By SCOTT ANDERSON
The "Red Sea Riviera," where tourists are shielded from the surrounding poverty and anti-West sentiment, has recently become a suicide-bomber target. Escaping to the seething streets, the author reports on an Egypt you aren't supposed to see
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The commercials are slick and alluring, holding out the promise of a pampered, hedonistic holiday in the sun: beautiful young couples lounging poolside, swimmers frolicking with dolphins and colorful fish, three women with fine, bikini-clad butts, gazing out at an azure sea. It is quite far into the spots before the dark-skinned locals first put in an appearance, but even they are no cause for alarm-most are in tailored servant uniforms and wear friendly smiles as they cater to their paler-complected guests. It's not clear where all this fun is taking place-maybe the Caribbean, maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean-until at the very end of the commercials, shown endlessly on CNN International, it's revealed to be someplace called Egypt's Red Sea Riviera.
Until a few years ago, no one had heard of the Red Sea Riviera. Perhaps that's because most of the shiny beach-resort hotels that fall under the marketing label aren't on the Red Sea at all, but rather on the Gulf of 'Aqaba, that narrow strip of water which separates the eastern coast of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula from Saudi Arabia and Jordan. No matter, because it really could be anywhere. From Taba, at the very north end, flush on the border with Israel, all the way down the 125 miles of rugged Sinai coastline to the main tourist resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the visitor exists in a cocoon of pleasure scrubbed clean of exoticism, the largest gated playground on the planet. Within those gates are five-star hotels and restaurants and world-class scuba-diving, a Hard Rock Cafe, and McDonald's. Outside those gates is everyone and everything else, a purity maintained by police checkpoints on all roads leading into the enclave. The only Egyptians allowed to enter are those wealthy enough to vacation in the zone, or those who can prove they have jobs there; the others are turned back.
But in the modern world, ugly reality has a way of intruding into even the most sanitized playgrounds. For the Red Sea Riviera, that ugliness started on the evening of October 7, 2004, when a vegetable-delivery truck rolled up to the entrance of the Hilton in Taba. Hidden beneath its crates of produce was a bomb so powerful it brought down the entire front wing of the 10-story hotel, killing 32; almost simultaneously, two smaller bombs exploded at tourist campgrounds farther down the coast, killing 2 more. Nine months later, in July 2005, Sharm al-Sheikh itself was the target: three more bombs, 88 more dead. And just this past April, it was Dahab, a quiet resort town midway between Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh: again three bombs, more than 20 dead.
For the Egyptian government, the Sinai bombings arrived like a ghost it thought it had long since killed. In the 1990s, shadowy Islamic guerrilla organizations carried out a series of attacks on foreigners in Egypt, culminating in a horrific slaughter of 58 tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, in Luxor, in 1997. For this direct assault on one of the bulwarks of the economy-at almost $8 billion annually, tourism is the main source of Egyptian foreign exchange-the government conducted a brutal, no-holds-barred war against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), killing or disappearing hundreds, and imprisoning thousands more. The pogrom effectively ended terrorism in Egypt-until the 2004 attack on the Taba Hilton.
While nowhere approaching the scorched-earth campaign directed against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian authorities have responded to the Sinai bombings in nearly identical fashion. Each time they have launched massive police dragnets among the local population of Sinai, especially in its northeast corner, rounding up hundreds, sometimes thousands. Each time, they have quickly identified the perpetrators as local malcontents working in collusion with elements of Sinai's criminal underworld. Even as those conclusions have been questioned by human-rights organizations, the government has embarked on a new public-relations campaign designed to assure foreign investors and tourists that the danger has passed, that Egypt is safe once again.
By chance, I had a passing familiarity with all three places targeted in the Sinai bombings. In the spring of 2002, after spending six weeks in Israel on a story assignment, I had decided to go to the Sinai Peninsula to unwind. Crossing the Israeli-Egyptian border on foot, I had walked the 100 yards to the Taba Hilton to pick up a rental car for the drive down the coast. On the way, I stopped off in Dahab, the site of the most recent attack, before continuing on to Sharm al-Sheikh. There, I stayed just down the street from the Ghazala Gardens, the hotel where a suicide bomber had driven into the lobby during the July 2005 attacks and claimed the greatest number of victims.
Brief as my time there was, I came to feel that I was confronting two illusions, that just as the tourist enclaves in the Sinai had little in common with the rest of Egypt, so the nation as a whole bears scant resemblance to the placid image that its boosters-the Egyptian government, its friends in the West-wish to project. It is, instead, something of a seething volcano.
With at least 80 million inhabitants, Egypt is not only the most populous nation in the Arab world but in many ways its intellectual and political nexus, the fount from which nearly every major political or religious force to spread through the region in the past century has emerged. And while much has been made since September 11 of the danger posed by such Muslim fundamentalist trends as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, it has been the much broader fundamentalist trends first fostered in Egypt, with their specifically anti-Western tilt, that have probably most fanned the flames of jihad throughout the region.
The pattern is unmistakable, should one bother to look. The Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a social movement espousing a rejection of Western values and a return to Islamic traditions, originated in Egypt in the 1970s before spreading throughout the Middle East. Islamic Jihad also has its roots in Egypt. Osama bin Laden was a disgruntled Saudi rich kid bankrolling Resistance fighters in Afghanistan until he came under the sway of his Egyptian spiritual mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and decided to go global; for that matter, 4 or 5 of the 10 original founders of al-Qaeda were Egyptian. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing? Egyptian. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11? Egyptian. Wherever one turns in the arena of Islamic jihadists, one is likely to find either the direct or spiritual influence of an Egyptian.
I decided to take a closer look at the Sinai bombings, sensing that in exploring who might have been behind them and why I could glimpse the darker currents that run beneath the surface in Egypt. To do so, however, would mean somehow skirting the Egyptian state-security apparatus-no small obstacle. In the wake of the 1997 Luxor massacre, for example, the Swiss government launched an official investigation into the killings (most of those murdered had been Swiss citizens) but had been thwarted at every turn by the Egyptian authorities and finally abandoned the effort.
Still, there was at least one strong lead to follow. In the parking lot of the Taba Hilton, authorities had found the mangled bodies of the two men who had driven the delivery truck to the entrance; it's likely they had been running for their lives when the bomb went off prematurely. One of those dead men was identified as Suleiman Flaifil, a previously unknown day laborer from northern Sinai. Nearly 10 months later, Suleiman's older brother Muhammad was killed in a shoot-out with police while on the run from an indictment in the Taba case. Whatever the actual circumstances of Muhammad's death-being killed in a "shoot-out" with police is a suspiciously common event in Egypt-it was hard to imagine any possible motive for the authorities to have invented Suleiman's role in the Taba bombing. My goal, then, was to find out whatever I could about the mysterious Flaifil brothers.
But to focus solely on a tragedy, even one on a grand scale, is to render only a limited portrait of a place. While in Sharm al-Sheikh in 2002, I developed a friendship with a young man I will call Farouk-as much as any relationship between a "rich" American and a struggling Egyptian worker can be called a friendship-and over the intervening years, I stayed in regular e-mail contact with him. In long messages to me-letters, really-Farouk chronicled the slow, sad decline in his fortunes. While the Flaifil brothers' story was certainly more dramatic, I felt that also examining the ongoing saga that was Farouk's life might lead to a fuller grasp of what was happening in Egypt.
The first hint of a problem with this little plan arose when I wrote Farouk that I was coming over and would take him up on his long-standing offer to show me around Bani Suweif, his hometown. I got a panicked reply.
"It is better that you not come to Bani Suweif. I will come up to Cairo and meet you there." Then he pushed the point just a little too far. "Please don't come to Bani Suweif."
Big Nanny
'Welcome to Egypt," the concierge at my Cairo hotel said with a broad smile.
Never mind that I'd already been in Egypt for a week and had spoken with the man almost daily; this was his standard greeting, as it is with many Egyptians upon encountering a foreigner. In restaurants, in taxis, on the street, the phrase is heard so often-and often from people who don't speak any further English-that it almost seems like someone slipped it into the national anthem.
The concierge wore that pleasantly helpful expression common to people in his profession, but his look changed to bafflement when he heard my request. "You want to take a train to Bani Suweif? But there is no reason to go to Bani Suweif, sir."
I explained I had a friend there.
"An Egyptian friend? Then it is much better if he comes here."
"But I want to go there," I said.
With a frown of consternation, he picked up his telephone and spoke in hushed Arabic. He apparently heard good news, for his frown cleared, and he replaced the receiver with a relieved sigh. "I'm sorry, sir; very few trains go to Bani Suweif, and all the ones today are full. What is best is to arrange a minivan for you, with a driver and a guide."
I knew this couldn't be true. Just 75 miles south of Cairo on the Nile, the town of Bani Suweif lay on Egypt's main rail line; there were probably dozens of trains every day, and they couldn't all be full. The real issue, I suspected, was that I had just run up against Big Nanny.
In response to the terror attacks on foreigners in the 1990s, the Egyptian government now operates a vast internal-security apparatus designed to shield visitors from any potential unpleasantness or harm. Wander away from the demarcated and heavily protected tourist zones in the countryside and the ever present tourist police will try to herd you back; insist on proceeding and, more than likely, you will end up with your own bodyguard detail. The specific problem with Bani Suweif, I surmised, was that the nondescript industrial city, best known for the pall of white dust from its two cement factories, fell outside of any conceivable tourist zone. By stating my intention to go there, I had tripped the Big Nanny alarm bells-and those bells would continue to sound until I gave up or submitted to whatever minivan security package was arranged.
Telling the concierge I would think things over, I wandered away. I then went down to the main railway station and caught the first train.
I was met in Bani Suweif by my friend Farouk. He looked much as I remembered him-slight, handsome-but seemed ill at ease, and he barely smiled as he quickly shook my hand.
"It's best we not stay here," he said, turning to go, but it was already too late; one of the policemen lounging at the station entrance, seeing our exchange, hurried over to interrogate Farouk in rapid-fire Arabic.
Once away from the policeman and the rail station, Farouk grew visibly more relaxed. "He was asking how I knew you," he explained, "because it is against the law for a normal Egyptian to be with a foreigner."
This is not technically true, although the effect of a selectively enforced executive order is the same. One of the more bizarre weapons in the Big Nanny arsenal, the order bars all but accredited guides from being in the company of foreigners, and while it is intended mainly to thwart the swarms of touts and souvenir hawkers who congregate around tourist sites-certainly, a well-dressed, middle-class Egyptian walking down a Cairo street with a foreigner is unlikely to be bothered-police can use it as a pretext to stop any Egyptian, like Farouk, who doesn't fit into this rarefied category. As a result, it's not at all unusual when being accompanied by an Egyptian through areas where policemen typically congregate-bus and train stations, museum entrances, or bazaars-for them to walk some distance ahead or behind so as to avoid any signs of fraternization. One possible reason Farouk had discouraged me from coming to Bani Suweif was his fear of harassment by the authorities-quite a reasonable fear, obviously.
As he led me down a narrow, trash-strewn alley to his home, however, I wondered if there was another reason. The crumbling apartment he shared with his parents and three brothers consisted of three tiny rooms; the fetid open-air courtyard at the center, no bigger than a typical American bathroom, was home to two penned goats and a half-dozen chickens. Clearly embarrassed by his poverty, Farouk perfunctorily introduced me to his family, then led me up the stairs to the rooftop bedroom he shared with one of his brothers. It was a converted utility shed, measuring perhaps 6 by 10, with two narrow beds and a poster of the Isle of Capri on a peeling wall.
"So this is my home," he said with an apologetic smile. "I've lived here all my life."
What I had most remembered about Farouk from Sharm al-Sheikh was his broad, easy smile-a lady-killer's smile-and while there were still vestiges of that, it crossed his face far less frequently now, and appeared forced when it did. I also noticed a small circle of discoloration at the center of his forehead that hadn't been there before, the telltale scarring a devout Muslim man gets from repeatedly touching his head to the ground during prayer. I asked him about it.
"Yes, I go to the mosque a lot now." He laughed. His old grin came back. "I have a lot of free time."
From a poor family-his father was a day laborer-Farouk had started out as a diligent student with hopes of going to university, but failing to win admission to the local university, he was shunted into a vocational-training center. After a short time, though, his parents could no longer afford the tuition, and, just like that, he became part of the vast horde of young Egyptian men-countless millions of them-in search of a job, any job. Into his early 20s, he found occasional part-time work in Bani Suweif, while making periodic forays to Cairo in search of something better.
There was nothing better.
Then, in 2002, Farouk's luck finally changed; with a friend's work permit, he managed to cross the police checkpoint into Sharm al-Sheikh. For the twentysomething charmer from Bani Suweif, it was like crossing into a world he had only dreamed of, a land of limitless possibility.
In the Sun
Upon entering the courtyard of the walled compound, I was met by an odd sight: in the early-afternoon light, about a half-dozen men lay sprawled over the bare sand sound asleep, and there was something in the tight cluster they had formed with their bodies that reminded me of so many resting pack animals. Not everyone was sleeping, though. Leaning his back against a wall, the weathered lines of his dark face offset by a white robe, sat Sheikh Ahmed, father of the infamous Flaifil brothers.
The meeting had been arranged by an intermediary who had initially been doubtful the sheikh would agree to talk to me. Reluctance would have been understandable, for the death of his youngest son, Suleiman, at the Taba Hilton, had been only the beginning of very bad times for the Flaifil family-and, to a lesser degree, for all the residents of northern Sinai.
Once Suleiman had been identified as one of the Taba bombers, Egyptian security forces descended en masse on the al-'Arish region of northeastern Sinai, rounding up the male populations of entire neighborhoods and villages for questioning. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, as many as 3,000 men from the region were caught up in the dragnet-some quickly released, others held for months-and there were persistent reports of torture among the detainees. Naturally, the extended Flaifil family came in for special attention; Sheikh Ahmed and many other males of the clan had been hauled off to Tora Prison, outside Cairo, and some were kept there for weeks.
More bad news was coming. In March 2005 the government released an indictment naming three conspirators in the Taba bombings: two men already in custody, and one still at large. That fugitive was one of Sheikh Ahmed's other sons, Muhammad. In late July 2005, Muhammad's luck ran out; he was killed along with his wife in a purported shoot-out with the security forces in the 'Ataqa Mountains just east of Cairo.
"They killed him over there," his father said, waving his hand at the far wall of the compound, in the general direction of the distant mountains. "The police came and told me a few days later."
Initially, I attributed the sheikh's lack of affect in discussing the deaths of his two sons to a certain cultural barrier. The Flaifils were Bedouin, the desert tribesmen who are scattered from Saudi Arabia clear across North Africa, and in their hard life stoicism comes with the territory. Sheikh Ahmed was no more forthcoming, however, when I asked more neutral questions-about his sons' interests, their personalities-and I finally asked why.
"Because five years ago, I put them in the sun," he replied.
The verb in Arabic is shammasa, and in this context means "to banish." In Egypt, where family ties form the very core of one's identity, there can be no worse punishment; in fact, being "put in the sun" is so severe and so rarely invoked that many Egyptians don't even know the phrase's meaning.
According to Sheikh Ahmed, his sons' waywardness began when they were attending high school in al-'Arish, the principal city of northern Sinai, 10 miles down the road from the tribal village. There, they apparently took stock of their surroundings and saw a lot to dislike.
While obviously not to the Flaifil brothers' extreme, a very deep sense of disenfranchisement runs through the people of northern Sinai. Part of it, no doubt, is the continuing impoverishment of the region even as the tourist resorts in southern Sinai boom, but it also stems from the complexities of recent Egyptian history. Seized by the Israelis in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Sinai was returned to Egypt only after the signing of the Camp David Accords, in 1978; living under Israeli occupation for all those years, many residents naturally traded with-and were frequently employed in-the hated "Zionist state." No matter that today the two nations are officially at peace-many Egyptian-government officials still regard the residents of northern Sinai as untrustworthy "collaborationists" and don't consider them Egyptians at all. Not without reason, then, many Sinai natives have long felt they are second-class citizens, with the added insult now of being barred from the opulent tourist enclaves in their midst.
Rather than to overt political activism, however, the Flaifil brothers channeled their newfound discontent in a very different direction, one that would ultimately lead to their banishment from the tribe. In al-'Arish, Sheikh Ahmed explained, his sons fell in with a "religious group" that had major problems with the brand of Islam the Flaifil clan practiced. "They came back here and told me that I was a kafir, an infidel, that we were all infidels, and we had to change. I tried to reason with them-many of us did-but, finally, there was nothing more to be done, so I put them in the sun."
The Flaifils practiced Sufism, a mystical version of Islam that some other Muslim sects view as somewhat primitive. Still, it was hard to imagine any but the most ardent fundamentalists carrying their distaste to the point of denouncing their own families.
He rose to his feet, the audience drawing to an end. "Anyway, what is the use of talking about all this now? Five years ago they left me and that is all I know. Now they are dead, it is finished, and may God have mercy on their souls."
The Flaifil brothers had left this place and been cast into the modern world. Instead of its offering an easier life than the one they had known in their village, they apparently saw in it a vision of hell, a place to be destroyed.
Paradise Lost
In trying to describe his first impressions of Sharm al-Sheikh, Farouk groped for words. "It was just incredible to me. I had never imagined that a place could be so beautiful, or that people lived in such luxury. It was like I was watching a movie."
It was more than just the opulence of the resorts and fancy boutiques that Farouk had to adjust to. The extent of his romantic experiences in conservative Bani Suweif had been limited. In Sharm al-Sheikh, he had crossed into a hedonistic playground, a land of bars, casinos, and barely clad foreign girls lounging on the beach.
Most remarkable of all, he actually managed to find a job. With Farouk's winning personality and near fluency in English, a food-and-beverage manager for a hotel hired him as a stock boy.
"This was something that could never happen in Egypt," Farouk explained, quite unconsciously differentiating the tourist enclaves from the rest of the country, "because there, to get any good job, you must either have connections or you must pay the boss."
Like most young Egyptians, Farouk knows the pay scale by heart. To obtain a low-level position somewhere in the massive government bureaucracy-coveted because such a sinecure means health benefits and lifetime employment-he says one can expect to pay $1,000 for a post that pays $50 a month. To be hired on as a contract worker in the oil-rich Gulf states, where millions of Egyptians, Palestinians, Indians, Pakistanis, and other South Asians do most of the work, middleman "commissions" can easily come to six months of wages or more. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that this is essentially a method of indentured servitude, or that Farouk's "free" job represented an unlikely end run around the system.
At a salary of less than 300 Egyptian pounds a month-about $40-he worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, re-stocking the hotel's various bars and restaurants. During his off time, he strove to better himself by brushing up on his English and gaining a working knowledge of Italian, German, and Russian, the predominant languages of the hotel's clientele. The effort paid off; increasingly, Farouk was called upon to serve behind the bar, a prized position in that it gave him direct contact with hotel guests.
"Because I have always been interested in learning about other countries," he explained blandly, "and it is nice to talk with people from all over."
In truth, Farouk's campaign to get to the "front of the store" was a good deal more calculated than he first let on, and it underscores one of the bleaker, if largely veiled, features of life in the tourist enclaves. Struggling to get by on a yearly wage that is about equal to what a foreign visitor to Sharm al-Sheikh might spend in a day, the Egyptian waiters and bartenders and drivers vie to find someone-anyone-who might somehow change their life: sponsor them for a job in Europe, say, or hire them on as a chauffeur, a personal assistant; almost anything will do. Among the largely male laborers, the most pursued of all are the foreign women, and not just for the chance to live as someone's pampered boy toy for a couple of weeks. The women are the holders of the most magical key of all: marriage, a new life, a permanent escape from a life of struggle.
"That is what all the guys I worked with were hoping for," Farouk said, "to marry a foreign woman and to leave. It was crazy, because sometimes they would take some woman out, spend a whole month's pay on buying her dinner and drinks, and then nothing. It was like gambling; that is the way most of them saw it. With gambling, you lose and lose and lose, but maybe someday you will win."
Farouk played a less expensive and potentially more clever version of this game, befriending foreigners-like myself-during their vacations in Sharm al-Sheikh and then endeavoring to stay in touch with them afterward through postcards or e-mails. Reaching under his bed in his rooftop room, he brought out a shoebox which contained perhaps 200 postcards.
They were from all over the world and grouped by sender. For some time, Farouk went through the bundles, describing their writers: a family in Spain, a businessman in Holland. Most of the messages were short and perfunctory-"This is a castle near our home; I hope you are well"-but the senders had at least been fond enough of Farouk to make the effort. I noticed that one bundle was tied with a piece of multicolored string, a slip of paper with a hand-drawn heart placed on top.
"From the girl I loved," Farouk said, untying the string.
The girl, from eastern Canada, had been on vacation in Sharm al-Sheikh with her family when they had met. As he flipped through the postcards, Farouk described a chaste, almost pre-pubescent version of romance: strolls along the beachfront promenade, long talks in a secluded corner of the hotel gardens, a quick kiss or hug when they were sure no one was looking.
"I loved her so much," he said, "and I thought she loved me, too, but ... " He held out a postcard. "This is the last one from her."
In a loopy, girlish hand, the message read, "How's my Smiler?! Good, I hope! I am fine, just very busy, but I'll write again soon! Hugs and kisses!" The postmark was more than two years old.
In late 2002, lured by the vague promise of even more lucrative work to be had in the Gulf states, he quit his job. What he didn't fully take into account, however, was the tremendous commission he would have to pay a middleman to obtain such work. Unable to come up with the commission, Farouk found himself back in Bani Suweif, living the hopeless life he had known before.
Pointing to the shoebox, I asked how many of his friends still wrote.
"None," he said quietly. "They have all stopped now."
Big Nanny vs. Big Brother
There was a palpable unease in the room, and my questions weren't helping. In a small village on the Mediterranean coast near al-'Arish, I had tracked down the widow of Suleiman Flaifil and been ushered into the sitting room of her family's spartan home. The small room was crowded with perhaps a dozen men and women perched on cushions along the walls, and while they clearly would have preferred I hadn't come, the Egyptian tradition of hospitality had made it all but impossible to turn me away. As it was, the 23-year-old widow, Fawzeya al-Deeb, left most of the talking to her father, 'Emeira. Wearing a black veil that covered everything but her brown eyes, she sat alongside and struggled to control her and Suleiman's only child, a two-year-old boy named Mosaab.
By 'Emeira al-Deeb's telling, he had known remarkably little about Suleiman before inviting him into his family. The two Flaifil brothers had been living together for some time in the inland village of al-Gourah, about 10 miles away, and 'Emeira had first met Suleiman when he came around the area looking for work. "He worked here in the fields-kept to himself. He would pray at the mosque and spend time with his wife. He was very decent and high-minded."
On the topic of his son-in-law's background and religious beliefs, 'Emeira professed to have known even less; it seemed they had never really discussed religion, and other than mentioning he was originally from a village on the other side of al-'Arish, Suleiman had never talked about his family. As for Muhammad Flaifil, Suleiman's older brother, 'Emeira could recall meeting him only once.
"I don't believe he was involved in any of this," the father-in-law concluded. "If I thought differently, I never would have let him into my home."
When gently coaxed, Fawzeya was even less forthcoming, allowing that her husband had been a kind man and that his one pleasure had been swimming in the sea in the evenings. It seemed they had never discussed religion, either.
The source of the family's profound incuriosity wasn't hard to trace. When word of Suleiman's involvement in the Taba bombing had reached the al-Deebs, all the males in the family had gone into hiding, only surrendering to police a week later, when they realized they couldn't stay on the run indefinitely. While most had soon been released, 'Emeira al-Deeb said that four members of the extended family were still being held. Understandably, they had decided that talking with a foreigner about the dead man who had once lived in their midst was only to invite more trouble.
As unenlightening as they were about Suleiman Flaifil, the al-Deebs were very revealing about a larger facet of Egyptian life-how perfectly innocent people might act in seemingly guilty ways. Why had the men of the family run when they learned the security forces were looking for them? Because, faced with the prospect of spending weeks or months languishing in jail, going on the run was precisely what hundreds of other men throughout northern Sinai had done. If to lesser consequence, it also shed light on why Farouk had been so reluctant to have me come to Bani Suweif. Not because he had anything to hide, but because he knew that once the machinery of state security slips into gear-and the catalyst can be as innocuous as an inquisitive policeman at a train station-it can develop a self-perpetuating momentum that will grind up anyone in its path.
But, in fact, the visit with the al-Deeb family was not totally unfruitful. As I was preparing to leave, one of the younger men in the room came alongside to mutter a suggestion. "This was a small group and Suleiman was involved," he said. "If you want to find out more, go to al-Gourah."
Even before the Flaifil brothers' residency enhanced its notoriety, the sprawling farm community of al-Gourah, near the Israeli border, had the reputation of being a nest of criminal activity, a convenient staging ground for smugglers running guns and drugs across the border, while also being remote enough to serve as a gathering place for Islamic fundamentalists seeking to stay below the state-security radar. And it wasn't as if the Flaifil brothers' demise had ended tension in al-Gourah; in mid-August 2005, a bomb targeting the local garrison of the Multinational Force and Observers, an international monitoring group that has patrolled the Egyptian-Israeli border since the Camp David Accords, injured two Canadians.
On the outskirts of al-Gourah, I contacted a man I will call Rami, a neighbor of the Flaifil brothers'.
"They came here about five years ago," Rami said of the brothers, "and, at first, there was no problem with them. They came to the mosque and prayed with us. But gradually we could see that they wanted to take over the mosque leadership, that they were very militant. Then I learned that, after praying with us in the mosque, they would go out to the desert with other men and pray again. From that time, I wanted to have nothing to do with them."
I didn't catch the significance of the Flaifils' repeating their prayers out in the desert and pressed Rami on the point.
"Because they believed the mosque was unclean," he explained, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Because they were Takfiris."
Of all the factions in extremist Islam, the Takfiris occupy a particularly fearsome niche. While holding that all so-called Islamic nations are now in a state of apostasy and thus legitimate targets for jihad, the Takfiris extend this target list to anyone-Muslim and non-Muslim alike-who might oppose them. More unnerving, while most Islamic fundamentalists subscribe to the tradition of growing beards and dressing conservatively, making them easy to spot, the Takfiris do not; instead, in their covert campaign to strike down the enemies of "true" Islam, it's more important to blend into society, even if this means adopting a very modern guise-the ultimate sleeper cells, in other words.
In our conversation, Rami let slip something else. The Flaifil brothers had been employed by relatives of his living nearby. After considerable cajoling, he agreed to try to arrange a meeting with those relatives at a teahouse the following morning. When I arrived the next day, however, Rami was ashen, literally trembling with fear.
"After you left last night," he explained, "the police came to my house. They knew all about our meeting-they had a tape recording of it-and they forced me to tell them when you were coming back. They are coming here now."
As ultimately became clear, nothing of the sort had happened. Rather, Rami had been so frightened at the possible repercussions of talking with a foreign journalist that he called the police himself. The result was the same, however. Within minutes, several cars pulled up to the teahouse, and a dozen or so uniformed and plainclothes police piled out. The one in charge, a stern-faced man in his 30s, instructed me to follow him in my car to the state-security headquarters in al-'Arish. Instead, we continued on through the town to a police checkpoint on its western outskirts, where he stopped, walked back to my car, and pointed down the highway.
"You have been ordered to leave North Sinai," he said. "That is the way to Cairo."
I asked who was ordering me out.
"My superiors."
"And who are they?"
He grew angry at my impertinence. "It doesn't matter who. It is orders, and so you will leave."
I refused to do so until he gave me the names. I could afford to be combative because I figured there would be no great consequences in being so: I was a foreigner, after all, and in Egypt, Big Nanny will almost always trump Big Brother.
While waiting for the names of the officials who were expelling me from northern Sinai-a list I already knew would never be provided-I chatted with the state-security man, and the initial hostility between us began to melt away. Now that he had accomplished his mission-it was just a matter of time before I gave up, and we both knew it-his tone became solicitous, Big Brother slipping into Big Nanny. "We are only doing this for your own safety, you know? The area you were in is very dangerous for an American. The people there are criminals, not good Egyptians. Anything could have happened to you."
When finally I re-started my car for the four-hour drive to Cairo, he extended his hand with a warm smile.
"Welcome to Egypt," he said. "I hope you have an enjoyable visit."
The Angriest Man in Egypt
In the afternoon, Farouk and I took a walk around Bani Suweif. He had told me the town wasn't much, and he hadn't been lying: it was a sleepy, dusty place of ramshackle cinder-block buildings.
As we strolled, Farouk told me of his life in the nearly four years since he had left Sharm al-Sheikh. It was an unbroken litany of disasters and dashed hopes, the worst being when he did finally go to the Gulf under the promise of a hotel job in Dubai. According to Farouk, to come up with the $1,200 commission charged by the middleman contractor, he had hocked his mother's sole possession of any value, a gold bracelet, but the Dubai hotel turned out to be a weekend condominium complex 50 miles from the nearest town, and there Farouk and the other Egyptian contract workers essentially toiled for their room and board, sometimes so hungry they would scavenge for scraps in the trash cans of the wealthy weekenders. After 15 months he returned home, having saved nothing.
"Now it is hard for me to stay here," he said. "Because I am the oldest son in my family, I should have a job. So everyone sees me as a failure."
I asked why he didn't try to return to Sharm al-Sheikh.
"I've thought about it, but it's not so easy- and that takes money, too. Besides, the lifestyle there is not a good one."
I took this as a reference to the enclave's libertine ways, and I noticed again the spot of discoloration on Farouk's forehead, evidence of the untold hours he was spending in the mosque.
Lending a certain desperation to his situation, he had recently fallen in love with a local girl and wanted to marry her. For that to happen, though, he needed money for an apartment, for furniture-perhaps $5,000-and that was a fantasy as long as he stayed in Bani Suweif.
"She says she loves me, too, and would like to marry, but now there is a rich guy who is interested in her. She says she will wait for me as long as she can, but I know she won't wait much longer."
When I asked what he planned to try next, Farouk merely looked out at the Nile, his face settling into a deep somberness. After a time, he turned to stare at me. "I have a friend who would like to meet you."
He led me back to his neighborhood and down a different alleyway. Climbing the stairs of a run-down apartment building, we were met on the landing by a man in his 30s whom I will call Ashraf. He was unlike any other Egyptian I had met. No warm greeting or customary offer of tea; instead, Ashraf ushered us into the tiny sitting room of his parents' apartment and fairly glared at me through the haze of his cigarette smoke.
"So you're an American?" he asked.
I said I was, and he immediately launched into a tirade against the United States. "America right now is on top, but the top is unfair. It will come down. History shows us that."
Gradually, though, a local component to his rancor emerged and his angry words shifted to Mubarak and the Egyptian government. "'King' Mubarak and his gang have collapsed our economy.... We have no economy, we have no freedom." Relative to other regimes in the Middle East, the Egyptian dictatorship permits a fairly wide latitude when it comes to political expression, and it's not uncommon to hear people criticize President Mubarak. Ashraf's vituperation, however, fell into an altogether more dangerous category, for while the middle class and intelligentsia can hold protest marches in Cairo-in fact, that plays very well to the Bush administration's claims of Egypt's being an "emerging democracy"-that privilege most certainly doesn't extend to young, disaffected men on the streets of places such as Bani Suweif.
In contrast to Farouk, Ashraf had attended university and done well enough to aspire to become a "professional." He borrowed money to start a business in Bani Suweif and did very well until the harassment and demands for kickbacks from the local authorities began.
Now in debt, Ashraf scratched by on the occasional day job, but most of his time was spent, like Farouk's, idly walking the streets of Bani Suweif or sitting in his parents' apartment. But there was a difference between the two. Where Farouk still nursed a flickering hope for something better, Ashraf, his elder, had given up.
If angrier than any other Egyptian I'd met, Ashraf also seemed to personify a facet of the Egyptian personality I'd long sensed lay just beneath the surface: the rage of a people living in a state of near-constant humiliation.
Some of these humiliations come with life under a dictatorship-the corruption, the petty harassments-but others are specific to Egypt. In the land of one of the world's most fabled ancient civilizations, the average Egyptian now struggles to get by on less than $1,000 a year. About the only opportunity for most Egyptians to economically advance is to labor as indentured servants for their far richer Gulf Arab cousins, or to obsequiously cater to the foreigners in their midst.
Perhaps the greatest humiliation of all, however, is that a people born in the very cradle of pan-Arab nationalism now find themselves in servile alliance with the two nations-Israel and the United States-that they most regard as the mortal enemies of the Arab cause. For this, Egyptians quite correctly blame their government, and it is no coincidence that recent public demonstrations against the current regime began as demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, shouts of "Down with Bush" seamlessly, quite naturally, segueing into shouts of "Down with Mubarak."
"Look at me," Ashraf said. "I feel like I'm 70. I feel like I don't have any future. Not even 1 percent of my dreams have come true. If I had a chance to do something, I'd take up a gun. It's the same life for me whether I live or die."
Throughout Ashraf's diatribe, Farouk listened intently, occasionally studying me as if to gauge my reaction.
The Trial
In the shabby little lawyers' lounge of the Isma'iliyya courtroom, the half-dozen defense lawyers in the Taba Hilton bombing trial debated among themselves just how weird their case was about to become.
Up until that morning, everything had been going their way. In eight months of stop-and-start testimony, the prosecutors of Muhammad Abdallah Riba'a and Muhammad Gayez Sabah, the only two surviving suspects in the case, had done little more than establish that a crime had been committed, while producing virtually nothing in the way of evidence to tie either man to the crime. The government's effort had also suffered from a disquieting pattern of violent death among alleged co-conspirators. Along with Muhammad Flaifil, the original third defendant in the case, at least five other men had been killed in purported shoot-outs with security forces, with the added difficulty that most had not been identified as suspects beforehand, their names joined to the "conspiracy" only in death.
In recent weeks, however, rumors had circulated that the prosecutors were preparing to drop a bombshell in the Isma'iliyya courtroom-and that they were going to do it at that morning's session. The most popular theory held that they would try to add more defendants to the case, but just how many the defense lawyers in the lounge could only guess.
Shortly before noon, word came that the trial session was about to begin, and we made our way through a lobby crowded with uniformed and plainclothes police. The courtroom was remarkably small given that this was Egypt's most notorious terrorism trial in a generation, just seven narrow spectator benches descending to a well, beyond which rose the judges' bench. In one of those architectural peculiarities that speaks volumes about a society, the three prosecutors sat at a table that formed part of the raised dais, only slightly lower than the table for the three judges; the defense attorneys were relegated to standing in the well, six feet below. The most arresting feature of the room, though, was a metal cage, measuring perhaps 6 by 12, along the right wall, its iron bars reinforced by steel mesh.
After a few minutes, the defendants began filing into the cage from a back room. I recognized Riba'a and Gayez from photographs, but after them, more and more men-13 more in all-crowded into the cage. All were in white or blue gallabiyyas, the traditional calf-length gown worn by Egyptian men, most bore scrubby beards from their long captivity, and they gazed about the courtroom with wide, puzzled eyes.
The session was brief. The chief prosecutor, a portly, balding man with an imperturbable manner, read out the newly expanded indictment, one which, like the original, provided little in the way of specifics about what the men were said to have done. The new defendants were then asked how they pleaded to the charges. All professed their innocence, and some took the opportunity to complain that they had been tortured during their captivity, that they had no idea of why they were there, or who the other men in the cage-their alleged co-conspirators-were. These various protestations appeared to impress the three judges about as much as the defense team's suggestion that, under Egyptian law, it is illegal to add new defendants to an ongoing trial-which is to say not at all. As plainclothes policemen formed a human wall around the cage, the prisoners were herded out the back door for their return to prison.
Afterward, I came across Ahmed Seif, the chief defense lawyer, somberly smoking a cigarette in the lobby. "I'm afraid they will make these men pay," he said. "The prosecution's case is so weak that now they must make examples of them."
If found guilty by the special state security court in which they're being tried, the Taba defendants not only face the death penalty but have no right to appeal.
At a coffee shop across the street from the courthouse, I was greeted by the elderly parents of Muhammad Riba'a, whom I had interviewed two months earlier in al-'Arish; their 42-year-old son, one of the original defendants, had been a metalworker and stood accused of having built the steel casings for the Taba bombs.
Muhammad's mother explained they had come from al-'Arish that morning to attend the day's session but had been barred from entering by the police. "How did it go?" she asked me with a kindly smile. "How did my son look?"
I didn't know what to tell her, so I said that Muhammad looked well, that his lawyers seemed to be doing a good job. She beamed at this, still apparently oblivious to the elaborate apparatus that had her son in its grip, that now seemed even less likely to ever let go of him.
The American Dream
'People might say that we take a severe approach to terrorism," a senior Egyptian government official told me on condition of anonymity, "but the fact is it works. Look at our record. There has never been an act of terrorism in Egypt that hasn't been solved."
At the time, the 13 new defendants had just been added to the Taba bombing case, and the Egyptian government had hinted it was about to bring indictments for the July 2005 attacks in Sharm al-Sheikh.
"I think we can say with great confidence that this group is finished now," Major-General Ahmed Omar, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told me in his Cairo office. "We uncovered [them] in record time.... Others are now being questioned."
General Muhammad Hani Metwalli, the new governor-general of southern Sinai, where both Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh are located, was even more sanguine. "President Mubarak has helped us to recover and to overcome these incidents very rapidly." The general pointed to the 95 percent occupancy rate among Sharm al-Sheikh hotels during the last Christmas-New Year season as proof that the resort had fully recovered from the July attacks.
"We are now working on expanding the airport runway," he explained, "and making the blueprints for the next five years' development. In a few years, Sharm al-Sheikh will be twice the size it is now."
One of the general's goals was to see more Americans come to the Red Sea Riviera, expanding from its mostly European client base. "This is a city of peace and beauty. We welcome any American tourists."
On my last day in Cairo, Farouk came up from Bani Suweif to say good-bye. Uncomfortable with being seen on the streets with me, he suggested we go to a caf�, and we ended up at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, of all things, in the basement of a downtown shopping center. For some time, we talked about Farouk's latest plan. He had heard there were hotel jobs in Tunisia, and he was trying to raise the money he needed for the expedition.
His ultimate dream, though, was to win the American-visa lottery. Every year, the U.S. awards some 50,000 work visas around the world, and this was the fourth year in a row that Farouk was applying.
"Of course, it is a very small chance I can win," he said, "but all my friends apply each year, and I have heard that two men from Bani Suweif have won in the past. One is in Chicago, the other in Los Angeles, I think, and now their lives are very good."
For some minutes, Farouk rhapsodized about what his life would become if he won the lottery, how it would answer all his dreams. "Because I know in America I would be a great success. Everything would be wonderful for me then."
After a short time, though, Farouk seemed to reflect on just how improbably small the odds were of this happening, and grew more solemn.
"You remember my friend Ashraf?" he asked. "He didn't tell you this, but last year he got an Iraqi visa. He wanted to join the jihad-as a fighter or as a shaheed [martyr], he didn't care-but so many Egyptian men have gone there that they have closed the land routes. To go to Iraq now, you first have to fly to Syria, and he didn't have the money for that."
It sounded like some bad joke, a guy so down on his luck he couldn't even get himself killed, but then Farouk continued in a soft voice.
"Sometimes I think maybe I should do that. They talk about it a lot in the mosques, about all the young men going there. I think I'm too soft to be a fighter, that it's not in my spirit, but I don't know ... If I could go and kill some Americans before I die, then maybe my life would have had some meaning."
Throughout our conversation, the K.F.C. manager had been solicitously hovering a short distance away, and as we rose to leave, he hurried over to ask where I was from.
"America," Farouk answered for me, touching my shoulder with a hint of proprietary pride. "He is my American friend."
"Ah, American!" The manager beamed, extended his hand. "Welcome to Egypt."
Destiny
At the end of my meeting with the anonymous Egyptian official, in late March, he gave me a polite admonishment. "You'll write whatever you want, obviously," he said, "but all I ask is that you not scare people about Egypt."
I assured him that was not my intention.
On April 24, less than a month after that conversation, the three bombs went off in Dahab, killing more than 20. Two days later, the Multinational Force and Observers garrison outside al-Gourah was again targeted, this time by a suicide bomber, while almost simultaneously another bomber blew himself up near a group of policemen outside al-'Arish. While neither shaheed succeeded in killing others, the attacks bore a foreboding similarity to those seen all too often in Iraq.
As in the wake of Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh, the Dahab bombings led the Egyptian security forces to conduct a dragnet in the northern Sinai. By the end of that month, they announced they had rounded up some 30 suspects in the latest attacks, while at least 6 other suspects had been killed in shoot-outs with the authorities. On May 9, news came that the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Nasser Khamis al-Mallahi, had been slain in a shoot-out near al-'Arish. The Egyptian Interior Ministry declared that his death was "a significant breakthrough."
In early April, Farouk made the passage to Tunisia in search of work. He was detained after one day there and deported back to Egypt, where he spent five days in prison. Upon his return to Bani Suweif, he learned that the woman he hoped to marry had become engaged to his wealthy rival. In an e-mail to me, he said he had contemplated suicide for the first time in his life, but had then talked to a wise old man in the local mosque.
"He told me that nobody can change his destiny," Farouk wrote, "and I should pray to God more and more. After I listened to his words, I felt very relaxed."
Scott Anderson has covered conflicts across the globe. His most recent book is Moonlight Hotel: A Novel (Doubleday).
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER
The "Red Sea Riviera," where tourists are shielded from the surrounding poverty and anti-West sentiment, has recently become a suicide-bomber target. Escaping to the seething streets, the author reports on an Egypt you aren't supposed to see
VIEW THE SLIDE SHOW
The commercials are slick and alluring, holding out the promise of a pampered, hedonistic holiday in the sun: beautiful young couples lounging poolside, swimmers frolicking with dolphins and colorful fish, three women with fine, bikini-clad butts, gazing out at an azure sea. It is quite far into the spots before the dark-skinned locals first put in an appearance, but even they are no cause for alarm-most are in tailored servant uniforms and wear friendly smiles as they cater to their paler-complected guests. It's not clear where all this fun is taking place-maybe the Caribbean, maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean-until at the very end of the commercials, shown endlessly on CNN International, it's revealed to be someplace called Egypt's Red Sea Riviera.
Until a few years ago, no one had heard of the Red Sea Riviera. Perhaps that's because most of the shiny beach-resort hotels that fall under the marketing label aren't on the Red Sea at all, but rather on the Gulf of 'Aqaba, that narrow strip of water which separates the eastern coast of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula from Saudi Arabia and Jordan. No matter, because it really could be anywhere. From Taba, at the very north end, flush on the border with Israel, all the way down the 125 miles of rugged Sinai coastline to the main tourist resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the visitor exists in a cocoon of pleasure scrubbed clean of exoticism, the largest gated playground on the planet. Within those gates are five-star hotels and restaurants and world-class scuba-diving, a Hard Rock Cafe, and McDonald's. Outside those gates is everyone and everything else, a purity maintained by police checkpoints on all roads leading into the enclave. The only Egyptians allowed to enter are those wealthy enough to vacation in the zone, or those who can prove they have jobs there; the others are turned back.
But in the modern world, ugly reality has a way of intruding into even the most sanitized playgrounds. For the Red Sea Riviera, that ugliness started on the evening of October 7, 2004, when a vegetable-delivery truck rolled up to the entrance of the Hilton in Taba. Hidden beneath its crates of produce was a bomb so powerful it brought down the entire front wing of the 10-story hotel, killing 32; almost simultaneously, two smaller bombs exploded at tourist campgrounds farther down the coast, killing 2 more. Nine months later, in July 2005, Sharm al-Sheikh itself was the target: three more bombs, 88 more dead. And just this past April, it was Dahab, a quiet resort town midway between Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh: again three bombs, more than 20 dead.
For the Egyptian government, the Sinai bombings arrived like a ghost it thought it had long since killed. In the 1990s, shadowy Islamic guerrilla organizations carried out a series of attacks on foreigners in Egypt, culminating in a horrific slaughter of 58 tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, in Luxor, in 1997. For this direct assault on one of the bulwarks of the economy-at almost $8 billion annually, tourism is the main source of Egyptian foreign exchange-the government conducted a brutal, no-holds-barred war against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), killing or disappearing hundreds, and imprisoning thousands more. The pogrom effectively ended terrorism in Egypt-until the 2004 attack on the Taba Hilton.
While nowhere approaching the scorched-earth campaign directed against al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian authorities have responded to the Sinai bombings in nearly identical fashion. Each time they have launched massive police dragnets among the local population of Sinai, especially in its northeast corner, rounding up hundreds, sometimes thousands. Each time, they have quickly identified the perpetrators as local malcontents working in collusion with elements of Sinai's criminal underworld. Even as those conclusions have been questioned by human-rights organizations, the government has embarked on a new public-relations campaign designed to assure foreign investors and tourists that the danger has passed, that Egypt is safe once again.
By chance, I had a passing familiarity with all three places targeted in the Sinai bombings. In the spring of 2002, after spending six weeks in Israel on a story assignment, I had decided to go to the Sinai Peninsula to unwind. Crossing the Israeli-Egyptian border on foot, I had walked the 100 yards to the Taba Hilton to pick up a rental car for the drive down the coast. On the way, I stopped off in Dahab, the site of the most recent attack, before continuing on to Sharm al-Sheikh. There, I stayed just down the street from the Ghazala Gardens, the hotel where a suicide bomber had driven into the lobby during the July 2005 attacks and claimed the greatest number of victims.
Brief as my time there was, I came to feel that I was confronting two illusions, that just as the tourist enclaves in the Sinai had little in common with the rest of Egypt, so the nation as a whole bears scant resemblance to the placid image that its boosters-the Egyptian government, its friends in the West-wish to project. It is, instead, something of a seething volcano.
With at least 80 million inhabitants, Egypt is not only the most populous nation in the Arab world but in many ways its intellectual and political nexus, the fount from which nearly every major political or religious force to spread through the region in the past century has emerged. And while much has been made since September 11 of the danger posed by such Muslim fundamentalist trends as the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, it has been the much broader fundamentalist trends first fostered in Egypt, with their specifically anti-Western tilt, that have probably most fanned the flames of jihad throughout the region.
The pattern is unmistakable, should one bother to look. The Gama'a al-Islamiyya, a social movement espousing a rejection of Western values and a return to Islamic traditions, originated in Egypt in the 1970s before spreading throughout the Middle East. Islamic Jihad also has its roots in Egypt. Osama bin Laden was a disgruntled Saudi rich kid bankrolling Resistance fighters in Afghanistan until he came under the sway of his Egyptian spiritual mentor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and decided to go global; for that matter, 4 or 5 of the 10 original founders of al-Qaeda were Egyptian. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the masterminds behind the first World Trade Center bombing? Egyptian. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9/11? Egyptian. Wherever one turns in the arena of Islamic jihadists, one is likely to find either the direct or spiritual influence of an Egyptian.
I decided to take a closer look at the Sinai bombings, sensing that in exploring who might have been behind them and why I could glimpse the darker currents that run beneath the surface in Egypt. To do so, however, would mean somehow skirting the Egyptian state-security apparatus-no small obstacle. In the wake of the 1997 Luxor massacre, for example, the Swiss government launched an official investigation into the killings (most of those murdered had been Swiss citizens) but had been thwarted at every turn by the Egyptian authorities and finally abandoned the effort.
Still, there was at least one strong lead to follow. In the parking lot of the Taba Hilton, authorities had found the mangled bodies of the two men who had driven the delivery truck to the entrance; it's likely they had been running for their lives when the bomb went off prematurely. One of those dead men was identified as Suleiman Flaifil, a previously unknown day laborer from northern Sinai. Nearly 10 months later, Suleiman's older brother Muhammad was killed in a shoot-out with police while on the run from an indictment in the Taba case. Whatever the actual circumstances of Muhammad's death-being killed in a "shoot-out" with police is a suspiciously common event in Egypt-it was hard to imagine any possible motive for the authorities to have invented Suleiman's role in the Taba bombing. My goal, then, was to find out whatever I could about the mysterious Flaifil brothers.
But to focus solely on a tragedy, even one on a grand scale, is to render only a limited portrait of a place. While in Sharm al-Sheikh in 2002, I developed a friendship with a young man I will call Farouk-as much as any relationship between a "rich" American and a struggling Egyptian worker can be called a friendship-and over the intervening years, I stayed in regular e-mail contact with him. In long messages to me-letters, really-Farouk chronicled the slow, sad decline in his fortunes. While the Flaifil brothers' story was certainly more dramatic, I felt that also examining the ongoing saga that was Farouk's life might lead to a fuller grasp of what was happening in Egypt.
The first hint of a problem with this little plan arose when I wrote Farouk that I was coming over and would take him up on his long-standing offer to show me around Bani Suweif, his hometown. I got a panicked reply.
"It is better that you not come to Bani Suweif. I will come up to Cairo and meet you there." Then he pushed the point just a little too far. "Please don't come to Bani Suweif."
Big Nanny
'Welcome to Egypt," the concierge at my Cairo hotel said with a broad smile.
Never mind that I'd already been in Egypt for a week and had spoken with the man almost daily; this was his standard greeting, as it is with many Egyptians upon encountering a foreigner. In restaurants, in taxis, on the street, the phrase is heard so often-and often from people who don't speak any further English-that it almost seems like someone slipped it into the national anthem.
The concierge wore that pleasantly helpful expression common to people in his profession, but his look changed to bafflement when he heard my request. "You want to take a train to Bani Suweif? But there is no reason to go to Bani Suweif, sir."
I explained I had a friend there.
"An Egyptian friend? Then it is much better if he comes here."
"But I want to go there," I said.
With a frown of consternation, he picked up his telephone and spoke in hushed Arabic. He apparently heard good news, for his frown cleared, and he replaced the receiver with a relieved sigh. "I'm sorry, sir; very few trains go to Bani Suweif, and all the ones today are full. What is best is to arrange a minivan for you, with a driver and a guide."
I knew this couldn't be true. Just 75 miles south of Cairo on the Nile, the town of Bani Suweif lay on Egypt's main rail line; there were probably dozens of trains every day, and they couldn't all be full. The real issue, I suspected, was that I had just run up against Big Nanny.
In response to the terror attacks on foreigners in the 1990s, the Egyptian government now operates a vast internal-security apparatus designed to shield visitors from any potential unpleasantness or harm. Wander away from the demarcated and heavily protected tourist zones in the countryside and the ever present tourist police will try to herd you back; insist on proceeding and, more than likely, you will end up with your own bodyguard detail. The specific problem with Bani Suweif, I surmised, was that the nondescript industrial city, best known for the pall of white dust from its two cement factories, fell outside of any conceivable tourist zone. By stating my intention to go there, I had tripped the Big Nanny alarm bells-and those bells would continue to sound until I gave up or submitted to whatever minivan security package was arranged.
Telling the concierge I would think things over, I wandered away. I then went down to the main railway station and caught the first train.
I was met in Bani Suweif by my friend Farouk. He looked much as I remembered him-slight, handsome-but seemed ill at ease, and he barely smiled as he quickly shook my hand.
"It's best we not stay here," he said, turning to go, but it was already too late; one of the policemen lounging at the station entrance, seeing our exchange, hurried over to interrogate Farouk in rapid-fire Arabic.
Once away from the policeman and the rail station, Farouk grew visibly more relaxed. "He was asking how I knew you," he explained, "because it is against the law for a normal Egyptian to be with a foreigner."
This is not technically true, although the effect of a selectively enforced executive order is the same. One of the more bizarre weapons in the Big Nanny arsenal, the order bars all but accredited guides from being in the company of foreigners, and while it is intended mainly to thwart the swarms of touts and souvenir hawkers who congregate around tourist sites-certainly, a well-dressed, middle-class Egyptian walking down a Cairo street with a foreigner is unlikely to be bothered-police can use it as a pretext to stop any Egyptian, like Farouk, who doesn't fit into this rarefied category. As a result, it's not at all unusual when being accompanied by an Egyptian through areas where policemen typically congregate-bus and train stations, museum entrances, or bazaars-for them to walk some distance ahead or behind so as to avoid any signs of fraternization. One possible reason Farouk had discouraged me from coming to Bani Suweif was his fear of harassment by the authorities-quite a reasonable fear, obviously.
As he led me down a narrow, trash-strewn alley to his home, however, I wondered if there was another reason. The crumbling apartment he shared with his parents and three brothers consisted of three tiny rooms; the fetid open-air courtyard at the center, no bigger than a typical American bathroom, was home to two penned goats and a half-dozen chickens. Clearly embarrassed by his poverty, Farouk perfunctorily introduced me to his family, then led me up the stairs to the rooftop bedroom he shared with one of his brothers. It was a converted utility shed, measuring perhaps 6 by 10, with two narrow beds and a poster of the Isle of Capri on a peeling wall.
"So this is my home," he said with an apologetic smile. "I've lived here all my life."
What I had most remembered about Farouk from Sharm al-Sheikh was his broad, easy smile-a lady-killer's smile-and while there were still vestiges of that, it crossed his face far less frequently now, and appeared forced when it did. I also noticed a small circle of discoloration at the center of his forehead that hadn't been there before, the telltale scarring a devout Muslim man gets from repeatedly touching his head to the ground during prayer. I asked him about it.
"Yes, I go to the mosque a lot now." He laughed. His old grin came back. "I have a lot of free time."
From a poor family-his father was a day laborer-Farouk had started out as a diligent student with hopes of going to university, but failing to win admission to the local university, he was shunted into a vocational-training center. After a short time, though, his parents could no longer afford the tuition, and, just like that, he became part of the vast horde of young Egyptian men-countless millions of them-in search of a job, any job. Into his early 20s, he found occasional part-time work in Bani Suweif, while making periodic forays to Cairo in search of something better.
There was nothing better.
Then, in 2002, Farouk's luck finally changed; with a friend's work permit, he managed to cross the police checkpoint into Sharm al-Sheikh. For the twentysomething charmer from Bani Suweif, it was like crossing into a world he had only dreamed of, a land of limitless possibility.
In the Sun
Upon entering the courtyard of the walled compound, I was met by an odd sight: in the early-afternoon light, about a half-dozen men lay sprawled over the bare sand sound asleep, and there was something in the tight cluster they had formed with their bodies that reminded me of so many resting pack animals. Not everyone was sleeping, though. Leaning his back against a wall, the weathered lines of his dark face offset by a white robe, sat Sheikh Ahmed, father of the infamous Flaifil brothers.
The meeting had been arranged by an intermediary who had initially been doubtful the sheikh would agree to talk to me. Reluctance would have been understandable, for the death of his youngest son, Suleiman, at the Taba Hilton, had been only the beginning of very bad times for the Flaifil family-and, to a lesser degree, for all the residents of northern Sinai.
Once Suleiman had been identified as one of the Taba bombers, Egyptian security forces descended en masse on the al-'Arish region of northeastern Sinai, rounding up the male populations of entire neighborhoods and villages for questioning. According to the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, as many as 3,000 men from the region were caught up in the dragnet-some quickly released, others held for months-and there were persistent reports of torture among the detainees. Naturally, the extended Flaifil family came in for special attention; Sheikh Ahmed and many other males of the clan had been hauled off to Tora Prison, outside Cairo, and some were kept there for weeks.
More bad news was coming. In March 2005 the government released an indictment naming three conspirators in the Taba bombings: two men already in custody, and one still at large. That fugitive was one of Sheikh Ahmed's other sons, Muhammad. In late July 2005, Muhammad's luck ran out; he was killed along with his wife in a purported shoot-out with the security forces in the 'Ataqa Mountains just east of Cairo.
"They killed him over there," his father said, waving his hand at the far wall of the compound, in the general direction of the distant mountains. "The police came and told me a few days later."
Initially, I attributed the sheikh's lack of affect in discussing the deaths of his two sons to a certain cultural barrier. The Flaifils were Bedouin, the desert tribesmen who are scattered from Saudi Arabia clear across North Africa, and in their hard life stoicism comes with the territory. Sheikh Ahmed was no more forthcoming, however, when I asked more neutral questions-about his sons' interests, their personalities-and I finally asked why.
"Because five years ago, I put them in the sun," he replied.
The verb in Arabic is shammasa, and in this context means "to banish." In Egypt, where family ties form the very core of one's identity, there can be no worse punishment; in fact, being "put in the sun" is so severe and so rarely invoked that many Egyptians don't even know the phrase's meaning.
According to Sheikh Ahmed, his sons' waywardness began when they were attending high school in al-'Arish, the principal city of northern Sinai, 10 miles down the road from the tribal village. There, they apparently took stock of their surroundings and saw a lot to dislike.
While obviously not to the Flaifil brothers' extreme, a very deep sense of disenfranchisement runs through the people of northern Sinai. Part of it, no doubt, is the continuing impoverishment of the region even as the tourist resorts in southern Sinai boom, but it also stems from the complexities of recent Egyptian history. Seized by the Israelis in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Sinai was returned to Egypt only after the signing of the Camp David Accords, in 1978; living under Israeli occupation for all those years, many residents naturally traded with-and were frequently employed in-the hated "Zionist state." No matter that today the two nations are officially at peace-many Egyptian-government officials still regard the residents of northern Sinai as untrustworthy "collaborationists" and don't consider them Egyptians at all. Not without reason, then, many Sinai natives have long felt they are second-class citizens, with the added insult now of being barred from the opulent tourist enclaves in their midst.
Rather than to overt political activism, however, the Flaifil brothers channeled their newfound discontent in a very different direction, one that would ultimately lead to their banishment from the tribe. In al-'Arish, Sheikh Ahmed explained, his sons fell in with a "religious group" that had major problems with the brand of Islam the Flaifil clan practiced. "They came back here and told me that I was a kafir, an infidel, that we were all infidels, and we had to change. I tried to reason with them-many of us did-but, finally, there was nothing more to be done, so I put them in the sun."
The Flaifils practiced Sufism, a mystical version of Islam that some other Muslim sects view as somewhat primitive. Still, it was hard to imagine any but the most ardent fundamentalists carrying their distaste to the point of denouncing their own families.
He rose to his feet, the audience drawing to an end. "Anyway, what is the use of talking about all this now? Five years ago they left me and that is all I know. Now they are dead, it is finished, and may God have mercy on their souls."
The Flaifil brothers had left this place and been cast into the modern world. Instead of its offering an easier life than the one they had known in their village, they apparently saw in it a vision of hell, a place to be destroyed.
Paradise Lost
In trying to describe his first impressions of Sharm al-Sheikh, Farouk groped for words. "It was just incredible to me. I had never imagined that a place could be so beautiful, or that people lived in such luxury. It was like I was watching a movie."
It was more than just the opulence of the resorts and fancy boutiques that Farouk had to adjust to. The extent of his romantic experiences in conservative Bani Suweif had been limited. In Sharm al-Sheikh, he had crossed into a hedonistic playground, a land of bars, casinos, and barely clad foreign girls lounging on the beach.
Most remarkable of all, he actually managed to find a job. With Farouk's winning personality and near fluency in English, a food-and-beverage manager for a hotel hired him as a stock boy.
"This was something that could never happen in Egypt," Farouk explained, quite unconsciously differentiating the tourist enclaves from the rest of the country, "because there, to get any good job, you must either have connections or you must pay the boss."
Like most young Egyptians, Farouk knows the pay scale by heart. To obtain a low-level position somewhere in the massive government bureaucracy-coveted because such a sinecure means health benefits and lifetime employment-he says one can expect to pay $1,000 for a post that pays $50 a month. To be hired on as a contract worker in the oil-rich Gulf states, where millions of Egyptians, Palestinians, Indians, Pakistanis, and other South Asians do most of the work, middleman "commissions" can easily come to six months of wages or more. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that this is essentially a method of indentured servitude, or that Farouk's "free" job represented an unlikely end run around the system.
At a salary of less than 300 Egyptian pounds a month-about $40-he worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, re-stocking the hotel's various bars and restaurants. During his off time, he strove to better himself by brushing up on his English and gaining a working knowledge of Italian, German, and Russian, the predominant languages of the hotel's clientele. The effort paid off; increasingly, Farouk was called upon to serve behind the bar, a prized position in that it gave him direct contact with hotel guests.
"Because I have always been interested in learning about other countries," he explained blandly, "and it is nice to talk with people from all over."
In truth, Farouk's campaign to get to the "front of the store" was a good deal more calculated than he first let on, and it underscores one of the bleaker, if largely veiled, features of life in the tourist enclaves. Struggling to get by on a yearly wage that is about equal to what a foreign visitor to Sharm al-Sheikh might spend in a day, the Egyptian waiters and bartenders and drivers vie to find someone-anyone-who might somehow change their life: sponsor them for a job in Europe, say, or hire them on as a chauffeur, a personal assistant; almost anything will do. Among the largely male laborers, the most pursued of all are the foreign women, and not just for the chance to live as someone's pampered boy toy for a couple of weeks. The women are the holders of the most magical key of all: marriage, a new life, a permanent escape from a life of struggle.
"That is what all the guys I worked with were hoping for," Farouk said, "to marry a foreign woman and to leave. It was crazy, because sometimes they would take some woman out, spend a whole month's pay on buying her dinner and drinks, and then nothing. It was like gambling; that is the way most of them saw it. With gambling, you lose and lose and lose, but maybe someday you will win."
Farouk played a less expensive and potentially more clever version of this game, befriending foreigners-like myself-during their vacations in Sharm al-Sheikh and then endeavoring to stay in touch with them afterward through postcards or e-mails. Reaching under his bed in his rooftop room, he brought out a shoebox which contained perhaps 200 postcards.
They were from all over the world and grouped by sender. For some time, Farouk went through the bundles, describing their writers: a family in Spain, a businessman in Holland. Most of the messages were short and perfunctory-"This is a castle near our home; I hope you are well"-but the senders had at least been fond enough of Farouk to make the effort. I noticed that one bundle was tied with a piece of multicolored string, a slip of paper with a hand-drawn heart placed on top.
"From the girl I loved," Farouk said, untying the string.
The girl, from eastern Canada, had been on vacation in Sharm al-Sheikh with her family when they had met. As he flipped through the postcards, Farouk described a chaste, almost pre-pubescent version of romance: strolls along the beachfront promenade, long talks in a secluded corner of the hotel gardens, a quick kiss or hug when they were sure no one was looking.
"I loved her so much," he said, "and I thought she loved me, too, but ... " He held out a postcard. "This is the last one from her."
In a loopy, girlish hand, the message read, "How's my Smiler?! Good, I hope! I am fine, just very busy, but I'll write again soon! Hugs and kisses!" The postmark was more than two years old.
In late 2002, lured by the vague promise of even more lucrative work to be had in the Gulf states, he quit his job. What he didn't fully take into account, however, was the tremendous commission he would have to pay a middleman to obtain such work. Unable to come up with the commission, Farouk found himself back in Bani Suweif, living the hopeless life he had known before.
Pointing to the shoebox, I asked how many of his friends still wrote.
"None," he said quietly. "They have all stopped now."
Big Nanny vs. Big Brother
There was a palpable unease in the room, and my questions weren't helping. In a small village on the Mediterranean coast near al-'Arish, I had tracked down the widow of Suleiman Flaifil and been ushered into the sitting room of her family's spartan home. The small room was crowded with perhaps a dozen men and women perched on cushions along the walls, and while they clearly would have preferred I hadn't come, the Egyptian tradition of hospitality had made it all but impossible to turn me away. As it was, the 23-year-old widow, Fawzeya al-Deeb, left most of the talking to her father, 'Emeira. Wearing a black veil that covered everything but her brown eyes, she sat alongside and struggled to control her and Suleiman's only child, a two-year-old boy named Mosaab.
By 'Emeira al-Deeb's telling, he had known remarkably little about Suleiman before inviting him into his family. The two Flaifil brothers had been living together for some time in the inland village of al-Gourah, about 10 miles away, and 'Emeira had first met Suleiman when he came around the area looking for work. "He worked here in the fields-kept to himself. He would pray at the mosque and spend time with his wife. He was very decent and high-minded."
On the topic of his son-in-law's background and religious beliefs, 'Emeira professed to have known even less; it seemed they had never really discussed religion, and other than mentioning he was originally from a village on the other side of al-'Arish, Suleiman had never talked about his family. As for Muhammad Flaifil, Suleiman's older brother, 'Emeira could recall meeting him only once.
"I don't believe he was involved in any of this," the father-in-law concluded. "If I thought differently, I never would have let him into my home."
When gently coaxed, Fawzeya was even less forthcoming, allowing that her husband had been a kind man and that his one pleasure had been swimming in the sea in the evenings. It seemed they had never discussed religion, either.
The source of the family's profound incuriosity wasn't hard to trace. When word of Suleiman's involvement in the Taba bombing had reached the al-Deebs, all the males in the family had gone into hiding, only surrendering to police a week later, when they realized they couldn't stay on the run indefinitely. While most had soon been released, 'Emeira al-Deeb said that four members of the extended family were still being held. Understandably, they had decided that talking with a foreigner about the dead man who had once lived in their midst was only to invite more trouble.
As unenlightening as they were about Suleiman Flaifil, the al-Deebs were very revealing about a larger facet of Egyptian life-how perfectly innocent people might act in seemingly guilty ways. Why had the men of the family run when they learned the security forces were looking for them? Because, faced with the prospect of spending weeks or months languishing in jail, going on the run was precisely what hundreds of other men throughout northern Sinai had done. If to lesser consequence, it also shed light on why Farouk had been so reluctant to have me come to Bani Suweif. Not because he had anything to hide, but because he knew that once the machinery of state security slips into gear-and the catalyst can be as innocuous as an inquisitive policeman at a train station-it can develop a self-perpetuating momentum that will grind up anyone in its path.
But, in fact, the visit with the al-Deeb family was not totally unfruitful. As I was preparing to leave, one of the younger men in the room came alongside to mutter a suggestion. "This was a small group and Suleiman was involved," he said. "If you want to find out more, go to al-Gourah."
Even before the Flaifil brothers' residency enhanced its notoriety, the sprawling farm community of al-Gourah, near the Israeli border, had the reputation of being a nest of criminal activity, a convenient staging ground for smugglers running guns and drugs across the border, while also being remote enough to serve as a gathering place for Islamic fundamentalists seeking to stay below the state-security radar. And it wasn't as if the Flaifil brothers' demise had ended tension in al-Gourah; in mid-August 2005, a bomb targeting the local garrison of the Multinational Force and Observers, an international monitoring group that has patrolled the Egyptian-Israeli border since the Camp David Accords, injured two Canadians.
On the outskirts of al-Gourah, I contacted a man I will call Rami, a neighbor of the Flaifil brothers'.
"They came here about five years ago," Rami said of the brothers, "and, at first, there was no problem with them. They came to the mosque and prayed with us. But gradually we could see that they wanted to take over the mosque leadership, that they were very militant. Then I learned that, after praying with us in the mosque, they would go out to the desert with other men and pray again. From that time, I wanted to have nothing to do with them."
I didn't catch the significance of the Flaifils' repeating their prayers out in the desert and pressed Rami on the point.
"Because they believed the mosque was unclean," he explained, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Because they were Takfiris."
Of all the factions in extremist Islam, the Takfiris occupy a particularly fearsome niche. While holding that all so-called Islamic nations are now in a state of apostasy and thus legitimate targets for jihad, the Takfiris extend this target list to anyone-Muslim and non-Muslim alike-who might oppose them. More unnerving, while most Islamic fundamentalists subscribe to the tradition of growing beards and dressing conservatively, making them easy to spot, the Takfiris do not; instead, in their covert campaign to strike down the enemies of "true" Islam, it's more important to blend into society, even if this means adopting a very modern guise-the ultimate sleeper cells, in other words.
In our conversation, Rami let slip something else. The Flaifil brothers had been employed by relatives of his living nearby. After considerable cajoling, he agreed to try to arrange a meeting with those relatives at a teahouse the following morning. When I arrived the next day, however, Rami was ashen, literally trembling with fear.
"After you left last night," he explained, "the police came to my house. They knew all about our meeting-they had a tape recording of it-and they forced me to tell them when you were coming back. They are coming here now."
As ultimately became clear, nothing of the sort had happened. Rather, Rami had been so frightened at the possible repercussions of talking with a foreign journalist that he called the police himself. The result was the same, however. Within minutes, several cars pulled up to the teahouse, and a dozen or so uniformed and plainclothes police piled out. The one in charge, a stern-faced man in his 30s, instructed me to follow him in my car to the state-security headquarters in al-'Arish. Instead, we continued on through the town to a police checkpoint on its western outskirts, where he stopped, walked back to my car, and pointed down the highway.
"You have been ordered to leave North Sinai," he said. "That is the way to Cairo."
I asked who was ordering me out.
"My superiors."
"And who are they?"
He grew angry at my impertinence. "It doesn't matter who. It is orders, and so you will leave."
I refused to do so until he gave me the names. I could afford to be combative because I figured there would be no great consequences in being so: I was a foreigner, after all, and in Egypt, Big Nanny will almost always trump Big Brother.
While waiting for the names of the officials who were expelling me from northern Sinai-a list I already knew would never be provided-I chatted with the state-security man, and the initial hostility between us began to melt away. Now that he had accomplished his mission-it was just a matter of time before I gave up, and we both knew it-his tone became solicitous, Big Brother slipping into Big Nanny. "We are only doing this for your own safety, you know? The area you were in is very dangerous for an American. The people there are criminals, not good Egyptians. Anything could have happened to you."
When finally I re-started my car for the four-hour drive to Cairo, he extended his hand with a warm smile.
"Welcome to Egypt," he said. "I hope you have an enjoyable visit."
The Angriest Man in Egypt
In the afternoon, Farouk and I took a walk around Bani Suweif. He had told me the town wasn't much, and he hadn't been lying: it was a sleepy, dusty place of ramshackle cinder-block buildings.
As we strolled, Farouk told me of his life in the nearly four years since he had left Sharm al-Sheikh. It was an unbroken litany of disasters and dashed hopes, the worst being when he did finally go to the Gulf under the promise of a hotel job in Dubai. According to Farouk, to come up with the $1,200 commission charged by the middleman contractor, he had hocked his mother's sole possession of any value, a gold bracelet, but the Dubai hotel turned out to be a weekend condominium complex 50 miles from the nearest town, and there Farouk and the other Egyptian contract workers essentially toiled for their room and board, sometimes so hungry they would scavenge for scraps in the trash cans of the wealthy weekenders. After 15 months he returned home, having saved nothing.
"Now it is hard for me to stay here," he said. "Because I am the oldest son in my family, I should have a job. So everyone sees me as a failure."
I asked why he didn't try to return to Sharm al-Sheikh.
"I've thought about it, but it's not so easy- and that takes money, too. Besides, the lifestyle there is not a good one."
I took this as a reference to the enclave's libertine ways, and I noticed again the spot of discoloration on Farouk's forehead, evidence of the untold hours he was spending in the mosque.
Lending a certain desperation to his situation, he had recently fallen in love with a local girl and wanted to marry her. For that to happen, though, he needed money for an apartment, for furniture-perhaps $5,000-and that was a fantasy as long as he stayed in Bani Suweif.
"She says she loves me, too, and would like to marry, but now there is a rich guy who is interested in her. She says she will wait for me as long as she can, but I know she won't wait much longer."
When I asked what he planned to try next, Farouk merely looked out at the Nile, his face settling into a deep somberness. After a time, he turned to stare at me. "I have a friend who would like to meet you."
He led me back to his neighborhood and down a different alleyway. Climbing the stairs of a run-down apartment building, we were met on the landing by a man in his 30s whom I will call Ashraf. He was unlike any other Egyptian I had met. No warm greeting or customary offer of tea; instead, Ashraf ushered us into the tiny sitting room of his parents' apartment and fairly glared at me through the haze of his cigarette smoke.
"So you're an American?" he asked.
I said I was, and he immediately launched into a tirade against the United States. "America right now is on top, but the top is unfair. It will come down. History shows us that."
Gradually, though, a local component to his rancor emerged and his angry words shifted to Mubarak and the Egyptian government. "'King' Mubarak and his gang have collapsed our economy.... We have no economy, we have no freedom." Relative to other regimes in the Middle East, the Egyptian dictatorship permits a fairly wide latitude when it comes to political expression, and it's not uncommon to hear people criticize President Mubarak. Ashraf's vituperation, however, fell into an altogether more dangerous category, for while the middle class and intelligentsia can hold protest marches in Cairo-in fact, that plays very well to the Bush administration's claims of Egypt's being an "emerging democracy"-that privilege most certainly doesn't extend to young, disaffected men on the streets of places such as Bani Suweif.
In contrast to Farouk, Ashraf had attended university and done well enough to aspire to become a "professional." He borrowed money to start a business in Bani Suweif and did very well until the harassment and demands for kickbacks from the local authorities began.
Now in debt, Ashraf scratched by on the occasional day job, but most of his time was spent, like Farouk's, idly walking the streets of Bani Suweif or sitting in his parents' apartment. But there was a difference between the two. Where Farouk still nursed a flickering hope for something better, Ashraf, his elder, had given up.
If angrier than any other Egyptian I'd met, Ashraf also seemed to personify a facet of the Egyptian personality I'd long sensed lay just beneath the surface: the rage of a people living in a state of near-constant humiliation.
Some of these humiliations come with life under a dictatorship-the corruption, the petty harassments-but others are specific to Egypt. In the land of one of the world's most fabled ancient civilizations, the average Egyptian now struggles to get by on less than $1,000 a year. About the only opportunity for most Egyptians to economically advance is to labor as indentured servants for their far richer Gulf Arab cousins, or to obsequiously cater to the foreigners in their midst.
Perhaps the greatest humiliation of all, however, is that a people born in the very cradle of pan-Arab nationalism now find themselves in servile alliance with the two nations-Israel and the United States-that they most regard as the mortal enemies of the Arab cause. For this, Egyptians quite correctly blame their government, and it is no coincidence that recent public demonstrations against the current regime began as demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, shouts of "Down with Bush" seamlessly, quite naturally, segueing into shouts of "Down with Mubarak."
"Look at me," Ashraf said. "I feel like I'm 70. I feel like I don't have any future. Not even 1 percent of my dreams have come true. If I had a chance to do something, I'd take up a gun. It's the same life for me whether I live or die."
Throughout Ashraf's diatribe, Farouk listened intently, occasionally studying me as if to gauge my reaction.
The Trial
In the shabby little lawyers' lounge of the Isma'iliyya courtroom, the half-dozen defense lawyers in the Taba Hilton bombing trial debated among themselves just how weird their case was about to become.
Up until that morning, everything had been going their way. In eight months of stop-and-start testimony, the prosecutors of Muhammad Abdallah Riba'a and Muhammad Gayez Sabah, the only two surviving suspects in the case, had done little more than establish that a crime had been committed, while producing virtually nothing in the way of evidence to tie either man to the crime. The government's effort had also suffered from a disquieting pattern of violent death among alleged co-conspirators. Along with Muhammad Flaifil, the original third defendant in the case, at least five other men had been killed in purported shoot-outs with security forces, with the added difficulty that most had not been identified as suspects beforehand, their names joined to the "conspiracy" only in death.
In recent weeks, however, rumors had circulated that the prosecutors were preparing to drop a bombshell in the Isma'iliyya courtroom-and that they were going to do it at that morning's session. The most popular theory held that they would try to add more defendants to the case, but just how many the defense lawyers in the lounge could only guess.
Shortly before noon, word came that the trial session was about to begin, and we made our way through a lobby crowded with uniformed and plainclothes police. The courtroom was remarkably small given that this was Egypt's most notorious terrorism trial in a generation, just seven narrow spectator benches descending to a well, beyond which rose the judges' bench. In one of those architectural peculiarities that speaks volumes about a society, the three prosecutors sat at a table that formed part of the raised dais, only slightly lower than the table for the three judges; the defense attorneys were relegated to standing in the well, six feet below. The most arresting feature of the room, though, was a metal cage, measuring perhaps 6 by 12, along the right wall, its iron bars reinforced by steel mesh.
After a few minutes, the defendants began filing into the cage from a back room. I recognized Riba'a and Gayez from photographs, but after them, more and more men-13 more in all-crowded into the cage. All were in white or blue gallabiyyas, the traditional calf-length gown worn by Egyptian men, most bore scrubby beards from their long captivity, and they gazed about the courtroom with wide, puzzled eyes.
The session was brief. The chief prosecutor, a portly, balding man with an imperturbable manner, read out the newly expanded indictment, one which, like the original, provided little in the way of specifics about what the men were said to have done. The new defendants were then asked how they pleaded to the charges. All professed their innocence, and some took the opportunity to complain that they had been tortured during their captivity, that they had no idea of why they were there, or who the other men in the cage-their alleged co-conspirators-were. These various protestations appeared to impress the three judges about as much as the defense team's suggestion that, under Egyptian law, it is illegal to add new defendants to an ongoing trial-which is to say not at all. As plainclothes policemen formed a human wall around the cage, the prisoners were herded out the back door for their return to prison.
Afterward, I came across Ahmed Seif, the chief defense lawyer, somberly smoking a cigarette in the lobby. "I'm afraid they will make these men pay," he said. "The prosecution's case is so weak that now they must make examples of them."
If found guilty by the special state security court in which they're being tried, the Taba defendants not only face the death penalty but have no right to appeal.
At a coffee shop across the street from the courthouse, I was greeted by the elderly parents of Muhammad Riba'a, whom I had interviewed two months earlier in al-'Arish; their 42-year-old son, one of the original defendants, had been a metalworker and stood accused of having built the steel casings for the Taba bombs.
Muhammad's mother explained they had come from al-'Arish that morning to attend the day's session but had been barred from entering by the police. "How did it go?" she asked me with a kindly smile. "How did my son look?"
I didn't know what to tell her, so I said that Muhammad looked well, that his lawyers seemed to be doing a good job. She beamed at this, still apparently oblivious to the elaborate apparatus that had her son in its grip, that now seemed even less likely to ever let go of him.
The American Dream
'People might say that we take a severe approach to terrorism," a senior Egyptian government official told me on condition of anonymity, "but the fact is it works. Look at our record. There has never been an act of terrorism in Egypt that hasn't been solved."
At the time, the 13 new defendants had just been added to the Taba bombing case, and the Egyptian government had hinted it was about to bring indictments for the July 2005 attacks in Sharm al-Sheikh.
"I think we can say with great confidence that this group is finished now," Major-General Ahmed Omar, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told me in his Cairo office. "We uncovered [them] in record time.... Others are now being questioned."
General Muhammad Hani Metwalli, the new governor-general of southern Sinai, where both Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh are located, was even more sanguine. "President Mubarak has helped us to recover and to overcome these incidents very rapidly." The general pointed to the 95 percent occupancy rate among Sharm al-Sheikh hotels during the last Christmas-New Year season as proof that the resort had fully recovered from the July attacks.
"We are now working on expanding the airport runway," he explained, "and making the blueprints for the next five years' development. In a few years, Sharm al-Sheikh will be twice the size it is now."
One of the general's goals was to see more Americans come to the Red Sea Riviera, expanding from its mostly European client base. "This is a city of peace and beauty. We welcome any American tourists."
On my last day in Cairo, Farouk came up from Bani Suweif to say good-bye. Uncomfortable with being seen on the streets with me, he suggested we go to a caf�, and we ended up at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, of all things, in the basement of a downtown shopping center. For some time, we talked about Farouk's latest plan. He had heard there were hotel jobs in Tunisia, and he was trying to raise the money he needed for the expedition.
His ultimate dream, though, was to win the American-visa lottery. Every year, the U.S. awards some 50,000 work visas around the world, and this was the fourth year in a row that Farouk was applying.
"Of course, it is a very small chance I can win," he said, "but all my friends apply each year, and I have heard that two men from Bani Suweif have won in the past. One is in Chicago, the other in Los Angeles, I think, and now their lives are very good."
For some minutes, Farouk rhapsodized about what his life would become if he won the lottery, how it would answer all his dreams. "Because I know in America I would be a great success. Everything would be wonderful for me then."
After a short time, though, Farouk seemed to reflect on just how improbably small the odds were of this happening, and grew more solemn.
"You remember my friend Ashraf?" he asked. "He didn't tell you this, but last year he got an Iraqi visa. He wanted to join the jihad-as a fighter or as a shaheed [martyr], he didn't care-but so many Egyptian men have gone there that they have closed the land routes. To go to Iraq now, you first have to fly to Syria, and he didn't have the money for that."
It sounded like some bad joke, a guy so down on his luck he couldn't even get himself killed, but then Farouk continued in a soft voice.
"Sometimes I think maybe I should do that. They talk about it a lot in the mosques, about all the young men going there. I think I'm too soft to be a fighter, that it's not in my spirit, but I don't know ... If I could go and kill some Americans before I die, then maybe my life would have had some meaning."
Throughout our conversation, the K.F.C. manager had been solicitously hovering a short distance away, and as we rose to leave, he hurried over to ask where I was from.
"America," Farouk answered for me, touching my shoulder with a hint of proprietary pride. "He is my American friend."
"Ah, American!" The manager beamed, extended his hand. "Welcome to Egypt."
Destiny
At the end of my meeting with the anonymous Egyptian official, in late March, he gave me a polite admonishment. "You'll write whatever you want, obviously," he said, "but all I ask is that you not scare people about Egypt."
I assured him that was not my intention.
On April 24, less than a month after that conversation, the three bombs went off in Dahab, killing more than 20. Two days later, the Multinational Force and Observers garrison outside al-Gourah was again targeted, this time by a suicide bomber, while almost simultaneously another bomber blew himself up near a group of policemen outside al-'Arish. While neither shaheed succeeded in killing others, the attacks bore a foreboding similarity to those seen all too often in Iraq.
As in the wake of Taba and Sharm al-Sheikh, the Dahab bombings led the Egyptian security forces to conduct a dragnet in the northern Sinai. By the end of that month, they announced they had rounded up some 30 suspects in the latest attacks, while at least 6 other suspects had been killed in shoot-outs with the authorities. On May 9, news came that the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Nasser Khamis al-Mallahi, had been slain in a shoot-out near al-'Arish. The Egyptian Interior Ministry declared that his death was "a significant breakthrough."
In early April, Farouk made the passage to Tunisia in search of work. He was detained after one day there and deported back to Egypt, where he spent five days in prison. Upon his return to Bani Suweif, he learned that the woman he hoped to marry had become engaged to his wealthy rival. In an e-mail to me, he said he had contemplated suicide for the first time in his life, but had then talked to a wise old man in the local mosque.
"He told me that nobody can change his destiny," Farouk wrote, "and I should pray to God more and more. After I listened to his words, I felt very relaxed."
Scott Anderson has covered conflicts across the globe. His most recent book is Moonlight Hotel: A Novel (Doubleday).
Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER
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