The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [17]
To the very end, Nasser misjudged his flinty adversary. As demonstrators filled the Cairo streets protesting the impending execution, Nasser realized that Qutb was more dangerous to him dead than alive. He dispatched Sadat to the prison, where Qutb received him wearing the traditional red burlap pajamas of a condemned man. Sadat promised that if Qutb appealed his sentence, Nasser would show mercy; indeed, Nasser was even willing to offer him the post of minister of education once again. Qutb refused. Then Qutb’s sister Hamida, who was also in prison, was brought to him. “The Islamic movement needs you,” she pleaded. “Write the words.” Qutb responded, “My words will be stronger if they kill me.”
Sayyid Qutb was hanged after dawn prayers on August 29, 1966. The government refused to surrender his corpse to his family, fearing that his grave would become a shrine to his followers. The radical Islamist threat seemed to have come to an end. But Qutb’s vanguard was already hearing the music.
2
The Sporting Club
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the man who would lead Qutb’s vanguard, grew up in a quiet middle-class suburb called Maadi, five miles south of the noisy chaos of Cairo. It was an unlikely breeding ground for revolution. A consortium of Egyptian Jewish financiers, intending to create a kind of English village amid the mango and guava plantations and the Bedouin settlements on the eastern bank of the Nile, began selling lots in the first decade of the twentieth century. The developers regulated everything, from the height of the garden fences to the color of the shutters on the grand villas lining the streets. Like Nathan Meeker, the founder of Greeley, the creators of Maadi dreamed of a utopian society, one that was not only safe and clean and orderly but also tolerant and at ease in the modern world. They planted eucalyptus trees to repel flies and mosquitoes, and gardens to perfume the air with the fragrance of roses, jasmine, and bougainvillea. Many of the early settlers were British military officers and civil servants, whose wives started garden clubs and literary salons; they were followed by Jewish families, who by the end of World War II made up nearly a third of Maadi’s population. After the war, Maadi evolved into a mélange of expatriate Europeans, American businessmen and missionaries, and a certain type of Egyptian—typically one who spoke French at dinner and followed the cricket matches.
The center of this cosmopolitan community was the Maadi Sporting Club. Founded at a time when the British still occupied Egypt, the club was unusual in that it actually admitted Egyptians. Community business was often conducted on the all-sand eighteen-hole golf course, with the Giza pyramids and the palmy Nile as a backdrop. As high tea was being served to the Brits in the lounge, Nubian waiters bearing icy glasses of Nescafé glided among the pashas and princesses sunbathing at the pool. High-stepping flamingos waded through the lilies in the garden pond. The Maadi Club became an ideal expression of the founders’ vision of Egypt—sophisticated, secular, ethnically diverse but married to British notions of class.
The careful regulations of the founders could not withstand the crush of Cairo’s burgeoning population, however, and in the 1960s another Maadi took root within this exotic community. Road 9 ran beside the train tracks that separated the tony side of Maadi from the baladi district—the native part of town, where the irrepressible ancient squalor of Egypt unfurled itself. Donkey carts clopped along the unpaved streets past peanut vendors and yam salesmen hawking their wares and fly-studded carcasses hanging in the butcher shops. There was also, on this side of town, a narrow slice of the middle class—teachers and midlevel bureaucrats among them—who were drawn by Maadi’s cleaner air and the nearly impossible prospect