PASSION FOR ISLAM

Well-framed journalistic portrait by the Washington Post’s former Cairo bureau chief of a strategically important nation in a time of terror and turmoil.

Murphy offers a view of contemporary Egypt that amplifies such recent studies of Islamism and regional unrest as John L. Esposito’s Unholy War (p. 542) and Anton La Guardia’s War Without End (p. 546). Religious terrorism, he writes, has its roots in three historical developments: the general resurgence of pietist, fundamentalist Islam, in part as a reaction to encroaching Western culture; the failure of the international community to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the rise and continued existence of authoritarian governments in a region long troubled by poverty, inequality, and corruption. As Murphy wisely points out, when “citizens feel that they have lost control of their lives, they take refuge in the familiar and fundamental.” The result has been hatred not just for the West, but also for the government of a country whose internal stability is a matter of extreme importance for the US, at least as long as the US remains dependent on oil imports. Murphy observes that tEgypt has been of two minds, or perhaps two faces, in the matter of Israel; though bound to peace accords, it has allowed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to serve as a distraction and safety valve to keep unrest away from its own doors, as all the while critics of Nasserite socialism and Egypt’s subsequent secular governments have urged that the Arab states are weak “because they had not built their nations on religion as the Zionist Jews had.” Murphy’s account depicts an Egypt uncomfortably close to collapse, though full of devout Muslims who have no interest in seeing their nation become another Iran or Afghanistan and are willing to struggle for the soul of Islam.

Lucid and solidly reported.