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Radical Roots
George Ziyad Cairo
Egypt looks inward to examine why it has spawned so many Islamic militants, including some of Osama Bin Laden's top lieutenants
A debate has broken out in Egypt over the country's now most famous � and embarrassing � export: Islamic militancy. TV shows and columnists are asking how and why the country produced the radical Islamicists who shifted their operations to Afghanistan and elsewhere over the last 20 years and dominate anti-American terrorist groups like Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'eda today.
The unusual self-examination has been prompted by questions leveled in the Western media since September 11 about why Egypt has spawned so many of the men at the core of Al-Qa'eda. Though Bin Laden himself is a Saudi, his second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, is Egyptian, as was the organization's operations chief, Muhammad Atef, who was killed during the Afghanistan campaign. According to U.S. investigators, one of the two men who plunged hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center towers was also an Egyptian, ringleader Muhammad Atta.
A number of mainstream American publications have criticized the Egyptian government for running a dysfunctional, undemocratic state which, while harshly suppressing its radical Islamist opposition, has quietly permitted religious extremism to spread throughout society. Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, one of the first to dig the knife in, wrote that the Bush administration needed to "fight the virulent currents that are capturing Arab culture" in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, because both countries had "resisted economic and political modernization."
And the fact is that many Islamic radicals, squeezed by the security forces rather than allowed entry into the body politic, left Egypt in the 1990s, some to join Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher has hit back, saying his country deserves praise for its iron-first policy towards extremist groups. "Everyone knows Egypt's role, which is appreciated by the whole world, including the United States," he told reporters last month, citing Egypt's own mini-war against terrorism over the last decade. But it is precisely this iron-fist policy that analysts in Egypt believe has contributed to the creation of the militant monster in the first place.
Modern Islamist fundamentalism started in Egypt, with the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. The godfather of all Islamist groups existing today, the Brotherhood began as a kind of social welfare network with a vague political agenda. Years of suppression by the authorities resulted in the splintering off of more extremist groups, like al-Gama'a al-Islamiya (the Islamic Group), which together with the Islamic Jihad was responsible for the 1981 assassination of president Anwar al-Sadat. The Brotherhood itself is illegal but tolerated, and has 17 members of parliament who ran as independents.
The battle between the Islamists and the Egyptian authorities reached a peak after the militant Gama'a and Islamic Jihad, led by Zawahri, launched an open war against the government in 1992. They fought a guerrilla campaign against the state, attacking police posts, and banks, attempting assassinations of government ministers and targeting tourists in order to hurt the government's main source of foreign currency. Over the next few years, more than 1,200 people were killed, including 58 foreign tourists massacred in the southern resort of Luxor in 1997. Since then the conflict appears to have ended, with Gama'a leaders in prison and abroad declaring a cease-fire.
But Jihad leader Zawahri, a 50-year-old surgeon from Cairo, went on to become Osama Bin Laden's chief ideologue when Al-Qa'eda and Jihad formally merged in 1998. Zawahri appeared in the videotaped statements that Al-Qa'eda supplied to the Arab al-Jazeera satellite television station soon after the American military campaign began in early October.
In October, Egypt's state television broadcast its first-ever examination into why groups with radical ideologies � which view all modern Arab states, not just the West, as heretic and outside Islam � have sprung up in Egypt in recent decades. The program, called "Ikhtiraaq" or "Breakthrough," gave much of its time to the government's favorite talking-head on fundamentalism, a controversial former state security officer called Fouad Allam. Allam is frequently wheeled out to tell the nation that the Muslim Brotherhood is the source of all evil, betraying the government's desire to discredit the group, still a potent force in moderate Islamist politics whose potential popularity the state clearly fears.
But less characteristically, the program also gave time to other people less loyal to the government's line. Their underlying message was that the authorities' continued heavy-handed approach to political Islam merely ensures that religious radicalism will not go away. For example, Montasser Zayat, a one-time al-Gama'a al-Islamiya front man, said the group had assassinated parliament speaker Rifaat Mahgoub in 1990 in retaliation for the unprovoked murder, by state security, he believes, of the Gama'a spokesman Alaa Mohieddin earlier that year. Mohieddin's murder came at a time when many hoped the radical groups could be brought into the political system.
In his 1995 book "Hiwaraat Mamnuua," ("Forbidden Discussions"), Zayat argued that Egypt's government deliberately provoked a fight with the radical groups around 1990 to avoid democratizing and having to accommodate both the radicals and the non-violent and popular Brotherhood. "Some perhaps feared that if they created democracy the [radical] groups would find quite a bit of support and they could turn against them [the state]," Zayat has said. He adds that the authorities also feared that such a policy of accommodation would have resulted in Egypt taking on an overtly religious hue unattractive to its Western financial backers.
Osama al-Baz, chief political adviser to President Mubarak, calls suggestions that the lack of political opportunity has helped promote extremism in Egypt "nonsense. It's not true," he says. "The extremist groups don't believe at all in democracy. If you want democracy, you must talk to people, distance yourself from violence and not impose your opinion." The government, for its part, considers the radicals responsible for having started the violence, and says their ideology is based on using violence in order to obtain their goals.
Although the use of brute force, mass detentions and military trials with no right of appeal allowed the state to crush the insurgency movement of the 1990s, analysts say that without more democracy, the danger of radical groups making a comeback remains. Many Islamists harbor a deep grudge against the government for its excesses towards the movement. At least 10,000 men suspected of links to the radical groups are confined and forgotten in Egypt's prisons, most of them detained without formal charges against them. Throughout the last decade, the radical groups have constantly demanded their release and an end to the military trials � introduced after a civilian court acquitted the suspected murderers of parliamentary speaker Mahgoub because they had confessed under torture.
And it is not only the radical fringes who have suffered. A senior Muslim Brother, Mohammed Abdel-Qaddous, recently offered bitter memories of a colleague who he said was tortured to death at a state security detention center in 1981. "The No. 1 suspect in his murder is still alive and I see him sometimes on television talking as a terrorism expert," Abdel-Qaddous wrote in an opposition paper in late September. It's no secret that he was talking about Fouad Allam. "When the sun of freedom shines in my country, this terrorism expert and his likes will be the first to face trial, and, if God wills, the tyrants will be punished in this world before the next," Abdel-Qaddous vowed.
The government, meanwhile, has given no indication that it ever intends to democratize and accommodate Islamist politics in any form. It has rebuffed repeated attempts to legalize the Muslim Brotherhood and last year rejected two attempts by figures once associated with the militant Jihad to set up political parties. The war on terror now being waged by President Bush seems set to reinforce the trend towards continued hard-hand policies against Islamic groups. "Moderate Islamist movements in Egypt and elsewhere are worried that governments will be more repressive, and that the international community will turn a blind eye," one Cairo analyst said.
The British authorities have already arrested Egyptian Islamist Yasser al-Sirri for his alleged role in the assassination of Afghani rebel leader Ahmed Shah Masood two days before the September 11 attacks. Sirri has residency in England despite an Egyptian court death sentence against him for the attempted assassination of former prime minister Atef Sidqi in 1993. Britain has not been prepared to extradite him because of European Union rules concerning the death sentence, but also because of the way that sentence came to be passed against him�in a military court where there is no right of appeal.
Rights activists have noted that his indictment in Britain is not connected with his alleged role in Sidqi's assassination, which they don't take seriously.
The English-language independent weekly Cairo Times was scathing about Britain's charge. "Britain is said to be considering sending Egyptian Islamist Yasser al-Sirri � a militant 'spokesman' whom the militants have basically disowned as a poseur with a fax machine out to pick up a little quick notoriety � back to where a military court, unwilling to distinguish between a front man and a con man, has sentenced him to death," it said in its November 1 issue (though it is not clear that either Britain or Egypt is actually seeking his extradition).
Since the September 11 attacks, Egypt has sent some 300 detainees' cases to military prosecutors, meaning a military trial is only a matter of time. Rights activists accuse the authorities of seizing the moment to deal with diverse groups of detainees when the international community will have nothing bad to say about the abuse. Some of them were detained in the last two years for alleged involvement in militant attacks around 1994; some were seized in May this year, accused of plotting to attack American targets. Names and exact charges have not been released.
One state-owned magazine recently claimed that some of them were linked to Bin Laden and had been plotting something similar to the attacks of September 11 in Cairo. The report played well to public opinion but turned out to be entirely untrue, as the Interior Ministry admitted in a statement later released to news agencies.
ANALYSTS SAY IT WAS THE cruelty of Gamel Abd al-Nasser's secular-nationalist regime that sparked religious radicalism in the first place. They say that the Brotherhood did dally with political violence, assassinating government ministers in the 1940s and 1950s, but was so ruthlessly suppressed by Nasser's regime in the 1960s that many Islamists began to develop radical ideologies, which had been absent from Arab politics for centuries.
These ideologies � akin to the thinking of a sect in early Islam known as the Kharijites � viewed contemporary societies as Muslim only in name and enjoined true believers to work towards overthrowing their rulers to create a new and pure Islamic order from the top. Their model was the Prophet Muhammad's decision to leave godless Mecca for exile, where the believers prepared for their triumphant military return to establish a Utopian Islamic state.
The Brotherhood, in contrast, seeks to make society apply Islamic shari'a law through legislative and community-level action.
The first modern proponent of the extremist thinking was Sayed Qutb, a Brotherhood leader hanged in 1966, after he had used his years in prison to pen the original fundamentalist action pamphlet, "Ma'aalim fil-Tareeq" or Signposts on the Road.
"Sayed Qutb's writing only had an effect because people were so cruelly tortured," analyst Wahid Abdel-Meguid said. Qutb concluded that rulers who subject a group of Muslims to such cruelties can no longer be Muslim themselves.
Well-known historian of the Brotherhood Salah Issa said that when Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat released members of the Brotherhood from Egypt's prisons in the 1970s to balance the influence of the leftists and Nasserists, he didn't realize that this fundamental shift had taken place in Islamist thinking. A plethora of extremist groups appeared declaring the state infidel and preaching revolution. Some of them had no name � such as one led by army cadet Salah Sirriya which made a botched coup attempt in 1974. But the two that gradually emerged as the main forces in radical politics were al-Gama'a al-Islamiya and Jihad. They cooperated to assassinate Sadat in 1981, after Sadat sheltered Iran's deposed Shah, signed Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and arrested 1,500 Islamist and other opponents of the accord.
Issa has argued that the second factor permeating the history of Egypt's political violence from the beginning has been the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "After the Palestinian Revolt in 1936, Palestinian Islamic leaders came to Cairo and the Brotherhood started to give them weapons. The Brotherhood copied the Zionist groups in Palestine who had created militias and set up a secret military wing," he said. Brotherhood activists tried to assassinate Nasser in 1954, since when the organization has been outlawed.
Palestinians were also key figures in the transformation to violent ideologies after Sayed Qutb: Coup leader Sirriya was a Palestinian, as was another early radical in the 1970s, Mohammed Salem Rahhan. "It was dictatorship and Israel that caused the violence," Issa asserted.
Egyptian leaders have said repeatedly that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would take the wind out of the sails of radical Islam and reduce the sympathy that many ordinary people feel for the causes they often espouse. Over 50 percent of terrorism is caused because of the 50-year dispute, President Mubarak has said.
But most political analysts in Egypt would agree today that the country's undemocratic politics must share the blame too.
(December 17, 2001)
Middle East
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