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

0:10This 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 Qutb 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 of radical terrorism and revolutionists, Jason Burke.

0:57He 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 been 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 it's absolute catnip for empire fans.

1:35So go out and buy it. 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 Saeed Qutb, 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, advocate as the key advocate of modern Sunni Islamic radicalism. Take us there. Who is he? Who is this man? So Qutb 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.

2:24even though he was hanged by the Egyptian authorities in 1966. Even because he was hanged by the Egyptian authorities, it cemented him as a martyr. 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, the milestones. So, Khutub is absolutely crucial. He was born in 1906 in a village called Musha in Upper Egypt. It's one of those, you know, remote-ish, small-ish villages, completely nondescript.

3:04Absolutely no reason why it should produce one of these kind of major thinkers. And the boonies by Egyptian standards. People in Cairo make laugh about people from that region. Absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that's important, is he's coming from a background that is absolutely not the kind of Kyrene elite. His dad is a sort of smallish landowner, quite involved in politics, actually sort of secular nationalist politics. So he's well off. He's not the dispossessed. He's not the wretched of the earth. Absolutely not the wretched of the earth, no. But then these people rarely are, not least because they usually don't have the education to go off and write great big tracts.

3:41There are exceptions on the whole. But definitely not the kind of big Egyptian landowning elite. He's not a member of the Zemalek club or anything like that. No, and he doesn't have the connections, which is important later. And so he has a kind of mixed education, mainly in secular government schools. He spends a year or so in a religious school and he doesn't like it much because the discipline is very harsh and the facilities are terrible. But 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.

4:36and he is interested in lecture he's interested in poetry he goes to the doral 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 not just unveiled i mean pictures from 1950s 1960s cairo show all these women very much wearing wearing mini skirts and pictures of glamorous people who are now grandmothers beside pools and all that sort of stuff on people's mantel sites. And this is when he goes up as a kid. He's only 19 or something. And he has a real problem with women all his life.

5:21I 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, and it's an amazing time in Egypt, the interwar period. It's 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 notes. He's clever, is he? He's clever, yeah. He's definitely, he's bright, he's little, he's not physical. He's slightly melancholic, possibly depressive. He doesn't make friends easily. He's not out partying.

6:09And as I say, he has real problems with any relationship with the opposite sex. He writes a kind of love-lorn, 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. He's a bit of a loner, but engaged in these vibrant debates between literary forms that taking place in the Arab world at the time and poetry and so forth. And he works at the government. He works as an education official inspector and such like. 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.

7:04And the effect is precisely the opposite of what they want or expect. 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 moment where he has a sort of epiphany, if you like, and becomes viscerally anti-American. I'd contest that a bit. If you look at his writings before that moment, 48, 49, he's already very - Heading in that direction. Yeah. Well, he's very interested in authenticity, He's very interested in the real spirit of Islam and of Egypt's identity, cultural identity, and 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.

8:01and he's not living in a kind of vacuum somewhere, or rather 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. And 1948, 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 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.

8:51Absolutely. And I think that may have contributed to the decision to send Samar Khutb, 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 Egyptian politics. There are riots, there are protests, there are all sorts of calls for a new regime, a new world 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.

9:35Now, many of the accounts of Kutupzai focus on one particular evening in Greenlee, 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 uh post-war america could offer but not to side could have Tell us what his reaction is, Jason.

10:19Well, he's disgusted and horrified. I mean, not least because this is a pastor. This is a place of worship. And the pastor himself has put on this record with its sort of moderately suggestive lyrics. And for him, that catalyzes this idea of the U.S. as a place of kind of unbridled lusts, if you like, whether they're materialist or sexual or other. And this comes out in a lot of his writing. So he's also horrified by jazz music, which he describes as a kind of animalistic, in a fairly racist way actually, animalistic music that appeals to the most base instincts 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 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.

11:43Horrifying degeneracy. Yeah, 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 degrading and as bestial. And you're absolutely right to point to the broader context, because often he is seen, could be seen as very isolated and an Islamist in his little religious world. But he's not. He's exposed to all these much broader trends. 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, the US and the US model is becoming so dominant in the post-war world that everywhere, people are saying, do we really want this kind of materialism and consumerism and capitalism?

12:33and how does it affect our societies and what does it mean for us? And this is precisely, of course, the moment that the US is beginning to flex its muscles. It's not long before Suez, when America will trim Britain's imperial ambitions. And people all over the world are facing the reality of a newly powerful, newly imperial America and reacting to it in different ways. Also importantly, and you covered it in your recent brilliant podcast 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 come through.

13:22And I think it's a mistake to see Qutb is isolated from that. I think a lot of his thinking is about that. And one of the first books he writes when he comes back from the US is about exactly the confrontation, the competition between Islam and capitalism. And that's really interesting. Jason, so bring us back now to 1950s Egypt. Qutb comes home, a changed man. And the first thing he does really is to throw himself into the Muslim Brotherhood, having a good sort of moment in Egypt. This is a moment of great growth and influence for them. So the Muslim Brotherhood founded in 1928, Hassan al-Banna, a school teacher who lives right next to the Suez Canal, creates this movement, a really visionary idea of what a social movement, a religious, political social movement could be based on preaching Dawah, but but also involving a huge social outreach, a really sophisticated and resilient organization based on branches and networks and cells and so forth, but very much kind of active in the public space.

14:34And it takes off. I mean, it really grows fast. And by these mid-late fifties, you're looking at possibly up to a million Egyptians and members. I mean, it's really become a potent movement. And there's been an 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 radicalization that goes along with the war in Palestine and what will become Israel, the violent element within the Muslim Brotherhood becomes much stronger. And this sets up some dynamics which are really important. Maybe, Jason, for a second, paint a picture of 1950s Cairo.

15:19This is a city almost under occupation. The British are still around, aren't they? 50s Egypt is teetering in between a kind of old world of imperial subordination, effectively. That world in the background of the Lawrence of Arabia film with lots of Brits in khaki shorts wandering around clubs ordering red and tonics. 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's actually fought in 1948 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 much of the Arab and Islamic world going forward for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

16:28Now, how quickly, Jason, does that world clash with the Brotherhood? Is it an immediate confrontation or could it have got a different direction? 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. Actually, there are some suggestions that Nasser and Qutb sat down before the coup and discussed what might or what might not happen. And they're definitely contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood.

17:05Do we know that to be true? Yeah. I mean, I've seen it reported many times. I don't know, to be honest. Interesting. I never heard it. No, it struck me when I read it quite recently, actually, and during some of my research for the book. But it's a nice image, the two of them sitting there. Whether it actually happened or not, I don't know. But it does say a lot about how it could have happened. Basically, the Muslim Brotherhood are not averse to the coup. They've been banned already. Hassan al-Bana has been assassinated by the king's thugs, basically. And there's no reason for them to be against the coup.

17:47That sours very quickly, partly because of this violent trend within the Muslim Brotherhood. That leads in 1954 to a Brotherhood member firing eight shots at NASA in Alexandria. He misses everyone, but this changes the future, really for all our futures. It's a very important pivot moment in history. It's the moment where the wave of repression and Khutub is among those detained, thrown into jail where he'll spend the next 10 years. 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 Qutb, but the whole Islamist movement and its birth, a lot of it happens within Egyptian prisons.

18:36And 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 persecutions 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 Brotherhood gives it a new force, in fact. Certainly, a lot of those who experience, which are absolutely horrendous, treatment in these vast prisons that start, and prison camps actually out in the desert that start to be constructed.

19:19I've been to some of the ones in Asyut, which was specifically built at this time for Islamist prisoners. And weirdly enough, it's exactly the same place the Byzantines had their prison camp for heretics in the 6th century. And they're almost next door to each other. It's where Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, gets sent. And it's where many of the Brotherhood are sent from the suburbs of Cairo into this desert prison camp, in this harsh desert around Asiyat. That says a lot about how regimes struggle to deal with opposition movements and how that produces further extremism. And I was doing a quick mental scan across the region in this moment, in the 60s and 70s about what's happening in Iran with the Savaq and what's happening in - The Shah's secret police.

20:05Yeah. Elsewhere in Syria and all these places, and how you get a catalyzing effect with the prisons. 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 Shukran 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. 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 Khutub is writing in prison, his seminal work, a text which will become the blueprint for modern jihadism, changes everything.

21:09Welcome back. So, Jason, we were talking just before the break about Saad Kutub being slung into prison, and this being, oddly, the chrysalis in which he develops now into the fully-fledged uh islamist radical um who he is now remembered as 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 victims the screams yeah 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 are hanged by their feet have their feet beaten i you know starved it's it's just horrendous and because he's ill quite a lot he's often in the prison infirmary.

22:16So he sees these prisoners being brought in with their injuries from torture. And it's just the most horrendous experience for him. And he takes a kind of sanctuary, if you like, or seeks in Quranic study, which even the Egyptian regime at the time can't really prevent inmates doing. And he writes this enormous kind of exegesis of the Quran, a six volume resume 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. Six volumes, though, Les.

22:59Yeah, it's huge. But very erudite and quite original. The real work that is important comes towards the end of his incarceration, or his first incarceration, which is Milestones. 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 an absolute seminal text for everyone involved in 9-11. So let's look at it in some detail, Jason. Take us to what it actually says. So, Milesland is kind of the urtext of modern Sunni Islamic jihadi activism. And it starts with this kind of lapidary statement that mankind is on the brink of a precipice facing total annihilation.

23:46It's a quite 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. It's not just addressed to Muslims, 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 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 milestones. And let's look at two key concepts here. Jahaliya, the idea that the pagan ignorance of pre-Islamic Arabia has returned under Nasser.

24:42And 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 Prof. Yeah, and that's new. Other thinkers, such as Maldudi, who you'll know from your South Asian studies, have discussed something similar, but for the whole of humanity, effectively. 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 the islamic world and that we need a vanguard of committed believers who will take us back to the right path through the means of jihad, who will bring back sovereignty to Islam.

25:46And true believers among Muslims. Yeah, and the only people who can do that 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. Now, one thing to establish is that at this point, his aim is very much against those, in the sense you've thrown him into prison. This is not a cry for attacks on America or attacks on non-Muslims.

26:37This is focused mainly on war against fellow Muslims who should be declared not truly Muslim or takfir. Well, there's that element too. There's the takfir element which is really important, which is that the true believers are not the unbelievers in the West, it's the unbelievers in the Islamic world, such as Nasser and the other rulers, and their collaborators. Now, again, an important point we should say is that this isn't just Egyptians and a few people in the Sumo-Zakira 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.

27:27Yeah, well, I mean, the book is incredibly popular. It's a lesson to us both, Jason, to write short books, 70 pages. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. How big was your revolutionist? 680. There you go. Yeah, I know. It's a much better business model as well. He goes through five reprints in the first six months. I mean, this is sort of before the Egyptian authorities even get across 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, they go everywhere. All the editions go everywhere in the Islamic world, obviously, the Arab-speaking world.

28:09Translations come much, much later. later. But they do go into Saudi. And yeah, Qutb's texts later on, when the Saudis begin this kind of big rollout 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 Tamiya, the 13th century scholar who inspired Qutb to an extent, but also Qutb himself. I mean, this is a kind of manual for radicalization and challenging these often secular nationalist rulers in the Islamic world that are being distributed by these big Saudi government funded NGOs through the 70s and well into the 80s and beyond.

29:03Now, Jason, one thing I'm not clear in my head is that he's been slung into prison. How come he's writing these books? Has he been let out to write them? Or is he writing them in prison and smuggling them out? It's not really he's writing them in prison, actually getting them to publishes from in prison. In 1964, when Miles Jones is published, he's in prison. He's then released from prison. There's a moment where Nasser takes the foot off 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.

29:38At this moment, Nasser feels it's a good idea to just ease up a bit. He's released. Partly because Nasser's at this point in the early 1960s, he's the winner. Everyone loves Nasser. He's inspiring people across the entire Arab world. He's an absolute pinup moment. Everyone appreciates what he's doing. And this is not so much a good moment for the Brotherhood, because such is the charisma of Nasser that he's eclipsing them in some ways. Yeah, and it's important to remember in this period that the kind of Islamism, even in its more moderate version, is, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood is a big movement, but Islamism is not the predominant ideology by a long way.

30:22The predominant ideology is nationalist, secular, leftist, inflected, and very much not this kind of religious prescription. 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 Kyrene movies and listening to Kyrene divas. And these guys are marginalized. There's this brilliant anecdote where Abdullah Azzam, 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 Syed Qutb's niece.

31:20Brilliant. so nonetheless um this is the moment that khutub 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 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 a thus becomes the martyr and this actually a major error for Dasar. This revives what had been an entirely flagging movement. Yeah, I mean it gives massive momentum to Khutub's ideas, to put it that way. He becomes the martyr Sa 'at Khutub 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.

32:26Now, among those who are horrified by the hanging of Qutb and someone who really admired his writing is someone from exactly the world that Qutb was not part of, which is the smart Cairo suburb of Mardi. and in Mahdi age 14 there is a bookish perspective called 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 Nasser's world and yet he's also very much connected with the world of Al-Azhar his great uncle had been a grand imam of the most renowned Islamic university in the world, but also in Egypt.

33:13His dad is a professor of pharmacology. Introduce us, Jason, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, a crucial figure in this story. Ayman al-Zawahiri is exactly the kind of young man, troubled, brilliant, educated, urban, who was really dramatically affected by Qutb's writings in Egypt in that time. And he is, as you say, a teenager. He has a familial connection to Qutb with an uncle who had known Qutb and possibly studied with him or worked with him at one time or another. And the uncle explains who Qutb was and to an extent what he thought. to the young Zawahiri. Zawahiri then goes on and reads Milestones and goes out and forms his own kind of teenage group dedicated to the overthrow of Nasser and the Egyptian regime, which is kind of bold for a 15-year-old.