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  • Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story by Thanassis Cambanis
  • Joshua Stacher (bio)
Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story, by Thanassis Cambanis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. 275pages. $26 cloth; $16 paper.

Once Upon a Revolution by Thanassis Cambanis explains the various choices made by the military, deep state, Muslim Brotherhood, and other revolutionaries after protests dislodged President Husni Mubarak in February 2011. It details the political opportunism, strategic blunders, and shifting power relations among these groups. Cambanis provides informed observations beginning with the initial protests and concluding with Defense Minister ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s installation as president.

Cambanis has a knack for narrative writing. He tells Egypt’s story through an accidental revolutionary as well as a disaffected Muslim Brother to illustrate the dramatic turns. These characters tread the path of political uncertainty while growing and shrinking personally against the larger national events. Basem Kamel goes from being an apolitical and successful architect to joining a party, winning a parliamentary seat, and ultimately quitting party politics. Moaz Abdelkarim is a young Muslim Brother pharmacist, who leaves the organization to work with the revolutionaries. He struggles with the creeping polarization gripping his countrymen, his connections to the Brotherhood, and ultimately flees Egypt to live in exile after the coup.

Cambanis records political moments in reflective ways. For example, he got used to seeing the state deploy violence against protesters but instantly knows when he sees a new paradigm emerge. After the October 2011 massacre of Coptic Christian demonstrators at the Maspero state television building, Cambanis writes, “The massacre at Maspero felt different from the violence in January and February. It felt out of control. It didn’t feel like the calibrated violence of a brutal state” (p. 136). The author also is savvy enough to see the rival narratives being written by the state and the revolutionaries as the latter’s began to disconnect from society or political reality. [End Page 474]

Making sense of this complexity, Cambanis notes the fault for the failed revolution lay at the unassailable privilege of the military, the power-intoxicated policies of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the unreformed state. It is refreshing to see analysis that does not pin the chaos solely on the hopeful revolutionaries that launched an experiment to improve their lots. Yet, his conclusions about the revolutionaries expose a regrettable assumption in the author’s portrayal. As Cambanis writes, “Egypt’s revolution was defeated because it wasn’t organized, it wasn’t political enough, and, most fatally, it didn’t have a compelling, constructive idea at its center” (p. 248). This sentence unmasks the key deficiency of the book. No coherent — much less single — idea could have resulted in the revolution’s success. The existing structural power inequalities among these groups decided the current moment in Egypt’s history. It is these inequalities that go unexplored in this book.

Mobilizations that break the former elites’ hold rely on resiliency to castrate existing power inequalities. Furthermore, they break the previous restrictive playing field of formal politics. Egypt’s mobilizations never achieved these goals. Revolutions are never about a single idea. They consist of a multitude of often opposing ideas and actors that need to resolve tensions through institutions and negotiations. Egypt’s revolutionaries never gained entry into institutions because stronger interested groups forced a process that excluded them. The revolutionaries, therefore, had to navigate their dealings with each other while also competing with a nationally organized and monopolistic Brotherhood, and an increasingly violent military and state.

More problematic, however, is that Cambanis projects a sense of superiority that Egyptians can be deluded or are politically unsophisticated. For someone that is sympathetic to the revolution’s democratic aspirations, he lacks empathy for the complex power inequalities that engulfed its dreams. Instead, he ponders why any Egyptian could support the military’s repression when everything is so blatantly clear to his outside eye. He points out that Basem is quick to describe the coup as “popularly legitimate” as “silly” semantics (p. 230). He notes, “the anti-Morsi mania sounded like the bleating of brainwashed fools, but so did the menacing rhetoric in Rabaa al-Adawiya...

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