At first the transcript caused suspicion, then bewilderment, followed shortly afterwards by a fluster of manic activity. When it was verified that I had actually seen the President and that he had given me his personal permission to visit Asyut, my hotel telephone number was taken and I was told that I would have an answer first thing in the morning.
That call has just come through. A government car will come to pick me up at the hotel early tomorrow morning. There was no problem, said the official; I could go anywhere I liked.
My initial jubilation was, however, tempered by the knowledge that this time tomorrow I will be heading towards Asyut - and into the waiting arms of the Gema'a al-Islamiyya. But beyond Asyut, inshallah, lies the Great Kharga Oasis, the Alcatraz of Byzantium, and still one of the most isolated spots in Egypt. It was the ultimate destination of John Moschos's travels, and will be mine too.
Hotel Casablanca, Asyut, 18 December
The journey to Asyut started promisingly. At six in the morning a black government Mercedes drew up outside my hotel; inside were a chauffeur and an interpreter (or rather minder) named Mahmoud. The chauffeur loaded my grubby rucksack into the beautifully hoovered boot. The Mercedes purred into life and we set off through the early-morning traffic in rather different style to my last trip in Ramazan's battered Peugeot.
For the first hundred miles there was not the slightest indication of trouble. It was a perfect cold, sharp winter's morning. We followed the same road through the peaceful mud-brick villages of the Nile Valley, with their hookah-smoking farmers and trellised tea houses, the edges of the villages punctuated by mud-brick pepperpot pigeon towers. The road was raised on a brick embankment with bright green paddy fields stretching off on either side. In a few areas the winter crop had already been harvested, and as we passed we could see white egrets standing out against the black alluvial mud.
Village labourers were trooping into the fields, silhouetted as they filed along irrigation dykes, hoes balanced over their shoulders. There were no other cars, though as we neared the larger towns, the roads would clog up with an armada of donkey-carts, or occasionally an old village bus rattling over the railway crossings. Sometimes the Mercedes would have to edge its way through a herd of leathery water buffaloes or a nuzzle of sheep being led into market by long-robed peasants, heavily swathed against the morning chill. Kingfishers hovered above the irrigation runnels. Scenes of Biblical calm surrounded us on all sides. It was impossible to imagine that we were heading into a civil war.
Only after we passed the market town of el-Minya did the atmosphere begin to change. We began to pass police checkpoints - at first every five miles or so, but then more frequently. At the same time the big black Mercedes began to attract more and more attention. People stared at us as we passed; few of them were smiling.
By the time we got to the town of Mallawi the police were everywhere. Sandbag emplacements dotted the rooftops; haphazard brick fortifications guarded the police stations and banks. Not only the police were armed: perhaps one in ten of the local population carried assault rifles as they inspected their fields or drove into town to go shopping, the barrels of the Kalashnikovs poking out of the car windows. Mahmoud, who had started the journey full of soothing words about the Western press exaggerating the problems in the region, began for the first time to look nervous.
To distract myself, I concentrated my attention on the region's
history. Every ten miles or so we would pass the ruins of some major Byzantine city or monastery: Hermopolis, the Monastery of the Pulley, Antinoe, Deir al Barsha, Bawit. I pulled out my copy of The Spiritual Meadow, finding it some comfort that Moschos had had the same problems when he passed through here in the first decade of the seventh century.
Then as now, Upper Egypt was lawless bandit country, where the traveller proceeded at his own risk. Although subject to frequent armed incursions from Nubia and the deserts to the south, the region seems only to have been defended by a half-hearted regiment of part-time limitanei (border troops), who did not apparently take their military duties very seriously. Among the papyri from Oxyrhynchus were discovered the family papers of one Flavius Patermuthis, who describes himself with engaging frankness as a 'soldier of the regiment of the Elephantine, by profession a boatman'. In a similar vein, John Moschos met a pious soldier who used every day to sit weaving baskets and praying from dawn until the ninth hour (3 p.m.), then put on his uniform and went on parade. This carried on for eight years, during which time his commander seems to have been quite unsurprised by his behaviour.
Slack discipline among the limitanei exacerbated the region's security problems. When he came to Antinoe, Moschos visited Phoebamon the Sophist, who told him the following story:
In the district around Hermopolis there was a brigand chief whose name was David. He had rendered many people destitute, murdered many others and committed every kind of evil deed. One day while he was engaged in brigandage on the mountain [behind Hermopolis], together with a band of more than thirty robbers, he came to his senses. Conscience-stricken by his evil deeds, he left those who were with him and went to a monastery.
He knocked at the monastery gate [and in due course] the porter emerged and asked what he wanted. The so the porter went inside and told the Abbot. The Abbot came out and when he saw that the man was advanced in age, he said to him: 'You cannot stay here, for the brethren labour very hard. They practise great austerity. Your temperament is different and you could not tolerate the rule of the monastery.' The brigand said he could put up with these things, but the Abbot was persistent in his conviction that the man would not be able to. Then the brigand said to him: 'Know, then, that I am David the robber chief; and the reason I came here was that I might weep for my sins. If you do not accept me, I swear to you and before Him who dwells in Heaven, that I will return to my former way of life. I will bring those who were with me, kill you all and even destroy your monastery.' When the Abbot heard this, he received him into the monastery, tonsured him and gave him the holy habit. Thus he began spiritual combat [against the demons and devils of temptation] and he exceeded all the other members of the monastery in self-control, obedience and humility.
'There were about seventy persons in that monastery,' adds Moschos, 'and David benefited them all, providing them with an example.'
I was still reading about Moschos's journey through the badlands of Upper Egypt when the car was brought to a halt at a heavily guarded checkpoint some fifty miles north of Asyut From slits in the brick turret surmounting the police bunker, the barrels of three machine guns covered the three approaches to the road junction. An officer barked into his walkie-talkie; a pa.ir of conscripts paced nervously around the bunker, Meeting with the safety catches of their ancient Enfield rifles. One of them looked no older than sixteen. His boots were old and scuffed, and one of them had no laces. He was clearly very frightened.
Mahmoud got out and talked to the two boys, offering them imported American cigarettes. By the time he returned to the car ' discovered why we had been held up.
'They say that it is too dangerous to go on without a guard,' he said. 'The police killed seven militants last weekend. Then yesterday the militants ambushed and killed three policemen not far from here. The militants need to get another four before they get even. Until then the whole district is on alert. They say we'll have to wait here until someone is free to escort us on.'
'How bad do they say the situation is around here?' I asked.
'They say it is very bad,' replied Mahmoud, shaking his head gravely. "Very bad indeed.'
Our escort drove up less than fifteen minutes later. I had expected a single conscript with an old gun; what we got, rather alarmingly, were six heavily armed paramilitary policemen in a souped-up Japanese pick-up. We had to struggle to keep up. Every time we neared a village, the pick-up driver increased his speed, while one of the guards would flick off his safety catch, balance on the back-flap and search the rooftops for snipers. Before long we turned off th
e main Upper Egypt road and headed into the town of Sanabu. This was the place that the Gema'a al-Islamiyya had attacked two years before, initiating the current campaign. Two convoys of armed activists had swooped down early in the morning. By the time they withdrew, seven Coptic farmers had been hunted down and murdered in their fields; seven others were shot dead in the streets. I had read brief agency reports on the massacre, but wanted to know more. What had precipitated the attack? Had it been completely unexpected?
We drove fast through the narrow streets of the old town, our escort frantically scouring the rooftops and windows for guerrillas, their rifles raised and their fingers on the triggers. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that there could not be a better way of attracting the attention of the Gema'a al-Islamiyya than to travel in a black government limousine with an escort of trigger-happy paramilitaries. If it hadn't been for the difficulty of getting through the police roadblocks, it would surely have been safer to have come anonymously in Ramazan's beaten-up old Peugeot, and perhaps to have pulled on one of his dirty old gelabiyas while I was about it. As it was, any self-respecting Gema'a active service unit must now have been alerted to the fact that a foreigner was in the area, charging around Sanabu in a ludicrously opulent government Mercedes.
Eventually we came to a halt at a makeshift roadblock in a small square at the centre of the town. The roadblock was made up of a pair of logs balanced on two battered old oildrums. Behind it stood a line of tall men in gelabiyas and white turbans, each holding a gun. Behind the men rose the facade of a Coptic church.
'These are village guards,' explained Mahmoud. 'Come on. If you want to do an interview, make it quick.'
I jumped out of the car and was ushered hurriedly into the priest's house beside the church. The paramilitaries stayed outside with their guns levelled, but the leader of the village guards came into the presbytery with Mahmoud and me. With his scarf and dark glasses removed I saw that he was a surprisingly old man, at least sixty. He kissed the priest's hand and sat down beside him. When the two men had introduced themselves, using Mahmoud as an interpreter, I asked them about the events which had led up to the massacre. Slowly the story emerged. It was a tale of almost Sicilian viciousness.
It had all begun several years before, when a Copt decided to sell his house. One of the leading Muslim families in the village, who also happened to be local commanders of the Gema'a, had wished to buy it. But they had offered an insultingly low price, and were outbid by a relatively wealthy Copt named Munir who owned the local garage. Gemal Haridi, the head of the Muslim family, made it clear that if he was magnanimous enough to let the sale go ahead between the two Copts, his family would at least expect a considerable cut of the purchase price. Munir refused to pay. Two weeks later, Munir's son, an engineer aged twenty-five, was shot dead as he bent under the bonnet of a car in his father's garage. In the same attack Munir was shot in the foot. He had to have the foot amputated. But he still refused to pay.
Haridi then got some Gema'a al-Islamiyya hitmen to murder another relative of Munir who worked in Asyut. The assassins ambushed him as he was walking to work at the Asyut Medical Centre. They were armed with long sickles and killed him by history. Every ten miles or so we would pass the ruins of some major Byzantine city or monastery: Hermopolis, the Monastery of the Pulley, Antinoe, Deir al Barsha, Bawit. I pulled out my copy of The Spiritual Meadow, finding it some comfort that Moschos had had the same problems when he passed through here in the first decade of the seventh century.
Then as now, Upper Egypt was lawless bandit country, where the traveller proceeded at his own risk. Although subject to frequent armed incursions from Nubia and the deserts to the south, the region seems only to have been defended by a half-hearted regiment of part-time limitanei (border troops), who did not apparently take their military duties very seriously. Among the papyri from Oxyrhynchus were discovered the family papers of one Flavius Patermuthis, who describes himself with engaging frankness as a 'soldier of the regiment of the Elephantine, by profession a boatman'. In a similar vein, John Moschos met a pious soldier who used every day to sit weaving baskets and praying from dawn until the ninth hour (3 p.m.), then put on his uniform and went on parade. This carried on for eight years, during which time his commander seems to have been quite unsurprised by his behaviour.
Slack discipline among the limitanei exacerbated the region's security problems. When he came to Antinoe, Moschos visited Phoebamon the Sophist, who told him the following story:
In the district around Hermopolis there was a brigand chief whose name was David. He had rendered many people destitute, murdered many others and committed every kind of evil deed. One day while he was engaged in brigandage on the mountain [behind Hermopolis], together with a band of more than thirty robbers, he came to his senses. Conscience-stricken by his evil deeds, he left those who were with him and went to a monastery.
He knocked at the monastery gate [and in due course] the porter emerged and asked what he wanted. The robber chief replied that he wanted to become a monk, so the porter went inside and told the Abbot. The Abbot came out and when he saw that the man was advanced in age, he said to him: 'You cannot stay here, for the brethren labour very hard. They practise great austerity. Your temperament is different and you could not tolerate the rule of the monastery.' The brigand said he could put up with these things, but the Abbot was persistent in his conviction that the man would not be able to. Then the brigand said to him: 'Know, then, that I am David the robber chief; and the reason I came here was that I might weep for my sins. If you do not accept me, I swear to you and before Him who dwells in Heaven, that I will return to my former way of life. I will bring those who were with me, kill you all and even destroy your monastery.' When the Abbot heard this, he received him into the monastery, tonsured him and gave him the holy habit. Thus he began spiritual combat [against the demons and devils of temptation] and he exceeded all the other members of the monastery in self-control, obedience and humility.
'There were about seventy persons in that monastery,' adds Moschos, 'and David benefited them all, providing them with an example.'
I was still reading about Moschos's journey through the badlands of Upper Egypt when the car was brought to a halt at a heavily guarded checkpoint some fifty miles north of Asyut. From slits in the brick turret surmounting the police bunker, the barrels of three machine guns covered the three approaches to the road junction. An officer barked into his walkie-talkie; a pair of conscripts paced nervously around the bunker, fidgeting with the safety catches of their ancient Enfield rifles. One of them looked no older than sixteen. His boots were old and scuffed, and one of them had no laces. He was clearly very frightened.
Mahmoud got out and talked to the two boys, offering them imported American cigarettes. By the time he returned to the car he had discovered why we had been held up.
'They say that it is too dangerous to go on without a guard,' he said. 'The police killed seven militants last weekend. Then yesterday the militants ambushed and killed three policemen not far from here. The militants need to get another four before they get even. Until then the whole district is on alert. They say we'll have to wait here until someone is free to escort us on.'
'How bad do they say the situation is around here?' I asked.
'They say it is very bad,' replied Mahmoud, shaking his head gravely. 'Very bad indeed.'
Our escort drove up less than fifteen minutes later. I had expected a single conscript with an old gun; what we got, rather alarmingly, were six heavily armed paramilitary policemen in a souped-up Japanese pick-up. We had to struggle to keep up. Every time we neared a village, the pick-up driver increased his speed, while one of the guards would flick off his safety catch, balance on the back-flap and search the rooftops for snipers. Before long we turned off the main Upper Egypt road and headed into the town of Sanabu. This was the place that the Gema'a al-Islamiyya had attacked two years before, initiating the current campaign. Two convoys of armed act
ivists had swooped down early in the morning. By the time they withdrew, seven Coptic farmers had been hunted down and murdered in their fields; seven others were shot dead in the streets. I had read brief agency reports on the massacre, but wanted to know more. What had precipitated the attack? Had it been completely unexpected?
We drove fast through the narrow streets of the old town, our escort frantically scouring the rooftops and windows for guerrillas, their rifles raised and their fingers on the triggers. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that there could not be a better way of attracting the attention of the Gema'a al-Islamiyya than to travel in a black government limousine with an escort of trigger-happy paramilitaries. If it hadn't been for the difficulty of getting through the police roadblocks, it would surely have been safer to have come anonymously in Ramazan's beaten-up old Peugeot, and perhaps to have pulled on one of his dirty old gelabiyas while I was about it. As it was, any self-respecting Gema'a active service unit must now have been alerted to the fact that a foreigner was in the area, charging around Sanabu in a ludicrously opulent government Mercedes.
Eventually we came to a halt at a makeshift roadblock in a small square at the centre of the town. The roadblock was made up of a pair of logs balanced on two battered old oildrums. Behind it stood a line of tall men in gelabiyas and white turbans, each holding a gun. Behind the men rose the facade of a Coptic church.
'These are village guards,' explained Mahmoud. 'Come on. If you want to do an interview, make it quick.'
I jumped out of the car and was ushered hurriedly into the priest's house beside the church. The paramilitaries stayed outside with their guns levelled, but the leader of the village guards came into the presbytery with Mahmoud and me. With his scarf and dark glasses removed I saw that he was a surprisingly old man, at least sixty. He kissed the priest's hand and sat down beside him. When the two men had introduced themselves, using Mahmoud as an interpreter, I asked them about the events which had led up to the massacre. Slowly the story emerged. It was a tale of almost Sicilian viciousness.
From The Holy Mountain Page 48