islamic Cairo, and other areas where a huge portion of Cairo's middle class resides. I bring up Mr. Cleaver now because he could, if the clashes in Tahrir drag on, be decisive. Right now he is in his neighborhood, and the newfound mastery of his (hyperlocal) destiny is strangely refreshing. At some point, though, he and his ilk will start making a decision. Will they choose more order or more chaos? More order means more Mubarak, in a devil's bargain with the middle class whereby he restores order by arresting the protesters, putting cops back on the street, and, with the collusion of neighborhood vigilantes, turns Egypt into not just a police state but a pariah state as well. More chaos means more demonstrations and a scary, unpredictable future that could make his role as author of his own destiny permanent. Right now I can't tell whether the Mr. Cleavers of Cairo are rushing to help the pro- or anti-Mubarak side--or are content to sit back and wait.

Photo by Marco Longari/AFP/Getty

Order vs. Chaos on the Streets of Cairo

Graeme Wood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 12:34:24 GMT

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/2: The Battle in Tahrir Square

A man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."

The Battle in Cairo's Tahrir Square

Graeme Wood — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:25:00 GMT

A first-hand account from our correspondent on the scene in Egypt

CAIRO, Egypt -- The Egyptian protest started getting violent early this afternoon, a few minutes after a cheerful girl, about 14 years old, handed me a caramel. Since I arrived yesterday afternoon, and up until the caramel reached my hand, Tahrir Square was a calm place lacking any menace whatsoever. Children were having their faces painted. Men and women were happily sweeping up trash, helping each other pitch tents, and waiting patiently for their turn at the water tap. It reminded me of Burning Man, except that in the place of stations for full-body nude massages or refills of psychedelics, it had little protest areas where one could find Muslim Brothers, students, and every other flavor of disaffected Egyptian.

More by Graeme Wood from Cairo
2/3: Dragged Through the Street
2/3: 'A Full-Scale Medieval Battle'
2/3: Order vs. Chaos in the Capital

I was sitting across from the Mogamma, the imposing futurist fortress on the edge of the square, when I heard that a pro-Mubarak crowd that started in Muhandiseen, about a mile away, had started to stream into the square from the direction of the Egyptian Museum. A few of them had already reached the KFC at the center of the square when I saw the first of more than a hundred injured men being carried back to safety, which for the protesters meant the center of the square. Then the stones started flying, and the blood gushing in full force. Each side was systematically unpaving downtown Cairo, and in moments when they were not throwing stones they were breaking them against the curb into smaller stones that they could throw further. Men and women were screaming and crying, and I lifted my notebook to my head to avoid getting brained by a stray rock.

Each side threw so many stones, they were practically unpaving downtown Cairo.

The protesters pushed back the pro-Mubarak crowd. Some of their charges (it really looked like a Civil War battle charge designed to overrun an enemy position) were so intense that I feared for the pro-government crowd's safety. That worry rapidly vanished. The pro-Mubarak group turned out to have great strategic depth, reaching all the way back to the Nile and beyond, and with sheer numbers it pushed forward, gradually rushing past the protesters and me. The Mubarak forces screamed "Yes Mubarak," and the protesters alternated between "Leave!" and "God is Great!" -- with the latter noticeably favored during moments when the protesters had the initiative. The injured were carried back, most with bloody head wounds. Seven middle-aged men stood in prayer next to a tank during the height of the stone-volleys, remarkably placid-looking, like the string quartet fiddling as the Titanic went down.

Gradually, near the entrance to the Egyptian Museum, each side began to realize that neither faction would be overrun completely. Entrenchment began, and a no-man's-land of about a hundred yards opened up. I stood there in the middle, taking video, dodging rocks coming from the side I could see and holding my notebook to cover the side I couldn't. Then, right by the Egyptian Museum entrance, five men in plainclothes grabbed me, hit me three times, twice in the back and once in the chest, and brought me toward the Museum itself. They grabbed my video camera and still camera, shouting "memory card," and tried to break it when they couldn't figure out how to remove it. Then two of them grabbed my arms and ejected me from the square, onto the Nile corniche, which was so calm that the first person I met was a newspaper journalist who had to ask me whether we were among Mubarak supporters or protesters.

I don't know whether he stayed, but if he waited another half hour his uncertainty about the sentiments of the crowd around us would evaporate. The pro-Mubarak group flooded the square, and its strategy became clear: All the entrances to the plaza were being probed and, if found lightly defended, overrun. I was now on the outside among the forward surge; no one was permitted to leave, but a trickle of captured protesters came out, each surrounded by at least a hundred screaming Mubarak supporters, and being beaten so intensely that I couldn't see their faces, only a circle of waving sticks and fists, raining down on whatever unfortunate was at the center. One female protester was brought out, thrashed, and delivered to a military unit inside the Egyptian Museum grounds. At one point a man was being crowd-surfed out and beaten; one of the pro-Mubarak men said he was a "Chinese journalist." "We will stay," the man said, "and then go into the square and take it over."

I'm now north of the square. There is no help coming for the protesters, but all the way up the banks of the Nile there are angry, screaming pro-Mubarak supporters walking and sometimes running to reach the front of the crowd and throw a stone. Men and women are pulling up cobblestones, breaking them, and using Egyptian flags to create bindles full of rocks and resupply the pro-Mubarak group.

Mubarak has the initiative and appears inclined to use it.

The last time I saw a massive protest in Tahrir Square was in 2003, during protests of the Iraq War. During those protests, the police encircled the protesters and let them scream for a couple days. Late at night, I stood among the police, asking them about their hometowns in Upper Egypt. Then, around midnight, they were called to attention, told to harden their lines, and finally to march toward the remaining protesters, letting none escape. Truncheons came down, and within a few minutes they had rounded everyone up into paddy wagons, and the square resumed its light evening traffic. I stood almost alone by the Mogamma, only because I was standing five feet outside the police ring rather than five feet inside it.

I assume the same will happen tonight, except instead of the police, the pro-Mubarak crowds will surge and then meet in the middle. I doubt the police or army would be willing, but the mobs certainly are -- and they will not have so light a touch with their weapons. Mubarak has the initiative, and he appears inclined to use it.

Photo: AFP/Getty