source"  The New Yorker

“In the Middle East, you travel in a time machine,” he told me one evening in his office. “In Libya, you have a complete madman in charge. In Iraq, you had Saddam and now bloodshed. In Yemen, the whole country is doped up on khat and everyone owns a Kalashnikov, as in ‘The Lotus Eaters.’ In Saudi Arabia, you leave Friday prayers and then you’re forced to watch an execution—some woman being stoned for adultery or a head chopped off. In Syria, they used their military to slaughter their own people. Jordan is banal. Not one of the Gulf States is a signatory to the Covenant of Human Rights. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Twenty-two Arab League states, all authoritarian. For decades, the Middle East has been kept in a political deep freeze. People flee from here: the crime, the fundamentalism, the brutality. There is no growth rate, no acceptable governmental or economic management. Nothing short of a military intervention could have exerted any political pressure on the region. It’s the only solution, the only lesser among many evils.”

by DAVID REMNICK

Issue of 2004-07-12 and 19

Posted 2004-07-05

Last November, President Bush delivered a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington, spelling out the loftiest of his rationales for the war in Iraq—a determination to remake the political world from North Africa to the Arabian peninsula. It was a radical conservative’s most radical address. The end of the twentieth century, Bush said, had marked “the swiftest advance of freedom in the twenty-five-hundred-year story of democracy,” an advance that began with Portugal, Spain, and Greece more than thirty years ago, spread to South Korea and Taiwan, and then, finally, to South Africa and the entire Soviet imperium. By the President’s accounting, there were forty democracies in the world in the early nineteen-seventies and a hundred and twenty by 2000. Never mind the reassertion of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and elsewhere. For Bush, one region in particular remained stubbornly unfree. “Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty?” he asked. The United States, he declared, had “adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” that would depend on American “persistence and energy and idealism” but also on the Arab countries—not least, the most populous, powerful, and influential country in the region. “The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East,” Bush said, “and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”

The logic of that rhetorical instruction was not lost on the Egyptians: just as Anwar Sadat, a quarter-century earlier, had flown to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel, Hosni Mubarak, an unchallenged four-term President, a modern pharaoh, should take the equally bold step of creating a constitutional democracy, even at the risk of surrendering power. Egypt is historically central, a civilization of more than seven thousand years’ standing, and, unlike the sectarian societies of Syria and Iraq or the arriviste dynastic oil depots of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, it is a true nation-state, the center of nearly all currents, intellectual and ideological, in the Arab world. In Bush’s own mind, at least, he was encouraging a revolution from above, an Arabian perestroika. And the revolution, he made plain, ought to begin in Cairo.

There has, of course, been no such revolution in Cairo, and no sign of one. Part of the collateral damage of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq is the erosion of American prestige and influence all over the world. Rather than take the democratizing cue from Bush, Mubarak’s regime has offered itself as an example to the United States: Spare us the pretense of an open society, its leaders imply. Your greatest fear, like ours, is terrorism, and the only way to defeat such an enemy is by crushing it. Not long after September 11th, Atef Ebeid, the Egyptian Prime Minister, seemed to give sympathetic counsel to an ally still stunned by its encounter with the capacities of jihad. “The U.S. and U.K., including human-rights groups, have, in the past, been calling on us to give these terrorists their ‘human rights,’” he said. “You can give them all the human rights they deserve until they kill you. After these horrible crimes committed in New York and Virginia, maybe Western countries should begin to think of Egypt’s own fight against terror as their new model.”

Ebeid was referring to a long history. Modern Islamic radicalism was born in the twenties in the villages of the upper Nile and the streets and mosques of Cairo. In communiqués over the years, Osama bin Laden has often referred to that period as one of calamity and humiliation—an allusion, clear to anyone in the Islamic world, to the collapse of Islam’s imperial seat, the Ottoman caliphate, based in Constantinople. In the nineteen-twenties, Kemal Atatürk, a secular revolutionary, banned the caliphate and established the Republic of Turkey. Islamic Constantinople became cosmopolitan Istanbul. At the same time, much of the Arab world was being parcelled out by the strongest powers in Europe, and nationalism came to displace the idea of a greater unified Islam.

In reaction, in 1928 Hassan al-Banna, a religiously educated teacher living near the Suez Canal, established the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna believed in Islam as a complete system, which provides divine instruction on everything from daily rituals, law, and politics to matters of the spirit, and to which all other forms of thought and social organization—secularism, nationalism, socialism, liberalism—are alien. In his essay “Between Yesterday and Today,” Banna wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with “their murderous germs”:

They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants.

The Brotherhood’s slogan was, and remains, “God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” The Brotherhood, like many groups that bear its imprint decades later—Hamas, Hezbollah—established charitable organizations, clinics, schools, and underground paramilitary groups to further the cause of an Islamic polity. Initially, the spectacularly corrupt Egyptian king, Farouk, used the Brotherhood as a stabilizing force against a stronger opposition, the Communists and the secular nationalists. And, as the Brotherhood grew in membership, it was able to act with a degree of freedom. But when terrorist challenges to the monarchy began, the government came to see the Brotherhood as a real threat. At the end of 1948, a member of the Brotherhood assassinated Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi Nuqrashi; in 1949, the secret police retaliated, shooting Hassan al-Banna dead as he was getting into a taxi in Cairo.

“A great shock occurred in the Brotherhood after Hassan was killed,” Banna’s surviving brother, Gamal, told me not long ago, when we met at his apartment on the outskirts of the capital. The strongest ideological voice among the factional leaders in the Brotherhood was also the most extreme—Sayyid Qutb. Gamal said that “Qutb was a man of complexes” who had been radicalized by an extended journey to the United States in the late nineteen-forties. In books of theology and political theory—the most famous of which are “In the Shadows of the Koran” and “Signposts on the Road”—Qutb popularized an interpretation of the Koran that, to this day, is used as a justification for political violence in the name of establishing an Islamic state. According to the Koran, mankind, before the advent of Islam, lived in jahilyya, a state of ignorance and paganism. During Qutb’s travels through America, he saw people living in a decadent swamp of commercial obsession and sexual permissiveness—a modern incarnation of jahilyya.

In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled the monarchy and came to power with promises of socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. Nasser was a hero throughout the Arab world for opposing the West, but Qutb charged that he was just as barbaric as the leaders of the West, and declared him kafir, an infidel. In short, Qutb excommunicated the head of state from the Community of the Faithful and placed him beyond the protection of Islamic law.

At first, Nasser tried to co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood, but in 1954 the government claimed that the group had tried to assassinate him, and it carried out a series of arrests and executions. For the next twenty years, the Brotherhood went underground. Many of its members were forced into exile, and established the group in Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. Qutb’s brother, Muhammad, edited and published Qutb’s works in Saudi Arabia, and they were soon available in much of the Arab world. In 1965, Qutb was arrested in Cairo, and a year later he was tried and hanged. Yet his influence persisted. Along with Mawlana Mawdudi, the principal leader of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan, and Ayatollah Khomeini, in Iran, Qutb remains one of the founding ideologists of Islamic radicalism.

Nasser died in 1970, of a heart attack, and when Sadat came to power he began to release Islamists from jail as a way of building his political base. Under Nasser, the Egyptians had suffered a humiliating military loss to Israel in 1967, and by 1972 members of the Brotherhood at Cairo University and elsewhere were among the loudest voices calling for another confrontation. The Lebanese-born scholar Fouad Ajami says, in his 1981 book “The Arab Predicament,” that after the shock and despair of the 1967 war Egypt required “solace and consolation” and felt a “nostalgia for purity” that only Islam could provide. But by allowing the Islamists back into the political picture Sadat was making an enormous concession. As Gilles Kepel writes, in his recent historical account “Jihad,” “Sadat gave up the Egyptian state’s monopoly on ideology, as well as the strategy of containing religion on which his predecessor had relied.”

Sadat had hoped to distinguish himself from Nasser by appearing to be a man of prayer and relative liberalism. He allowed the Brotherhood to publish its own magazine, Al Dawa (The Call to Islam); he tolerated the rise of the Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Association), an even more fundamentalist group, which urged the “pure Islamic life” and began to have an impact at the universities in Cairo. He also restored a measure of Egypt’s self-image when the Army crossed the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. Yet when Sadat made his overture to Menachem Begin and signed a peace pact at Camp David, in 1979, the Islamists turned on him. They could not accept the idea of a Middle Eastern political order, an accommodation that would concede Israel a permanent place on what they insisted were Islamic lands.

In Cairo, and in Upper Egyptian towns such as Asyut and Minia, the radical heirs of Sayyid Qutb began organizing cells and issuing calls to overthrow Sadat’s regime. One of the radical sects, under the leadership of a young electrical engineer, Abd al-Salam Faraj, declared Sadat “an apostate of Islam fed at the tables of imperialism and Zionism,” and in 1981 Sadat was murdered while attending a military parade. Faraj wrote a pamphlet, “The Hidden Imperative,” consistent with Qutb’s guidelines of justifiable political murder. At the trial, one of the assassins declared, “I am guilty of killing the unbeliever, and I am proud of it.”

Sadat was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, the commander of the Air Force, who was a far more cautious figure and had no ideological ambitions. For twenty-three years, power and its maintenance has been Mubarak’s obsession. Ever since the assassination of Sadat, he has maintained a state of emergency to justify a war against religious radicals. Over the years, tens of thousands of Islamists and other political opponents have passed through the jails, usually without trial or charge. According to both Egyptian human-rights groups and international organizations like Human Rights Watch, torture is “widespread and systematic”: beatings, electric shock, isolation. And Mubarak has always proved himself ready to employ maximum force to quell protest or unrest.

In time, Mubarak wore down the Islamist movement in Egypt, a fact that was all but admitted when, in 1997, the two main radical groups declared that they were ending all violent operations. There was an incident later that year, when terrorists killed seventy people in Luxor, but since then there has been nothing.

A squat, middle-aged lawyer named Montasser al-Zayat has been a public face of radical Islam in Cairo for many years. He is the principal attorney for Gama’a al-Islamiya and promotes a notion of law very different from that of the relatively secular Egyptian constitution. A sign outside his office door reads, in Arabic, “Only God Rules.” He has been jailed four times and counts among his prison friends Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian Jihad leader who is Osama bin Laden’s chief ideologist and lieutenant.

“Definitely, the Islamic groups in Egypt are suffering a period of weakness,” he told me. “They’ve been beaten down by prison, attacks, torture, interrogations. Most of the leaders were killed. There are large numbers still in prison. Those who have been released are in search of a future, trying to find a way to combat what the regime has done to them. But the Islamic state of affairs in general is still strong. The people feel endangered, and they are moving toward Islamic groups, more so since the American attacks” in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This sense of a threat to our national security, to our identity, is having a profound effect on people.”

In radical circles, the Muslim Brotherhood is considered to be passive, generationally divided, and far too accommodating to the regime. Its demonstrations are invariably orderly, its platform for an Islamic state purposefully vague. But Zayat said he thought that the Brotherhood was the one “dissident” organization in Egypt that had a chance to displace the current regime. “Although I’m not a member of the Muslim Brothers, I believe they are the political future of Egypt,” Zayat said. “In the event of true reform and elections, they are trained and competent and ready to take the reins of power.”

In all corners of official Cairo—at government offices, at the newspapers—that was the word: the radical groups were in eclipse (or hiding or exile), and the Muslim Brotherhood was, in an authoritarian state, the shadow opposition. Its members hold sixteen of the four hundred and forty-five seats in the parliament, and are prominent in the professional associations. In 2002, when one of the Brotherhood’s leaders died, two hundred thousand people turned out for the funeral. A recent article in Egypt Today wondered whether the Brotherhood might someday take power and resemble the moderate Islamic parties that now rule Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey.

But when you enter the offices of the Muslim Brotherhood, after taking off your shoes at the door, it is hard to reconcile its reputation for competence and even power with the listless scene before you: a shabby warren of rooms in which a few dozen men stand around chatting, drinking tea, and shuffling papers. I made two visits, and both times everyone was unfailingly polite. An elderly assistant gave me glasses of cool lemon squash and translated the posters on the wall. One showed a portrait of Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas leader who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The old man squinted at the caption and told me, “It says, ‘Sheikh Yassin: Congratulations on Your Martyrdom!’”

When I met with Mohamed Mahdi Akef, the new Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, I could only wonder what Hosni Mubarak had to fear. Akef belongs to a generation in its seventies and eighties that, almost to a man, spent years in prison during the Nasser regime. He is broad-bellied and has close-cropped white hair and a white beard. He gestured with his hand around the offices as if to acknowledge their modesty: “What can I say? We live and work to assist our religion, and despite these limited resources we do what we can to press the greatness of Islam and to reform life in all of its aspects.”

I said that it probably didn’t help that the Brotherhood is officially banned and the emergency laws are still in effect.

Akef smiled. “We no longer think of ourselves as banned,” he said. “We just don’t compete with the government.”

Not surprisingly, almost no one in Cairo today has anything good to say about the American invasion of Iraq—people are convinced that the U.S.’s purpose was to seize the oil fields, protect Israel, and gain a permanent foothold in the Middle East—and so I began with what I thought would be a less lecture-provoking question. I asked Akef how he had reacted to the attacks on September 11, 2001.

“The incidents of September 11th were criminal, and only a professional criminal would have done such a thing,” he said. “That is why, until now, there’s been no clear evidence of who did this. Talk of Mohammad Atta and Al Qaeda is all lies, an illusion. Al Qaeda is an American illusion. Is there any power on earth that can stand up to the United States of America and its power? Whenever America claims there is another power to challenge it, it is an illusion used to serve other purposes. For example, the United States wanted to invade Afghanistan in order to ship its oil by pipeline across that country. The U.S. wanted to plant its bases there and ship the oil. So they claim there is a Taliban there with Al Qaeda functioning there, too. But how much power does the Taliban really have?”

In the nineteen-sixties, Sayyid Qutb said that the Jews were behind “materialism, animal sensuality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society.” As for the West, he said, “Should we not issue a sentence of death? Is this not the verdict most appropriate to the nature of the crime?” The intervening decades have not much changed this aspect of ideology within the Brotherhood, at least among the reigning elders. Akef saw Sadat’s treaty with the Israelis as a grievous heresy and, again, turned conspiratorial when it came to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “In the West, they wanted to get rid of the Jews, and so the Europeans and the United States implanted the Zionists in the Holy Land to get rid of them and their evils,” he said. “At the same time, they implanted this evil in the Middle East so the Muslims could busy themselves with it. The Europeans and Americans knew that Israel would never survive. Israel cannot stand before one and a half billion Muslims. This is temporary. Israel has no future! And I am not the only one saying this. There are scholars saying this.”

The Muslim Brotherhood leadership, even the younger generation, is realistic about the Brotherhood’s current inability to compete for power. Its public position is that through its community organizations it will slowly change the values of Egyptian society, and build a legal party; Islam will flourish and public opinion will eventually put pressure on the regime, either during Mubarak’s reign or after. For now, senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are kept out of sight, banned from speaking at universities and appearing on state-run television.

“Mubarak fears that if he widens the margins of democracy things will happen,” Essam al-Eryam, one of the Brotherhood’s most prominent middle-aged leaders, told me at the Brotherhood’s headquarters. “There will be democracy here, sooner or later. It requires patience, and we are more patient because we are, as an organization, seventy-six years old. You have already seen some countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran—describe themselves as Islamic regimes. There’s a diversity of models, even among the Sunni and the Shia. Egypt can present a model that is more just and tolerant.”

The Mubarak government’s policy is simple: finesse—periods of tolerance followed by crackdown. Ali Heilal Dessouki, a Cabinet minister, met me at his office one afternoon and reeled off the decades-long history of Islamist violence directed at various government leaders. “Whether it is the Muslim Brotherhood or Islamic Jihad, the goal in the end is the same: the establishment of a Muslim state,” he said. “When the mujahideen returned from Afghanistan in 1989, 1990, the level of military professionalism among the Islamists had increased. Somewhere in 1990, 1991, the strategy of reconciliation showed itself to be a failure. For us to say ‘Come share with us’ was considered a sign of weakness. So the government got tough.”

Actually, nearly all the Islamists who committed terrorist acts in the early nineteen-nineties were members of groups more radical than the Brotherhood, but the government does not spin it quite that way. Fouad Allam, who was Egypt’s chief of intelligence under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, until 1988, when he retired, compared the Brotherhood to the Italian Red Brigades and the German Baader-Meinhof gang. “They are the most dangerous organization in the Arab world,” he said. “In reality, they created terrorism in the region. Despite this, they claim they are not a terrorist organization. When you ask them about the assassination of the Prime Minister under Farouk in 1948, killing people in movie theatres, the assassination of other government officials, the robbery of the Bank of Egypt, putting explosives in police stations, blowing up certain Jewish shops—there have been six hundred crimes since 1928—when you ask them, they say these are isolated, individual acts. They declare themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. What I respect about Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiya is that they operate in the open. The Muslim Brothers are liars, even today.

“It’s been a long time since they last committed a terrorist act,” he continued, “but every now and then a clandestine cell is discovered. I can’t say whether they have renounced terrorism or they are dormant, like a volcano. But why are they still forming clandestine cells?”

In mid-May, the government carried out the most extensive crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in a decade, making more than fifty arrests, closing down twenty companies aligned with the group, and shutting off its Web site. According to Al-Ahram, a newspaper that tends to reflect the government line, intelligence officials had come to believe that the Brotherhood was escalating recruitment and sending the recruits to Iraq, Chechnya, and Palestine to get the training they would need to overthrow the Egyptian government. The Brotherhood denied all the charges.

Not long after the arrests, prison officials called Brotherhood leaders to say that one of theirs, a forty-year-old engineer named Akram Zuheiri, who suffered from diabetes, had died while being transferred between detention facilities. Would they kindly come and pick up the body? The Brotherhood and human-rights organizations blamed “clear and grave negligence” for Zuheiri’s death and said that other prisoners swept up in the recent dragnet were being interrogated and tortured. According to Al-Ahram, a “common interpretation” of the arrests is that they are a signal from Mubarak to the public that the Muslim Brotherhood “will never be part” of government reform in Egypt. The only point of agreement between the government and the Brotherhood is that American policy in the Middle East is radicalizing more and more young Egyptians.

The Mubarak regime has a natural interest in exaggerating, for foreign consumption, the strength and the potential menace of the Muslim Brotherhood. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist who studied the Islamist movement and then was jailed by Mubarak for three years, told me, “Mubarak has a low I.Q., but, politically, he is a survivalist. He has used the Islamists as a fear-arouser for the West. He wards off the pressures for a more open system by pointing to their presence. He uses them as a deterrent: ‘Do you want me to open the door to another Iran or Algeria or Afghanistan?’ This frightens the Egyptian middle class and the United States. It is a very skillful bluff, and the Muslim Brothers recognize the bluff.”

Egypt under Mubarak is a system of safety valves and controls, an autocracy that in some respects simulates civil society. Political opponents cannot compete for real power, or make frontal attacks on the President in the press, but they can talk in apartments and cafés, they can run for seats in parliament and join the professional unions and the like. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, for example, conduct religious study groups, and run charitable programs for the poor, but they no longer embarrass the government, as they did in 1992 when they were much quicker and more effective than the state bureaucracy in aiding the victims of an earthquake. In other words, they are given strict limits; should they exceed those limits, their last remaining freedom is to join thousands of others in prison.

And yet, if a political dissident or group wants to express opposition to or hatred of Israel, the Jews, or the Bush Administration, there are hardly any boundaries at all. This is part of what makes the Egyptian media seem “lively.” In 2002, state television broadcast a forty-one-episode series based on the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The Muslim Brotherhood had a rare opportunity to get a representative on television recently when it protested the broadcast of the Harrison Ford movie “Air Force One.” And the newspaper columnist Rifat Sayyid Ahmad felt no hesitation in calling Dick Cheney “a super-racist Jew” or in comparing Guantánamo to Auschwitz.

One of the leading moderate Islamists in Egypt is the newspaper columnist Fahmy Howeidy. In his office one afternoon, Howeidy told me that he held out no hope of Mubarak’s instituting real democratic reforms and that, at this point, U.S. pressure would be counter-productive. “The only thing that will bring it about will be the people’s will, their readiness to pay a price for it,” he said. “Democracy will not be a gift from Mubarak or Colin Powell.”

Howeidy and many others I spoke to said that it was difficult to gauge what sort of Islamism could emerge in a democratic Egypt. “It’s hard to say how powerful the Muslim Brothers are,” Howeidy said. “We have no polls, no transparency. They have power in the society, but to what extent I don’t know.”

In an atomized political culture like Egypt’s, the one issue that has energized, and enraged, the political opposition today is American foreign policy under George W. Bush. I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration. The novelist and editor Gamal al-Ghitani greeted me at the offices of his journal, Akhbar Aladab, the most prominent literary magazine in the Middle East, and showed me the portraits on the wall of his “American icons”—Hemingway, Melville, and Louis Armstrong—and yet within minutes he was telling me that what he feared most in the world was the United States. The faces of American officers in Iraq reminded him of Nazi officers, he said. “I fear that my culture is targeted by a superpower that is acting stupidly.” He was, if anything, mild in his rhetoric.

Later, I visited Sonallah Ibrahim, a Marxist novelist who is known for scathing political fictions, like “The Smell of It,” which he published after a term in Nasser’s prisons. Before knocking on his apartment door, I noticed a decal above the bell showing the American and Israeli flags joined by a swastika. He, too, was enraged about Palestine and Iraq, but not only that: everything about the United States repelled him. Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”

Anti-Americanism, routine or virulent, is not new in Egypt. Only its intensity is new—an intensity that is marked not only among opposition figures and literary intellectuals but also among people close to Mubarak.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was the Secretary-General of the United Nations in the nineteen-nineties and now runs a government human-rights agency in Cairo, told me, “In 1992, I had the illusion that the United Nations would manage the post-Cold War world. I was mistaken. The U.S. felt it should manage the post-Cold War world, based on free markets and democracy, with the idea that one democracy will not fight another. But this ideology failed. The new Administration moved from a policy of persuasion to a policy of coercion and preventative war. After the Napoleonic Wars, you had the Congress of Vienna. After the First World War, there was the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. And after the Second World War there was San Francisco and the rise of the U.N. After 1991, Bush’s father promised a new world order. We missed an occasion to have a new system.”

Abdel Moneim Said, who is the head of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a think tank that works closely with the regime, was among many who told me that the American failure so far to establish security in Iraq has decisively undermined the idea of a democratization movement in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. “The United States is in a position that looks like Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties—occupation, resistance, as well as a competition among groups,” he said. “You want Egypt to democratize, to change, but Egypt has drawn the opposite lesson. Instead of creating a liberal model, we see chaos, and the Saudis and the Syrians see the same thing. Now you have arrived at a much more modest sense of a liberal state than you started with.”

“There is a cultural war to change the Middle East, to create a new Saudi Arabia, a new Egypt, a new history,” Diaa Rashwan, an Islamic-movements expert at the Al-Ahram Center, said. “It’s really not very intelligent. In two years, you cannot even build a village. How are you going to rebuild the world?”

Three times a week, the novelist Naguib Mahfouz holds court in a café or bar—sessions that are meant to emulate the noisy camaraderie of bourgeois liberal Cairo a half-century ago. Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, is known for his intimate stories of Egyptian life—“The Cairo Trilogy” is his most celebrated work—and his national prestige is absolute, like Victor Hugo’s in nineteenth-century Paris. He is ninety-two and nearly deaf. In his prime, he was a prolific writer, but now he has pared down his work to fragmentary stories and prose poems. I was invited to meet him one night at the wood-panelled bar of Shepheard’s Hotel. When I arrived, a young hanger-on was sitting next to Mahfouz and shouting into his left ear, reading the text of an adulatory article about him. Mahfouz stared off into the distance, smiling slightly. He wore a dark-blue serge suit of an old-fashioned cut. Others traded the now ancient gossip that another novelist, Yusuf Idris, thought that he had deserved the Nobel. Mahfouz waved this away with a slight, elegant flop of his hand. When he spoke, it was usually to repeat a remark or to make a small joke.

In 1994, an Islamist radical stabbed Mahfouz in the neck and he nearly died. At the time, religious leaders, like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now in an American prison for inciting the first bombing of the World Trade Center, were on the attack against liberal intellectuals like Mahfouz. Other intellectuals of Mahfouz’s generation were physically assaulted or harangued into fear and silence. The Mubarak regime deplored the violence against Mahfouz, but what little remained of a liberal Cairo had long before been eclipsed.

“Liberal politics has had a bad name in Egypt,” Mohamed Salmawy, a newspaper columnist and playwright, told me. “It’s not discredited, it still exists, but it suffers from being tarnished by the revolution of 1952, when it was equated with corruption under the monarchy’s liberal system. Then came Sadat, who did away with Nasser’s theories and went to a multiparty system and the economic open door. People began to feel that liberalism was a Trojan horse for the West to creep into Egypt and dominate it and endanger its identity. Identity is very important here. We don’t have people like Samuel Beckett, who was born in Ireland, moved to Paris, and is a citizen of the world. We went a hundred and eighty degrees, turning away from the Soviet Union and jumping into bed with Israel and the United States and liberalism.”

These days, intellectuals are more likely to agree with a radical like Sonallah Ibrahim than with Naguib Mahfouz. The business élite, not the universities, has become the bastion of pro-Western opinion. Internationalism has cut both ways in Egypt: those who went to work in Saudi Arabia during the oil boom often came back more conservative, more religious; those who went for the same reasons to the emirates or Europe returned more secular, more politically liberal. Those liberals for the most part keep themselves, and their opinions, concealed, and stick to the business of making money.

Hisham Kassem, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the publisher of the English-language magazine The Cairo Times, is an exception. His jaundiced view of Egyptian politics, and of the Middle East in general, would not be out of place at a conservative American think tank. “In the Middle East, you travel in a time machine,” he told me one evening in his office. “In Libya, you have a complete madman in charge. In Iraq, you had Saddam and now bloodshed. In Yemen, the whole country is doped up on khat and everyone owns a Kalashnikov, as in ‘The Lotus Eaters.’ In Saudi Arabia, you leave Friday prayers and then you’re forced to watch an execution—some woman being stoned for adultery or a head chopped off. In Syria, they used their military to slaughter their own people. Jordan is banal. Not one of the Gulf States is a signatory to the Covenant of Human Rights. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Twenty-two Arab League states, all authoritarian. For decades, the Middle East has been kept in a political deep freeze. People flee from here: the crime, the fundamentalism, the brutality. There is no growth rate, no acceptable governmental or economic management. Nothing short of a military intervention could have exerted any political pressure on the region. It’s the only solution, the only lesser among many evils.”

When I asked Kassem his opinion of the American invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed, he said, “When you look at the intervention itself, you look at the people who will die as a result. Well, a great many more would have died from sanctions and from Saddam than from any intervention. All those arguments about how you can’t bring democracy in on the wings of a B-52 are garbage. The only thing that can bring about a change here is American foreign policy. Egyptian brutality will not change and neither will the apathy of the people. Change in the Middle East will be slow, but we needed the air cover. There was no way we could have done this on our own. We were going nowhere.”

Hosni Mubarak is the longest-serving Egyptian leader since Muhammad Ali, in the early nineteenth century. But Mubarak is seventy-six, and his health is imperfect. In mid-June, he sought medical treatment in Germany—Al-Ahram described it as “possible back surgery and/or physical therapy.” Last year, during an address to the parliament, Mubarak stopped speaking and muttered, “The air-conditioning is too strong in here.” Then he said, “What is happening?” His aides rushed to his side and escorted him from the podium. State television, which had been broadcasting the speech live, went blank. Inside the chamber, a member of parliament asked that last rites be read from the Koran; an imam prayed for the President’s health. It was nearly an hour before Mubarak returned, made his apologies, and said he hadn’t had enough sleep. There is also the persistent threat of a violent end. In 1995, assassins from Gama’a al-Islamiya fired on Mubarak’s motorcade while he was visiting Addis Ababa.

According to Article 82 of the Egyptian constitution, when the President cannot fulfill his duties he is to be replaced by a Vice-President. Mubarak, however, has always refused to appoint one. To a degree, he recalls the sort of dictator who begins his speeches, “If I die . . .” For the past few years, there have been rumors that members of Mubarak’s team were grooming his forty-one-year-old son, Gamal, as a successor—a plan that seemed to take its cue from the father-to-son succession in Syria. Gamal, who is called Jimmy by his friends, has worked as a banker in London, and, as a key figure in the ruling National Democratic Party, he is surrounded by pro-Western technocrats. Unlike his father, Sadat, and Nasser, he does not come from the military. Some members of the Egyptian élite believe that Gamal might be able to preserve political stability and yet reform a stagnant economy marked by forty-five-per-cent illiteracy and a per-capita income ranked a hundred-and-eighteenth in the world. Last New Year’s, however, the elder Mubarak dismissed the rumors as “nonsense.” Earlier, he had said, “We are not a monarchy. We are the Republic of Egypt, so refrain from comparing us to other countries in the region”—a clear reference to the Syrians.

Although the rumors persist, several sources close to the President told me that Mubarak would almost certainly seek a fifth term next year—unopposed, as usual. If he were unable to continue, however, the list of pretenders to the Presidency begins with a series of severe, colorless military and security chiefs—including Omar Suleiman, the head of intelligence—who hardly promise democratic reform. What’s more, those in power are not in the mood to take direction. “We do not need any pressure from anyone to adopt democratic principles,” Mubarak has said.

Not long before leaving the city, I went to the American University of Cairo and met with a young graduate named Hazem Kandil, who was looking forward to pursuing a doctorate at New York University. Hazem was training, it seemed, for membership in the Egyptian political élite. At the A.U.C. campus, the courtyard is divided into an area full of kids in jeans and T-shirts and a smaller area where Islamic dress—particularly head scarves for the young women—is in vogue. “Beirut” and “Tehran,” some call it.

As we sat in “Beirut” and looked over at “Tehran,” Hazem said, “We’ve tried the socialist agenda, we’ve tried the non-agendas of Sadat and Mubarak, which were mixed, and both failed miserably. We’ve exhausted the socialist and capitalist leanings. But people see that we have not exhausted the Islamic possibility. This worries me. It’s very plausible that we’ll take the Islamic road. A lot of what the U.S. is doing implies to people that this is your real motivation. Also, when the United States pushes for democracy without really supporting liberalism in the Islamic world in an adequate way, support for the Islamists grows. In this part of the world, too, conspiracy-thinking is part of the mood of thinking. Liberalism is being linked with American aggression.

“The Islamist influence will grow and will dominate, even without an Islamic President,” he went on. “When people start suffering under that, maybe they’ll listen to a more liberal agenda, but not before. What’s scary is that if we don’t deal with these people they’ll re-launch themselves. I see people at A.U.C. tilted toward the jihadist cause more and more. They’re watching satellite television, they’re watching Saudi-financed channels, they’re listening to the cassette tapes of fundamentalists that are sold on every street corner, they’re reading Islam Online and lots of other Web sites like that. The Islamic discourse is concentrating on the West. Under Sadat and Nasser, the Islamists were oriented toward moral issues in Egypt. Now the word is: ‘We are fighting for our lives.’”

One morning, at a café called Cilantro, near the university, I met with a recent graduate who was now writing articles—fairly incendiary articles—for an Islamic Web site. Because he wanted no trouble from the police or, more likely, immigration officials if he ever decided to travel to the West, he asked that I not use his real name. “We’ll stick with Tariq,” he said. Tariq has very short hair, stylish rectangular glasses, and an emerging beard. At first, I was sure that he was American, so fluid was his English and so slight his accent. He laughed when I mentioned it: “I guess you could say that my accent is the result of cultural imperialism. I got it from Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and satellite television.”

Tariq does not come from a fundamentalist family, but he said that he had become more and more observant and politically radicalized. “A lot of things did it,” he said: the Russian bombing of Chechnya, American support for Israel, and the “despicable” leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The news of September 11th, Tariq said, gave him a “sense of joy,” a sense of the possible. “Two years later, I’ve met people in the Egyptian bourgeoisie who are happy every time they hear that the Islamists have hit a soft target in the West. With Palestine and Iraq, the militant perspective is making more and more sense.”

Tariq said that when he graduated he had thought about going to law school in the United States. But he quickly realized that he didn’t want anything to do with that life style. He began to study the Koran and attend a mosque led by a radical young sheikh in one of the poorer neighborhoods. “When I grew a beard, my family worried. Initially, they were really tense. But over the past two years they are gaining a newfound sympathy for me.”

Young men and women—politicized, intelligent, fluent in English and European languages—get their information, it seems, from every source imaginable except the Egyptian papers, which, as Tariq put it, “are propagandistic crap.” Instead, Tariq reads the leading British and American papers on the Internet, checks into political chat rooms, and watches satellite television. Even in lower-income neighborhoods in Cairo, the rooftops sprout satellite dishes. Like anyone in Egypt with an education and an interest in politics, Tariq may despise American foreign policy, and see the American press as slavish to the Administration, but he believes completely the harsh reports on Egypt provided by U.S.-based human-rights organizations. “Egypt has an atrocious human-rights record,” he said. “And yet your President called my President a builder of open societies.”

As an Islamist, he said, he saw only one solution: “An ideal Egypt would have an Islamic government. The framework for that is very broad—it can lean more toward capitalism or socialism, even toward an Islamic monarchy, or even a council of guardians, as in Iran. There are many varieties. But the public image is always the Taliban. I didn’t approve of some of their practices; they had some serious problems. Preventing women from studying medicine and preventing women from seeing male doctors, well, that is a recipe for killing women. But they were isolated and coming to power after twenty years of civil war. Secularism has no future here. Secularism is a product of the West.”

Tariq smiled disdainfully at a mention of Bush’s speech at the National Endowment. “The nightmare for the West is that they advocate democracy and then they find that these countries elect Islamic governments,” he said. “Islamists have gained a lot of legitimacy through their social work, even in their jobs as engineers or doctors. They have a certain status.”

Tariq and I arranged to meet at the Al Rawas mosque, which is in the neighborhood called, for good reason, the Butchery. In the car heading to the mosque, I saw dozens of carcasses—sheep, lambs, and chickens—hanging in the cool evening air. When I arrived, Tariq was finishing prayers, along with thirty or forty other men. He introduced me to Sheikh Ragab, who is in his thirties and blind, and we all headed downstairs to a small office.

“The Egyptian government, like all other Arab governments, is a puppet regime, an agent of foreign powers, particularly the United States, which controls the world now,” the Sheikh said. “But if democracy were implemented and there were freedom of expression, Islam would rule and rule all aspects of life, including for non-Muslims. Some non-Muslims, especially in the West and the States, believe that if Islam rules it will massacre all non-Muslims. The Jews lived under Islamic rule in Medina in the time of the Prophet, and it was the best life they ever had. The same with the Christians. Whereas under Roman rule they were treated brutally.” The Sheikh also said that he and everyone he knew was firmly convinced that “the Jews” were behind September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, globalization, and just about everything that he might label “pernicious” in the course of our conversation. “Jews are like that,” he said.

Since Tariq had said that he was pleased by September 11th and “admired” Al Qaeda, I asked him if he could see himself engaging in such acts. After all, he’d said that the Muslim Brotherhood was “far too moderate” for him, and he hadn’t said a contrary word about the use of violence. “We are all capable of acts like this,” he admitted. “It depends on how far you are pushed. I’m a firm believer in the concept of belligerent reprisal.”

By now, we have become accustomed to calm young men assessing the wisdom of crashing planes into office towers or setting off bombs in a crowded train station. What was more disconcerting was Tariq’s confidence, his serene sense that the United States had faltered, that it had lost its influence in Cairo as well as in Baghdad, and that the future was his. “A clash of civilizations,” he said, “is a war that the West cannot win.”