Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [226]
The democratisation of religious opinion as against received authority, and the rage that ensued when mass education did not automatically translate into status, was evident in the group that eventually assassinated Sadat. One cell developed in a Cairo suburb, where a young electrical engineer called Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj linked up with two men from the prominent al-Zumr family. Together with Muhammed Zumi, a fugitive from southern Upper Egypt where a further cell developed, they formed Tanzim al-Jihad in 1980. From the start, the group was divided between the northern group which focused on killing Sadat, and southerners more concerned to persecute Coptic Christian goldsmiths and jewellers. The latter’s numbers and prosperity had exceeded Islam’s threshold of tolerance, while their pope was gaining the ear of Americans concerned about persecution of fellow Christians. Not only were the Copts getting above themselves, but it appeared that their greater assertiveness was being manipulated by their ‘Crusader’ allies abroad. Minor incidents, perhaps the charge that someone had put the hex on a buffalo, resulted in sectarian violence which the police struggled to contain. It spread to the Cairo slums when in the autumn of 1981 Copts and Muslims attempted to massacre each other.
The conspiracy assumed lethal proportions when it was joined by twenty-four-year-old first-lieutenant Khalid Ahmed Shawqi al-Islambouli, like the al-Zumrs from a prominent family. Frustrated in his desire to become an air force pilot, he had washed up in artillery. The electrician Faraj provided the vision, borrowing bits of Qutb and venerable Taymiyya to justify an attack on the ‘near enemy’ of apostate Muslim rulers, preparatory to the assault of a consolidated Islam on the ‘far enemy’ of Israel. Clerical endorsement of this strategy was supplied by a blind lecturer in theology from a southern outpost of Cairo’s al-Azhar university, whom Sadat had released from a nine-month prison sentence when he signalled the break with the Nasser era. This forty-something cleric was sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, thenceforth a pivotal figure in several terrorist atrocities.
Recruitment of others into the developing conspiracy against Sadat occurred in radical mosques, where the more devout were singled out to attend intensive retreats, part of the grooming that draws people into the more select group responsible for acts of terrorism. The next step from these retreats for a select few, whose sense of being the elite within an elite was consolidated, was basic weapons training. The group began by robbing jewellery businesses owned by Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt, robberies which were designed to finance major operations and to make the bumptious Copts—one of whom, Boutros Boutros Ghali, was even foreign minister—feel the Muslim fist. In this climate of sectarian tension, Sadat announced a new line: ‘No politics in religion, and no religion in politics’. The regime rounded up about fifteen hundred radicals, including Khalid al-Islambouli’s brother Muhammed, leader of Islamic students in the commerce department at Asyut university. This engendered emotions like those that once prevailed in Lenin’s family. Their mother recalled: ‘When he heard the news, Khalid burst out crying and said to me: “Why have they arrested my brother, who committed no crime?” He cried so much that he had convulsions. When he finally calmed down, he said to me, “Be patient, mother, it is the will of God …