Tarek Osman > Quotes

“Al-Zawahiri, the son of an upper middle-class family who had grown up in Al-Maadi, an affluent Cairene suburb, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of fifteen right after the 1967 defeat. He quickly moved from the Brotherhood's ordinary ranks to join (and create) independent, highly radicalized cells. Though he had no links to the murder of Sadat, he was imprisoned in the major incarceration waves that followed the crime, and was sentenced to three years. Having served his prison sentence, he emigrated to Saudi Arabia, then soon afterwards to Afghanistan to join in the fight against the Soviets. It was during that time that he met Dr Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian godfather of many militant Islamic groups and the founder of the Jihad Service Bureau, the vehicle that helped recruit thousands of Arabs to the Afghanistan War. Al-Zawahiri became a close friend and confidant of Azzam. After the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan, he returned to Egypt where he became the effective leader of the Al-Jihad group. In 1992, Dr Al-Zawahiri joined his old Arab Afghan colleague, the Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, in Sudan, and from there he continued to lead Al-Jihad, until its merger with Al-Qaeda in 1998. Dr Al-Zawahiri presented his thinking and rationale for ‘jihad by all means’ in his book Knights under the Prophet's Banner.38”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The Alexandria Bourse (the fourth largest worldwide) and the Cairo stock exchange were sizable, international markets. In fact, the story of the Alexandria Bourse – or the Alexandria Futures Exchange – is an interesting representation of Egyptian society's capitalism – and cosmopolitanism – in the first half of the twentieth century; the Bourse's board of directors included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Egyptians in addition to Egyptianized foreigners who had settled in the country.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“the expansionist Wahhabi project found fertile ground in Egypt. Three indigenous factors contributed to its favourable reception. First, between 1974 and 1985, more than 3 million Egyptians migrated to the Gulf, with the majority settling in Saudi Arabia. Most of them hailed from Egypt's lower (and lower middle) classes, and had had limited exposure to Egypt's old glamour. In part as a result, they quickly absorbed the cultures of their new home; and more slowly, the dominant social and cultural milieu of the Gulf's most austere centre found its way to Egypt's Delta and Saeedi villages, and later to the heart of Cairo and Alexandria.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The change can be measured in the increase in the proportion of women in Egypt wearing the veil, from less than 30 per cent to more than 65 per cent in two decades; by the early 1990s, the veil was established as the dress code on the Egyptian street rather than as an occasional choice. In the less-privileged villages of the Nile Delta, as well as in Cairo's and Alexandria's poorest neighbourhoods, the veil became the natural step for girls as young as twelve.5 There was also a general shift in the socially preferred pattern of gender roles, with the return to an emphasis on men's public role and women's domesticity.6”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Paris on the Nile’ or the ‘finery of Cairo’, Al-Ismailiya – a district to which Ismael gave his name – comprised large, wide avenues, piazzas, belle époque buildings and urban public gardens.8 He brought steam shipping to the Nile, which revolutionized internal trading. He was a major patron of the arts and created the Cairo Opera House, another architectural jewel. He founded Dar-Al-Kuttub (the National Library), an ambitious project that started with more than 250,000 volumes, most of which were gathered from Egyptian, Levantine, Turkish and European collections, and which grew to become the region's largest library and one of the cultural treasures of the world.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Voice of the Arabs (Sout Al-Arab), Nasser's far-reaching radio station, became a propagandist vehicle par excellence, conveying the leader's fiery speeches to the Arab world from ‘the Ocean to the Gulf’; even Egyptian cinema and music were mobil ized to market the notion of the ‘rising Arab nation’ led by its ‘historical leader’. A new adaptation of the Saladin story was made into a smash-hit film, in which the Kurdish leader who fought the Christian Crusaders in the name of Islam was transformed into ‘the servant and the leader of the Arabs fighting the invading Westerners’.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Such criticism grew in the later 1970s, as the immediate post-Nasser years gave way to the period of economic opening up (al-infitah) under Anwar Sadat, and the entire Nasserite project was assailed as a failure rooted in a lack of dynamism. If anything the exact opposite was true. Nasser's development programme was frenetically action-oriented as well as rich in rhetoric. In the space of a few years following the July 1952 coup that abolished Egyptian monarchism, Nasser overhauled Egypt's entire political system; sidelined the political class that had ruled Egypt for half a century, replacing the Turco-dominated aristocracy with ordinary Egyptians, who at least in theory represented the will and aspirations of the masses; emasculated all political parties; tried (and in many cases imprisoned) most of the key politicians of the ‘bygone era’; created a new constitutional order; and established a new system based on an ultra-powerful presidency supported by an executive government, the legitimacy of which was derived from the consent (albeit without formal electoral channels) of the people.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“1923 constitution. The committee, which comprised five Christians, one Jew and six Muslims, instituted Article 1 (that Islam is the religion of the state) unanimously. And interestingly the five Christian committee members were the ones who rejected a clause, suggested by a Muslim, to have a minimum number of parliamentary seats and ministerial posts reserved for Christians. ‘It would be a shame for Egyptian Christians to be appointed, not elected,’ commented one of the Christian committee members. That was the era when a Christian politician such as Makram Ebeid Pasha, the legendary general secretary of Al-Wafd, was elected for six consecutive terms to the parliament in a constituency with virtually no Christians. Sadly, those were different times.46 In another incident following its 2005 electoral success,”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“most intellectually intriguing episode in Ibn Hanbal's life was his fierce struggle with Al-Mutazillah, an isolationist school of Islamic philosophy that flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries in parts of Iraq and the Levant and which started with advocating the primacy of reasoning over tradition in interpreting the Koran and progressed into elaborate beliefs on the nature of God and the Koran that were very different from those of the Sunnis and the Shiis.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The Islamic movement in Egypt, from the late 1970s, managed to occupy the political space in the country that had been the domain of Nasserite Arab nationalism, and to monopolize the representation of the country's middle class.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“he did revive the thinking of two respectable (if rejectionist) Islamic thinkers of mediaeval times, Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taimiyah, and used their ideas as a focus for contemporary criticism of ‘modernity and Westernization’.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Ibn Taimiyah spent years hunting down any philosophical interpretation that appeared to deviate from the literalist, ‘clear’ interpretation of the Koran. He was especially scathing of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who, in earlier ages, had produced some of the most creative and refreshing insights in Islamic thought. Ibn Taimiyah's most famous book, Politics in the Name of Divine Rule for Establishing Good Order in the Affairs of the Shepherd and the Flock, called for strict imposition of the Sharia, set out the literalist interpretation of the Koran as the sole source and measure of law and rule, and criminalized the separation of power and authority from religious rule and jihad. Ibn Taimiyah's ideas had featured regularly, not only in Sayyid Qutb's writings, but in those of other jihadist theorists as well.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The story of Ayman Al-Zawahiri (head of Al-Qaeda following Osama bin Laden's killing in May 2011), his transform ation from a successful surgeon to a leader of a violent group, bent on the murder of thousands, is a perfect example of the radicalization of segments of the Egyptian middle class.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“to the, then, sympathetic Saudi Arabia, where many managed to build vast fortunes. Others settled in Europe, especially in Switzerland, where new branches of the Brotherhood were created and were able to operate freely.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“In the 1980s and 1990s, however, thousands of Egyptians were forced conscripts and paid fighters constituting the bulk of Iraq's 200,000 reservoir in its war with Iran. The ‘Egyptian fighter’ was also absent from the Arabs' most important struggle against Israel in the last thirty years: the Israeli–Hezbollah wars in southern Lebanon. Also, today, an Arab nationalist identity based on the old premise of an Egyptian leadership does not match the reality of the developmental state of Egyptian society relative to its supposed constituency (the Arab world).”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Between 1991 and 1993, the militants had virtually taken complete control of Imbaba, replacing the government as the social arbiter. The situation reached a climax in 1992 when the security forces decided to intervene. More than 12,000 troops in more than 100 armed cars descended on the neighbourhood (home to more than a million Cairenes) and sealed it off; by the end of a bloody, tense day,”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, political Islam in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particu lar, believed that Egypt's future was theirs.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Luxor attack in 1997 in which Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya killed fifty-eight tourists and four Egyptians outside a pharaonic temple. In the same year, an ambush near the Egyptian museum in downtown Cairo by the group took the lives of nine tourists. In 1995, eighteen Greek tourists had been killed close to the Pyramids. But the violence was not only directed at the ‘infidel Westerners’ (though they, and the tourism industry, were especially prized victims). Egyptians also suffered: between 1982 and 2000, more than 2,000 Egyptians died in terror attacks – from the speaker of parliament to a number of secular writers and commentators (for example, Farag Foda, a prominent and controversial writer, was assassinated in 1992, and in 1994 an assassination attempt was made against Egypt's Nobel Literature Laureate Naguib Mahfouz), to a series of senior police officers,39 and children caught up in the blasts.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The 1981 assassination of President Sadat is the perfect example of that flexible structure and decentralized modus operandi. The crime was undertaken by two groups (which, combined, comprised less than a dozen men) with limited technical capacity or hierarchy.36 The real potency of militant Islamism in Egypt lay not in the organizational acumen of its militants; it was in the thousands of young Egyptian Muslims who embraced the violent doctrine of its radical groups and who were willing to die in order to terrorize their own society and rulers.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Even the weighty Salafist voices (for example, Mohamed Seleem Al-Awaa,19 Mohamed Al-Ghazali,20 Fahmi Howeidy21 and Gamal Al-Banna22) were sidelined as ‘too intellectual’.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“(Ibrahim Pasha captured and flattened the Saudis' capital of Diraiyah – now a suburb of Riyadh, arrested the Saudi emir Abdullah Ibn Saud and sent him to Istanbul, where he was beheaded).”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Their chance came with the 2011 revolution. The group's leaders calculated that the end of Mubarak's reign would create a political void, and hoped that the Brotherhood, with their unmatched organizational skills, deep roots in Egyptian society, command over the religious vernacular, and the aura earned by so many decades of persecution and resilience, would gain a decisive advance. And so they lent their support to the uprising and played a leading role in its success.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Nasserite project was increasingly becoming real; something akin to a ‘United Arab World’ could, at the time, be envisaged; it was impossible to dismiss or ignore his project.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Thousands of prayer rooms (Zawyas) were established in garages and ground-floors in rich and poor neighbourhoods alike. In the mid-1980s there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, by the mid-2000s, there was a mosque for every 745 persons.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Some (but not Nasser) actually ‘swore on the Koran and the sword’ (pleaded allegiance to the group). But neither the Brotherhood's political nor its military leadership had any command of the group of officers who led the coup in July 1952.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“the Luxor attack (the latter widely reported in the West as a serious indication of a regime unable to assert its control over the country and contain the threat), the Egyptian security forces launched a comprehensive campaign against the key militant groups in (and outside) the country: infiltrating the most important, targeting their key leaders, taking control of thousands of mosques, squeezing their financial sources, draining the weapons sources (especially in Al-Saeed) and stepping up the internal pressure with a series of arrests. In a very intelligent move, the government diverted the payment of Islamic alms (zakat) from the local committees and charities that traditionally had allocated it to government-controlled banks, depleting one of their key sources of internal funding.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“unique mix of Sunni theology and Shi'ite social traditions.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“since ancient times, the people of Egypt have been expert in deceit and treachery’, he said, before recommending a ruthless campaign in the country.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Rather, the society was wide open to popular Western culture at the very time when it was being drawn towards conservatism and increased religiosity. The Cairene and Alexandrian middle-class family would watch the afternoon lesson of Sheikh Al-Sharaawi only to switch channels later to watch the evening episode of Dallas or Dynasty, and later Grey's Anatomy or Desperate Housewives. As large segments of society became participants in the new consumerist waves,13 they were also presented with archaic, debilitated views of ‘a return to Islam’.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak