I had been a member of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamia for 6 yeas starting 1986. I joined them when I was 14 years old, and with them I spent my whole adolescence. The overwhelming majority of my brothers in the group were at the same age period. This group was responsible for killing of former Egyptian president Anwar Assadat in 1981 and the former speaker of parliament Rifaat Almahgoub in early nineties. A dissident faction of the group was responsible for Luxor massacre in which 57 people were killed in 1997. I wrote a book about my experience with the group titled Life is More Beautiful than Paradise.
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The degree of one's belief in God is not a static thing, the young Islamist was told: it increases when you obey God and decreases when you disobey him. The impression you come up with is that, as a believer, a young man in your teens, your relationship with god is tenser than an adult's one is. It vibrates all the time. Don't take it for granted, your brothers in God would tell you, it might tear apart. The more they tell you that the more you’re vigilant, cautious and aware of yourself. What might go wrong? Your innocent mind would ask. Who hates to be close to God? Nobody does. The whole issue of faith appears to be a linear line upwards. But it is not, you are warned, there is a big obstacle. Your body is born to sin. You inherited desires in every cell of your body. ‘Eye fornicates,’ the prophet says. ‘It does by sight.’ Ear fornicates, he adds. It does this by hearing. And they are not the only organs in the list. Each one of them is a potential obstacle in your way to God.
No doubt. This is right. It doesn't need a proof. Your eyes look at things they mustn't look at. Your tongue says words it mustn't say. Your stomach receives drinks and solids it mustn't receive. Your feet walk to places they mustn't go to. And the worst of all is your genitals. It looks like a lost battle. How could you defeat all those enemies? Is there a way out?
Yes of course, there always is in the kingdom of justice. You have to tame this container of potential sins, to weaken it and hold its keys.
The prophet Mohamad used to stay up praying the whole night until his feet turned sore. The prophet David used to fast one day and eat the next (Don’t mention the army leader’s wife tale here. It’s not in Islam. All prophets in the non-Israeli prophet’s teachings are infallible). Prophets, our examples, kept their bodies away from thinking of desires and sins. They kept bombarding them the whole time and let them be in the defensive. Otherwise bodies would have hit back. Try it. Relax for some time and let your body dictate what it wants and it will think only of sins. The adolescent I was did not doubt it. Women in life and movies, music and bad friends were everywhere around me. Dirt is everywhere of this mortal body. The more the young man tried to cleanse it the more it proved hard for him to win the battle and the more he knew how formidable his enemy was. The battlefield, your body, is a homeland for dirt. And the battle became the militant’s obsession in life and – his life became an endless battle. Gains were over himself, and losses were to himself. When the young man was victorious he was encouraged to go a step farther and when he lost he was a furious fighter, aggressive to himself and others.
However, the reward has been always there. In the thereafter he was promised what an eye had never seen and what an ear had never heard of and what had never come to a mind of a human being. This wasn’t everything, in the current life there was also a reward. If he won he would be chosen among the elite of the army of God, those were the potential martyrs. Those would be allowed to cut their lives short and get rid of the weight of body without being punished for killing themselves or others.
For it is a very high position to be a God’s suicidal or homicidal, very few could be chosen. And this is done through a rigorous selection process. Panelled it is by people who consider themselves inspired by God. They examine everything, your height, fitness and stamina. But, first of all, your purity, your inner eligibility to be one of the righteous killers. And the first sign of this eligibility is to win the first battle, in the closest battlefield – your body.
I had always been awaiting for this reward, so were, assumingly, all my comrades. Then, a glimpse of hope had come for me.
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I was 17 when I first met one of Al-Gamaa’s top leaders – who were serving life sentence in jail for their roles in assassinating late president Sadat. I went to visit them in my town’s prison when they were brought in there to allow them to do their university exams. Asem Abdel-Maged was thirty something, North African black, with a friendly face in spite, or because, of his dense beard. He had a wide smile. A mutual ‘brother’ introduced me. The leader shook hands and said, ‘tall and wide’ – a saying in Egypt that means fit. Then he looked me in the eye and asked, ‘are you a good runner?’ I replied positively. He smiled: ‘good. Good.’
I thought this meant I was considered for future jihadist operations, not least because I would be now introduced to the top of the top – Karam Zuhdi. A lot of heroic tales had I already known about him. One thing I’d definitely take the taste of, his foxy glance. Brothers said it searched any one he met. He must search me then and give them the final approval, I thought. But he was too busy to give me a screening look, he hardly shook hands and welcomed me, then he turned to his other visitor to resume a conversation I, now embarrassingly, interrupted.
I realised Asem was only joking. Yet I didn’t give up hope of being selected for the ultimate prize.
A week later I welcomed to my home a rather surprising visitor, a man who was shot 13 times in the leg before being arrested and jailed for two months. This horrifying experience doesn’t change anything in him, except for limping, which became the strongest thing in his physique.
He chatted with me over general subjects. At one point he asked me how I saw the progress of the Islamic mission. I seized the chance to talk about how I saw my future – a martyr for this mission. He listened to me politely, showed a superficial interest that I interpreted as an expected behaviour from a trained operational man.
He visited me again, only one more time.
Not yet. The panel had still not chosen me. There must have been battles to fight with my body.
I must have had to look deep inside. There, only there, it should have been reasons why I was still not worthy of being selected by this experienced panellist. My body’s brain still had questions and suspicions that made it unworthy of fast track paradise. For instance, I once asked a more experienced brother about the fate of people who were killed in collateral damage. They would go to God according to their intentions, he said. God knew our essence, no doubt, and we shortened the testing time for them. A man is born with his fate had been already decided. How could a man who hoped to be one of the winning elite have had such a confusing question in his mind?
I should have known beforehand that winning elite had not only won the battle for themselves. Their bodies were not tools for only their own wonderful fate, but also for the good fate of others. We were a clan who took people to paradise tighten in chains, one of the prophet companions said.
I wished the selection process of the elite had been easier. To be one of the elite required absolute and doubtless belief in the rightness of your mission, both for you and for those who would be affected by your deeds.
And not only had my brain not been tamed enough. I would assess myself.
I’d had in the building opposite my flat on the second floor a family who lived in the first floor. There were 3 girls in that family, one of them was 3 years older than me and one was the same age. From my early adolescence, before I joined the group, the elder one was my fantasy. She used not to take me seriously as an 11 year old kid. Hence she didn’t intend to be cautious that our flat overlooked theirs. By the age I joined the group when I was 14 her younger sister had already been a big girl. For five years on, I hadn’t been able to tame my eyes. I used to spend our voyeuring from behind the shutters of my room’s window. Since body is an aggressive enemy, this loss of eyes’ battle was followed by another loss – I touched my body.
But, on the other hand, having diagnosed my illness, I wouldn’t surrender. I took a pledge on myself to keep on fighting. I worked hard to raise my standard of obedience of God’s orders. At a point I managed to win a battle.
For three moths that followed my being able to recite the whole book of Quran (which is such an achievement itself that I accomplished when I was almost 19) I didn’t spy on my neighbours. Even when I was alone at home, I never switched TV on to steal some glances at women on it. I never overslept and missed dawn prayers (3 O’clock in the morning) for more than 40 consecutive days, which meant devil no longer urinated in the hearing pieces of my body – ears – to prevent me waking up to the call for prayers.
I felt lighter and more transparent. For three consecutive days I did nothing other than praying and reading in a big volume book about the life of Prophet Mohammad. When I finished the book at the early hours of day, when the sun had just risen, I went to sleep. And I had a night dream.
I saw myself praying in a mosque. I thought that was a very good sign, then told the dream to one of my brothers who was talented in interpreting them. He told me I would be jailed soon.
Don’t get too superstitious here, please. A week later I was indeed jailed.
It was both bad and good news. Bad for obvious reasons. The good part of it was that I passed the preliminary test with body temptation and was moving to another higher temptation/test that involved it but in a different way. I would be taken away from sights of sins and put between four walls that didn’t belong to the openness of mundane battles of eyes and ears.
However, for my disappointment the good news was not as good as I’d thought.
I found out later that the preliminary battle I thought I’d won was far from over, that the ‘higher-degree’ test came prematurely.
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In prison, in one of those totally dark cells where we spent the first ten days before we were moved to a recognised prison, my cellmates and I were chatting over what the interrogators had just asked each one of us about when an inmate mentioned that he was asked if he took part in what was called Youm Al-Ribat, (Al-Ribat means trenching for the battle). I’d had no clue about this before. What did it mean? I asked. Another inmate told me it was a day of fasting followed by a whole night of standing prayers, attended by a carefully selected group of brothers. Those brothers were able to challenge their bodies, fasted the whole day then resisted sleeping, let alone resting, the whole night. Did you attend one of them? I asked again. Yes, he replied modestly, only once.
I envied him. I thought when this stage had been reached it meant one thing: The enemy was there no more for him, at least that this was the assessment of big brothers, the same people who didn’t choose me. I was certain that the next step for him would be a far higher degree. He would be one of the Mujahdeen, who opted to offer their bodies as tools in the fight for God. I also realised, having not achieved this, I was far away.
It had haunted me ever since that I was a failure. When we were moved from the interrogating place to the real prison in Cairo I meant not to be with this potential martyr in the same cell. The sight of him, the voice of him kept reminding me that I was a failure, that I would be alive for more time fighting the mundane battles of my body and might even lose in the end.
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The process of taming one's body is a long one. You can’t shortcut the route to paradise by suicidal attacks. This was the basic line of the group I worked with. You can go to a fight in which the possibility was overwhelming that you would be killed, provided that you were taking every chance to prevent this from happening. But it was absolutely not acceptable to do a death operation, one that you killed yourself to achieve.
Then something had changed. Death became cheaper in the market. It did not even deserve a question of three letters - WHY? Some of our brothers were assassinated by police.
At this stage we moved a step further from our basic line. The only suicide operation I had come through when I was a member in the most militant group of Islamists in Egypt happened around this time. It was meant to kill the notorious Egyptian interior minister Zaki Badr, but it failed. Both the Egyptian government and al-Gamaa al-Isalmia were complacent in their avoidance to talk about it, to the extent that its executer was released without any charge, although he was caught near the scene of the small explosion with the remains of the explosive material were still in the car. Both parties realised how dangerous the turn was. The potential martyr was called The Living Martyr within the group.
This operation was important, first of all, because of the message it conveyed: if we were being killed anyway let our death had a price.
The group that I belonged to didn't do more suicide attacks; most probably for operational difficulties. But the damage had been done. Islamic militancy moved a step forward, breaking even one of its own taboos.
When, later, Al-Gamaa Al-Isalmia’s members were caught in thousands and put into jail (No reliable information here. Some people put the number of Islamists jailed without trial in Egypt to 40 000 and officials say no more than 4000) the Egyptian government portrayed its ability to control the situation as a story of success, a lesson to the rest of the world. It was. But it was first and foremost a lesson to the rest of Islamists: their bodies should be more useful than mere defiant receivers of torture and mistreatment. And what had been once a taboo, and later, a single failed operation, became a commonplace, an every-day headline – suicide attacks.
The idea of suicide attacks is a brilliant yet cruel combination of materialist and religious thinking. By this I mean an equation that has been given to bodies as goods. What we exactly have got now is a piece of arms, intelligent as it could be, able to destroy tens of folds of its value, able to choose the target, plan how to reach it and maximise the damage. In one phrase: it is a Self-sufficient intelligent weapon. It looks like a science fiction movie in which the invented weaponry acquires the look of the target and gains its trust before it blows it up. It is able to surprise, deceive and spoil all our calculations that rely on the basic human instinct, the instinct of survival. This is the materialist, modernist part of the combination. At the same time it has an arrogant religious component that gives the culprit a claimed moral high-ground over victims. The latter are looked at as masses of goods owned by someone who is the real target.
I left the Islamic Group, and was exposed to what mortals are usually done to – failures, betrayals and losses. Simply, I found that it took you to be totally bored, and absolutely disappointed, of life to kill yourself.
Well, not for Islamic militants who, now, look at it as the ultimate act of purification.
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In few situations, a Muslim man is obliged to have a religious wash up (you can trace it back to baptism but, as always in Islam, you don’t need a superior person to do it for you): when he enters the religion, after he ejaculates, and before he goes to pilgrimage (visits house of God on earth). A woman is additionally obliged to do so after her monthly menstruation and after birth or abortion. When a Muslim dies they have their body washed up for them, to be ready for meeting God.
There are other occasions when it’s favoured that they have this religious wash up: before Friday prayers and, more interestingly for us here, if they are going for Jihad since there is a considerable probability they get killed.
Religious washing up comprises washing head and face, then washing the right half of chest and abdomen and the front of right arm then the right half of back and arm. It goes to the front again to wash the left half and arm then the left half of back and arm. The front of right thigh then the back of it also comes before the front and back of left thigh. The same goes to legs and feet. It’s not favoured to cut your nails or hair before obligatory wash up – there is uncleanliness (janaba) under each single hair.
One of the stories we used to be told as young militants was that of a prophet’s recently married companion who was having sex with his wife when he heard the call for jihad. ‘He stood up away from his wife’s belly,’ a preacher would say, ‘and answered the call for jihad.’ He was killed. The prophet told his companions that he saw the man being washed up by angels.
A body of a martyr is the only intact body that could be buried without being washed up – by giving up their lives they have already washed out the dirt of life and the dirt of their deeds in it.
An ‘accidental’ martyr is perfectly clean and pure. However, never is he so as much as one of the deliberate martyrs, those who know beforehand what they are doing and, hence, have time to ensure their bodies are double-timing clean.
To sum up this picture of pure killer, all what you have to do to turn your body from an enemy to an intelligent tool is to cleanse it from the dirt. As you’ve cleansed it from the metaphysical dirt, go cleanse it from the physical dirt as well. Hence, the advice of Mohamad Atta to his companion in the last night before flying planes in World Trade Centre, killing around 3000 people is: “The previous night, shave the extra hair from the body. Pray.’ In one phrase: Clean and kill. (Don’t we clean weapons before using them?)
Now, the martyr’s body, his old enemy, his tool, is eligible to act solely under its own leadership. It is able to fly a plane into a tower.
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One of the best phrases religious people use in defending their dear beliefs is ‘this is not religious’ – Islamic, Christian etc.
It is a phrase that I love to avoid, because each single belief, in the end, manifests itself by what its followers do, at least for others who don’t know a lot about it. Nevertheless, I would say that mutilating dead bodies is not, as far as I’m concerned, Islamic. That’s what I learnt even with the militant group I have been with. They used to say that God ordered the prophet Mohamad in one occasion to, only, kill his prisoners of war, and that this order is restricted to this specific event, being the first ever battle between Muslims and Koffar (infedils). It didn’t even happen that the prophet killed them; he rather chose to have each of them taught 70 Muslims how to write and read in order to be released. Others paid ransoms. But the order came in the shape of blame from God who wanted the prophet instead to kill them to terrorise his enemies so that they didn’t attack Muslims again. The order has been abolished since. It has become ‘mansoukh’ according to Islamic terminology.
But, why do militant Islamic groups now kill their ‘prisoners’ in a savage way and show this on cameras?
The image – according to what I argued in this article – of a militant’s self reflects on others, at the same level the dialectique has reached (for example islamists didn’t use to do kill hostages on TV that frequently 10 years ago, more over, one of the messages claimed to be sent from Al-Zwahiri, the second man in Al-Qaeda to Al-Zarqawi who represented until his death a new phase in militancy, carried and advice from the elder Islamist to Al-Zarqawi not to show slaughtering hostages on cameras. It literally advised that ‘a bullet could do.’) This self-image reflection is one reason, I think, why today militants deliberately show their ‘prisoners’ being killed and mutilated. They saw them as mere tools, weaponry in the fight against them. Those killed might simply be ordinary Muslims as well as enemy soldiers. This is a specific ‘reason’.
The other reason, in my opinion, is not totally separate, yet it is a general one. It relates to image of war in our age. Technology has helped man show his worst instincts and optimal degradation of the other’s body. World War One was shock to human race, it combined mass killing weaponry with, still, direct confrontation. Yet, its effect was more or less restricted to people who lived the experience. Then came cities’ wars in the World War 2, and more people were subject to the horror leading up to mass murder by Nazis, mass destructive weaponry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mass destructive bombardment of Dresden, all accompanied by documented live pictures. Then came technology of communication, our ethical reference in Post Modernist age, which guaranteed that every single person on earth live the experience. Shock and Awe in Iraq reported live in every household, and even bloody action movies, have all changed the way we look at our bodies..
Middle Easterners, I’m proudly one of them, lived a double experience that was unique to them – live pictures of devastating attacks on Baghdad, followed by a smiley western face describing success. On the other end, Al-Jazeera and local stations are showing dead, disfigured bodies here and there.
Communication highlighted a missing link. What do I mean?
It created some sort of defensive image for militants: ‘when you see these pictures you think we are not there, we don’t count. Now, we are telling you, we are there, it’s you who don’t count.’
Once the image of slaughtering another person is desensitised, it doesn’t matter later who the original target was. A militant mind goes farther, it slaughters every body it thinks doesn’t count – regardless race, religion or affiliation.
When I was a young member of Al-Gamaa Al-Islamia, my colleagues and I were shown pictures of ‘massacres’ done to Muslims in Afghanistan, Palestine and later in Bosnia. It was a very effective tool in recruitment and radicalisation. These pictures were also restricted to us; they were not shown on TV’s. There were no satellite channels back then. We used to think it’s for our own privilege, that they made us the truly informed people, the knowledgeable ones of the bare truth that others didn’t know. We used to think if others had known what we had they would’ve chosen the path we had. We were not able to convey the message because of limited resources, a video in a mosque or a description of what we came to know in a microphone. We did not dream of what technology had for us.
And now, communication has the entire job of radicalisation to do at a finger tip. It has had so much effect on us, that communicative man becomes either a potential killer or a potential victim.
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How weird and philosophically disturbing this dichotomy of punishment/reward is in our lives. As religious people, killing oneself is the worst thing one can do in their life, next worst is killing another person. God curse is the judgement in the thereafter and capital punishment is the judgement in life. But, on the other hand, killing oneself and others might turn to be the best thing to do when you do it in obedience to God’s, or one of his spokespeople’s, order. A fast track to the highest level in paradise is the judgement in thereafter, and honouring in life is the guaranteed reward.
Just remember that, with a very little difference, this is the case with secular patriotism. Half the statues around you are of killers, some of them for just reasons but the other some are not.
In July and august 2007, I covered as a journalist the so called the war between Israel and Hezballah. I had the rare chance of being on both frontiers during the same war. The real losers have as always been ordinary people paying the price of conflicts they have nothing to do with, while the wagers of war use phrases like ‘casualties including women and children’ to portray cruelty of their enemies. The sad fact of the matter is that such a phrase is a joke. In our modern life a woman is a soldier and even a child could be a soldier or a shield. Fighters who are shelling the other side from civilian areas, and others who target civilian areas all know that ‘women and children’ will be among casualties. There is no sanctuary for any kind of body. The nobility of old time wars has no place in the cruelty of our age of intelligent weapons.
All bodies are enemies. All bodies are weaponry. All bodies are targets.
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