CHAPTER 13

The Power of Islam

Each year the Egyptian armed forces hold a parade on the sixth of October, a national holiday marking the anniversary of the 1973 War. The Cairo parade ground is set against the dramatic backdrop of a modern pyramid commissioned by President Anwar Sadat to honor the fallen of the October War. This monument also serves as the tomb of Egypt’s unknown soldier. The Armed Forces Day parade celebrates the high point of Sadat’s presidency, when he became the “Hero of the Crossing” of the Suez Canal. The parade commemorates Egypt’s military leadership of the Arab world against Israel in 1973, before Egypt’s separate peace with the Jewish state severely compromised its standing. Sadat did his utmost to focus public attention on the Armed Forces Day parade, which he attended in person in the full glare of the Egyptian and international press. At least for a day, he could ignore the fact of Egypt’s isolation: in response to the Camp David Accords, the other Arab states had severed their ties to Egypt, and the Arab League had relocated its headquarters from Cairo to Tunis. These measures only stiffened the Egyptian government’s resolve to celebrate the accomplishments of the 1973 War as a matter of national honor. On October 6, 1981, Sadat took his seat in the review stand with full state pomp, dressed in his ceremonial uniform, surrounded by his cabinet, clerics, foreign dignitaries, and the military’s top brass. Row upon row of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and missile launchers filed between the pyramid-shaped cenotaph and the review stand. A tight formation of air force fighters screamed overhead, trailing colored smoke. “Now comes the artillery,” the commentator announced, as the dull tan-colored trucks pulling howitzers approached the review stand. One of the trucks swerved violently and came to a sudden halt. A soldier leaped from the cab and lobbed a number of stun grenades into the review stand, while his three accomplices opened fire on the assembled dignitaries from the back of the flatbed truck. They had achieved total surprise, and the renegade soldiers enjoyed thirty seconds of unimpeded carnage. They probably killed Sadat with their opening shots. The leader of the band ran to the front of the reviewing stand and fired point blank at the prone body of President Sadat until finally one of the presidential guards shot and wounded him. “I am Khalid al-Islambuli,” the assassin shouted to the chaos in the review stand. “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”¹ The assassination of Sadat, broadcast live on television, sent shock waves around the world. A minor Islamist, acting almost entirely on his own, had assassinated the president of Egypt, the most powerful Arab state. The prospect of an Islamic revolution could no longer be confined to Iran, as Islamist movements cropped up across the Arab world to challenge secular governments.

When Khalid al-Islambuli shouted, “I have killed Pharoah,” he was condemning Sadat for being a secular ruler who placed man’s law before religion. The Islamists were united by their belief that Muslim societies had to be ruled in accordance with “God’s law,” the body of Islamic law derived from the Qur’an, the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, and the jurisprudence of Islamic theologians collectively known as sharia. They saw their own secular governments as the enemy and referred to their rulers as “pharaohs.” The Qur’an, like the Hebrew Bible, is very critical of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, portraying them as despots who promoted man’s law over God’s commandments. There are no fewer than seventy-nine verses of the Qur’an condemning pharaohs. The more extreme Islamists advocate violence against the latter-day pharaohs ruling the Arab world as a necessary measure to overturn secular governments and build Islamic states in their place. Khalid al-Islambuli was one of their ranks, and he declared the assassination of Sadat legitimate by denouncing the fallen president as pharaoh. The Islamists were not Sadat’s only critics. Anwar Sadat was laid to rest on October 10, 1981, in a state funeral attended by a number of international leaders but few representatives from the Arab states. Attendees included Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, the three American presidents with whom Sadat had worked closely. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat for the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, led a prominent Israeli delegation. Among Arab League members, only Sudan, Oman, and Somalia sent representatives to the funeral. More striking, perhaps, was the paucity of prominent Egyptians at their president’s funeral. Mohamed Heikal, the veteran journalist and political analyst who nurtured his own grievances against Sadat (Heikal had been arrested and imprisoned in a roundup of opposition figures one month before the assassination), reflected on how ?a man who was mourned as a heroic and far-seeing statesman in the West found hardly any mourners among his fellow-countrymen.?² Yet both his critics and his admirers were satisfied with the choice of Sadat’s final resting place. To those who honored the “Hero of the Crossing” it was most appropriate that Sadat was buried in the grounds of the 1973 War memorial, facing the review stand where he had been gunned down. Sadat’s Islamist enemies took satisfaction in the fact that the pharaoh had been buried in the shadow of his pyramid. The Islamists had managed to kill the president of Egypt, but they lacked the resources and planning to topple the government of Egypt. Vice President Husni Mubarak, who had been rushed from the parade grounds with minor wounds, was declared president shortly after the announcement of Sadat’s death. The Egyptian security forces rounded up hundreds of suspects and allegedly subjected many of them to torture. Six months later, in April 1982, five of the defendants were sentenced to death for their role in the assassination of Sadat: Khalid al-Islambuli, his three accomplices, and their ideological guide, an electrician named ’Abd al-Salam Faraj who had written a tract advocating jihad against “un-Islamic” (i.e., secular) Arab rulers. Their executions made martyrs of Sadat’s assassins, and throughout the 1980s, Islamist groups continued to wage an often violent campaign against the Egyptian government in their ongoing bid to turn the secular nationalist Arab Republic of Egypt into the Islamic Republic of Egypt.

Given the prominence of Islam in public life across much of the Arab world today, it is easy to forget just how secular the Middle East was in 1981. In all but the most conservative Arab Gulf states, Western fashions were preferred over traditional dress. Many people drank alcohol openly, in disregard of Islamic prohibition. Men and women mixed freely both in public and in the work place, as more and more women were entering higher education and professional life. For some, the freedoms of the modern age marked a high point in Arab progress. Others viewed these developments with unease, fearing that the rapid pace of change was leading the Arab world to abandon its own culture and values. The debates over Islam and modernity have deep roots in the Arab world. Hassan al-Banna had created the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to fight against Western influences and the erosion of Islamic values in Egypt. Over the decades the Muslim Brothers had faced increasing repression, banned by the Egyptian monarchy in December 1948, and then by Nasser’s regime in 1954. In the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Islamic politics were driven underground across the Arab world, and Islamic values were undermined by secular states that increasingly drew their inspiration from either Soviet socialism or Western free-market democracy. Yet repression only strengthened the will of the Muslim Brothers to fight secularism and promote their own vision of Islamic values. A radical new trend emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s, led by a charismatic Egyptian thinker named Sayyid Qutb. He was to prove one of the most influential Islamic reformers of the century. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Qutb moved to Cairo in the 1920s to study in the teacher’s college, Dar al-’Ulum. Upon graduation, he worked for the Ministry of Education as a teacher and an inspector. He was also active in the literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s as both an author and a critic. In 1948 Qutb was sent on a two-year government scholarship to study in the United States. He took his masters in education from the University of Northern Colorado’s Teachers’ College, with periods of study in both Washington, D.C., and Stanford, California. Though he crossed the United States from east to west, Qutb came away with none of the typical exchange student’s affection for the country. In 1951 Qutb published his reflections, “The America I Have Seen,” in an Islamist magazine. Condemning the materialism and dearth of spiritual values he encountered in the United States, Qutb was appalled by what he saw as moral laxity and unbridled competitiveness in American society. He was particularly shocked to find these vices in American churches. “In most churches,” Qutb wrote, “there are clubs that join the two sexes, and every minister attempts to attract to his church as many people as possible, especially since there is a tremendous competition between churches of different denominations.” Qutb found such behavior, of trying to pack in the crowds, more appropriate for a theater manager than a spiritual leader. In his essay Qutb told the story of how one night he had attended a church service followed by a dance. He was appalled to see the lengths to which the pastor went to make the church hall look “more romantic and passionate.” The pastor even chose a sultry record by Ray Charles to set the mood. Qutb’s description of the tune—“a famous American song called ‘But Baby, It’s Cold Outside,’” captures the gulf that separated him from American popular culture. “[The song] is composed of a dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late, and her mother was waiting but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with this line: but baby, it’s cold outside!”³ Qutb clearly found the song distasteful, but he was even more shocked that a man of religion would choose such an inappropriate tune for his young parishioners to dance to. Nothing could be further from the social role of mosques, in which the sexes are separated and modesty is the rule in dress and behavior. Qutb returned to Egypt determined to snap his fellow countrymen out of their complacent admiration for the modern values that America embodied. “I fear that a balance may not exist between America’s material greatness and the quality of its people,” he argued. “And I fear that the wheel of life will have turned and the book of time will have closed and America will have added nothing, or next to nothing, to the account of morals that distinguishes man from object, and indeed, mankind from animals.”⁴ Qutb did not want to change America; rather, he wanted to protect Egypt, and the Islamic world generally, from the moral degeneration he had witnessed in America. Shortly after his return from the United States, in 1952 Sayyid Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Because of his background in publishing, he was placed in charge of the society’s press and publications office. The ardent Islamist had gained a wide readership through his provocative essays. Following Egypt’s 1952 revolution, Qutb enjoyed good relations with the Free Officers. Nasser reportedly invited Qutb to draft the constitution of the new official party, the Liberation Rally. Presumably, Nasser did so less out of admiration for the Islamist reformer himself than as a calculated bid to harness Qutb’s support for the new official organ into which all political parties—the Muslim Brotherhood included—were to be dissolved. The new regime’s goodwill toward the Muslim Brotherhood proved short lived. Qutb was arrested in the general clampdown on the organization after a member of the Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser in October 1954. Like many other Muslim Brothers, Qutb claimed he had been subjected to horrific torture and interrogation while under arrest. Convicted on charges of subversive activity, Qutb was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor. From prison, Qutb continued to inspire fellow Islamists. Ill health often confined him to the hospital wing, where he wrote some of the most influential works of the twentieth century on Islam and politics, including a radical commentary on the Qur’an and his clarion call for the promotion of a genuine Islamic society, titled Milestones. Milestones represents the culmination of Qutb’s views on both the bankruptcy of Western materialism and the authoritarianism of secular Arab nationalism. The social and political systems that defined the modern age, he argued, were man-made and had failed for that very reason. Instead of opening a new age of science and knowledge, they had resulted in ignorance of divine guidance, or jahiliyya. The word has particular resonance in Islam, as it refers to the pre-Islamic dark ages. Twentieth-century jahiliyya, Qutb argued, “takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behaviour, and to choose any way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has prescribed.” By implication, the remarkable advances in science and technology of the twentieth century had not led humanity into a modern age; rather, the abandonment of God’s eternal message had taken society back to the seventh century. This was as true for the non-Islamic West, Qutb believed, as it was for the Arab world. The result, he argued, was tyranny. Arab regimes did not bring their citizens freedom and human rights, but repression and torture?as Qutb knew from painful firsthand experience. Qutb believed that Islam, as the perfect statement of God’s order for mankind, was the only route to human freedom, a true liberation theology. By extension, the only valid and legitimate laws were God’s laws, as enshrined in Islamic sharia. He believed that a Muslim vanguard was needed to restore Islam to “the role of the leader of mankind.” The vanguard would use “preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs” and would deploy “physical power and jihad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord.” Qutb wrote his book to guide the vanguard who would lead the revival of Islamic values, through which Muslims would once again achieve personal freedom and world leadership.⁵ The power of Qutb’s message lay in its simplicity and directness. He identified a problem—jahiliyya—and a clear Islamic solution that was grounded in the values that many Arab Muslims held dear. His critique applied equally to imperial powers and to autocratic Arab governments, and his response was a message of hope grounded in the assumption of Muslim superiority:Conditions change, the Muslim loses his physical power and is conquered; yet the consciousness does not depart from him that he is the most superior. If he remains a Believer, he looks upon his conqueror from a superior position. He remains certain that this is a temporary condition which will pass away and that faith will turn the tide from which there is no escape. Even if death is his portion, he will never bow his head. Death comes to all, but for him there is martyrdom. He will proceed to the Garden [i.e., heaven], while his conquerors go to the Fire [i.e., hell].⁶