The New Middle East (12 page)

Nasser had already managed to humiliate the old colonial master, Britain. A deal done in 1954 meant the last British troops left Egypt after seventy-four years on 13 June 1956. A month later Nasser added insult to British injuries after he had been left ‘mad as hell’ by a decision by the Eisenhower administration to withdraw its financial support for the huge Aswan dam project that Nasser saw as totemic of his vision for the Arab world.
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A week after his ambassador was told that the US didn’t think Egypt could afford it, Nasser came up with a way that they could. He seized control of the Suez Canal, the most important stretch of water in the world and a lifeline for the economies of the European powers. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal infuriated the British and the French, who already loathed Nasser. World opinion at the time was largely divided on Cold War lines: ‘London’s Tory Daily Mail calls him “Hitler on the Nile.” The Peking press coos: “Egyptian brother.” France’s Premier Guy Mollet has called him “a megalomaniac” dictator . . . The Cairo press calls him “savior of the people,” the Israelis say “highway robber,” “treacherous wolf.” ’
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It was in concert with the Israelis that France and Britain planned their riposte. They persuaded the Israelis to attack Egypt so that they could then pretend to step in as a peacekeeping force and secure the waterway. All three parties conspired to deceive the Americans with their ruse, leaving President Eisenhower, who was a week away from elections for his second term, furious with them all. ‘Nothing justifies double-crossing us,’ he complained.
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The French and British invaded the Canal Zone region on 31 October 1956 and were then forced into a humiliating withdrawal just weeks later after immense pressure from Washington. During the Suez Crisis Israel captured Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. When they eventually pulled out they were replaced with a United Nations force that acted as a buffer between the two sides.

The Suez Crisis signalled a key shift in geopolitics and it forced America to rethink its policy in the Middle East. The Americans believed the Suez fiasco proved the Arab world couldn’t be left to the Europeans to manage any more. From that moment on the European powers lost much of their influence in the region. The Middle East became America’s backyard. Suez is seen by many as the full stop at the end of Britain’s time as a Great Power.

Nasser emerged triumphant. Despite his military losses he had seen off the two most meddling European powers, Great Britain and France. Almost every person in the Arab world would have had first-hand experience of the insult of being second-class citizens to these two nations, of being just ‘wogs’, as the British used to call the Egyptians. Now the town bullies had been given a good hiding. The diplomatic intrigue surrounding the incident did not even register. As far as the Arab people were concerned, Nasser had thrown the decisive punch, and they rallied to him as to no other Arab leader before or since.

The first consequence of the Suez Crisis was that in the Arab world Nasser was now ‘The Boss’. He used his charisma and stature to launch his project in earnest. He embraced the new technology of the day to spread his message using his ‘Voice of the Arabs’ Cairo radio station to broadcast a call for Pan-Arab unity. The voice of Nasser floating across the airwaves inspired another young officer, Muammar Gaddafi, to launch his own revolt. ‘Tell President Nasser we made this revolution for him,’ Gaddafi told one of Nasser’s ministers after he had overthrown his own monarchy.
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Shortly before his death Nasser would repay the compliment. ‘You know, I rather like Gaddafi,’ he said. ‘He reminds me of myself when I was that age.’
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At home Nasser’s socialism built a new middle class in Egypt on the back of a hugely expanded social welfare programme and an enormous government bureaucracy that gave millions of people jobs for life. In the decades that followed it outlived its usefulness, but none of his successors found a way to reform it, leaving the state today saddled with a bloated, creaking system that rewards sloth and corruption.

Abroad, Nasser sent his spies throughout the Middle East to ferment dissent:

During a 1966 visit, former [US] Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson told him: ‘Mr. President, the U.S. Government has received complaints from every Arab government of subversive activity by your people.’ Nasser, feebly professing surprise, said that surely there were at least one or two states where nothing had ever been attempted. ‘Mr. President,’ Anderson said, ‘there are no exceptions.’
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But Pan-Arabism was never achieved. The only thing the Arab leaders shared was a sense of self-importance and desire to put their own interests first. The Arab people may have yearned for unity, but the various attempts to forge permanent alliances between states during and after Nasser’s reign all failed. North Yemen joined them to create the United Arab States, but Egypt’s dominance and the geographical separation between them doomed the project. Egypt’s union with Syria, the United Arab Republic, lasted only three years before collapsing in 1961. The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan collapsed in six months. Nasser’s young disciple Colonel Gaddafi tried the project again by forming the Federation of Arab Republics, which lasted for five years, but existed in name only. His later effort to create an Arab Islamic Republic between Libya and Tunisia was stillborn.

The Brotherhood would not begin its recovery until after Nasser’s death, which was hastened by the hammering his army took when it fought and lost to Israel in the 1967 ‘Six Day War’. Like his army, Nasser was crushed by the defeat. He resigned and then allowed himself to be called back by popular demand, but he was a shadow of the man he had been. He had blamed the outcome of the 1948 war on the Egyptian leadership he had overthrown. This catastrophic defeat of the Arab armies was largely of his own making. Nasser found enough energy, just before his death, to interfere in the Jordanian civil war of 1970 between the monarchy and Palestinian militants, but these were Pan-Arabism’s death throes. The war in 1967 killed it off and the same war still physically shapes much of the struggle for land between the Israelis and Palestinians today.

It also began to shape the Arab view of America. Nasser’s actions had finally united the Arab world, but only in a shared sense of humiliation. The anger that flowed from that was channelled by the Arab states back towards Israel and increasingly towards the US. The Arab nations believed that Washington had given Israel the green light to stage its attack.

The new president, Anwar Sadat, tried to present himself as a more pious figure than his predecessor, but this was largely just a way to assert his leadership against the Nasserists. In doing so he slowly brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to life. But those men who began to be released from jail were less influenced by the teachings of al-Banna than by a man who was little known at the time by the outside world but whose philosophy would arguably lead to some of the most traumatic incidents of the century that would follow.

The story published in the
New York Times
of the execution of Sayyid Qutb in Cairo on 29 August 1966, along with two other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, was only four sentences long. Just over thirty-five years later reams of column inches would be taken up around the world describing his life and ideology after ‘a consensus [emerged] that the “road to 9/11” traces back to him’.
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Qutb was described as the ‘intellectual grandfather to Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists’.
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Sayyid Qutb was one of the few really influential voices to emerge from the Ikhwan, but he wasn’t of its making. He joined the group in 1953, by which time he was already in his late forties and a recognised Islamic scholar. He entered the fold only because he decided he had to pick a side as the relationship between the army and the Brotherhood slid into open warfare.
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It has been argued that his loathing of Western society was driven by the two years he had previously spent in the United States on a scholarship sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Education, where he worked. In his own writings he detailed his disgust with Western morality, which was undoubtedly shaped by incidents such as a ‘beautiful, tall, semi-naked’ woman trying to get into bed with him on the boat going over.
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Matters weren’t helped by the fact that she was drunk and collapsed on the floor outside when he kicked her out of his cabin. What he found when he got off the boat also greatly offended his sensibilities.

But what really radicalised Qutb was not the thought of being confined in a small space with a beautiful woman but actually being confined in a small space with a bunch of sadistic Egyptian prison guards. He was arrested four years after his return from the US during the crackdown on the Ikhwan after the failed assassination attempt on Nasser in 1954.

The world wasn’t changed by what Sayyid Qutb said, it was changed by what the people who listened to him did. Some scholars have reacted to his demonisation by asserting that the ‘ambiguity in his thought was partly to blame’
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and that ‘it is unwise to assume a direct link between Sayyid Qutb and Usama bin Laden’.
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There is some evidence for that argument in the sense that his insistence that modern Muslim societies had been polluted by Western thought and needed to return to the pure model of the Prophet’s era resonated with an entire generation of young Egyptian Islamists who did not turn to violence. Qutb’s thoughts also inspired the thinking of men like the Tunisian Rashid Ghannoushi and many of the modern and moderate leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

But while the argument can be made that Qutb would not have approved of the mass murder of civilians, it is clear that his ideas were both the loaded gun and the justification for pulling the trigger of those that did. While he was locked up and being tortured he rewrote and expanded much of his earlier more moderate thinking to produce his seminal work
Milestones
, which reflected his new radicalised outlook. His were the words of an angry, tortured man. These words would inspire the men who brought down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the man who sent them and hundreds of other Islamic extremists around the world to carry out other appalling acts of violence.

‘Qutb’s writings represented an exceptional state of mind because it represents the suffering of torture and abuse in prison. There is no doubt that I respect Qutb’s bravery, although I disagree with his thoughts, which never represented the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood’s way of thinking,’ said Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, who was a member of the Brotherhood’s highest governing body, the Guidance Bureau, for more than twenty years. He was also imprisoned for long periods by the Egyptian military. The shared experience of jail and, for many in the leadership, torture bound the group together throughout the years of the dictatorship. It only began to unravel after the revolution. Aboul-Fotouh told me he was also once a ‘fundamentalist’ in his youth, but over time he helped shape and rebuild the Ikhwan into a more moderate organisation after the Nasser years. ‘I consider Qutb’s ideas a danger to the Islamic movement worldwide much more than it is for the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter by nature not only read Qutb, they also read al-Banna and others. The other foreign Islamic movements were negatively affected by Qutb’s thought because he is all they read.’

Sayyid Qutb’s critique of Islamic societies and what he saw as their failure to follow the true path of Islam went well beyond the teachings of al-Banna or any other Islamic scholar of his era. Al-Banna wanted Egyptian society to be run according to traditional Islam. He thought some Muslims were bad Muslims and he sought to persuade them to move back to the core values of the faith.

Qutb concluded that you were either his kind of Muslim or you weren’t a Muslim at all.
Milestones
, which was smuggled piecemeal out of jail,
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was his manifesto for political Islam, and in it he declared that ‘all the existing so-called “Muslim” societies are
jahili
societies.’
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Jahili
means ignorant or backward. This was the word used to describe the state of the pre-Islamic Arab world before God revealed the tenets of the Islamic faith to the Prophet Muhammad. According to Qutb:

The position of Islam in relation to all these
jahili
societies can be described in one sentence: it considers all these societies un-Islamic and illegal. Islam does not look at the labels or titles which these societies have adopted; they all have one thing in common, and that is that their way of life is not based on complete submission to God alone.
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