And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  In Cairo, living among the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi dreamers, and seeing the horrors of what Salafi jihadis did at the Egyptian Museum and in Luxor, I delved deeper into the political side of the Islamic movement. I came in contact with a group called Tabligh wa Dawa. Tabligh means “to inform” and dawa means “to call,” so roughly speaking the name of the group is “inform and call.” It’s a Salafi group, not violent but strict in its adherence to the words of Mohammed. It conducts Islamic patrols to inform Muslims when they are straying from the Prophet’s teachings and call them to the righteous path.

  I wanted to get to know these people because they have the same mind-set as violent fundamentalists. If someone from al-Qaeda sat down with members of Tabligh wa Dawa, they would agree on everything except how to get from A to B. They would agree on the fundamental narration of history: that Islam was perfect and that the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols, reborn under the Ottomans, destroyed again by the Europeans, and locked into submission by a nation-state structure enforced by America and Israel.

  As far as getting from A to B, a leader of Tabligh wa Dawa would say, “There’s nothing we can do about it, let’s just go to the mosque and pray for better days.” Bin Laden would have replied, “No, we’re going to knock down buildings, we’re going to pull planes out of the sky, and we’re going to kill tourists, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to bring down the infidels.” Only a tiny portion of Muslims agree with bin Laden’s tactics, but many millions understand the world vision he’s talking about.

  So I arranged to go out with a Tabligh wa Dawa patrol. We met at night on a street corner in old Cairo. They were dressed in white with short jellabiyas, which are a kind of pajama dress. They also had turbans with long tails hanging from the back. They looked a little like nuns, except for their beards. And they were the most polite, soft-spoken people you’d ever meet. “Hello, brother. How are you, brother?” Everyone’s a brother. “Oh, it’s so good to see you.” If one of them had a dollar, he’d give you half and then tell you for an hour why Islam requires Muslims to be generous and share.

  They were religious fanatics but gentle. That’s the kind of Islam they wanted to project. They would go up to people who were drinking or smoking and try to win them over with kindness. “Oh, my brother, how can you do this to yourself ? Come and have a sandwich with us. And then let’s go to the mosque and pray.”

  I spent a night with these people going from coffee shop to coffee shop. The whole time they were trying to convert me because I was among them as a non-Muslim. “If I don’t try and bring you to Islam,” one of them told me, “you’re going to go to hell, and then I’m going to go to hell too for not having tried to bring you into the faith.”

  During this conversation, he took out a cigarette lighter and told me to put out my hand. Then he lit the lighter and held my hand over it. It was hot and I pulled my hand away.

  “No, no, no,” he said, and put the lighter under my hand again. “You see that? That’s just a little, tiny fire and you pulled your hand away. It hurt.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “Well, how about if you’re in the fires of hell for eternity and they’re burning you for eternity, how would you deal with that?”

  I was trying to stay in their good graces so I played the game a bit. “Well, that would be terrible. I couldn’t handle that.”

  “Well, if you come to Islam, not only will you not have this hellfire, you have virgins when you die, dark-eyed virgins who are waiting for you in heaven.” It was a perfect fantasy and quite sexualized.

  Their vision of heaven had a lot of sexualization. Heaven was the antithesis of Egypt. It was sweet smelling, the water was clean, there was no garbage, and beautiful virgins were everywhere. I got along well enough with the Tabligh wa Dawa and started spending a lot of time with them because they were a window on the fundamentalist world. It wasn’t violent, but all you needed to do was pull the switch. They were almost comically gentle, but completely saw the world in black and white, right and wrong. If they were convinced something was against Allah, it wouldn’t take much for them to kill. That’s what bin Laden did, he made Salafis into jihadis and turned them on the United States.

  I left the Middle Eastern Times in 1998 and started freelancing for ABC, The World (a coproduction of the BBC and Public Radio International), and other news organizations large and small that paid my airfare and expenses so I could travel. My first trip to Saudi Arabia was an eye-opener, and it’s worth recounting because the Saudis are so central to the problem of militant fundamentalism. In many ways, they are its father. Their Wahhabi vision is a form of Salafism, and it doesn’t take much to push this intolerant and unforgiving ideology into bin Laden’s way of thinking about permanent war with the West.

  The Wahhabi movement began as a reaction to the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, the Ottomans weren’t Arab. They were people from the steppes—Central Asians, Turkmen, and other non-Arabs. The Ottoman Empire was incredibly diverse with many Muslim converts from the Caucasus in high positions. The Ottomans at various times were also not especially strict Muslims. Some sultans wrote classical music and operas, which are prohibited by Islam. Other sultans—who also had the title of caliph or successor to Mohammed—even painted nudes. Some drank alcohol. Nearly all the Ottoman leaders failed to follow the Prophet’s model of simplicity. The Ottoman Empire was lavish, as can be seen by a quick tour of the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. The hilt of the Topkapi dagger, the target of thieves in the movie Topkapi, is ornamented with three large emeralds. Two large candleholders are mounted with 6,666 diamonds. A gold throne is here, a gold bassinet is there, jewels are everywhere. The names of sections of the palace capture the lifestyle of the sultans: the Imperial Harem, Courtyard of the Sultan’s Concubines and Consorts, the Courtyard of the Eunuchs. Mohammed probably would have felt out of place.

  The Ottomans used to travel to Mecca and Medina for the annual hajj in enormous caravans. They would bring gifts for the mosques, or even encase parts of the Shires in precious metals. The displays of wealth enraged the local Wahhabis. The Wahhabis, by contrast, celebrated Mohammed, an illiterate grain trader who married a wealthy older woman but continued to live simply, eating dates and drinking camel milk. The Wahhabis embrace Mohammed’s nomadic ethical system born of, and perhaps appropriate to, the harsh deserts of Arabia, valuing loyalty, generosity, physical endurance, and hospitality, as well as bravery in battle, dedication to family honor, and insistence on revenge. For the Wahhabis the highest aspiration would be to live as if they were in the days of the Prophet, acting as much like the Prophet as possible, rejecting the trappings of modernity. The Wahhabi movement also began a pro-Arab movement. Mohammed was an Arab from Arabia. He spoke Arabic. That the lavish Ottoman sultans didn’t come from Arabia and often spoke little Arabic were all the more upsetting to the Wahhabis.

  The early Wahhabi movement was a puritanical and violent reaction to the Ottoman excesses, and it spread the way ISIS would two centuries later. In the first few years of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire faced an insurgency in Arabia led by fanatical Wahhabis who attacked Ottoman convoys, killed Shiites and destroyed their shrines in Iraq, eradicated antiquities, and cleansed the region of minorities and others who didn’t follow their interpretation of Islam. The insurgents were followers of Salafi cleric Mohammed Ibn Wahhab and tribal chiefs of the al-Saud clan. By 1805 the forces of this alliance had conquered Mecca and Medina and committed massacres at Karbala in Iraq. The Ottomans pushed back with the 1811–18 Ottoman Wahhabi War, led by the Ottoman’s viceroy in Egypt. The Ottoman forces ultimately prevailed, expressing outrage by taking Amir Abdullah bin Saud to Istanbul to be executed. The Ottomans took revenge by forcing him to listen to music before he was hanged, beheaded, and had his heart cut out of his body. His head was on display in Istanbul for three days. This Saud-Wahhabi alliance was defeated, but it would rise again in the early twentieth century under Abdulaziz al-Saud, better known simply
as Ibn Saud (son of Saud), who would become the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud revived the zeal of the initial Wahhabi uprising with a fanatical fighting force known as the Ikhwan, the Brothers, not to be confused with the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

  On the surface it is difficult to understand why strict Wahhabism would appeal to masses of Muslims. Like all austere faiths, it is hard to warm up to. People have tended to be drawn to religions they can touch and feel with exciting festivals, specialty foods, inspiring saints and martyrs, music, art, icons, shrines, and promises of salvation. Salafism, or its Saudi form, Wahhabism, offers none of these. In fact, it actively preaches the opposite. In Salafism and Wahhabism there can be no music. No mingling of the sexes. No art. No alcohol. No dancing. No shrines other than mosques. Only prayer and submission to Allah’s unbending will. As a way of life, it is not much fun. I like to think of Wahhabis (or Salafis) as akin to the Amish. Clearly the Amish are innocent of the savage violence associated with many Islamic extremist groups, but I make the comparison only to point out that both believe in a literal and inflexible interpretation of an ancient text, rejecting modernity. But why do the Amish have little mass appeal and no influence in world affairs, while Wahhabism has spread far and wide across the Islamic world? The answer is location and wealth. The Wahhabis, once they aligned with the Saud clan, took control of Mecca and Medina, the centers of Islam, where every year millions of Muslims congregate for the hajj. By dominating the physical center of the faith the Wahhabis have been able to exercise an outsize influence on the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

  Then, in the twentieth century, Saudi Arabia struck it rich. For many Saudis, the oil under their feet was further proof of Allah’s blessing, a gift to Mohammed’s homeland and the custodians of his faith. The combination of the annual hajj and an effectively limitless budget pushed Saudi Arabia’s interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, all across the Muslim world. For the last several decades, Saudi Arabia has funded untold numbers of mosques and Islamic charities and trained and inspired thousands, if not tens of thousands of clerics, in what the Wahhabis like to call “pure Islam.” Wahhabis don’t like to be called Wahhabis, or Salafis either. They like to be simply called Muslims, as if there was no other interpretation than their own. With its location and fantastic wealth, Saudi Arabia has set the tone for modern Islam. The faith would likely be very different if Wahhabis had never taken over Mecca and Medina or if there was only sand in the Arabian Desert. To continue the thought experiment, imagine if the Amish controlled St. Peter’s in Rome and the churches in Jerusalem and suddenly became wealthy beyond measure. It’s likely their impact would be far greater than it is today.

  Simply put, Mohammed was born in a land where the founding fathers of the modern state entered an alliance with a puritanical, ascetic movement whose influence became supercharged with the discovery of oil. But money also changed Saudi Arabia. Many modern Saudis believe in Wahhabism in principle, but they don’t all follow it in practice.

  One evening I went to a dinner party at the home of a Saudi prince, an elaborate affair, with lots of liquor, women without veils, various ambassadors and foreign guests, and sophisticated, Western-educated Saudis. We had lively conversations about the latest comings and goings in Paris and what exhibits were in New York. It could have been a dinner party in London. You would not have imagined you were in Saudi Arabia.

  Another time I was invited to the home of a newspaper publisher. The modern house, minimalist and sleek, had the latest-model Mac computer on a desk. I ended up leaving after several more men showed up to take a dip together in a hot tub. They told me about parties with drag singers and men jumping from the windows to avoid the religious police. The more time I spent in Saudi Arabia, the stranger I found it and the more it seemed to be in no position to tell the majority of the world’s Muslims how to think and behave.

  When you instill the intolerant mentality of Wahhabism in a country such as Egypt, the effect is dramatic. In Egypt people drink water from the same river where they dump their sewage and industrial waste, scrounging out a miserable existence in a broken economy and shop in trash-strewn bazaars. The proselytizers tell the Egyptians that things would be great if only the West didn’t keep the Muslim world divided, if only the modern banking system devised by the Jews was torn down, if only the Arabs could restore the caliphate. The result, unsurprisingly, is anger and resentment against the West, sometimes of the murderous kind.

  * * *

  ANTI-SEMITISM WAS PERVASIVE IN EGYPT. in conversations with people ranging from members of the Tabligh wa Dawa and the Muslim Brotherhood to the local shopkeeper to a newspaper editor, Jews were depicted as aggressive and bloodthirsty schemers who persecuted Muslims. This view came through in the media, in cartoons, in schools. When pressed, Muslims denied it: “That’s not true. We as Muslims embrace Jews as people of the Book. We accept them as part of our own ancestry as people of the prophets.” But in reality, anti-Semitism was inescapable and oppressive.

  Oddly enough, some of the anti-Semitism actually goes back to Muslims’ insistence that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, which Muslims call Allah. It sounds very inclusive and inviting, a message that the great monotheistic religious are part of a single family, until you think about it. If there is only one God, Allah, then there is also an assumption that Jews and Christians don’t understand him. According to the Muslim interpretation, Jews began to worship thousands of years ago until Allah sent Jesus to correct their ways. Christians then worshipped according to Jesus taught until Allah sent Mohammed with the final draft of his plan in the Koran. By saying Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship only one God—Allah—Muslims are saying Jews are using an old and outdated text that was improved by Christians, but that only Muslims have the full picture. This hierarchy of understanding formed the basis of much of how Islamic or sharia law dealt with religious minorities. Under the Arab caliphate and Ottoman Empire, Jews and Christians were tolerated, but were considered second-class citizens who were required to pay special taxes and were forbidden from holding high-level jobs and even from using certain materials reserved for Muslims. Muslims didn’t force Jews and Christians to convert, but believed it was better to be patient and let them convert on their own. Muslims believed if they waited long enough, Jews and Christians would eventually come around and recognize Islam’s superiority. It was just a matter of time.

  Muslims in medieval Europe, however, generally faired far worse. Christians considered Muslims to be heathens, infidels, enemies, and deniers of Christ.

  Homophobia was also rampant in the Middle East and just as entrenched. A male orgy may go on in a luxurious private home in Saudi Arabia, but, if the participants were caught, the punishment could be severe. In Egypt, I reported a story about the Queen Boat—that was its real name—which was the venue for a gay party on the Nile. The police arrested fifty or sixty men and subjected them to humiliating examinations with fingers and rulers to determine whether they had engaged in homosexual sex.

  There was also a fear of witchcraft. I did a story on a group of young people in Cairo who had been hanging out in an abandoned house, drinking and listening to heavy metal. They were arrested and accused of being Satan worshippers because of the kind of music they were playing. Anti-Semitism, homophobia, fear of Satanism—these were part of the baseline mentality of the hard-line religious groups that took their theological cues from Saudi Arabia.

  The pragmatists of the Muslin Brotherhood and the dreamers of Tabligh wa Dawa were fundamentalists, but they could manage in Egypt because they weren’t violent. Things were different for the hard-core Egyptian jihadists. The jihadists were simply the Salafis, the Wahhabis, who’d decided prayer wasn’t enough. They’d decided austerity and self-denial couldn’t change the world. They’d need to fight. The jihadis, who should technically be called Salafi jihadis or Wahhabi jihadis, would join the holy wars in Afghanistan against the Soviets or help the Muslims suffering in Bosnia or o
ppressed by Russia in Chechnya, then come back home. But it became harder and harder for these groups to return because the government started looking for them.

  The last thing the jihadists wanted was to end up in an Egyptian prison. I remember driving by prisons and actually hearing screams from inside. The military put on mass trials of twenty, forty, or sixty Islamists. The detainees were put in a holding cage, and they held up their Korans, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and calling for an Islamic state. The court would hand out death sentences by the dozens. If a detainee was lucky, he got fifteen years, but fifteen years in an Egyptian prison is basically a death sentence.

  The Saudis, and in some cases the CIA, had encouraged and funded their foreign jihads, and these men had seen combat, lived hard in the mountains, did what their religion asked them to do. Then they came home to Egypt and were rewarded with a death sentence. The result was the creation of a standing army of jihadis who couldn’t go home. They would go on to found al-Qaeda, which became something of a jihadi veterans association. History is always obvious in retrospect, but in this case the rise of al-Qaeda should have been fairly easy to predict. Saudi Arabia, Pakistani intelligence, the CIA, and others used jihadis to fight Cold War battles in Afghanistan and elsewhere and the jihadis, believing they were helping Muslims, were happy to go. But when the fighters tried to return home, they faced the horrors of prison and torture, so they went underground and became an army of exiles eventually known as al-Qaeda. What did Pakistan, Egypt, or the CIA expect would happen if they directed jihadis at their enemies like cannons and then abandoned them? The cannons would fire on them.