The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (8 page)

The United States is hated not because of what it does, or because of what it is. The United States is hated for what it is
not
, not Arab and not Muslim. America plays the part of the utterly alien force that puts the Arabs at existential risk unless they cohere as one.
The United States is the most powerful embodiment of the non-Arab other, and as any tribe is galvanized by the present threat of its rivals, anti-Americanism is the easiest method available to consolidate the Arabs and create consensus. Fear of the outsider clarifies Arabism, and war against him unifies the whole—or, in Nasser’s formulation, “No voice louder than the cry of battle.”

Arab nationalism is how the state retraces the limits to individual expression already drawn by Arab societies, including parents, families, and friends. Mustafa was fired as censor and then hired a second time to regulate the morals of moviegoing Egyptians for the simple reason that it just wasn’t that sensitive a job. It doesn’t take much to quiet the masses where self-censorship is a habit of mind; to step out of the consensus is to weaken the one, and if the integrity of the whole, whether it is family, tribe, or nation, is compromised, then there is no protection against the outsider. Arab nationalism is an expression of these same ideas raised to the supranational level; it is not merely a political doctrine but also a tribal value, an Arab value. Anti-Americanism is not the effect of American policies, but is organic to the region. Arab rulers have certainly played a role in fostering it, but its existence does not depend on them.

This is not something that’s generally accepted in American press and policy circles, where the governing assumption is that the regimes are single-handedly responsible for inciting their people against America. The general thesis goes something like this: to deflect attention away from their corruption and incompetence and lay the blame elsewhere, Arab rulers use mosques, media, and educational systems to brainwash an otherwise-moderate Arab citizenry that would naturally be predisposed to like the United States were it not for the incitement of their rulers. This narrative is so widely accepted that the Bush administration based its democratization strategy on it: if Washington could circumvent the regimes and speak directly with the Arabs themselves, then it could make plain that America was not their enemy. This was a delusion. Nasser and his Arab nationalist followers have connected with the Arab masses,
while the United States has failed, because Arab nationalism is a variation on a theme with which they were already familiar and comfortable—resistance to the West, or opposition to another tribe.

Arab mosques, media, and educational systems reflect the societies of which they are a part, as do Arab rulers. Nasser didn’t invent anti-Americanism; his success, like that of any regime chief, was the result of his understanding the habits and wants of his people, and knowing when to manipulate them—and when to repress them. Indeed, Arab rulers are not wholly untruthful when they warn Washington policy makers that they’re the only thing standing between the United States and the unfettered passions of the masses.

Consider the case of the Egyptian pop idol Shaaban Abdel Rahim. His premiere hit, “I Hate Israel,” catapulted the overweight, pockmarked former shirt ironer to a fame and fortune surprising only in that no one had ever thought of such an obviously profitable tune before. In addition to hating Israel, Shaaban sang that he loved Amr Moussa, Egypt’s then foreign minister, which caused Hosni Mubarak enough concern to push his putative rival over to a new post as secretary-general of the Arab League. This was a telltale sign not only of that organization’s relative insignificance but also of the amount of respect the regime had for Shaaban’s ability to move the masses. And so when he recorded his next song, a number that was sure to rival the success of “I Hate Israel,” it was blocked from the airwaves lest millions of Egyptian youths humming a catchy pop tune about Sheikh Osama less than half a year after 9/11 send the wrong PR message to the Americans. The top political (and musical) echelons denied there ever was such an anthem to bin Laden, even if all of Cairo was already singing the chorus.

 “B
in—bin—bin—bin Laden!” sang the waiters at Pub 28, a small Cairo bar and restaurant. It was the early spring of 2002, and Pub 28, seemingly modeled after an alpine ski chalet, was always packed with expatriates and wealthy Egyptians with second,
European or American, passports. It was a melting pot of a different order of anti-Americanism, the anger and resentment of deracinated elites: Americans too young, confused, or rich to love or respect their own country; and wealthy Arabs, trust-fundamentalists, whose foreign education caused them embarrassment about the civic and moral deficiencies of their native land, a shame they turned into hatred of the world’s center of cultural, economic, and political gravity, America.

When my tablemate started singing along to the bin Laden song, I chucked him in the shoulder. Jason looked at me as if he’d just come out of a trance. He was a twenty-four-year-old from Memphis with thick glasses and Elvis sideburns who’d worked for one of the wire services before coming to Cairo. We met at the AUC and roomed together for a while before he got into an altercation with a neighbor and broadly hinted he worked for the CIA, a vocation all Egyptians assume of all Americans in Egypt anyway. The neighbor called his bluff by claiming he flew Mubarak’s private jet, which he did.

Jason inherited his gambling skills from his father, and weekend nights we pooled a small sum of money that he doubled after several hours of careful betting in the casino at the Marriott in Zamalek. It was a palace built in 1868 as a guesthouse for the empress Eugénie when she came to open the Suez Canal, and it was turned into a hotel a dozen years later when European creditors came to collect Egyptian debt for the canal. The casino was in a large gilded hall with a guard checking passports to make sure no Egyptians got in, though much of the crowd consisted of Egyptians carrying second passports. The rest were all Saudis, who along with Americans are the Egyptians’ other favorite scapegoats.

Shortly after 9/11, as the extent of Saudi involvement in the global jihad became clearer, world opinion came to hold petro-fueled Wahhabism responsible for everything wrong with the Muslim Middle East. But the Saudis weren’t the problem; they were merely the wealthiest clan of a super-tribe that is bound together to take on the other, and for the most part fought among themselves. And so in
the fleshpots of Egypt, Jason and I cursed the custodians of the two holy shrines of Mecca and Medina only if they took a card we needed.

The Saudis were always the high rollers at the card tables and invariably the worst players. They bet clumsily and cursed their bad luck, even as Jason reminded them that it wasn’t their luck that was drawing a card on fifteen. As we counted our meager winnings in the early morning hours over a plate of pancakes at the hotel restaurant, Jason often spoke of starting a gaming tutorial for elite Gulf clients. They admired his skill, and we liked hanging around them. We talked college football with the younger ones in nylon jackets bearing the insignia of some Texas school where they’d studied petroleum engineering. And we joked with the most ostentatiously Bedouin among them, the older, coarser Saudis with cheap rubber sandals rather than English brogues and Italian loafers under their dishdashas, happy and worldly with a tumbler full of whiskey, a Moroccan girl in each arm, and looking to split a pair of tens.

We saw them in the nightclub boats moored along the banks of the Nile as well, drinking in packs or alone late into the night as evening turned to morning and one twenty-piece orchestra changed places with another and then another, with so many string and wind players and percussionists moving in and out of these large, dark halls it seemed there must have been entire Egyptian villages whose industry was the manufacture of band members. Waiters shuffled back and forth, rushing heaping plates of vegetables, hummus, and other Oriental dishes to diners at 3:30 in the morning, overcharging for Egyptian beer and wine and foreign whiskey while an MC in a threadbare evening jacket cased the room, chatting up guests to check their sobriety and disposable income. He circled back around to the stage and serenaded those he thought most likely to tip the entertainers by calling out their nationalities, like Amr Moussa taking a head count at the Arab League—“Oh, Lebanon,” he intoned soulfully, “Oh, Algeria,” and so on, invariably reserving the biggest spenders for last, “Oh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

At 5:00 a.m., millions of Egyptians throughout the city of a thousand
minarets were preparing for dawn prayers, while in the nightclubs the Saudis were still fresh in their bright white dishdashas, swinging their prayer beads over their head scarves as they improvised a Bedouin sword dance onstage and threw Egyptian pound notes at some half-naked belly dancer’s powdered face. The beautiful bills amassed in a small pile at her feet—red, blue, green, and gold money stamped with the images of pharaohs, kings, and khedives, a hundred U.S. dollars’ worth or more, maybe twice what the young Egyptian stagehand who stooped to collect it for her would see in a month.

The Egyptians are right; the Saudis are hypocrites, the missionaries of an austere Islam, Wahhabism, who come to Cairo on holiday to drink and whore while their wives sleep off a big day of shopping. But Egyptian piety comes cheap; without money there are few temptations, and if they resented the Saudis for the blessing bestowed on them in the form of vast energy resources, the Egyptians did their best to empty their wealthy co-religionists’ oil coffers, charging them sometimes even twice what the clueless Americans paid for hotels, taxis, food, drinks, and entertainments.

The Egyptians contemptuously called the Gulfies “Arabs,” drawing a line between themselves as the inheritors of a great and classical civilization and a bunch of lizard-eating Bedouin. It was hard not to sympathize with the Saudis since anti-Saudi sentiment was virtually indistinguishable from anti-Americanism. The Egyptians hated the Saudis because they were rich and because they were not Egyptians, and they blamed them for their problems and resented them, the profligate and arrogant tribesmen whom God had blessed in order to curse the Egyptians mired in their poverty. For the Egyptians, it was a zero-sum calculation, like all Bedouin math: we are poor because the other tribe is rich and they have kept to themselves the key to all the treasure.

The Egyptians even blamed the Saudis for radical Islam. No one questions the fact that the kingdom handsomely funds jihad
throughout the world, but what had the Egyptian authorities ever done to stem the flow of Saudi cash into Egyptian pockets and bank accounts? For years all of the Arab countries had depended on Gulf money from guest-worker receipts, tourism revenues, luxury real estate investment, and direct aid, which kept Arab economies afloat, regime wheels greased, and complaints about Wahhabi meddling to a minimum. And whenever a journalist in one of the Cairo papers did try to point out the dangers of Saudi influence, someone with instructions from above and an envelope full of cash put a red line through it. You could refer vaguely to the doings of “some Gulf states,” but no direct criticism of the house of Saud was permitted. It was only after 9/11, when the Americans came around asking questions, that the Egyptians pointed at Riyadh.

Saudi money was an explanation tailor-made for the Americans, especially the materialists among the U.S. policy makers, analysts, and journalists whose default ideological setting is to discount ideology and attribute everything to economic causes. Accordingly, the Cairo version of radical Islam holds that Wahhabism would have died out long ago of its own accord on the Arabian Peninsula had it not been for the discovery of oil, which allowed the Saudis to export their creed. In this telling, radical Islam has no roots in the land of the Nile and only took hold there after Egyptian professionals, doctors, lawyers, and engineers who had come to work in the Gulf, had been brainwashed by the Wahhabis, and returned to Egypt as radical Islamists.

In reality, many of those Egyptian naïfs employed in the Gulf during the 1950s and 1960s were Muslim Brotherhood cadres whom Nasser had released from prison or exiled from Cairo. And so there was another, private story that Egyptians told about the rise of Islamism. In this version, the Saudis were just ignorant billionaires who didn’t even know how to write their own names with the expensive gold pens that they carried for show in the pockets of their dish-dashas. Cairo on the other hand was the intellectual and cultural
capital of the Arab world—and indeed it was, the birthplace of Salafism and all its leading lights, like the nineteenth-century mufti of Egypt Muhammad ‘Abduh; Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Sayyid Qutb, the preeminent modern theorist of jihad. All the Saudis had done was fund the Islamist movement. The Egyptians had given it life.

  C
airo, and not the Arabian desert, was ground zero of the Muslim reform movement. It had been one of the seats of Sunni authority since Saladin, and Napoleon’s 1798 invasion touched off tremors resonating throughout the Muslim world. Political and religious leaders were forced to confront the fact that, in military terms at least, their world was no match for the foreigners. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reform movement was Islam’s effort to meet and match the newness of the world revealed by the Christian West. The reformers took Muhammad and the early
umma
as an example, not in order to turn back the clock, but rather to rid Islam of the impurities that had accumulated over the centuries and restore the faith to its rational essence as practiced by the Prophet of Islam, his companions
(al-sahaba)
, and the first four caliphs
(al-rashidun).
They were collectively known as
al-salaf
, the righteous forebears, and from them the reformers took their name, the Salafis.