Greeting the Unthinkable: Mubarak on Trial

By ANTHONY SHADID
CAIRO — The headlines of newspapers on sale in a subway station once called Mubarak, and now renamed Martyrs', captured the moment Tuesday that could prove one of the most remarkable in modern Arab history: “The pharaoh in the cage of the accused.”

“This is a true moment of the revolution,” said one passenger, Mohammed Fathi, as trains hurtled through the din of a heaving Cairo.

The cage is precisely how it sounds — a pen barricaded with metal bars, the kind behind which the assassin of Anwar el-Sadat was tried 30 years ago. The pharaoh is Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, a former war hero, president and strongman toppled by the epic protests that gathered in Tahrir Square in February, who is scheduled to face trial Wednesday with his two sons, the former interior minister and six senior police officers.

By nightfall, there was still suspicion over whether Mr. Mubarak, convalescing in a hospital in a Sinai resort, would attend the trial, which will convene in a police academy in Cairo that, like the subway station, once bore his name. But the anticipation rippled across the unsettled landscape of today’s Egypt, where the revolution to overthrow him has proved far easier than the aftermath of building a new order.

In subway stations, libraries, schools and streets of a city seething with summer heat and short tempers, there was a sense of awe, anticipation and doubt at the trial of a figure whose imperial power was once so distant and uncontested that a famous Egyptian novel simply called him the Big Man. In conversations Tuesday over his fate, often heard were cries of justice, calls for vengeance and sentiments in between that felt cathartic.

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