At 44, Gamila Ismail has lived in the public eye for nearly two decades—as a stringer for NEWSWEEK, a TV personality, a parliamentary candidate, and the wife of charismatic opposition politician Ayman Nour. They cut a glamorous pair, at one point living in a houseboat with a menagerie, their St. Bernards, and their two sons. The downtown office of their party, el-Ghad, on Talaat Harb Square above the Greek Club, was an intellectual hangout—at least until January 2005, when their family life came to a crashing halt. Nour, who was running for president, was arrested on charges of forgery that were never proved. Ismail became known as Job’s wife, embattled, angry, sad, shouting outside police stations, “Down with Mubarak.” That is how people still remember her. A man in Tahrir even called out to her: “I saw you when you took the police and wiped the floor with them!” She gave him a weary nod.
Ismail and Nour are just two of the many Egyptians who got on the regime’s radar as troublemakers. As the clique around Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal grew wealthier and more ostentatious, so did the critics and the crackdowns. Dozens of journalists who exposed their corruption were fined or beaten or jailed.
Ismail lost her jobs. Anyone who tried to help her received warnings from the Interior Ministry. “These six years have been terrible,” she says. “The world completely against you. Me and my sons so isolated, as if we were born on the day of Ayman Nour’s arrest without any past, no connections.” She began selling off family assets to keep her kids in school. Even the private TV stations wouldn’t hire her because they had to get licenses from the Interior Ministry. “They’d say, ‘Your issue is so exceptional’ and then point up and make the shape of long hair.” They meant Suzanne Mubarak.
At the end of 2008, while Nour was in prison, Ismail’s political struggle took a deadly twist. A pro-government faction of el-Ghad marched to take over the party headquarters. Security thugs set the offices on fire. Ismail and her colleagues barely made it out alive. The story got more Orwellian as the night wore on. While she was at the attorney general’s office filing a complaint against the interior minister and Gamal Mubarak’s men, a call came in. She was the prime suspect in the arson case. If she persisted with the charges, she would go to prison. “I thought of my children. I was in charge of them, the finances, the party, and that’s when I realized how mean this regime is.”
The next day the papers wrote: “Gamila Ismail destroyed the precious building of Old Cairo.” Even among Cairo’s intellectuals, many believed it and saw the whole affair as a political squabble among elites.
“I had this mask for years of a very resistant, strong person,” says Ismail. But the mask broke after the arson attack, when she choked up with tears at the end of a televised debate with the politician leading the pro-government el-Ghad faction. “I thought, how could I be such a weak woman?”
Like most of her 40-something generation of activists and opposition politicians, Ismail had stopped believing anything like the Jan. 25 demonstration was possible, so, as it is for Saadawi, the revolution has been a vindication both personal and political—a sweet, unexpected victory against a regime that had persecuted her family.
When I met Ismail, she was so anxious and exhausted she could barely breathe. She was flipping among the news channels. Every few minutes she was phoning Nour, her 21-year-old son, who had gone to Tahrir to deliver medicine. The first night of the protests, Nour was grabbed by security thugs and thrown in a paddy wagon with dozens of other protesters and a Guardian journalist. When a policeman recognized Nour and tried to release him, he refused. “Either I leave with everyone else or I stay with everyone else; it would be cowardice to do anything else,” he told the Guardian reporter. “That’s just the way I was raised.” His parents found out about Nour’s detention and managed to secure the release of the entire vanload.
On the 10th day of the protest, Ismail addressed the crowd at Tahrir, as she did each day, and condemned by name the interior minister, Habib el-Adly, and the minister of information, Anas el-Fekky, for deliberately inciting the violence. Ismail has been in a public war with Adly for a decade now. But behind him she—along with many Egyptians—has seen the hand of Suzanne Mubarak, who has become, in caricature fashion, Egypt’s Lady Macbeth, a mother whose vaulting ambition would stop at nothing to ensure her son Gamal succeeded her husband, Hosni.
After years of bearing up, Ismail is optimistic. “We should not let the long, bitter years destroy the future,” she says. “I honestly believe [the Army] wants to set a good example for the other Arab states and give a white fingerprint on Egyptian history that they handled the country for a while but helped it cross the border to democracy.”
She has decided to become the first Egyptian woman to found a political party, one that will emphasize national dialogue along the lines of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “We need a new psychology,” she says. Human-rights lawyers she is working with are appearing with young police officers on prime-time shows asking, “Who ordered the police to abandon the people on Jan. 28? Who ordered you to shoot bullets at the people?” “It’s had a big impact on the street,” she says. “We need to hear all these testimonies and confessions of people who committed crimes. Who told presenters and news editors to put all these lies on TV that ended up killing people, 365 martyrs? We have to purify the media and security organs from those who committed these crimes and repair the relationship between the citizen and the police.”
She is not so idealistic as to believe that a military-controlled government will march to democracy on its own. “I am telling the youth, let us polish and let grow the good moves by the military and react instantly to anything that is making us suspicious!”
Excerpt from NEWSWEEK's The Feminists in the Middle of Tahrir Square.
Gameela meets with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Cairo on March 15, 2011.
