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fighters made mincemeat of regular Saudi soldiers who were despatched to eject them from the mosque, a mission inhibited by the need not to destroy it. Eventually the monarchy called in assistance from France’s Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale and the Pakistani army. Three hastily converted commandos recommended using mass electrocution by putting a high-voltage cable into the mosque’s flooded basements, or nerve gas to flush the Mahdists out. After two weeks of close-quarter combat, al-Utaybi and the other surviving fighters were captured, a task made easier when the construction firm Bin Laden Brothers, which had refurbished the mosque, provided blueprints essential to storming it. Al-Utaybi and sixty comrades were quickly beheaded. At the time this siege seemed like a perplexing incident of cultic violence, as mysterious in meaning, or meaninglessness, as similar events that happened in the Christian world. The fact that during the siege rioting Arab and Pakistani students from Pakistan’s Qaid-i-Azam university stormed the US embassy in Islamabad—on the rumour that the Americans and Israelis were behind al-Utaybi’s seizure of the Mecca mosque—merely seemed like a bizarre pendant, as did ayatollah Khomenei’s warm words to the embassy rioters, which included the observation: ‘Borders should not separate hearts.’7

II THE BROTHERS AND PHAROAH

Although Egypt is the size of France and Spain combined, 95 per cent of its population of sixty million live on 5 per cent of its land, the lush, lotus-shaped strip that follows the course of the Nile. Beyond lies inhospitable desert, whose only redeeming grace may be that it is unsuited to guerrilla warfare. Mysterious monuments remind Egyptians that they are not really Arabs, but heirs to one of the world’s greatest polytheistic civilisations, whose mysterious iconography still shimmers beneath the high art of Christianity. The French left the legacy of Napoleonic law. Egypt became an independent parliamentary monarchy in 1922, although the British remained a powerful, and often resented, commercial and military presence, clinging on to the vestiges of Empire. The flourishing of Western modernity during the 1920s, as manifested in a vibrant press, cinema and literary culture, inevitably triggered an Islamic response, which took the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 by a devout primary school teacher called Hassan al-Banna. Appalled by British military bases, foreign ownership of utilities, Egypt’s almost foreign-seeming Turko-Circassian upper class, and a vocal feminist movement, al-Banna incorporated existing charitable and pious associations into a series of cell-like ‘families’, which were linked by such modern communications as magazines and newspapers as well as sermons. Education and charitable work (or da’wa) would lead to social reformation, provided evil Western influences were contained. The Brotherhood patiently built a grassroots base that rapidly reached into every Egyptian province, with a membership of half a million people. One of the main ideological influences upon al-Banna was Rashid Rida, an erstwhile moderniser turned salafist who demanded the replacement of Western-influenced laws by the sharia, and revived the Koranic notion of jahiliyya—that is the pre-Islamic state of pagan benightedness—to denounce the regimes of the Arab present. At first viewed sympathetically by a monarch who saw the Brotherhood as less menacing than secular nationalism or socialism, this mood changed when its surface network of charitable and pious foundations was accompanied by an underground military organisation, the Secret Apparatus, that began to infiltrate the armed forces. The Brotherhood was compulsorily disbanded in 1948, prompting it to assassinate the prime minister responsible. By way of revenge, a year later, the forty-three-year-old al-Banna was killed in turn.8 Initially, the largely lower-middle-class Brothers welcomed the coup which in 1952 chased out the reforming sybarite king Farouk. They confused their own drive for Islamic unity