Graeme Wood

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

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?”

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Filed under: Atlantic Monthly

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

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.

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Filed under: Atlantic Monthly

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

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.

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Filed under: Atlantic Monthly

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

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.

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Filed under: Atlantic Monthly

Originally appeared in The Atlantic.

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.

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Filed under: Atlantic Monthly