Anna dibattista john o neill

HISTORY

The Looming Tower

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T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R "What a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. The Looming Tower is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve. [It's] a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today . . . Wright has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri. . . and all the rest of them. They come alive . . . The portrait of John O'Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I, agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. The Looming-Tower is, a thriller. And it's a tragedy, too."

—Dexter Filkins, Cover, The New York Times Book Review

"A towering achievement. One of the best and more important books of recent years. Lawrence Wright has dug deep into and written well a story every American should know. A masterful combination of reporting and writing." —Dan Rather

"A searing view of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective . . . A narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the pub- lic and the private were often inextricably intertwined."

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Lawrence Wright's integrity and diligence as a reporter shine through every page of this riveting narrative." —Robert A. Caro

CURRENT A F F A I R S / ISBN 0 - 3 7 5 - 4 K 8 6 - X HISTORY

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A SWEEPING NARRATIVE HISTORY of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the peo- ple and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.

As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the cross- currents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organiza- tion capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despair- ing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda com- pounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high- wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life—he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence—and the nitty-gritty of turf bat- tles among U.S. intelligence agencies.

Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a gal-

vanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at Septem- ber i i , 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing ter- rorist threat.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT graduated from Tulane Uni- versity and spent two years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law. The author of five works of nonfiction— City Children, Country Summer; In the New World; Saints and Sinners; Remembering Satan; and Twins— he has also written a novel, God's Favorite, and was cowriter of the movie The Siege. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.

Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan and Saints and Sinners are available in Vintage paperback.

With 16 pages of photographs and 1 map in text

jacket photograph: Osama bin Laden and His Sixteen al-Qaeda Members, © Reuters/Corbis

Jacket design by Chip Kidd

> ~ < Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York

www.aaknopf.com 8/2006

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THE LOOMING

TOWER

A L S O BY L A W R E N C E W R I G H T

God's Favorite

Twins

Remembering Satan

Saints and Sinners

In the New World

City Children, Country Summer

THE LOOMING

TOWER Al-Qaeda and the

Road to 9/11

Lawrence Wright

Alfred A. Knopf ^ ^ New York 2006

THIS IS A B O R Z O I B O O K

P U B L I S H E D BY A L F R E D A. K N O P F

Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Wright

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in

Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Constable & Robinson Ltd. and Michal Snunit for permission to reprint an excerpt from

The Soul Bird by Michal Snunit. Reprinted by permission.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Lawrence, [date]

The looming tower : Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 / by Lawrence Wright.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-375-41486-x

1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. 2. Qaida (Organization) 3. Terrorism—Government policy—United States.

4. Intelligence service—United States. I. Title.

HV6432.7.W75 2005 973.931—dc22 2006041032

Manufactured in the United States of America Published August 8, 2006

Reprinted Three Times Fifth Printing, August 2006

http://www.aaknopf.com
This is for my family,

Roberta, Caroline, Gordon & Karen

CONTENTS

Prologue

i. The Martyr

2. The Sporting Club

3. The Founder

4. Change

5. The Miracles

6. The Base

7. Return of the Hero

8. Paradise

9. The Silicon Valley

10. Paradise Lost

11. The Prince of Darkness

12. The Boy Spies

13. Hijira

14. Going Operational

15. Bread and Water

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32

60

84

99

121

145

163

176

187

202

213

224

237

245

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18.

19.

20.

"Now It Begins"

The New Millennium

Boom

The Big Wedding

Revelations

Principal Characters

Notes

Bibliography

Author Interviews

Acknowledgments and Notes on Sources

Index

262

287

301

333

362

375

385

429

439

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Sayyid Qutb, the educator and writer whose book Milestones ignited the radical Islamist move- ment, is shown here displaying one of his books (probably Social Justice in Islam) to the president of Col- orado State College of Education, Dr. William Ross.

Greeley, Colorado, from the air in the 1940s. "The small city of Greeley, in which I am staying, is so beautiful that one may easily imagine that he is in paradise," Qutb wrote. But he also saw the darker side of America.

Qutb on trial, circa 1965. He was hanged in 1966. "Thank God," he said when his death sentence was pronounced. "I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom."

/*£££%.

Zawahiri as a schoolboy, right, and as a medical student at Cairo University, below

Ayman al-Zawahiri grew up in Maadi, a middle-class suburb of Cairo. A solitary child, his class- mates regarded him as a genius. He is shown in his childhood in a Cairo park.

Opposite bottom: Ayman al-Zawahiri was defendant number 113 of the 302 who were charged with aiding or planning the October 1981 assassina- tion of Anwar al-Sadat. He became spokesperson for the defendants because of his superior English. He is shown here delivering his lecture to the world press in December 1982. Many blame the torture of prisoners in the Egyptian prisons for the savagery of the Islamist movement. "They kicked us, they beat us, they whipped us with electric cables! They shocked us with electricity! And they used the wild dogs!"

The defendants on trial

Left: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, "the blind sheikh," was one of the defendants. He was the emir of the Islamic Group at the time.

Left: Mohammed bin Laden came to Saudi Arabia in 1931 as a penniless Yemeni laborer and rose to become the king's favorite contractor and the man who built much of the infrastructure of the modern Kingdom. He gestures here to Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz during a tour of the renovation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, circa 1950.

Right: Mohammed bin Laden and King Faisal. During the construction of the road to Taif, King Faisal would often come to examine the progress and ask about cost overruns. When the road was completed, the Kingdom was finally united and Mohammed bin Laden became a national hero.

*+

Left: The renovation of the Grand Mosque took twenty years. During the hajj it can accommodate a million worshippers at once.

Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's college friend and later his brother-in-law, moved into bin Laden's house with his first wife. Their friendship broke apart over the issue of creating an all-Arab legion in Afghanistan, which was the predecessor of al-Qaeda.

Osama moved to this house in Jeddah with his mother after Mohammed bin Laden divorced her.

Osama bin Laden's second house in Jeddah, a four-unit apartment build- ing, which he acquired after he became a polygamist

Opposite, bottom: Juhayman al-Oteibi, the leader of the attack on the mosque in 1979, a turning point in the history of Saudi Arabia. The demands of the insurgents foreshadowed bin Laden's agenda. When Oteibi begged for forgiveness after his capture, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, told him, "Ask forgiveness of God!"

Abdullah Azzam, who issued a fatwa in 1984 that called upon Muslims everywhere to "join the cara- van" of the Afghan jihad. He and bin Laden set up the Services Bureau in Peshawar to facilitate the movement of Arabs into the war.

Bin Laden in a cave in Jalalabad in 1988, at about the time that he began al-Qaeda

Below: Azzam in the Panjshir Valley in 1988, where he traveled to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the greatest of the Afghan commanders in the war against the Soviet invasion. Massoud sits next to Azzam with his arm around Azzam's son Ibrahim. Shortly after this visit Azzam and two of his sons, including Ibrahim, were assassi- nated in a bombing that has never been solved.

General Hamid Gui, who ran the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence during the Afghan jihad. The United States and Saudi Arabia tunneled hundreds of millions of dollars through the ISI, which was largely responsible for creating the Taliban when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.

Right: Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence, held the file on Afghanistan and worked with bin Laden. Later he negotiated with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, but came away empty- handed.

Prince Turki after the Soviet occupation, negotiating among the warring mujahideen. He is on the far left, next to Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of Ahmed Shah Massoud's political party. Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sherif sits on the right.

The World Trade Center as seen from New Jersey/where the followers of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman plotted to bring it down

Ramzi Yousef was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing. It was his dark imagination that gave shape to al-Qaeda's ambitious agenda.

Hasan al-Turabi, the loquacious and provocative ideologue who organized the Islamist coup in Sudan and courted bin Laden to invest in the country. "Bin Laden hated Turabi," a friend confided. "He thought he was a Machiavelli." Bin Laden came to Sudan a wealthy man; he left with little more than his wardrobe.

While bin Laden was in Sudan, the king of Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden's citizenship and sent an emissary to collect his passport. Bin Laden threw it at the man. "Take it, if having it dictates anything on my behalf!"

In the mornings, bin Laden walked to the mosque, followed by acolytes, and would linger to study with holy men, often breakfasting with them before going to his office.

Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996. He habitually carried the Kalikov AK-74 that had been awarded to him in the jihad against the Soviets.

Opposite, top: Zawahiri and bin Laden holding a press conference in Afghanistan in May 1998. In Afghanistan, the destinies of bin Laden and Zawahiri became irrevocably intertwined, and eventually their terrorist organi- zations, al-Qaeda and al-Jihad, merged into one.

Taliban fighters headed to the front to fight against the Northern Alliance in 2001. The Taliban arose out of the chaos of mujahideen rule in 1994 and swiftly moved to consolidate their control of Afghanistan. At first, bin Laden and his followers had no idea who they were— there were rumors that they were communists.

The Dar-ul-Aman Palace, Kabul. The palace was caught between the lines during the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. After twenty-five years of continuous warfare, much of Afghanistan was left in ruins.

Above: The ruins of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, which was bombed on August 7,1998— al-Qaeda's first documented ter- rorist strike. The attack killed 213 people and injured thousands. More than 150 people were blinded by flying glass.

Right: The American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was bombed nine minutes later, killing 11 and wounding 85.

Left: The Clinton administration responded by destroying several al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, pictured here. A night watchman was killed in the plant, which later proved to have nothing to do with producing chemical or biological weapons.

The USS Cole after a suicide attack by two al-Qaeda operatives in a fishing skiff in October 2000. The attack nearly sank one of the most invulnerable ships in the U.S. Navy. Seventeen sailors died. "The destroyer represented the capital of the West," said bin Laden, "and the small boat represented Mohammed."

Michael Scheuer, who created Alec Station, the CIA's virtual Osama bin Laden station. He and the FBI's John O'Neill were bitter rivals.

Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar in the White House, proposed that O'Neill succeed him in his job—an offer that may have led to his downfall.

Valerie James saw John O'Neill in a bar in Chicago in 1991 and bought him a drink because "he had the most compelling eyes." O'Neill was married at the time, a fact he failed to reveal to the many women he courted.

While he was dating Valerie in Chicago, O'Neill asked for an "exclusive relationship" with Mary Lynn Stevens in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, O'Neill also became involved with Anna DiBattista. "That guy is never going to marry you," her priest warned her.

John O'Neill said good-bye to Daniel Coleman and his FBI teammates at a farewell coffee on the occasion of his retirement from the bureau on August 22, 2001. The next day he started work at the World Trade Center.

Above: After gaining the names of the hijackers from al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen, Ali Soufan (left, with Special Agent George Crouch) traveled to Afghani- stan. Here he stands in the ruins of what was bin Laden's hideout in Kabul.

O'Neill's funeral was the catastrophe of coincidence that he had always dreaded. Here his mother, Dorothy, and his wife, Christine, leave St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church in Atlantic City. They were among a thousand mourners.

The ruins of the World Trade Center burned for a hundred days. John O'Neill's body was found ten days after the 9/11 attack.

THE LOOMING

TOWER

Prologue

ON SAINT PATRICK'S DAY, Daniel Coleman, an agent in the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation handling foreign intelligence cases, drove down to Tysons Corner, Virginia, to report for a new posting. The sidewalks were still buried under gray banks of snow from the blizzard of 1996 a few weeks before. Coleman entered an undistinguished government office tower called the Gloucester Building and got off the elevator at the fifth floor. This was Alec Station.

Other stations of the Central Intelligence Agency are located in the various countries that they cover; Alec was the first "virtual" station, situated only a few miles from the headquarters building in Langley. On an organizational chart it was labeled "Terrorist Financial Links/7 a subsection of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, but in practice it was devoted to tracking the activities of a single man, Osama bin Laden, whose name had arisen as the master financier of terror. Coleman first heard of him in 1993, when a foreign source spoke about a "Saudi prince" who was supporting a cell of radical Islamists who were plot- ting to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and even 26 Federal Plaza, the build- ing where Coleman worked. Now, three years later, the bureau had finally found time to send him to look over the intelligence the agency had compiled to see if there was any reason to pursue an investigation.

Alec Station already had thirty-five volumes of material on bin Laden, consisting mostly of transcripts of telephone conversations that had been sucked up by the electronic ears of the National Security Agency. Coleman found the material repetitive and inconclusive. Still, he opened an intelligence case on bin Laden, largely as a placeholder in case the "Islamist financier" turned out to be something more than that.

3

T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R

Like many agents, Dan Coleman had been trained to fight the Cold War. He joined the FBI as a hie clerk in 1973. Scholarly and inquisitive, Coleman was naturally drawn to counterintelligence. In the 1980s, he concentrated on recruiting communist spies in the populous diplo- matic community surrounding the United Nations; an East German attaché was a particular treasure. In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle East- ern terrorism. There was little in his background that prepared him for this new turn—but that was true of the bureau as a whole, which regarded terrorism as a nuisance, not a real threat. It was difficult to believe, in those cloudless days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that America had any real enemies still standing.

Then, in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. "Terroriz- ing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,,, he stated. He presumed to speak on behalf of all Muslims, and even directed some of his lengthy fatwa to U.S. Secre- tary of Defense William Perry personally. "I say to you, William, that: These youths love death as you love life.... These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck-smiting."

Other than Coleman, few in America—even in the bureau—knew or cared about the Saudi dissident. The thirty-five volumes in Alec Sta- tion painted a picture of a messianic billionaire from a sprawling, influential family that was closely connected to the rulers of the King- dom of Saudi Arabia. He had made a name for himself in the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. Coleman had read enough history to understand the references in bin Laden's war cry to the Cru- sades and the early struggles of Islam. Indeed, one of the striking fea- tures of the document was that time seemed to have stopped a thousand years ago. There was now and there was then, but there was nothing in between. It was as if the Crusades were still going on in bin Laden's universe. The intensity of the anger was also difficult for Cole- man to grasp. What did we do to him? he wondered.

Coleman showed the text of bin Laden's fatwa to prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. It was droll, it was weird, but was it a crime? The lawyers puzzled over the language and found a rarely invoked seditious conspiracy statute

4

Prologue

from the Civil War era that forbids instigating violence and attempting to overthrow the U.S. government. It seemed a stretch to think that it might be applied to a stateless Saudi in a cave in Tora Bora, but on the basis of such meager precedent, Coleman opened a criminal hie on the figure who would become the most wanted man in the FBI's history. He was still working entirely alone.

A few months later, in November 1996, Coleman traveled to an American military base in Germany with two U.S. attorneys, Ken- neth Karas and Patrick Fitzgerald. There in a safe house was a jittery Sudanese informer named Jamal al-Fadl, who claimed to have worked for bin Laden in Khartoum. Coleman carried a briefing book with pho- tographs of bin Laden's known associates, and Fadl quickly identified most of them. He was selling a story, but he clearly knew the players. The problem was that he kept lying to the investigators, embroider- ing his tale, depicting himself as a hero who only wanted to do the right thing.

"So why did you leave?" the prosecutors wanted to know. Fadl said that he loved America. He had lived in Brooklyn and he

spoke English. Then he said he had run away so he could write a best- selling book. He was keyed up and had a hard time sitting still. Obvi- ously, he had a lot more to tell. It took several long days to get him to stop confabulating and admit that he had run off with more than $100,000 of bin Laden's money When he did that, he sobbed and sobbed. It was the turning point in the interrogation. Fadl agreed to be a government witness should a trial ever occur, but that seemed unlikely, given the modest charges that the government lawyers were considering.

Then, on his own initiative, Fadl began talking about an organiza- tion called al-Qaeda. It was the first time any of the men in the room had ever heard the term. He described training camps and sleeper cells. He talked about bin Laden's interest in acquiring nuclear and chemical weapons. He said that al-Qaeda had been responsible for a 1992 bombing in Yemen and for training the insurgents who shot down the American helicopters in Somalia that same year. He gave names and drew organizational charts. The investigators were stunned by his story. For two weeks, six or seven hours a day, they went over the details again and again, testing his responses to see if he was consistent. He never varied.

When Coleman got back to the bureau, no one seemed particularly

5

T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R

interested. Fadl's testimony was chilling, they agreed, but how could they corroborate the testimony of a thief and a liar? Besides, there were other more pressing investigations.

For a year and a half, Dan Coleman continued his solitary investi- gation of bin Laden. Because he was posted to Alec Station, the bureau more or less forgot about him. Using wiretaps on bin Laden's busi- nesses, Coleman was able to draw a map of the al-Qaeda network, which extended throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Cen- tral Asia. He was alarmed to realize that many of al-Qaeda's associates had ties to the United States. He concluded this was a worldwide ter- ror organization dedicated to destroying America, but Coleman couldn't even get his superiors to return his phone calls on the matter.

Coleman was left to himself to puzzle out the questions that would later occur to everyone. Where had this movement come from? Why had it chosen to attack America? And what could we do to stop it? He was like a laboratory technician looking at a slide of some previously unseen virus. Under the microscope, al-Qaeda's lethal qualities began to reveal themselves. The group was small—only ninety-three mem- bers at the time—but it was part of a larger radical movement that was sweeping through Islam, particularly in the Arab world. The possibili- ties for contagion were great. The men who made up this group were well trained and battle hardened. They apparently had ample re- sources. Moreover, they were fanatically committed to their cause and convinced that they would be victorious. They were brought together by a philosophy that was so compelling that they would willingly— eagerly—sacrifice their lives for it. In the process they wanted to kill as many people as possible.

The most frightening aspect of this new threat, however, was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primi- tive and exotic. Up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageant of history, the defiant gestures of bin Laden and his followers seemed absurd and even pathetic. And yet al-Qaeda was not a mere artifact of seventh-century Arabia. It had learned to use mod- ern tools and modern ideas, which wasn't surprising, since the story of al-Qaeda had really begun in America, not so long ago.

6

1 The Martyr

IN A FIRST-CLASS STATEROOM on a cruise ship bound for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, a frail, middle-aged writer and educator named Sayyid Qutb experienced a crisis of faith. "Should I go to Amer- ica as any normal student on a scholarship, who only eats and sleeps, or should I be special?" he wondered. "Should I hold on to my Islamic beliefs, facing the many sinful temptations, or should I indulge those temptations all around me?" It was November 1948. The new world loomed over the horizon, victorious, rich, and free. Behind him was Egypt, in rags and tears. The traveler had never been out of his native country. Nor had he willingly left now.

The stern bachelor was slight and dark, with a high, sloping fore- head and a paintbrush moustache somewhat narrower than the width of his nose. His eyes betrayed an imperious and easily slighted nature. He always evoked an air of formality, favoring dark three-piece suits despite the searing Egyptian sun. For a man who held his dignity so close, the prospect of returning to the classroom at the age of forty-two may have seemed demeaning. And yet, as a child from a mud-walled village in Upper Egypt, he had already surpassed the modest goal he had set for himself of becoming a respectable member of the civil ser- vice. His literary and social criticism had made him one of his coun- try's most popular writers. It had also earned the fury of King Farouk, Egypt's dissolute monarch, who had signed an order for his arrest. Powerful and sympathetic friends hastily arranged his departure.

At the time, Qutb (his name is pronounced kuh-tub) held a comfort- able post as a supervisor in the Ministry of Education. Politically, he was a fervent Egyptian nationalist and anti-communist, a stance that placed him in the mainstream of the vast bureaucratic middle class.

7

T H E L O O M I N G T O W E R

The ideas that would give birth to what would be called Islamic funda- mentalism were not yet completely formed in his mind; indeed, he would later say that he was not even a very religious man before he began this journey, although he had memorized the Quran by the age of ten, and his writing had recently taken a turn toward more conser- vative themes. Like many of his compatriots, he was radicalized by the British occupation and contemptuous of the jaded King Farouk's com- plicity. Egypt was racked by anti-British protests and seditious politi- cal factions bent on running the foreign troops out of the country—and perhaps the king as well. What made this unimposing, midlevel gov- ernment clerk particularly dangerous was his blunt and potent com- mentary. He had never gotten to the front rank of the contemporary Arab literary scene, a fact that galled him throughout his career; and yet from the government's point of view, he was becoming an annoy- ingly important enemy.

He was Western in so many ways—his dress, his love of classical music and Hollywood movies. He had read, in translation, the works of Darwin and Einstein, Byron and Shelley, and had immersed himself in French literature, especially Victor Hugo. Even before his journey, however, he worried about the advance of an all-engulfing Western civilization. Despite his erudition, he saw the West as a single cultural entity. The distinctions between capitalism and Marxism, Christianity and Judaism, fascism and democracy were insignificant by compari- son with the single great divide in Qutb's mind: Islam and the East on the one side, and the Christian West on the other.

America, however, stood apart from the colonialist adventures that had characterized Europe's relations with the Arab world. At the end of the Second World War, America straddled the political chasm between the colonizers and the colonized. Indeed, it was tempting to imagine America as the anticolonial paragon: a subjugated nation that had bro- ken free and triumphantly outstripped its former masters. The coun- try's power seemed to lie in its values, not in European notions of cultural superiority or privileged races and classes. And because Amer- ica advertised itself as an immigrant nation, it had a permeable rela- tionship with the rest of the world. Arabs, like most other peoples, had established their own colonies inside America, and the ropes of kinship drew them closer to the ideals that the country claimed to stand for.

And so, Qutb, like many Arabs, felt shocked and betrayed by the support that the U.S. government had given to the Zionist cause after

8

The Martyr

the war. Even as Qutb was sailing out of Alexandria's harbor, Egypt, along with five other Arab armies, was in the final stages of losing the war that established Israel as a Jewish state within the Arab world. The Arabs were stunned, not only by the determination and skill of the Israeli fighters but by the incompetence of their own troops and the disastrous decisions of their leaders. The shame of that experience would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any other event in modern history. "I hate those Westerners and despise them!" Qutb wrote after President Harry Truman endorsed the trans- fer of a hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine. "All of them, without any exception: the English, the French, the Dutch, and finally the Americans, who have been trusted by many."

THE MAN IN THE STATEROOM had known romantic love, but mainly the pain of it. He had written a thinly disguised account of a failed relationship in a novel; after that, he turned his back on mar- riage. He said that he had been unable to find a suitable bride from the "dishonorable" women who allowed themselves to be seen in public, a stance that left him alone and unconsoled in middle age. He still enjoyed women—he was close to his three sisters—but sexuality threatened him, and he had withdrawn into a shell of disapproval, see- ing sex as the main enemy of salvation.

The dearest relationship he had ever enjoyed was that with his mother, Fatima, an illiterate but pious woman, who had sent her preco- cious son to Cairo to study. His father died in 1933, when Qutb was twenty-seven. For the next three years he taught in various provincial posts until he was transferred to Helwan, a prosperous suburb of Cairo, and he brought the rest of his family to live with him there. His intensely conservative mother never entirely settled in; she was always on guard against the creeping foreign influences that were far more apparent in Helwan than in the little village she came from. These influences must have been evident in her sophisticated son as well.

As he prayed in his stateroom, Sayyid Qutb was still uncertain of his own identity. Should he be "normal" or "special"? Should he resist temptations or indulge them? Should he hang on tightly to his Islamic beliefs or cast them aside for the materialism and sinfulness of the West? Like all pilgrims, he was making two journeys: one outward, into the larger world, and another inward, into his own soul. "I have

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decided to be a true Muslim! " he resolved. But almost immediately he second-guessed himself. "Am I being truthful or was that just a whim?"

His deliberations were interrupted by a knock on the door. Stand- ing outside his stateroom was a young girl, whom he described as thin and tall and "half-naked." She asked him in English, "Is it okay for me to be your guest tonight?"

Qutb responded that his room was equipped with only one bed. "A single bed can hold two people," she said. Appalled, he closed the door in her face. "I heard her fall on the

wooden floor outside and realized that she was drunk," he recalled. "I instantly thanked God for defeating my temptation and allowing me to stick to my morals."

This is the man, then—decent, proud, tormented, self-righteous— whose lonely genius would unsettle Islam, threaten regimes across the Muslim world, and beckon to a generation of rootless young Arabs who were looking for meaning and purpose in their lives and would find it in jihad.

QUTB ARRIVED in New York Harbor in the middle of the most pros- perous holiday season the country had ever known. In the postwar boom, everybody was making money—Idaho potato farmers, Detroit automakers, Wall Street bankers—and all this wealth spurred confi- dence in the capitalist model, which had been so brutally tested during the recent Depression. Unemployment seemed practically un- American; officially, the rate of joblessness was under 4 percent, and practically speaking, anyone who wanted a job could get one. Half of the world's total wealth was now in American hands.

The contrast with Cairo must have been especially bitter as Qutb wandered through the New York City streets, festively lit with holiday lights, the luxurious shop windows laden with appliances that he had only heard about—television sets, washing machines—technological miracles spilling out of every department store in stupefying abun- dance. Brand-new office towers and apartments were shouldering into the gaps in the Manhattan skyline between the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Downtown and in the outer boroughs, vast projects were under way to house the immigrant masses.

It was fitting, in such a buoyant and confident environment, unprecedented in its mix of cultures, that the visible symbol of a

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changed world order was arising: the new United Nations complex overlooking the East River. The United Nations was the most powerful expression of the determined internationalism that was the legacy of the war, and yet the city itself already embodied the dreams of univer- sal harmony far more powerfully than did any single idea or institu- tion. The world was pouring into New York because that was where the power was, and the money, and the transforming cultural energy. Nearly a million Russians were in the city, half a million Irish, and an equal number of Germans—not to mention the Puerto Ricans, the Dominicans, the Poles, and the largely uncounted and often illegal Chinese laborers who had also found refuge in the welcoming city. The black population of the city had grown by 50 percent in only eight years, to 700,000, and they were refugees as well, from the racism of the American South. Fully a fourth of the 8 million New Yorkers were Jewish, many of whom had fled the latest European catastrophe. Hebrew letters covered the signs for the shops and factories on the Lower East Side, and Yiddish was commonly heard on the streets. That would have been a challenge for the middle-aged Egyptian who hated the Jews but, until he left his country, had never met one. For many New Yorkers, perhaps for most of them, political and economic oppression was a part of their heritage, and the city had given them sanctuary, a place to earn a living, to raise a family, to begin again. Because of that, the great emotion that fueled the exuberant city was hopefulness, whereas Cairo was one of the capitals of despair.

At the same time, New York was miserable—overfull, grouchy, competitive, frivolous, picketed with No Vacancy signs. Snoring alco- holics blocked the doorways. Pimps and pickpockets prowled the midtown squares in the ghoulish neon glow of burlesque houses. In the Bowery, flophouses offered cots for twenty cents a night. The gloomy side streets were crisscrossed with clotheslines. Gangs of snarling delinquents roamed the margins like wild dogs. For a man whose English was rudimentary, the city posed unfamiliar hazards, and Qutb's natural reticence made communication all the more diffi- cult. He was desperately homesick. "Here in this strange place, this huge workshop they call 'the new world/ I feel as though my spirit, thoughts, and body live in loneliness," he wrote to a friend in Cairo. "What I need most here is someone to talk to," he wrote another friend, "to talk about topics other than dollars, movie stars, brands of cars—a real conversation on the issues of man, philosophy, and soul."

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Two days after Qutb arrived in America, he and an Egyptian acquaintance checked into a hotel. "The black elevator operator liked us because we were closer to his color/' Qutb reported. The operator offered to help the travelers find "entertainment. " "He mentioned examples of this 'entertainment/ which included perversions. He also told us what happens in some of these rooms, which may have pairs of boys or girls. They asked him to bring them some bottles of Coca-Cola, and didn't even change their positions when he entered! 'Don't they feel ashamed?' we asked. He was surprised. 'Why? They are just enjoying themselves, satisfying their particular desires.' "

This experience, among many others, confirmed Qutb's view that sexual mixing led inevitably to perversion. America itself had just been shaken by a lengthy scholarly report titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at the University of Indiana. Their eight-hundred-page treatise, filled with startling statistics and droll commentary, shattered the country's leftover Victorian prudish- ness like a brick through a stained-glass window. Kinsey reported that 37 percent of the American men he sampled had experienced homosex- ual activity to the point of orgasm, nearly half had engaged in extra- marital sex, and 69 percent had paid for sex with prostitutes. The mirror that Kinsey held up to America showed a country that was frantically lustful but also confused, ashamed, incompetent, and astoundingly ignorant. Despite the evidence of the diversity and frequency of sexual activity, this was a time in America when sexual matters were practi- cally never discussed, not even by doctors. One Kinsey researcher interviewed a thousand childless American couples who had no idea why they failed to conceive, even though the wives were virgins.

Qutb was familiar with the Kinsey Report, and referenced it in his later writings to illustrate his view of Americans as little different from beasts—"a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money." A staggering rate of divorce was to be expected in such a society, since "Every time a husband or wife notices a new sparkling personality, they lunge for it as if it were a new fashion in the world of desires." The turbulent overtones of his own internal struggles can be heard in his diatribe: "A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless. "

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THE END OF THE WORLD war had brought America victory but not security. Many Americans felt that they had defeated one totalitarian enemy only to encounter another far stronger and more insidious than European fascism. "Communism is creeping inexorably into these destitute lands/7 the young evangelist Billy Graham warned, "into war-torn China, into restless South America, and unless the Christian religion rescues these nations from the clutch of the unbelieving, America will stand alone and isolated in the world."

The fight against communism was being waged inside America as well. J. Edgar Hoover, the Machiavellian head of the FBI, claimed that one of every 1,814 people in America was a communist. Under his supervision, the bureau began to devote itself almost entirely to uncovering evidence of subversion. When Qutb arrived in New York, the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun hearing testimony from a Time magazine senior editor named Whittaker Chambers. Chambers testified that he had been part of a communist cell headed by Alger Hiss, a former Truman administration official, who was one of the organizers of the United Nations and was then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The country was riveted by the hearings, which gave substance to the fears that communists were lurking in the cities and the suburbs, in sleeper cells. "They are everywhere," U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark asserted, "in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in pri- vate businesses—and each carries with him the germs of death for society." America felt itself to be in danger of losing not only its politi- cal system but also its religious heritage. "Godlessness" was an essen- tial feature of the communist menace, and the country reacted viscerally to the sense that Christianity was under attack. "Either Communism must die, or Christianity must die, because it is actually a battle between Christ and the anti-Christ," Billy Graham would write a few years later—a sentiment that was very much a part of the main- stream Christian American consensus at the time.

Qutb took note of the obsession that was beginning to dominate American politics. He was himself a resolute anti-communist for sim- ilar reasons; indeed, the communists were far more active and influ- ential in Egypt than in America. "Either we shall walk the path of Islam or we shall walk the path of Communism," Qutb wrote the year

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before he came to America, anticipating the same stark formulation as Billy Graham. At the same time, he saw in the party of Lenin a tem- plate for the Islamic politics of the future—the politics that he would invent.

In Qutb's passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied. He predicted that once the average worker lost his dreamy expectations of becoming rich, America would inevitably turn toward communism. Christianity would be powerless to block this trend because it exists only in the realm of the spirit—"like a vision in a pure ideal world." Islam, on the other hand, is "a complete system" with laws, social codes, economic rules, and its own method of government. Only Islam offered a formula for creating a just and godly society. Thus the real struggle would even- tually show itself: It was not a battle between capitalism and commu- nism; it was between Islam and materialism. And inevitably Islam would prevail.

No doubt the clash between Islam and the West was remote in the minds of most New Yorkers during the holiday season of 1948. But, despite the new wealth that was flooding into the city, and the self- confidence that victory naturally brought, there was a generalized sense of anxiety about the future. "The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible," the essayist E. B. White had observed that summer. "A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the mil- lions." White was writing at the dawn of the nuclear age, and the feel- ing of vulnerability was quite new. "In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning," he observed, "New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

SOON AFTER THE NEW YEAR BEGAN, Qutb moved to Washington, where he studied English at Wilson Teachers College.* "Life in Wash- ington is good," he admitted in one letter, "especially as I live in close proximity to the library and my friends." He enjoyed a generous

*Wilson Teachers College merged with three other schools to form the Univer- sity of the District of Columbia in 1977.

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stipend from the Egyptian government. "A regular student can live well on $180 a month," he wrote. "I, however, spend between $250 and $280 monthly."

Although Qutb came from a little village in Upper Egypt, it was in America that he found "a primitiveness that reminds us of the ages of jungles and caves." Social gatherings were full of superficial chatter. Though people filled the museums and symphonies, they were there not to see or hear but rather out of a frantic, narcissistic need to be seen and heard. The Americans were altogether too informal, Qutb con- cluded. "I'm here at a restaurant," he wrote a friend in Cairo, "and in front of me is this young American. On his shirt, instead of a necktie, there is a picture of an orange hyena, and on his back, instead of a vest, there is a charcoal picture of an elephant. This is the American taste in colors. And music! Let's leave that till later." The food, he complained, "is also weird." He reports an incident at a college cafeteria when he saw an American woman putting salt on a melon. He slyly told her that Egyptians preferred pepper. "She tried it, and said it was deli- cious!" he wrote. "The next day, I told her that some Egyptians use sugar on their melons instead, and she found that tasty as well." He even grouched about the haircuts: "Whenever I go to a barber I return home and redo my hair with my own hands."

In February 1949 Qutb checked into the George Washington Univer- sity Hospital to have his tonsils removed. There, a nurse scandalized him by itemizing the qualities she sought in a lover. He was already on guard against the forward behavior of the American woman, "who knows full well the beauties of her body, her face, her exciting eyes, her full lips, her bulging breasts, her full buttocks and her smooth legs. She wears bright colors that awaken the primitive sexual instincts, hiding nothing, but adding to that the thrilling laugh and the bold look." One can imagine what an irresistible object of sexual teasing he must have been.

News came of the assassination of Hasan al-Banna, the Supreme Guide of the Society of the Muslim Brothers, on February 12, in Cairo. Qutb relates that there was a hubbub in the street outside his hospital window. He inquired about the reason for the festivities. "Today the enemy of Christianity in the East was killed," he says the doctors told him. "Today, Hasan al-Banna was murdered." It is difficult to credit that Americans, in 1949, were sufficiently invested in Egyptian politics to rejoice at the news of Banna's death. The New York Times did report

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his murder. "Sheikh Hasan's followers were fanatically devoted to him, and many of them proclaimed that he alone would be able to save the Arab and Islamic worlds/' the paper noted. But for Qutb, lying in his hospital bed in a strange and distant country, the news came as a profound shock. Although they had never met, Qutb and Banna had known each other by reputation. They had been born within days of each other, in October 1906, and attended the same school, Dar al-Ulum, a teacher-training school in Cairo, although at different times. Like Qutb, Banna was precocious and charismatic, but he was also a man of action. He founded the Muslim Brothers in 1928, with the goal of turn- ing Egypt into an Islamic state. Within a few years, the Brothers had spread across the country, and then throughout the Arab world, plant- ing the seeds of the coming Islamic insurgence.

Banna's voice was stilled just as Qutb's book Social Justice in Islam was being published—the book that would make his reputation as an important Islamic thinker. Qutb had held himself pointedly apart from the organization that Banna created, even though he inclined to similar views about the political uses of Islam; the death of his contemporary and intellectual rival, however, cleared the way for his conversion to the Muslim Brothers. This was a turning point, both in Qutb's life and in the destiny of the organization. But at this pregnant moment, the heir apparent to the leadership of the Islamic revival was alone, ill, unrecognized, and very far from home.

As it happened, Qutb's presence in Washington was not completely overlooked. One evening he was entertained in the home of James Heyworth-Dunne, a British Orientalist and a convert to Islam, who spoke to Qutb about the danger of the Muslim Brothers, which he said was blocking the modernization of Muslim world. "If the Brothers suc- ceed in coming to power, Egypt will never progress and will stand as an obstacle to civilization," he reportedly told Qutb. Then he offered to translate Qutb's new book into English and pay him a fee of ten thou- sand dollars, a fantastic sum for such an obscure book. Qutb refused. He later speculated that Heyworth-Dunne was attempting to recruit him to the CIA. In any case, he said, "I decided to enter the Brother- hood even before I left the house."

GREELEY, COLORADO, was a flourishing agricultural community northeast of Denver when the recuperating Qutb arrived in the sum-

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mer of 1949 to attend classes at the Colorado State College of Educa- tion.* At the time, the college enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most progressive teaching institutions in America. Summer courses were always swollen with teachers from around the country who came to take advanced degrees and enjoy the cool weather and the splendid mountains nearby. In the evenings, there were symphonies, lectures, Chautauqua programs, and outdoor theatrical presentations on the leafy commons of the college. The college set up circus tents to house the spillover classes.

Qutb spent six months in Greeley, the longest period he stayed in any one American town. Greeley offered an extreme contrast to his dis- agreeable experiences in the fast-paced cities of New York and Wash- ington. Indeed, there were few places in the country that should have seemed more congenial to Qutb's sharpened moral sensibilities. Gree- ley had been founded in 1870 as a temperance colony by Nathan Meeker, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune. Meeker had formerly lived in southern Illinois, near Cairo, above the convergence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, in the "Little Egypt" portion of that state. He had come to believe that the greatest civilizations were founded in river valleys, and so he established his colony in the rich delta between the Cache la Poudre and the South Platte rivers. Through irrigation, Meeker hoped to transform the "Great American Desert" into an agricultural paradise—just as Egyptians had done since the beginning of civilization. Meeker's editor at the Tribune, Horace Greeley, vigorously supported the idea, and his namesake city soon became one of the most highly publicized planned communities in the nation.

Greeley's early settlers were not youthful pioneers; they were mid- dle class and middle-aged. They traveled by train, not by wagon or stagecoach, and they brought their values and their standards with them. They intended to establish a community that would serve as a model for the cities of the future, one that drew upon the mandatory virtues required of every settler: industry, moral rectitude, and tem- perance. Surely, on such a foundation, a purified and prosperous civi- lization would emerge. Indeed, by the time Sayyid Qutb stepped off the train, Greeley was the most substantial settlement between Denver and Cheyenne.

*Now the University of Northern Colorado.

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Family life was the center of Greeley society; there were no bars or liquor stores, and there seemed to be a church on every corner. The col- lege boasted one of the finest music departments in the country, with frequent concerts that the music-loving Qutb must have enjoyed. In the evenings, illustrious educators spoke at the lyceum. James Mich- ener, who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Tales of the South Pacific, returned to teach a writing workshop at the school where he had studied and taught from 1936 to 1941. At last Qutb had stum- bled into a community that exalted the same pursuits that he held so dear: education, music, art, literature, and religion. "The small city of Greeley that I now reside in is beautiful, beautiful, " he wrote soon after he arrived. "Every house is like a flowering plant and the streets are like garden pathways. One observes the owners of these homes toiling away in their leisure time, watering their yards and manicuring their gardens. This is all they appear to do/7 The frantic pace of life that Qutb objected to in New York was far away. There was a front-page article in the Greeley Tribune that summer chronicling a turtle's success- ful crossing of a downtown street.

And yet even in Greeley there were disturbing currents under the surface, which Qutb soon detected. A mile south of campus there was a small community of saloons and liquor stores named Garden City. Here the teetotalers of Greeley held no sway. The town got its name during the Prohibition era, when local rumrunners hid bottles of liquor inside watermelons, which they sold to students at the college. Whenever there was a party, the students would visit "the garden" to stock up on supplies. Qutb would have been struck by the disparity between Greeley's sober face and the demimonde of Garden City. Indeed, the downfall of America's temperance movement earned Qutb's disdain because he believed that the country had failed to make a spiritual commitment to sobriety, which only an all-encompassing system such as Islam could hope to enforce.

America made him sharply aware of himself as a man of color. In one of the cities he visited (he doesn't say where) he witnessed a black man being beaten by a white mob: "They were kicking him with their shoes until his blood and flesh mixed in the public road." One can imagine how threatened this dark-skinned traveler must have felt. Even the liberal settlement of Greeley was on edge because of racial fears. There were very few black families in the town. Most of the Ute Indian population had been run out of the state after a battle that left

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The Martyr

fourteen cavalrymen dead and Nathan Meeker, the founder of Greeley, without his scalp. In the twenties, Mexican labor was brought in to work in the fields and slaughterhouses. Although the signs forbidding Mexicans to remain in town after dark had been taken down, the Catholic church still had a separate entrance for nonwhites, who were supposed to sit upstairs. In the handsome park behind the courthouse, Anglos kept to the south side and Hispanics to the north.

The international students at the college occupied an uneasy place in this charged racial environment. Students from Africa, Latin Amer- ica, and Asia, as well as a number of Hawaiians, formed the core of the International Club, which Qutb joined. The college also hosted a small Middle Eastern community, including recent Palestinian refugees and several members of the Iraqi royal family. For the most part, they were well treated by the citizens of Greeley, who often invited them into their homes for meals and holidays. Once, Qutb and several friends were turned away from a movie theater because the owner thought they were black. "But we're Egyptians," one of the group explained. The owner apologized and offered to let them in, but Qutb refused, galled by the fact that black Egyptians could be admitted but black Americans could not.

Despite the tensions of the town, the college maintained a progres- sive attitude toward race. During the summer sessions students from the Negro teachers colleges of the South came to Greeley in abun- dance, but there were only a couple of black students during the regular school year. One of them was Jaime McClendon, the school's star football player, who was a member of the International Club and roomed with one of the Palestinians. Because the barbers in Greeley refused to serve him, he had to drive to Denver every month to get his hair cut. Finally, several of the Arab students escorted him to the local barbershop and refused to leave until McClendon was served. Qutb would later write that "racism had brought America down from the summit to the foot of the mountain—taking the rest of humanity down with it."

The 1949 football season was a dismal one for the Colorado State College of Education. McClendon sat out the season with an injury, and the team lost every game, including a memorable defeat (103-0) to the University of Wyoming. The spectacle of American football simply confirmed Qutb's view of its primitiveness. "The foot does not play any role in the game," he reported. "Instead, each player attempts to

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take the ball in his hands, run with it or throw it to the goal, while the players on the other team hinder him by any means, including kicking in the stomach, or violently breaking his arms or legs . . . . Meantime, the fans cry out, 'Break his neck! Crack his head!' "

It was the women, however, who posed the real threat to this lonely Egyptian bachelor. Far more than most settlements in the American West, Greeley expressed a powerfully feminine aesthetic. The city had not been settled by miners or trappers or railroad workers who lived in a world largely without women; from the beginning, Greeley had been populated by well-educated families. The female influence was evident in the cozy houses with their ample front porches, the convenient and well-ordered shops, the handsome public schools, the low-slung architecture, and the comparatively liberal political climate, but nowhere was it more powerfully expressed than in the college itself. Forty-two percent of the 2,135 students enrolled during the fall semester were women, at a time when the national average of female enrollment was about 30 percent. There were no departments of business or engineering; instead, three great schools dominated the college: education, music, and theater. City girls from Denver and Phoenix, country girls from the farms and ranches of the plains, and girls from the little mountain towns—all of them were drawn to the college because of its national reputation and the sense of entitlement that women were awarded on its campus. Here, among the yellow- brick buildings that embraced the great commons, the girls of the West could sample the freedom that most American women would not fully enjoy for decades to come.

In this remote Western town, Sayyid Qutb had moved ahead of his time. He was experiencing women who were living beyond most of their contemporaries in terms of their assumptions about themselves and their place in society—and consequently in their relations with men. "The issue of sexual relationships is simply biological," one of the college women explained to Qutb. "You Orientals complicate this simple matter by introducing a moral element to it. The stallion and the mare, the bull and the cow, the ram and the ewe, the rooster and the hen—none of them consider moral consequences when they have intercourse. And therefore life goes on, simple, easy and carefree." The fact that the woman was a teacher made this statement all the more subversive, in Qutb's opinion, since she would be polluting genera- tions of young people with her amoral philosophy.

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The Martyr

Qutb began his studies in the summer, auditing a course in elemen- tary English composition. By fall, he was sufficiently confident of his English to attempt three graduate courses in education and a course in elocution. He was determined to master the language, since he har- bored the secret goal of writing a book in English. One can appreciate the level of his achievement by examining an odd and rather disturb- ing essay he wrote, titled "The World Is an Undutiful Boy!", which appeared in the student literary magazine, Fulcrum, in the fall of 1949, only a year after he arrived in America. "There was an ancient legend in Egypt," he wrote. "When the god of wisdom and knowledge cre- ated History, he gave him a great writing book and a big pen, and said to him, 'Go walking on this earth, and write notes about everything you see or hear.' History did as the god suggested. He came upon a wise and beautiful woman who was gently teaching a young boy:

History looked at her with great astonishment and cried, "Who is it?" raising his face to the sky.

"She is Egypt," his god answered. "She is Egypt and that little boy is the world..."

Why did those ancient Egyptians hold this belief? Because they were very advanced and possessed a great civilization before any other country. Egypt was a civilized country when other peoples were living in forests. Egypt taught Greece, and Greece taught Europe.

What happened when the little boy grew up? When he grew up, he had thrown out his nurse, his kind nurse! He

struck her, trying to kill her. I am sorry. This is not a figure of speech. This is a fact. This is what actually happened.

When we came here [presumably, to the United Nations] to appeal to England for our rights, the world helped England against the jus- tice. When we came here to appeal against Jews, the world helped the Jews against the justice. During the war between Arab and Jews, the world helped the Jews, too.

Oh! What an undutiful world! What an undutiful boy!

Qutb was quite a bit older than most of the other students at the school, and he naturally held himself somewhat apart. There is a pho- tograph of him in the campus bulletin showing a copy of one of his books to Dr. William Ross, the president of the college. Qutb is identi- fied as "a famous Egyptian author" and "a noted educator," so he

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must have been accorded some respectful notice by his peers on the faculty, but he socialized mainly with the foreign students. One evening, the Arab students held an International Night, where they prepared traditional Arabian meals, and Qutb acted as host, explain- ing each dish. Otherwise, he spent most of his time in his room listen- ing to classical records on his turntable.

There were polkas and square dances in town several times a week, and the college brought in well-known jazz bands. Two of the most popular songs that year were "Some Enchanted Evening" and "Bali Hai," both from the musical South Pacific, based on Michener's novel, and they must have been in the air constantly in Greeley. It was the end of the big band era; rock and roll was still over the horizon. "Jazz is the American music, created by Negroes to satisfy their primitive instincts—their love of noise and their appetite for sexual arousal," Qutb wrote, showing he was not immune to racial pronouncements. "The American is not satisfied with jazz music unless it is accompanied by noisy singing. As the volume increases, accompanied by unbearable pain to the ears, so does the excitement of the audience, their voices ris- ing, their hands clapping, till one can hear nothing at all."

On Sundays the college did not serve food, and students had to fend for themselves. Many of the international students, including Muslims like Qutb, would visit one of the more than fifty churches in Greeley on Sunday evening, where, after services, there were potluck dinners and sometimes a dance. "The dancing hall was decorated with yellow, red and blue lights," Qutb recalled on one occasion. "The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips, and the atmosphere was full of love." The minister gazed upon this sight approvingly, and even dimmed the lights to enhance the romantic atmosphere. Then he put on a song titled "Baby, It's Cold Outside," a sly ballad from an Esther Williams movie that summer, Neptune's Daughter. "The minister paused to watch his young charges swaying to the rhythms of this seductive song, then he left them to enjoy this pleasant, innocent night," Qutb concluded sarcastically.

In December a new tone entered his letters to his friends. He began talking about his "estrangement," in both soul and body By then he had withdrawn from all his classes.

Sayyid Qutb spent another eight months in America, most of that time in California. The America he perceived was vastly different from

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The Martyr

the way most Americans viewed their culture. In literature and movies, and especially in the new medium of television, Americans portrayed themselves as sexually curious but inexperienced, whereas Qutb's America was more like the one sketched by the Kinsey Report. Qutb saw a spiritual wasteland, and yet belief in God was nearly unanimous in the United States at the time. It was easy to be misled by the proliferation of churches, religious books, and religious festivals, Qutb maintained; the fact remained that materialism was the real American god. "The soul has no value to Americans/' he wrote to one friend. "There has been a Ph.D. dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion." Many Americans were beginning to come to similar conclu- sions. The theme of alienation in American life was just beginning to cast a pall over the postwar party. In many respects, Qutb's analysis, though harsh, was only premature.

CERTAINLY THE TRIP HAD NOT accomplished what Qutb's friends in Egypt had hoped. Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized. Moreover, his sour impressions, when published, would profoundly shape Arab and Muslim perceptions of the new world at a time when their esteem for America and its values had been high.

He also brought home a new and abiding anger about race. "The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy," he declared. "The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives We are endowing our children with amazement and respect for the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us. Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity."

Oddly, the people who knew Qutb in America say he seemed to like the country. They remember him as shy and polite, political but not overtly religious. Once introduced, he never forgot anyone's name, and he rarely voiced any direct criticism of his host country. Perhaps he kept the slights to himself until he could safely broadcast them at home.

It is clear that he was writing not just about America. His central

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concern was modernity. Modern values—secularism, rationality, de- mocracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism—had infected Islam through the agency of Western colo- nialism. America now stood for all that. Qutb's polemic was directed at Egyptians who wanted to bend Islam around the modern world. He intended to show that Islam and modernity were completely incom- patible. His extraordinary project, which was still emerging, was to take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins. For him, that was a state of divine oneness, the complete unity of God and humanity. Separation of the sacred and the secular, state and religion, science and theology, mind and spirit—these were the hallmarks of modernity, which had captured the West. But Islam could not abide such divisions. In Islam, he believed, divinity could not be diminished without being destroyed. Islam was total and uncompromising. It was God's final word. Mus- lims had forgotten this in their enchantment with the West. Only by restoring Islam to the center of their lives, their laws, and their govern- ment could Muslims hope to recapture their rightful place as the dom- inant culture in the world. That was their duty, not only to themselves but also to God.

QUTB RETURNED TO CAIRO on a TWA flight on August 20, 1950. Like him, the country had become more openly radical. Racked by cor- ruption and assassination, humiliated in the 1948 war against Israel, the Egyptian government ruled without popular authority, at the whim of the occupying power. Although the British had nominally withdrawn from Cairo, concentrating their forces in the Suez Canal Zone, the hand of empire still weighed heavy on the restive capital. The British were present in the clubs and hotels, the bars and movie theaters, the European restaurants and department stores of this sophisticated, decadent city. As his people hissed, the obese Turkish king, Farouk, raced around Cairo in one of his two hundred red auto- mobiles (his were the only cars in the country allowed to be red), seducing—if one can call it that—young girls, or else sailing his fleet of yachts to the gambling ports of the Riviera, where his debauchery tested historic standards. Meanwhile, the usual measures of despair— poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and disease—grew recklessly out of control. Governments revolved meaninglessly as stocks fell and the smart money fled the teetering country.

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The Martyr

In this rotten political environment, one organization steadily acted in the interests of the people. The Muslim Brothers created their own hospitals, schools, factories, and welfare societies; they even formed their own army and fought alongside other Arab troops in Palestine. They acted less as a countergovernment than as a countersociety, which was indeed their goal. Their founder, Hasan al-Banna, had refused to think of his organization as a mere political party; it was meant to be a challenge to the entire idea of politics. Banna completely rejected the Western model of secular, democratic government, which contradicted his notion of universal Islamic rule. "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet," he wrote.

The fact that the Brothers provided the only organized, effective resistance to the British occupation ensured their legitimacy in the eyes of the members of Egypt's lower-middle class, who formed the core of Brothers membership. The government officially dissolved the Mus- lim Brothers in 1948, following the killing of the hated police chief Salim Zaki during a riot at the medical school of Cairo University; but by that time the Brothers had more than a million members and sup- porters—out of a total Egyptian population of 18 million. Although the Brotherhood was a mass movement, it was also intimately organized into cooperative "families"—cells that contained no more than five members each, giving it a spongy, clandestine quality that proved dif- ficult to detect and impossible to eradicate.

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 mur- dered 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

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the Muslim Brothers' secret apparatus, slashed the hoses of the fire engines that arrived to put out the flames, then moved on to the Euro- pean quarter, burning every movie house, casino, bar, and restaurant in the center of the city. By morning, a thick black cloud of smoke lin- gered over the ruins. At least 30 people had been killed, 750 buildings destroyed, fifteen thousand people put out of work, and twelve thou- sand 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.

QUTB HAD TAKEN uphis 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, includ- ing 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, advis- ing 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 Offi- cers in a social revolution that both organizations thought was theirs to control. In fact, neither faction had the popular authority to rule.