Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “I don’t know what happened in New York,” Youssef said. “I don’t have the answer.”

  The mosque’s muezzin began calling the faithful to prayer. “God is Greater,” he chanted, his voice carried by speakers across Arab League Street, beside the mosque. “I bear witness that there is no God but God. I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

  Some of the men who went to pray asked if I was a man of the Book; Christians and Jews, as monotheists, however flawed, still hold a certain status in Islam, and I was invited to perform the ablutions that would purify me for the prayer service. As we stepped outside to the fountain, where a great number of Muslims were already washing, an old man, sallow-skinned and stooped, moved our way, surrounded by courtiers.

  “He has the answer,” Sheikh Abdelrazi said, pointing to the mosque’s founder, Mustafa Mahmoud himself. But Mahmoud hobbled into the mosque; the answer would wait until after prayers.

  By now, two thousand or so worshippers had assembled. The Friday service was short, and the sermon lasted only a few minutes. In it, Youssef acknowledged that an injustice had been done in the United States but cautioned America to stay its hand. “Don’t say that one should not kill civilians and then kill civilians yourself.”

  After prayer, Youssef found me and 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 U.S. 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 with me. I made my way to an austere office where Mahmoud, who is eighty, 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 learned 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 coordinated 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 onetime Marxist who found religion; his popular television show, Science and Faith, explores the connections between religion and reason; a charitable organization that bears his name runs several clinics and hospitals in Cairo, including an eye institute that is reputed to be one of the most advanced in the Middle East.

  Mahmoud told me that he is not sorry about the destruction of the World Trade Center. “Even Rome was a great empire once,” he said. “This was an attack on American arrogance.”

  He said I could read more about his beliefs in a newspaper column that would appear the next day. In addition to his other achievements, Mahmoud regularly contributes articles to Al-Ahram,which is the largest and most respected daily newspaper 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. Israelis have visited Egypt by the thousands, but the Egyptian government has long discouraged its citizens from visiting Israel or doing business with Israelis. And 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. Mubarak supports the peace treaty signed by his predecessor, Sadat—an American-aid package of two billion dollars a year fairly demands this of him—but he has discouraged the normalization of relations between the two states.

  It is in the domain of the press that Mubarak’s position is most evident. Al-Ahram is often described in the American press as a “semi-official” daily newspaper, but this may be an understatement. Its editor, two government officials told me, is chosen by President Mubarak, who also chooses the editors of other government newspapers and magazines. Even supposedly independent or opposition newspapers are said never to criticize the President. The one area in which they are given especially wide latitude is in criticizing Israel and, to a lesser extent, America.

  One day last week, I visited the offices of the newspaper Al-Usbu, an independent weekly that is distinctly anti-Israel and critical of ministers in the Mubarak government—though not, of course, of Mubarak himself. Its editor, Mustafa Bakri, who is in his forties, was in his office, watching Al-Jazeera, the Pan-Arabic cable channel. He was impeccably dressed, polite and deferential. I had wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon’s bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo’s airport, and in the column, which appeared in February, he wrote:

  The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland’s soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything: the past and the future, my wife and my children and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig’s head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. The criminal died. I stepped on the pig’s head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.

  Bakri offered me an orange soda, and talked of the attack on the World Trade Center. He spoke in terms that, in the current shorthand, are considered Nasserist, after Gamal Abdel Nasser, the revolutionary leader and 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,” Bakri said. “This is a reaction to their thinking.” Bakri blamed the September 11 attacks on the American right wing, with help from the 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, he continued, “American targets will be legitimate targets of Arab anger.”

  I also went to the offices of Al-Ahram to talk about this phenomenon. I met with Abdel Monem Said Aly, the director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a respected moderate think tank attached to the newspaper. I asked him about the many anti-Israel and anti-American articles published in the official Egyptian press in the year leading up to the terror attacks. He himself has not disseminated anti-American ideas, and has fought the spread of conspiracy theories in Egyptian life.

&nb
sp; “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 U.S., but that does not mean that they’re anti-American.”

  Nevertheless, Al-Akhbar this year has run opinion pieces defending Hitler. I found one of them translated on the Web site of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a watchdog organization 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.”

  Holocaust denial is a regular feature of Al-Gomhuriya, another government daily. Its deputy chief editor, Lotfi Nasif, sat with me in his windowless office in downtown Cairo last week and explained that the Holocaust is “an exaggeration” and that gas chambers are a product of the “Jewish imagination.” He told me, “The crimes of the Zionists against the Palestinians far outweigh any of the crimes committed by the Nazis.”

  Colin Powell has frequently been denounced in the government press, sometimes in racial terms, and, shortly before the attacks in New York and in Washington, the Al-Akhbar columnist Mahmoud Abd Al-Munim Murad wrote, “The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor must be destroyed because of . . . the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism.” He also declared that “the age of the American collapse has begun.” This is a not uncommon theme among members of the Egyptian intellectual class.

  On one subject of international controversy—the use of suicide bombers against Israel—there is near unanimity: despite slight shades of difference, as seen at the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, most people agree that it is sometimes allowable. Some Islamic moderates believe that suicide attacks are doctrinally permissible only against Israeli soldiers; a more extremist position holds that all Israelis are legitimate targets.

  Before September 11, American officials who worked closely with Egypt tried to downplay the role of anti-Israel and anti-American incitement in the local press. One of the few incidents that provoked a public American response came in 1998, when the newly appointed American Ambassador in Cairo, an Orthodox Jew named Daniel Kurtzer (who is now the Ambassador to Israel), was attacked in anti-Semitic terms in the Egyptian press.

  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.