“I drew them myself,” says the 75-year-old barber, Salah Abdelaziz Moussa. Confronted by an American journalist, his smile is weary but welcoming. He shows none of the fury poured onto the many taped-up pages, or that he often hears from customers. He offers tea.
If there is war between Washington and Baghdad, the reporter wants to know, what then? Will the streets of Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world explode? Will it help spawn suicidal terrorists and plots to bring on the apocalypse? Or does the anger begin with slogans–and end there, too? It’s a vital calculation. The Bush administration is betting nothing will happen. Saddam is betting that everything will, and so is Osama bin Laden.
“Only God knows,” says the barber. “But think of this: if you come here to my street and you beat somebody on the head in front of all of us–maybe we will wait a little bit, maybe we will not react right away–but eventually we will turn against you, and we will explode, and we will not let you alone.”
That doesn’t seem like much of a threat if you look outside the shop, where a nut-seller pushes a handcart, a teenage boy unravels straw to stuff upholstery and battered cars inch past mounds of garbage. But Moussa’s prophecy has a particular resonance in this neighborhood called Abdeen, because this is where Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, grew up. The apartment where he lived until he was 22 is just three blocks away. The barber says he didn’t know the hijacker. But the barber’s sentiments–“We will explode… We will not let you alone”–haunt these streets along with Atta’s memory.
Abdeen is just one of thousands of neighborhoods from Casablanca to Kuwait City that could be filed under that vague think-tank term “the Arab Street.” The larger concept is mostly an imaginary place. No “street” can encompass the attitudes of 380 million people. But it’s a potent force nonetheless. It stokes Western fears and heats up Capitol Hill debates. It is the audience to which Saddam Hussein addresses his bombastic speeches. It shapes the language in Osama bin Laden’s proclamations and affects the timing of his attacks. When Al Qaeda recently claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, it used the opportunity to make a wider appeal: “On this blessed occasion, we remind Muslims of the dangers of simply accepting what the Americans and their allies are preparing for Iraq,” the statement said. “Rise and champion your brethren, with all that is in thy possession.”
For al Qaeda, the pickings are good in the Arab Street. Two thirds of the Middle East’s population is under 25. And the Arab Street is also home to millions of the unemployed–dubbed hayateen, or “men who lean against walls.” Frustration over corruption at home, and unrivaled American power abroad, has grown immeasurably over the past few years. “When you have educated young people by the millions, with no future, that is the heart of the problem,” warns France’s U.N. Ambassador Jean-David Levitte. “They can’t understand why they are deprived of what they hope for, which is an American way of life.”
But that’s the great irony. If the United States is hated in the Arab Street today, and that is far from certain, it’s largely the reaction of people who adore America’s dream, and, cherishing it so, feel terribly betrayed by American actions.
The bearded youths outside the mosque near Atta’s home may be hawking CDs urging an anti-American jihad, but the top renter at the local video shop is the George Clooney vehicle “Ocean’s 11.” The same young men who sit in Abdeen’s cafes cursing Bush crave green cards to work in his country. Men and women in Abdeen will rage against America’s Middle Eastern policies, but when a British Council poll conducted last winter asked young Egyptians which country in the world they thought most highly of, the answer, overwhelmingly, was the United States of America. A stunning 76 percent of Egyptians, age 15 to 25, had either a “very favorable” or “mainly favorable” view of America. And yet a more recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 69 percent of Egyptians had an unfavorable view of the United States–a disparity that reflects, perhaps, the volatility of a relationship that encompasses both love and hate, and can veer wildly between the two.
The neighborhood where Atta lived from 1978 to 1990–the neighborhood where he turned from a child into a man–is far from the worst in this city or the Arab world. A district of auto mechanics, furniture makers and medical-equipment suppliers, it’s also got a market selling live sheep and bunches of parsley, street cafes where men talk politics and play dominoes, and photo stores for visa and marriage pictures. “Abdeen is the heart of Egypt,” says Balsam Abdul Fatiha, manager of a local Internet cafe. “I can find anything here–the good, the bad, the high class, the low class.”
Known as the Neighborhood of Kings for its proximity to a royal palace built by a dynasty that ended with Nasser’s 1952 coup, the cramped streets also have features that might be found in a typical American block. Dusty rooftops are studded with satellite dishes, mobile phones ring out in the pockets of traditional robes. And on the walls near Atta’s apartment, Michael Douglas and Nicole Kidman beam down from film ads.
For most Abdeen residents, however, the promises of the good life are as paper-thin as movie posters. A short drive from Abdeen, the tombs of a vast ancient cemetery known as the City of the Dead are inhabited by hundreds of thousands of the living. Nearer Atta’s old apartment stands the city’s housing office, a weekly pilgrimage site for Cairenes hoping to get a chance to get one of the thousands of tiny one-room apartments with communal toilets that the government builds and sells for roughly $1,000. Go on a Friday, when the new lists are posted, and you’ll meet people who’ve been coming to check the roster every week since 1988.
Unable to deliver what’s been promised–the jobs, the housing, the health care, a future–Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and other Arab leaders devote enormous energy to distracting and deceiving their subjects. And Mubarak is better at it than most. For 21 years his regime has been kept afloat by American assistance, which in 2002 totaled roughly $2 billion, a payoff for its peace treaty with Israel (which received $3 billion). Yet Mubarak has taken to jailing or threatening critics accused of accepting money from European and American foundations. (Egypt’s highest appeals court last week freed the most prominent of these critics, civil-rights advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim, and ordered a new trial.) The carefully monitored film and television industries, meanwhile, still thrive on tales of evil Israeli conspiracies, reviving even the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “One of the conundrums of the Arab Street,” Under Secretary of State Chris Ross has said, is that Arab news media controlled by American allies “frequently engage in negative stereotypes, disinformation and downright demonization of the United States and of Israel.”
In Abdeen, the tension has always been more about demolished dreams than about clashing civilizations. “We love it that Americans can do anything they want,” says 19-year-old Shereen Gad. “Here in Egypt we kill the hopes we have.” For most of her life, Shereen has lived with her sister and her mother in a single windowless room beneath a stairwell. An air shaft serves as communal cooking space next to a toilet used by the Gads and three other families. Shereen is just about to start university, but she doesn’t dare to think that will really change her life. “Egyptian education doesn’t give us the chance to make things, to discover things, to realize our dreams,” she says. If she could, she would go to the U.S.A. in a second. “Americans know how to build people’s futures.” And yet Shereen also has misgivings: “Why does Bush hate the Arabs so much?”
If you walk from the one-chair barbershop on Madbuh across bustling El Sheik Rihan Street you pass a shop where burlap sacks of cotton fiber are piled high, and the man wearing a robe who sits among them looks like a Cairene merchant from a 19th-century lithograph. But the shop next door is the “Internet Caffee.” Past coffee vendors and long-extinguished streetlights now filled with birds’ nests, on little Adfa Damalsha Street, there’s an entrance to a dilapidated apartment building where the stairway smells of dust and cats, and every step is cracked. On the top floor, three flights up, is the apartment where the teenage Atta used to live.
Twenty-year-old Haysam Muhammad Kamal Khamis lives here now. “I love America,” he says. “We see and hear about America 24 hours a day. Half the time we’re watching the news about it, the other half we’re watching American movies. We get the impression America has everything, and everything about America is good. But the way Americans treat the Arabs makes us wonder, and it makes us feel bad when we hear it will hit Iraq.” Living in the same five-room apartment with Haysam are his brother, Ahmed, 21, who’s just starting his mandatory service in the Egyptian military; his sister, Mona, a university student; their father, nicknamed Arabi, who owns a small shop that recharges batteries on the ground floor, and their mother, Anhar Sayyad Mursi, who has tried to make their home a refuge from Cairo’s chaos.
Anyone who has read Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel-laureate chronicler of Cairene life, would find these rooms familiar. Vases of plastic flowers, lace doilies, a tiny china swan, an Alpine scene on the living-room wall–all are testimony to Mursi’s domestic reign. When she meets visitors, she pulls her hajib, or Islamic head covering, far forward so only a small oval reveals the features at the center of her face. But her eyes are intense and her hands wave operatically as she talks about her fears that her sons might be drawn toward drugs, crime or extremism.
“September 11th put me on high alert,” says Mursi. “In my house, I’m a microscope.” When the boys come home, she sniffs their breath to make sure they aren’t drinking and checks their eyes to make sure they aren’t stoned. She searches their pockets and their room. When they claim they’ve prayed, and she’s skeptical, she checks the prayer mat to make sure it’s warm. But if she catches any whiff of religious zealotry, she’s also worried. “If he’s going too far with religion, this would mean he’s under the influence of the extremists,” she says solemnly. “I’ve seen a lot of young men lost, either to drugs or extremism, because their mother wasn’t alert.”
Haysam and his brother, Ahmed, two sad-eyed, handsome young men, share the room where Muhammad Atta used to do his engineering homework on a drafting table. Now posters of Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys decorate the wall above Ahmed’s bed, while verses from the Qur’an in elaborate calligraphy adorn the wall above Haysam’s. But neither the Top of the Pops nor the One God gives them a real design for the future. “My sons feel tomorrow is dark,” says Mursi. “Next year, my Ahmed will finish the military and look for a job. There won’t be one.”
The more Mursi worries about the dangers of the streets, the more her sons long to escape to them. “Staying at home drives us crazy,” says Haysam. “So we go down and fill the cafes.” At other times–five times a day–he’s answering the call to prayer from the large mosque and Islamic center just across the alley from home. It’s run by “moderate salafis,” as the directors of the Tawhid wa Sunna describe themselves. They preach strict conformity with the Qur’an and constantly call on young men to don the simple robes the Prophet Muhammad’s men wore; to trim their hair evenly; to grow their beards. “I tell them my faith is inside me,” says Haysam, who is cleanshaven and prefers name-brand sports shirts. He listens to the salafi imams, but resists their absolutism. Others do not.
“I never met Atta, but I know about him through common friends,” says Haysam one afternoon in a favorite cafe. “They always say that he was as shy as a girl. He could be influenced by anybody.” A television blared near the entrance, showing a 1950s Egyptian melodrama with a lively bit of belly-dancing. “Some people go too deep into Islam and end up believing things according to very strict values that I do not think are the real ones,” says Haysam. “God did not tell us to kill innocents. Atta might have thought that our brothers in Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan needed help, but what he did is not jihad for Islam.”
In a second-floor office of the Tawhid center, a former secretary-general of the group, the gray-bearded Abdelaziz Ashar, says it has 136 branches throughout Egypt. “It calls people to the faith and shows them the path of righteousness,” he says. The group does not advocate violence as some other salafi groups do, and no voice is raised against Mubarak. The group is adamantly against anyone preaching to overthrow Arab regimes–so adamant, in fact, that some neighbors suspect it’s doing the government’s bidding.
In front of the Islamic center, which is only a couple of hundred yards from the presidential offices in Abdeen Palace, fresh-burned CD-ROMs are on sale that are meant to enrage the faithful, but carefully avoid attacking Mubarak. On the day after the disco bombing in faraway Bali, a NEWSWEEK reporter bought a CD-ROM for five Egyptian pounds, or about $1.10, that had the newly printed label indonesia on the cover. In fact it was a compendium of hatemongering calls to holy war with separate documentaries and diatribes about every front in the fight against “infidels.” On the CD-ROM were Osama bin Laden’s last several TV appearances and a video of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. There was a slide show of the Pentagon and Trade Center hits on 9-11 juxtaposed with old black-and-white pictures of Al Aqsa Mosque burning after a 1969 arson attack in Jerusalem. “Prepare us, prepare us,” intones the Arabic narration. “Send us! Give us arms! We are longing for a jihad against infidels!”
Conventional Washington wisdom is that the Arab Street is far less important than strongmen like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or for that matter Hosni Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. As a State Department Mideast veteran explains, administration hawks know full well the fury the United States provokes with its support for Israel and its failure to stop the bloody reoccupation of Palestinian territory. They see the heat that’s building as the threat of war against Iraq grows. “They get it,” says the official. “They just don’t think the Arab Street matters.”
But it does. And both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden know it. When Bush calls from the Rose Garden for a leadership change among the Palestinians, or Vice President Dick Cheney goes stumping for regime change in Iraq, it may sound to the folks at home like an effort to make the Middle East a better place, but it smacks of crude colonialism to Arabs. They’ve heard all the promises, and lived many betrayals, for more than a century. They remember too well the patronizing rule of the French and the British, exemplified by author Freya Stark, one of the most sensitive to the Middle East. In 1936 she told an Iraqi policeman in the town of Tikrit just outside a British cemetery, “Our people have given you Iraq as a present. I hope you won’t forget it too soon.” A few months later Saddam Hussein was born near that site.
What Washington risks missing in the latest orchestrated run-up to war with Iraq, and the cocktail-party banter about grand designs for redrawing the Middle East map, is that it doesn’t need to “win” the Arab Street. It has to keep from losing it.
The issues that inflame anti-Americanism are in fact few. Ambassador Ross, deputy to Under Secretary of State Charlotte Beers, warned Congress recently that “one overriding issue crosses all boundaries in the Middle East. This is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” And one powerful reason for that is that Israel, viewed by Arabs as a colonial outpost, was created at a time when most peoples of the world were driving colonial powers out of their lands. If the United States sweeps Saddam out of power in favor of an American client regime (nominated with B-52s and consecrated by Special Forces), that will raise a fresh specter of colonialism, and every inadvertent massacre and each euphemism about “collateral damage” will inflame the Arab and Muslim world. “We will explode,” as the old barber of Madbuh Street says. “We will not let you alone.”
Yet there are few delusions about the dictator Saddam or the terrorist bin Laden, either. Far stronger than hatred of America is reverence for the most basic American Dream–a fair shot at getting a job or an apartment, a chance to cast votes that count and some sort of say over one’s own future, the opportunity to build one’s own life in one’s own country without local thugs or neocolonial clients to keep one down. But that’s not the kind of thing Washington can deliver with a masterstroke of military prowess. “We respect America, we respect Bush,” says the old barber of Madbuh Street. “But not in return for our freedom.” Democracy is not a present. It takes clear and just goals, steady support for democratic movements, a willingness to listen to the Street, the ability to understand and the common sense to care. Until Washington realizes that, the people of the Arab Street won’t have a prayer against the Middle East’s strongmen, and the United States will be playing the game of demagogues, not of democrats.
