Requiem for Dhahab

When several bombs went off in the low-key Red Sea resort of Dhabab in Egypt this April, another rock was hurled in the clash of civilizations.

Egypt has always been attractive as a destination for westerners, not only for its Pharonic remains, but for its exquisite Red Sea coast. In the sixties the Sinai attracted low-budget westerners—girls and boys—from across Europe, and even from Israel. Dhahab—“Gold,” in Arabic—was originally a Bedouin camp, little more than a few huts belonging to seasonal nomads who were in the process of settling down, encouraged by the authorities to stop wandering and become part of the political entity known as Egypt. Hippie travelers found this camp quaint, and hung out on the beach, snorkeling and smoking pot. The Sinai had more than its fare share of violence—being sandwiched between Egypt and Israel guaranteed this—but it overcame the wars it suffered in 1956, 1967 and 1973. Before long, canny locals and cannier business types from Cairo had realized there was money to be made along the Red Sea, and they built a community of cheap huts for travelers and opened some small restaurants. Bedouin guides took the travelers into the desert for sleepovers. They smoked their pot on the mountain tops, looking over the Sea to Saudi Arabia, where, 1400 years ago a merchant named Muhammad started receiving messages from God.

It was to be self-proclaimed followers of Muhammad’s religion who would seek to destroy this place, and all it stood for, in the recent spate of Sinai bombings.

Fifteen years ago, when I was a student in Alexandria, we used to make regular trips to Dhahab. Then it was still a one-camel town, and although its visitors indulged in all manner of licentious acts, it was a small place, an isolated oasis of sin in thousands of miles of purifying desert. We slept on the beach, and ate ten-cent falafel sandwiches. In the mornings the soft footfalls of camels woke us as they passed, snorting. Now Dhahab is coming to resemble other more glamorous fleshpots around the world. Dhahab City, which didn’t exist back then, boasts hotels and restaurants, dive shops and boutiques. The old camp of Assalah, where the Bedouins used to hang out with the hippies, still exists, although its low key, low budget quality now looks like a pretense.

To the eyes of an angry Islamist, this outpost of godlessness has, with Global Jihad becoming a growth business, become a major sore in the country’s body politic. Islamists have never much liked the idea of infidels in their country, and they find the thought of young foreigners freely co-mingling on Mother Egypt’s soil almost impossible to bear. But this residual prejudice has been exacerbated, proportionate to the growth of Islamic opposition to President Mubarak’s oppressive secularist authoritarianism, and tourists have suffered as a consequence.

Tourists have in the past been the victims of this, and wider regional struggles. The various attacks on tourists in Egypt over the last 20 or so years exhibit a certain evolution. Egypt’s modern experience with political violence can, perhaps, be traced back to the brutal assassination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 by Islamic Jihad. When, four years later, Suleiman Khater, an Egyptian Soldier, killed eight Israeli tourists in the Sinai, domestic extremism was turning on the country’s guests—and hence its economic lifeblood. Khater was found soon after his arrest, hanging in his prison cell (probably killed by the government to avoid political embarrassment). There was widespread sympathy for Khater—not unlike sympathy for bin Laden; the Kuwaiti parliament publicly expressed support for him. Ayatollah Khomeini made him a martyr, and named a street in Tehran for him.

In 1997, 58 foreigners and four Egyptians were massacred at Luxor by the Gamaa al-Islamiyya, expressly hunting for foreigners at the temple of Hatshpsut, after the pyramids the country’s main tourist attraction. This sent a message both to the Egyptian government and the world at large: Your economy is vulnerable, and Westerners not Welcome, respectively. A couple of months later nine Germans and their local bus driver were shot in Cairo. But by 2004, Egypt’s tourist industry seemed to have rebounded; the country’s essential fascination and its good value were as attractive as ever. In that year it reported growth in foreign visitors of 34%, the busiest tourist year ever.

Although the Gamaa Islamiyya officially renounced violence in 2002, this renunciation has been plagued by the group’s own splinters which have not all been in agreement with the main limb of the organization (once headed by the famous Blind sheikh, Abdul Rahman, now residing in a New Jersey prison cell after his alleged involvement in the 1993 attempt on the World Trade Center). In October, 2004, 34 people were killed in several bombs in and around the Sinai town of Taba, not the most popular tourist attraction in the country, but one on the border with Israel. And then, in July, 2005, several large bombs strategically placed in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh killed 88 people, mostly Egyptians. Two militant groups claimed responsibility for this attach, one was the Abdallah Azza Brigade, an organization which appears to have links to the foreign group Tawhid and Jihad, literally, “Monotheism and Jihad,” two concepts far from the cares of vacationing westerners on the Red Sea. That same year, anti-government violence in Cairo killed several foreigners. Another group known ominously as the “Holy Warriors of Egypt” issued a statement later claiming that it was responsible. Notwithstanding multiple claims for responsibility the Egyptian government rounded up thousands of Sinai Bedouin and detained them, one of the few categories of citizens who had not claimed responsibility, and according to Human Rights Watch many suffered torture.

The Bedouin theory stated that Bedouins were behind the attacks because of the raw deal they had received during this period of rapid development, and had seen “their land ” swamped by foreigners and Cairenes (also considered foreigners by Bedouin), without experiencing any benefits themselves. Whether or the not the Bedouin theory holds, it is plausible that a non-Sinai group may have needed some Bedouin support to plan these attacks. But there is also a very plausible case for foreign Islamist being behind the attacks. The motivation behind such violence had changed somewhat since Suleiman Khater’s day. Back then it was all about Palestine, and fighting for the Arab homeland. Zionists were the target. Sadat had been killed for his Camp David Accord with Israel, for making common cause with the enemy. But the Luxor massacre of ’97 had targeted the “far enemy,” foreshadowing the subsequent explosion of Islamist enmity towards the West, the lead act being the atrocities of 9/11. Egyptian extremists had connected their domestic agenda with a world-wide crusade against the West, a crusade which had its landmark cases—Palestine still made the list, as did Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia. But signing up for the crusade did not mean abandoning the domestic agenda; there was still the ongoing struggle within Egypt itself.

Determined to root out all signs of invidious Islamism, Mubarak, in the aftermath of Sadat’s assassination, had kept the country in a state of emergency, liberally applying anti-fundamentalist weed killer around the county, but in the process scorching the delicate buds of civil society, which the country so desperately needed if it was to avoid the slide to extremism. While the main Islamic opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, renounced violence, there were plenty of other Islamic organizations to choose from who were willing to take over this role. Furthermore many members of the Gamaa al-Islamiyya had been to Afghanistan in the Soviet days to train in Bin Laden’s camps. The Arab world was flooded with these fighters when the Soviet’s pulled out, and Bin Laden began looking around for a greater cause.

Freeing the Red Sea resorts, as well as the rest of the country, from the specter of terrorism is high on the list of the government’s priorities. The nation’s reliance on foreign exchange currency demands that it make foreigners safe. But as the world settles into the long-haul in the war on terror, Egypt’s struggle to determine the nature of its government and society has taken on a darker hue, as similar forces array themselves across the globe, lending strength to each other, broadening the causes of their discontent, and forcing sun-seeking foreigners to ask, “at what cost, my snorkeling vacation?”