Today I sat down with Dr. Marlyn Tadros for the fourth time on Cairo in Exile. This time, the conversation airs on both our shows: hers and the Janoub Podcast.
Marlyn has known me since I was a kid. She stood with my family when my father arrived in America, and we will never forget that. But she is more than a family friend. She is a mentor and one of the people I learned from. In Cairo, I took her Virtual Activism training on how to use the internet for change. She was among those who backed Egypt's bloggers in the early 2000s, the movement that fed into everything we saw in 2011. On my podcast, I host people I believe made history. Marlyn is one of them.
Where we left off
Our last conversation was two and a half years ago, in my final month at CPJ. We talked about Gaza, the shameful role of American and Western media, and how to stop Western governments from enabling the genocide. I was in a fight with CPJ then. They offered me a promotion if I stopped criticizing Western media. I refused. Weeks later, we ended the contract, and I kept going on my own: exposing the journalists, the media outlets and even the human rights organizations that abandoned their responsibility and gave Israel cover.
I also said then, as an Egyptian, that I was glad to see Arabs, Muslims and students on campuses start to move American politics. I said it would matter.
This year, I took that fight into American politics myself.
Why I wasn't sold on Abdul at first
Marlyn asked me straight out: why were you against him at first?
I wasn't against him. I wasn't convinced. My politics here are progressive left: Bernie, healthcare, the economy. Abdul read to me as a Democrat, not a progressive. And as an Egyptian, I wanted him to talk more about the revolution when he talked about democracy. Then I realized I was being unfair. I was judging him as an Egyptian when he is fully American.
What changed my mind was Sunrise. Through Janoub, I trained them in July: nonviolent discipline, election monitoring, de-escalation if violence breaks out. That is what I learned as an Egyptian activist, and as an election monitor in Egypt, Palestine and Tunisia. They wanted Abdul. Their candidate in Lansing ran on the same flyers with him.
I have never defined myself as Islamic. I am secular, born Muslim, and I never talked about being Muslim here. Nobody expected me to back him. But when the hate came, the Islamophobia and the rumors, I saw it as a violation of me too. That is why I spoke out publicly in the final stretch. Islamophobia has to be stopped in American politics.
Lansing
When I got to Michigan, I didn't go to Detroit, where Arabs and Muslims could relate to me. I went with Will Lawrence to the capital: a mostly white district, many of them Republicans, in a Republican seat we were trying to flip. Will was one of the people I trained in July. He didn't just run. He won.
It was the district with the most PAC money spent against our side, AIPAC and Republican money both. It was also the most door-knocked district in America: 300,000 doors.
In the last stretch, I helped train 50 volunteers from universities across the country. They gave us 2,000 doors for four days. We finished in two. They gave us 2,000 more. We finished early. We asked for a third batch, and they told us they had nothing left to give.
These are youth movements. The cutoff is 35. I was the old man in the room telling stories. It took me back to April 6, to when we were young. All volunteer, all out of our own pockets.
I drove the van. I dropped off volunteers, picked them up, and knocked doors in between. Once, someone called the police on our volunteers when they tried to enter a building. We picked them up and took them somewhere else.
At the doors
The first days were hostile. Doors shut. Some people said, I want Will, but not Abdul. When people saw me, they assumed I was there for Abdul, because I look Egyptian or Middle Eastern. Black voters were more afraid to say where they stood.
Then two days before the election, Haley Stevens, the Democrat Abdul beat in the primary, turned and endorsed his Republican opponent. The response was immediate. We expected 40 volunteers and 30 showed up. After Stevens, 15 more signed up the same day. Anger, energy. Even at the doors, supporters started thanking us and wishing they had time to come with us.
When Obama came out with Abdul, support among Black Americans shifted. It was clear he would win.
I had never seen so many poor white Americans in my life. I have lived among the elites on the East and West coasts. Michigan was my first time in the Midwest. And on Will's campaign, I met people who had voted for Trump, deceived, now ready to support a Democrat on the far left. Change is possible. I saw it.
On election day I told everyone: this isn't going to be a blue wave. It's going to be a blue tsunami. Not even the most optimistic among them expected what happened. By the end of the night, people were coming to hug me, including the candidate himself.
Abdul won by seven points. Will's race wasn't clear until 4 a.m. I left his party at 11, shook his hand and told him he would win. He did it with young voters, in the university and the Black neighborhoods around the capital, where he won by 38 points.
"What is the Muslim Brotherhood?"
The volunteers asked me that. My answer was not to change their minds but to let them see with their own eyes: a Muslim comes in fifty forms. Islamist, secular, atheist.
I volunteered to cook, and to introduce them to Egyptian food. They wanted to get halal-only food for me. I told them no need. We talked about pronouns and gender, and I told them my own family's experience.
I told them about Farag Foda, God rest his soul. The Brotherhood are my opponents. I saw them turn to violence after they lost the debate. And still, when they were the weak ones and the ones being wronged, I stood up and defended them.
In my first training with Sunrise, I told them Egyptians have a weapon: humor. Against Mubarak, against Sisi. We don't just expose the abuse. We mock the lie. Abdul took that from us. That's the Egyptian in him.
I spent 17 years in Al-Azhar. I can read Quran. I can give a sermon. That doesn't make me an Islamist or a Brother. It means I understand the religion better than they do, and I can answer them better than they can: religion has nothing to do with governing. Don't turn our mosques into campaign offices.
The taxi, the aid, and AIPAC
Marlyn raised two things Abdul was criticized for: saying that in Egypt he would have been a taxi driver, and wanting to tie US aid to human rights again after Trump dropped it.
On the taxi: if he were in Egypt, he would be in exile, in prison or tortured, not driving a taxi. Marlyn's show has 200 examples.
On aid: I wrote my master's thesis on conditioning aid. I have never accepted red lines, from Sisi, from bin Salman or from Netanyahu. It is already in the law. We don't need to amend anything. People just looked the other way for Israel's interests and its clients in the region. I said it in the media, in my research, and to Hillary Clinton when I met her. I am a taxpayer. I have a right to say where my money goes. As a senator, enforcing that law is his job.
And Sunrise went further. These young people, Americans with no tie to Egypt, most of whom never cared about any of this until the last two or three years of Gaza, launched a campaign to kick AIPAC out. AIPAC moved its political money under a new name and stopped doing its work in the open. Not because of Abdul. Because of young people like them, who won despite all that money and changed how America sees unconditional money and weapons for Israel.
What Marlyn said
I asked Marlyn how she felt, as an American and an Egyptian, watching the smears against Abdul's identity.
She backed him from day one. What hurt her was how many Coptic Americans turned on him the moment someone said Brotherhood. She explained why: many arrive conservative and become more so here, and join the Republicans over gender, Muslims and abortion, not over any economic ideology. The same church that bused people to cheer Sisi in New York. She pointed to Ishak Ibrahim's piece in Al-Manassa: Coptic economic success has not translated into political power.
She named the trauma too: the Morsi years, the blasphemy cases, the churches burned after his removal. So when someone here says he's coming to impose sharia, it lands. And she laughed at Abdul's answer: not sharia law, Shakira law.
Her sharpest point was aimed at her own community. Copts focus on minority rights, not rights in general. But if you want to protect a minority, defend the right to assemble, defend the right not to be jailed without trial, because in the end you too get jailed without a fair trial. She agreed with Abdul on aid. Trump dropping the condition was against the law, and a green light for Sisi.
Hope
I end every episode with the same question: what gives you hope?
Marlyn said people in Egypt are fed up, and more and more are speaking without fear, in the country of fear. The economy matters, there as here. Here, the blue wave lifted a weight off our hearts. She sees Trump and Sisi mirror each other: vanity projects, the ballroom, the people's money and loans spent on things with their names on them. Dictators want to be remembered. People remember them with anger.
She is the first person in a long time to tell me she has hope in Egypt.
Thank you, Marlyn. To 400 episodes, and to our fifth and sixth conversations.
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