The New Middle East (11 page)

The Brotherhood led waves of riots and protests that culminated with the prime minister Mahmoud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi approving a decree dissolving the movement on 8 December 1948.
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Twenty days later that act cost him his life. The decree and the arrests that followed sent al-Banna’s carefully structured hierarchy into convulsions. He lost control of the organisation, and the organisation lost control of its senses. As al-Nuqrashi walked into the interior ministry on 28 December he was shot first in the back and then, as he turned, in the front by a 23-year-old member of the Brotherhood who had dressed himself as an officer. Al-Banna tried to negotiate with the new prime minister, but then another member of the Brotherhood tried to bomb a courthouse the following January. Although al-Banna condemned the men who carried out the violence, saying: ‘They are neither brothers, nor are they Muslims,’ the government was done talking.
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At the same time al-Banna’s words infuriated many of his followers.

Isolated from the fractured remains of his life’s work, al-Banna wrote his final pamphlet. In it he laid the blame for the bloodshed at the door of the authorities for dissolving the movement and locking up the moderating hand of the Brotherhood’s leadership. He said the British and the Zionists were the hidden hand behind the ban. He also disassociated the movement from the violent actions of its members, saying they had operated alone.
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The only anomaly in the authorities’ actions at that time was that they had not jailed al-Banna himself. He interpreted the ‘failure of the government to arrest him [as] his official death warrant’.
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It was served as the evening drew down on 12 February 1949. As he climbed into a taxi outside the Young Men’s Muslim Association building in Cairo he was shot; he died shortly afterwards in a hospital.
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The king’s men didn’t know it then, but their regime, which probably had al-Banna killed, was also about to reach the end of its life.

‘Within the Arab circle there is a role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero,’ wrote Gamal Abdel Nasser in his book
Egypt’s Liberation
, published in 1955:

For some reason it seems to me that this role is beckoning to us to move, to take up its lines, put on its costumes and give it life. Indeed, we are the only ones who can play it. The role is to spark the tremendous latent strengths in the region surrounding us to create a great power, which will then rise up to a level of dignity and undertake a positive part in building the future of mankind.
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Nasser was consumed by a sense of purpose for himself and the Arab people. When he and his Free Officers toppled King Farouq in July 1952, ushering in the end of British domination, they began the rule of Egypt by Egyptians for the first time in two and a half thousand years. Two years later he celebrated his revolution by officially renaming Cairo’s central square as ‘Tahrir’ or Liberation Square. Nasser would go on to become one of the most influential people on the planet.

Many in the Brotherhood assumed that, having fought alongside the army and shared its aims for national self-determination, this would be a new era for them too. Around a third of the officers in the army during the king’s time were said to be part of the organisation.
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It has been claimed that Nasser too was once a member. The army and the Ikhwan were co-conspirators in Egypt’s first revolution, but just as in the uprising that followed nearly sixty years later, the Brotherhood stayed out of the limelight, and for similar reasons. ‘[There was] agreement among all concerned that open participation of the Society would assure automatic Western intervention in the revolution and its destruction.’
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The Ikhwan hoped that in return for their support the army would introduce Islamic rule.

This was a key moment. The two sides had to choose between working together and attempting to destroy each other. It would be the latter. This was when the long war began.

It was largely al-Banna’s charisma that enabled him to build the Brotherhood into such a large movement. He was able to attract support from many tiers of Egyptian society. The Brotherhood still tried to use that ‘everyman’ appeal after his death, but the ‘man of the people’ role was something Nasser wanted for himself, and that would require the removal of any alternative offering. He took on and decimated the Brotherhood, and then began to project his own vision for the future. He rallied the region with the same call that sixty years later would be used against the military regime he created: dignity for the Arab people. While the remnants of the Brotherhood languished in jail, Nasser would attempt to fill the vacuum they left behind with his own movement, Pan-Arabism.

The Brotherhood was being run during Nasser’s heyday by al-Banna’s replacement, Hasan al-Hodeibi, a compromise candidate who suited nobody in the movement. He was told soon after taking up his position by members of the Special Apparatus that: ‘We want nothing from you; you need not even come to the headquarters . . . We will bring the papers for you to sign or reject as you will . . . We only want a leader who will be a symbol of cleanliness.’
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At this crucial moment in its history al-Hodeibi would prove to be a disaster for the Ikhwan. His refusal to even attempt to live up to the standards set by his predecessor and his constant bungling of the relationship with the army’s Revolutionary Command Council, RCC, eventually led to paralysis in the organisation’s leadership. After the revolution the junta needed the credibility of the Brotherhood while it found its feet. It made the right noises and gestures – the leadership, including Nasser, even joined the annual pilgrimage to al-Banna’s tomb.
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In January 1953 the Brotherhood’s pragmatism hit new heights when it connived in the abolition of all parties and groups while it was given an exemption.
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But the RCC was just biding its time. The Ikhwan stood by as the army picked off its enemies one by one until their own turn finally came.

First the RCC tried to wreck the Brotherhood from within by promoting an internal leadership coup. When that failed they used the Brotherhood’s own complicity against it. In January 1954 the movement was declared a political party and banned under the same law it had supported the year before. Then Nasser showed he would be ruthless with all his challengers.

When the coup against the king was announced on national radio by one of the Free Officers group, Anwar Sadat, it was done in the name of the new commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Muhammad Naguib.
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When the institution of the monarchy was abolished in June 1953 and Egypt was declared a republic, Naguib became its first president. But, like al-Hodeibi’s in the Ikhwan, his position was also largely symbolic: the power rested with Nasser.

Naguib tried to rein in Nasser and briefly got the ban on the Brotherhood and other political parties lifted, but his days in power were numbered. The Ikhwan was still bordering on dysfunctional. Once again its members would try to take the movement’s destiny into their own hands; once more that would be disastrous.

Nineteen fifty-four would prove to be a tumultuous year, and decisive for Egypt. It turned around the evening of 26 October, when as Nasser was giving a speech before a crowd in Alexandria, a member of the Ikhwan stood up and ‘fired eight wild shots’ at a distance of forty feet.
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The closest shattered a lamp above his head, but Nasser stood firm.
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His coolness under fire, and the inability of his would-be assassin to shoot straight, turned him into a living legend. It also gave him the ammunition he needed to see off all his rivals.

‘To be shot at and missed is a happy state of affairs for a Middle Eastern leader,’ reported the
Economist
magazine at the time. ‘Multitudes deduce that Allah did not will his end and so the crowds applauded Colonel Nasser after his escape from assassination.’
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Another reporter in Cairo reflected that the incident was ‘the moment of truth for Gamal Nasser; it gave him the inspiration and the chance to step from the background and assume open command’.
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Six members of the Brotherhood were tried and hanged; thousands more were arrested; the organisation was almost destroyed.

The attempted assassination also gave Nasser the opportunity to deal with the irritant of a president who thought he was there to preside. During the trial Naguib was improbably implicated in the plot. Nasser had him dismissed. It was improbable because even the Ikhwan leadership were ignorant about the plan. The hopeless assassin was selected for his task by the entirely unconstrained Special Apparatus unit. Despite being tagged as fanatical by the Western media, the Special Apparatus knew its limits. One early incarnation of the plot to kill Nasser involved a suicide bombing. Someone was supposed to wear a belt of dynamite, get close to Nasser and blow them both up. ‘There were no volunteers,’
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so they found a ‘round-faced shock-haired man’ called Mahmoud Abdul Latif, a tinsmith from Cairo, to shoot him.
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Latif, a member of the Brotherhood since 1938, had been selected for his task two months earlier.
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He sobbed his way through the court formalities that would condemn him to death, accusing the Brotherhood of duping him into his crime.
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The entire process of trying the Brotherhood members was a farce. One of the three judges, who was himself from the military, spent the proceedings abusing and heckling the witnesses, declaring at one stage: ‘See, people! There is the Brotherhood. They’re all liars.’
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The defendants all turned on each other, abandoning any loyalty to the movement. ‘Egyptians openly laughed at the Brotherhood as, one by one, its high dignitaries, shorn of their imposing beards, shambled forward to stammer confessions and recriminations like so many cringing schoolboys,’ wrote a reporter in the court.
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The conspiracy was likely confined to just a handful of the Cairo branch of the Special Apparatus, but it is impossible to know for sure because the ‘confessions’, which were largely obtained by or through the threat of torture, implicated almost everyone.
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The courts and the media produced an array of ‘evidence’ that proved that ‘the Brothers were the agents and lackeys of the monarchy, the ruling classes, the British, the French, the Zionists, Western Imperialism, communism, and capitalism’.
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The leadership was accused of everything from homosexuality to serial adultery and theft. It was, in short, not a fair trial.

On 5 December 1954 seven death sentences were announced for those found directly implicated in the plot. But al-Hodeibi had his sentence commuted to life with hard labour, because the government said ‘he was an old and sick man who was under the influence of terrorists’.
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Other leaders were also given long prison terms. Hours before the verdicts were read out, Nasser announced the RCC was once again dissolving the Muslim Brotherhood, and this time it would stick.
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This was the Brotherhood’s lowest point in its struggle with the army. It would face other crises and brutal crackdowns, but none of the severity of this one. The ban on the organisation would only be lifted after the membership’s great-grandchildren had taken to the streets in January 2011. Having beaten all his opponents, Nasser could now concentrate on reshaping the Middle East in his image.

I’ve often heard Egyptians being mocked by other Arabs for taking themselves too seriously. Many nations in the Middle East owe their creation to a small bunch of meddling Europeans drawing lines on maps over a cup of tea. In those countries a sense of nationhood was often tempered by clan or sectarian loyalties. Egypt, though, was created by the Egyptians, and the pride they have in their identity runs deeper than in most parts of the Arab world. Because that was lacking among other peoples in the region Nasser offered to fill the gap for them: pride in their identity as Arabs instead.

Nasser began his reign by playing the two Cold War rivals, America and the Soviet Union, off against each other to build up his military might. By 1956 he had consolidated his grip on power and settled on the Soviets. ‘I know everything that goes on in this country,’ he told a reporter. ‘I run everything myself.’
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He was ready for his first big play on the global stage.