The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (12 page)

“The Americans worked with the mujahideen in Afghanistan because you thought it was pragmatic,” said Raouf. “But it was ideological because the Americans thought that Islam was not a big deal. You had no idea that Islam was a bigger threat than communism? Wow. The Soviets got people to fight for communism by threatening to shoot them in the back. But if I believe in God, a God that takes care of me in heaven and on earth, then it is very easy to get me to die for God.”

Raouf didn’t believe in God, at least not since his first year at college. “I’d sit in classes and listen to my teacher’s lectures about Aquinas and religious persecution, freedom of thought and Voltaire, and I realized they weren’t just talking about the history of thought in Christendom; they were talking about the Muslim world now; they were talking about Egypt. You have to pay attention, because they can’t be too obvious, but if you know what you’re listening to, it’s there.”

Raouf specialized in texts of dissimulation, Muslim writers who used the language of Islam to criticize it. He handed me a book by a linguist who, as Raouf explained it, casually notes that there were many Persian words in the Quran. “And then, about a hundred pages later,” Raouf said, “he mentions that Muhammad spent a lot of time with one of his companions, who happened to be Persian. The writer never says so explicitly, but his meaning is clear. If the Quran is an Arabic Quran, a message given in Arabic by God, then the Persian words in the text suggest that there was another influence on the Quran, not divine, but human.”

He pulled another volume down from his shelves. “This is by an Iraqi Marxist who tried to separate Muhammad as a prophet of God
from the political leader. So he writes that Muhammad’s assassination of a Jewish leader was a wise political move, but the implication is that the assassination wasn’t ethical. The writer gives himself away as a critic just by offering his own opinion, even if he praises the action. The fundamentalist scholars give no opinions; they just describe what happened. That’s how you know when someone is not a fundamentalist—when they make a comment. And this is who the fundamentalists fear, scholars who know the history and the precedents as well as the fundamentalists themselves.”

I told him he would make a good fundamentalist.

“I would be a great fundamentalist,” he said. “I know all the texts; I know all the arguments against the texts. And I respect the fundamentalists. They know how to make arguments, and they understand the logic of the system they’re working in.”

“So what’s kept you from becoming a fundamentalist?”

“Philosophy is my fundamentalism. Doubt, skepticism, and this isn’t the subject of the fundamentalists.”

“But since you know Kant, Descartes, Voltaire, you’d make an even better fundamentalist since you’d know those arguments and could put them down.”

“Yes, but I believe those arguments. I can’t refute them, which is why I’m not a fundamentalist. I am probably not really even a Muslim anymore. I tried to talk to my friends about things I’m interested in, about Islam, about our history, but I gave up. You can’t talk about Islam or Islamic culture; all people want to know about is ritual, the right way to wash yourself before prayer, the correct way to pray or fast. I used to hate Islamic culture. I looked around and compared us to the West and saw we had no intellect and no material wealth. I was interested in Greek philosophy, Plato, Aristotle. But then I started reading more Islamic history, the early periods, and it was the first time I was proud. Muslims had wide experience of other cultures, including their own, and interest in them. I was so happy. I saw that in the past we had intellectuals, wealth, humor. Religion was just an
aspect of life, not all of it. And now you have twenty-year-old women reading Ibn Taymiyya.”

Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) was a Muslim jurist, and one of the intellectual forefathers of the Islamist movement, a predecessor of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the Salafis, and Sayyid Qutb. Ibn Taymiyya’s current popularity in Egyptian intellectual life rests largely on a single fact: he gave a ruling seven hundred years ago that was used by Islamist militants to justify the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat. “The Islamists said he collaborated with an enemy of Islam in signing the treaty with Israel,” Raouf says.

Sadat was murdered on October 6, 1981, the eighth anniversary celebration of the war with Israel that Egypt counted as a victory. Sadat’s assassin, a junior officer in the Egyptian military, Khaled al-Islambouli, approached the reviewing stand at Cairo Stadium and opened fire on the president, whose peace treaty with Israel and realignment from Moscow to Washington spelled the end of Nasserism. Sadat had restored Egyptian pride with the army’s performance in the 1973 war and with his recovery of the Sinai in his peace deal with the Israelis, although that agreement also set him at odds with the rest of the region and his domestic rivals. Riddling Sadat’s body with bullets, Islambouli, a member of Islamic Jihad, shouted, “Death to the pharaoh,” a protest against the Egyptian leader’s ostensibly non-Islamic values, and also, strangely, an echo of the Hebrew Bible, where there are no Muslims for the pharaoh to repress but only Jews.

I asked Raouf if his sister justified Sadat’s assassination. “No, she’s not interested in politics, just in how to be a good Muslim. She reads Ibn Taymiyya on personal conduct, like how to pray, how to wash before prayer. Islam is good for her. She does social work for the poor; I respect her. We just have different ideas.”

When it was time to go, Raouf restacked his books on the shelves. “I don’t like to leave these books out for my sister to find them,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” We were going to
meet one of the Islamists who had been rounded up in the aftermath of Sadat’s murder. Raouf was more excited than I was to meet him, one of the public faces of the group whose war against Egypt shaped his childhood.

 B
y the time we got to Montasser al-Zayyat’s law office downtown, the reception room was already filled with clients, almost all of them women, whose husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers were being held as members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist group that throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s targeted politicians, policemen, intellectuals, foreign tourists, and the Coptic Christian minority. The Islamist war against the Egyptian state and Egyptian society left more than thirteen hundred dead in the 1990s alone. Many Gama’a members were still being detained illegally, even though the organization’s bloody career had essentially ended in 1997 when it declared a unilateral truce with the government. Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s unofficial membership was at one point reckoned in the tens of thousands, drawing recruits mostly from prisons and universities, like Cairo University, where Zayyat was studying law when he became affiliated with them after a stint in the Muslim Brotherhood. Since it is against the law to belong to al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, or any political group based on religion, Zayyat describes himself as a spokesman for the group.

“Our fight now is not to be excluded from society,” Zayyat said, multitasking. He was fielding phone calls on his land and mobile lines, answering e-mails, and checking the Web site of a local soccer team. “Our aim is to get back to our original message of peace and preaching, and to reconcile with the Egyptian people.”

A barrel-chested man in his late fifties with a fistful of beard modeled the way the Prophet of Islam supposedly wore it, Zayyat spent three terms in prison, one during which he befriended Ayman al-Zawahiri, long before the emir of Egyptian Islamic Jihad signed
on with bin Laden. “We met in ’81 and spent three years together,” said Zayyat. Both of them had been rounded up with hundreds of other suspects in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination. Zayyat said he still considered Zawahiri a friend, even though he had publicized his disagreement with the Al Qaeda lieutenant in an e-mail exchange a year after 9/11 and then later written a book about his former prison-mate,
The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right-Hand Man.
While Zawahiri and the former Gama’a head Omar Abdel Rahman, held in a U.S. federal penitentiary for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, continued to preach armed struggle, Zayyat was now against it. “I refuse violence,” he told me. “I denounce it from conviction.”

This was what jailed Gama’a leaders said, too. They insisted that religious study led them to reject their violent legacy, but there’s little doubt that their self-reflection was at least partly prompted by the Egyptian government’s own ruthlessness.

Hosni Mubarak famously warned that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would give birth to a hundred more bin Ladens, that a crusade against jihadis would just recruit more jihadis from all over the Muslim world. However, the fear of breeding Zawahiri clones never deterred the Egyptian president from conducting a brutal campaign against his own Islamist enemies. He operated under the conviction that overwhelming force stops those determined to do violence and gives everyone else good enough reason not to try it. And he was right. It is not violence against jihadis that recruits jihadis. (Had the United States not invaded Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been content to stay home in his native Jordan and watch TV.) It is jihad that recruits jihadis, bringing them into a perpetual war against the nonbelievers: it is a fourteen-hundred-year-old political institution that is like a bottomless cup filled to the brim with the martial energies of young men who, as all Arab rulers know, must be either used to advantage or killed, lest they turn on the ruler. If we want to know how Arab rulers deal with jihad, we should ignore
Mubarak’s self-serving warning to the Bush administration and take note of his actions. Any Egyptians who might have been motivated by Mubarak’s violence to take up arms against the regime soon discovered that the government’s capacity for violence and cruelty was much more formidable than their own.

“There was no way to bring down the Egyptian government through armed struggle,” Zayyat says. “We were losing this cycle of violence. It weakened us.” With most of its leadership and military wing imprisoned, deceased, or exiled, Gama’a had no choice but to sue for peace. Its cease-fire, in effect a surrender, was in order by 1997.

At any rate, Zayyat insisted, it was the regime that made the Islamists violent in the first place. “Starting violence was the government’s trap to make the people hate us,” he explained. Raouf gave me a sidelong glance to remind me that I was listening to one side in what is effectively a family quarrel.

“The government pushed you into killing tourists, journalists, and Coptic Christians?” I asked.

“Starting violence was a trap,” said Zayyat, looking back at his computer screen. “It stimulates anger and leads to counteraction against violence. The murders in prison, the detentions, made the groups want revenge.”

Zayyat is a pretty affable fellow with a flair for self-promotion that’s made him a darling of Cairo’s foreign and Arab press corps—everyone’s favorite Islamist, as one Egyptian reporter told me. He has given his version of Egypt’s civil war to so many visiting journalists that he is perhaps the man most responsible for disseminating the myth that it was the cruelty of the Egyptian government that made the Islamists wage war. That version has been widely accepted not only by the press but also by foreign governments, including the Bush White House.

The idea goes something like this: the Arab ruling order is so corrupt and repressive that Arab citizens have no other outlet to express their political selves except through ideologies as bloody minded as
the regimes themselves. Sayyid Qutb, Al Qaeda’s intellectual godfather, was tortured in prison, which only made him angrier and more likely to preach armed revolt; and the same was true for Zawahiri, also allegedly tortured by the Egyptians. Like Qutb and Zawahiri, the 9/11 attackers were all in effect created by an Arab political establishment that refused to take responsibility for its own citizens and instead deflected anger at itself toward others, like the United States. As one American journalist neatly summed it up, 9/11 was born in the dungeons of Egypt.
¹

The assumption behind this theory, and all theories purporting to explain the root causes of Islamic terror—for example, that it is the product of dire economic conditions, or is an expression of legitimate political grievances against the West—is that political violence in the modern Middle East is a deviation from the norm that requires a theory to explain it. The reality is very different. In the Middle East, political violence is not an anomaly. It is the normal state of affairs.

 L
et us pick up the Salafi thread we left off last chapter with Muhammad ‘Abduh. One of ‘Abduh’s chief disciples, also his biographer, was Rashid Rida, born in 1865 near Tripoli, the largest city in what is today northern Lebanon. In 1897, Rida came to study with ‘Abduh in Cairo, where they started an influential magazine called
Al-Manar
(The Beacon) that Rida published until the end of his life in 1935. Rida’s outlook was conventionally Salafi, holding, like Afghani and ‘Abduh, that the lands of Islam were stagnant not because of the faith but because Muslims had “deviated from the principles of public law as they had been decreed at the time of the rightly guided caliphs,”
²
and that a reform effort embracing science and technology would bring the
umma
up to speed with the West.

For Rida, the origin of the
umma’s
problems went back to a specific historical moment in the seventh century, when Mu‘awiya, the
Syrian governor who wrested the caliphate from Ali, handed the post to his own son. In the wake of that decision, the caliphate came to be decided by violence and bribes, sending Islam off of the true path.

With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, Rida saw that trying to save the Ottoman caliphate was a hopeless cause. If the caliphate were to continue in some form, Rida believed, it had to return to the Arabs, the lifeblood of Islam and whose language was the only tongue in which Islam could properly be studied and discussed.
³
Rida was not an Arab nationalist, though it is in his work that Salafism is first scored with a pronounced Arabist strain. But by casting a cold eye on the Ottomans, Rida began to consider the historical reality of the caliphate: there was the “ideal caliphate” of the
rashidun
that lasted about forty years, and the “actual caliphate” of more than thirteen hundred years in which tyranny was the norm.
⁴
Still, in spite of this dismal track record, Rida maintained that it was “the archetype of government.” What it needed was a refitting for the modern age, which Rida provided by proposing that the caliphate be equipped with a prototype of representative government called
shura.