And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (6 page)

Simply put, Mohammed was born in a land where the founding fathers of the modern state entered an alliance with a puritanical, ascetic movement whose influence became supercharged with the discovery of oil. But money also changed Saudi Arabia. Many modern Saudis believe in Wahhabism in principle, but they don’t all follow it in practice.

One evening I went to a dinner party at the home of a Saudi prince, an elaborate affair, with lots of liquor, women without veils, various ambassadors and foreign guests, and sophisticated, Western-educated Saudis. We had lively conversations about the latest comings and goings in Paris and what exhibits were in New York. It could have been a dinner party in London. You would not have imagined you were in Saudi Arabia.

Another time I was invited to the home of a newspaper
publisher. The modern house, minimalist and sleek, had the latest-model Mac computer on a desk. I ended up leaving after several more men showed up to take a dip together in a hot tub. They told me about parties with drag singers and men jumping from the windows to avoid the religious police. The more time I spent in Saudi Arabia, the stranger I found it and the more it seemed to be in no position to tell the majority of the world’s Muslims how to think and behave.

When you instill the intolerant mentality of Wahhabism in a country such as Egypt, the effect is dramatic. In Egypt people drink water from the same river where they dump their sewage and industrial waste, scrounging out a miserable existence in a broken economy and shop in trash-strewn bazaars. The proselytizers tell the Egyptians that things would be great if only the West didn’t keep the Muslim world divided, if only the modern banking system devised by the Jews was torn down, if only the Arabs could restore the caliphate. The result, unsurprisingly, is anger and resentment against the West, sometimes of the murderous kind.

ANTI-SEMITISM WAS PERVASIVE IN EGYPT.
in conversations with people ranging from members of the Tabligh wa Dawa and the Muslim Brotherhood to the local shopkeeper to a newspaper editor, Jews were depicted as aggressive and bloodthirsty schemers who persecuted Muslims. This view came through in the media, in cartoons, in schools. When pressed, Muslims denied it: “That’s not true. We as Muslims embrace Jews as people of the Book. We accept them as part of our own ancestry as people of the prophets.” But in reality, anti-Semitism was inescapable and oppressive.

Oddly enough, some of the anti-Semitism actually goes back to Muslims’ insistence that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God, which Muslims call Allah. It sounds very inclusive and inviting, a message that the great monotheistic religious are part of a single family, until you think about it. If there is only one God, Allah, then there is also an assumption that Jews and Christians don’t understand him. According to the Muslim interpretation, Jews began to worship thousands of years ago until Allah sent Jesus to correct their ways. Christians then worshipped according to Jesus taught until Allah sent Mohammed with the final draft of his plan in the Koran. By saying Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship only one God—Allah—Muslims are saying Jews are using an old and outdated text that was improved by Christians, but that only Muslims have the full picture. This hierarchy of understanding formed the basis of much of how Islamic or sharia law dealt with religious minorities. Under the Arab caliphate and Ottoman Empire, Jews and Christians were tolerated, but were considered second-class citizens who were required to pay special taxes and were forbidden from holding high-level jobs and even from using certain materials reserved for Muslims. Muslims didn’t force Jews and Christians to convert, but believed it was better to be patient and let them convert on their own. Muslims believed if they waited long enough, Jews and Christians would eventually come around and recognize Islam’s superiority. It was just a matter of time.

Muslims in medieval Europe, however, generally faired far worse. Christians considered Muslims to be heathens, infidels, enemies, and deniers of Christ.

Homophobia was also rampant in the Middle East and just as entrenched. A male orgy may go on in a luxurious private home
in Saudi Arabia, but, if the participants were caught, the punishment could be severe. In Egypt, I reported a story about the
Queen Boat
—that was its real name—which was the venue for a gay party on the Nile. The police arrested fifty or sixty men and subjected them to humiliating examinations with fingers and rulers to determine whether they had engaged in homosexual sex.

There was also a fear of witchcraft. I did a story on a group of young people in Cairo who had been hanging out in an abandoned house, drinking and listening to heavy metal. They were arrested and accused of being Satan worshippers because of the kind of music they were playing. Anti-Semitism, homophobia, fear of Satanism—these were part of the baseline mentality of the hard-line religious groups that took their theological cues from Saudi Arabia.

The pragmatists of the Muslin Brotherhood and the dreamers of Tabligh wa Dawa were fundamentalists, but they could manage in Egypt because they weren’t violent. Things were different for the hard-core Egyptian jihadists. The jihadists were simply the Salafis, the Wahhabis, who’d decided prayer wasn’t enough. They’d decided austerity and self-denial couldn’t change the world. They’d need to fight. The jihadis, who should technically be called Salafi jihadis or Wahhabi jihadis, would join the holy wars in Afghanistan against the Soviets or help the Muslims suffering in Bosnia or oppressed by Russia in Chechnya, then come back home. But it became harder and harder for these groups to return because the government started looking for them.

The last thing the jihadists wanted was to end up in an Egyptian prison. I remember driving by prisons and actually hearing screams from inside. The military put on mass trials of twenty, forty, or sixty Islamists. The detainees were put in a holding cage,
and they held up their Korans, shouting “
Allahu Akbar!
” and calling for an Islamic state. The court would hand out death sentences by the dozens. If a detainee was lucky, he got fifteen years, but fifteen years in an Egyptian prison is basically a death sentence.

The Saudis, and in some cases the CIA, had encouraged and funded their foreign jihads, and these men had seen combat, lived hard in the mountains, did what their religion asked them to do. Then they came home to Egypt and were rewarded with a death sentence. The result was the creation of a standing army of jihadis who couldn’t go home. They would go on to found al-Qaeda, which became something of a jihadi veterans association. History is always obvious in retrospect, but in this case the rise of al-Qaeda should have been fairly easy to predict. Saudi Arabia, Pakistani intelligence, the CIA, and others used jihadis to fight Cold War battles in Afghanistan and elsewhere and the jihadis, believing they were helping Muslims, were happy to go. But when the fighters tried to return home, they faced the horrors of prison and torture, so they went underground and became an army of exiles eventually known as al-Qaeda. What did Pakistan, Egypt, or the CIA expect would happen if they directed jihadis at their enemies like cannons and then abandoned them? The cannons would fire on them.

In 1996 the Taliban took over in Afghanistan. The Taliban were mostly Pashtun tribesmen with their own history and goals. But their religious fanaticism, harsh treatment of women, and hatred of the West were almost identical to those of the Salafi jihadis. So it was only natural that the Taliban would provide a safe haven for bin Laden and his murderous band, which they did, starting in 1996. Al-Qaeda set up bases and training camps in Afghanistan. At last the jihadists’ army of exiles had a home.

The world would be very different if Saudi Arabia had never struck oil. The wealth allowed the Wahhabis to set a harsh standard for Islam, while staying isolated from it themselves. A growing number of Muslim reformers say—at great physical risk to themselves—that Islam needs to evolve and rediscover more tolerant strains of the faith, schools of thought that were pervasive in Islam when it led the world in science, mathematics, and medicine. Instead, these days Islam is unfortunately mostly known for its anger, which is a tragedy for most believers of one of the world’s longest-surviving and decent religions.

MY LIFE AS A FREELANCER
in Cairo was fun and interesting, but also a hassle. The term of art in the business for each of your client publications is “a string,” which makes you, the freelancer trying to report for all these disparate outlets, a “stringer.” If you’re stringing for newspapers, you don’t know if they’ll ever pay you, and if they do, it might be three or four months later. By then you’ve written fifty articles for other people, and you have a devil of a time figuring who’s paid you for what. Every freelancer, at least back then, dreamed of getting a staff job. So it was a no-brainer when Agence France-Presse (AFP) offered me a job in Jerusalem as its Palestinian-affairs correspondent. AFP paid me the princely sum
of $24,000 a year, not much more than I was making in Cairo, but with health benefits, a small housing allowance, and the assurance that I’d get a check every two weeks.

It was snowing in Jerusalem when I arrived over New Year’s weekend in 2000. The city looked beautiful, even peaceful. But that was before the Second Intifada, before the riots and clouds of tear gas, before “rubber” bullets knocked me down and left painful welts on my legs, before protesters and soldiers killed each other in gunfights, before a suicide bomb tore bodies apart in the market across from my house—and before I bribed an official to give me a “human shield” visa so I could get to Iraq before the US invasion.

I got married a few months before leaving Egypt. My wife had been my girlfriend at Stanford, and we rekindled the relationship when I was in Cairo. We moved to Jerusalem to start a new life in a new land. We settled in a handsome, three-story brownstone off Agripas Street. It was quite charming—you entered through a gate and walked down a narrow path rimmed with morning glories and jasmine—but it badly needed renovation. The roof leaked, and there was no proper heating. We put oversize kerosene lanterns by the bed at night and by our feet if we were sitting and reading. The lanterns heated up a tiny area, but the smell was pretty awful. I loved the location of the house. It was a twenty-minute walk to the Old City, and right across from the Mahane Yehuda, the city’s main market for butchers, bakers, and fruit and vegetable sellers. I spent a lot of time browsing in the market—or at least I did before the suicide bombers came.

WE LIVED IN AN AREA
called Nachlaot, a sort of Bohemian enclave. ITS winding lanes had speakeasies with no signs on the doors and a couple of underground music clubs in basements. It had a New York City East Village feel, a beatnik vibe, and was quite cool. Now large parts of it are ultra-Orthodox. Our friends were almost all journalists. The expat community was nothing like the one in Cairo. Most of the Americans in Jerusalem had made aliyah, a Hebrew word meaning “ascent,” which by Jewish custom means going to Israel. They were Americans who had decided to embrace Zionism and their Jewish heritage, and they were deeply involved in their temple groups. I was never able to break into their close-knit communities.

Part of my job at AFP was doing my own reports—interviewing people, finding features, turning out stories. But my main focus was running a dozen or so Palestinian reporters—in Gaza, in Nablus, in Tulkarm, in Ramallah, and so forth. Every morning at eight thirty I’d start calling them to find out what was going on in their areas that day and what had happened overnight. I kept checking in with them throughout the day. So if a big story broke in Ramallah, say, I would be on the phone a lot with my reporter there and write stories under his byline.

In Egypt I did a lot of local stories, even some restaurant reviews. Aside from my pieces on the attacks at Tahrir Square and Luxor, almost nobody outside the Cairo community noticed my work. In Jerusalem, with the Camp David Summit only months away, I was writing big international stories. I was part of the game. I had to be fast and couldn’t afford to make mistakes. When I hit “send,” the story went to Nicosia for a quick check by the editors there, then it hit the AFP wire in a minute, sometimes less. A mistake would go around the world in the blink of an eye.

The AFP bureau was in the Jerusalem Capital Studios (JCS) building, which was a media center mainly serving broadcast outlets (ABC, CNN, and BBC among others) because it had studios and satellite dishes. It was also a good location for wire organizations such as AFP because Israeli officials were always prowling the halls.

You didn’t need to work too hard to get a comment from an Israeli official. You could work for a regional Danish radio station, and if you needed a comment at four in the morning, you could reach a senior official who might spend an hour being interviewed on your station. In Cairo, you couldn’t find an Egyptian official to talk about anything, even something as innocuous as tourism. If you met an Israeli minister or deputy minister, he’d give you a cell phone number, if not his own, then one for his aide. It was answered twenty-four hours a day, and the official was authorized to give you a comment that, more often than not, was spicy, provocative, thought-out, and in English. I had never seen such a well-oiled PR machine.