Author: Kanchan Gupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: July 24, 2005
Driving from Cairo to Sharm el-Sheikh,
across the Suez Canal and along the Red Sea coast to the southern tip of
Sinai is an exhilarating experience. It's a passage through history.
Sharm el-Sheikh, better known as
Sharm, an ancient Bedouin outpost in the desert of Sinai and now a glittering
collection of fine hotels and exclusive resorts built around Na'amah Bay,
is a sprawling playground that offers a place in the sun to Europe's rich
and famous, America's bold and beautiful, and Arab sheikhs looking for
unveiled women in g-strings.
If you drive further east, you will
reach Israel which had seized Sinai in the Six-Day War of 1967. Anwar Sadat,
through a dextrous mix of military adventurism in 1973 and peace diplomacy
that led to the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord of 1979, secured
its return.
Since then, it has been developed
as a tourist spot, earning huge revenues in foreign currency. Sharm is
a world apart from the rest of Egypt. It is cosmopolitan and a happening
place, loud and raucous at night, peaceful and idyllic during day. It's
almost the same at Ta'aba, another Red Sea resort, close to Egypt's border
with Israel.
That peace was broken on October
7 last year when a series of explosions ripped through Ta'aba Hilton, killing
34 people, most of them Israelis soaking the sun. The obvious jihadi attack
was written off as a spill-over of violence in the Gaza Strip.
Later, this assessment was proved
incorrect when the Abdullah Azzam Brigades of al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
The Ta'aba attack was followed by a suicide bomber blowing himself up in
a Cairo bazaar on April 7, 2005, killing an American and two French tourists.
On April 30, a suicide bomber blew himself up near the Egyptian Museum
in Cairo, injuring two Israelis, an Italian and a Swede. On each of these
occasions, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades of al-Qaida claimed responsibility.
On Saturday, when a series of blasts
ripped through Sharm, killing scores and injuring many more, the message
was loud an clear: Islamist terror had come home to roost in the country
of its origin.
For, it is in Egypt that the progenitor
of modern day jihadi terror was born in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood
in 1928. Hasan al-Banna, a 22-year-old elementary school teacher, founded
this Islamic revivalist movement following the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and the subsequent ban of the Caliphate system of government.
Al-Banna based his ideas on the
belief that Islam is not only a religious observance but a comprehensive
way of life, on the tenets of Wahhabism, better known today as "Islamism",
and he supplemented the traditional Islamic education with *jihadia* training.
The Brotherhood entered the political
arena through the Party of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimoon,
and after Nasser came to power, blamed the Egyptian Government for being
passive against "Zionists". A Muslim Brother assassinated the Prime Minister
of Egypt, Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, on December 28, 1948. Al-Banna himself
was killed by government agents in Cairo in February 1949.
The movement was banned, then legalised
and banned again in 1954 because it insisted that Egypt be governed under
shari'a, or Islamic law. Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf along with five Muslim
Brothers was executed for plotting Nasser's assassination. Thousands of
Muslim Brothers fled to Syria, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, and Lebanon.
But the crackdown did not deter
the Muslim Brotherhood. Three more plots were hatched to assassinate Nasser,
leading to the entire top leaders of the Brotherhood being executed in
1966.
Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat tried
to buy peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. But for all his efforts, four
Muslim Brothers assassinated him on October 6, 1981. Sadat's successor
President Hosni Mubarak used draconian measures to stamp out the Muslim
Brotherhood, but with little success.
Muslim Brothers have been winning
seats in Parliament by contesting as independent candidates, they have
wrested control over all professional bodies and they have a vast network
of activists and funding.
Its extremist jihadi offshoots,
Jamaat al-Islamiyya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, continue to flourish -
within Egypt and in "friendly" Islamic countries. Both the groups have
umbilical links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Jamaat al-Islamiyya's spiritual
leader, the blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, is serving a life sentence
in the US for his involvement in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
The Egyptian Islamic Jihad has a
small but fiercely loyal cadre with specialised skills and training in
carrying out acts of terror. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Jamaat al-Islamiyya
and Egyptian Islamic Jihad have a common goal: Replace the republican government
with an Islamist state.
Their collective ideology fired
the imagination of Mohammed Atta to lead the attack against the US on 9/11.
Atta and his fellow jihadis may have gone down with the Twin Towers, but
their ideology is still alive and kicking.
Saturday's terror hit at Sharm brings
home this point with horrifying brutality.
