Posted on 10/06/2001 4:51:18 PM PDT by dighton
The Mohandessin section of Cairo is a fashionable district on the west bank of the Nile that contains embassies, boutiques and American fast-food restaurants. It also houses the Mustafa Mahmoud mosque, named after a physician and Islamic television personality who founded it 20 years ago.
On Friday, September 21, I arrived at the mosque with the first worshippers. I had arranged to meet the mosque's imam, Sheikh Nasser Abdeirazi. A slight, anxious man, he pre-emptively offered up the observation that "Muslims are gentle and Islam is peace".
Many in Cairo are on the defensive in the wake of the attack on New York. Greater Cairo, a city of 16m, is the intellectual capital of the Arab world, home to its movie-makers, many of its great writers, and some of its most respected interpreters of Islam. Muslim leaders here are sensitive to the image of their faith - especially now, because Egyptians are among those allegedly involved in the attacks.
Mohammed Atta, believed to have flown one of the hijacked planes, is the son of a Cairo lawyer. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that sought to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, is said to be second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden.
I did not dispute the imam's assertion, but the speaker at the service that Friday, Ahmed Youssef, an elderly, bespectacled professor at Cairo University, who joined us before the service got under way, did. "Look, what happened in New York is the work of a gangster mentality, but America must learn not to take the side of the aggressor," he said. "I hope America learns from this mistake before it makes another mistake."
In his view, the aggressor is Israel, which signed a peace agreement with Egypt almost 23 years ago. This historical fact is not immediately noticeable in Cairo, where the public obsession with Israel is overwhelming.
Youssef said that the 19 terrorists who on September 11 committed mass suicide in the course of committing mass murder engaged in an un-Islamic act. They killed civilians, which is haram, or forbidden, and they killed themselves, which is also haram.
Only against Israel is it permissible to engage in a "martyrdom attack", he said, and this is because it is "only the Jews who kill innocent people". He added: "There are no Israeli civilians, only soldiers, so this is a legitimate tactic."
At this, Sheikh Abdeirazi blanched. "He is not speaking for the mosque," he whispered. The mosque, like all mosques in Egypt, ostensibly comes under the supervision of the government, whose position on suicide attacks against Israeli civilians is ambiguous. When I asked President Hosni Mubarak's chief spokesman, Nabil Osman, if his government condemns such attacks, he would say only: "One cannot condemn these acts without condemning the acts of the occupier."
The Friday sermon lasted only a few minutes. In it, Youssef acknowledged that an injustice had been done but cautioned America to stay its hand. "Don't say that one should not kill civilians and then kill civilians yourself."
After prayer, Youssef gave his interpretation of the differing outlooks of Christianity and Islam. "In Islam, if I slap your cheek" - he slapped my cheek - "you should slap my other cheek. But in Christianity, Jesus says turn the other cheek. The US is Christian, so why doesn't it turn the other cheek?"
The discussion was curtailed by the announcement that Mustafa Mahmoud was ready to meet me. I made my way to an austere office where Mahmoud, who is 80, was already sitting.
"I understand you want the answer," Mahmoud said.
I said yes.
"Waco," he said. At my silent surprise, he went on: "The Branch Davidians attacked the World Trade Center; the McVeigh people. The Mossad gave them help. Did you know that the Israelis who work at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?"
He had learnt this, he said, from research on the internet. "It is impossible for Osama Bin Laden to do this," Mahmoud continued. "No Arab could have done this."
For moral reasons? I asked.
"No!" he said. "For technical reasons. Arabs are always late! They aren't co-ordinated enough to do this, all at once on four airplanes. What does Osama Bin Laden know about American air travel, anyway? He lives in Afghanistan."
Mustafa Mahmoud is not a marginal figure in Egyptian society. He is an eminent surgeon and one-time Marxist who found religion; his popular television show, Science and Faith, explores the connections between religion and reason; a charitable organisation that bears his name runs several clinics and hospitals in Cairo. Mahmoud regularly contributes articles to Al-Ahram, the largest and most respected daily paper in Egypt.
I later found, on the internet, a translation of one of Mahmoud's columns, from late June. Its headline was "Israel - the plague of our time and a terrorist state". Much of the column is taken up with a recounting of the main points of the notorious turn-of-the-century tsarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. "What exactly do the Jews want?" he wrote on June 23. "Read what the ninth protocol of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion says: 'We have limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance and hatred beyond imagination. We are a secret army whose plans are impossible to understand by using honest methods'."
The image of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin joyously clasping hands with Jimmy Carter at the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord is indelible but misleading, because it did not herald a true peace between two peoples. It has been a cold peace, particularly on the Egyptian side. Since the latest outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, a year ago, and the attendant photographs of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinian rock-throwers, the relationship has turned frigid.
It is in the domain of the press that Mubarak's position is most evident. Al-Ahram's editor, two government officials told me, is chosen by Mubarak, who also chooses the editors of other government newspapers and magazines. Even supposedly independent or opposition newspapers are said never to criticise the president. The one area in which they are given especially wide latitude is in criticising Israel and, to a lesser extent, America.
One day last week, I visited the offices of Al-Osboa, an independent weekly that is distinctly anti-Israel and critical of ministers in the government - though not, of course, of Mubarak himself. Its editor, Mustafa Bakri was in his office, watching Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arabic television channel. He was impeccably dressed, polite and deferential. Bakri spoke in terms that, in the current shorthand, are called Nasserist, after Egypt's first president. Nasserism today combines populism, pan-Arab socialism and opposition to all relations with Israel. Nasserists also resent American economic influence.
"The new globalists want to impose American thinking on the Arabs," said Bakri. "This is a reaction to their thinking." Bakri blamed the September 11 attacks on the American right, with help from Mossad. "Five Israelis were arrested the day before the attack outside the World Trade Center for taking pictures," he said, and added that he knew this from reading American newspapers. If America responds militarily to the attacks, "American targets will be legitimate targets of Arab anger".
I also went to the offices of Al-Ahram to talk to Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, a respected moderate think tank attached to the paper. I asked him about the many anti-Israel and anti-American articles in the official Egyptian press.
"We have anti-semitic papers and fanatics, yes, but these are garbage magazines," he said. "Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, these are very moderate newspapers. Sometimes they are highly critical of the US, but that does not mean that they're anti-American."
Nevertheless, Al-Akhbar this year has run opinion pieces defending Hitler. I found one translated on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a watchdog organisation based in Washington. "Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance against the most vile criminals on the face of the earth," the Al-Akhbar columnist Ahmad Ragab wrote in April. "Although we do have a complaint against him, for his revenge was not enough."
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. He 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 centre, which he oversees. Tantawi is known as the Sheikh of Al-Azhar. He was appointed by Mubarak, whose official photograph hangs in his office. Tantawi usually has taken the side of Islamic moderation, 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. 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 of an international conference on terrorism.
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 theatres and belly dancing, although the percentage of women wearing traditional headscarves seems to have increased dramatically since I first visited 10 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.
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 hatred of Israel, and, to a lesser extent 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 on the West Bank. "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 $2 billion (£1.35 billion) 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'."
There are few Egyptian intellectuals who still argue publicly in favour of normalisation with Jerusalem. They are despised and for the most part quiet. One is Ali Salem, a playwright recently expelled from the Egyptian Writers' Union for making frequent visits to Israel and for assuming a pro- normalisation stance.
I wanted to ask Salem, who is 65, 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: nobody even asked why all these guys wanted flying lessons. You should learn to be suspicious. A little backwardness would be healthy."
Ali Salem paused to order another cup of coffee. "Bernard Shaw said it best, you know. In the preface to St Joan, he said Joan of Arc was burnt not for any reason except that she was talented. Talent gives rise to jealousy in the hearts of the untalented."
Soon after seeing Ali Salem, I ran into Mohammed Atta's father, Mohamed al-Amir Atta, outside a downtown Cairo hotel. He was agitated, alternately aggressive and disconsolate. He had spent much of the week defending himself to reporters and defending his son. I asked him the same question: what, in his mind, lay behind the attack on the World Trade Center? "The Mossad kidnapped my son and stole his papers," he told me. "Then they spread those papers out at the World Trade Center in order to make it seem like he did it."
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© Jeffrey Goldberg 2001
This is an edited version of an article in The New Yorker.
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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