Sisi's Crusade

One country’s legislative assault on the press

- Ruth Margalit

What Mohamed Soltan still can’t get over, six years later, is the smell. He rubs his fingers together, trying to conjure the odor, “of smoke mixed with tear gas and the iron smell of blood.” In 2013 he was a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the Ohio State University, living in Cairo in the chaotic days after a popular uprising had unseated Hosni Mubarak from Egypt’s presidency and a military council had taken over. But Soltan wasn’t like other Egyptian-American expats or some of the foreign correspondents he’d met that year who cheered when, in July, a military coup ousted the newly sworn-in president, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. Soltan disdained outsiders parachuting in, looking for the most radical Islamist leader to give them a sound bite so that they could file their story, denounce the Muslim Brotherhood, and move on.

He wasn’t a Morsi supporter, either. Not like his father, a senior figure affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and a professor at Cairo University who wrote treatises on Islam and the dangers of globalization to the Muslim family. Soltan was more moderate. And he had an idea: if these foreign journalists just spent time in Rabaa Square, where opponents of the coup had set up camp to protest Morsi’s removal, they would see that the activists represented varied interests and beliefs. (The group included some armed and violent protesters, but the vast majority of those assembled were peaceful.) So, during a sit-in lasting six weeks, Soltan joined the encampment’s media center. He crisscrossed the square, through its tent city, taking in the majestic mosque in the center, the vendors hawking skewers of grilled chicken, the stage where speakers recited from the Koran. He accompanied journalists from CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and Al Jazeera, trying to help them portray a nuanced view of the scene.