A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam by Mary Anne Weaver

Author:Mary Anne Weaver [Weaver, Mary Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2000-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman had arrived in the United States, quietly and without attracting attention, in July 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, on his much-disputed tourist visa —the sixth visa he had been granted by the United States. What is perhaps as interesting as how he entered this country is why he decided to come. I had learned in Cairo that his primary purpose was to set up a U.S. infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt’s militant Islamist groups—an undertaking that he had largely accomplished by the time of his arrest.

One afternoon just before Christmas in 1994, after returning from Cairo to New York, I went to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in lower Manhattan, to meet with him, in what appeared to be a recreation room, in the prison’s maximum-security ward. The sheikh had been in prison, for a year and a half, and his arrest, on immigration charges in July 1993, was still largely unexplained. Only a week or so earlier, U.S. officials had abruptly informed the Egyptian government that the sheikh could leave the United States for any country that would accept him—and Afghanistan had—unless the Egyptians quickly presented an extradition request. The government of Mubarak was exceedingly reluctant to do this, since it feared a confrontation with the sheikh’s followers. For Egypt, it would be far more convenient if the sheikh could be held under guard in the United States indefinitely. But after twenty-four hours of sometimes heated talks between Amr Mousa, the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the U.S. Ambassador, Robert H. Pelletreau, an angry Egyptian government submitted the extradition request, which led to further strains in the relationship between Egypt and the United States. Mubarak, in particular, was furious, I was told by one of his aides, that Washington had shifted the responsibility for the sheikh’s prosecution to Cairo. Then, to everyone’s collective—and continuing—surprise. Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the sheikh’s arrest.

I was accompanied to the Metropolitan Correctional Center by Ahmad Sattar, my usual interpreter, who was now serving as a paralegal for the sheikh, whose conspiracy trial would begin in Manhattan in January 1995. No sooner had we sat down, on two straight-backed chairs, than Sheikh Omar came in. He wore a blue two-piece prison uniform, brown bedroom slippers, and a pair of woolly white socks. His eyes were not covered by the heavy black glasses that he normally wears, nor was he wearing the crimson turban of al-Azhar. Instead, he had a simple white prayer cap on his head.

He greeted me cordially and opened the conversation by telling me that his twenty-year-old son, Abdullah, had just begun his first year at the University of al-Azhar, where the sheikh himself had received his Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence some twenty-five years before.

I asked him how he explained the new militancy at al-Azhar.

“In my view, it isn’t militancy,” Sheikh Omar said. “It’s just a tepid whispering that has begun. You mentioned the UN population conference, and the Grand Sheikh’s opposition to it.

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