There was almost a party atmosphere on Maglis al-Shaab Street, where the Parliament building is located, this morning. Men carrying bouquets of flowers and mini-Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) flags danced in a circle before launching into improvised street theatre. Behind them, a man perched on someone’s shoulders led the singing, an ode to Egypt followed by a pledge to free Jerusalem.
The main drag of Maglis al-Shaab Street is sealed off at both ends by newly erected iron gates and rows of riot police. Inside this area, bored policemen, watched by army soldiers standing outside the Parliament building, wandered to and fro on its roof and on the ground outside the structure.
There is not a trace of the sit-in outside Parliament that was violently broken up on 16 December; everything — curbs, lampposts, the building itself — has been given a coat of paint. The Ministry of Transport building damaged during the clashes has been covered in a giant Egyptian flag.
Beyond the iron gate on the other side there was another, smaller, group — a motley group of doctors, workers and members of the Muslim Brotherhood standing behind a string of Egyptian flags sewn together.
A foreign television correspondent interviewed one of them about the FJP’s policy on women and Egypt’s Coptic Christians.
“Islam means freedom and justice,” engineer Mohamed Ibrahim said. “Women are the heart of society and we deal with women like they are queens”.
“Yes, but can a woman be president?” the correspondent asked.
Ibrahim insisted that she could. The foreign correspondent then asked Ibrahim about its policy on a Coptic president of Egypt.
“Would Denmark allow a Muslim to be the head of the nation’s administration?” countered Ibrahim. “It’s about what the people want.”
One of the protesters launched into a poem about the revolution’s martyrs. The refrain was, “Don’t worry, Egypt, today is an eid (celebration).”
The mood was very different 100 metres away from where a jumble of barbed wire seals off the road. The army put it there in December.
A small group of angry men had congregated, furious at being refused permission to pass the cordon by riot police officers and plain-clothed policemen. One man shouted furiously at the riot police that all he wants “is to be allowed to freely express his opinion.”
A workers’ march — one of three staged today — took a back street to reach the Parliament. It was eventually joined by two other marches, one demanding freedom of expression for artists and another demanding martyrs’ rights.
All three converged in the small area outside the iron gates on Maglis al-Shaab Street where protesters chanted, “Bread, freedom and social justice” and “Speak, say, power must be handed over.”
Safaa Mohamed Hassan, the mother of Kamal Sayyed Barakat, who was killed on 28 January 2011, said, “I just want my son’s rights. I just want his killers to be tried. I don’t want money, it won’t bring him back.”
Mona Youssef, a 21-year-old unemployed graduate of a technical academy said that she was protesting because, “There’s nothing new. Nothing has changed since the revolution.”
Arriving with the artists’ march, Mo’men Abd-Rabo held up a banner reading, “The Egyptian Secular Current is against a constitution that limits freedoms.”
Abd-Rabo explained that the Secular Current is a non-ideological group formed last month that so far has attracted 100 members. Its mission, Abd-Rabo said, is to lobby Parliament to protect secular freedoms.
Abd-Rabo was pessimistic about the extent to which these freedoms will be protected by the Parliament’s Islamist majority.
“There will be discrimination on the grounds of religion and gender and censorship of art, books and cinema. The Muslim Brotherhood will not create a secular state,” Abd-Rabo said.
Twenty-nine-year-old Mohamed Shafiq, a doctor protesting outside Parliament, downplayed divisions between Egypt’s Islamists and secularists, saying, “It’s all manufactured by the [ruling] Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.”
“I don’t care who’s in Parliament as long as they respond to my demands,” Shafiq said.