The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (11 page)

 S
till, Salafism is not antimodernist, nor is it even anti-Western, except in the sense that it is a typical manifestation of a society that tends to define itself against the other. Salafism, in fact, represents the progressive and rational current of Islam, one that sought to reconcile a society marked by fatalism and backwardness with the forces of modernity embodied by the West. Salafism is not deviant but the mainstream of contemporary Islamic thought-even if some of its adherents do not always put it into practice.

For instance, Muhammad the
bawwab’s
belief in supernatural creatures that pulled pranks on mankind was folkloric Sufi in origin, but the Salafi preachers from his neighborhood had filled him with loathing for the Sufis. “Sufism is not real Islam,” he said. Ahmed, a neighbor, was careful never to raise the issue when the three of us were together, for he was a Sufi.

Ahmed was a student, tall and thin with nervous hands. Every time we walked on the street together, he took my hand in his, customary among middle-class Cairo men. His father was a law school professor from a well-educated family that lost land and money when an uncle crossed the Nasserists, so Ahmed avoided politics and kept to philosophy, Western and Islamic. At Cairo University he majored in philosophy and specialized in Sufism. “Sufis believe that you don’t change anything,” he said. “If there’s a problem with someone else, leave it alone. The point in Sufism is to change yourself.”

That peaceful self-improvement program is precisely what the Salafis read as quiescence and Oriental fatalism. Instead of the jihad of personal growth, the Salafis preached a jihad that recognized real
enemies in the world, enemies who needed to be defeated for Islam to survive and the
umma
to flourish. An even greater foe than the West, many of the Salafis thought, were the Westernized collaborators who corrupted Muslim societies from within. Those Muslims who did not share Salafi beliefs were subject to
takfir
(the accusation of apostasy), and the militants, starting with the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, resolved to wage real jihad against them, no matter how many innocents were caught in the cross fire. Paradoxically, the Salafi crusade against apostates sent some Egyptians looking for relief from such bloodshed in the name of Islam, and they found it ready-made in the Sufi orders, or
tariqat
(sing.,
tariqa)
, communities of faith built around a firm core of tolerance and a history of openness toward other traditions and cultures.

The Sufi-Salafi dialectic was the topic of Ahmed’s graduate thesis. He had counted almost one hundred different Sufi brotherhoods flourishing now in Egypt as part of the renaissance of Egyptian Sufism. He was a member of a
tariqa
and invited me to join him for one of its meetings. “They will not divulge any secret knowledge to you as an outsider,” he warned. As an outsider, I told him, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish what was secret from what wasn’t.

The mosque was on the second floor of a commercial building near Al-Azhar. Some of the men were already there, a few praying on cushioned mats in the middle of a room the size and pale hue of a middle-school cafeteria. Others were sitting in the back, chatting quietly and smoking. Ahmed introduced me to a friend of his, a classics professor from Cairo University who regarded the sheikh with great reverence. “He knows everything,” the professor said. “He’s a
wali.”

I asked him, if Sufi wisdom is an advanced form of Islamic knowledge, why aren’t more Muslims interested in pursuing Sufism? “It is an advanced spiritual stage in Islam, and not too many people can do it,” he said. “And thank God, because we don’t want it as crowded in heaven as it is in Cairo,” he said, laughing. That was just
the sort of elitism that turned people off of the Sufis and won the Salafis large constituencies across the region.

Still, the Sufis were a kindly-looking bunch, from college students in baseball caps to workingmen in
galabeyas
, and a few braved business suits in the hundred-degree heat that seemed that much worse with the large crowd of maybe two hundred packed into the small room. The women were in an adjoining hall watching on a live video feed. When the sheikh entered the room, Ahmed and I scrambled to find seats on the floor up front.

Sheikh Mukhtar was a short, roundish man with a dark complexion and gray spiky hair. His bright blue suit, blue tie, and large silver wristwatch were evidence of his life outside the
tariqa
as a successful entrepreneur whose agricultural project had won him some favor from the government. The mukhabarat, or state security, regularly attended the meetings to make sure that despite his worldly ambitions he avoided sensitive political topics. Also, they were there to protect him, since there had apparently been an attempt on the sheikh’s life a few years back. There were practical reasons for Sufi secrecy as well as spiritual ones.

The sheikh saw Ahmed speaking to me and asked who the visitor was. Ahmed explained I was an American, and the sheikh punned on my name—an Arabic construction meaning “I have”—and all the Sufis laughed. “Now you understand why we like this,” Ahmed leaned over to whisper. “We have fun. Sufis are different from other Muslims.”

“This isn’t just for Muslims,” Sheikh Mukhtar said, looking at me. “This is for people who are open to different ideas, Christians, Jews—even,” and he paused for the punch line, “Marxists.” He waited for the laughter to subside and then resumed. “We want peace with everyone. We don’t want war, not with Jews, not with Israel, no matter what some people say. We want peace.” It was a political opinion, but one in line with a regime that had a peace treaty with Israel, and the mukhabarat breathed easily.

The sheikh paced the small stage with a microphone, discussing spiritual salvation and telling an occasional joke. The
tariqa’s
elders sat behind him in large comfortable chairs nodding and smiling pleasantly. They stood and moved to the front to lead a group prayer resembling deep-breathing exercises when Sheikh Mukhtar paused for a drink of water. “Allah,” the Sufis chanted, “Allah, Allaaaah, Allaaaah …”

At the end of the two-hour meeting, the sheikh retired from the stage, parting the crowd like a prophet, and Muslim men reached like Romans to touch his blue suit. Ahmed said that we had been granted an audience.

We waited at the end of a long line leading into a room in the back where Sheikh Mukhtar was seated in a large throne-like chair to receive visitors. “Don’t be nervous,” Ahmed told me nervously. He’d never met Mukhtar before. I offered to go first to give him some more time to prepare himself. “No!” he said. “You have to watch me and follow the protocol. Go up, take his hand, and bow, and when he gives you permission, then you can speak to him.”

At last it was Ahmed’s turn. He told the sheikh about his scholarly interest in as well as his spiritual devotion to Sufism. When he explained excitedly that his thesis was about the differences between Sufi
tariqat
, Mukhtar exploded with anger. “There are no differences among Sufis,” he shouted. “We are all one!” Ahmed didn’t even have time to apologize before the sheikh’s men led him away. He was stunned, and his mouth hung wide open. The sheikh had yelled at him, and how would he live this down—the Sufi apprentice who had broken the composure of a
wali?

I followed in line reluctantly. The sheikh looked down at me and asked if I was Muslim. “No,” I said. “I’m in the Christian, Jewish, Marxist camp.” He turned serious and told me there was little for me in Sufism if I wasn’t already a Muslim. I didn’t want to be a Sufi, I said. I just wanted to hear different ideas. I was quickly dismissed.

Ahmed and I went to a nearby coffee shop. He ordered
shisha
and
then got a call on his cell phone from someone in the sheikh’s inner circle. “Mukhtar’s brother heads a different
tariqa,”
said Ahmed after hanging up. “The two brothers have been arguing.” He poked at the hot coal in his water pipe for a bit and then continued. “The sheikh was very sensitive when I asked about divisions in Sufism because the brothers started accusing each other of apostasy.” The Sufis are doing
takfir?
I asked. Brother against brother? He nodded his head despondently.

 O
ne of the typical charges against Westerners, made by Arab thinkers from Afghani down to Edward Said, is that we think of Islam as a monolithic, static force that has not changed over its fourteen-hundred-year career and is incapable of changing now. But the truth is that it is Muslims themselves who are most likely to see Islam as static, or their own variety of Islam as the essential version and all others as deviations. Non-Muslims do not practice
takfir
and accuse Muslims of apostasy; Muslims do.

Because Islam is not merely a matter of personal faith but also the basis of a political order, these debates over what is the real or true Islam are of great consequence—not just to the individual believer but also to Muslim communities, which during the last century have torn each other to pieces in search of an answer.

  R
aouf invited me to his house for lunch before our meeting with a terrorist lawyer. Raouf’s sister was home, and since as a non-family member I wasn’t allowed to see her uncovered (she took her veil off when she ate), his mother served us our meal in his room. Raouf’s mother also wore a head scarf, one that swept her graying hair off her bare neck, a style different from the one that the young Islamist girls, like her daughter, had made fashionable with the veil covering everything but the face. Raouf was not an Islamist. He modeled his life not after the Prophet of Islam but after the German philosophers whose pictures he had taped to his wall. “My mother hates those pictures,” he said. “They’re too depressing for her. She would rather I put up photos of girls.”

But Raouf’s dream in life was to translate all of Kant into Arabic, an ambition that is not really as odd as it sounds. As the philosopher who tried to derive a morality separate from organized religion, Kant is an important figure for Arab liberals, especially young ones. Raouf was twenty-three when we first met in the spring of 2002, and just out of college, where he, like the Sufi Ahmed, had studied philosophy.
They’d never met before I introduced them, and when I did, they didn’t like each other. Their chosen field was not one of the high-profile faculties at Cairo University, like medicine or pharmacology, and it offered no guarantee of a good job for the only son of a comfortable and educated middle-class family.

Raouf’s sister was studying architecture at Cairo U. and made him drive her around the city to look at buildings. “She says she is going to take a sketch pad and go through all of Europe,” he told me. “France, Germany, and England, too, and draw all the churches, and I told her it’s going to take the rest of her life because there are thousands of churches in England alone.”

I asked him how drawing churches fit with her fundamentalism.

“It doesn’t,” he said, laughing. “Muslims live contradictions that can’t be reconciled.”

Like how the same family managed to raise an Islamist daughter and a German Idealist?

Raouf credited his father, a successful businessman who’d inherited the family store when his father died, leaving three wives, dozens of children, and a family business, and had no choice but to abandon his law studies. When it came time for his son to go to school, he encouraged Raouf to study what he liked. Raouf’s father spoiled him some, giving him an allowance until he found work, money Raouf stashed away all year for the Cairo International Book Fair, where he used his savings to purchase so many books that he had to buy lunch for the friends he brought along to carry his purchases. For his companions, the field trip was a chance to look at girls at the exhibition grounds, but Raouf cared for nothing except his books.

He was handsome and tall with thick shoulders, big Egyptian eyes, and a full mouth. The Egyptian girls giggled when he walked by, and the middle-aged British women on holiday said things about him out loud to each other that would’ve made him blush had he been paying attention to the attention paid him. Unlike American men with the same literary interests, he never assumed his interesting
ideas were destined to win him the affection of interesting women, so he kept his thoughts to himself. His ideal job was to run a small book stand, like the one specializing in philosophy that we stopped by late one night in Azbakiyah Square, a large open-air mall. Business was slow. The bookseller, a man in his early sixties, had also studied philosophy at the university and told us that he had ambitions when he was younger, had convened discussion groups with some like-minded friends, but was satisfied to raise his family on a government salary and bide his time until he could retire and surround himself with books. He brought us tea, and we talked about Aristotle. Raouf thought the whole setup was perfect.

In the meantime, he was building his own formidable library. Along with his precious Germans, he had, among others, volumes of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
, a collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, a collection of Nasser’s speeches, Foucault, Samuel Huntington, a history of the Baath Party in Syria, and
From Beirut to Jerusalem.
“I love this book too much,” he said. “Thomas Friedman is great, but I don’t agree with some of his neoliberal colleagues—that money and jobs will make everything okay across the world.”

Raouf thought our faith in
Homo economicus
and materialism made us more dogmatic than the Arabs and led us to underestimate the power of ideas. If ideas mattered less to a man than having another ten dollars in his pocket at the end of the day, then why had all these Americans who believed man to be a rational economic actor pursued intellectual work as a career? Writers, journalists, professors, diplomats—they were all smart enough to become lawyers or businessmen and make millions. So why didn’t they make a rational economic choice with their own lives? Because they are not slaves, ideas matter. Yet our political theory, he thought, was all typed on a cash register, especially when it came to the Arabs and Islam. We believe that poverty has so humiliated the Arabs that they have no choice but to suicide themselves and murder others—that is, the
Arabs lack money. Arabs kill Americans because they hate our freedoms—that is, the Arabs lack the opportunity to make money. Arabs are motivated by legitimate political grievances—that is, the way to stop the violence is to bribe them. But the Arabs, Raouf insisted, are not slaves, either. Ideas matter to them, too.