by Kim Ghattas
Good morning dear Tehran … Good morning of victory … of reaching the goal. We sang our joy, we told poems, we rode our dreams …
Thus went the ode to revolutionary Iran in the words of Egypt’s poet of the people Ahmad Fouad Negm. Sung in irreverent verses by his partner, the hugely popular blind singer Sheikh Imam, “Good Morning Tehran” was hummed across the Arab world.
Iran’s revolution raised many questions for Islamists in Egypt: Why can’t we replicate this here? Why is the opposition in Egypt unable to channel revulsion at the establishment into a similar uprising that will overthrow the government? Islamist students concluded it was a structural problem. The religious establishment in Iran was independent of the government; it was much more organized, with a long history of activism against the ruler. In Egypt, the religious establishment was subservient to the government. The country’s highest Islamic institution, Al-Azhar, had never played much of an opposition role, even against British colonialism. Every government since the 1800s had tried to control Al-Azhar, but Nasser had understood the challenge such an institution could pose to his rule as he struggled against the Muslim Brotherhood. He practically turned it into an arm of the state, putting the government in control of its finances and the president in charge of appointing its leadership. Outside Al-Azhar, there were rabble-rousing preachers, like Abd al-Hamid Kishk, whose sermons were copied onto cassette tapes that sold tens of thousands—the ones that Jamal Khashoggi was listening to in Jeddah. But Kishk was no Khomeini. And yet the maelstrom of forces at play in 1979 was about to produce another small but key event: a meeting between two young university graduates. This pair of Islamists would introduce violence to the national stage, changing the course of Egypt’s history and of political Islam.
* * *
Karam Zuhdi was a twenty-seven-year-old agricultural studies graduate who came from a poor, conservative family and was now focused on studying Islamic law. He was one of the founding members of the Gama’a, but he was an impatient man—proselytizing was slow work. Mohammad Abd al-Salam Farag was the same age, an electrical engineer working as an administrator at Cairo University. Thin and wiry, with a short, neatly trimmed beard, Farag was a restless reactionary; in his sermons in mosques, he preached revolution. He was inspired by the great ideologues of his youth: Sayyid Qutb of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who had been executed in 1966, and Abu A’la al-Mawdudi, the founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami. Qutb had been introduced to Mawdudi’s ideas through one of the Pakistani thinker’s disciples, and while in prison Qutb had read a copy of Mawdudi’s book The Four Expressions. He had been deeply affected by it, and he expanded in his own writings on key concepts elaborated by Mawdudi, such as the idea that the jahiliyya, the pagan era of ignorance before Islam, had not in fact ended with the prophet Muhammad, because no ruler was truly governing according to the tenets of Islam. The answer, in Mawdudi’s eyes, had to be the hakimiyya, the rule of God, or God’s sovereignty, through the full application of God’s word: the Quran. Khomeini had opted for revolution, but Mawdudi believed a true state of Islam would be born when society, through slow methodical proselytizing and education, embraced the shari’a by itself. Even Qutb—though he asked urgently in his writings “What is to be done?”—counseled patience.
Farag had no patience: the answer was action now. In his eyes, Egyptian society had already embraced religion and was basically sound. The problem was with the rulers: remove them and a true Islamic society would be revealed. He published a badly, quickly written book compiling the wisdom of past radical theologians and called it Neglected Duty. That duty, the obligation of every Muslim, was jihad, a pressing call to action to remove leaders who were not ruling through shari’a. In Arabic, jihad means “to strive or struggle,” and in a religious context the greater jihad is the constant struggle against evil to conform to God’s ideals, while the lesser jihad in Islam is the military struggle to defend the religion or the community. Taken further by Salafist jihadists it becomes a war to impose a single interpretation of God’s ideals and an Islamic society. Farag had Sadat in his sights, and he’d persuaded Zuhdi and the Gama’a to join him on this mission. Qutb would forever be known as the learned ideologue whose erudite writing inspired generations of Salafists and jihadists. But it was Farag who had written the pamphlet to action and founded the Islamic Jihad, the same organization that Ayman Zawahiri, of future al-Qaeda infamy, would take over in the 1980s.
Inspired by Iran, angry at their own country, Islamists started hoarding weapons. Violence was in the air. The dividends of peace with Israel and friendship with America were nowhere to be seen other than in television ads for fancy products most Egyptians could not afford to buy. Corruption was endemic, the gap between rich and poor growing rapidly, and mismanagement of the economy was a disaster: Egypt, a country that had been an exporter of agriculture goods, was now reliant on imports for half its foodstuffs. Opposition to the peace treaty was building.
“Shaking with fear, shaking with fear,” went Negm’s poem. “Those who danced in Carter’s lap, those who traveled to Golda Meir, they are shaking with fear.”
In early September 1981, sensing danger, Sadat launched a purge. He ordered a wave of arrests, netting some three thousand people, not only Islamists but also leading leftists and socialists as well, including the feminist activist Nawal al-Saadawi and the renowned journalist and author Mohammad Heikal. Sadat had managed to unite a very disparate group of people who had one thing in common: opposition to his peace treaty with Israel.
Sadat, the imperial president, stood his ground, giving speeches and interviews to defend his actions. He only made things worse. After having harassed and hounded the left all this time, he was mocking the Islamists he had enabled. He derided the women who wore the full Islamic cloak, “going about like black tents,” and banned the niqab, the face veil with a slit for the eyes; he dissolved all religious student organizations and shut down the summer camps of Islamist groups. And finally he declared there would be “no politics in religion and no religion in politics.” Sadat stooped even lower: he attacked a popular preacher, Sheikh Ahmad al-Mahallawi, the voice of the poor, whose sermons on cassette tapes sold like hotcakes and who had criticized the First Lady. “Now this lousy sheikh finds himself thrown into a prison cell, like a dog.”
Nageh and his friends in the Gama’a Farag and Zuhdi, as well as the Jihad, were choking with rage. Years later, Nageh would wonder what would have happened if the Islamists had somehow found a way to accept Sadat’s peace treaty. The president would likely have acquiesced to many of their other demands, which would have paved the way to their ultimate goal: an Islamic republic to rival Iran. The Gama’a would not have needed to resort to violence; so much would have been different. But in those fall weeks of 1981, the autumn of fury, in those weeks, Nageh and his comrades in the Gama’a were about to sanction the ultimate violent act: the assassination of a leader. Sadat had committed so many mistakes, he had signed his own death warrant.
Farag and Zuhdi had evaded capture when Sadat launched his wave of arrests. They were both on the run, as were Nageh and Abboud Zomor, a decorated army officer who was also a founding member of the Jihad. Farag had broken his leg escaping the police. They all felt hunted by their enemy. It didn’t matter that leftists and Nasserists had also been arrested. Islamists felt that they were the ultimate target and they feared a repeat of the 1954 clampdown by Nasser that had decimated the ranks of the Brotherhood and fed their feverish anger with tales of torture in prison—this was a question of survival; they had to strike first, and strike hard.
The heightened sense of danger accelerated the process; the opportunity was around the corner: a military parade on October 6, in which a young officer who had befriended Farag a year prior would be participating. Khaled Islambouli came from a nationalist and conservative family, in a very Egyptian way: he had gone to a missionary school; his sisters were all university graduates. But the twenty-four-year-old was also a typic
al recruit of Islamists: the son of a lawyer in a small town, recently arrived in Cairo and looking for a new tribe. Farag had taken Islambouli under his wing and given him a copy of Neglected Duty. Islambouli was devout but raised no suspicion among his superiors—though his brother had been picked up in the wave of arrests. He didn’t need to do any secret scouting: he had participated in previous military parades and there would soon be a rehearsal before this year’s event. He reported back to Farag the evening of the rehearsal: he could pull it off. Zomor, the army officer, wanted to wait. He didn’t think Islambouli could carry out the attack. But more important, he envisioned a much broader plan to take over the country, killing its key leaders and seizing army headquarters as well as state radio and television. This required at least two years of preparation, just as it had in Iran, with the building of determined revolutionary committees that would organize protests so large that the army and police would be overwhelmed. But Farag was confident that the assassination of Sadat would create a whole new set of circumstances: it would free the people from their fear, they would “rise as the Iranian masses had risen,” and other pillars of the state would consequently fall. Farag overturned Zomor’s objection and Islambouli convinced the others he could do it.
On September 26, the decision to kill Sadat was put to a vote. The leadership council of the Gama’a approved it. Nageh would often marvel in the years to come about how everything seemed to have aligned perfectly to make the assassination possible: fateful meetings of the mind, serendipitous friendships, access … but mostly opportunity. Theirs was a daring yet simple plot. In the end, Zomor was right. Although the assassination went according to plan, the uprising failed.
* * *
Sadat loved the pageantry of military parades, and the one commemorating the October War, his war, was his favorite. He was wearing a new blue-gray uniform, bedecked with military decorations. He refused, as always, to wear a bulletproof vest. He was relaxed and smiling during the show, puffing on his pipe every now and then as he sat in the front row behind a low five-foot-long concrete wall decorated with Pharaonic motifs in relief. The tension surrounding the purge, the reports of foiled coups were all seemingly forgotten. Two hours into the military parade, at 12:40 p.m., the audience was looking up at the sky, marveling at the Mirage jets swooping above leaving behind a trail of white, red, and blue smoke. No one was paying attention to the slow-moving Soviet military truck that veered to the right, out of the line, and stopped in front of the reviewing stand. Sadat, flanked by his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, and his defense minister, got up, probably expecting the men in the vehicles to salute him. Instead, Islambouli and his crew climbed out of the truck, lobbed a couple of grenades against the concrete wall of the reviewing stand, and started shooting with AK-47s. The attack was so stunning that there was no reaction for a full thirty seconds. Some people thought the grenades were part of the show. The shooting went on for two minutes. Pandemonium broke out among the two thousand guests, as Islambouli cried out: “I killed the Pharaoh.” Sadat had been shot in the neck. Ten others were dead. State television and radio had interrupted its live broadcast as soon as the explosions had rung out and started broadcasting patriotic songs. Only at 6:25 that evening did they start broadcasting Quran recitations, acknowledging what had been true for several hours: Sadat was dead. Within hours, Tehran radio was lauding the “death of the traitor mercenary” who had “joined his old friend Mohammad Reza Shah.”
In the hours that followed the shooting on the reviewing stand, officialdom was gripped by panic. No one knew for sure the extent of the plot beyond the assassination. Zomor headed to Asyut, home of Nageh’s alma mater, and a stronghold of the Gama’a. From there, he hoped he could launch the uprising, making Asyut the nucleus of the new order until Cairo and the rest of the country swung into line. The plotters had managed to recruit an official of the state broadcasting service and provided him with a statement written and recorded by Farag himself calling on Egyptians to rise in the name of religion. The statement asked the armed forces to stay neutral if they could not support the Islamic Revolution. But the statement never aired. For three days, the radio broadcast Quran recitations. The insurrection lasted only for about as long. The masses never rose.
On some level, the Gama’a had misjudged the whole of Egyptian society. Nageh and his friends were buoyed by their successes on campus, heartened by the responses to their preaching of the rightful da’wa, the call to Islam; by the growing readership of their publications; and by the multitude of women around them who were putting on the veil. They were young, brash, and confident in the reach of their messages. They didn’t mix much with those who had differing opinions or worldviews, so they had come to believe they represented a silent majority that had been awaiting this moment to be liberated from oppression. But the Gama’a was still a marginal group in a country of over 45 million people. There was no love for Sadat—but there was also no appetite for an Islamic uprising that would upend the system overnight. The Iranians renamed a street in Tehran to honor Islambouli, but they, too, had misjudged Egypt. The parallels between the two countries, like the parallels between the shah and Sadat, were many but, crucially, Egypt did not have a Khomeini to lead a revolution following the assassination of Sadat. And while Egyptian society was indeed conservative and pious, it had never gone through a forced secularization as the Iranians had, so it never had to yearn for the forbidden, like the veil, banned by the first Pahlavi shah. They did not have to rise to demand more religion in their life; those who wanted it could have it. Sadat’s vice president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped in as president and quickly asserted his control.
A few weeks after the assassination, Nageh’s luck ran out. He’d been on the run for almost a month, hiding in fields, surviving on the generosity of villagers and the network of fellow Islamists, but someone had ratted him out. He was arrested in a small village in the governorate of Asyut. He had heard the news of Sadat’s death on the radio and felt a calm sense of achievement, a matter-of-fact assessment of a job concluded. Thousands of Islamists had already been picked up, and the key leaders and members of the plot from Gama’a and Jihad were already in custody by the time Nageh landed in a cell. Most of the details of the plot had been tortured out of the detainees, sparing Nageh the worst of the investigators’ wrath. Or at least that’s the version of events he would maintain in the years to come. Whatever torture he endured, Nageh would never speak of it. He remembered the anger that had built in young men’s hearts hearing the stories of the Brothers suffering in jail under Nasser. It swelled and it swelled for years, until it exploded in Sadat’s face, even though he had in fact legally banned torture in prison. Now, under Mubarak, torture was officially back, and the methods used by the security forces were more sadistic and humiliating than ever before. Nageh would spend twenty-four years in jail; he would mellow and renounce violence. One day, he would apologize to the Egyptian people and even in person to Sadat’s daughter for the assassination of the Believer President.
But long before that, others would be released, still young and hardened with rage, their bodies scarred by indescribable abuse. One of them was a young doctor from the wealthy Cairo neighborhood of Ma’adi, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He had been convicted of participating in the planning of the assassination and dealing in weapons. He was sentenced to three years in jail. He was a leading member of the Islamic Jihad and would take over the organization from Zomor. Zawahiri had traveled to Peshawar in 1980 for relief work with the Red Crescent and even crossed into Afghanistan a few times. After he was released in 1984, he returned to his medical practice. By 1985, he was in Jeddah. Osama bin Laden was there too, already running a pipeline of money and mujahedeen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) to Afghanistan.
* * *
On October 10, 1981, Ebtehal Younes, a thirty-year-old French literature professor with dark brown almond eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, sat at home, in silence, watching Sadat’s funeral procession. Outside, Cairo was
quiet (so quiet it became the title of a BBC documentary about the assassination and funeral: Why Was Cairo Calm?). The streets were not thronged by millions as they had been for the funeral of the Arab hero Nasser, when time stopped and mourners poured into the streets five hours before the start of the funeral procession, hanging from lampposts and balconies to get a view. That day, a delirious crowd of men and women cried as they walked through the streets and radio stations across the Arab world broadcast the event or Quran recitations. On the day of Sadat’s funeral, the silence was eerie. The Believer President had shocked his nation and the Arab world with his peace treaty with Israel and his love affair with America. And he had died like an American president, on television.
Three former American presidents attended, but Ronald Reagan—who had survived an assassination attempt earlier in the year—stayed away for security reasons. Sitting presidents and prime ministers from Germany, Italy, France, and of course Israel all attended. Admittedly, it was a Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, and unrest was still gripping parts of the country, but had Egyptians carried their president in their heart, they would have braved the fear and the security restrictions. Only two Arab leaders, from Sudan and Somalia, traveled to Cairo to join the procession. On the front page of Syria’s official newspaper, Tishreen, a brutal headline: EGYPT TODAY BIDS FAREWELL FOREVER TO THE ULTIMATE TRAITOR.
Ebtehal wasn’t exactly celebrating, but she wasn’t shedding any tears. She too saw Sadat as a traitor to the nation and to Palestine. But in that instant, she overlooked a crucial detail: that his assassins were radical Islamists with a different vision of the future of Egypt and her role in it. She had nothing in common with Nageh or Farag. She didn’t sense the danger. Few people did. Political Islam and violent Islamists were still a marginal force, undetected and unacknowledged, and the assassination looked like a fluke; there was no threat to anyone but those who made peace with the enemy. She should have remembered the sight of young women clad in black from head to toe, distributing veils on campus, or the women-only buses that had started offering their services to female students. Mostly, she should have taken notice of the fundamentalist zealot who had barged into her classroom at Cairo University in the fall of 1979 and beaten her French literature professor with a chain. French was the language of the infidels; it had no place in Egypt. The man looked like a lunatic to her, an exception. In just over a decade, this new generation of zealots and Zawahiri himself would come after Ebtehal and upend her life.
