From Thirteen Days in September (Lawrence Wright, 2014) pp193-5
At the beginning of the conference, there had seemed to be a consensus on all sides that Jerusalem should remain united, with unimpeded access to the holy places and complete freedom of worship. An independent authority would govern the city itself. This was very much what the UN had in mind for Jerusalem when it partitioned Israel and Palestine in 1947. But the more the Egyptians and the Israelis talked about Jerusalem, the less they agreed. The one issue they thought they could resolve became radioactive because of the conflicting religious claims to the city. The Americans and the Israelis wanted to put the matter off until the end of the summit, but it refused to go away because of Tohamy’s emphatic campaigning and his inexplicable influence over Sadat.
Within the rising element of Islamic radicals, Jerusalem played a powerful emotional role. Sadat’s trip there had already sent a jolt through the entire Muslim world. Jerusalem was a symbol of the Palestinian movement; pictures of the golden Dome of the Rock were everywhere as a reminder of the claim that Arabs had on the city. Jerusalem had also become a kind of marker for Islam’s standing in history. Control of the religious sites had passed back and forth from pagan to Jewish, followed by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the British, and the Arabs. Each of these powers had promoted and exploited the city’s cult of holiness. The Old Testament repeatedly asserts that Jerusalem is where God lives and where his power is most efficacious. That promise has drawn pilgrims to the city for centuries. Muslims also endorse the idea that whoever prays in Jerusalem or al-Quas, as it is called in Ara-bic, the Holy Place-has all his sins absolved and becomes as innocent as a newborn child. Each of the three religions believes that Jerusalem will be the scene of the Last Judgment. Evangelical Christians and Jews say that the Messiah will appear on the Mount of Olives and enter the Old City through the Golden Gate. In Islam, there is a belief that, on that last day, the Kaaba the holiest place in Mecca will be spiritually transported to Jerusalem and that the dead will rise and greet each other in jubilation on the streets of the city. Because such legends are believed to be the literal truth, the struggle for Jerusalem never ends.
These dangerous currents created a charge that made Jerusalem almost untouchable at the summit. Genuine, comprehensive peace in the Middle East of the sort that Sadat and Carter envisioned would sap the radical Islamist trend; on the other hand, complete failure would appease the naysayers and allow Sadat to return to the Arab embrace. It was in the middle area of compromise where real peril lay.
Sadat knew that he was mixing highly volatile materials, but these same disparate elements were a part of his own personality. He had always been attracted to Islamist politics, and in his youthful revolutionary days, he had met several times with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a clandestine organization that was destined to shape the political climate of the entire Arab region and give birth to even more radical spin-offs in the future. Eventually Sadat served as a conduit between the Brothers and Nasser’s underground junta-in-waiting, the Free Officers. Sadat even arranged a back channel between Banna and the palace, through the king’s private doctor.
Following the mortifying defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies in the 1948 War of Independence, the clandestine Muslim Brotherhood boomed in membership. The population of Egypt at that time was about eighteen million, and as many as one million of them were in the Brotherhood. Some of Sadat’s fellow coup plotters in the military also joined the Brothers, swearing allegiance on a Quran and a revolver. The terrorist arm of the organization, called the secret apparatus, bombed theaters, harassed Jews, and turned on the government, assassinating prominent officials. The king himself felt sufficiently threatened by the Muslim Brothers that the palace had Banna killed in 1949. But the Brotherhood survived its founder’s death.
When Nasser’s revolution took power in 1952, he tried to work with the Brotherhood, appointing its premier propagandist, Sayyid Qutb, as an adviser to the Revolutionary Command Council. But the Brothers and the Free Officers had practically nothing in common. Nasser’s dream was to unite the Arabs, with Egypt at the center of a secular, socialist republic. The Brothers had a similar but wholly incompatible goal: to recreate a Muslim theocracy, called a caliphate, which had been dormant since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The tension between these opposing utopian ideals would roil Egypt for decades to come. Nasser came to wage an unending campaign against the Brother-hood, imprisoning its leadership and, in 1966, hanging Qutb, who had been convicted of plotting to overthrow the government.
After Nasser died in 1970, Sadat looked to the Islamists for allies, calculating that they would stand with him against the Nasserites and Communists. He began a dialogue with the imprisoned Brotherhood leaders, which ended with the new president allowing the Brothers back into society as long as they renounced violence. Sadat didn’t realize that there had been a generational split among the Islamists. Radical new groups were already forming, which reached far beyond Egypt’s borders. He had granted the Islamists freedom, but they were watching him, and waiting.
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