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  GENERATION

  FREEDOM

  The Middle East Uprisings and

  the Remaking of the Modern World

  Bruce Feiler

  Dedication

  For John Healey,

  whose hands gave me the power to walk again

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue - Freedom from Fear

  Chapter I - Freedom Comes Home

  Chapter II - The Birthplace of Freedom

  Chapter III - The Voice of Freedom

  Chapter IV - Freedom to Believe

  Chapter V - Generation Freedom

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author - Meet Bruce Feiler

  Have You Read? - More by Bruce Feiler

  Books by Bruce Feiler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Freedom from Fear

  The Twin Towers and the Two Doors

  I heard the singing as soon as I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. It came from the hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers had once stood. It was nearing 1 a.m. on Monday, May 2, 2011, a little more than an hour after President Barack Obama announced that American service personnel had just hunted down, trapped, and killed the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. As soon as the president finished speaking, I told my wife I wanted to go to Ground Zero. She looked at me like I was crazy. It was after midnight. I told her I thought the still-open wound in lower Manhattan would be dark and tranquil at that hour, and maybe it would provide some insight into this near-perfect bookend to what had happened there a decade earlier.

  Instead I found several thousand people—many who were only in grade school on September 11, 2001—gathered for an impromptu rally. They waved American flags, tossed toilet paper on the lampposts, and sprayed champagne on the crowd. The only thing missing was a sailor kissing a nurse. And just as I arrived, the crowd was finishing a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?—before breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” I felt like I was at a homecoming rally.

  I waded into the crowd. About half of the people there were raucous college students. One was dressed as Captain America. Another shimmied up a traffic light pole and recited the Declaration of Independence by reading it from his BlackBerry. Another sounded an Australian didgeridoo. “I just wanted something that made a lot of noise,” explained Dinos San Pedro, a jazz student.

  Others had come for more solemn reasons and were offended by all the fist-pumping. “I’m happy bin Laden is dead,” said Constance Lauria, a flight attendant for United Airlines, whose Flight 175 flew into the South Tower. “But people are not remembering the victims here. This is a hollow victory. It’s not going to bring back all those souls.”

  As she looked around, it occurred to me that the number of people who had gathered for this rally was near in size to the number who had been killed on September 11.

  I also noticed something else about the crowd. It reminded me of one I had seen in Liberation Square in Egypt a few weeks earlier. I had gone to report on the historic youth uprisings sweeping the region and what they meant for the future of peace, coexistence, and relations with the West. There, like here, young people dangled from light poles, painted their cheeks with flags, and held up iPhones to snap photos they posted on Twitter. “When I heard that young people over there started a revolution,” said Averie Timm, a writing student from Pratt Institute, “I was so happy. People say our generation uses Facebook as a drug. For us to take technology and change the world, that made me proud.”

  At first glance, the uprisings across the Middle East and the killing of Osama bin Laden appear to have little in common. One was a populist movement to topple brutal dictators and demand greater freedom for innocent people. The other was a masterful plot by an elite military force to take out a brutal murderer who despised freedom and slaughtered innocent people.

  But having spent months exploring the roots causes and future impact of the Arab Spring, I believe the two events—coming at the same moment—will always be intertwined. The coming of age of a new generation of Muslim youth and the dramatic death of Osama bin Laden will be the Twin Towers of 2011. And for the one billion people around the world who are Muslims under the age of thirty, these two towers represent opposing life choices.

  One path—the jihadist—offers a better life through religious conformity, violence, and self-annihilation. The other offers a better life through activism, voting booths, and job opportunities. Both of these paths have had people on them. But at this moment, one appeared headed toward the bottom of the sea and the other toward the Nobel Peace Prize. This year would be remembered as the moment those two paths crossed.

  Hours later, after the crowd began to disband, I spotted a young man narrating a letter to his family in Arabic into his cell phone’s video camera. His name was Nadir Bashir. He was twenty-eight-years-old, from Sudan, and he worked at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Dark-skinned and animated, he was eager to show me his ID card to prove he had such a prestigious job.

  “Young people in the Arabic world were the first victims of the terrorists,” he said. “Osama bin Laden and other leaders of terrorist organizations brainwashed these people and made them focus on something other than spreading freedom in their own countries. The men who flew those planes on September 11 were nineteen young people from the Muslim world.

  “But this year,” he continued, “those young people woke up from a long dream and focused like young people everywhere not on attacking others but on building their own countries. They made revolutions from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Yemen, to elsewhere.”

  “Why was that other path so appealing?” I asked.

  “I will tell you honestly,” he said. “Young people in the Muslim world were thinking that the path the terrorists offered them was the easy path to happiness. If you choose that direction, you will go to heaven very quickly. This is Door No. 1. But if you choose the long way, you will have to go to college, study hard, suffer for a while, and then after seven or eight years still not find a job. This is Door No. 2.”

  “So which will be more popular going forward?”

  “Today, Door No. 1 has been closed by the United States. Some people might slip through, but that door has lost much of its appeal. And Door No. 2, because young people across the Arabic world are creating such exciting opportunities for change, has just opened a little wider.”

  To me, this was the heart of the question I had been exploring for months. Are the changes transforming the Middle East potent enough to undo a generation of stagnation, resignation, and blame—a morass so powerful they helped make Door No. 1 so appealing in the first place? Are the calls for freedom coming from Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Damascus, and other capitals—along with the extraordinary display of interreligious, intergender, intergenerational cooperation they ignited—unifying enough to make the changes necessary to allow Door No. 2 to become a viable option again?

  The youth uprisings in the Middle East set the stage for this choice. The death of bin Laden brought it into sharper relief. One population. Two doors. Which will they choose? And what will their choice mean for us?

  The answers to these questions lie in the hands of one group of people: Generation Freedom. Now that bin Laden’s passing allows us to close our own door on 9/11, maybe we’re finally ready to open a second door ourselves and find out who this generation is. Our future clearly depends on it.

  Chapter I

  Freedom Comes Home

  Can What Was Born in the Middle East

  Save the Middle East?

  They started ga
thering just before noon. They walked across bridges, drove in from the Nile Delta, taxied in from the neighborhoods surrounding the pyramids. They brought their children, their mothers, their cell phones, their cameras. They packed water, sandwiches, oranges, and chocolate. A few brought scarves dipped in vinegar in case the police fired tear gas again; others wore padded jackets to absorb any blows from the hired thugs wielding wooden batons. They hoped, but they feared, too.

  The night before, the largest crowds in more than seventeen days had gathered in Liberation Square in Cairo to witness the end of three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s erratic, repressive rule and the spread of the Arab Spring to the cradle of the ancient world. Yet while encouraging leaks had emanated from the presidential palace all day and the military had issued “Communiqué #1,” the traditional sign of a new regime, when the grim-faced president with the pancake makeup took to the giant screens in Tahrir Square he issued a rambling, heart-hardened speech that made it clear he was not abdicating his gilded perch. A stunned disbelief descended on the crowd. Many gasped in horror or wept. And soon the masses began shouting in unison, “Leave! Leave! Leave!” They removed their shoes and waved them in the air, a popular sign of contempt in the Arab world. (Remember when George W. Bush had a shoe thrown at him in Baghdad?) A few hundred even marched in anger toward the presidential palace in Heliopolis.

  The protesters had little choice but to call for greater numbers of demonstrators the next day. If today was the “Great Disappointment,” tomorrow would be “Farewell Friday.” Some diehard activists camped overnight in the white-tented village in the heart of Tahrir Square that had become known as Freedom City. Others returned home for a shower or change of clothes. Still others, members of the much-maligned “Sofa Party” who had watched the uprisings from the seats of their pants, decided now was the time to leave their pillows behind.

  All day Friday, the third Sabbath of the revolt, defiant residents streamed toward Tahrir. By dusk they had reached their largest numbers yet, more than 1.2 million people. The crowd, with their many brightly colored sweaters, pullovers, and scarves, buzzed about the crowded plaza, ebbing and flowing like a bucket of marbles dumped in a mixing bowl.

  Just as the sun dipped behind the sands, the early evening call to prayer cried out across the city, and suddenly what seemed like half of Egypt stopped and formed into straight lines in the direction of Mecca. They unfolded pieces of newspaper on the ground and began the ritual of bending, rising, kneeling, touching their foreheads to the ground, then standing, chanting, and doing it again. Even soldiers climbed on the tops of tanks to join the prayers, with some inviting marchers to join them on the bulwarks of repression. The serpentine lines and weaving trails looked like the fingerprint of a changing world. It’s as if they created a new koan for the sages to consider: What’s the sound of a million people praying?

  But not everyone paused to pray that night. Some of the protesters were secular, some were undercover loyalists looking to stir up trouble, some were Christians. To make sure no thugs attacked the worshipers and no rowdy protesters disturbed them, huge throngs of Christians locked their arms and formed a massive human chain around the Muslims to create a sacred space for them to pray. Earlier, during a Christian mass in the same spot, Muslims had done the same thing for Christians. And on occasions when a melee threatened Cairo’s historic downtown synagogue, Muslims and Christians together had locked arms and formed a human shield in front of the house of worship. Three faiths. Three spontaneous armies of defense. A visual manifestation of an evolving Middle East.

  Then, about three and a half minutes into the sunset prayers, a new and unexpected image flickered onto the giant television screens of Tahrir. It was Vice President Omar Suleiman, standing at a podium with an unidentified man hovering just over his left shoulder like a mother making sure her son properly apologized for throwing toilet paper in the neighbor’s pool. (Later this unnamed military official—he was eventually identified as Major Sherif Hussein of the army—became the hero of a viral Internet campaign called “The Man Behind Omar Suleiman,” in which his frowning face was photoshopped behind Saddam Hussein; Adolf Hitler; Darth Vader; Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Titanic; Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech; Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta; Justin Bieber; Jesus; the Sphinx; and nearly every other icon in the history of celebrity.)

  Suleiman read a terse, two-sentence statement. “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate: Citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country. May God help everybody.” Those who were not praying unleashed an ebullient cheer across Tahrir. But even more striking, those who were praying did not stop. History could wait; God could not. For a remarkable three and a half more minutes, even as their prayers were being answered around them, they continued to maintain their silent vigil in the direction of God’s holy ground.

  Finally, with the last chant complete, hundreds of thousands of extremely patient worshipers leapt in the air, unfurled Egyptian flags, and unleashed a collective, guttural cheer that could be heard from the Nile to the Yangtze. “We are free!” they cried. “We are free!”

  In the miracle of that moment, the world naturally focused on the toppling of a long-hated dictator. In less time than it takes to start a blog, a new population of revolutionaries, wielding little but cell phone snapshots, status updates, and hashtags, had felled one of the most sophisticated and entrenched police states in the world. But while everyone was understandably fixated on the ousted president, I couldn’t help wondering if we hadn’t missed the real news. Maybe the bigger story wasn’t the president up on the screen but the young people linking their arms on the ground. Maybe this young generation of freedom-loving Muslims was creating a new triple helix of shared identity that could forge an updated DNA for the Abrahamic faiths. Maybe, after decades in which the dominant voice of the Muslim world was orthodoxy, extremism, and terror, we were finally hearing the call of shared destiny and trust. What’s the sound of a million people praying? The remaking of the future of faith.

  Two weeks later I was standing in Tahrir Square. I came with a host of questions: Who is this new generation? What are they creating? And what do they mean to the world?

  I hadn’t planned to be here. My first visit to Egypt was fifteen years earlier, on a summer tour of the Middle East. On a visit to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, I sat beside a giant shrub that monks claim is the actual “burning bush” in which Moses heard the voice of God. Alongside it was a fire extinguisher. Is this in case the burning bush catches on fire? I thought. The next morning I climbed Jebel Musa, or Mount Moses, which tradition says is the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

  That trip convinced me to undertake a three-year project retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. I climbed Mount Ararat looking for Noah’s Ark, crossed the Red Sea where Moses led the Israelites to freedom, and trekked to the top of Mount Nebo in Jordan where Moses died overlooking the Promised Land. Walking the Bible was published in 2001. Six months later came the September 11 attacks. As the world teetered on the brink of religious war, I went back to the region to learn more about Abraham, the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In subsequent years, I was airlifted into Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom and took my wife on a second honeymoon in Iran. Altogether, over more than a decade, I managed to hike, swim, camp, spelunk, bargain, baksheesh, and kebab my way through every holy site, camel depot, war zone, and hot spot from Casablanca to the Caspian Sea.

  And then I stopped. After I got back home from one of my more arduous trips, my wife announced, “You’ve had your time as a war correspondent.” The following week I packed up my body armor. I slowly put my camel years behind me.

&n
bsp; But the past has a way of not letting you go, especially when it involves the desert. As 2011 dawned, I watched with awe as wave after wave of hope-starved young people across two continents—from Tunisia to Libya, to Bahrain, to Yemen, to Syria—took to the streets to reclaim their lives. They marched in the face of dictators. They withstood the rain of bullets. They prayed in the face of tanks. And as the volatile mix of rallies, recriminations, worship, crackdowns, topplings, repression, and still more cries for reform continued to spread, people outside the Middle East began to wonder how much change the revolutionaries were bringing.

  Time and again, commentators told us these uprisings represented something new. They were driven by young people—a bulging generation burdened with no jobs, rising prices, few prospects for marriage, and limited opportunities to define or fulfill their dreams. These young people, we were told, were fueled by decades of repression, government torture, and corruption. They were fed by an underground dot-com samizdat of YouTube videos, Facebook pages, Flickr photos, and Twitter feeds. #Jan25 was this generation’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” It was, in the iconic words of Wael Ghonim, “Revolution 2.0.”

  But was it, really? Sure, all these newfangled elements were present in this movement. But as someone steeped in the ancient world, I also heard a different cry coming from the protesters. I heard the prayers of a suffering people calling out to a higher authority to help overthrow an oppressor. I heard the promise of an earthly paradise where the children of the prophets finally claim their God-given liberty. I heard the echo of the oldest stories ever told.

  And then, in the crowds in Cairo, I began to see the signs. “Since you are a pharaoh, we are writing you in the hieroglyphics,” said one. “Mubarak, if you’re a Pharaoh, we are all Moses,” said another. And in the final hours before the dictator’s fall: a banner depicting King Tutankhamen’s mask with Hosni Mubarak’s face on the left and the face of a mummy on the right. In between was a line from the Qur’an in Arabic, “So today we will save you in body that you may be to those who succeed you a sign.” The verse comes from Sura 10, the climax of Moses’s showdown with the Egyptian leader. Pharaoh dies, and God preserves his body as a reminder to other tyrants that they, too, shall not prevail.