And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  By then I had learned that the rhetoric of the Brotherhood and Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (or Islamic Group, a party that advocated the most austere form of Sunni Islam) was only the outward manifestation of deeper rage that could not be sated by praising Allah and extolling virgins who smelled like mangoes. This rage could only find expression in violence, as I learned when my phone at the paper rang on the afternoon of September 18, 1997, two days after my twenty-fourth birthday.

  ONE

  THE OFFICES OF THE MIDDLE East times were in the Zamalek neighborhood of Cairo, on an island in the Nile. Zamalek was a cosmopolitan oasis, with nineteenth-century apartment blocks and villas. It was known for its restaurants and cafés and was a favorite of European expats. You could go into a restaurant in Zamalek, find a waiter who spoke English, and get a beer and Western food.

  When the phone rang at midday, one of our tipsters said there had been a shooting on a tourist bus in front of the Egyptian Museum. The museum is in Tahrir Square, the busiest part of downtown, the Times Square of Cairo. The newspaper was a short hop away. You go across one bridge and you’re almost there. I jumped in a cab and arrived five minutes later. Our tipster had been fast because the attack had just happened.

  The scene was chaotic. The bus was still burning. The police and soldiers had their guns drawn but hadn’t put a cordon around the bus. They were still looking for the attackers. I got on the bus and looked down the rows of seats and didn’t see any blood.

  I just saw people who were melted to their Styrofoam seats. Fat was dripping off them because they had literally been roasted alive. Some were dead on the floor because when the attacker got on the bus, he killed the driver, opened fire with his assault rifle, and then started lobbing Molotov cocktails. Nine German tourists were killed.

  It was so senseless. These people were just going to the Egyptian Museum. They had done nothing wrong. It was the opposite of a crime of passion. It was a calculated crime to achieve a political objective. The militants wanted to hurt the Egyptian government by scaring tourists away. By killing Christian tourists the attackers could also claim they had struck a blow against the infidels.

  This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn’t violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn’t the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city.

  The attack on the bus showed the dark side of the fundamentalist mentality—the rage, the anger, the hate, the feeling of being left behind by history, the sense that Islam was under attack and needed to defend itself. The gunmen at Tahrir Square, and the terrorists who have gone on murderous rampages since then, see themselves as vigilantes for Islam. In their twisted minds, they are serving the greater glory of Islam.

  Two months after the Cairo museum attack, assailants dressed as security guards and armed with automatic weapons and knives approached the Temple of Hatshepsut, the queen pharaoh, in Luxor in southern Egypt. They went on a forty-five-minute killing spree in the temple, mutilating many victims with machetes. Four Egyptians and fifty-eight tourists, including thirty-six Swiss and ten Japanese, were killed. The savagery was breathtaking. The gunmen shoved leaflets identifying themselves into the mouths and wounds of victims. As they fled to the hills, one terrorist was wounded by police, then shot dead by his compatriots. The five other attackers, taking refuge in a cave, machine-gunned themselves to death rather than be captured.

  I count Tahrir Square and Luxor as the first al-Qaeda–style attacks. They were savage attacks, what terrorism experts and security officials would later call “spectacular.” They were designed to be both brutal and headline grabbing. Within months, in February 1998, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and three compatriots announced a “jihad against Jews and crusaders.” That August, hundreds were killed in simultaneous bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

  I had been looking into the militant groups and started digging deeper after the Luxor attack. The name that kept coming up—this was before the declaration of jihad—was al-Zawahiri. An Egyptian surgeon from a prominent family, he had lived in an affluent neighborhood of Cairo called Maadi before going off to Afghanistan to fight with bin Laden. He was bin Laden’s right-hand man and became al-Qaeda’s leader after bin Laden was killed in 2011.

  I think of bin Laden as an angry historian. He was quite widely read and thought a lot about what he was doing and why. He was eloquent and soft-spoken. He didn’t come across as bloodthirsty. He was a bit effeminate in his mannerisms and in his speech. His speeches were hard to understand because they were so full of poetry. He obviously thought of himself more as a philosopher and spiritual guide than as someone who mixed explosives.

  The anger of people such as bin Laden came from what they witnessed in their own lives, but it also had deeper roots. It dated to AD 610, when the Archangel Gabriel came to Mohammed and roughly demanded that he “recite” Allah’s dictation, which the Prophet did for twenty-three years. These words from Allah were written down by his followers (Mohammed was illiterate) and collected in the Koran. Islam offered an appealing message: that all men are equal in prayer, humbled together in communal submission, rich and poor side by side. Mohammed kept the rites of the new faith simple and conversion easy. He asked for five daily prayers, a weekly gathering with a short sermon, partial fasting for a month each year, and a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, called the hajj, for those who could afford it.

  From the beginning, Islam also provided the foundation for an empire. Unlike Christianity, Islam had no concept of what in more recent times became the separation of church and state. Islam expanded by conquest as well as by conversion. The early Muslims were hardy and effective fighters, attacking in small bands and retreating into the desert. After Mohammed’s death, Islam spread rapidly into the Persian and Byzantine empires despite internecine strife that resulted in the assassination of three of its first four caliphs, the “successors” to Mohammed and rulers of the faithful. Those early assassinations led to the split between Sunnis and Shiites, battle lines drawn fourteen centuries ago that US troops would encounter, and help reignite, in Iraq. There is no distinction between modern and ancient history in the Middle East. No region is more obsessed with its own past. Islam began as a force to be reckoned with, and Muslims have longed to return to their former glory.

  Christianity, by contrast, spent three centuries in the shadows, dodging Rome’s irregular but sometimes massive persecutions. Its fortunes began to change in 312 when Emperor Constantine the Great embraced the Christian God as his protector and then, in an audacious and revolutionary move, not only legalized Christianity but made it the empire’s officially favored religion. He moved the seat of his empire from Rome to Byzantium, soon to be renamed Constantinople (which became Istanbul after it was conquered by a Muslim-led army in 1453). Through divisive councils and synods, Christianity refined and established itself over the next several hundred years.

  In the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the Islamic world was a main center of culture and civilization. It was a leader in astronomy, algebra, and poetry, experiencing a golden era as Europe sank into the Dark Ages. While Vikings were plundering Europe, Muslims were translating Aristotle, building libraries, and developing surgical procedures. Muslims today know about this golden age and are nostalgic about it. There are costume dramas about this period on television in the Arab world every Ramadan. They are extremely popular.

  The Crusades, waged intermittently from 1095 to 1291, but which continued in waves for centuries after that, were military campaigns sanctioned principally by the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land. American students barely learn about the Crusades, but they are essential to understanding the wars of the las
t decade.

  As Islam spread after Mohammed’s death, Muslim armies began to threaten the great eastern Christian empire founded by Constantine, Byzantium. Constantine founded Constantinople and with it the seat of Christian Rome in AD 330, but within only three centuries Islam was already challenging it. Byzantium tried to fight back, but the armies of Islam were winning. By the end of the eleventh century, Byzantium was so weakened and frightened by the growth of its Muslim neighbor that the emperor in Constantinople reached across the Mediterranean to ask fellow Christians in Europe to come to their rescue. By now European Christians were pulling themselves out of the Dark Ages and were in a position to help. Those wars, launched by Europe to save Byzantium and free Jerusalem from Muslim occupation, were the Crusades. They were ping-pong wars, some won by Christians, others by Muslims. From a Muslim perspective, modern wars launched by Christian powers into Islamic lands are still considered Crusades because they reflect the same basic East vs. West, Islam vs. Christianity, power struggle. When President Bush said he was launching a crusade after 9/11, many Muslims took his words at face value. The medieval Crusades left both Muslims and Christians politically and militarily exhausted. But the worst was yet to come. The two sides were about to be blindsided by a people from the harsh plains of Asia. The Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his descendants came like tidal waves. Constantinople was saved by negotiations and its three layers of walls, but Baghdad wasn’t as fortunate. In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad and executed the caliph. Several accounts say he was rolled in a rug or put in a sack and trampled by horses. Others say he was strangled or locked in a cell and starved to death.

  Mosques and libraries in Baghdad were burned. Estimates of the number killed range from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand. The Mongol armies pursued a scorched-earth strategy. If Muslims surrendered, their cities were spared. If they resisted, every living thing was destroyed. The destruction of Baghdad ended the classical Muslim empires established by Mohammed’s successors. The Mongols killed the first and most glorious Arab caliphate.

  From the debris left by the Mongols, new Muslim empires rose, absorbing both the shattered Arab caliphate and emasculated Byzantium. It was the time of the House of Osman, the Ottomans as they came to be known, a Turkish Muslim tribe. For six hundred years, the Ottomans, “the Turk,” as they were called in Europe, would rule Islam’s most extensive empire. The Arab caliphate was weakened by the Crusades and killed by the Mongols. The Turkish Ottomans picked up the pieces and forged a massive Islamic empire.

  The Ottoman Empire grew so powerful that it was finally able to deliver on Mohammed’s prophecy and capture Constantinople for Islam. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II camped just outside Constantinople’s walls. He fought with the conviction that the world should have only one leader, him, and one religion, Islam. Once again, Constantinople’s triple wall was its greatest defense. Mehmed had engineers tunnel under the walls to collapse them from below. He forged massive cannons to blast through. Finally, the walls of Constantinople, and with them all of Byzantium, came crumbling down. In May 1453, Mehmed entered Constantinople as conqueror, the title by which he’s still remembered. He was only twenty-one years old.

  The victorious Muslim armies turned Hagia Sophia, Christendom’s most monumental church, into a mosque. Minarets were added. The axis of the floor was even shifted so that it faced Mecca instead of Jerusalem. It would be as if St. Peter’s were realigned so that its altar faced Saudi Arabia. Constantinople, seat of the Christian Roman Empire for more than a millennium, was now the capital of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

  As the Ottomans grew stronger and the eastern Mediterranean more hostile, Europe began to look for new territory and new markets. They turned their attention west, searching for a new world. In 1492, just forty years after the fall of Constantinople, Columbus landed on America’s shores.

  But the Ottoman Empire was mainly agrarian and was steadily undone by technology and debt. The Ottomans never had an industrial revolution. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe had developed steam engines, trains, cotton mills, and factories. The Ottomans desperately wanted European technology and exports, and they borrowed heavily to get them. They ended up leveraging their empire into the poorhouse. By the 1900s, the Ottoman Empire was effectively run by European creditors and foreign embassies based in the upscale neighborhood of Pera, on a hilltop overlooking Hagia Sophia, the long-lost church.

  As World War I approached, the empire was clearly dying. In 1908, a mysterious group of men who came to be known as the Young Turks pushed aside the tyrant Sultan Abdul Hamid II, turning him into a figurehead. The Young Turks were nationalists who worried that the European industrial powers were heading for war and that once it was over, the winners would carve up the Ottoman Empire.

  They were absolutely right. The Young Turks were desperate to find a European ally. The empire was too big, and too strategic, standing right between Russia, Germany, Britain, and France, to stay neutral. The Young Turks reached out to Britain and France, but were rebuffed. Britain didn’t think the Ottomans, crippled with foreign debt and lacking a modern army, could offer much help in the war effort. The Young Turks ultimately made what would be the worst decision in the Ottoman Empire’s six-century history. In October 1914, they entered the war in alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor and king of Prussia. In short, they chose the losing side in a war that was to redraw the borders of what was then much of the known world.

  After the war, at Sèvres, France, and other conferences, European leaders divided up the Ottoman Empire into the modern Middle East. Ottoman provinces were re-formed and cobbled together into states. The region was carved up with little regard to ethnic, religious, or territorial concerns. The flawed and cavalier treaties of World War I explain to a large degree why the Middle East remains unstable and angry today. Every Muslim schoolchild is taught this arc of history and resents it: Islam’s golden era of the Arab caliphate, the Crusades, the Mongol devastation, the rise of the Ottomans, World War I, the carving up of the Middle East by Europe, and the poverty, weakness, and wars in the Muslim world of the last century. This is the basic and sad narrative taught at every mosque, and it has the benefit of being broadly accurate. Osama bin Laden preached this arc of history as well. He obsessed over it. His solution for changing it was to attack the West’s greatest power, the United States, the modern crusader, bring it down, and push history’s reset button so Islam could rise again.

  There is a problem of course with this general historic narrative. It blames every problem Muslims face on the West. Another way of explaining the Middle East’s chronic instability for the last century is that the Islamic world, which embraces all Muslims as brothers and sisters, has failed to adjust to the nation-state system that replaced the empires that rose and fell but dominated civilization until World War I.

  Even carefully drawn borders after the First World War would have been problematic in a region that had no concept of nation states or parliaments. But the European victors made a total hash of it. Ethnic minorities were divided and put in different states. The Kurdish people were scattered among five nations. Syria was reduced to a tiny fraction of the powerful Ottoman province it once was, even more insulting since it had once been a capital of the early caliphate. Iraq was cobbled together with different Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds and given almost no access to the sea. A Jewish entity was established by mandate in Palestine (it became the state of Israel in 1948). World War I and the treaties and promises made by Europeans after it left the Middle East hopelessly divided.

  The Arab caliphate, which had survived the Crusades only to be destroyed by the Mongols, had been reborn with the Ottomans. Now in the modern era, while Americans landed men on the moon and Western science sequenced the human genome, the house of Islam was in pieces and humiliated, the shrapnel from a giant explosion, the afterthought of victorious European powers. This great decline is the basic grievance in the Middle East. It is wh
y Osama bin Laden went to war with the West. It is why the United States has been able to do little to stop Islamic radicals who see nation-building as an attempt to reinforce a foreign system, trickery under the banner of democracy.

  Ironically enough, the United States had almost nothing to do with the age-old conflict between Islam and the West. The founding of Constantinople, the birth of Islam, and the Crusades occurred centuries before North America was even colonized. The United States was only peripherally involved in creating the borders of the Middle East after World War I. This centuries-old conflict was not America’s fight, but Washington blundered into it and chose to make stabilizing the Middle East its main foreign policy objective.

  After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, the United States became the guardian of Middle East stability. Islamic fundamentalists believe the United States has been policing a Middle East full of divisions that were deliberately put there to keep the region weak, keep Israel secure, and keep pro-American autocracies in place in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and, until 1979, Iran—in short, to keep Muslims locked in a nation-state system that thwarted the rightful destiny of Islam. The fundamentalists were convinced that it was Israel and the Jews who really understood this game, using American muscle to keep Islam at bay.

  I think of bin Laden as a violent and angry historian, but he left major gaps. In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means “through war,” so it is a militant movement seeking an “originalist” form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East.