Egypt on the Brink 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

“contrast to Nasser, who interacted with his people as a missionary figure charting a path to national glory and redemption, Sadat was the village chief (oumda): a traditionally dressed, honoured, pious and modest guest at weddings, funerals and regional celebrations, ready to engage in discussions on matters of day-to-day concern.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“In the end, the majority of Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the proposed constitutional amendments. Of the more than 18 million Egyptians who voted on the 19 March 2011 referendum, more than 77 per cent voted in favour of the amendments, paving the way for the parliamentary elections. It was a major success for political Islam in general, and the Brotherhood in specific.”
― 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

“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

“economic aspect of Islamism penetrated a number of the economy's industrial and service sectors. For example, eight of the twenty richest families in Egypt throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with vast and interconnected equity stakes across the country's private sector, had direct links to either the Muslim Brotherhood or other Salafist groups.52”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“the mid-2000s, Islamic banks operating in Egypt controlled around 10 per cent of the commercial deposits in the country's banking system; and a number of the world's leading banks (from Citigroup to HSBC) were heavily promoting their ‘Islamic arms’.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“hiwala's expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, when hundreds of offices were set up across Egypt, was exponential. In a few years, the halal hiwala became the main (sometimes the only) interface through which hundreds of thousands of families were receiving their livelihood from absent fathers and brothers.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“There was a major demographic boom in Egypt from the 1980s, in which the population almost doubled from around 45 million to 80 million, but there was also a notable increase in literacy and urbanization. The literacy rate in Egypt increased from around 45 per cent in the early 1970s to 65 per cent in the early 2000s,”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Islam became the uncontested ‘last resort’. The fall of loyalties and ideologies, the lack of national projects and the sense of humiliation as a result of successive decades of drift and what seemed to many as a series of historical defeats47 left the society clinging to religion as its innermost identity, its only remaining shield and consolation.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Amr Khaled, the most successful of those young sheikhs,”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Al-Azhar had over several decades lost part of its authoritative intellectual firepower. Several notable theologians emerged in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Sunni world) who had been trained by Al-Azhar yet later broke away from the institution's structure and became independent. Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is the most prominent of these.”
― 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

“regime also imposed a further restriction on religious parties (and independent parliamentary candidates), namely an amendment of Articles 1 and 2 of the constitution to define Egypt as ‘a state of citizenship’ and remove the reference to Islam as ‘the religion of the state’. The change in theory would have the effect of allowing women, and Christians, to run for any position, including the presidency.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The charm offensive was complemented by the work of a number of Islamic intellectuals with strong links to the Egyptian Islamic movement in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Tariq Ramadan was the most famous of these. The grandson of Hassan Al-Banna and a scholar at Oxford University, he argued for a heterogeneous Islam that combined the religion's traditions with new aspects rooted in the experiences of Muslims living in the West.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“Brotherhood extended its social reach and infrastructure into a much more developed political platform. In the late 1990s, the traditionally vague Muslim Brotherhood proposed a draft political manifesto, seen by many observers as the skeleton of an alternative constitution. It championed political reform, increased freedom and fair elections, all in the language of Egyptian political activism. The Brotherhood, for the first time since its rehabilitation in Egyptian politics, was positioning itself as a direct political competitor to the regime that had ruled Egypt since 1952. This became abundantly clear in the”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“regime had handled the military threat successfully.41 But the rise of Islamism as a social force was a different story.”
― 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

“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

“Khaled Yousef's Hina Maysara a voyeuristic, smash-hit film, produced in 2007, recounts of the story of Cairene slums – such as Imbaba – in which religious extremism blurred with aggression, drug use, child labour and abuse, the grey economy and prostitution.”
― 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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Egyptian mujahideen had a rich experience in Afghanistan. Thousands of young Egyptian men lived in Al-Sindh and the Punjab regions, and among populations that cut through Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“anger sweeping society expressed itself in significantly rising crime rates and everyday violence.26”
― Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak

“The country's literary and intellectual luminaries were marginalized in the same way. Naguib Mahfouz's23 novels were no longer serialized in Al-Ahram. Tawfik Al-Hakeem's last two novels were published in Paris and Beirut, but not in Cairo. Ihsan Abdel Kodous, Egypt's foremost romance novelist, was branded a ‘pornographer’, and some of his publishers took it upon themselves to change the endings of some of his novels (without his knowledge) to suit the rising social conservatism.”
― 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