Al-Qaeda and the eventual atrocities of 9/11 were born in the jail cells of Egypt, according to Lawrence Wright, author of his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage, 2006).
In the 1950’s and 60’s Sayyid Qutb was imprisoned and tortured in Egyptian prisons for writing and organizing against Gamal Abdul Nassar’s post-World War II government. Qutb founded what would become the Muslim Brotherhood and argued that the modern values of secularism, tolerance, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the genders and materialism was infecting Islam through the agency of colonialism (Wright p 28). He envisioned an Egypt governed by Sharia, Islamic law. Qutb would apply an obscure Islamic concept of takfir or “excommunication” to justify and encourage violent resistance against the Muslims supporting the regime of Nassar which Qutb insisted betrayed the faith. (Wright p. 34) Qutb was hanged a martyr to his cause in 1966.
“Takfir”, considered a heresy by most Muslims, evolved out of the concentration camps in Egypt to its current form to fuel the suicidal violence of modern extremists in direct contradiction to The Koran which forbids violence against another Muslim, non-combatants and women and children. (Wright pp. 142-43, in confusing contrast to many citations justifying war and violence against the non-believer, also note that the Koran strictly forbids suicide (Surah 4:29), prohibits the killing of innocent non-combatants (Surah 2:190-192) and advocates compassion towards non-hostile non-believers (Surah 60:8))
Ayman Al-Zawahiri was one of the thousands educated, middle-class Egyptians who adopted the writings and philosophy of Qutb as a result, in part, of their frustration with the brutality, corruption and privileges of the ruling class of Egyptian secularists. A leader in a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood he would be swept up in the aftermath of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assignation by elements of the Brotherhood in 1981, although he had no direct involvement in the killing.
One line of thinking proposes that American’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt….torture created an appetite for revenge….the main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage. Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution, they called it justice, was all consuming. (Wright p. 61)
It would be Al-Zawahiri in partnership with Osama bin Laden who would conceive of and organize the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi Kenya, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the 9/11 attacks on mainline USA.
When our Presidents Bush and Obama insist that we are not at war with Islam they are right. Religion may have given Al-Qaeda and the extremist Jihadists the philosophical framework to justify their violence, after much theological manipulation. But Islam is not the enemy. Social class, economic and political oppression and the corruption of autocracy, which we now see confronted in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen, are the ground out of which such violence has grown.
Not that that offers any excuse.
There is no excuse for terrorism, even in the name of retribution, even in the name of victimization and especially in the name of God.
"Washington has been very anxious about what's happening here, but it shouldn't be. It should be happy. This will reduce terrorism. When people have their voice, they don’t need to explode themselves."
--Mohammed Fouad, an Egyptian software engineer. (The Washington Post, 2/2/11)
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