Pain of Political Change

When the last light drains from the autumn sky and sinks into the fields, Damanhur could be any town in the Nile Delta. Workers wheel home on rusting bicycles. Donkey carts circle the town square. Little girls in head scarves weave arm in arm through the dusk.

As elections rolled through Egypt this fall, Damanhur was just one of the many towns where the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood fought the ruling National Democratic Party for parliamentary seats. It was a contest that reflected the decades-old struggle between the wildly popular Muslim Brotherhood and the historically repressive, secular government.

By the time election day was over, curses had been uttered, blows landed and tear gas fired in the streets of Damanhur. Known as a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, the town of 300,000 had become an unwilling window on the tortured political evolution of Egypt -- and the Arab world beyond.

“It’s the government versus the people here,” said Hamdi Assar, a 30-year-old computer consultant and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. “You have a very strong Islamist tendency, support for the Muslim Brotherhood and love for this candidate. Then someone who represents a corrupt government tries to run and says, ‘I’m going to win.’ ”

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Gamal Heshmat’s biography is typical of Damanhur: The son of an Education Ministry bureaucrat, he was an Alexandria University medical student when his political conscience was roused by the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“It was the idea of purity, the idea of religion for the sake of religion, of serving the people without payback,” Heshmat, a family doctor and professor, said in the drafty Damanhur walk-up he used as a headquarters. “The Brothers have such a long legacy, and this attracted me.”

At 49, Heshmat defies Islamist stereotypes of flowing robes and unruly beard. A clean-shaven man with a single tuft of hair clinging to his forehead, he wears his glasses on a chain and dresses in the tweedy, rumpled style of a distracted professor. This is the face of the Muslim Brotherhood that puts many Egyptians at ease.

“The Brothers are not really strangers to any Egyptian family,” said Assar, the computer consultant, who also serves as an aide to Heshmat. “They’re everywhere. Rarely will you find a family without a Brother.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most popular opposition group, has seen its activists suffer detention and torture. Perhaps realizing that the organization is woven into the fabric that is Egypt, the government has settled into a tenuous political tolerance. In recent years, the group’s members have made it to parliament by running, with a nudge and a wink, as “independents.” The government looks the other way.

That’s how Heshmat got to parliament in 2000. Once there, he stood out as a flamboyant, name-calling critic of corruption. He also led the controversial charge against “Banquet for Seaweed,” an Arabic novel whose treatment of Islam chafed religious sensibilities. When the book was banned, secular Egyptians wrung their hands.

By 2003, it seemed as if the government had lost patience with the upstart lawmaker. A judge declared Heshmat’s election fraudulent and ordered a runoff. Police, soldiers and plainclothes thugs flooded the streets to keep Muslim Brotherhood supporters from the polls. Heshmat lost, and Damanhur was left with a bitter anti-government grudge that lingers today.

“There were widespread feelings of anger and humiliation,” Heshmat said. “The people would meet me in the street, hug me and start crying.”

It wasn’t long after his ouster that Heshmat was charged with membership in an illegal organization -- an old standby invoked to jail the group’s members -- and sent to prison for four months.

By the time he was freed, he was determined to get his seat back.

Seen as an Outsider

Although people here speak of him as a stranger, Moustafa Fiqi is quick to point out his prominent family’s centuries-old ties to these ancient farmlands. Born in a village a few miles out of town, he was still a teenager when he moved to Cairo to study politics. He never came back.

Fiqi, 61, has spent his life attaining the trappings and titles of a ruling party heavyweight. He was the ambassador to Austria, the envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency and chairman of parliament’s foreign relations committee.

But this year’s election presented a new challenge: For the first time, Fiqi had to court common people. In the past, he had been handpicked for the 454-seat parliament by President Hosni Mubarak, who appoints 10 lawmakers each session. This year, Fiqi was vying to represent Damanhur.

The weeks-long election for Egypt’s parliament began in mid-November. In the days before the Damanhur election, people here wondered aloud whether the government would allow a fair vote. But Fiqi entreated voters to have faith; he said it was still anybody’s race.

Although he acknowledged that Heshmat’s ouster from parliament was “the deprivation of rights by security measures,” he said the country had changed since then. Egypt held its first multi-candidate presidential election this year. Although there was no serious possibility that Mubarak would lose, the ruling party argues that the historic vote was proof of a new openness.

But there was something else that Fiqi and his aides kept repeating, and with equal fervor: If the Muslim Brotherhood got too much power, it would spell Egypt’s downfall.

This debate, in one version or another, is raging throughout the Arab world. If Islamists come to power using democratic means, would they proceed to undo democracy? Is it all right to ignore democratic principles in order to block Islamists from power?

“The Muslim Brotherhood is trying to snatch the seats for their own purposes,” said Fiqi, sitting in his office on a dull, sunless afternoon. “Not for the people.” In the front room, the national anthem scratched, over and over, on a cassette player.

Opposing Rallies

It was a chilly Friday night just before the election, and Damanhur’s sleepy downtown pulsed with life. Skinny young men escorted their veiled sweethearts; water buffaloes lurched in the traffic; newlyweds promenaded in wedding cars, horns blaring, plastic ribbons and balloons flapping in the wind.

The candidates held rallies on opposite sides of the town square that November night. There was a stark difference, though: Fiqi drew hundreds of people, refused to take questions and left early. Heshmat attracted thousands, and his rally turned into an impromptu march through the streets.

As the speeches got underway, a 58-year-old civil servant named Abdel Ghani Hamid frowned in the direction of the ruling party rally. Then he turned and squinted toward the Muslim Brotherhood gathering.

“We’ve got nothing but these two jokers fighting each other,” he said ruefully. “We’re choosing between bad and worse.”

Passersby, who craned their necks and pressed in to hear him, shouted him down. They wouldn’t let the Muslim Brotherhood be denigrated.

“He’s the son of this country,” schoolteacher Samir Sayid el Shaer said of Heshmat. “We’re Muslims, of course. And he follows Islam and its laws.” As for Fiqi, the teacher said, “he’s parachuted here and the government’s forced him upon us. We never saw him before this.”

On the stage, one Fiqi aide told the crowd that the government had sent a favorite son as a peace offering to Damanhur. The message was laced with threat: If the voters didn’t accept Fiqi, he implied, Damanhur would remain a sore spot in the eyes of the government.

Then Fiqi spoke.

“I’ve announced from the beginning that I’ll quit if there’s any rigging,” he said. “I believe in my freedom and the freedom of others.”

Election Day

Nov. 20 was election day, but the street in front of a downtown polling station stood deserted except for troops in riot gear. Once in a while, a defiant would-be voter got his courage up and marched down the road toward the school. Each time, the voter was set upon by a pack of plainclothes agents, beaten and hauled off behind the army lines.

One man screamed to the thugs, “I’m with you! I want to vote for Fiqi.” They freed him and watched while he entered the polling station.

At another polling station across town, an armored truck hulked at the gate; a sniper emerged from the roof. Here, too, riot police stood shoulder to shoulder to block voters from passing.

Frustration swelled; the neighbors rebelled. Men toted broken pieces of lumber as weapons; little boys snatched up handfuls of rocks and hurled them at the soldiers.

The soldiers fired back with tear gas. The pops of the canisters resounded through the alleys, followed by a dull hiss as the clouds swallowed the butcher shops, cigarette stands and teahouses. Children squeezed themselves flat against the buildings and wept.

“May God avenge me!” screamed a man, tripping through the acid haze with tears coursing down his face. In the square, men threw their arms toward the sky and cursed Fiqi’s name.

“We are determined to vote in spite of all this,” said Reda Shamma, a 23-year-old engineering student. He raked his hands through his hair and struggled to calm down; he didn’t seem to realize that he was screaming.

Rage Against System

It was cold and dark by the time the polls closed and ballots were carried off to be tallied by hand. The street in front of the counting station writhed with jostling bodies; it seemed as if everybody was yelling.

Officials marched past carrying ballot boxes, duffel bags, backpacks and bulky brown paper packages. The crowd attacked one of the officials and ripped his bag from beneath his arm.

It was crammed with blank ballots, each one marked with the official eagle stamps of the Interior Ministry. They might have been extras, but on a tense street, the ballots were seized upon as evidence of nefarious doings.

“We’re being raped!” the people howled. “It’s fraud!” The ballots flew through the air, piled in the street like snowdrifts, shredded under sandals.

A slight man stood at the edge of the crowd, watching with weary eyes. A 47-year-old engineer, Moustapha Haddad, said he was not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I did my best to be a good man in this society,” he said, carefully pronouncing the English words. “But I feel too much small. I cannot find myself in my own country.”

He waved an arm at the ballots. “I am feeling that I am nothing,” he said. “I want to feel that I am a man, that I am a member of this society.” He shook his head.

Boots clattered on the sidewalk as police conscripts arrived. Wearing helmets and toting shields, they lined up and probed the crowd with nervous eyes. Some of the Muslim Brotherhood members approached and spoke quietly over the police shields.

“All of this is just for you,” one of the members said. “It’s just for you, so you shouldn’t beat us.”

The conscripts nodded and smiled self-consciously. “What a black night,” one of the conscripts muttered to his neighbor.

When the skies opened up with rain, the streetlights sizzled and snapped overhead. On the street, the storm was greeted like an omen.

The Muslim Brotherhood members prayed out loud for the drops to fall all around them but leave them dry, for the water to go straight down to the roots of the plants. Their voices rang through the wet streets, over the heads of the police generals with their shoulders full of stars who hid beneath the dripping trees.

A Landslide

Midnight came and went, and Heshmat was winning. He’d gotten 25,000 votes to Fiqi’s 7,000, people inside the counting station said. As he hovered over the count, he remembered later, some of the supervising judges began to wander over and shake his hand. It was a landslide, they told him.

Then the provincial security director arrived and asked Heshmat to leave the schoolroom where the votes were being counted. He agreed to wait outside. It was only a matter of time, he told himself. He felt at peace.

But hours went by. Dawn broke. No results were announced. Legions of security forces were being trucked in from neighboring provinces. The government, it seemed, was bracing for unrest.

It was after 7 in the morning when the head judge and the security director emerged together to announce the results: Fiqi had won by a landslide.

The election was over.

The Aftermath

All the threats and fights and rage drained away that day as if they had never happened.

Heshmat had put out word that nobody should create a ruckus. The people obeyed.

Dozens of people had already been rounded up; this was a warning against trouble. Heshmat’s 22-year-old son, an art student, was among those arrested. In his living room, Heshmat sat looking wearily at the floor.

An older man, a neighborhood elder, broke into the room. His beard was untamed, his eyes wild with indignation. He was keen to start a street rebellion.

“So many people have already been arrested,” Heshmat told him evenly.

“So what? So what? Even if they arrest 1,000, so what?” the man replied. “We were all willing to die for the ballot boxes yesterday.”

Heshmat just nodded and listened.

A few days later, one of the judges who’d supervised the count in Damanhur broke her silence. In a letter to opposition newspaper Al Masri al Youm, she accused security officers of ballot fraud.

In a last-ditch effort, Heshmat traveled to Cairo to give a news conference. He called on Mubarak to intervene. He asked more witnesses to come forward. And finally, he appealed to Fiqi’s conscience.

Parliament will reconvene in a few months. When it does, Fiqi will almost certainly sit as the Damanhur representative.