by Robert Baer
Khartoum, Sudan - January 1985
AFTER THE SADAT ASSASSINATION, I was determined to talk with a real live Muslim Brother. How else was I going to learn what made the Brothers tick? And if we didn’t know what made them tick, how would we ever stop them? I didn’t know it at the time, but I would get my chance two months later, in December 1981, less than twenty blocks from the White House.
One morning I was walking out of my Georgetown apartment building to go to Arabic class when I noticed that the new desk clerk - a very tall, slim black man in his early thirties - was reading a book in Arabic. I walked over and introduced myself. Khalid, as I will call him, was a Sudanese, a graduate student in comparative law. We talked for a long time, then struck a deal for him to tutor me in Arabic. I needed the practice, and he needed the money. He had brought his wife and children from the Sudan and was barely surviving.
For the next six months, we gave it our best, but I’ve got to admit that Khalid did my Arabic more harm than good. The problem was that he had a classical education in the language. Worse, he’d taken a degree in Islamic law. Even by the end, I couldn’t hold a conversation with Khalid without his reminding me not to forget the complicated vowel endings that the man in the street never used. It was like Chaucer trying to teach modern English.
Lessons aside, we became friends. I helped edit Khalid’s dissertation, taught him how to drive, and even gave him my clunker when I was assigned to Tunis for my second year of Arabic. It was the first car he had ever owned. At least once a week, I joined Khalid and his family for dinner in their apartment in Adams-Morgan, a racial mixing bowl north of Dupont Circle.
After I left for Tunis, Khalid and I lost track of each other. I had no idea what became of him until I was assigned to Khartoum in January 1985 and saw his picture in a local newspaper. The caption said he had been appointed as a judge to one of Sudan’s new Islamic courts. I put down the paper and headed straight to his court. Nothing like running into an old friend in a sandbox like Khartoum.
The two religious policemen blocking the court’s front door looked at me slack-jawed when I asked for Judge Khalid, explaining that he was a friend. It was rare to see a Westerner in Khartoum, much less have one show up at one of its notorious Islamic halls of justice. Inside, the anteroom was packed. The electricity was off. The place was hot and dark and reeked of sweat. I would have turned around and left if I hadn’t heard a voice booming inside the courtroom. It sounded like Khalid, but I couldn’t be sure. I’d never heard him raise his voice. He’d always come across as gentle, soft-spoken, and polite. Now he sounded downright possessed.
Abruptly, the yelling stopped. A second later, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, and out came Khalid with one of the policemen by his side, his jalabiyah sweeping the filthy floor. He came running over to me, straight-arming some innocent who wandered into his way, and gave me a hug.
“Let me finish up here,” he said. “And then you come to my house for lunch.” He changed his mind almost as soon as he’d finished speaking. “No, Mr. Bob, you stay, and we will start working on your Arabic again. You need it.” He put his arm around me and pulled me into the courtroom with him. Mind you, I’d spent three years unlearning everything he had taught me, but I was curious to see who or what had made Khalid so mad.
He shooed away an old man sitting on the front bench so I could sit down, then went around and stood on his dais, winked at me, and resumed yelling as if nothing had happened. The audience stopped staring at me and listened raptly to Khalid.
The object of his fury was a small man dressed in dirty denims, a shirt that might have once been white, and a pair of cracked leather sandals. He had a rope for a belt and was standing inside a waist-high battered wooden enclosure that reminded me of a hockey penalty box.
The man never said a word. He wouldn’t even look up at Khalid. It looked as though he didn’t have a lawyer, and there was no jury, either. If the man’s family was there, they weren’t saying a thing. As Khalid went on, I understood that the man had been caught stealing a pot from an open-air market that morning.
Without warning, Khalid lowered his voice and handed down the man’s sentence. “In the name of the merciful and compassionate, I find you guilty of theft. I sentence you to twenty lashes.” With a nod from Khalid, the two policemen pushed their way back through the crowd, grabbed the man by both arms, and led him out of the courtroom.
As soon as they were gone, pandemonium broke out in the court. About half the audience was shouting that it had been a fair call. The other half was screaming and crying. Some of the latter must have been the man’s relatives and friends. Everyone was trying to leave at the same time.
When I managed to get outside, I saw the condemned man tied to a tree, face flattened sideways against the bark. Someone had removed his shirt, and the two policemen, now cradling automatic weapons, stood on either side, making sure no one attempted to interfere. Khalid stood directly behind the man, the sleeves of his jalabiyah rolled up. His right hand, gripping a leather whip, was raised. He paused for maybe ten seconds. As he was about to strike, he intoned, “Bismi ar-rahman, ar-rahim” - “In the name of the merciful and the compassionate” - and brought the whip down with a force only a man of his size could attain. At every lash, the penitent spit out “God is great!” between his clenched teeth.
On the drive to Khalid’s house, we didn’t say anything for a long time. Khalid could tell I was uneasy. The entire spectacle went against everything he had learned about the law in America.
“You know, Bob, there is no choice in Sudan,” he said at last in English. “We are a very poor, troubled country. If we ever let go of control, it’s over for us - we will live like wild animals. The one thing people will ever understand and accept is the Qur’an. We will never enjoy the luxuries of your legal system. Please don’t look at this as an American.”
“How do you know what they want, the people?” I asked. It was a question any American would want the answer to.
“Please understand that the Sudanese are backward. They’re just starting to understand what the Holy Qur’an is. Do you know what the ignorant do when they’re sick? They rip out a page of the Holy Qur’an that they think has to do with their illness. They boil it in a pot of water until the ink bleeds away, and then they drink it, believing it will cure them. These people need a firm hand.”
I let it drop. “How did you know that guy stole the pot?”
“My police saw him” - the judicial police assigned to his court. Great, I thought, Khalid was judge, prosecutor, defense, jury, and executor, all wrapped into one.
Although he had never said anything, I was starting to suspect Khalid was a Muslim Brother. He had studied under Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood guide Hassan al-Turabi when Turabi was dean of the law faculty at the University of Khartoum, a prime recruiting ground.
I never went back to Khalid’s court, but I continued to see him as often as I could. I usually drove out to his one-story whitewashed house south of Khartoum. The house was testament to how poor even a judge was in the Sudan. We sat on synthetic Korean-made carpets; there was almost no other furniture. The glass in some of the windows was missing, and gusts of sand blew through. The kitchen sink never seemed to have running water, and Khalid’s wife had to prepare dinner outside, drawing water from plastic buckets. It didn’t seem to bother anyone, though.
I pressed Khalid to tell me about the Muslim Brotherhood. General Nimeri’s regime had started to wobble in early 1985. It looked as if Khalid’s old law dean might make a grab for power. The Muslim Brothers supposedly had a strong following in the army.
One evening I got tired of beating around the bush - elicitation obviously wasn’t working - and I asked Khalid if he was a Muslim Brother.
Khalid had this endearing habit of smiling with his eyes. He flashed me a smile now. “I’m a Sufi, Bob,” he said. “I really don’t know anything about them.”
What Khalid wanted me to believe was that a Sufi, a
n Islamic mystic, held a set of beliefs so diametrically opposed to a Brother’s that he couldn’t possibly be a Brother. Maybe, I thought, but I also noted that Khalid hadn’t exactly denied it.
I got my answer late one night in March when there was a pounding on my door. It was after midnight, and I was asleep. When I opened the door, I found Khalid’s wife. A scarf covered most of her face, but I could see she had been crying. “Khalid’s been arrested,” she said. “Please help me get him out. The children won’t stop crying.” Earlier that night, she said, the police had come and taken him away. She had no idea where he was being held.
I did what I could to reassure her and then drove her home. But that was all I could do. The next morning the news was splashed all over the newspapers: Nimeri had arrested the Muslim Brother leadership. Khalid must have been among them. Unless the Sudanese had made a highly unlikely mistake, he was a Brother after all.
When General Nimeri was forced from power in April 1985, the new government released Turabi and the Brothers, including Khalid. Turabi would come to share power with a pro-Islamic military government, partially realizing his dream of establishing an Islamic government in the Sudan. As for Khalid, he’d had all the excitement he needed and found himself a professorship at a Saudi-financed university.
I would never see him again. By the time he was released, I had already been pulled back to Washington thanks to the Libyan hit team that showed up in town to hunt CIA officers. I thought a lot about him, though. Here was a guy I’d spent the better part of a year with, a friend, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell me he was a Brother. I was starting to sympathize with the CIA. The Brotherhood was a nut almost impossible to crack. But damned if I was going to give up.
IN LATE 1985, I was assigned to the CIA’s new Counter-Terrorism Center and started to poke around headquarters archives to see if there was anything authoritative there on the Brothers. It wasn’t easy. Although the purpose of CTC was to bring all CIA files and experts under one roof, no one followed radical Sunni Muslims. CTC had specialists for everything else, from the Japanese Red army to the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, but not one for the most adept terrorists of them all: the Muslim Brotherhood.
Post-9/11, it’s easy to say what a mistake it was to leave out the Sunnis, but even back then I thought it was odd. After all, in 1979 Sunni fundamentalists took over the Mecca mosque, shaking the Sa’ud royal family to its bones. A special French police team had to be brought in to take the mosque back because the Saudi army refused to take orders. In the middle of it all, a Sunni fundamentalist mob burned the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. Militant Sunnis were a much bigger threat to the United States than the Japanese Red army, for God’s sake, yet the CIA still didn’t have a single source in the Brothers. The files I did find were stuffed with old newspaper clippings, a few analytical pieces, and cables from embassies.
What I did come across that was interesting was the trial of the Islamic Jihad members who assassinated Sadat. It was especially instructive on how the Islamic Jihad had wormed its way into elite units of the Egyptian military and through the tight security screen surrounding the October 6 parade. Via an elaborate recruitment of key people, they smuggled into the barracks boxes of ammunition to load their Kalashnikovs; live ammunition wasn’t supposed to be within miles of the parade. It underscored the importance of having someone bless such an act. For Sadat’s assassination, that person was ‘Umar ‘Abd-al-Rahman, the blind sheikh currently in jail in the United States.
What really struck me was the way the Islamic Jihad cited a thirteenth-century Syrian cleric to justify the murder. Ibn Taymiyah was born in 1263 in Harraan, near what is now Urfa in Turkey, but spent most of his life in Damascus, where his father had fled from the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyah’s numerous polemics and other writings attacking orthodox theology had made him one of the most controversial figures of his day. In 1306 an Islamic court imprisoned him for his heresies, and he spent most of the rest of his life behind bars, in Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus. He died in 1328. That much was relatively easy to find, but why had Ibn Taymiyah become, in essence, the patron saint of the Brothers? And what did the writings of a cleric who had been dead for more than 650 years have to do with the present slaughter in the Middle East?
More and more, these seemed to be vital questions. A tide of history was playing out under our noses, and we were looking everywhere but the right place for the reasons.
IN 1986 some exiled Syrian Muslim Brothers in Germany knocked on the door of the U.S. embassy in Bonn, thinking America might be thrilled with their latest plot to take down Hafiz al-Asad. As I described in See No Evil, I jumped at the chance to meet them, but other than finding out they had an SA-7 buried at the end of the Damascus airport, ready to shoot down Asad’s plane, I didn’t learn a whole lot about them. I didn’t need to fly out to Germany to know they wanted to kill Asad. A year later in Beirut, I got my chance to spend some quality face-to-face time with a Muslim Brother. I even got a couple of quick lessons in jihad.
In April 1987 I’d been in Beirut almost a year when I heard about a Syrian Muslim Brother living in East Beirut named Zuhayr Shawish. My first thought was: What is an Islamic fundamentalist doing living in a strictly Christian enclave? Just as quickly, I reminded myself that the Lebanese Christians were at war with Syria and needed all the friends they could get, even a Muslim fanatic who preached that the East’s Christians should be fed to the Red Sea’s sharks along with the Jews. It was Tom Twetten’s rule again. I arranged to meet Shawish.
I checked around about Shawish. At one time he had been a fairly well-known figure in Syria, even a member of parliament. When the Syrian government cracked down on the Brothers, he was forced to leave. After a detour through Saudi Arabia and a few other places, he landed in Beirut in the early 1980s and now ran an Islamic bookstore, or at least that was what he told people. (If Shawish was making a living selling Qur’ans to Christians, he was one hell of a salesman.)
Meeting him wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t walk into his bookstore and introduce myself as his friendly neighborhood CIA agent. Even if the United States was the nominal ally of the Lebanese Christian Maronites, Shawish had no reason to talk to the CIA or any other American official. It was probably a toss-up whether he hated the CIA, Israel, or the Alawites more. What I needed was what the CIA calls cover for action - another of those lies woven out of whole cloth.
I came up with the idea that I would pose as an American of Lebanese heritage, a Muslim who had grown up in the United States. That would explain my flawed Arabic and my ignorance about Islam. The cover was weak as rooster soup, but that’s the best I could do.
The part of East Beirut that Shawish lived in was one of the most exposed neighborhoods on the Green Line, the no-man’s-land that separated Christian parts of the city from the Muslim side: a short, clear sniper shot from Hizballah’s front line. As soon as I turned down Shawish’s street, I gunned the Peugeot. A heavy metal gate was already opening from the inside as I pulled up in front of Shawish’s house. It closed behind me as soon as I was inside.
Shawish’s house was dark as a grave. Fifty-gallon drums stuffed with sand blocked all windows and doorways. Sandbags and boxes of books filled the few remaining spaces. The electricity was off; it probably had been in that part of Beirut for months. It looked like Shawish couldn’t afford a generator, or maybe he just didn’t care.
I was shown into another dark room where I found Shawish sitting on a tattered rug, his legs crossed under him, reading by candlelight. A flannel cloak and layers of robes covered him, but I could tell he was a large man. With his salt-and-pepper beard and the cracked lens of his glasses, he looked every bit the fiery Islamic radical.
Shawish didn’t stand to greet me but pointed to a space on his rug that he wasn’t already taking up. “So you want to learn about Islam?” he asked. So far, so good; he hadn’t challenged the cover story.
Shawish launched into a sermon about the sorry state of Islam. Tha
t morning he was particularly irked that Jerusalem had become the epicenter of the Middle East conflict. “There are only two holy cities in Islam,” Shawish said, still speaking calmly. “Medina and Mecca.”
For the next hour, he provided a detailed exegesis of exactly where Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock stood in the canons of Islam. Every other sentence was a quote from the Qur’an or the sayings of the prophet. (I silently thanked Khalid for throwing me into the deep end of classical Arabic.) I knew we were coming to the end when Shawish launched into a tirade against Yasir Arafat. Shawish accused him of having politicized Jerusalem solely for the Palestinians’ sake. “Arafat is a dog and a liar,” he said in not very classical Arabic. I recognized that as straight Wahhabi propaganda: They hated anyone who contested the supremacy of the two holy cities they occupied.
Shawish would have gone on about Arafat forever if there hadn’t been a burst of machine-gun fire. It sounded like it was coming from a position opposite his house, across the Green Line.
I quickly slipped in my question: “Ever heard about Ibn Taymiyah?” It was beyond naive, but I’d pegged Shawish as not caring who I was. Even if I were to break cover, he still would have agreed to tutor me in Islam.
“Ibn Taymiyah? Anna Abb ibn Taymiyah” - “I am Ibn Taymiyah’s father.” It was Shawish’s way of saying he knew more about Ibn Taymiyah than even the man himself. “What do you want to know about him?”
Shawish had extended the handle I was looking for. “I have always wanted to study Ibn Taymiyah,” I said. “Would you have the time to instruct me?”
It was a lie, of course. I’d never even seen the cover of one of Ibn Taymiyah’s books, but I was about to.
For the next year, every time I had a chance, I ventured down to the Green Line to see Shawish. We’d sit there for hours reading Ibn Taymiyah line by line, book by book. Considering Ibn Taymiyah wrote in the thirteenth century for well-educated Muslims, his Arabic was surprisingly accessible. His conclusions were just as accessible: Islam had to be purified. All the accretions that had attached themselves to Islam since the times of the prophet were like barnacles on a boat. They had to be scraped off. Muslims should refer only to the original texts.