A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Read Online Free PDF Page B

superfluity of their colonial predecessors. The corruption trickled down to the lowest levels of government, and bakshish was required for even the smallest of services. To open a business, an entrepreneur had to grease the police and other protectors, and for a bright young graduate to find work often required similar lubrication. The bright and young who could leave, did. (The trend continues today: Mohamed Atta, before finding his calling in aeronautic murder, had taken a degree in architecture from Cairo University but left for better opportunities in Germany.) This all would have been bad enough with a stable demography, but in Egypt, as elsewhere in the Third World, the people were multiplying beyond the land’s ability to sustain them and crowding into cities. One million Alexandrians in 1950 were four million by century’s end.
    Nasser’s failure was God’s opportunity. The instrument through which He seized it was a young teacher named Hassan al-Banna, who espoused the view that Muslims had succumbed not merely to the West’s armies but, worse, to its worldliness. The Westerner, al-Banna said, worshipped wealth and put ambition over humility, individual over community, and the desires of the body above the needs of the soul. Centuries of colonialism had so contaminated Arabs that they desired little more than to be Westerners themselves. They claimed to be Muslim, but the Islam they practiced was a bastardization, and the wages of their sin were manifest: God had let His people wither under the rule of the corrupt. But al-Banna preached a cure: undiluted piety, which was to say a return to the true Islam of the Quran and hadith.
    In 1928, a quarter of a century before Nasser’s coup, al-Banna gave his developing philosophy (it took decades to fully flower into the above) a practical form by founding the Society of Muslim Brothers. “Society” was meant not in the cramped sense of a group or association but in the larger sense of a whole community: a neighborhood, a village, a nation. Al-Banna’s Society offered not just religion but services the government had either failed to provide or provided badly. Where the government left people illiterate, the Brothers held night classes to teach them to read. Where the government left people malnourished, the Brothers sold them meat at cost. Where the government neglected the worker who lost his job, the Brothers pooled wages into unemployment-insurance collectives. As the Brotherhood grew, it founded hospitals and schools, textile factories and labor unions, apartment co-ops and mosques, newspapers and magazines. In its totality, it approached the society al-Banna had imagined, and it was less corrupt than the government. If you stepped into a taxi with a Brother behind the wheel, you could be sure of getting to your destination without being cheated. If you applied for a loan from a Brother’s bank, you need not pay a bribe; often you need not even pay interest. By the time Nasser took power at mid-century, the Brotherhood had grown to 2,000 chapters of perhaps 500,000 members, in a nation of 20 million.
    The religion on offer from the Brothers was stern. Islam may be translated “surrender” or “submission,” and a Brother’s submission was expected to be complete. Centuries of Islamic study of the Quran and hadith had determined how a Muslim should dress (baggily, for one’s sex should be hidden), what he ate (no swine, no carrion, no elephant), what he drank (no alcohol), what he read (mainly the Quran and hadith), the songs he sang (not many), the pictures he hung on his wall (also not many), how he prayed, how he played, to whom he talked. Sex, as in other authoritarian religions, was a fearsome power, and the Brothers dealt with it by obliterating woman, who was a trap to ensnare the male believer as he walked Islam’s path. A woman in Brotherly society covered her hair, neck, trunk, arms, legs, feet, and ideally her face and hands. In schools and in