A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks Read Free Book Online

welcome changes, like subordination of women and attacks on Jews and Copts. By the end of the 1950s, the Jews were forced to flee en masse, and a community that had survived millennia was, suddenly, gone. Over time nightclubs and beach huts closed, swimsuits yielded to robes and headscarves, and many inland Egyptians who once summered in the city’s cool, literal and metaphorical, stayed away. The city’s boulevards fissured with the national and local economies. Its edifices turned scabrous. In a generation, multicultural, polyglot, and (for some) prosperous Alexandria was remade unicultural, monoglot, and shabby.
    The family of Osama Nasr belonged to Alexandria’s remnant upper middle class. His father was a public prosecutor, his mother a housewife. They were Muslim, but they wore their religion without ado, as one wears socks. The young Nasr was a small, sickly child with a slightly deformed femur and was preyed on by schoolyard toughs, whom he learned to fight off. He also learned to take refuge in introversion and long hours of reading in the municipal library. In high school he became enamored of Marxism and its photogenic propagator Che Guevara, and he decided politics was the life for him. Since Egypt was short on parties of the revolutionary Left, and since his breeding was more liberal than Communist anyway, he joined New Wafd, a reformist party that called cautiously on Mubarak to hold fair elections, restore civil liberties, and guarantee human rights. He took to writing articles for a party organ called Wafd Youth and thought he had a way with words. But as his involvement in Wafd deepened, he became repulsed by its internal power struggles. After watching party members throw fists and chairs at one another at one caucus, he resigned his membership and looked elsewhere for answers to Egypt’s problems.
    He found them in the Islamism that was thriving all around him. Its devout solution, he saw, was cleaner and more empowering than Wafd’s messier politics. He attended Islamist lectures and read the Quran with new eyes and had soon made a political conversion so complete that he declared himself a Salafist. Salafism might be thought of as a fundamentalist’s fundamentalism. It holds that Islam was perfect during the Prophet’s generation and the two generations following and that everything added to Islam has been, in essence, rot. He felt no queerness about replacing his previous liberal, democratic view with a conservative, authoritarian one. He felt, he later said, as if he had come home. His parents felt differently. They said his increasing fundamentalism could end only in trouble, and they urged him to desist. His father even locked him inside the house one night to keep him from going to an Islamist gathering. But he persisted, and in the end they let him be. Later his younger brother Hitham chose the same Islamist path. It was symptomatic of the movement’s power that it could draw both sons of a comfortably establishmentarian family.
    Nasr enrolled at the University of Alexandria and, his religious rebellion notwithstanding, elected to study law as his father had done. But his passion for Islam was a distraction, and he failed several classes. He almost certainly joined the university’s very active chapter of Gamaa, although he would later sometimes say he did not. He also attended a smallish, radical mosque that was less regulated than the larger mosques at which the government appointed imams and supplied sermons. To keep the less regulated mosques in check, the government sent informers and police to watch them. In 1988, when Nasr was in his third year of law school, he was invited to give a sermon at the mosque, and he chose for his topic political repression in Egypt. As he spoke, he warmed to his subject and denounced several high officials by name. After the service, three policemen in plainclothes met him at the door.
    “You got enthusiastic,” one said. “You are under