As Nasser’s socialism faltered, it was his misfortune to bungle wars against Israel in 1956 and 1967. The failure of 1967, which he shared with Jordan and Syria, was so thorough that Arabs generally and Egyptians particularly asked how they had come to such desolation. Many throughout the Arab world found convincing the Brotherhood’s argument that God was punishing them for leading wicked lives and leaving wicked men in power. They were also comforted by the Brotherhood’s simple cure for these ills. Piety could be achieved by anyone, and collective piety, whether forcefully or peacefully expressed, was easier to understand as a national remedy than, say, improving the balance of trade or entering wiser geopolitical alliances. After 1967 a large subset of Muslims gravitated to the Brotherhood’s hairshirt Islam like down-and-out Pentecostals to snake-handling.
NASSER DIED in 1970 of a bad heart. His successor, Anwar Sadat, wanted little of his socialism, and to balance the leftists who had multiplied under Nasser, he negotiated a détente with the Brothers. They renounced violence, and in exchange he paroled great batches of them from prison and let them preach and organize politically. Officially the group was still banned, but unofficially it was tolerated. Perhaps more important, other Islamist groups were given greater freedom to proselytize, and they gained members quickly. (An Islamist is a Muslim with a fundamentalist view of the Quran and a desire to share it. Some, but by no means all, Islamists believe violence is the best means of sharing.) Sadat seems not to have fully appreciated the power he was dealing with. He apparently thought Islamism was something like an unruly camel that could be pacified with a few dates and bridled, but it was much more akin to a virus, and he had just let it out of quarantine. In 1981, after making peace with Israel, he was assassinated by members of Jihad, one of several extremist groups that had evolved under his détente. Jihad had hoped the assassination would inspire a popular uprising that would culminate in sharia, as had happened in Iran in 1979, but the Jihadis overestimated the Egyptian enthusiasm for both blood and Islam.
Sadat was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, who reverted to a Nasserian intolerance and imprisoned so many thousands of Islamists—some after trials but many not—that he had to build new prisons to house them. Many of the prisoners were tortured, and nearly all were brutalized in one form or another. They defended themselves with prayer and solidarity and found in their persecution a stigmata of their faith. Men who came to prison relatively moderate Islamists became zealots. Zealots were won over to violence. Some of the violent came to support not just insurrection but terrorism. These last reasoned that a government so barbaric could be defeated only with barbarity and that those who enabled the government, whether by action or inaction, would have to suffer. Mubarak had meant to pulverize the movement, but his maul had forged a stronger metal.
Jihad profited from these developments but not as fully as it might have. The group’s leaders remained more interested in trying to decapitate and seize the state than in winning over the millions who might demand more enduring change, so Jihad remained a relatively small group. Not so al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, whose bland name—the Islamic Group—belied its wallop. Founded in 1973 during Sadat’s liberalization, Gamaa flourished among students at Egypt’s badly underfunded and overcrowded universities. Its founders had learned from the Brotherhood’s provision of services, and they offered tutorials, cheap textbooks, lecture notes, and rides to classes. Within a few years, Gamaa was powerful enough to force colleges to adopt Islamist curricula, segregate classes by sex, and silence heretical professors. Eventually, Gamaa expanded its work beyond universities and became more critical of government repression and corruption, thereby earning a more diverse, less educated membership. After Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak imprisoned so many Gamaa militants that it took the group most of a decade to rebuild. When it did, the fire of the prisons was inside it.
In 1992 Gamaa began a campaign of terror against the godless, bombing liquor stores, video stores, and discos and murdering Jews, Copts (the Christians of Egypt), anti-Islamist intellectuals, policemen, mayors, judges, and, most spectacularly, the speaker of Parliament and the head of the counterterror police. In 1995, working with Jihad, Gamaa nearly killed President Mubarak in Ethiopia. In five years in the 1990s, Gamaa and its allies killed more than 1,200 people. Egypt was terrorized.
Mubarak’s trouble in stopping Gamaa was that it consisted of hundreds of unhierarchical cells, one of which was no sooner undone than another struck. His eventual solution was to kill whom he could and terrorize everyone else. When his security services learned a terrorist was in a certain house, they might assault the whole block. When a terrorist wasn’t found, his family might be tortured. After Mubarak’s near assassination in Ethiopia, his security services kidnapped the thirteen-year-old son of a Jihad leader, sodomized him on camera, then blackmailed him to spy on Islamists by threatening to show photos of the sodomy to his family. He was made to recruit another child, who was abused in the same way. (When Islamists discovered their spying, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Jihad’s leader and soon to be second-in-command of al-Qaeda, had the boys executed on videotape and distributed copies as a warning to would-be traitors.) In his crackdown, Mubarak killed at least several hundred people and probably thousands. His interior minister, Zaki Badr, said that if he had his way, he would kill every Islamist militant in Egypt. “I only want to kill one percent of the population,” he explained moderately.
By 1997, Mubarak had crippled Gamaa, and a large faction of its leaders struck the same deal with him that the Muslim Brotherhood had with Sadat—renouncing violence for parole. Not all of Gamaa’s leaders supported the accord. In particular those who had fled Egypt urged their brothers not to surrender, then condemned them when they did and thereafter saw themselves as the last repository of resistance to Mubarak. In November of 1997, several months after the accord, exiles of Gamaa and Jihad organized the slaughter of fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor. As the terrorists had intended, Egyptian tourism was devastated for years. As they had not intended, Egyptian opinion turned on them for good. What little popular support Gamaa had retained through the years of bombings and murder evaporated, and terrorism as a political solution was thoroughly discredited. In 2003 another set of imprisoned Gamaa leaders would be persuaded to renounce violence, and Mubarak, for the moment at least, could claim to have won the fight against terrorism. But for an Egyptian set on violence, there were other places to practice it.
THE ALEXANDRIA to which Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr was born in 1963 was in some respects unrecognizable even from the Alexandria of nine years earlier, when the attempt on President Nasser was made there. The Muslim Brotherhood had thrived in Alexandria—an equal and opposite reaction to the city’s extreme Westernization—and when Westerners were banished from Alexandrian society in the late 1950s and Nasser failed to fill their place, Islamists did. There followed several merciful changes, like the closing of child brothels and the extension of aid to the poor. But there were less welcome changes, like subordination of women and attacks on Jews and Copts. By the end of the 1950s, the Jews were forced to flee en masse, and a community that had survived millennia was, suddenly, gone. Over time nightclubs and beach huts closed, swimsuits yielded to robes and headscarves, and many inland Egyptians who once summered in the city’s cool, literal and metaphorical, stayed away. The city’s boulevards fissured with the national and local economies. Its edifices turned scabrous. In a generation, multicultural, polyglot, and (for some) prosperous Alexandria was remade unicultural, monoglot, and shabby.
The family of Osama Nasr belonged to Alexandria’s remnant upper middle class. His father was a public prosecutor, his mother a housewife. They were Muslim, but they wore their religion without ado, as one wears socks. The young Nasr was a small, sickly child with a slightly deformed femur and was preyed on by schoolyard toughs, whom he learned to fight off. He also learned to take refuge in introversion and long hours of reading in the municipal library. In
high school he became enamored of Marxism and its photogenic propagator Che Guevara, and he decided politics was the life for him. Since Egypt was short on parties of the revolutionary Left, and since his breeding was more liberal than Communist anyway, he joined New Wafd, a reformist party that called cautiously on Mubarak to hold fair elections, restore civil liberties, and guarantee human rights. He took to writing articles for a party organ called Wafd Youth and thought he had a way with words. But as his involvement in Wafd deepened, he became repulsed by its internal power struggles. After watching party members throw fists and chairs at one another at one caucus, he resigned his membership and looked elsewhere for answers to Egypt’s problems.
He found them in the Islamism that was thriving all around him. Its devout solution, he saw, was cleaner and more empowering than Wafd’s messier politics. He attended Islamist lectures and read the Quran with new eyes and had soon made a political conversion so complete that he declared himself a Salafist. Salafism might be thought of as a fundamentalist’s fundamentalism. It holds that Islam was perfect during the Prophet’s generation and the two generations following and that everything added to Islam has been, in essence, rot. He felt no queerness about replacing his previous liberal, democratic view with a conservative, authoritarian one. He felt, he later said, as if he had come home. His parents felt differently. They said his increasing fundamentalism could end only in trouble, and they urged him to desist. His father even locked him inside the house one night to keep him from going to an Islamist gathering. But he persisted, and in the end they let him be. Later his younger brother Hitham chose the same Islamist path. It was symptomatic of the movement’s power that it could draw both sons of a comfortably establishmentarian family.
Nasr enrolled at the University of Alexandria and, his religious rebellion notwithstanding, elected to study law as his father had done. But his passion for Islam was a distraction, and he failed several classes. He almost certainly joined the university’s very active chapter of Gamaa, although he would later sometimes say he did not. He also attended a smallish, radical mosque that was less regulated than the larger mosques at which the government appointed imams and supplied sermons. To keep the less regulated mosques in check, the government sent informers and police to watch them. In 1988, when Nasr was in his third year of law school, he was invited to give a sermon at the mosque, and he chose for his topic political repression in Egypt. As he spoke, he warmed to his subject and denounced several high officials by name. After the service, three policemen in plainclothes met him at the door.
“You got enthusiastic,” one said. “You are under arrest.”
Years later he would say he did not realize he could be arrested for vigorous sermonizing, a perhaps plausible claim since at that moment, several years after Sadat’s assassination and several before Gamaa’s campaign of terror, Mubarak’s government was arresting extremists with some discrimination. The policemen put him in a car and drove him to an office of the State Security Service, where he was made to sit on a chair and blindfolded. An officer started screaming questions at him: When did he begin attending Islamist lectures? Who did he know in the mosques? Why did he speak against the government? Who told him to do it? The officer punctuated his questions with blows—first with fists, then with a stick. After some hours, the questions stopped, and Nasr was driven to a different office and the questions were repeated, only this time the punctuations were shocks with an electrified rod. At the end of the interrogation, he was driven from Alexandria to Tora Prison, outside Cairo, where he was held without trial for six months. During that time he met many Islamists, including members of Gamaa and Jihad, whose piety and commitment to achieving sharia impressed him. Probably he was further radicalized under their influence.
At the end of his term, he was returned to the State Security office in Alexandria, and an officer said he hoped Nasr’s adventure had taught him a thing or two about public speaking. He also said that, having met a lot of members of Gamaa, Nasr would make a useful spy, and he offered him a job as a paid informer. Nasr would later say that he refused, that even had he been tempted by money or fear, Islam forbade him to betray his brothers. He would not be untrue to Islam. But the officer insisted, and when Nasr hesitated, the officer said he would jail his whole family if he did not take the job. Nasr asked for two weeks to think about it—a play for time, he later said—and the officer granted his request and sent him home.
He resolved to flee. He got a student passport, which was not hard to do, but getting across the border was another matter because he was probably now on a registry of political criminals forbidden to leave the country. He heard, however, that a new port of entry had been opened at Nuweiba, on the Gulf of Aqaba, and that either it had no computers or its computers were not yet linked to central computers in Cairo. He decided to try it. He shed his Islamist clothing for Western wear, trimmed his beard, and left Alexandria without telling anyone, not even his family. At Nuweiba he passed through the border station without incident. Either the stories he had heard about the computers were true, or he was lucky.
He traveled by ferry to Jordan, which was not the destination he ultimately desired but would have to do for the moment. His ultimate desire was Europe or, better still, America. He would later say that at the time he practically worshipped the United States and that he had earlier applied for visas to study there and in Europe but had been turned down. Evidently he was untroubled by the contradiction between his admiration of the West and Islamism’s critique of it—a contradiction not entirely unusual in Islamism, several of whose luminaries were educated in or took refuge in the West.
Nasr had chosen Jordan as expedient because it was nearby, because an Egyptian did not need a visa to enter, and because it was poor enough that one could live there on little money. His plan was to work, save, and make his way to Europe to resume his legal studies. But Jordan turned out to be much poorer than he had thought—startlingly so to a bourgeois Alexandrian—and jobs were scarce for a young man who not only knew no trade but had never held a job in his life. The job he finally found was carrying rocks at a construction site, but he was too delicate for the task and soon quit. When he failed to find other work that appealed to him, he asked his Jordanian acquaintances where else he should look, and they told him Yemen. The Yemenis, they said, had a large, uneducated population and were hiring Arabs from abroad to teach their children the Quran. Egyptians did not need a visa to get into Yemen, so after two or three months he quit Jordan for Sanaa. Yemen, however, proved to be already awash in Egyptians teaching the Quran. He managed to find work at a school library, which was more agreeable than hauling rocks, but the pay was slight and he could save nothing. Again he asked the natives where he might find a better life, and this time he was told to go to Pakistan. Pakistan, the Yemenis said, is the place for a man like you. After four or five months in Yemen, he went.
PESHAWAR IS the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. From its tin-makers’ shops and wool-spinning factories, it is a short and not particularly steep climb to the Khyber Pass, beyond which lies the chaos of Afghanistan, battlefield of greater powers since history began. Afghanistan’s modern convulsions started in 1978, when the country fell into civil war, which prompted the Soviet Union to invade and the United States to arm the opposing rebels, some of whom, notoriously, saw in their struggle not merely a resistance to empire but a jihad. The war was—is, depending on how one defines it—nasty, brutish, and long, and millions of shelled and pauperized Afghans sought refuge over the Khyber Pass. With them came holy warriors who set up headquarters in Peshawar, from which they raised money, bought arms, launched raids into the motherland, and in some cases trained terrorists for attacks beyond Afghanistan. The noncombatants who overfilled Peshawar lived in sweeping tent cities whose pitiful sight moved governments and individuals across the Middle East to send money for their relief. For a time Peshawar was, if not quite soaked, at least damp in riyals from Saudi Arabia and Yem
en, dinars from Algeria and Jordan, and pounds from Egypt and Syria. Much of the money went to schools, clinics, and charities of the food-and-shelter variety, but much also went to jihad. For terrorists, it was convenient to smudge the line between humanitarian and military aid, and so charities arose that gave long-grain rice with one hand and long-range sniper rifles with the other.
Arabs sometimes traveled to Peshawar with similarly smudged intentions. A man might start from Jeddah for a madrassa and end in a Tora Bora tunnel. Sometimes the madrassa had been a ruse all along, but sometimes the man had been moved to fight only after arriving. Or maybe he had known he would fight but not that he would become a terrorist. Some Arab governments, eager to be rid of their zealots, paid their way to Peshawar. Egypt even released a few extremists from prison on condition they enplane for Pakistan. Evidently the governments assumed that the zealots would be killed in the war, or their zeal would shrivel in the Afghan wastes, or the rich among them—Osama bin Laden being the epitome—would run through their fortunes arming God’s battalions. The Arab governments thought little, and the American government less, about the men who would survive the Afghan wars. They did not foresee that the zealots’ passion for sharia might be intensified or that they would become practiced in guerrilla warfare and connected to an international network of terroristic financiers, recruiters, and plotters. The blowback, infamously, would concuss the Hudson and Potomac.
Peshawar had many exiles from Egypt, in large part because the repression by Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination sent many Islamists fleeing at just the time when Peshawar was most in need of humanitarians and soldiers. One Egyptian who came to Peshawar, for a few months in 1980 and a few years from 1986, was Ayman al-Zawahiri. A surgeon, he dressed the wounds of refugees in a Red Crescent hospital but eventually developed an enthusiasm for mass murder. From Peshawar (and elsewhere beyond Egypt) he rebuilt Egyptian Jihad, allied the group with bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, and plotted a righteous apocalypse, which was partially realized with the massacres at Luxor in 1997 and in the United States in 2001.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 4
