“I don’t speak Italian,” Abu Omar answered in thickly accented English.
This surprised Ludwig, but he recovered and repeated his request in English. Abu Omar got out his passport, residency permit, and identification card and handed them over. He did not seem surprised at being stopped. Ludwig walked him toward the wall and stood facing the van with Abu Omar facing him, so that the Egyptian’s back was to the van’s sliding cargo door. Ludwig did not notice anyone in the cab up front. The back was windowless.
He quickly saw that Abu Omar’s papers were in order, but he leafed through them slowly to give Bob’s men in the van time to act. Several moments passed. He drew out his perusal further, giving each line of the documents as much scrutiny as it would bear, but still the men in the van did nothing. A minute crawled by, maybe two. Later Ludwig would not be sure whether his perception of time had been accurate or had become elongated, as happens to some people in car wrecks. He pulled the phone without a battery from his pocket and pretended to call a Carabinieri dispatcher to verify Abu Omar’s information. This too he dragged out, but for some time still nothing happened.
Then, suddenly, the passenger door of the van’s cab blasted open—or so it seemed—and a man leaned out and screamed in Italian, “Hey! What are you doing?” Notwithstanding that Ludwig had been hoping for something like this, he was caught completely by surprise. He jumped, and Abu Omar did too. In the next moment, or maybe it was the same, the sliding cargo door of the van tore open with a great rip and crash, and two men leaned out of the hold, grabbed Abu Omar by the shoulders and torso, and heaved him from the ground. They had him inside the van in a second—two seconds at most—and the door slammed shut as quickly as it had opened. A moment later the van’s motor started and the van jerked back into the street, then sped north up Via Guerzoni.
Ludwig remained on the sidewalk, slack-jawed, Abu Omar’s papers in one hand, the cell phone in the other. This was not what he had expected. Later he would not be able to say quite what he had expected, but the abruptness and ferocity were such a shock that his mind’s ability to receive information seems to have been rattled out of him. Of the man in the passenger’s seat, he would later be able to say only that he was puffy-faced and very tan or dark-skinned—Arab, if he had to guess. The men who had grabbed Abu Omar were nothing but heaving arms—faceless, incorporeal, more force than human. Abu Omar, he thought, had neither resisted nor shouted. There simply hadn’t been time.
Stocky recalled him from his bewilderment by shouting, “Come on! Get in!” Ludwig got in the car, and Stocky U-turned, or maybe he had already U-turned—Ludwig was not attending to the details—and drove back north on Via Guerzoni. The van, already far ahead of them, was soon out of sight, and Stocky did not follow. He turned the car toward Piazzale Maciachini, and they drove in silence. Ludwig took the phone Bob had given him from his pocket and set it and Abu Omar’s papers on the dashboard and left them there when he got out at Maciachini. Neither man said goodbye.
He unchained his scooter and rode to his apartment in Piazza Tricolore, named for the Italian flag. The green of the Tricolore is said to symbolize Italy’s fertile valleys, the white its snow-covered Alps, the red its warriors’ blood, spilled in the wars of Resurgence that freed Italy from foreign tyranny. Ludwig fed his dog, then himself, then went back to the office, just another carabiniere.
Chapter 2
A Sirocco
THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD gave the name Hassan, meaning “handsome” or “pleasant,” to his first grandson. According to the hadith, the body of sayings that Muslims attribute to the Prophet, in the afterlife Hassan is to lead the children of Paradise. “Osama,” famously after September 11, 2001, is Arabic for “lion.” “Mustafa” means “the chosen one.” “Nasr” was the name of a house of the medieval Saffarid Dynasty in Persia and means “victory” in Arabic. A child born in Alexandria in 1963 and given the name Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr did not want for decoration.
Alexandria is not what it once was. Founded by Alexander the Great as the port of supply for his Persian campaigns and the new capital of Egypt (replacing Memphis, which returned the snub by refusing to bury Alexander after his death), it became a city of Hellenic splendor and learning and remained so for nearly a thousand years. There Euclid fathered geometry, Herophilos begat anatomy, and Archimedes forwarded his theories on levers and screws. The intellectualism begat tolerance, and people of different creeds lived alongside one another in relative ease. Jews so thrived that for a time the Jewish community was the world’s largest. The Septuagint was produced in Alexandria. Christians were later made welcome, albeit after a rough start: Mark the Evangelist was dragged through the streets until hardly enough was left of him to make a reliquary. (A Coptic church in Alexandria still has what is purported to be his head, but the rest of his remains were smuggled to Venice in 828 to reside in St. Mark’s Basilica.) It is a commonplace in the West that the town degenerated when the Arabs took it in 642 in the great wave of conquest that Muhammad began and his successors continued. But in fact by the time the Arabs arrived, Alexandria’s Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian institutions of knowledge, including its vast library, which was collected by copying the texts of every ship that called at harbor, had already dulled and decayed. The Arabs only accelerated the decline, principally by moving the capital to Cairo. The denouement continued for a millenium, and when Napoleon intruded into Egypt briefly in 1798, staying no longer than a Romantic poet on holiday, he found Alexander’s mighty port a negligible fishing village.
Alexandria, like all Egypt, dates its encounter with modernity to the Ottoman invasion of 1801 and particularly to the rule of the first Ottoman pasha in Egypt, Muhammad Ali. The pasha’s power knew few limits. Early in his reign, he invited hundreds of Mamluks, the former slave-soldiers who had come to dominate Egypt, to his citadel and, after fêting them, had the lot of them murdered—a precedent for dealing with opponents that later rulers of Egypt would appreciate. But Muhammad Ali was no mere brute. He built foundries and factories, hospitals and schools, canals and ports, bridges and railroads, and he turned the valley of the Nile into an immense cotton plantation. Alexandria became a great port once again, cotton flowing through its harbor to the world, and machines and experts to build a nation flowing in. The trade gave rise to subsidiary institutions, and Frenchmen, Ottomans, and Britons sailed to Alexandria and built resplendent banks and accounting firms and mansions in high colonial style. When the British relieved the Ottomans of their rule in 1882, the flavor of Alexandria became more European yet, and by the turn of the century, 100,000 foreigners lived there. They came for money but stayed for other reasons, like the tolerance that still prevailed among the citizens. Alexandria’s Christian and Jewish communities, although reduced during the Arab and Ottoman reigns, had been well accepted by the Muslim majority, and the ecumenicalism continued under the British. Foreigners were also drawn by the Corniche, the graceful palm-lined promenade with the broad bay to one side and handsome cafés and clubs to the other—a sanctum in the heat and poverty of North Africa. After World War I, the British nominally returned control of Egypt to the Egyptians, but Britain retained an enormous influence over the country, and the Europeans who ran the nation’s telegraph companies, railways, and trading houses remained. They continued to make their symbolic capital in Alexandria, which by the middle of the twentieth century was a pleasant bustle of a million beings.
So, at least, did Alexandria seem to Europeans—and to a minority of Egyptians who had profitably attached themselves to the Europeans. Most Egyptians had long held a different view, as Europeans could have seen if they had but looked. Flaubert, on visiting Alexandria in the mid-nineteenth century, observed complacently, “We have had bands of ten or twelve Arabs, advancing across the whole width of a street, break apart to let us pass,” and he quoted his traveling companion, “Whatever happens, I’ll be able to say that once in my life I had ten slaves to serve me and one to chase away the flies.” Egyptians were
less sanguine about chasing away their colonizers’ flies. Among the many other debasements they endured, one for which Alexandria became known was sexual depravity. For a hundred years starting around the time of Flaubert, a class of Europeans came to Egypt generally and Alexandria particularly on what amounted to whoring safaris. Boys rented their mothers to tourists for a few pence, jesters had themselves buggered by animals for public amusement, and ghastly child brothels operated in Alexandria without censure into the middle of the twentieth century. A protagonist in a Lawrence Durrell novel famously synopsized the city “Alexandria, princess and whore. The royal city and the anus mundi.” This state of affairs did not endure.
IN 1952 a postman’s son from Alexandria who had risen to a colonelcy in the army led a coup that overthrew King Faruk, the playboy descendant of Muhammad Ali and bootlick of Britain. Gamal Abdel Nasser soon expropriated nearly all of the property of Europeans in Egypt—their factories, their farms, their banks—some of which he gave to the people and some of which he reserved for the state. The foreigners bayed, but their governments were not ready to war with Nasser, and in the end the bayers left like concertgoers denied an encore. Their departure left a large economic and, in some ways, cultural void, particularly in Alexandria. Nasser thought he could fill it with a nimble socialism. The profits of Egyptian labor that had once passed to foreigners would be redirected to schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure, which would be built and run by and for Egyptians. There would be electricity, clean water, sewers, literacy, and jobs. Of course, there would be costs. Political opposition would have to be forbidden for a time, lest opponents hinder the young socialism, and persistent opponents might need re-education of a forceful, highly unpleasant kind. But Nasser was confident that once Egypt prospered, few would complain.
Had the oil of Kuwait lain beneath him or genius within him, he might have succeeded. Instead, in his eighteen years in power, his economy soured for want of natural resources and intelligent investment. The poor increasingly lived ten or twelve to a room, took unclean water from a tap down the block, endured open sewers where sidewalks should have been, and sent their illiterate or barely literate children into the streets to sell cigarette butts to supplement the family’s meager income. The government meanwhile became an all-fingering oligarchy. Its elite, who grew fat skimming the national pot, gave thick contracts to cronies, sent their children to the best schools at home and abroad, and built sporting clubs and villas that outdid the superfluity of their colonial predecessors. The corruption trickled down to the lowest levels of government, and bakshish was required for even the smallest of services. To open a business, an entrepreneur had to grease the police and other protectors, and for a bright young graduate to find work often required similar lubrication. The bright and young who could leave, did. (The trend continues today: Mohamed Atta, before finding his calling in aeronautic murder, had taken a degree in architecture from Cairo University but left for better opportunities in Germany.) This all would have been bad enough with a stable demography, but in Egypt, as elsewhere in the Third World, the people were multiplying beyond the land’s ability to sustain them and crowding into cities. One million Alexandrians in 1950 were four million by century’s end.
Nasser’s failure was God’s opportunity. The instrument through which He seized it was a young teacher named Hassan al-Banna, who espoused the view that Muslims had succumbed not merely to the West’s armies but, worse, to its worldliness. The Westerner, al-Banna said, worshipped wealth and put ambition over humility, individual over community, and the desires of the body above the needs of the soul. Centuries of colonialism had so contaminated Arabs that they desired little more than to be Westerners themselves. They claimed to be Muslim, but the Islam they practiced was a bastardization, and the wages of their sin were manifest: God had let His people wither under the rule of the corrupt. But al-Banna preached a cure: undiluted piety, which was to say a return to the true Islam of the Quran and hadith.
In 1928, a quarter of a century before Nasser’s coup, al-Banna gave his developing philosophy (it took decades to fully flower into the above) a practical form by founding the Society of Muslim Brothers. “Society” was meant not in the cramped sense of a group or association but in the larger sense of a whole community: a neighborhood, a village, a nation. Al-Banna’s Society offered not just religion but services the government had either failed to provide or provided badly. Where the government left people illiterate, the Brothers held night classes to teach them to read. Where the government left people malnourished, the Brothers sold them meat at cost. Where the government neglected the worker who lost his job, the Brothers pooled wages into unemployment-insurance collectives. As the Brotherhood grew, it founded hospitals and schools, textile factories and labor unions, apartment co-ops and mosques, newspapers and magazines. In its totality, it approached the society al-Banna had imagined, and it was less corrupt than the government. If you stepped into a taxi with a Brother behind the wheel, you could be sure of getting to your destination without being cheated. If you applied for a loan from a Brother’s bank, you need not pay a bribe; often you need not even pay interest. By the time Nasser took power at mid-century, the Brotherhood had grown to 2,000 chapters of perhaps 500,000 members, in a nation of 20 million.
The religion on offer from the Brothers was stern. Islam may be translated “surrender” or “submission,” and a Brother’s submission was expected to be complete. Centuries of Islamic study of the Quran and hadith had determined how a Muslim should dress (baggily, for one’s sex should be hidden), what he ate (no swine, no carrion, no elephant), what he drank (no alcohol), what he read (mainly the Quran and hadith), the songs he sang (not many), the pictures he hung on his wall (also not many), how he prayed, how he played, to whom he talked. Sex, as in other authoritarian religions, was a fearsome power, and the Brothers dealt with it by obliterating woman, who was a trap to ensnare the male believer as he walked Islam’s path. A woman in Brotherly society covered her hair, neck, trunk, arms, legs, feet, and ideally her face and hands. In schools and in hospitals, in mosques and in cafés, women were sequestered, often with back-of-the-bus care, when they were not banned outright. (Many women found comfort in these “protections,” and a few were allowed positions of prominence in the group, provided they did not question man’s preeminence—somewhat as women are in the Catholic Church.)
The Brotherhood held that those who strayed beyond the true Islam were enemies of God, to be won back to Islam if they could, to be condemned if not. It followed that Egypt’s government, which was far more secular than religious, would have to fall to sharia, the body of law based on the Quran and hadith that is best known in the West for the severing of thieving hands and of blasphemous heads. The most extreme of the Brothers wanted sharia not just in Egypt but in all the lands of the medieval caliphate. They envisioned a single holy kingdom, without individual states, stretching from North Africa to South Asia. The Brothers were divided on whether God’s rule should be brought about peacefully or forcefully. Those who argued for peace said that if the Brotherhood continued its good works, fallen Muslims would see the superiority of piety and return to the true Islam, that over time the numbers of the pious would so increase that the governments of men would have to yield to that of God. Those who argued for force said no government would let the Brotherhood (or any other group) threaten its power and that Egypt in particular would crush the Brothers long before sharia arose. If the Brothers wanted to see God’s kingdom on earth, they would have to put it there by the sword, as Muhammad had in Arabia and as his followers had across the Mediterranean and Near East. For authority they cited the Quran, which said, “The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Messenger and who strive with might and main for mischief throughout the land is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.” And, “Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for God loves not
transgressors. And slay them wherever you catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out.”
Al-Banna wavered between violence and peace for several years, but at last he created a militia known as the Secret Apparatus, which might be thought of as the godfather of the many Islamic terrorist groups that have disturbed the world since. At its peak, the Apparatus probably had a few thousand militiamen and was hidden even from much of the Brotherhood. The Apparatchiks bombed hotels and restaurants frequented by the godless and murdered Egyptian officials and British soldiers. In 1948 the Apparatus assassinated King Faruk’s prime minister, but Pyrrhically: six weeks later, the regime assassinated al-Banna. The Egyptian populace was as divided on the violence as the Brothers themselves had been. On the one hand, the people had little sympathy for the decadent autocrats who ruled them—they had got what was coming to them. On the other, murder was appalling, particularly of civilian innocents. For the next half century the Egyptian mood would wander between these two poles, now a little nearer one, now the other.
Although Nasser had given the Brothers a small role in his coup in 1952, once in power he signaled that his modern Egypt had no room for their archaic cause. Two years later a Brother tried to assassinate him as he addressed the nation from a square in Alexandria. (The would-be killer thought God would guide his bullets, but if He did, He was a poor Marksman: eight of His eight shots went awry.) Most Egyptians, still grateful to Nasser for liberating them from the kings of Egypt and England, deplored the attempt, and the liberals of Alexandria were aghast. Nasser responded by banning the Brotherhood, hanging six of its leaders, and sending nearly a thousand of its members (many innocent) to long terms in desert prisons. But an idea is hard to destroy, and the Brotherhood, though banned, did not die. Many of its activities continued underground, and some Brothers cautiously formed groups similar to the Brotherhood. The momentum behind sharia grew.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 3
