foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Epilogue 167
strength in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, and in 1981 Islamists
assassinated Sadat in a suicide attack.
For the next two decades, a small-scale war was fought between an in­
creasingly repressive Egyptian state under Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak,
and Islamist terrorists. The Islamists were not without a real base in some
sectors of society, not only taking over professional associations of lawyers,
doctors, and engineers, but also setting up social aid programs in the slums,
as for example in the wake of the 1993 earthquake. During the same period,
armed Islamist fanatics attacked secular, leftist, or feminist students and in­
tellectuals, driving many of them from the campuses. In 1994, they nearly
assassinated Naguib Mahfouz, the first Egyptian to have won the Nobel Prize
for Literature. In an act of desperation as the state began to defeat them, the
Islamists alienated much of the population by targeting a core part of the
economy, tourism, killing a number of West em tourists in 1996 and 1997.
After the main Islamist groups called off their war against the Egyptian state,
members of the movement's most fanatical wing, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri,
joined with bin Laden in 1998 and became a core element of the leadership
of Al Qaeda, first in Sudan and then Afghanistan. The Egyptian state has also
placated Islamists by allowing them to preach on the airwaves, to censor lit­
erature, and to harass secular and feminist intellectuals.
By the end of the 1990s, the radical Islamist movement had lost much
of its organizational strength and to some extent, even its mass base, especially
in Iran. In Egypt and Al geria, after some Islamist leaders accepted com­
promise or defeat, small groups split away, vowing to continue the fight. It
was this wing, the fringe of a fringe, that joined with bin Laden to form the
AI Qaeda movement, with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan its most secure base of
operations.
The September 11, 2001, attacks, which killed three thousand civilians in
the heart of the world's sole remaining superpower, unleashed an equally
profound global realignment. First and most obvious was the new stage
reached by Islamist terrorism, which until 2001 had succeeded in attacking
mainly outposts of the United States abroad, with the exception of the relatively
low-impact 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Unlike the Iranian Is­
lamists of 1978-79, who had a considerable mass base, the secretive Al Qaeda
network was cut off from direct contact with the popUlations it claimed to
represent. Nonetheless, as with the 1979 hostage-taking in Iran, a surge of
support around the Muslim world gave their brand of radical Islamism an
ideological victory, making bin Laden and Al Qaeda heroes in many quarters
for having taken on the widely hated United States government.
The Bush administration was initially caught off guard by September 11,