Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (54 page)

On May 15, 1948, Israel declared itself born. Immediately, Arab armies attacked from three sides, determined to crush the new country before it could take its first breath. But instead, Israel did the crushing,
routing the armies of its three Arab adversaries, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and so it was Palestine, not Israel, that became the stillborn child. When the war ended, a war that Israel remembers as their War of Independence but that Arabs called the Catastrophe, some seven hundred thousand Arabs found themselves homeless and stateless, living as refugees in the neighboring Arab countries. The lands that were supposed to become Palestine were annexed (mostly by Jordan). The bulk of the Arab refugees collected on the West Bank of the Jordan River, where they seethed and stewed and sometimes staged small
raids into the land that had once been theirs.

In the aftermath of the war of 1948, the Arabs lost the public relations battle even more drastically than they had lost their land. For one thing, some prominent Arabs publicly and constantly disputed Israel’s “right to exist.” They were speaking within the framework of the nationalist argument: Zionists wanted Israel to exist, the Arabs of Palestine wanted Palestine to exist, and since they claimed the same territory, both could not exist: the assertion of each nation’s “right to exist” was inherently a denial of the other nation’s “right to exist.” But in the shadow of the Nazis’ attemp
ted genocide, asserting that Israel had no right to exist sounded like saying, “Jews have no right to exist.”

To make matters worse, at least one Arab notable made no bones about actually endorsing Nazi anti-Semitism. This was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had lived in Nazi Germany during the war and now spouted racism from many pulpits including his radio broadcasts. The weight of world opinion, the tone of media reporting, and the rantings of Arabs such as this mufti subtly conflated the Arab cause with Nazism in the public mind, especially in the West. Arabs not only lost the argument about the land but in the process became the Bad Guys who
deserved
to lose their land. This combination of f
eeling wronged and feeling vilified fed a spiraling resentment that rotted into the very anti-Semitism of which Muslims stood accused.

 

One man who took part in the debacle of 1948 was Egyptian army officer Gamal Abdul Nasser. Nasser was born in southern Egypt, the son of a humble postman. Even as a boy, he felt keenly wounded by his country’s subservience to Europeans. At an age when most boys were starting to obsess about girls, Nasser was obsessing about his nation’s “honor.” His prospects for doing anything about it looked dim, however, until a su
dden need for army officers opened up places for lower class boys in the country’s elite military schools and Nasser rode this opportunity all the way to the rank of colonel.

The Arab defeat in 1948 deepened his sense of grievance. He blamed the country’s king for it, and so he conspired with some hundred other army officers (“the Free Officers Club”) to overthrow the monarchy and set up a republic. One morning in the summer of 1952, the Free Officers struck hard and fast: a nearly bloodless coup—two casualties and the monarchy was gone.

Getting rid of the king was the easy part, though. The big step was getting the British out of Egypt. For this step, however, Nasser needed serious firepower. The Cold War being in full swing at this time, almost any emerging nation-state could get arms from one of the two superpowers, so Nasser approached the Americans; but they didn’t see Egypt as a key to “containing” Communism and mistrusted what this Arab fellow would do with weapons, so they turned him down. Nasser then went to the Soviets and from them got mountains of weaponry—which made the Americans sit up and take not
ice. In typical Cold War fashion, they decided Egypt was important after all. In a bid to win Nasser back, they offered to build him the world’s biggest dam, right across the Nile River at a place called Aswan, a dam that would multiply Egypt’s farmland and produce enough electricity to vault the country into the ranks of industrialized nations instantly! A breathtaking vision—the fulfillment of the secular modernist dream!

But when Nasser looked at the fine print, he saw that the aid agreement included U.S. military bases on Egyptian soil and U.S. oversight of Egypt’s finances: here was the thin end of the imperialist wedge once again entering his country’s heart. Nasser refused the aid, but could not stop dreaming of the Aswan Dam. But how could he finance the dam without selling his country to one of the superpowers?

Then he saw the answer: the Suez Canal, of course. The canal was pulling in about $90 million a year, and Egypt was getting only $6.3 million of it, roughly. Here was the money Egypt needed for its development, and it was mostly draining away to Europe! In 1956, Nasser suddenly poured troops into the Canal Zone and took over the canal.

A furor broke out in Europe. British politicians called Nasser another Hitler, a madman with a grandiose scheme of world conquest. The French press said Egyptians were too primitive to run the canal; they would
disrupt global trade and wreck the world economy. These two European countries colluded with Israel in a complicated scheme to bomb Cairo, kill Nasser, and recover the canal.

Just in time, however, U.S. president Ike Eisenhower heard about the scheme and flew into a rage. Didn’t the Europeans know there was a Cold War on? Didn’t they know their little plot could deliver the whole Middle East to the Soviets? Eisenhower ordered the Europeans to give the canal back to Egypt and go home, and U.S. dominance was such that both countries (and Israel) had to obey.

Arabs saw this as a great victory for Nasser. For the next eleven heady years, Nasser was the decolonizing hero, the prophet of Arab unity, and the avatar of “Islamic Socialism,” by which he meant a classless society achieved not through class warfare, as in Marxism, but through class cooperation regulated by the principles of Islam—a vigorous “socialist” restatement of the basic secular modernist Muslim creed.

Nasser built his dam and electrified his nation. He also joined with India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike, and several others to forge the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc of neutral countries intended to counterbalance the two Cold War superpowers.

Nasser’s big deeds and global stature won him countless new admirers at home, and not just in Egypt. Arabs of all classes and countries found him intoxicatingly charismatic. As a speaker, no one could touch him. When he spoke, Arabs (who heard him mostly on the radio) said they felt like he was in the room with them, addressing each person eye to eye, drawing each one into a conversation about what was to be done, as if all of them were in this thing together and every one of them mattered.

Nasser’s popularity got him to dreaming of something bigger than a sovereign Egypt—a pan-Arab nation! This was exactly what the Ba’ath Party had been preaching in Syria. In fact, in 1958, Egypt and Syria tried to form one big country, the United Arab Republic, but Syria seceded three years later—a blow to Nasser’s prestige.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood was still alive. In 1952, they had helped overthrow the Egyptian king but as soon as Nasser’s secular government commenced operations, they turned against
him,
even attempting to assassinate him. Nasser retaliated by putting the movements’ leaders in prison, where he had them tortured.

Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, had been assassinated before Nasser’s day, but a nervous, brilliant, erratic, anxious intellectual zealot named Sayyid Qutb had taken charge of the Brotherhood in his place. Qutb’s outlook had been shaped by a curious two-year sojourn at a teacher’s college in Greeley, Colorado, where the Egyptian government had sent him to study U.S. educational methods. The materialism Qutb saw in America repelled him, the individualism disturbed him, the social freedoms unnerved him, and the sexual mores shocked him—the sight, for exampl
e, of young men and women
square dancing
together at a church social!

Qutb came home convinced that the United States was a Satanic force and had to be destroyed. He began publishing political tracts. He wrote that Islam offered a complete alternative, not just to other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism, but also to other political systems, such as communism and democracy, and he renewed the call for Muslims to rebuild one big universal Muslim community. And if that sounded like he was saying that the Muslim Brotherhood should seize power in Egypt, so be it.

Nasser clapped this man in prison: big mistake, it turned out. There in prison, garbed in the glamour of victimhood, Qutb wrote his most incendiary work, a book called
Milestones
. Here, he proposed a radical reinterpretation of Sayyid Jamaluddin’s pan-Islamist modernism. He revived the ancient theoretical schema of a world divided between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the realms of (Muslim) peace and (infidel) violence. Qutb was no ranter. His prose was cool and measured; he picked his words precisely. And in this steady, lucid, unblinking language, he called on every Muslim to embrace
and practice jihad, not just against non-Muslims but against Muslims who faltered in their allegiance to Islam or collaborated with the enemy.
⁷
Under Qutb’s leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood basically declared war against the governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordon, and Lebanon and against all the secular modernists who supported them.

Egypt had no democratic process with which to co-opt the Brotherhood’s hold on the underclass. Nasser relied instead on police power to quell demonstrations and on
secret
police to nip conspiracies in the bud.

Qutb and his brotherhood were all the more irritating to Nasser because he had plenty of other rivals assailing him, more daunting ones, he thought. The rulers of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq envied Nasser’s popularity, and they were doing their best to discredit him. Ba’ath activists challen
ged his status among Arabs, claiming that they were the
real
pan-Arab nationalists. Then there were Egypt’s communists. At the height of the Cold War, given their pipeline to Soviet support, they no doubt seemed more dangerous than some cult organizing the Muslim rabble. And finally there were the frankly antirevolutionary monarchs and the tribal dynasts who still ruled some of the Arab states, and who disapproved of everything Nasser stood for.

In 1963, Nasser blundered into a proxy war in Yemen. He sent troops in only as a gesture, to show support for a socialist party that had seized power there by ousting the tribal monarchy; b
ut as soon as Egyptian troops arrived in Yemen, Saudi Arabia began pumping money and guns to the royalists. Suddenly Nasser found himself bogged down in a quagmire of a war that dragged on without result for years.

Meanwhile, Sayyid Qutb went on preaching his doctrines from prison. Nasser decided that, frustrated though he was on other fronts, he didn’t have to put up with this gadfly. In August 1966, he did what men with too much power and too few procedural restraints often do: he had Qutb hanged—only to see him hailed as a martyr by a frighteningly far-flung network of admirers.

Just three months later, Syria and Israel got locked into a cycle of raids and counterraids back and forth across their border, which escalated for six months, growing ever more bloody. Ba’athists ruled Syria by this point. They were Nasser’s main rivals in the secular modernist camp and by going toe-to-toe with Israel, they were gaining credibility at Nasser’s expense, among Arabs generally and among the Palestinians in particular, those wretched refugees still mired in the camps.

So there was Nasser, hero of the Arab world, besieged by his own Arab Muslim masses, eclipsed by his Arab secular modernist rivals, bogged down in an endless war—with other Arabs. Clearly he needed to do something! And clearly it could not be directed against any other Arab country, group, or movement.

This is where matters stood in the spring of 1967, just before one of the most seminal events of modern history, at least as seen through Islamic eyes: Israel’s Six Day War against her Arab neighbors.

 

 

I
N MAY, 1967, Nasser began to spout martial rhetoric at Israel; to prove he meant business, he even blockaded Israel’s access to the Red Sea. Actually, of course, with seventy thousand of his best troops bogged down in Yemen, Nasser could not possibly take any real military action; but a man can talk. Talk, if it’s tough enough, will sometimes do the job.

And sometimes not. On June 5, without warning, Israel attacked Egypt, Jordan, and Syria simultaneously. “Without warning” should be uttered with an asterisk here: Arab-Israeli tension had been ratcheting up for months. Yet none of the Arab states were expecting a war on that June morning; and none of them were ready.

In the first twenty-four hours, Israel destroyed virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. In the next five days, Israel conquered all the territories penciled in by the United Nations as the state of Palestine. These became instead the Occupied Territories, ruled by Israel but populated mostly by Palestinians. By the seventh day, the war was over, and the world would never be the same.