The Looming Tower (5 page)

There was a violent underside to the Society of the Muslim Brothers, which would become deeply rooted in the Islamist movement. With Banna’s approval, a “secret apparatus” formed within the organization. Although most of the Brothers’ activity was directed at the British and at Egypt’s quickly dwindling Jewish population, they were also behind the bombings of two Cairo movie theaters, the murder of a prominent judge, and the actual assassinations—as well as many attempts—of several members of government. By the time the government murdered Banna, in an act of self-protection, the secret apparatus posed a powerful and uncontrollable authority within the Brotherhood.

In retaliation for raids against their bases, British forces assaulted a police barracks in the canal city of Ismailia in January
1952,
firing at point-blank range for twelve hours and killing fifty police conscripts. Immediately upon hearing the news, agitated mobs formed on the streets of Cairo. They burned the old British haunts of the Turf Club and the famous Shepheard’s Hotel. The arsonists, led by members of the Muslim Brothers’ secret apparatus, slashed the hoses of the fire engines that arrived to put out the flames, then moved on to the European quarter, burning every movie house, casino, bar, and restaurant in the center of the city. By morning, a thick black cloud of smoke lingered over the ruins. At least 30 people had been killed, 750 buildings destroyed, fifteen thousand people put out of work, and twelve thousand made homeless. Cosmopolitan Cairo was dead.

Something new was about to be born, however. In July of that year, a military junta, dominated by a charismatic young army colonel, Gamal Abdul Nasser, packed King Farouk onto his yacht and seized control of the government, which fell without resistance. For the first time in twenty-five hundred years, Egypt was ruled by Egyptians.

Q
UTB HAD TAKEN UP
his old job in the Ministry of Education and returned to his former home in the suburb of Helwan, which was once an ancient spa known for its healing sulfur waters. He occupied a two-story villa on a wide street with jacaranda trees in the front yard. He filled an entire wall of his salon with his collection of classical music albums.

Some of the planning for the revolution had taken place in this very room, where Nasser and the military plotters of the coup met to coordinate with the Muslim Brothers. Several of the officers, including Anwar al-Sadat, Nasser’s eventual successor, had close ties to the Brotherhood. If the coup attempt failed, the Brothers were to help the officers escape. In the event, the government fell so easily that the Brothers had little real participation in the actual coup.

Qutb published an open letter to the leaders of the revolution, advising them that the only way to purge the moral corruption of the old regime was to impose a “just dictatorship” that would grant political standing to “the virtuous alone.” Nasser then invited Qutb to become an advisor to the Revolutionary Command Council. Qutb hoped for a cabinet position in the new government, but when he was offered a choice between being the minister of education or general manager of Cairo radio, he turned both posts down. Nasser eventually appointed him head of the editorial board of the revolution, but Qutb quit the post after a few months. The prickly negotiation between the two men reflected the initial close cooperation of the Brothers and the Free Officers in a social revolution that both organizations thought was theirs to control. In fact, neither faction had the popular authority to rule.

In a story that would be repeated again and again in the Middle East, the contest quickly narrowed to a choice between a military society and a religious one. Nasser had the army and the Brothers had the mosques. Nasser’s political dream was of pan-Arab socialism, modern, egalitarian, secular, and industrialized, in which individual lives were dominated by the overwhelming presence of the welfare state. His dream had little to do with the theocratic Islamic government that Qutb and the Brothers espoused. The Islamists wanted to completely reshape society, from the top down, imposing Islamic values on all aspects of life, so that every Muslim could achieve his purest spiritual expression. That could be accomplished only through a strict imposition of the Sharia, the legal code drawn from the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which governs all parts of life. Anything less than that, the Islamists argued, was not Islam; it was
jahiliyya
—the pagan world before the Prophet received his message. Qutb opposed egalitarianism because the Quran stated: “We have created you class upon class.” He rejected nationalism because it warred with the ideal of Muslim unity. In retrospect, it is difficult to see how Qutb and Nasser could have misunderstood each other so profoundly. The only thing they had in common was the grandeur of their respective visions and their hostility to democratic rule.

Nasser threw Qutb in prison for the first time in
1954,
but after three months he let him out and allowed him to become the editor of the Muslim Brothers magazine,
Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin.
Presumably Nasser hoped his display of mercy would enhance his standing with the Islamists and keep them from turning against the increasingly secular aims of the new government; he may also have believed that Qutb had been chastened by his time in prison. Like the former king, Nasser always underestimated his adversary’s intransigence.

Qutb wrote a number of sharply critical editorials calling for jihad against the British at the very time Nasser was negotiating a treaty that would nominally end the occupation. In August 1954 the government shut the magazine down. By that time, ill will between the Brothers and the military leaders had hardened into cold opposition. It was clear that Nasser had no intention of instituting an Islamic revolution, despite his highly publicized pilgrimage to Mecca that same month. Qutb was so infuriated that he formed a secret alliance with the Egyptian communists in an abortive effort to bring Nasser down.

The ideological war over Egypt’s future reached a climax on the night of October
26, 1954.
Nasser was addressing an immense crowd in a public square in Alexandria. The entire country was listening to the radio as a member of the Muslim Brothers stepped forward and fired eight shots at the Egyptian president, wounding a guard but missing Nasser. It was the turning point in Nasser’s presidency. Over the chaos of the panicked crowd, Nasser continued speaking even as the gunshots rang out. “Let them kill Nasser! What is Nasser but one among many?” he cried. “I am alive, and even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdul Nasser!” Had the gunman succeeded, he might have been hailed as a hero, but the failure gave Nasser a popularity he had never enjoyed until then. He immediately put that to use by having six conspirators hanged and placing thousands of others in concentration camps. Qutb was charged with being a member of the Muslim Brothers’ secret apparatus that was responsible for the assassination attempt. Nasser thought he had crushed the Brothers once and for all.

S
TORIES ABOUT SAYYID QUTB’S SUFFERING
in prison have formed a kind of Passion play for Islamic fundamentalists. It is said that Qutb had a high fever when he was arrested; nonetheless, the state-security officers handcuffed him and forced him to walk to prison. He fainted several times along the way. For hours he was held in a cell with vicious dogs, and then, during long periods of interrogation, he was beaten. “The principles of the revolution have indeed been applied to us,” he said, as he raised his shirt to show the court the the marks of torture.

Through confessions of other members of the Brotherhood, the prosecution presented a sensational scenario of a planned takeover of the government, involving the destruction of Alexandria and Cairo, blowing up all the bridges over the Nile, and numerous assassinations—an unprecedented campaign of terror, all in the service of turning Egypt into a primitive theocracy. The testimony also demonstrated, however, that the Brothers were too disorganized to accomplish any of these dreadful tasks. Three highly partisan judges, one of them Anwar al-Sadat, oversaw these proceedings. They sentenced Qutb to life in prison, but when his health deteriorated, the sentence was reduced to fifteen years.

Qutb was always frail. He had a weak heart, a delicate stomach, and sciatica, which gave him chronic pain. After a bout of pneumonia when he was thirty years old, he suffered from frequent bronchial problems. He experienced two heart attacks in prison, and bleeding in his lungs, which may have been an effect of torture, or tuberculosis. He moved to the prison hospital in May
1955,
where he stayed for the next ten years, spending much of his time writing a lucid, highly personal, eight-volume commentary called
In the Shade of the Quran,
which by itself would have assured his place as one of the most significant modern Islamic thinkers. But his political views were darkening.

Some of the imprisoned Brothers staged a strike and refused to leave their cells. They were gunned down. Twenty-three members were killed and forty-six injured. Qutb was in the prison hospital when the wounded men were brought in. Shaken and terrified, Qutb wondered how fellow Muslims could treat each other in such a way.

Qutb came to a characteristically radical conclusion: His jailers had denied God by serving Nasser and his secular state. Therefore, they were not Muslims. In Qutb’s mind, he had excommunicated them from the Islamic community. The name for this in Arabic is
takfir.
Although that is not the language he used, the principle of excommunication, which had been used to justify so much bloodshed within Islam throughout its history, had been born again in that prison hospital room.

Through family and friends, he managed to smuggle out, bit by bit, a manifesto called
Milestones
(
Ma’alim fi al-Tariq
). It circulated underground for years in the form of lengthy letters to his brother and sisters, who were also Islamic activists. The voice of the letters was urgent, passionate, intimate, and despairing. When finally published in
1964,
the book was quickly banned, but not before five printings had been run off. Anyone caught with a copy could be charged with sedition. Its ringing apocalyptic tone may be compared with Rousseau’s
Social Contract
and Lenin’s
What Is to Be Done?
—with similar bloody consequences.

“Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice,” Qutb posits at the beginning. Humanity is threatened not only by nuclear annihilation but also by the absence of values. The West has lost its vitality, and Marxism has failed. “At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived.” But before Islam can lead, it must regenerate itself.

Qutb divides the world into two camps, Islam and
jahiliyya,
the period of ignorance and barbarity that existed before the divine message of the Prophet Mohammed. Qutb uses the term to encompass all of modern life: manners, morals, art, literature, law, even much of what passed as Islamic culture. He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation. Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam. This was the choice: pure, primitive Islam or the doom of mankind.

His revolutionary argument placed nominally Islamic governments in the crosshairs of jihad. “The Muslim community has long ago vanished from existence,” Qutb contends. It was “crushed under the weight of those false laws and teachings which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.” Humanity cannot be saved unless Muslims recapture the glory of their earliest and purest expression. “We need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country,” he writes, in order to fashion an example that will eventually lead Islam to its destiny of world dominion. “There should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking the path,” Qutb declared. “I have written
Milestones
for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized.” Those words would echo in the ears of generations of young Muslims who were looking for a role to play in history.

In 1964 President Abdul Salam Aref of Iraq personally prevailed on Nasser to grant Qutb a parole, and invited him to Iraq, promising an important government post. Qutb declined, saying that Egypt still needed him. He immediately returned to his villa in Helwan and began conspiring against the revolutionary government.

From prison, Qutb had been able to regenerate the secret apparatus. The government of Saudi Arabia, fearing the influence of Nasser’s revolution, covertly supplied Qutb’s group with money and arms, but the movement was riddled with informers. Two men confessed and named Qutb in a plot to overthrow the government and assassinate public figures. Only six months after Qutb left prison, the security police arrested him again at a beach resort east of Alexandria.

The trial of Sayyid Qutb and forty-two of his followers opened on April
19, 1966,
and lasted nearly three months. “The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement,” Qutb defiantly declared when the trial began. He bitterly acknowledged that the anticolonialist new Egypt was more oppressive than the regime it had replaced. There was little effort on the part of the judges to appear impartial; indeed, the chief judge often took on the role of the prosecutor, and hooting spectators cheered the grand charade. The only real evidence produced against Qutb was his book,
Milestones.
He received his death sentence gratefully. “Thank God,” he declared. “I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.”

To the very end, Nasser misjudged his flinty adversary. As demonstrators filled the Cairo streets protesting the impending execution, Nasser realized that Qutb was more dangerous to him dead than alive. He dispatched Sadat to the prison, where Qutb received him wearing the traditional red burlap pajamas of a condemned man. Sadat promised that if Qutb appealed his sentence, Nasser would show mercy; indeed, Nasser was even willing to offer him the post of minister of education once again. Qutb refused. Then Qutb’s sister Hamida, who was also in prison, was brought to him. “The Islamic movement needs you,” she pleaded. “Write the words.” Qutb responded, “My words will be stronger if they kill me.”