Egypt Happy to See U.S. Destroy Its Armed Opposition, Worried About Resentment on the Street

By Andrew Hammond

Concerned that popular anger could call into question their rule, Arab leaders like Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak are trying to strike a balance between support for America’s war on Muslim Afghanistan and articulating the deep resentments their populations feel toward the United States because of its policies in the region.

While Egypt and other Arab states can rely on tightly controlled state media, things are not as easy for them as during the 1991 Gulf war, when Egyptians and Arabs were similarly incensed at their leaders’ alliance with the West against a Muslim neighbor.

Media-savvy Osama bin Laden has been able to use the Arabic satellite channels which have emerged in the last decade to make sure that he gets at least a hearing from the masses. His success via the highly popular al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, isn’t worrying just the U.S.-British coalition. It’s also worrying Arab regimes who don’t want trouble with citizens questioning their governments’ support for the Americans in their latest war.

It’s not as if regimes like Egypt’s aren’t getting anything in return for backing the West, however. When Britain’s Tony Blair was in Egypt Oct. 10 to assure the Egyptians that this is no war on Islam, Mubarak found for the first time a British prime minister willing to listen to his constant complaints about Islamist dissidents given residency in Europe. Britain has been unable to extradite any because of the death sentence that awaits them in Egypt and because of human rights complaints over the military trials Egypt uses to convict them in the first place. After Blair’s visit, Egyptian Islamist Yasser al-Serri was arrested in London, but not—officially anyway—because of a death sentence against him from an Egyptian court. He apparently is suspected of involvement in the assassination of Afghan rebel leader Ahmed Shah Masoud two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The fact is, Egypt’s regime is happy to see the U.S. smash up its armed opposition-in-exile, and only has to worry about public anger boiling over if Washington takes its war to Iraq. “After the terrorist acts in the United States, we decided that we support any actions to end terrorism, because we suffered from it, too,” Mubarak said in his first comments after the Afghanistan war began. Two of Bin Laden’s main lieutenants are Egyptian, dozens of his footsoldiers are from Egypt, and the man at the controls of one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center is thought to have been an Egyptian.

Bin Laden’s Egypt contingent joined him after their attempt last decade to topple Mubarak’s government failed. Some 1,200 people were killed during the 1992 to 1997 insurgency, which included a 1995 assassination attempt in Ethiopia on Mubarak. The guerrilla war cost Egypt millions in tourist revenue.

Nevertheless, there are still jitters over the war on Afghanistan, and they were in evidence in mid-October when rumors spread around Egypt that perennial Information Minister Safwat al-Sherif had been attacked. When state television showed archive footage of a 1993 assassination attempt on Sherif as well as other incidents in Egypt’s terrorist war of the 1990s, many thought they were seeing real-time events. Traffic was paralyzed in central Cairo as crowds headed to Tahrir Square thinking an attempt on Sherif’s life had taken place there. State television was forced to interrupt programming to explain the misunderstanding to a nation on edge because of the daily protests against the air strikes on Afghanistan and heightened security in anticipation of any terror attacks in the country. But the subtext to the scare is that Sherif, in charge of the information portfolio since 1982, is deeply unpopular and few would have been sad if 1993’s Islamist attackers had rid them of the state’s chief propagandist.

Whether Cairo and other Arab governments continue to navigate successfully these difficult waters depends to a great extent on how this war plays out. “If it goes on for many more weeks and the death toll of innocent civilians rises, then the government will have problems,” says Dia Rashwan, an expert in Islamist movements at Egypt’s al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. The state’s great fear is of street protests. They are banned in Egypt and could get out of hand if people took the opportunity to vent any number of simmering resentments in Egypt’s complicated society.

Egypt’s Militant Islam Debated

One domestic consequence of the new war on terrorism is the emergence of a once forbidden debate in Egypt—how and why the country produced Islamic political violence in the first place. Egypt is coming under critical scrutiny in the international media, particularly in the United States, because it spawned the men at the core of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda group, which the Americans say was behind the Sept. 11 atrocity. The media declare Egypt’s most famous export has become Islamic terror, as it were. A number of mainstream American publications have accused Egypt of running a dysfunctional undemocratic state which, while coming down on its radical Islamist opposition like a ton of bricks—forcing them to commit worse acts from abroad—has also quietly permitted religious extremism to spread like cancer throughout society.

Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher has already reacted to the Egypt-bashing. “Everyone knows Egypt’s role, which is appreciated by the whole world, including the United States,” he told reporters the other week, citing Egypt’s own problem with the terrorists. In taking the bait, however, the government appears to have opened a can of worms. State television broadcast its first ever exploration into why groups with radical ideologies—which view Arab societies, not just the West, as heretic and outside Islam—have appeared in Egypt in recent decades. The program, called “Ikhtiraaq,” or “Breakthrough,” gave much of its time to the government’s favorite talking head on fundamentalism, a controversial former state security officer named Fouad Allam. Allam is wheeled out time and time again on state television to tell the nation that the Muslim Brotherhood, which began in 1928 as a kind of social welfare network with a vague political agenda, is the source of all evil. The government’s agenda here is to discredit the group, a potent force in moderate Islamist politics today whose potential popularity the state clearly fears.

The government’s agenda is to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the program, however, Brotherhood and other Islamist figures were given at least a chance to put forward their opinion, which most independent analysts say is closer to the truth: that the Brotherhood, as the godfather of Islamist groups in the Arab world, did dally with political violence in the 1940s and 1950s, but was so ruthlessly suppressed by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular-nationalist regime in the 1960s that many Islamists began to develop radical ideologies, which had been absent from Arab politics for centuries. These ideologies—akin to the thinking of a sect in early Islam known as the Kharijites—viewed contemporary societies as Muslim only in name and enjoined true believers to work toward overthrowing their rulers to create a new and pure Islamic order from the top. Their model was Prophet Muhammad’s decision to leave godless Mecca for exile, where the believers prepared for their triumphant military return to establish a Utopian Islamic state. The Brotherhood, in contrast, seeks to make society apply Islamic shariah law through legislative and community-level action.

The first modern proponent of the extremist thinking was Sayed Qutb, a Brotherhood leader hanged in 1966, after using his years in prison to pen the original fundamentalist action pamphlet, Ma’aalim fil-Tareeq (“Signposts on the Road”). “Sayed Qutb’s writing only had an effect because people were so cruelly tortured,” noted analyst Wahid Abdel-Meguid. When Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, released the Brotherhood from Egypt’s prisons in the 1970s, he didn’t realize that a fundamental shift had taken place in Islamist thinking. A plethora of radical groups appeared bearing extremist ideologies. Some of them had no name—such as the one led by army cadet Salah Sirriya which made a botched coup attempt in 1974. But two gradually emerged as the main force in radical politics, al-Gama’a al-Islamiya and Jihad. In 1981 Jihad assassinated Sadat—mainly provoked into action by Sadat’s opposition to the Iranian Revolution and decision to shelter the shah, according to Brotherhood historian Salah Issa. Both groups began an open war against the regime in 1992.

Issa has argued that the second factor permeating the history of Egypt’s political violence from the beginning has been the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “After the Palestinian Revolt in 1936, Palestinian Islamic leaders came to Cairo and the Brotherhood started to give them weapons,” he said. “The Brotherhood copied the Zionist groups in Palestine who had created militias and set up a secret military wing in the Brotherhood.”

Brotherhood activists tried to assassinate Nasser in 1954, and since then the organization has been outlawed. Palestinians were also key figures in the transformation to violent ideologies after Sayed Qutb—coup leader Sirriya was a Palestinian, as was another early radical in the 1970s, Mohamed Salem Rahhan. “It was dictatorship and Israel that caused the violence,” Issa argues.

Politicians in Egypt are now trying to tell the authorities that with their continuing heavy-handed approach to political Islam, they are ensuring that religious radicalism will not go away. Montasser Zayat, one-time “spokesman” for the al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, told “Breakthrough” last week that the group assassinated parliament speaker Rifaat Mahgoub in 1990 in retaliation for that year’s unprovoked murder of Gama’a spokesman Alaa Mohieddin, which came at a time when many hoped the radical groups could be brought into the political system.

Zayat has argued in his 1995 book Hiwaraat Mamnuua (“Forbidden Discussions”), that Algeria-style “eradicateurs” in Egypt’s government deliberately provoked a fight with the radical groups around 1990 to avoid democratizing and having to accommodate both the radicals and the moderate and popular Brotherhood. “Some perhaps feared that if they created democracy the [radical] groups would find quite a bit of support and they could turn against [the state],” Zayat says. A second fear of the authorities, he contends, was that via such a policy of accommodation Egypt would have taken on an overtly religious hue unattractive to its Western financial backers.

Brute force has brought some success, however. The state managed to crush the insurgency movement of the 1990s, and since the al-Gama’a al-Islamiya announced a cease-fire in 1997, Islamist figures associated with the radical groups have attempted to set up official political parties in Egypt. Analysts welcomed the move and encouraged the state to do the same so as to put an end to the republic’s historical rupture.

To one degree or another, this move to moderation has been going on in other Arab countries, such as Algeria and Morocco. But the current war on terror being waged by America and Britain in Afghanistan is stirring up these difficult waters once again. The result could be a re-radicalization of religious politics, warned Diaa Rashwan. “But this time around their focus will be solely on America and that which is foreign,” he said. “They won’t waste their time arguing that Arab regimes are infidel.”

At the same time, latent resentments remain. Many harbor a deep grudge against the government for its excesses toward the Islamist movement. At least 10,000 men suspected of links to the radical groups are holed up and forgotten in Egypt’s prisons, most of them detained without formal charges against them. For the past decade, their release and an end to military trials has been a constant demand of the radical groups. Well-known Muslim Brother Mohamed Abdel-Qaddous recently offered bitter memories of a colleague who he said was tortured at a state security detention center in 1981. “The number one suspect in his murder is still alive and I see him sometimes on television talking as a terrorism expert,” Abdel-Qaddous wrote in an opposition paper here in Egypt. It’s no secret that he was talking about the very same Fouad Allam mentioned above. “When the sun of freedom shines in my country this terrorism expert and his likes will be the first to face trial,” Abdel-Qaddous vowed, “and, if God wills, the tyrants will be punished in this world before the next.” All of which portends that the dysfunction alluded to in the American media is set to continue for the foreseeable future.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.