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Under Egypt's Volcano

[Vanity Fair] Scott Anderson - With at least 80 million inhabitants, Egypt is not only the most populous nation in the Arab world but in many ways its intellectual and political nexus, the fount from which nearly every major political or religious force to spread through the region in the past century has emerged. Fundamentalist trends first fostered in Egypt, with their specifically anti-Western tilt, have fanned the flames of jihad throughout the region. The Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a social movement espousing a rejection of Western values and a return to Islamic traditions, originated in Egypt in the 1970s before spreading throughout the Middle East. Islamic Jihad also has its roots in Egypt. Osama bin Laden was a disgruntled Saudi rich kid bankrolling resistance fighters in Afghanistan until he came under the sway of his Egyptian spiritual mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and decided to go global; 4 or 5 of the 10 original founders of al-Qaeda were Egyptian. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing? Egyptian. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11? Egyptian. Wherever one turns in the arena of Islamic jihadists, one is likely to find either the direct or spiritual influence of an Egyptian. Egypt as a whole bears scant resemblance to the placid image that its boosters - the Egyptian government and its friends in the West - wish to project. It is, instead, something of a seething volcano.
2006-09-27 01:00:00
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