389. Road To 9/11: Origin of Al-Qaeda (Part 1)

What were the building blocks of the rise of Radical Islamism that paved the road to the 9/11 terror attacks? How did the torture of radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood fan the flames of Islamist thought in the 1960s? Who were Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and how did their experience in Egyptian prisons lead to the rise of extremist ideologies? In Episode 1 of this new series, William Dalrymple is joined by Jason Burke, author of Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam and The Revolutionists, to discuss the seeds of Islamic terrorism. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This is the story of how the radical fringe of mid-century Cairo and the torture cells of Egyptian prisons forged the ideas which would ultimately inspire the deadliest terrorist attack in human history. In this episode of Empire, we trace the ideological roots of 9/11. We explore the life of Said Kuttub and the young bookish doctor who took up his violent mantle from inside a courtroom cage, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In this first episode of what is an extraordinary lineup of guests to talk about the road to 9/11, I'm joined by my old friend, the author and journalist and distinguished scholar

• 2:09Speaker 03

  of radical terrorism and revolutionists, Jason Burke. He is the author of many books, many of which I've had the pleasure of reviewing and blurbing over the years. Al Qaeda, The True Story of Radical Islam, the book that taught the world what this movement actually was, one of the first books out of the trap after 9/11. And most recently, The Award Winning Revolutionists, The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, which has just been shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford Prize and is rightly being celebrated in all the book pages. It's a brilliant gripping book which tells the story of radicalism and political extremism that gripped the 1970s and its absolute catnip for Empire fans. So go out and buy it.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  And Jason has very kindly agreed to come today not to talk about that, but really on the work he's been doing for the last 30 years on Al Qaeda. So let's first focus on Said Kuttub, who most commentators focus in on as the originator of the ideology which had its most terrible expression in 9/11. He's a man who, you in your books, Jason, advocates the key advocate of modern Sunni Islamic radicalism. Take us there. Who is he? Who is this man?

• 3:27Speaker 04

  So Kuttub is the iconic figure, if you like, of modern Sunni militant extremism. And he's still very present in the thinking and the ideas of the movement, even though he was hanged by the Egyptian authorities in 1966.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Even because he was hanged by the Egyptian authorities, it cemented him as a martyr.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  No, absolutely. But yeah, certainly. And the sense of him as a martyr is absolutely key to his appeal, although I think his ideas would have had an enormous impact anyway because of the timing of the publication of his key work, which we'll talk about in a minute, Milestones. So Kuttub is absolutely crucial. He was born in 1906 in a village called Mousha in Upper Egypt. It's one of those, you know, remote-ish, smallish villages, completely nondescript, absolutely no reason why it should produce one of these kind of major thinkers.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  And the boonies by Egyptian standards. This is, people in Cairo make laugh about people from that region.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And, and I think that's one of the things that's important is he's coming from a background that is absolutely not a kind of Kyren elite. He, his dad is a sort of smallish landowner, quite involved in politics, actually sort of secular nationalist politics.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  So he's well off. He's not the dispossessed. He's not the wretched of the earth.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely not the wretched of the earth, no. But then these people really are, not least because they usually don't have the education to go off and write great big tracts. There are exceptions, but on the whole, but not, definitely not the kind of big Egyptian landowning elite.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  He's not a member of the Zabalet Club or anything like that?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  No. And he doesn't have the connections, which is important later. And so he goes, he has a kind of mixed education, mainly in secular kind of government schools. He spends a year or so in a religious school and he doesn't like it much because the discipline's very harsh and the facilities are terrible. But he, he does learn the Quran, so he's a Hafiz, which is an early indication of not just a religious devotion, but in some ways an almost romantic literary attachment to the message and the culture and the history of Islam and the message of Islam, which is really interesting.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  And he is interested in literature, he's interested in poetry. He goes to the Dar al-Loom Government College in Cairo. He's a bit shocked when he gets to Cairo because women go around unveiled and it's very different from the kind of rural, small town environment that he's grown up in.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Not just unveiled, I mean, pictures from 1950s, 1960s Cairo show all these women very much wearing sort of miniskirts and pictures of glamorous people who are now grandmothers beside pools and all this sort of stuff on people's mantles. Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  This is when he goes up as a kid. He's only 19 or something. And he has a, you know, put it blunt, he has a real problem with women all his life. I mean, a lot of his writing is inflected with a kind of deep misogyny, a fear of women, a fear of intimacy. And that's important as well later on. And he's very involved in, and it's an amazing time in Egypt, the interwar period, I mean, this kind of politically febrile but enormous cultural output as well and activity. And he's involved in poetry and circles around literature. He's a literary critic of some note.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  He's clever, is he?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  He's clever, yeah. He's definitely, he's bright, he's little, he's quite, he's not physical, he's slightly melancholic, possibly depressive. He doesn't make friends easily. He's not out partying and as I say, he has real problems with any relationship with the opposite sex. He writes a, a kind of lovelorn, rather weird, romantic, tortured book at one point called Thorns, about what may have been a kind of failed early relationship that certainly didn't end in any intimacy.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  He's, you know, a bit of a loner, but engaged in these kind of vibrant debates between literary forms that are taking place in, in the Arab world at the time and poetry and so forth. And he works at the government. He works as a, as an education official inspector and such like.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And then in 1948, the Egyptian government, partly perhaps to get him out of the country where he might be possibly trouble, sends him to America to study at schools. And the effect is precisely the opposite of what they, what they want or expect.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  It is indeed. And I mean, this moment where he goes to America is seen often as a kind of absolutely crucial turning point and the, the moment where he has a sort of epiphany, if you like, and, and becomes viscerally anti-American. And I'd contest that a bit. If you look at his writings before that moment, 48, 49, he's already very involved.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Heading in that direction, yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Well, he's inverted these, these, he's very interested in authenticity, very interested in the, the kind of, the real spirit of Islam and of, you know, Egypt's identity, cultural identity, how it's under attack. He's also steeped in these discussions, as he would be obviously, about nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, the alternatives to capitalism. And he, he's not living in a kind of vacuum somewhere, or rather in a, in a hermetically sealed cultural zone. And he's writing about this. He's writing about increasingly kind of vitriolic stuff, actually. And that's why he gets dispatched to the US.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  And 48, of course, an important year because it's the year that the Egyptians fail to save the Palestinians. It's the year of the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians get kicked out of their homes. Many of them end up under Egyptian rule in Gaza. And the Egyptian army is ill-prepared, badly led, and widespread moment of disillusionment with the, with the government, not just among Islamic radicals, but across the board, at how badly the Egyptian army fared when facing the new Israeli, what will become the IDF.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And I think that may have contributed to the decision to send Sumar Kuttub, who's a brilliant writer, and increasingly vocal in his criticism, subversive ideas, get him out of the country, send him off to the US. I mean, this is a period, 48, 49 is a really difficult period in, in Egyptian politics. There are riots, there are protests, there are all sorts of calls for a new regime, a new world in the, in the post-war period. So yeah, absolutely. Get him out of the country and hopefully he'll come back after a couple of years moderated by his experience in the consumerist, capitalist world of the Midwest, the US.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Now, many of the accounts of Kuttub's side focus on one particular evening in Greenley, Colorado. A small farming town on the high plains, an hour north of Denver, on the edge of the Rockies. It's a winter's evening in 1949 and in the hall of a local church, a dance is getting underway. The pastor, wanting the young people to enjoy themselves, dims the lights and puts on a record on the gramophone, the hit of the season, "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Couples begin to sway, arms circle, waists, chests pressed together. It's about as innocent a scene as post-war America could offer, but not to Saad Qutub. Take, tell us what his reaction is, Jason.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  Well, he's disgusted and horrified. I mean, not least because this is a pastor, this is a place of worship. And, and the past himself has put on this record with its sort of moderately suggestive lyrics. And for him, that catalyzes this idea of the US as a place of kind of unbridled lusts, if you like, whether they're materialist or sexual or, or other. And, and this comes out in a lot of his writings. So he's, he's also horrified by jazz music, which he describes as, as, as a kind of animalistic, in a fairly racist way, actually, animalistic music that appeals to the most base instincts

• 12:21Speaker 04

  of hu- of humanity. And that's really his vision of America is that it is base, it is debased, it is not just corrupt, but morally kind of putrid.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  It should be said that I think quite a lot of people in Europe at the same time have similar-ish prejudices. I mean, my mother, I remember as a good Catholic, talking about Elvis Presley with a sort of sense of horror, but this is the Islamic version. So what would be mildly shocking and distasteful to a pious European is to an Islamist from the boonies, much, much worse, horrifying degeneracy.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and, and it doesn't have what he appreciates, what he's looking for, which is the more elevating elements of human nature. He sees it all as, as degrading and as bestial. And you're absolutely right to point to the broader context, because you know, often he's, he is seen, Qutub is seen as, as very isolated and a kind of Islamist in his little kind of religious world, but he's not, he's exposed to all these much broader trends. And, and this is a period where people are beginning to question consumerism in a really serious way. I mean, that will come through later in the 60s, but also, you know, the US and the US model is becoming so dominant in the post-war world that everywhere people are saying, do

• 13:45Speaker 04

  we really want this kind of materialism and consumerism and capitalism? And how does it affect our societies and what does it mean for us?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  And this is precisely, of course, the moment that the US is beginning to flex its muscles. It's not long before Suez, when, when America will trim Britain's imperial ambitions. And people all over the world are beginning to get a bit, you know, facing the reality of a, of a newly powerful, newly imperial America and reacting to it in different ways.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Also importantly, and you covered it in your recent brilliant podcast on the, on the Algerian revolution, I mean, this is a moment where the ideas of third worldism and the global south and the developing world and as a block, as a counter to the West and often to the USSR as well, are beginning to, to come through. And I think it's a mistake to see Qutub as isolated from that. I think a lot of his thinking is about that. And one of the first books he writes back, writes when he comes back from the US is about exactly the confrontation, the competition between Islam and capitalism. And that's really interesting.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Jason, so, so bring us back now to 1950s Egypt. Qutub comes home, a changed man, and the first thing he does really is to throw himself into the Muslim Brotherhood, who, having a, having a good sort of moment in Egypt. This is a, a moment of great growth and influence for them.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  So the Muslim Brotherhood are founded in 1928. Hassan al-Banar, a school teacher who lives right next to the Suez Canal, creates this movement, a really visionary idea of what a social movement, religious, political, social movement could be, based on preaching Dawah, but also involving a huge social outreach, really sophisticated and resilient organisation based on branches and networks and cells and so forth, but very much kind of active in the public space. And it takes off. I mean, it really grows fast. And by this mid, late 50s, you're looking at possibly up to a million Egyptians and members.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  I mean, it's, it's really become a potent movement. There's been a element within it all the time, a debate over, do they use violence? Is it non-violent? And in the post 48, 49 moment, with the kind of radicalisation that goes along with the war in Palestine and what will become Israel, the violent element within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt becomes much stronger. And this sets up some dynamics which are really important.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Maybe, Jason, for a second, paint a picture of 1950s Cairo. This is a city almost under occupation. The British are still around, aren't they?

• 16:40Speaker 04

  50s Egypt is, is teetering in between a kind of old world of imperial subordination, effectively.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  That world in the background of that, of the Lawrence of Arabia film with lots of Brits in khaki shorts wandering around clubs ordering dread of tonics.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  At a time when the world is changing incredibly rapidly and Egypt then moves almost overnight into the new world, when Gamal Abdul Nasser, a military officer who has actually fought in 48 and been disgusted by that failure, but has other reasons to resent the decrepit monarchy and British overlordship and so forth, takes power with half a dozen or a dozen similar military figures and moves Egypt into this kind of brave new world of pan-Arab quasi-socialism and nationalism, which is the new world for

• 17:39Speaker 04

  much of the Arab and Islamic world, going forward for, for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Now, how quickly, Jason, does that world clash with the Brotherhood? Is it an immediate confrontation or, or could it have got a different direction?

• 17:52Speaker 04

  It's not immediate because Nasser, he's not a pious man, but he understands the role of religion. Some of the people around him, including one other officer called Anwar Sadat, are more pious, genuinely observant, but they don't see the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. And actually, there are some suggestions that Nasser and Qutub sat down before the coup, discussed what might, what might not happen or, and they're definitely concerned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Do we know that to be true?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen it reported many times. I don't know, to be honest.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Interesting. I never heard it.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  No, I, you know, it struck me when I read it quite recently, actually, in, in doing some of my research for the book, but, but it's a nice image. I mean, the two of them sitting there, whether it actually happened or not, I don't know. But, but it does, it does say a lot about how it could have happened. And basically, the Muslim Brotherhood are not averse to the coup. They've been banned already. Hassan al-Banar has been assassinated by the king's kind of thugs, basically. And there's no reason for them to be against the coup. That sours very quickly, partly because of this, this violent trend within the Muslim Brotherhood.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  That leads in 1954 to a Brotherhood member firing eight shots at Nasser in Alexandria. He misses everyone, but this changes the future, well, really for all our futures. It's a very important pivot moment in history.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  It's the moment where the wave of repression and Qutub is among those detained, thrown into jail, where he'll spend the next 10 years.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  And we should say that one of the great themes that we're going to see in the next few episodes, not just with Saad Qutub, but the, the whole Islamist movement and its birth, a lot of it happens within Egyptian prisons. And the repression and the torture that takes place in Egyptian prisons is the kind of perfect breeding ground for the kind of, it's rather like sort of the early Christians created, the success of the early Christianity created by the persecutors of Diocletian, also in Egypt, brings forth the Christian revival under Constantine. This is the moment where repression of Islamism in Egyptian prisons and suppression of the

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Brotherhood gives it a new force, in fact.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Certainly, a, a, a lot of those who experience, which are, you know, absolutely horrendous treatment in these vast prisons that start, and, and prison camps actually out in the desert that start to be constructed.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  I've been to some of the ones in Asyut, which was specifically built at this time for, for Islamist prisoners. And, and it's weirdly enough, it's exactly the same place the Byzantines had their prison camp for heretics in the, in the 6th century. And they're almost, they were sort of next door to each other. It's where Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantine, gets sent. It's where many of the Brotherhood are sent from the suburbs of Cairo into this desert prison camp in this harsh desert around Asyut.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  That says a lot about how regimes struggle to deal with opposition movements and how that produces further extremism. And, and if you, I was doing a quick mental scan across the region in this moment and in the 60s and 70s about what's happening in Iran with the Savak and what's happening in.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  The Shah's secret police, yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Elsewhere in Syria and, you know, all these places and, and how you get a catalyzing effect with the prisons. And, and actually, the first real militant, Islamic militant who comes out of the movement we're discussing, the kind of Qutubist movement as it becomes, a man called Shukri Mustafa, who ends up being a mini revolt and being captured and hanged in 1977. He is a veteran of these prisons. And that's one of the first instances where you get exactly what you're talking about.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Jason, we're going to have to take a break here, but after this, we're going to come back and we're going to see what Qutub is writing in prison, his seminal work, a text which will become the blueprint for modern jihadism, changes everything.

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• 23:50Speaker 03

  Welcome back. So Jason, we were talking just before the break about Saad Qutub being flung into prison. And this being oddly the chrysalis in which he develops now into the fully fledged Islamist radical, who he is now remembered as.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's about 50 years old. Melancholic, depressive, frail in health, celibate, no family to speak of. And he's thrown into these prisons. And whether he himself is subjected to torture or just witnesses very close up the effects of that torture, hears it, sees the victim.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  The screams, yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  It is unclear, but, but I mean, it's such absolutely horrendous experience. At the very least, he's beaten up a few times. Other inmates had dogs set on them or hang by their feet, have their feet beaten, you know, starved. It's just horrendous. And because he's ill quite a lot, he's often in the prison infirmary. So he sees these prisoners being brought in with their injuries from torture. And it's just the most horrendous experience for him. And he, he takes a kind of sanctuary, if you like, or seeks in, in Quranic study, which even the Egyptian regime at the time can't really prevent inmates doing.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  And he writes this enormous kind of exegesis of the Quran, a six volume work, which is really engaging in the literary elements of the Quran. He is a former literary critic after all, and looking at it very much as a kind of artistic work, but with a lot of the theology obviously therein.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Six volumes still less.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's huge. But I'm very erudite and, and quite original. The real work that is important comes towards the end of his incarceration or his first incarceration, which is Milestones.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Now, this is something we really need to understand because this is a book that's read by everyone who will take on this mantle after him of the Islamist movement and, and absolute seminal text for everyone involved in 9/11. So let's, let's look at it in some detail, Jason. Take us to what it actually says.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  So Milestones is kind of the Ugh text of modern Sunni Islamic jihadi activism. And it, it starts with this kind of lapidary statement that mankind is on the brink of a precipice, facing total annihilation. And it then, it's quite a short book, but it could have been over this 70, 80 pages. Gives his prescription as to what's gone wrong and what can now go right. And it's not just addressed to Muslims. It's, it's about mankind as a whole, but it's humanity as it were. But he's really addressing Muslims because he's saying what is going wrong in the Islamic world

• 26:54Speaker 04

  is that we have departed from the true message of our faith, of the prophet, and we are suffering as a result. We are on the wrong path. That's the Milestones.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And let's look at two key concepts here. Jahiliya, the idea that the pagan ignorance of pre-Islamic Arabia has returned under Nasser and we're now in this sort of, he equates the secular nationalism of Nasser with the pagan, non-Islamic, anti-Islamic world before the rise of the prophet.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's new. Other, other thinkers such as Maloudi, who you'll know from your South Asian studies, have discussed something similar, but for the whole of humanity effectively. He, he's being much more specific. He's saying that we have a corrupt, apostate, hypocritical leadership in Egypt and in, he doesn't say it quite as directly, but in the Islamic world. And that we need a vanguard of committed believers

• 28:14Speaker 04

  who will take us back to the right path through the means of jihad, who will bring back sovereignty to Islam.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  And true believers among, among Muslims.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the only people who can do that is a small, you know, are the committed believers who are prepared to sacrifice their lives, who are prepared to do whatever it takes. And he's a little bit unclear as to what that might actually be. But basically who will execute this mission of returning Islam to the true path and overthrow what he calls the obstacles to the re-establishment of the true faith.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Now, one thing to establish is that at this point, his aim is very much against those, in a sense, who've thrown him into prison. This is not a cry for attacks on America or attacks on, on non, non Muslims. This is focused mainly on war against fellow Muslims who should be declared not truly Muslim or Takfir.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  But there's that element too. There's the Takfir element, which is really important, which is that the true believers is not the unbelievers in the West. It's the unbelievers in the Islamic world, such as Nasser and the other rulers and, and their collaborators.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Now, again, an important point we should say is that, is that this isn't just Egyptians and a few people in, in the suburbs of Cairo that get to read this. Copies make it quite quickly to Saudi, don't they? And are distributed by the Wahhabis. And it very rapidly becomes a kind of pop text.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's, the book is incredibly popular.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Lesson to us both, Jason, to write short books, 70 pages.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, I know, I know.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  How big was your revolutionist?

• 30:18Speaker 04

  680.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  There's a much better business model as well. He goes through five, he gets, there are five reprints in the first six months. I mean, this is sort of, you know, before the, before the Egyptian authorities even kind of get across the, the effect of this book and the power of it, the kind of concentrated power of it. So it's everywhere very quickly. And yeah, some of the, some, they go everywhere. All the editions go everywhere in the Islamic world, obviously, the Arab speaking world. Translations come much, much later, but they do go to Saudi. And yeah, the Qutub's texts later on, when the Saudis begin this kind of big rollout

• 31:03Speaker 04

  of their version of Islam as a kind of soft power exercise across the entire Islamic world. Among the various texts are very conservative, radical, intolerant thinkers like Ibn Tamea, the 13th century scholar who inspired Qutub to an extent, but also Qutub himself. I mean, this is a kind of manual for radicalization and, and challenging these often secular nationalist rulers in, in the Islamic world that are being distributed by these big Saudi government funded NGOs through the seventies and wailing to the eighties and beyond.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Now, Jason, one thing I'm not clear in my head is that he's been sung into prison. How come he's writing these books? Has he, has he been let out to write them or is he writing them in prison and smuggling them out or?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  It's not, he's writing them in prison, actually getting them to, to publishers from in prison. In 64, when, is, is when Milestones is published, he's in, he's in prison. He's then released from prison. There's a moment where Nasser kind of takes the foot off the, or the pressure off the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood. And there are all sorts of dynamics going on within the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its relationship with the regime. At this moment, Nasser feels it's a good idea to just ease up a bit. He's released.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Partly because Nasser's, at this point in, in, in the early 1960s, he's the winner. Everyone loves Nasser. He's inspiring people across the entire Arab world. He's absolute pinup moment. Everyone appreciates what he's doing. And this is not so much a good moment for the Brotherhood because the, such is the charisma of Nasser that he's eclipsing them in some ways.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and it's important to, to remember in this period that the kind of Islamism, even in its more moderate version, is

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Yes, the Muslim Brotherhood is a big movement, but Islamism is not the predominant ideology by a long way. The predominant ideology is nationalist, secular, leftist, inflected, and very much not this kind of religious prescription.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  And this is also the golden age of Egyptian music, the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Everyone as far away as Yemen and northern Syria are watching Cairo movies and listening to Cairo divas, and these guys are marginalized.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  There's this brilliant anecdote where Abdullah Azam, who we'll talk about later, the second great major thinker of Sunni Islam, radical Islam in this period, he ends up in Cairo around this period and complains that of the hundreds of thousands of students and other young women that he's seen in the street, only one is veiled, and that was Saad Kuttub's niece.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Brilliant. So nonetheless, this is the moment that Kuttub in August 1966 is convicted of conspiracy by NASA's government. And he's not just thrown back in prison at this point, he is sent to the gallows.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's released and then pretty much picks up on this very spurious pretext, back in prison. Yeah, and he's hanged and thus becomes the martyr.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  And this is actually a kind of major error for NASA. This revives what had been an entirely flagging movement.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it gives massive momentum to Kuttub's ideas, put it that way. I mean, he becomes the martyr, Saad Kuttub, and the actual act of the hanging and the violence of the hanging, it becomes a sort of symbolic moment that says everything that some people want to think about the repressive, decadent, hypocritical, un-Islamic regime and rulers.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Now, among those who are horrified by the hanging of Kuttub, and someone who'd really admired his writing, is someone from exactly the world that Kuttub was not part of, which is the smart Cairo suburb of Mahdi. And in Mahdi, aged 14, there is a bookish bespectacled, brilliant, top of his class boy who comes from one of the grandest medical and clerical families in Egypt, very much the kind of people who are creating NASA's world. And yet he's also very much connected with the world of Al-Azza. His great uncle had been a grand Imam of the most renowned Islamic university in the world, but also in Egypt.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  His dad is a professor of pharmacology. Introduce us, Jason, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a crucial figure in this story.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Ayman al-Zawahiri is exactly the kind of young man, troubled, brilliant, educated, urban, who was really dramatically affected by Kuttub's writings in Egypt in that time. And he is, as you say, a teenager. He has a familial connection to Kuttub with an uncle who had known Kuttub and possibly studied with him or worked with him at one time or another. And the uncle explains who Kuttub was and to an extent what he thought to the young Zawahiri.

• 36:46Speaker 04

  Zawahiri then goes on and reads milestones and goes out and forms his own kind of teenage group dedicated to the overthrow of NASA and the Egyptian regime, which is kind of bold for a 15-year-old. And amazingly, that group stay together to an extent. I mean, the core of it.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  And are they all from this posh world? I mean, we are talking super posh at this point. Zawahiri is born in, almost in a sporting club world of croquet lawns and jacarandas.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Sure, but he's very slightly on the wrong side of the tracks. And literally, there's a railway that goes through Mahdi and they're kind of, you know, they're living in the slightly down a hill side of it. And I'm not sure they're permitted, they're not given membership.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  How interesting. I'd always just thought he was a rich, rich boy.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  No, no, no, they're not given membership to the Mahdi Sporting Club. Not that they probably want it. I mean, I think they're not part of the real Cairo elite. And that's again really important because there's this sort of, in Kuttub, there's this really strong message of social justice. And he talks about classes, I mean, clearly influenced by communism and other leftist ideologies and repression on a kind of class basis. And there's a lot of stuff that's sort of close to arguments about social exclusion. And I think the interesting thing about Zawahiri is that there is an element of kind of resentment towards the elite

• 38:22Speaker 04

  and a sense of injustice.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  I didn't know that. How interesting. So he's not the same class as Osama bin Laden?

• 38:29Speaker 04

  No, Osama bin Laden is exceptional in kind of the world he came from and his family and the relationship with the Saudi regime and so forth. But no, it's not like they're these two kind of rich kids. I mean, there's no way that Zawahiri had, you know, he does his military service as a military surgeon. When he comes out, he gets married to a nice devout local girl and a very quiet, austere wedding. And he sets up a clinic as a pediatrician in Mahdi. He lives in the clinic. It's a, you know, I mean, it's kind of upper middle class.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  You know, you and I both know similar people. I have friends in Isambab, where I lived for a few years and so forth, who are very much in that kind of zone. And actually, importantly, that is also partly the constituency, a big constituency for Islamism.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Particularly for some reason, people in medicine, in engineering, in the kind of non-humanities.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Non-humanities. Yeah, that's been discussed, you know, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, whatever Latin tag you want. And there's lots of speculation as to why that might be the case. Some of it fairly spurious, but it's certainly, certainly true. It's also the case that these kind of technical disciplines in this period, 1960s, 1970s, there are lots and lots of engineers.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Lots of them around, yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  It's what a new developing country needs.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  Quite, and it's what they were producing in the educational establishments.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Now, the next thing that happens, crucial milestone that we've discussed in an entire separate series, is the Six-Day War, 1967. And this, if Suez is the moment when NASA bursts onto the world stage as this great hero of the Arab world, 67 is the moment when that balloon is punctured. The Israelis massively defeat not just the Egyptians, but the Syrians and everyone else, the Jordanians, and Egypt and its secular government are both humiliated and made to look failures. They have failed to defend the Arab world, they failed to defend the Islamic world.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  So take us to that moment and what happens now.

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Right, it is absolutely the case that the 67 catastrophe for the Arab powers is a seismic event and it completely undermines NASA's claim to leadership of the Arab world and his grip on Egyptian national identity in a sense. And above all, that model, the ideology that is nationalist, Pan-Arab, broadly secular-ish, albeit with significant recognition of faith as important culturally and socially and so forth, but not politically.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  It definitely undermines that. And importantly too,

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Destroys the credibility of a whole generation of leaders and a lot of young people are watching and thinking they have failed, now it's our turn. One example being a young Palestinian student called Yasser Arafat, among many, many others. So, so there's absolutely that moment. And what isn't necessarily the case is that this translates immediately and directly into support for Islamism. In fact, if you read Tarnak Cafe, brilliant book by Nageed Mahfouz, who, a great Egyptian author, Nobel Prize winner, who was actually possibly discovered by Kuttub.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  By Kuttub, and Kuttub had reviewed his early books, hadn't he?

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Exactly, in his sort of literary critic days. Tarnak Cafe is written shortly after this moment and, and describes Egyptian society at the time. And one of the protagonists is saying, oh, no, no, you know, the great problem is not, is that we haven't been socialist enough. And if you look at the, the protests and the demonstrations immediately post sixty seven, sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy, I mean, a moment of enormous unrest across the whole world in terms of demanding new things, this kind of nineteen, late nineteen sixties moment in the Arab world, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. But those in Egypt are often demanding more socialism, more kind of progressive agendas than, than their alternatives.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  And, and at the time, I found these quotes from the Muslim Brotherhood when I was researching my book, where they're saying, oh, you know, we're completely stuffed here. We've got, we haven't got any purchase on public opinion.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  We're in a really, you know, we're in a really bad place. And even after sixty seven.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Because, because it's very easy for historians to see this as the moment that Islamism gets a shot in the arm.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  I, I think it's a long burn and that's why I think the seventies is much more important and certainly the eighties.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Is there a good book about the rise of revolutionaries in the seventies you recommend, Jason?

• 43:40Speaker 04

  I don't know, if there isn't, somebody ought to write one.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  A very long one.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Anyway, so we need now to get to Sadat because Sadat has succeeded Nasser. He then goes on, as we learnt in our series on the Arab Israeli wars, to make this extremely controversial in the eyes of many peace with Israel, which regains the Sinai for Egypt, but basically shafts the Palestinians who are left out of this deal. That there is, there are clauses in the Camp David Accords that talk about the West Bank being given back, but they are sort of never acted on and, and, and having made peace, there's no pressure put on the Israelis to, to give the, the West Bank back.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  And so we get to that moment, this famous moment in October nineteen eighty one, when a young army lieutenant named Khalid Istanbuli jumps out of the back of a truck at a military parade, the victory parade in October nineteen eighty one, and attacks Sadat, who's sitting in the front row. Among those present, who hits the ground and survives the grenades going off is Mubarak,

• 45:00Speaker 03

  who, who, who avoids the shrapnel. And what's the famous line? I have killed Pharaoh, I'm not afraid to die. Take us here.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  So to understand what happened to Sadat, you have to understand two things. One is what Sadat does in the seventies and the other thing is, is the rise of a kind of non Muslim Brotherhood opposition, Islamist opposition, who are drawing a lot of inspiration from Kuttub and others in that period. So Sadat pivots away from the Nasser legacy very quickly and decides he's going to back the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists against the leftists and establish this new, more conservative constituency. He's trying to juggle that with a very broad ranging economic liberalisation programme,

• 45:49Speaker 04

  which is a bit of a disaster and increases inequality. Prices of bread and all this sort of thing go through the roof. And he's trying to pivot geopolitically towards the US and the Camp David Agreement and peace with Israel is part of that. At the same time, he's allowed the Islamists to operate again. So he's released a lot from prison, he's downsized the departments who are looking at the Islamists when there are the bread riot in nineteen seventy seven. The only people who are blamed are, you know, the usual suspects, communists, socialists, leftists, Mossad agents, Libyans, da, da, da.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  And, and so through the seventies, the Islamists have moved into particularly the universities, but lots of other institutions and are really quite big. Muslim Brotherhood is sticking to a non violent, non confrontational strategy, trying to grow through just non violent preaching, and they are growing steadily through that period in Egypt. There is a radical fringe that are being generated, as there always is, on the kind of outer margins of the movement, who believe the Muslim Brotherhood are moving too slowly. They also believe that other groups are even a bit more activist than the Muslim Brotherhood are also moving too slowly and they're looking for a violent revolt, revolution, as Kuttub would have recommended.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Now, in the aftermath of the Sadat assassination, there are massive roundups. The Egyptian police want to know who has been behind this, who Islam bully is been sent by or relying on. And they're very much picking up all the usual Muslim Brotherhood suspects and, and filling the prison with these, with these people. And among the people picked up is the thirty year old surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri. Now, this brings us to one of the most extraordinary pieces of courtroom footage that we, that

• 48:00Speaker 03

  we all know in these, in every doco on this subject, of Zawahiri in a metal cage, prisoner one one three, screaming, now we want to speak to the whole world. Who are we? So where is democracy? Where is freedom? Where is human rights?

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he says it in English. It's incredible. It's, it's such an important moment. So Zawahiri didn't actually know anything about the plot to kill Sadat. It was different group of militants who were involved in that. He was still active. He'd actually been more and more active over the previous couple of years in this violent fringe that were responsible for the death of Sadat. But he, he didn't know about the

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Actual.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  The actual assassination. When he found out about it, he thought it was a very bad idea. He was then picked up anyway, because there'd been successive huge roundups over the previous few years. But he gets picked up in the aftermath of the assassination. He's chucked into prison, tortured horribly. They do absolutely atrocious things to him. Basically make sure that he betrays others and then they take the people he's betrayed, torture them and then put them in his cell so that he can be, see absolutely the consequences of his failure to withstand, you know, whatever horrible torture it was. And, I mean, you know, it's, it's really appalling.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  The Egyptian Mukaberat secret police are some of the nastiest in the whole region.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  Do not mess around. No. There are also trials and Zawahiri is eventually in the courtroom, in this cage, and he makes this incredible speech where he's, he's always shaking with anger. And the thing is, he does it in English and it's captured by cameras and it's broadcast. And for me, it's, it's this moment where this language of Kuttub, of the new Islamic extremism, comes out of the back rooms in the mosques or the community centres where

• 50:17Speaker 04

  no one else is around or someone's lounge or whatever. And it goes into the public space in a really dramatic new way. And it's a very, very pivotal moment in the development of

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Islamic extremism of that new Sunni Jahadi ultra violent, ultra committed character.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Now, Zohairi does get out of prison eventually.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  But as happens with so many of these people who have been tortured and abused in the Egyptian prisons, he emerges full of hatred and longing for revenge against his persecutors. He's a harder, crueler man. And he's looking for a place to rebuild and he finds it in a city you and I know very well, Jason, Peshawar.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  A dusty frontier city, filling up now with Arab volunteers, many fleeing the Arab world and the kind of roundups which we've been talking about, but also drawn to the Pakistan-Afghan border, wanting to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan for the cause of Islam. And there, a Palestinian preacher is issuing a global call for holy war, quietly financed by a pious, young Saudi called Osama bin Laden. Jason, will you join us on the next episode to take us to this frontier zone?

• 51:53Speaker 04

  With great pleasure. Any invitation to return to Peshawar, particularly in the early 1980s, I would gladly accept, Willie.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  It's a place that you and I cut our teeth in our different ways and had one of the most exciting cities, had to be a young journalist at that period. Anyway, this will be the next episode.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk about such interesting, fascinating, important subjects.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  That is not well known enough and we all need to understand it better. And there's no better way to understand it than to read Jason's brilliant books. I have loved his Al Qaeda books, which we've been drawing in on extensively for this. But his most recent book, which we've referred to again, is a massive and brilliant and acclaimed tome called The Revolutionists, now out in paperback at a bookshop near you and available to our club members at a considerable discount. Now, if you want to hear Jason and I revel in the excitement of the allies of Peshawar and the Islamist cells which are growing there at this point, initially to take on the Soviets, you do not have to wait.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  You can access that straight away now and ad free by heading to empirepoduk.com. That's empirepoduk.com to become a member. Now, it also keeps us going, obviously, is the thing that supports this whole endeavour of the Empire Pod. So if you like what we're doing, please join up and help us. So from me, William Drumple.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  A quick word for our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.

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• 53:55Speaker 03

  This sizzling summer, we would love you to join our Empire Club and we know you will love being a member of our community. You'll get bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and much more.

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  And your summer trips provide you that perfect opportunity to dive into our archives and catch up on all the exclusive content you might have missed before joining. So you can listen to our interview with Yong Chang, our Willie's fabulous bonus on Fomir's Girl with the Pearl Earring, and our exclusive four part member series covering the scandal that shaped partition.

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  So make the most of the deal before it ends at the end of August 2026. The code is SUMMER26 to be used on our annual membership at empirepoduk.com. We'd love you to become a member of our club and it's brilliant, even if we say so ourselves.

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