Those Who Forget the Past (58 page)

Dennis Ross, who guided Middle East policy under the first Bush administration and was the chief Middle East negotiator for Bill Clinton, told me last week that he and others had underestimated the influence that the press and the imams had in creating a climate hostile to Israel and America.

“The media have been a kind of safety valve to release tensions, and you could even say that a safety valve is a legitimate way to approach such problems,” Ross, who is now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “But in doing so they appeased extremist sentiments rather than countering them. A climate has been created in which the practice of suicide attacks has come to be seen as legitimate. I'm concerned that there are those who say that if it's O.K. against Israelis, then it's O.K. against Americans.”

When I summarized Ross's view to Muhammad El-Sayed Said, the deputy director of the Al-Ahram Center, he blamed Ross for the failure of the peace process. “Dennis Ross is behind it all,” Said said. “The Americans should be blamed for the disaster we are in,” he continued, referring to the collapsed peace process, and, indirectly, to the terror attacks on the United States. “There's an ambivalence about the World Trade Center. I saw so many people crying when they heard the news, but the other side of it is that many Egyptians saw this as a useful blow against American arrogance. The sense is that it will help the Americans learn that they, too, are vulnerable. That they are paying a price for their total support for Israel.”

Egyptian political élites, unlike the makers of street opinion, do not suggest that Israel, either alone or in concert with American extremists, carried out the attacks, but they blame Israel for creating an atmosphere of despair which leads to terrorism.

Last Tuesday, I met with Amir Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, which is housed in a palatial building on Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo. Before being appointed secretary-general, Moussa served as President Mubarak's Foreign Minister. He is known as an outspoken critic of Israel. Moussa is a dapper man who, like many veteran diplomats, can speak at great length without giving much away. He said first that he hoped the World Trade Center would be rebuilt; then he outlined the current thinking of the Mubarak regime.

“There is a wide menu of cooperation,” he said. “Countries will choose the areas where they can do best. All of us will fight terrorism, confront terrorism, but not necessarily by conducting a military campaign.”

Moussa said that the World Trade Center attack should provide the impetus for America to “reassess” its Middle East alliances. “When it comes to the crunch, such as the Persian Gulf War, ten years ago, or the situation today, America has to sideline Israel,” he said. “If Israel intervened on the side of America, it would be destructive to any coalition against terrorism.” Many Arab governments have stated that they will not participate in a coalition in which Israel plays a part, and the Bush administration has agreed. Moussa said that Israeli behavior in the occupied territories is contributing to instability and unease throughout the Muslim world.

Last October, during a visit here to attend an Arab summit on the Palestinian uprising, I spent a morning with a Muslim cleric named Muhammad Sayed Tantawi. Tantawi is the highest-ranking cleric in Egypt, and an influential figure across the Sunni Islamic world. I met him in his office near Al-Azhar University, the venerable Muslim theological center, which he oversees. Tantawi is known as the Sheikh of Al-Azhar.

Tantawi was appointed by Mubarak, whose official photograph hangs in Tantawi's office. Sheikh Tantawi usually has taken the side of Islamic moderation and believes in interfaith dialogue, but he also supports the development of an Arab nuclear weapon. Last October, the Palestinian uprising was in its infancy; there had not been a wave of suicide bombings since 1997. But in the interview Tantawi forcefully addressed the issue of jihad. “If someone takes something from you by force, it is your right to take it back by force,” he said. “This is a requirement of Islam. If the Israelis would stop transgressing Muslim land, then there no longer would be a requirement to rise up and fight them.”

I asked if Muslims were forbidden by Islamic law to engage in specific acts of retribution. “The killing of civilians is always wrong,” he said. “Women, children. This is abhorrent to Islam.”

Tantawi has since endorsed some suicide attacks against soldiers. In an interview earlier this year, he said, “The Palestinian youth who bomb themselves among people who fight against them are considered martyrs.” Last week, though, he would not talk about suicide attacks. When I spoke to him briefly outside his office, he said only that he was sorry for the attacks on America, and he approved the notion of an international conference on terrorism. I noticed that he moved with a serious-looking security detail; men with submachine guns hanging under their jackets shadowed him through the building.

I asked one of Sheikh Tantawi's aides if there had been a specific threat against the Sheikh's life. No, he said, but added, “Egyptians are the victims of terrorism as well.” He was referring to the anti-government campaigns of the 1990s, in which terrorists operated on behalf of two fundamentalist Muslim groups: the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Gama'a al-Islamiya. In this wave of terror, Egyptians and foreign tourists alike were murdered in a brutal campaign to convert Egypt into an Islamic state. Fundamentalists killed President Sadat in October of 1981, and they have tried to kill Mubarak as well. But the security around Tantawi suggests that they might want to kill him, too—and they could find, in a liberal interpretation of Tantawi's ruling favoring suicide attacks against “oppressors,” a new and devastatating way to carry out their vision.

From an Islamic theological perspective, perhaps the most significant suicide attack to have taken place in the last two weeks occurred on September 9, in northern Afghanistan. Two men suspected to be operating under the command of Osama bin Laden blew themselves up along with the leader of the Afghan opposition, Ahmed Shah Massoud. It is one thing for Muslim extremists to martyr themselves while attacking infidels; it is quite another for them to begin defining religious Muslims such as Massoud as infidels. Even among the Islamic Jihad and Hamas clerics of the Gaza Strip, I never heard anyone justify the use of suicide bombers against Muslim targets.

For some fundamentalists, the Massoud murder seemed to have significantly shifted the boundaries of what is considered permissible. Some Islamic scholars, including those under Sheikh Tantawi's supervision at Al-Azhar, have argued that, if one could attack Israelis, one could also attack anyone who stands in the way of their vision of what the world should look like.

To better understand the thinking of Muslims who have killed fellow Muslims in holy war, I went to see Montasser al-Zayyat, the spokesman of the Gama'a al-Islamiya, which is the larger of Egypt's two fundamentalist terrorist groups. He is a lawyer and has represented, among others, his organization's spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is in prison in America for plotting to blow up a number of New York landmarks, including the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the Empire State Building, and the United Nations.

When I arrived at a decrepit building in downtown Cairo, where al-Zayyat has his office, it was 9 P.M., and in his waiting room were several bearded men who were seeking an audience with him. They were noticeably hostile toward me, but I could not tell if they were upset by the presence of an American or by the fact that the American was jumping the line.

Al-Zayyat himself, a heavy featured, bearded man, was friendly, but, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, he was evasive. At a press conference in Cairo earlier this year, he had warned, “The U.S. will reap a bitter harvest if it continues humiliating Dr. Omar”—Sheikh Rahman. “The continuation of the Sheikh's abuse may result in an explosion of events targeted against U.S. interests. Sheikh Omar has many followers.” That night, he said that his threats were not to be taken literally. “I'm very sorry for what happened in New York,” he said.

Although Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt have been less visible since President Mubarak ordered a crackdown in the mid-nineties, they have been especially discreet over the last two weeks. The Gama'a al-Islamiya declared a ceasefire in 1999, but thousands of its members remain in jail. Like its rival, the ideologically similar Islamic Jihad, the Gama'a grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which for decades has been advocating the Islamization of Egyptian society. Unlike the Gama'a, which is illegal, the Muslim brothers exist in an ambiguous political state described to me by one government official as “illegal but tolerated.”

The Egyptian Islamic Jihad is also illegal, and in any case seems to have transferred its operations to Afghanistan and merged with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, with the help of Jihad's Ayman al-Zawahiri. Though they represent rival organizations, al-Zayyat considers al-Zawahiri a friend.

“He's a very sensible man, a very quiet man,” al-Zayyat said, when I asked him to describe al-Zawahiri. “When he speaks, you listen to him carefully.”

I asked al-Zayyat what might have driven al-Zawahiri to help organize the American attacks. He replied that he had no knowledge of the attacks, and also said, “I'm not going to be a witness against my friend.”

I had a final question: What is it about America that incites the fury of so many Islamists? I suggested that it is American values, especially as they relate to sex and the role of women in society, which Islamic conservatives abhor. “We have sex in Egypt,” al-Zayyat said, laughing. Then he went on, “We don't have feelings of hatred toward the people of the U.S., but feelings of hatred toward the government of the U.S. have developed because you support Israel so blindly.” At that moment, Montasser al-Zayyat's views seemed inseparable from those of Mubarak's spokesmen.

One evening, I met a friend, a member of the small Egyptian upper class, for drinks in a hotel by the Nile. Cairo isn't Islamabad: Muslims are free to drink alcohol, and there are movie theaters and belly dancing, although the percentage of women wearing traditional headscarves seems to have increased dramatically since I first visited, ten years ago. What people aren't encouraged to do is express interest in democratic reform. My friend asked that I not name him in anything I might write; he believes that the soft despotism of the Mubarak government is hardening, and he wants to stay out of jail. Earlier this year, a prominent sociologist and democracy advocate, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, was sentenced to seven years' hard labor on trumped-up charges, and, like the Egyptian peace camp, the number of those who support true democracy is purposefully shrinking from view.

We spoke about the Egyptian preoccupation with Israel. He is no friend of Israel—“I'm an Arab, how can I have warm feelings for such a place?” he said—but he believes that hatred of Israel, and, to a lesser extent, hatred of America, is fomented by the Mubarak regime as a diversion; as long as Egyptians think about Palestinians, they aren't thinking about themselves. “Egyptians live in just appalling conditions today,” he said.

Per-capita income in Egypt is less than the per-capita income on the West Bank. Cairo is a tumultuous, decaying city with a wealthy élite and great masses of the destitute and the near-destitute. The universities are turning out thousands of graduates each year for whom there are no jobs. “The gap between rich and poor is widening, and what does the government give us? Hatred of the peace process.” He ascribes to Mubarak's circle the ability to turn on and off anti-Western rhetoric.

All of this, he went on, is indirectly the fault of America, which gives Egypt two billion dollars a year in aid but demands little in return. “You allow them to manipulate you. Every time anti-American feelings appear here, Mubarak says, ‘Support me or else you see what you'll get.' But the suppression and the corruption and the anti-democratic behavior will create much worse fundamentalism over time. Washington never stands up to them.” He cited the imprisonment of the democracy advocate Saad Ibrahim, and said, “Look what they just did on the Queen Boat.”

The boat in question, a well-known disco that allegedly attracted a gay clientele, was anchored a short distance from where we sat. (“Queen” is thought to refer to the wife of the deposed King Farouk.) Following a police raid of the vessel in May, fifty-three men were arrested for presumed homosexuality; these men are now on trial in Cairo. Two weeks ago, the first sentence was handed down: a seventeen-year-old received three years' hard labor.

“What does the U.S. do about this? Nothing,” my friend said. The only prescription is the robust export of democratic values. “There's no Cold War anymore. You can't drive him into an alliance with the Soviets.”

There are few Egyptian intellectuals who still argue publicly in favor of normalization with Jerusalem. They are despised, and for the most part quiet. One of them is Ali Salem, a play-wright recently expelled from the Egyptian Writers' Union for making frequent visits to Israel and for assuming a pro-normalization stance.

I wanted to ask Salem, who is sixty-five years old and looks like the literary critic Harold Bloom, what had happened, but he said that he was interested in talking about “something deeper than that.” We sat in a cafeteria not far from the Mahmoud mosque. Salem drank coffee and chain-smoked Marlboros. “History is cruel,” he said. “It is trying to drag America backward. But I think in this case history is right.”

He explained, “We here need to be more progressive, but you need to take a step back. If the bureaucrats in your airports were just a little more paranoid, like us, it would be a different world. Really, America is a beautiful place: no one even asked why all these guys wanted flying lessons. You should learn to be suspicious. A little backwardness would be healthy.”