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CHAPTER 13
The Power of Islam
Each year the Egyptian armed forces hold a parade on the sixth of October, a national holiday marking the a
When Khalid al-Islambuli shouted, “I have killed Pharoah,” he was condemning Sadat for being a secular ruler who placed man’s law before religion. The Islamists were united by their belief that Muslim societies had to be ruled in accordance with “God’s law,” the body of Islamic law derived from the Qur’an, the wisdom of the Prophet Muhammad, and the jurisprudence of Islamic theologians collectively known as sharia. They saw their own secular governments as the enemy and referred to their rulers as “pharaohs.” The Qur’an, like the Hebrew Bible, is very critical of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, portraying them as despots who promoted man’s law over God’s commandments. There are no fewer than seventy-nine verses of the Qur’an condemning pharaohs. The more extreme Islamists advocate violence against the latter-day pharaohs ruling the Arab world as a necessary measure to overturn secular governments and build Islamic states in their place. Khalid al-Islambuli was one of their ranks, and he declared the assassination of Sadat legitimate by denouncing the fallen president as pharaoh. The Islamists were not Sadat’s only critics. Anwar Sadat was laid to rest on October 10, 1981, in a state funeral attended by a number of international leaders but few representatives from the Arab states. Attendees included Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, the three American presidents with whom Sadat had worked closely. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who had shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat for the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, led a prominent Israeli delegation. Among Arab League members, only Sudan, Oman, and Somalia sent representatives to the funeral. More striking, perhaps, was the paucity of prominent Egyptians at their president’s funeral. Mohamed Heikal, the veteran journalist and political analyst who nurtured his own grievances against Sadat (Heikal had been arrested and imprisoned in a roundup of opposition figures one month before the assassination), reflected on how ?a man who was mourned as a heroic and far-seeing statesman in the West found hardly any mourners among his fellow-countrymen.?2 Yet both his critics and his admirers were satisfied with the choice of Sadat’s final resting place. To those who honored the “Hero of the Crossing” it was most appropriate that Sadat was buried in the grounds of the 1973 War memorial, facing the review stand where he had been gu
Given the prominence of Islam in public life across much of the Arab world today, it is easy to forget just how secular the Middle East was in 1981. In all but the most conservative Arab Gulf states, Western fashions were preferred over traditional dress. Many people drank alcohol openly, in disregard of Islamic prohibition. Men and women mixed freely both in public and in the work place, as more and more women were entering higher education and professional life. For some, the freedoms of the modern age marked a high point in Arab progress. Others viewed these developments with unease, fearing that the rapid pace of change was leading the Arab world to abandon its own culture and values. The debates over Islam and modernity have deep roots in the Arab world. Hassan al-Ba