CAIRO: Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the United States. Many are heralding the Arab Spring, and the Egyptian Revolution more specifically, as a clear example of the major changes that the world has undergone in these 10 years. As a primarily secular, broad-based, homegrown, and essentially non-violent (on the part of the protesters) movement for democratic ideals and social justice, many of the fissures that once attenuated the relationship between the western and Muslim world are diminishing.
Ashraf Nabih El-Sherif, a masters student at the American University in Cairo (AUC) at the time and now a professor of Political Science at AUC, vividly recalled learning of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001.
It was roughly 3 pm in Cairo, or nine in the morning in New York City. Leaving campus, he hopped into a cab and started speaking to the taxi driver about the day’s events. The drivers’ eyes were alight with excitement, “‘It’s as if I were watching a movie where the hero just shot the bad guy or a soccer game where our player just scored a goal’,” recounted the driver as he spoke of his initial feelings upon seeing the attacks on TV. The cab dropped El-Sherif off at his house, where he started on the same subject with his aunt, a well-educated woman: “We finally did something!” she exclaimed.
The United States, viewed by many as an incarnation of injustice, unfairness, and hegemonic power had finally been hit. Osama bin Laden had become a veritable icon, an “Arab Che Guevara,” a courageous man of both talk and action.
Scott MacLeod, former TIME Magazine Cairo bureau chief and professor at AUC’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, explained: “Here was a man who finally stood up while other political leaders in the Middle East were in bed with America or were too afraid and kept their mouths shut.” Bin Laden was a rich man who could have lived a luxurious life but had instead dedicated himself to a life of asceticism and struggle.
Even non-Islamist nationalists and some leftists supported bin Laden’s struggle against imperialism. To many it made no sense to pursue peaceful opposition to imperialism. Elections were not an option, so bin Laden was doing the only thing he could essentially do. “An imperialist power would only understand the language of the sword,” El-Sherif opined. As a particular jab at America and the West, Bin Laden decided to utilize Western technology, the airplane, for his own purposes. Four planes and 19 hijackers later, over 3,000 people lost their lives.
“Arab media focused on the dramatic aspect of the towers falling, while the human aspect, the pictures of victims and people suffering, were not really shown. Therefore, the events were not understood in human terms but were rather viewed as a political standoff between good and evil,” El-Sherif mused.
“Some may have even thought that attacking the Pentagon, a clear image of American military power, was completely legitimate from a human rights perspective.”
The 9/11 attacks symbolically attacked both America’s economic power, in the form of the World Trade Centers, and its military power, in the form of the Pentagon. While the loss of life in the attacks was egregious, few Americans, for instance, were or are aware of the one million people who died as a result of UN sanctions on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, which was labeled as a predominantly US-led foreign policy measure.
It was the second war with Iraq, launched in March 2003, that marked the climax of anti-American sentiment in Egypt, according to El-Sherif. It was in this year that the first political opposition party against former president Hosni Mubarak started to form.
The Kefaya political movement, which ultimately emerged in 2004, was primarily composed of the same people who had led the anti-war movement in Egypt after the US-led invasion in 2003. These anti-war protests were the first public demonstrations against Mubarak in the 22 years since he had taken office. As MacLeod recalled, “There was a visceral reaction to putting boots on the ground,” referring to both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “There has always been a pretty vibrant independent press in Egypt, and they were against the wars. But even the pro-Mubarak papers were no friend of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As the two wars continued, the tide started to turn in terms of the level of reverence for bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and terrorism in general. The brutality of terrorism became starkly apparent with the bombings in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, and the Sinai from 2004-2006. It was also evident that Al-Qaeda, among other terror groups, did not differentiate between Muslim and non-Muslim casualties.
A report published in 2009 by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the United States’ Military Academy at West Point in New York found that Al-Qaeda killed roughly eight times more Muslims than non-Muslims. Between 2004 and 2008, Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. Even though these attacks included those such as the Madrid and London bombings, only 12 percent of the victims were Westerners.
Ayman Al-Zawahri, former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and current leader of Al-Qaeda, also failed to curry much favor for Muslim extremism among the general Egyptian population in the post-9/11 era. Al-Zawahri was and continues to be viewed widely as reckless, aggressive, and overly egotistical, even by many other Islamists, according to El-Sherif. He cared little about EIJ as an organization and instead viewed it as a conduit for increasing his own fame. He routinely criticized the other two prominent Islamist groups in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiyya, which renounced violence back in 1997.
“Terrorist attacks simply cannot produce sustainable change,” El-Sherif flatly stated. “The Arab Spring exposed Al-Qaeda’s shortcomings. Terrorism has proven not to be the way toward freedom and social justice. Instead the Arab Spring has proven that change can be brought by political struggle and peaceful disagreement, not by violence. I believe that this explains why people in Egypt reacted quite favorably to bin Laden’s death [on May 2, 2011]. If he had been killed five years ago, the reaction most likely would have been different.”
The Egyptian revolution has seemingly undermined the value or pull of extremism, as people are now infused with another sense of purpose and focus: the establishment of a socially just and democratic national government that protects the rights and liberties of its citizens, in addition to other economic and legal reforms.
The Arab Spring more broadly, is still in their nascent stages and much change is undoubtedly in store for the “Muslim World.” One can only imagine what dynamic changes will be reflected upon on January 25, 2021, the 10th anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution. By then the world will be able to tell with greater clarity the extent to which the Arab Spring has been a turning point in the post-9/11 world.
