Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Jihadists as Unfaithful Allies — Egypt (Part 6)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here.

Jihadists remain ultimately faithful to Islam and not to any alliance, however momentarily beneficial, with anyone who does not share the jihadist vision of establishing an all-encompassing Islamic theocracy. This lesson recurs throughout Egyptian history as Lawrence Wright’s 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 documents, essential reading for the twenty-fifth anniversary year of Al Qaeda’s 2001 9/11 attacks.

Egypt since July 23, 1952, provides a stark example of the dangers of secular policymakers trying to instrumentalize politically the piety of Islamists like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement. That day Gamal Abdel Nasser and his fellow Free Officers in the Egyptian army overthrew the country’s corrupt monarch and British vassal, King Farouk, whereupon Nasser rose to power as Egypt’s dictator. “Several of the officers, including Anwar al-Sadat, Nasser’s eventual successor, had close ties to the Brotherhood” during the coup planning, Wright noted. “If the coup attempt failed, the Brothers were to help the officers escape. In the event, the government fell so easily that the Brothers had little real participation in the actual coup.”

Post-1952 Egypt presented a power struggle between the military under Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose chief ideologue was Sayyid Qutb. “In a story that would be repeated again and again in the Middle East,” Wright stated,

the contest quickly narrowed to a choice between a military society and a religious one. Nasser had the army and the Brothers had the mosques. Nasser’s political dream was of pan-Arab Socialism, modern, modern, egalitarian, secular, and industrialized, in which individual lives were dominated by the overwhelming presence of the welfare state. His dream had little to do with the theocratic Islamic government that Qutb and the Brothers espoused. The Islamists wanted to completely reshape society from the top down, imposing Islamic values on all aspects of life, so that every Muslim could achieve his purest spiritual expression. That could be accomplished only through a strict imposition of the Sharia, the legal code drawn from the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which governs all parts of life. Anything less than that, the Islamists argued, was not Islam; it was jahiliyya—the pagan world before the Prophet received his message.

Nasser offered Qutb several posts in the new Egyptian government such as education minister, and he even served a few months as head of the government’s editorial board before quitting. This “prickly negotiation between the two men” over political positioning, Wright noted,

reflected the initial close cooperation of the Brothers and the Free Officers in a social revolution that both organizations thought was theirs to control. In fact, neither faction had the popular authority to rule.

“In retrospect, it is difficult to see how Qutb and Nasser could have misunderstood each other so profoundly,” marveled Wright. Qutb, for example, “rejected nationalism because it warred with the ideal of Muslim unity.” “The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their respective visions and their hostility to democratic rule,” concluded Wright.

The falling out of the pair came quick enough, with Nasser throwing Qutb into prison for the first time in 1954 for three months, after which Nasser allowed Qutb to become editor the Muslim Brotherhood magazine, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin. “Presumably,” Wright wrote,

Nasser hoped his display of mercy would enhance his standing with the Islamists and keep them from turning against the increasingly secular aims of the new government; he may also have believed that Qutb had been chastened by his time in prison. Like the former king, Nasser always underestimated his adversary’s intransigence.

In strident editorials Qutb called for jihad against British forces in Egypt precisely when Nasser was negotiating with the British for their withdrawal. “In August 1954,” Wright chronicled,

the government shut the magazine down. By that time, ill will between the Brothers and the military leaders had hardened into cold opposition. It was clear that Nasser had no intention of instituting an Islamic revolution, despite his highly publicized pilgrimage to Mecca that same month. Qutb was so infuriated that he formed a secret alliance with the Egyptian communists in an effort to bring Nasser down.

“The ideological war over Egypt’s future reached a climax on the night of October 26, 1954,” Wright observed. Broadcast nationally on radio, Nasser addressed throngs in an Alexandria public square as a Muslim Brother gunman fired eight shots at Nasser, missing him but wounding a guard. Nasser’s government responded by hanging six conspirators and placing thousands of political opponents in concentration camps.

Qutb himself went to prison under charges that he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s secret apparatus, the organizer of the assassination attempt. There he remained with a brief release in 1964 until his execution in 1966. “Nasser thought he had crushed the Brothers once and for all,” summarized Wright.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s banishment did not last long, as Wright wrote:

Nasser died of a sudden heart attack in 1970. His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, desperately needing to establish his political legitimacy, quickly set about making peace with the Islamists. Calling himself the ‘Believer President’ and ‘the first man of Islam,’ Sadat offered the Muslim Brothers a deal. In return for their support against the Nasserites and the leftists, he would allow them to preach and to advocate, so long as they renounced violence. He emptied the prisons of Islamists, without realizing the danger they posed to his own regime, especially the younger Brothers who had been radicalized by the writings of Sayyid Qutb.

The American Muslim convert Abdallah Schleifer, who later became a media studies professor at Cairo’s American University, noticed growing Islamic piety and political activism under Sadat when he first went to Cairo as journalist in 1974. “Schleifer quickly sensed the shift in the student movement in Egypt,” Wright recounted:

Young Islamic activists were appearing on campuses, first in the southern part of the country, then in Cairo. They called themselves al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya—the Islamic Group. Encouraged by Sadat’s acquiescent government, which covertly’ provided them with arms so that they could defend themselves against any attacks by Marxists and Nasserites, the Islamic Group radicalized most of Egypt’s universities. Different branches were organized along the same lines as the Muslim Brothers, in small cells called ‘anqud—a bunch of grapes. Within a mere four years, the Islamic Group completely dominated the campuses, and for the first time in the living memory of most Egyptians, male students stopped trimming their beards and female students donned the veil.

Sadat, unfortunately, had unleashed forces he could not control. “Under Sadat, the government had repeatedly pledged to conform to Sharia, but his actions showed how little that promise could be trusted,” Wright wrote. Indeed, Sadat enraged pious Muslims with his recognition of the Jewish state of Israel in the 1979 Camp David peace accords. A new law sponsored by his wife Jihan only added to these religious passions by granting to women more equality with men in divorce in violation of Islamic norms. “In what would prove to be his final speech, Sadat ridiculed the Islamic garb worn by pious women, which he called a ‘tent,’ and banned the niqab from the universities,” Wright added.

When Islamists demonstrated against Sadat’s government, Wright observed,

Sadat dissolved all religious student associations, confiscated their property, and shut down their summer camps. Reversing his position of tolerating, even encouraging, such groups, he now adopted a new slogan: ‘No politics in religion and no religion in politics.’ There could scarcely have been a more incendiary formulation in the Islamist mind.

Sadat’s behavior branded him a heretic in the eyes of many Islamic scholars, a dangerous label under Islamic law. “It is forbidden, under Islamic law, to strike against a ruler unless he doesn’t believe in God or the Prophet. The declaration of heresy was an open invitation to assassination,” Wright explained. An underground Islamic Jihad cell in the Egyptian military decided to put these words into effect.

These jihadists killed Sadat on October 6, 1981, while he reviewed a Cairo military parade in honor of the anniversary of the Egyptian army’s crossing of the Suez Canal at the beginning of the 1973 war with Israel. “I have killed the Pharaoh!” Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli cried after riddling Sadat with bullets from an assault rifle. Sadat’s assassination “met with little grief in the Arab world, which regarded him as a traitor for making peace with Israel,” Wright coolly remarked.

Sadat thus paid with his life for his one-time political flirtation with believers in Islam’s rule on earth. While political leaders like Sadat might at times find the support of such Muslims convenient, for jihadists piety is always more important than any secular practicality. Mutual interests among those who unreservedly follow Islam’s call to submission and others not so committed may come and go, but the unshakable will of jihadists to use force in the name of their faith remains constant. These facts would appear again during the various jihads against the Soviets and others in Afghanistan in the last two decades of the twentieth century, as the next article in this series will examine.