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

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

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: Casting a Shadow of Terror 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: [e-mail] 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

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 Saeed Kutub and the young, bookish doctor who took up his violent mantle from inside a courtroom cage. Iman al-Zawahiri. In this first episode of what is an extraordinary line-up 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. 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 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 its absolute catnip for empire fans. So 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 Sait Kutup, 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 he? Who? Who is this man? So Kutub is the iconic figure, if you like, of modern, sunny, 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. Even because he was hanged by the Egyptian authorities, it cemented him as a matto. No, absolutely. 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 Gutub 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, smallish villages, completely nondescript, absolutely no reason why it should produce one of these kind of major thinkers. And the boonies by Egyptian standards. This is 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 tracks.

There are exceptions, but on the whole. But not, definitely not, the kind of big Egyptian land-owning elite. He's not a member of the Zabalek Club or anything like that, yeah. No, and he doesn't have the connections, which is important later. And so 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 does learn the Qur'am, so he's a Huffis, 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 a very important. interesting. And he is interested in fixture, he's interested in poetry. He goes to the Doro La Lume

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 sort of mini skirts and pictures of glamorous people who are now grandmothers beside pools and all this sort of stuff on people's mantle side. This is when he goes up as a kid. He's only 19 or something. And he has a, you know, put it bluntly, 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. And it's an amazing time in Egypt, the interwar period. It's kind of politically feebrile, 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, and 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 kind of vibrant debates between literary forms that are 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 kill 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 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 evolving.

He's evolving in that direction. Yeah. Well, he's involved in these, these, these, he's very interested in authenticity, very interested in 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 the alternatives to capitalism, and 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 staff, actually, and that's why he gets dispatched to the US. 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 Nakhpa. 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 the Islamic radicals, but across the board, how badly the Egyptian army fared when facing the new Israeli, what will become the IDF. Absolutely, and I think that may have contributed

to the decision to send Samark Kutub, who's a brilliant writer, an 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, their riots, their protests, they're 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, U.S.

Now, many of the accounts of Kutub side 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 wastes, chests pressed together. It's about as innocent as seen as post-war America could offer, but not to side-cutta. Tell us what his reaction is, Jason. Well, he's disgusted and horrified. I mean, not least because this is a pastor. This is a place of worship. 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 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 Boone's much, much worse. horrifying 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 actually right to point to the broader context,

because often he is seen, Kutl be seen 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 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?

And this is precisely, of course, the moment that the US is beginning to flex its muscles, It's not long before Sue is when America will trim Britain's imperial ambitions and people on over the world. They're beginning to get about, you know, 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.

And I think it's a mistake to see Kutub is isolated from now. I think a lot of his thinking is about that. And one of the first books he writes back, 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.

Kutub comes home, a changed man, and the first thing he does really is to throw himself into the Muslim Brotherhood, who 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-Banah, a schoolteacher 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

Dawa, but also involving a huge social outreach, 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. And it takes off. I mean, it really grows fast. And by these mid-late 50s, you're looking possibly up to a million Egyptians and members. I mean, 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 Brother in Egypt becomes much stronger. and this sets up some dynamics which are really important. 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? 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 filled

with lots of Brits and Kharky Shorts wandering around clubs ordering. 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 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 much of the Arab and Islamic world going forward for the next 10, 15, 20 years.

Now, 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 NASA, 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 brothers as a threat. And actually, some suggestions are Nasser and Kutub sat down before the coup discussed what might not happen. And they're definitely contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood. Do 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, in jury 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. And basically, the Muslim Brotherhood are not averse to the coup. they've been banned already. Hassan al-Bah now has been assassinated by the king's kind of thugs basically. And there's no reason for them to be against a coup. That 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 Nasser 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, at Kutub 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 Saitkutub, but 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 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. I've been to some of the ones in Asiut, which was specifically built at this time for Islamist prisoners.

And it's, weirdly enough, it's exactly the same place the Byzantines had their prison camp for heretics in the sixth century. And almost there were sort of next door to each other. It's when the story is the Patriarch Ocasters Noble gets sent. It's where many of the Brotherhood have sent from the suburbs of Cairo into this desert prison camp, in this harsh desert around Asiote. That says a lot about how regime struggled to deal with opposition movements and how that produces further extremism.

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. The Shah's Secret Police, yeah. Elsewhere in Syria and, you know, 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 Shukhruc 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 Kutub is writing in prison, his seminal work, a text which will become the blueprint for modern jihadism, changes everything. Welcome back. So Jason, we were talking just before the break about Saitkleto being slung 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. 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, 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, hanged by their feet, have their feet beaten, you know, it's 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 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 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, they're in. Six volumes, they're less. Yeah, it's huge. But I'm very erudite and quite original. The real work that is important comes towards the end of his incarceration, or its 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 absolute seminal text for everyone involved in 9-11. So let's look at it in some details, Jason, take us to what it actually says. So Milesand is kind of the o text 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. And it then, it's 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.

And it's not just the just of 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 the milestones. And let's look at two key concepts here.

Jahlia, the idea that the pagan ignorance of pre-Islamic Arabia has returned under NASA. And we're now in this sort of, he equates the secular nationalism of NASA with the pagan, non-Islamic, anti-Islamic world before the rise of the prophet. 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 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, sovereignty to Islam.

And true believers among Muslims. 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 reestablishment of the true faith. No, 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 non-Muslims.

This 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 is not the unbelievers in the West, it's the unbelievers in the Islamic world, such as Nassau and the other rulers. And they're collaborators. Now, again, an important point we should say is that this isn't just Egyptians and a few people in the summer of Cairo that get to read this. Copies make it quite quickly to sound don't they, and are distributed by the Wahhabis,

and it very rapidly becomes a kind of pop text. Yeah, well, I mean, the book is incredibly popular. A lesson to us both, Jason, to write short books, 70 pages. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. How big was your revolutionists? 680. There you go. I know.

It'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 Egyptian, authorities even kind of 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, some of the, some of the, they go everywhere. All the additions 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 Kutrov's text later on, when the Saudi is being. 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 Tamir, the 13th century scholar who inspired Khatub to an extent, but also Qutub 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 whaling to the 80s and beyond. Now, 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 publishers from in prison. I mean, 64 is when Miles Jones is published, he's in prison. He's then released from prison.

There's a moment where NASA kind of takes the foot off the pressure off, the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood. And there are all sorts of dynamics going on within a Muslim Brotherhood moment and its relationship with the regime. At this moment, NASA feels it's a good idea to just ease up a bit. He's released. Partly because NASA's at this point in the early 1960s, he's the winner. Everyone loves NASA. He's inspiring people across the entire Arab world. He's an absolute pin-up moment.

Everyone appreciates what he's doing. And this is not so much a good moment for the Brotherhood, because such as the charisma of NASA 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 Brothers 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.

And this is also the golden age of Egyptian music, the golden age of Egyptian cinema, everyone as far away is, you know, Yemen and northern Syria are watching Kairine movies and listening to Kairing Divas. And these guys are marginised. This is brilliant anecdote where Abdullah Azam, who we'll talk about later, the second great, sort of 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 Kutub's niece. Brilliant.

So, nonetheless, this is the moment that Kutub 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 said to the gallows. Yeah, he's released and then pretty much picked up on this very spurious pretext back in prison, yeah, and he's hanged. And thus becomes a martyr. And this is actually a kind of major error for Dasso. This revives what had been an entirely flagging movement. Yeah, I mean, it gives massive momentum to Kutuz's ideas, put it that way.

I mean, he becomes the martyr side, Qutub, 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. Now, among those who are horrified by the hanging of Qutub and someone who would be. really admired his writing is someone from exactly the world that Qutab was not part of, which is the smart Cairo suburb of Mardi. And in Madi, age 14, there is a bookish, bespectacled, brilliant, top of his class, boy who comes to 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-Aza.

His great uncle had been a grand imam of the most renowned Islamic university in the world, but also in Egypt. His dad is a professor of pharmacology. Introduce us, Jason, to Iman al-Zawahiri, a crucial figure in this story. Ivan Azuah is exactly the kind of young man troubled, brilliant, educated, urban, who was really dramatically affected by Qutub's writings in Egypt in that time. And he is, as you say, a teenager. He has a familial connection to Qutub with an uncle. who had known Kutub and possibly studied with him or worked with him at one time or another. And the uncle explains who Kutab was and to an extent what he thought to the young Zawahui.

Zawahui 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. And amazingly, that group stayed. together to an extent, I mean, the core of it. And are they all from this posh world? I mean, we are talking super posh at this point. Zoha Hiri is born in almost in a sporting club world of croquet lawns and jaccarander. Sure, but he's very slightly on the wrong side of the tracks.

And literally, there's a railway that goes through Mardi. And they're kind of, you know, they're living in the slightly down-at-heel side of it. And I'm not sure they're permitted. They're not given membership. How interesting. I'd always just thought he was rich, rich boy. No, no, no. They're not given membership to the Mahdi Sporting Club.

Not that they probably want to. I mean, I think they're not part of the real Kareen elite. And that's, again, really important. Because there's this sort of, in Kutub, 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 and 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 Zawahri is that there is an element of kind of resentment towards the elite and a sense of injustice. I didn't know that. How interesting. So he's not the same class as Zama bin Laden? No, well, Osama bin Laden is exceptional in 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 Zerachar 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 Mahadi. He lives in the clinic. It's a, you know, I mean, it's kind of up the middle class. You know, you and I both know similar people. I have friends in his Andabad where I live for a few years and so forth, who are very much in that kind of zone.

And actually, importantly, that is also partly a constituency, a big constituency for Islamism. Particularly for some reason, people in medicine, in engineering, in the country. in the kind of non-humanities non-humanities. Yeah, that's been discussed at infinitum, ad nauseam, whatever Latin tag you want.

There's lots of speculation as to why that might be the case. Some of it are fairly specious, but it's certainly true. It's also the case that these kind of technical disciplines in this period, 1960s, 90s 70s, there are lots of engineers. Lots of them around, yeah.

Yeah. It's what a new developing country needs. Quite, and it's what they were producing. in the educational establishment. 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 may fail to defend the Islamic world. So take us to that moment and what happens now. Right, it is absolutely the case. 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. It definitely undermines that. And it, importantly, too, 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 Yazharharafat, among many, many others. 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 Nagy. who, a great Egyptian author, Nobel Prize winner, who was actually possibly discovered by

Kutub. By Kutub, and reviewed his early book, certainly. Exactly, in his sort of literary critic dates. Tarnat Cafe is written shortly after this moment and describes Egyptian society at the time. And one of the protagonists is saying, oh, no, the great problem is not, is that we haven't been socialist enough. And if you look at the protests and the demonstrations immediately post 67, 68, 69, 70, I mean, a moment of enormous unrest across the whole world in terms of demanding new things,

this kind of late 1960s 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 their alternatives. 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 haven't got any purchase on public opinion. Oh, interesting. We're in a really, you know, we're in a really bad place. And even after 67. Because it's very easy for historians to see this as the moment that Islamism gets a shot in the arm.

I think it's a long burn. And that's why I think the 70s is much more important, and certainly the 80s. Are a good book about the rise of revolutionaries in the 70s you recommend, Jason? I don't know if there isn't somebody ought to write one. A very long one. Yeah. Anyway, so we need now to get to Sadat because Sadat has succeeded NASA. He then goes on as we learned 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. 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 having made peace, there's no pressure put on the Israelis to give the West Bank back. And so we get to that moment, this famous moment, in October 1981,

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 1981, 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, who avoids the shrapnel. And what's the famous line? killed Pharaoh, I'm not afraid to die. Take us here. So to understand what happened to Sadat, you have to understand two things. One is what Sadat does in the 70s, and the other thing is, is the rise of a kind of non-Muslim Muslim Brotherhood, opposition, Islamist opposition, who are

drawing a lot of inspiration from Qutub and others in that period. So Sadat pivots away from the NASA 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 program, 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 were a bred riot in 1977, the only people who are blamed are, you know, the usual suspects, communists, socialists, Fist, Mossad agents, Libyans, da-da-da. And so through the 70s, the Islamists have moved into, particularly the universities, but lots of other institutions and are really quite big. Mosin Brotherhood is sticking to a non-violent, non-confrontational strategy, trying to grow through just non-violent and 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 Kutub would have recommended. 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 being sent by or relying on, and they're very much picking up all the usual Muslim Brotherhood suspects and filling the prison with these people. And among the people picked up is the 30-year-old surgeon, Eimann al-Zohahiri.

Now, this brings us to one of the most extraordinary pieces of court-trial. footage that we all know in every doco on this subject of Zawahiri in a metal cage, prisoner 113, screaming, now we want to speak to the whole world, who are we? So where is democracy? Where is freedom? Where is human rights? Yeah, and he says it in English. It's incredible.

It's such an important moment. So Zaharanah 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 didn't know about the actual assassination. And when he found out about it, he thought it was a very bad idea.

He was then picked up anyway because they'd been successive huge roundup. 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 with 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 see absolutely the consequences of his failure to withstand, you know, whatever horrible torture it was. I mean, you know, it's really appalling.

The Egyptian Mukabarat secret police are some of the nastiest in the whole region. Do not mess around. No. There are a whole series of trials, and Zaraki is eventually in the cool room, in this cage, and he makes this incredible speech, right? 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 Qutu, of the new Islamic extremism, comes out of the back rooms in the mosques or the community centers when 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 Islamic extremism of that new Sunni jihadi, ultra-violent, ultra-committed character.

Now, Zawiri does get out of prison eventually. 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, crueller 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. Yeah, absolutely. 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 third? frontier zone. With great pleasure, any invitation to return to Bashar, and particularly in the early 1980s, I will gladly accept Willie. It's a place 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. Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk about such interesting, fascinating, important subjects. That is not well known enough and you'll need to understand it better. And there's no way 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 alleys of Bashawa and the Islamist cells, which are growing there at this point, initially to take on the Soviets, you do not have to wait. You can access that straight away now and ad-free by heading to Empirapodukuk.com, that's Empirpodukuk.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. That's all from me, William Dremple. A quick word for our Empire listeners.

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