I t was almost 11 PM on Friday, November 23, , when from the window of her apartment in downtown Cairo, not far from Tahrir Square, Ghada heard a crowd screaming, "She has a bomb strapped to her stomach! She ran to the balcony to search for them, but her terror shifted into action when she saw a naked woman pinned against the hood of a car, with a circle of men around her.
Ghada grabbed her husband and some clothes for the stranger, and they sprinted downstairs to rescue her. They pushed through the crowd and into the circle, pulling the girl to safety. Earlier that afternoon, Yasmine El Baramawy and her friend Soha a pseudonym chosen to protect her identity had made their way to Tahrir Square after hearing about the clashes between anti-Morsi activists and government-backed security forces.
Protests against the post-Arab Spring constitution had started in Tahrir Square two days before. Yasmine and Soha hadn't planned to explicitly join in; they just wanted to watch from a few feet away as protesters cheered against President Morsi.
In the fall of , five months after becoming Egypt's first-ever democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi signed a "constitutional" decree that gave him unlimited authority: he simultaneously appointed himself the chief of police, the chief of the military, and the head of Congress, giving himself the power to appoint or dismiss anyone within the government at only his discretion. He was, in the plainest terms, mad with power when many felt he had run on a platform that styled himself as the antithesis of Hosni Mubarak.
Backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi was supposed to improve Egypt's economic well-being and restore political control to the people. Egyptians were angry. Yasmine and Soha were angry. They had yet to reach the demonstrations in the distance, and the square was relatively calm where they stood; Yasmine's instincts immediately filled her with an urge to flee. She had witnessed mobs of protesters before, but something was off this time.
