Naguib Mahfouz, the Arab world’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature, leaves nothing to chance. There is a precision and an economy about him, and he measures his daily life down to the minute. Thus, on the afternoon of October 14, 1994—as he had done every Friday afternoon for seven years—the eighty-two-year-old writer left his apartment building in the Agouza section of Cairo at exactly ten minutes before five, and walked outside. It seemed to him unusually quiet that afternoon as he glanced around the street—a rather ordinary, rather characterless block, where old houses of ochre and beige are interspersed with taller, concrete buildings from the nineteen-fifties, and where there are shops of all kinds, offices and apartment buildings, and, usually, traffic jams and noise.

A small, frail figure, he walked slightly stooped, assisted by a cane; his face was half obscured by heavy dark glasses. (His eyes were failing and sensitive.) He was somewhat irritated, he later recalled, because he did not immediately spot Dr. Fathi Hashem’s waiting car. Fathi, a forty-eight-year-old veterinarian, had been picking him up every Friday afternoon for seven years to drive him the ten minutes or so to the Kasr al-Nil, a fashionable café overlooking the Nile, where every Friday evening for thirty years Mahfouz had met with like-minded writers, intellectuals, and disciples. The “Friday sitting” had become a ritual for him.

“The moment I saw him, I jumped out of the car, walked the few feet to where he stood, and gave him my arm,” Fathi told me as we sat, with a group of friends, at the Mahfouz table at the Kasr al-Nil café a few weeks afterward. “I opened the right front door of my car for him, he sat down, and I closed the door. Everything seemed normal—except for the lack of people. At least, at first.”

Fathi went on, “It was only as I circled the car that I saw the young man approach. He went directly to Mr. Mahfouz’s side of the car; I assumed that he wanted to shake his hand, as many people do. The right front window was open, and Mr. Mahfouz extended his hand. It was only when I got into the driver’s seat that I noticed that Mr. Mahfouz’s body was shaking. I thought the young man was shaking him, and I screamed, ‘What are you doing? Are you mad?’ It was the only eye contact I had with the man. When I shouted, he hesitated, and for a few seconds his eyes locked with mine. I couldn’t see his face, only his forehead and his eyes—they were aggressive and afraid at the same time. He had very dark skin, not like us.” Fathi encompassed the table with a sweep of his hand. “Then, in an instant, the young man turned and ran. It was only then that I saw something brown lying on Mr. Mahfouz’s shoulder. It was the handle of a knife.” He paused for a moment, then added, “The blade was still in his neck, on the right side.”

Mahfouz was conscious, but he said nothing as Fathi leaned over and carefully removed the knife. He threw it out of the car, onto the street, and then placed his hand directly over the wound, which was dangerously close to the central carotid artery.

Realizing what had happened, Fathi began shouting for help. People began to appear: bawabs, or doormen of sorts, from the apartment buildings, who were dressed mostly in turbans and long, flowing djellabahs; customers from a corner sandwich shop; guards from the Police Hospital, across the street; and a few bearded young men dressed in Western shirts and trousers.

Keeping his right hand on the right side of Naguib Mahfouz’s neck, Fathi backed his car out of its parking place, and sped, in reverse, to the main gate of the Police Hospital, some fifty yards away. “It was five minutes total,” Fathi told me. “For everything.”

When they reached the hospital, Mahfouz asserted, quite emphatically, that he wanted to leave the car unassisted, and Fathi complied. The moment he removed his hand from the author’s neck, however, Mahfouz began bleeding copiously. The doctor who admitted him later recalled a small, frail man, a diabetic with a heart condition, nearly blind and nearly deaf, holding his hand to the right side of his neck. “He said, ‘There’s a bit of blood here. You might want to look at it. I also have some coldness in my arm.’ The moment he removed his hand, blood spurted all over, yet he remained calm. He sat in a chair and waited. In ten minutes, we took him into surgery, for a five-hour operation.”

Mahfouz had left behind him, outside the hospital’s towering concrete walls, in the streets and alleyways, an increasingly cacophonous crowd of bawabs and neighbors, street venders and hawkers, café patrons, and merely curious passersby, who now mingled with hundreds of uniformed police. Their voices rose and fell, and they flailed their arms—sometimes so violently that turbans came unwound. Mahfouz had spent an entire lifetime documenting just such scenes—of chaos and confusion, of contradiction spliced with chicanery, of situations in which nothing is what it appears to be—as he perfected the novel form in Arabic literature. He had presented in close, rich detail the intricacies of life in the margins and in the alleyways; his often idiosyncratic characters, from the lower and middle classes, argue over matters of justice and injustice, expectation and disillusionment, and belief in God. His portraits of the city, though they are often compared to Dickens’ portraits of London or Zola’s of Paris, are preëminently Cairene, as his characters struggle, caught between an uncertain future and the weight of the past.

When Mahfouz’s friends heard of the stabbing, they rushed to the Police Hospital, and so did his wife and his two daughters. Like most Cairenes, they were all stunned by the news. It would become the most controversial act of violence in Egypt in years.

There are many versions of what happened, some of them absurd. But the key questions remain: If it was in fact an assassination attempt, why Naguib Mahfouz? Who was responsible? And, perhaps as important, why did it happen just then? The government was quick to blame the Gama’a al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Group, which is the strongest member of a network of militant underground Islamic groups that have been attempting for the past two years, through violence and stealth, to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak’s secular government. (By late last October, when I arrived in Egypt, both the Islamists and the regime had raised the stakes in their increasingly vengeful warfare to a new height. The militants had accelerated attacks on foreign tourists, Coptic Christians, security forces, Cabinet Ministers, and the police. The government had responded brutally.)

Within an hour of the attack on Mahfouz, the government announced—to everyone’s sheer astonishment—that an arrest would be made that night; the following morning, seven young men were arrested, and an eighth was killed by police gunfire. One skeptical Cairene told me that the police action reminded him of Claude Rains’s saying, “Round up the usual suspects.” Ultimately, sixteen alleged Islamic militants were tried by a special, in-camera military court. (A number of these courts have been set up by Mubarak, and Amnesty International has described them as consistently conducting “grossly unfair trials.”) Some of the defendants were charged with attempted murder, others with the illegal possession of explosives and arms—and all of them with membership in Gama’a. Every defendant denied the charges. Earlier this month, the court sentenced two of the defendants to death—against which there is no appeal—and two others to life imprisonment.

Mahfouz had openly criticized the violent tactics of the underground Islamic groups, as he had openly criticized the tactics and, in many cases, the policies of the Mubarak government. He first came to the Islamists’ attention more than thirty years ago, when Cairo’s powerful religious institution, al-Azhar, which is generally regarded as the Oxford of Islamic learning and thought, had judged one of his books, “Children of Gebelaawi,” to be heretical. The novel is filled with allegorical characters who resemble figures from the Koran and the Bible, and describes the complex relationship of a group of Cairo slumdwellers with their various prophets and with God. After being serialized in the prestigious daily newspaper al-Ahram, the novel was banned, and no publication of it—indeed, no mention of it—was officially permitted in Egypt for thirty-five years. Then, in 1988, Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize. It was something that completely disordered his exceedingly orderly and exceedingly private life.

The following year, when the furor over Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was sweeping the Islamic world, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a warrant for Rushdie’s death, the blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—who is currently standing trial in New York, on charges of, among other things, conspiracy to assassinate President Mubarak and to bomb various New York landmarks—reportedly told a journalist that Rushdie was not unlike Mahfouz: in the Sheikh’s opinion, both were heretics. “Islamic law calls on these people to repent, and if they do not, they will be killed,” Sheikh Omar was quoted as saying at the time. “If this sentence had been passed on Naguib Mahfouz when he wrote ‘Children of Gebelaawi,’ Salman Rushdie would have realized that he had to stay within certain bounds.”

When I asked a senior Egyptian security official if in his view this amounted to a fatwa—or religious opinion—justifying Mahfouz’s death, he said that he wasn’t sure but that that was the way it had been interpreted, and Egyptian militants had threatened to assassinate the author on the October anniversary of his receiving the Nobel. What was even more important, the official added, was that Sheikh Omar was the spiritual mentor of Gama’a.

“I haven’t believed the government’s version from the very start; I think they have the wrong man,” one of Mahfouz’s closest friends told me one afternoon a week or so after a mysterious and dishevelled young man—with fair skin and an Islamic beard—had “confessed” on nationwide television to stabbing Mahfouz in what he claimed was a “kidnapping” attempt gone awry. He later retracted the statement, and most Cairo intellectuals I spoke with found the “confession” more amusing than edifying. Although the young man was sentenced to hang, it is unlikely, given the secrecy of the court proceedings, that the many puzzles surrounding the stabbing will ever be solved.

“It is indeed bizarre,” a Western diplomat said to me one afternoon. “It is certainly not the usual modus operandi of the Islamic Group—they have never resorted to the use of primitive weapons in their attacks. Why use a kitchen knife, which requires a great deal of skill, when the chances of success are far greater if you use a gun? This was an extremely amateurish act, and Gama’a is not an unsophisticated group. So does this mean that the movement is splintering even more, and that we’re now seeing the emergence of still more fanatic groups? We have got to assume, in the absence of a smoking gun, that the attacker came from the Islamic underground. But a key question is: What does it mean?”

Naguib Mahfouz was born in a warren of ancient alleys in the heart of Islamic Cairo, behind the al-Hussein Mosque, in the neighborhood of Gamaliya, in December of 1911. His father, a minor civil servant who later became a business manager for a merchant in the bazaar, was highly traditional, and highly distant from his youngest son; his mother was doting and became his closest friend. His childhood was often lonely but otherwise unremarkable. After attending Islamic elementary schools and a secular high school, he entered Cairo (then King Fuad I) University, and in 1934 he graduated with a degree in philosophy. He remembers that period, which coincided with the anticolonial movement against the British, as the happiest of his life—as “the golden age of patriotism . . . when the times themselves were listening to you,” he wrote in his 1961 novel “The Thief and the Dogs.”

Until 1971, all his works were written late at night, for he spent his days as a government bureaucrat: as an official film censor, an adviser on the arts, and a minor functionary in various ministries, including the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

A private, timid man who married late in life, Mahfouz is a strong believer, a bit of a mystic, and a Fabian socialist of the most passionate sort. By the late nineteen-fifties, social realism had become the defining characteristic of his work. His well-ordered, punctilious daily life was the antithesis of the world he created in his books—some forty books, over forty years. The world of his characters was unsettled and difficult, informed by history, and pervaded by an overwhelming sense of loss. His “Cairo Trilogy,” which was largely responsible for his receiving the Nobel, is a family saga tracing three generations and spanning both World Wars. In it he tackled not only religious and political themes, which are his normal forte, but prostitution, drug addiction, and the degradation of the urban poor. In 1979, when he was among the first to support the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the “Trilogy” and a number of his other works were banned in much of the Arab world.

As the years went by, his novels became increasingly hard-edged and stark, and the failures of contemporary Egypt were his stage. “We live in a repugnant age of slogans,” one of the characters in a novella entitled “The Day the President Was Killed” laments. “And between the slogans and the truth is an abyss, into which we have all fallen and lost ourselves.” Published more than a decade ago, the novella has all the elements of Mahfouz’s prophetic fictional world: the decline of the Egyptian system; the emergence of an authoritarian state; a middle-class urban family torn apart by economic stagnation and uncertainty; the sexual tensions of a young couple in a society in which men and women are kept strictly apart; the rise of corruption, and of Islam, as the almost inevitable result of a system that seems to be spiralling out of control. As he follows one disillusioned young man through his day on October 6, 1981—the day that President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by members of a militant, underground Islamic group—Mahfouz melds illusion and reality through the eyes of his protagonist, Ilwan, and flashes of memory leap about in time. Unable to marry because he cannot find a well-paying job or buy or furnish an apartment, Ilwan, who graduated with honors in philosophy, shares a cramped, dingy room with his grandfather, who lived through the Revolution of 1919, in which Egypt was meant to come of age. Now Ilwan sits in a coffeehouse, and begins a monologue:

We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us—no more, no less. Where are the good old days? . . . My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this café as a refuge from the pain of loneliness . . . . How many nations live here side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi’ites and Sunnis?—stories far better than “A Thousand and One Nights.”

One evening, three and a half weeks after the attack on him, Mahfouz agreed to meet me at the Police Hospital. Security was tight when I arrived at the main gate of the hospital—a large, sprawling complex of glass and chrome—accompanied by one of Mahfouz’s friends, a poet named Naim Sabry. Only after passing through a metal detector, presenting identity cards, and having our bags searched twice were we permitted to enter the grounds. We found Mahfouz in his room, on one of the upper floors, with his wife and daughters. A nurse sat at the entrance to the room, and outside the door three security men in plain clothes fidgeted with their Kalashnikovs.

As Mahfouz greeted us, with a weak wave of his hand, I was astonished at how frail he was and how small he seemed—far smaller than his five-foot-three frame. Dressed in a navy-blue robe and pajamas, he sat, slightly stooped, on a wooden chair between two single beds. Speaking in halting English, he asked me to sit on the bed to his left, because he was deaf in his right ear. He had lost a great deal of blood, and had required numerous transfusions. “Concentration tires me,” he said, “so don’t expect much.”

I began by asking Mahfouz the questions that everyone in Cairo was asking: “Why you? Why now?”

His eyes seemed to mist over, and then he said, “I simply got caught in the middle, in the battle between the system and the Islamists. ‘Why now?’ is not the question—perhaps circumstance or fate—yet it could have happened any time, for I’m convinced that the battle will continue, and that both sides will take it as far as they can. Why me? Why others?” He shrugged, and gave me a sad smile.

“In ‘The Day the President Was Killed,’ Ilwan searches for order and reason and grapples with God,” I said. “Yet nothing in the alleys is as it appears to be.”

“Yes,” he interrupted, before I could finish my thought. “It’s interesting that you chose that book, and obviously what you mean to ask is, Did I somehow prophesy my own attack? Yes, perhaps I did. But then so much of what is now happening in Egypt is, in a sense, Mahfouzian.”

The streets of Cairo are like no other streets in the world. Every corner, every crevice, every alleyway seems to be inhabited. Crowds of pedestrians and traffic jostle for space, and noise is everywhere—a pervasive din of car horns tooting, street venders hawking their wares, and muezzins, their voices shrilly amplified, calling the faithful to prayers. Yet as I wandered around one late-October afternoon I was struck, more than ever before in the twenty years that I have known Cairo, by the impression of a city that was angry and out of control. People seemed to be living on the edge, as much of the city’s infrastructure, like its ancient monuments, was being reduced to dust. Corruption flourished, and political stagnation ossified. The number of Cairenes increased by nearly a thousand every day, in a country whose population, of nearly sixty million—a third of the Arab world—grew by more than a million every year. Yet ninety-five per cent of that population lived on less than five per cent of the land. Every year, Egypt produces more than a hundred thousand university graduates, many of whom cannot find jobs—in a country whose literacy rate has remained frozen at about fifty per cent. The city’s once astonishing diversity of cultures and social strata had seemingly been reduced to two starkly contrasting poles: poverty, which appeared to be everywhere, and extraordinary wealth. All across Cairo, as I drove back to my hotel, it was easy to spot soaring new apartment buildings of glass and polished chrome and, immediately behind them, narrow, labyrinthine lanes where half-naked children played—as they had done in “Midaq Alley,” one of Mahfouz’s most popular books—with cockroaches, in mud and dust.

As I continued through Tahrir Square, everything there seemed dwarfed by a bulbous gray twelve-story structure, Stalinesque in design, called the Mugamma. It is the headquarters of Egypt’s equally bulbous state bureaucracy, three million strong. Many Cairenes say that more souls are at rest in the Mugamma than in the City of the Dead. (According to a recent study, the average Egyptian bureaucrat works twenty-seven minutes a day.) The Mugamma, perhaps more than anything else, has come to symbolize a system that had been created by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1952, but was now exhausted, and in steady decline.

Mubarak had become the coincidental inheritor of that system in 1981, when his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, was gunned down by members of a military cell of al-Jihad—a group that, like Gama’a and others in today’s militant Islamic underground, had been encouraged, trained, and armed to challenge the left by Sadat himself. As the third generation of the revolution, Mubarak lacked the charisma of Nasser and the vision of Sadat, and many Cairenes say that he is a bit like a Mahfouz bureaucrat: gray, one-dimensional, almost smaller than life.

Since the late nineteen-seventies, when I lived in Cairo, Egypt has been receiving lavish amounts of Western aid, including some two billion dollars a year from the United States. It is, after Israel, Washington’s second-largest recipient of funds, and the largest United States overseas aid operation since Vietnam. The money began arriving after the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, when President Sadat embarked on policies that transformed Cairo—the Islamic world’s largest city—into the hub of American policy in the Middle East. But the distribution of the aid was uneven at best, and little of it filtered down. The new wealth also bred a new, and ostentatious, class, which surrounded Sadat and now surrounds Mubarak. Its members think little of spending four hundred thousand dollars on a new Mercedes—or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a daughter’s wedding at a five-star Cairo hotel—while the nation’s per-capita G.N.P. remains frozen at around six hundred dollars a year.

The government’s reputation for rampant corruption is fuelling popular discontent and is being exploited by the Islamists; it is also leading to growing consternation among Western donors and diplomats. Particularly nettlesome are the mounting accusations against the Gang of Sons, as the wheeling-and-dealing offspring of a number of key Mubarak officials are called; two of the most frequently mentioned are the sons of the President. Accusations that the Gang of Sons—and, by extension, the Mubarak government—is actively assisting neighboring Libya in circumventing United Nations sanctions have led to a number of recent rebukes from the United States. Nevertheless, Washington continues to have an enormous stake in the Mubarak regime, for on assuming office Mubarak immediately reaffirmed Egypt’s commitment to the peace treaty with Israel, began reëstablishing the nation’s place as a leader in the Arab world, and set to work behind the scenes as a mediator in the ongoing quest for Middle Eastern peace. Later, he, more than anyone else, gave legitimacy to the United States-led coalition in the Gulf War.

As I headed back to my hotel, I passed clusters of riot policemen, their faces partly hidden by visored helmets, who were standing guard outside tourist centers and half-empty hotels. The campaign by Islamic militants to cripple Egypt’s economy through attacks on tourism—the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange—had cost the Mubarak government one and a half billion dollars last year, and had decimated the tourist industry. Combined with an admittedly timid government attempt at structural economic reform, the growing reluctance of foreign investors to consider Egypt potentially promising had only served to widen the gap between the rulers and the ruled. And the social and economic alienation that was largely fuelling the Islamic flame was almost certainly going to get worse. Waging war on the Islamists will not change that.

When I asked a Western ambassador how serious a threat the Islamic groups posed, he replied, “Unlike Algeria, they’re not regime-threatening—at least, not yet—but if the government continues to refuse to address the root causes of this revolt, and persists in treating it as merely a law-and-order problem, I’ll be a little less certain about that. Mubarak has a mind-set about the Islamists, and he keeps insisting to us that they’re a creation of Iran and Sudan, but doesn’t produce a shred of evidence. Some Iranian money probably is coming in, and some Egyptians are undoubtedly training in Sudanese camps, but it is very wrong—indeed, potentially self-defeating—to put all the weight on external help, because the great majority of weapons, money, and recruits and the anger that fuels them are coming from here. Despite Mubarak’s pronouncements, the problem is not Iran or Sudan. It’s him.”

The anger of which the ambassador spoke had increased almost palpably in the eighteen months since I’d last been in Egypt. So had the level of violence, and the intransigence on both sides. Egypt seemed to be sliding into an incipient guerrilla war, in which neither the Islamists nor the security forces had defined any front lines. At the street level, the country had been transformed into a police state that is never quite in control. Thousands of political prisoners are being systematically tortured, as part of official policy; hundreds have “disappeared”; hostage-taking and collective punishment are common practices; and entire neighborhoods have been cordoned off, and mosques and houses razed.

One morning, I called on two writers who had received death threats from the Islamists, and found both of them hidden away—one inside his shuttered apartment, the other in his office, with thick curtains drawn. In both cases, heavily armed guards were standing at attention outside their doors. I then visited a group of young men, mostly students, who were also hidden away, in a slum neighborhood in one of Mahfouz’s labyrinths. They hadn’t attended classes in more than a month, they said. When I asked why, one replied, “Because we’re bearded, and we’re young. To be young and bearded in Egypt is a crime.”

What Mahfouz has termed “the concealed side”—the reality that hides behind convention and form in societies where repression has become an inescapable part of everyday life—did not express itself in a highly visible presence of crack troops or of uniformed policemen on the streets, though I did notice them from time to time. It expressed itself mostly in fear in the alleyways and in outrage in sophisticated Cairo salons. It also expressed itself in a growing anti-Americanism, which I had not known in Egypt before, and in an intellectual siege, in which the country’s writers, directors, playwrights, and poets found themselves increasingly caught between the Islamists, on the one hand, and the government, on the other—especially the official sheikhs of al-Azhar, whose increasingly strident pronouncements, as they attempted to guide artistic thought, were proving as outrageous as the demands of many militants.

“What is happening to our civility?” Egypt’s best filmmaker, an eccentric genius named Youssef Chahine, asked. His most recent film, “The Emigrant,” which was hugely successful and broke all Egyptian attendance records, had come under attack by the militants, who alleged that it was based on the Biblical travels of Joseph, and thus personalized a prophet in a human way. There were bomb threats against one of the theatres where it was being shown, and an obscure Islamist lawyer, backed by al-Azhar, had demanded that the film be banned. The case is now in the courts. “You know,” Chahine told me, “last year I had a film”—a docudrama depicting the alienation of Cairo’s slumdwellers—“banned by the government.” Unlike many writers and artists, Chahine hadn’t been fatwa-ed, but he felt threatened nevertheless. “All of us do,” he said. “Both physically and artistically. Strangling someone’s work is like hitting Naguib Mahfouz in the neck.”

Mahfouz had begun receiving death threats in 1988, only days after being awarded the Nobel Prize—when the controversy over the banned “Children of Gebelaawi” was revived—but he had doggedly refused to accept armed government guards. “I walk to the coffee shop, and I don’t look to the left or the right,” Mahfouz said in an interview at the time. “And so what if they get me? I have lived my life and done what I wanted to do.”

Like most Egyptian secularists, Mahfouz, who had frequently called on the government to enter into a dialogue with its Islamic foes, had grown concerned over the steady, consistent rise in the influence of the Islamists in the schools and universities, in the news media, in the courts, and in the arts, and over what he considered an acquiescent government response. (Clearly baffled by the movement, the government has veered between suppression and a highly orchestrated campaign to make itself appear more Islamic than the Islamic activists.) Last year, Mahfouz’s concern gave way to alarm when the Minister of Culture agreed to demands by an Islamist parliamentarian that any books scheduled for publication by his Ministry be sent to al-Azhar for review. Never before in the history of modern Egypt had any government agreed to such a demand. Mahfouz issued a furious statement, signed by scores of artists and writers, in which he described the assault on the arts as “intellectual terrorism,” and he later told friends, “The censor in Egypt is no longer just the state. It’s the gun of the fundamentalists.”

Al-Azhar University, the oldest university in the world, attracts thousands of students each year from every part of the Muslim world. It has long been a prime recruiting ground for the Muslim Brotherhood—the oldest and most moderate of Egypt’s Islamic groups—and its graduates have, in turn, reëxported the Brotherhood’s brand of militant Islam throughout the Muslim world. What is far more worrying to the Egyptian government, however, is the Brotherhood’s recent success, thanks largely to funding from Saudi Arabia, in recruiting prominent sheikhs from within al-Azhar itself.

Western diplomats were thus not surprised when the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, aged seventy-seven, who had been appointed by Mubarak, issued a scathing fatwa against holding a United Nations conference on population in Cairo last fall, or when he granted the title of shahid, or martyr—the highest accolade that an Islamist can receive—to a young member of Gama’a who had joined forces with the Palestinian militant group Hamas in a shooting spree in Jerusalem which left sixteen wounded or dead.

The diplomats and Egypt’s increasingly beleaguered secularists were nevertheless stunned when one of the world’s leading moderate Islamic scholars, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, of al-Azhar, testifying for the defense at the trial of those accused of assassinating the writer Farag Foda, in 1992, effectively endorsed the extrajudicial killing of anyone who opposed the implementation of Islamic Sharia law. For the secularists, Sheikh al-Ghazali had come to represent a dangerous convergence between Egypt’s radical and moderate Islamic political trends. In their view, as the government has accommodated al-Azhar, and thus emboldened it, al-Azhar has begun adopting political ideas from the militants.

“Suddenly, we realized that within al-Azhar there are many sheikhs who aid and abet the violence, who give it credence,” Tehseen Bashir, a retired Egyptian Ambassador, told me over tea. “Al-Azhar has always been a center. Sheikh Yassin [the leader of Hamas] studied there; so did Hasan al-Turabi [the leader of the Islamic movement in the Sudan] and Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. And today we see the sheikhs of al-Azhar issuing fatwas as extreme as those of Gama’a, and they are doing it with the active encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The key question about the banned Brotherhood—one that has proved vexing to Egypt’s nervous bourgeoisie and to many of its Western friends—is whether it has really renounced violence, as it claims to have done. It maintains that it has no direct control over groups like Gama’a, but many Egyptians and Westerners aren’t convinced.

“How overt the coördination is between the groups is secondary,” one Western diplomat told me when I called on him. “What matters is that all these groups have a relationship that works; their goals are the same. They could be rivals, they could be in competition, or somewhere in between. That doesn’t matter. What does is that they have an effective distribution of labor, and that the glue that holds it all together is the money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, whether it comes from individuals or from their governments.”

Imbaba, only a bridge away from the affluent island of Zamalek, is one of Cairo’s most dismal and sprawling slums, holding some eight hundred thousand people. In it stark, sometimes tottering houses, built of stucco or brick or of corrugated iron and mud, line a labyrinth of open sewers and unpaved alleyways. The alleys are so narrow that they are little more than dark, hidden passageways. Some of them are less than six feet wide, and an attempt to navigate them by car meant lurching, no faster than a person could walk, through gullies and ravines, then negotiating one’s way around chicken coops, uncollected garbage, and open cesspools. Laundry hung from rooftops and from window frames on both sides of the car, and when there was a wind the laundry met in the middle of the alley, creating billowing barricades. I had come here with a graduate student—whom I will call Ahmad, since at the moment he is living underground—and we decided that it was far more practical to walk.

From the moment you arrive in Imbaba, the problems facing Egypt overwhelm you. There is almost no government presence here: few services; no sanitation; only sputtering electricity; few hospitals or schools. We had left the government behind us at the last paved road.

We finally reached our destination, the al-Iman Billah Mosque. One of some seventy thousand unofficial, or what are called “popular,” mosques in Egypt, it was little more than a room on the ground floor of a dun-colored apartment building in Imbaba’s Munira Gharbiya neighborhood. Militant Islamic slogans were defiantly scrawled across its walls, above latticed windows and brown-painted doors, which were sealed with immense padlocks. The government, in its move to crush the Islamic groups, had closed all of Munira’s popular mosques—there were ten—and imprisoned their sheikhs. The sheikh of al-Iman Billah was a medical doctor who, without charges or trial, had been in the “punishment ward” of various Cairo prisons for more than four years. Sheikhs from the neighborhood’s other popular mosques—including professors, lawyers, and a former Marxist economist—had been in prison just as long. (A fairly significant number of former Marxist and socialist professionals are part of the militant Islamic movement now.) But the popular mosques—nearly a thousand of which had been shut down nationwide—were, in a sense, like the Islamic militants themselves: quiescent in one province or in one neighborhood after a government crackdown, they would spring up in another.

Leaving the al-Iman Billah, we moved next door, to a coffeehouse, and sat at one of a number of small wicker tables spilling out into the alleyway, while four disagreeable-looking plainclothes security men at the table next to us were fingering worry beads. As we sipped tiny cups of thick coffee, we watched the life of the alleys pass by: a young girl on a donkey, who was dressed in a black djellabah and wearing the traditional head scarf, or hijab; birds in wicker cages, in a cart pulled by a mule; a herd of goats waiting to be slaughtered outside a butcher shop, where carcasses of meat hung from spikes and blew in the breeze. A group of dark-eyed, dark-skinned men in djellabahs, with prayer caps or floppy turbans on their heads, walked by silently in single file, as if performing a secret military drill. The security men stared at them, and they stared back. The dark-skinned men were mostly from the countryside of Upper Egypt, Ahmad said, where the battle between the Islamists and the regime was most intense. Many Cairenes worried that the chaos it had spawned was driving Upper Egypt dangerously close to civil war.

A buxom woman who had tattoos on her fingers and her nose, and whose head was covered by a scarf, joined us; Ahmad introduced her to me as Gamila, the neighborhood prostitute. She told me that she gave twenty per cent of her earnings to a popular mosque. An alley-dweller is not just a person but part of a social network, a professor of sociology had told me earlier. And now, as I watched the life on the street, it seemed to me that, as in so many of Mahfouz’s works, two seemingly contradictory worlds coexisted in the alleys—a world of extreme Islamic activism and a world of extreme vice.

And those who lived here, tucked away from public view, were—like the alleys—Mahfouzian. They included civil servants and bureaucrats, the educated unemployed, laborers and shopkeepers, pensioners and petty thieves, drummers and belly dancers, drug dealers and prostitutes. As they measured their lives against their hopes, they came up short, so it is hardly surprising that the alleys of Imbaba had become a stronghold of the militant Islamic groups.

The two strongest of these groups are Gama’a al-Islamiya and al-Jihad. For religious counsel and guidance, both of them follow the teachings of Gama’a’s spiritual mentor, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman—the sheikh now on trial in Manhattan on charges of conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks. It is easy to find cassettes of his sermons in the Imbaba alleyways, and his name is familiar there. After Ahmad and I left the coffeehouse, we watched men transform a small, empty square by spreading out straw mats for midday prayers. The few women in evidence were shrouded in black abayas; they were anonymous forms, gliding in and out of storefront shops. The sounds, from amplified systems, or from radios, were those of the Koran. I saw on nearly every crumbling wall we passed, and flying from balconies above, the green-and-white flags and signs of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Islam Is the Solution,” they announced.

The Islamists, led by the Brotherhood, had built their own social and welfare system here. Gama’a-controlled popular mosques had set up discount health clinics and schools, day-care centers, and furniture factories to employ the unemployed, and they provided meat, at wholesale prices, to the poor. Despite an aggressive, ten-million-dollar social program launched by the government last fall, the Islamists’ institutions remained generally far more efficient and far superior to run-down government facilities. Along with the collapse of every secular ideology embraced by Egyptian politicians and intellectuals during this century, it was government repression and ineptitude, far more than militants’ guns and bombs, that were fuelling the Islamic flame.

Dissent was rarely tolerated in the alleys under Gama’a’s control. Girls and women were harassed if they ventured outside without covering their heads, and I noticed that even girls as young as six—as opposed to the usual age of twelve or thirteen—had “taken the veil,” and were wearing hijabs. Christian shopkeepers were made to pay “taxes”—forcibly, I was told—for their protection, and many had removed icons of the Virgin Mary from their walls. Groups of militants, armed with knives and guns, went around burning video shops, and there were many neighborhoods that policemen feared to enter after dark. Local emirs, or princes, were appointed—most often bearded young men wearing long white robes and crocheted prayer caps. Throughout their areas of control, they imposed Islamic law by fiat. In Imbaba, the Islamists had, for all intents and purposes, created a state within a state. Then, in December of 1992, the government moved in, in an abortive attempt to crush the Islamic groups. It was a virtual invasion, of some fifteen thousand troops. Raids have occurred intermittently ever since.

I found evidence of the violence everywhere I went: metal sheeting pockmarked with bullet holes; popular mosques whose doors had been cemented closed; the faces of mothers whose sons had disappeared; and a young boy, barely a teen-ager, who had been arrested and buried up to his neck for days at a time, in highly saline soil in a state security camp. His skin, discolored and disfigured, resembled that of a leper, and it was impossible to guess his age.

I met Ali Ismail, a lawyer who defended members of the Islamic groups, in his office, in a flooded, unlighted Imbaba alleyway. A stocky man in his mid-thirties, whose most distinguishing characteristics are deep, dark eyes and a neatly trimmed black beard, he greeted me and my interpreter warmly and offered us Pepsi. Then he guided us from an outer office into his own—a small, bare whitewashed room lit by a single electric bulb that dangled from the ceiling. The shutters on the only window were closed.

During the security operation in December of 1992, Imbaba had been effectively sealed off from the world. “They cordoned off the entire area at four or five strategic points,” Ismail said. “People woke up in the morning to find themselves under siege. There had been so many police operations here before that people got used to it. But there had never been anything like this. It was unprecedented in its intensity, in its viciousness, in its length of time, and in the number of arrests. It went on night and day, for five weeks. By the first evening, the idea of collective punishment was the defining line: they would arrest all those who were bearded and young, their mothers and fathers, their children and wives. Babies were even taken in. And children less than ten years old were herded into police stations and tortured, to pressure their fathers to turn themselves in.

“Women were tortured with electroshocks and beaten in the streets—dragged by their hair, after their hijabs were savagely torn off their heads. Altogether, there were no fewer than five thousand long-term arrests. Over the next year, some forty-five hundred people were released; they were never charged or tried. Many of them have no idea why they were arrested—except that they lived in Imbaba’s alleyways.”

“What about the five hundred others?” I asked.

“They’re all still in prison,” he said. “Some of them were charged and tried, and most were acquitted and ordered released by the courts. Others—the great majority, four hundred or so—were never brought to trial, because the courts ordered their release for lack of evidence.” He paused for a moment, and then he continued, “But under our emergency law”—which has been in effect ever since the assassination of Sadat—“when you go to prison in Egypt there’s no hope of getting out.”

According to Human Rights Watch, the number of Islamists in Egyptian jails in 1994 was over twenty thousand—as opposed to some six thousand the previous year. When I called on General Hassan al-Alfi, the hard-line Minister of the Interior, he became increasingly agitated, and said that these figures were totally wrong. He refused to provide an alternative number, however, and would say only that some four thousand Islamists had been arrested in 1994. Ismail told me that a total of nearly thirty-eight thousand were being held. It was the largest number of political prisoners in Egypt’s modern history, and the vast majority of those prisoners had been ordered released by civilian courts.

Ismail explained the way the Orwellian system worked. When Islamists are acquitted by the courts, most of them are transferred almost immediately to the headquarters of the dreaded State Security Investigation, or S.S.I., an arm of the Interior Ministry, and they are kept there for anything from a week to a month. Then a new order is issued for their arrest, signed by the Minister of the Interior himself. During the period between a person’s acquittal and his re-arrest, an S.S.I. official draws up documents claiming that he has been released. “And who would know?” Ismail said. “They’ve been in S.S.I. headquarters all along. This has happened in Egypt before. But what is noteworthy, and alarming, is that it’s the usual procedure now.”

I asked him to give me an example, and he spoke of Hassan al-Garabawi, a lawyer from a slum area called Ayn Shams. He had been arrested in January of 1989 and acquitted in May of the following year. Since that time, thirty court orders had been issued for his release and thirty new detention orders filed. This month, Hassan al-Garabawi will have been in prison for six years. He has never left jail, even though he has been ordered released by five different judges, five times a year.

“I have fifty cases of such severity,” Ismail said. “They are doctors, lawyers, architects who are being held incommunicado in what is called ‘the highly guarded prison’—the Scorpion.” (The Scorpion, a new prison within the high-security section of Cairo’s Tora Prison complex, is one of Egypt’s most dreaded detention sites. A number of lawyers and judges told me that it had been built at least partly with aid from the United States.) “And this is illegal,” Ismail went on. “Here are the court rulings.” He waved a sheaf of papers in the air. “Abdel Harith Madani was one of the attorneys who challenged this. He was not the most prominent or the most forceful, but he could have paid the price with his life.”

I had met Abdel Harith Madani—a handsome young man of thirty, with intense dark eyes, a square black beard, and short black hair—in the office of another Islamist lawyer when I visited Cairo in 1993. Soft-spoken, almost shy, Abdel Harith had defended many Islamic militants, including some (there have been fifty-six in all) who have been sentenced to death. In April of 1994, he was arrested by the S.S.I. “I know the case dot for dot,” Ismail said. “He was my friend.” The account he gave me was later confirmed by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

April 26th was a beautiful early-

summer day, and Abdel Harith, after spending the day in court, returned home for an early dinner with his twenty-one-year-old wife and their two infant daughters. Then, as was his custom, he jogged along the Nile; jogging and soccer were passions of his. He was particularly pleased with himself that evening, for only a few days earlier he had won an important case: a court had ruled that the incommunicado detention of prisoners in the Scorpion was contrary to the Egyptian Constitution and the penal code. Just the previous morning, he had had the documents hand-carried to the director of the Scorpion.

Abdel Harith had often told friends that the spiralling violence in his country appalled him, and now he was attempting to broker a ceasefire between the two sides, through a respected opposition member of Parliament, Kamal Khalid. He hoped to have word from Khalid later that evening on the government’s response.

He arrived at his law office, in the fashionable area of Giza, at around eight o’clock that evening, and he apparently didn’t notice that unmarked S.S.I. cars were parked just down the block. Three lawyers with whom he shared the office were already there. Like Abdel Harith, they were members of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, and, like him, they headed a legal-aid fund—reliably said to be underwritten by Saudi Arabia—for Islamist detainees. Khalid had called him, one of the other lawyers said, but Abdel Harith was never able to return the call. Nine S.S.I. officers stormed the office, breaking down the door. Several others cordoned off the building. The four young lawyers were told to stand up and face the wall, with their arms raised above their heads. They remained there for three hours, as the S.S.I. officers tore the office apart.

Abdel Harith was then driven blindfolded to his home by the S.S.I. (The three other lawyers were released.) The officers ransacked his apartment, terrifying his wife and his daughters. Then they drove him to the S.S.I. headquarters in Giza. It was just past midnight.

Across Giza, at the Kasr al-Ayni Hospital, where a small rooftop extension on the eighth floor had been transformed into a secret prison ward, doctors remember that Abdel Harith was carried in just before dawn. He was bleeding profusely and was in a severe state of shock. Within an hour, he was dead. According to a still unreleased autopsy report, he was beaten to death. Seventeen wounds were found on his body, including punctures with a sharp instrument. The fatal blow had been delivered by a club, to the back of his neck.

Yet no one told his family or his friends for eleven days. It was only on May 7th, at dawn, that his wife was told to come and pick up her husband’s body at the central morgue. (The Ministry of the Interior later announced that Abdel Harith had died of lung failure caused by an asthma attack, and a spokesman told the press, “What do you expect the government to say? We never violate human rights. He died God’s death.”)

At the same time that Abdel Harith’s wife received the telephone call, the S.S.I. arrested his mother-in-law, one of his cousins, and a cousin of his wife’s, and they were held, virtually as hostages, until the family would agree to pick up the body and bury it immediately. But the family refused, demanding that the autopsy report be released, and that a second, independent autopsy be performed. They were backed by the powerful syndicates of lawyers and doctors—both of which, along with nearly all the syndicates, the Islamists control—and later by the American State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

Nevertheless, the family’s protest did not last long. The next evening, Abdel Harith’s cousin Amir, who had spent two days at the S.S.I., returned home. He had been tortured. The following morning at dawn, the family went to the Zeinhum Morgue and retrieved the corpse.

The S.S.I. had arranged a car and a plane to fly Amir and the coffin containing Abdel Harith to the tiny village of Qimaan al-Mataana, in Upper Egypt, where Abdel Harith’s parents live. But neither of his parents was permitted to attend the burial; nor, for that matter, was anyone else. And the family and the villagers were warned that if they complained Abdel Harith’s younger brother, Salah, who was in prison after being accused of killing an undercover S.S.I. officer in 1992, could meet the same fate that Abdel Harith had met.

The S.S.I. buried Abdel Harith in an unmarked grave in al-Mataana’s cemetery, near the banks of the Nile, and for the forty days of official mourning S.S.I. officers stood guard by it. Nobody was permitted to come to pray, or to pay final respects. And every morning during the forty days the women of al-Mataana, dressed in black shawls, passing by the cemetery on their way to the village well, craned their necks forward and tried to find the grave. It was identifiable only by the presence of the security men. Otherwise, it was just a pile of stones covered with dust and sand.

Dr. Hussein Kamel Baha al-Din has what is probably Egypt’s most difficult job. As Minister of Education, he is charged with combatting Islamic activism in the schools, where one of the fiercest battles is now being played out between the Islamists and the government. Since the days when Hassan al-Banna, a teacher, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, some seventy years ago, Egypt’s twenty-five thousand schools—which have eight hundred and fifty thousand poorly paid teachers—have proved fertile ground for the spread of political Islam. In schools around the country—especially in Upper Egypt, a particular stronghold of the militant groups—the Islamists had basically seized control of the educational system, assaulting secular thought, altering school texts, and playing cassettes of radical sermons of popular sheikhs in class. And, as the battle lines have become increasingly drawn, they have most symbolically been expressed in a growing tussle over whether female students and teachers could attend classes veiled.

In 1993, Baha al-Din banned the niqab—a shawl-like garment that covers the face, hair, and neck—from the schools, but when, the following year, he banned the less extreme hijab he was, much to his astonishment, overruled by the Supreme Court. Emboldened, the Islamists have now forcefully challenged him on the niqab. Like so much else that is now happening in Egypt, the government’s campaign against the head scarves has only served to harden the Islamists’ resolve.

Just after the opening of the school year, there were demonstrations nearly every other day and, often, violent clashes, as bands of young girls dressed in niqabs stormed government schools. One afternoon in Imbaba, I watched a number of girls being rounded up—some as young as ten. They refused to enter a police van, because, they said, it was a symbol of the regime, but they were picked up and carried into it anyway, flailing their arms and singing verses from the Koran.

Baha al-Din had stunned Cairenes in an interview last year by saying that the Islamists had successfully infiltrated primary, preparatory, and secondary schools all over Egypt. When I visited him early one evening, in his office, I asked him to explain.

“I couldn’t believe how many fundamentalist teachers we had in the schools,” he said. “I’ve transferred more than a thousand teachers out of their jobs, and put them into administrative posts; then I went through the libraries, which were full of fundamentalist tracts, and had them all removed. And then, of course, there’s the matter of the niqab, and the hijab. And this matter is a matter of actual war.

“When I tried to ban them, there was an immense uproar. Everyone fought me ferociously—the media, the teachers, al-Azhar. The fundamentalists have forced entire schools to wear the hijab. I found schools in which little girls as young as six, seven, eight were being forced to wear it; schools where teachers were preventing students from singing the national anthem, or saluting the flag. In other words, there was to be no national identity—only an Islamic one. Music, theatre, anything relating to the arts was being proscribed. The fundamentalists disapprove of drama clubs, so, the night of a performance, they would surround a theatre, kneeling in prayer and blocking all the entrances so that no one could get in. One woman was forced to divorce her husband because he had sent their children to a particular school. They told her that her husband was heretical.

“It’s an immense problem,” Baha al-Din went on. “The leaders of this movement are very well educated, and they know exactly what they want. They want to seize power, and our educational system offers them a very convenient route.”

Baha al-Din refused to comment on the perceived rise of Saudi Arabia in evidence at al-Azhar—and in the Egyptian Islamist movement at large—but one of his key advisers had told me earlier that considerable amounts of Saudi money were coming in, and that they had increased substantially over the past year.

When I asked a Western diplomat later how the funding of Egypt’s Islamic underground worked, he replied, “It’s mostly legitimate, but it’s all managed behind the scenes: through banks, insurance companies, foundations, front organizations, and mosques.” What has changed over the last year or two, he said, was the increasing amount of money, in percentage terms, that was coming from Europe and the United States.

Egypt’s militant Islamic groups now have support offices in some thirty countries, one Western ambassador told me. Generally, he said, these supporters work under the cover of a religious front, from which they collect money, set up organizational cells, and purchase explosives and arms—not only for the Egyptian groups but also for the Palestinian organization Hamas. I learned later, from a ranking official of the Egyptian government, that its assessment was that in 1994 over fifteen million dollars had been collected in, or channelled through, the United States. According to the official, the bulk of it had gone to Hamas.

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the fifty-six-year-old spiritual mentor of Gama’a, arrived in the United States, quietly and without attracting attention, in July of 1990, via Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, on a much-disputed tourist visa—the sixth visa he had been granted by the United States. What is perhaps as interesting as how he entered this country is why he decided to come. I had learned in Cairo that his primary purpose was to set up a United States infrastructure, a funding mechanism, and an organizational base for Egypt’s militant Islamic groups.

One afternoon just before Christmas, after I returned to New York, I went to the Metropolitan Correction Center, in lower Manhattan, to meet with him, in what appeared to be a recreation room, in the prison’s maximum-security ward. I was accompanied by one of the Sheikh’s followers, who was acting as my interpreter and as a paralegal for the Sheikh, whose conspiracy trial would begin in Manhattan on January 9th. No sooner had we sat down, on two straight-backed chairs, than Sheikh Omar came in. He wore a blue two-piece prison uniform, brown bedroom slippers, and a pair of woolly white socks. His eyes were not covered by the heavy black glasses that he normally wears, nor was he wearing the crimson turban of al-Azhar. Instead, he had a simple white prayer cap on his head.

He greeted me cordially, and opened the conversation by telling me that his twenty-year-old son, Abdullah, had just begun his first year at al-Azhar University, where the Sheikh himself had received his Ph.D., in Islamic jurisprudence, some twenty-five years before.

I asked him how he explained the new militancy at al-Azhar.

“In my view, it isn’t militancy,” Sheikh Omar said. “It’s just a tepid whispering that has begun. You mentioned the U.N. population conference, and the Grand Sheikh’s opposition to it. But, in the final analysis, what did he do? We didn’t see the kind of opposition that we saw from the Pope, in Rome—his opposition was very forceful. I do admire that man. He opposed this conference, and the issue of abortion, in a most positive way, and he did whatever he could to prevent this conference’s taking place. Everyone in the world knew what the Catholic Church’s position was, so why didn’t the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar stand up and tell the world what Muslims think? No. Al-Azhar’s response to this conference was not nearly adequate enough for me.”

“But,” I persisted, “many Egyptians believe that the al-Azhar sheikhs sense that their interpretations of Islam are being superseded by those of more militant groups, and, as a consequence, they are increasingly adopting the ideas of these groups.”

“Good,” the Sheikh responded. “If what you say is true.” After a moment’s pause, he went on, “You know, if al-Azhar had not neglected its duty, had it not become only a mouthpiece of the government, had it implemented Islamic Sharia law, you would not see any Islamic groups, like Gama’a, working as they are now. They wouldn’t even exist, for it was only after al-Azhar forfeited its historical role that all these groups began popping up to fill the void. Every Islamic group working in Egypt now is trying to fill a vacuum created by al-Azhar.”

I asked him to give me an example, and he replied, “In the area of education, for one; but, most important, in the implementation of Sharia law. I can assure you, the moment that al-Azhar begins doing what it is supposed to do you will no longer see any of these Islamic activist groups.”

As the Sheikh continued talking, he appeared at ease, rocking back and forth in his chair, his long white beard resting on his chest. He apologized that he could not offer me tea or soda, explaining that he was not permitted to carry money in his prison uniform.

I asked Sheikh Omar if, in his view, the attack on Naguib Mahfouz was justified.

“I don’t know the circumstances, but it all seems a bit strange,” he said. “It could be just another government trick to anger the people. Naguib Mahfouz has been around for years, and if our youth wanted to attack him they would have done it long ago. The main question I have is, Why now? They’ve charged sixteen people. It’s unbelievable! They say sixteen people were needed, just to scratch a man on his neck with a knife. Now they will court-martial them all, and within a month they’ll be dead. And no one will know, not even their lawyers, what really happened to Naguib Mahfouz.”

“Are you absolutely certain that this attack was not carried out by Gama’a?”

I asked.

“This is what I think,” he replied. “Naguib Mahfouz is not a target for the Islamists. As I said before, we know where he sits, where he walks. When the pressure on the Islamic groups was not nearly as great as it is now, when they were more or less able to freely move about, they never attacked Mahfouz. So, why now? And what could they hope to accomplish by killing him, anyhow?”

“It has been reported that you issued a fatwa against Mahfouz, by declaring him an apostate,” I said.

“No, no, no,” he replied, and his voice began to rise. “This whole matter is so misunderstood. What I said—and this was when ‘The Satanic Verses’ was making headlines—was, if we had punished Naguib Mahfouz for what he wrote in ‘Children of Gebelaawi,’ then Salman Rushdie never would have dared to write that book. This was a reply, to a question asked by a journalist. It was a reply, an opinion. It was not a fatwa.”

“How should Mahfouz have been punished?” I asked.

“You’ve got to understand the rule of Sharia law,” Sheikh Omar replied. “Al-Azhar should have brought Mahfouz before a committee where he would have been judged. He would have had an opportunity to defend himself, and, if found guilty, he would have been given an opportunity to repent. But under Islamic law any Muslim who is found to be an apostate has no other option: he must repent.”

”And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he will be executed,” Sheikh Omar said.

He stopped for a moment, and then he went on, “You personally, and others in the West, may not like this; you may find it harsh. But this is our religion; it is the rule of God.”

For a few moments, neither of us said anything more.

Before I left Cairo, I had asked a foreign diplomat what he anticipated was going to happen in Egypt next, and he had replied, “Egypt is not Algeria, at least not yet. There it’s a civil war; here it’s guerrilla attacks. But should widespread violence and unrest break out, then the key question is, What will the Army’s reaction be, for it is Mubarak’s only real constituency. I suspect he will keep the troops in the barracks for as long as he can, for there are many who doubt whether the Army will fire on civilians to support an increasingly unpopular government.”

Last year, there had been at least one court-martial—and probably two—of junior officers charged with plotting to assassinate President Mubarak. (The officers were subsequently executed by firing squad.) It was the realization of the government’s worst nightmare.

So I now asked Sheikh Omar what the Islamists’ strength in the Army was.

He hesitated, and didn’t reply directly. Instead, choosing his words carefully, he said, “That is a very difficult question, which no one can answer right now. And, even if I knew, obviously I would not tell The New Yorker—which divisions, where, and how much—and allow the Egyptian government to finish them off. What I can say is that, in addition to the courts-martial, there have been at least three trials of civilians this year, in which some of the defendants were officers or cadets from the military academy.” (According to defense lawyers, there were thirteen.)

Sheikh Omar had been animated during our interview, but now he began to fidget in his chair. In an hour or so, he told me, he was meeting with former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who is heading his defense team.

“One more question,” he said.

I asked him what, in his view, was the most likely scenario for the Islamists to come to power in Egypt, if they do.

“Be specific,” the Sheikh said. “Give me your choices.”

I did. A growing number of Egyptians and foreign diplomats had come to believe that if parliamentary elections, which will take place in October, are free and fair, the Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, would probably win. I now said to the Sheikh that it seemed to me that the three most logical scenarios were: elections; a military coup; or mass demonstrations and chaos on the streets.

“Forget about elections,” he replied. “As long as this government is in power, they will never be free or fair. Every election in which Mubarak has stood, he has won by ninety-nine per cent. Has this ever happened to an American President? As far as a coup is concerned, the Egyptian Army is now under unprecedented surveillance and security. Military intelligence has set up a new arm—it’s called the Seventy-Fifth Group—and its sole purpose is to monitor junior officers and new recruits. And that monitoring tells me that there is something to be worried about. But, nevertheless, the moment they discover anyone who prays, who reads the Koran, who observes Islamic rituals, they are weeded out; thus, through attrition, they are trying to deplete the ranks.”

“So,” he went on, “we’ve eliminated two of the three choices, and the last one is the most viable for me: for people to rise up, and go to the streets. You’ve seen the disaffection all over Egypt—we control the bar association, yet when lawyers demonstrate they are beaten back with tear gas and clubs. We control the student unions at the universities, yet the representatives are being carted off to jail. And the students, like the lawyers, are elected representatives. Blue-collar workers have been striking more than ever before. Everyone, from the extreme right to the extreme left, has lost faith in this regime; on every level of society, people are in conflict with this regime.”

He stood up and walked me to the door, ringing a button for a guard to see me out. He seemed confident, even puckish, and I was struck by the realization that, for over a year, Sheikh Omar had been in jail. Yet even from a prison in the United States he was better informed on what was happening in Egypt than many Egyptians were.

Before I left Cairo, I had called on President Hosni Mubarak in the Presidential palace, in Heliopolis, some ten miles from the center of town, where he had set up his primary office. To walk through the palace’s high-ceilinged halls, resplendent in marble, alabaster, and gold, is to enter a vanished world of monarchs and colonial powers, seemingly cut off from the rest of Egypt.

The sixty-six-year-old Mubarak is well aware of the risks involved in leaving the palace grounds. As Vice-President, he had been sitting only a few seats away from Sadat on the afternoon of October 6, 1981, watching a military parade, when machine-gun fire began. In forty-five seconds, Sadat was dead, along with ten others. Mubarak, a cautious, self-effacing man, who was a former fighter pilot and later the Commander of the Egyptian Air Force, had seemed an unlikely choice when Sadat appointed him Vice-President, in 1975. The day after Sadat’s assassination, he was sworn in as only the third President in Egypt’s history. It was a job that he had never aspired to, and never really wanted, he told friends.

Yet he consolidated his power, retired potential rivals, and, by scrupulously maintaining the status quo, managed to stay ahead of the three-hundred-thousand-man Army, whose leaders are the arbiters of power in Egypt, and have been for more than forty years. But, according to his critics, he grew increasingly out of touch in recent years, surrounding himself with sycophants and old military friends, and issuing increasingly authoritarian decrees, in the same manner that doomed the Egyptian monarchy. His inability, or unwillingness, to come to grips with the monumental problems that Egypt faces has led to a widespread perception that the Arab world’s largest country is badly adrift.

All that I had heard about Mubarak led me to expect a disillusioned man. He doesn’t take pressure well, I was told, and tends to withdraw into himself. Only a few days earlier, he had met with President Clinton, who had stopped in Cairo en route to the signing of the peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. The meeting had not gone well, according to all accounts, and the Egyptian government had begun to sense that American foreign policy in the Middle East was no longer as inextricably tied to Cairo as it once had been.

There had also been a disaster in Upper Egypt a few days after Clinton left, in which some six hundred people died when blazing fuel from an Army depot was carried by flash floods through a small town. Two years earlier, when Cairo was hit by a devastating earthquake, the government had dithered while Islamist groups rushed in with relief. Mubarak was determined that that would not happen again. But the government stumbled, and every stumble was pounced upon.

Security at the Presidential palace was unprecedented when I arrived. The outer foyer bristled with electronic equipment and metal scans. After some time, I was escorted into the private office of the President. As Mubarak greeted me, and indicated that I should sit on a large gilded sofa to the left of his elegant armchair, his manner was confident, even ebullient. After an exchange of pleasantries, I asked Mubarak what concerned him most about the problems facing Egypt today.

“Our main concern is the economy,” he said in English, “and we’re working hard on economic reform. I suppose you’re asking that question because of the [Islamic] fanatics here. They’re nothing to worry about. We’re used to this in Egypt; it goes up and down. And, frankly, I must tell you, this whole

problem of terrorism throughout the Middle East is a by-product of our own, illegal Muslim Brotherhood—whether it’s al-Jihad, Hizbollah, in Lebanon,

or Hamas. They all sprang from underneath the umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood. They say they have renounced violence, but, in reality, they are responsible for all this violence, and the time will come when they will be uncovered.” He went on to imply that a severe crackdown on the Brotherhood was imminent.

As we continued talking, Mubarak expressed both irritation and concern over what he considered to be the passive attitude of Western governments, particularly those of Britain, Germany, and the United States, in allowing Egypt’s militant Islamic groups to operate freely from their soil. But he voiced his greatest concern—rage, really—over the veterans of the United States-sponsored Afghanistan war.

“Nearly all those who are committing these crimes, these acts of violence, were trained on the battlefield of Afghanistan,” he said. “They are now re-infiltrating, all over the Middle East. They have training, money, and arms, and they’re now looking for a new cause. The problem of violence in this country began when the first man returned from Afghanistan. Before that, there was a dialogue between the Gama’a al-Islamiya and the government.”

When I asked him if he could give me details, he hesitated, and then said that he would prefer not to.

A number of Western diplomats had told me earlier that they were troubled by mounting evidence not only of coöperation between Egypt’s militant Islamic groups and Hamas but of recurring reports that the Egypt-Gaza frontier had, for all intents and purposes, become a cordon sanitaire for the smuggling of weapons and men, and the transfer of funds, in and out of Yasir Arafat’s beleaguered Palestinian autonomous zone. I asked Mubarak how concerned he was about the breakdown of law and order in the Gaza Strip.

“I’m concerned, of course,” he replied. “The last thing we want is to have the ghost of Afghanistan haunting us again—and, this time, right across our border, in the Gaza Strip. And, I must be absolutely frank; the failure of the Palestinian Governing Authority, and of Yasir Arafat, not only will set us back by fifty years but there will be terrorism everywhere! My own fear is that if there is a delay in the process, if Arafat fails, all these extremists, all these terrorists trained in Afghanistan, will rush to Gaza and join Hamas. It will be a disaster, and create one hell of a problem for us.”

From time to time during my interview with Mubarak, which lasted two hours, he seemed bewildered, then annoyed, by some of my questions—concerning, for example, the increasingly iconoclastic behavior of the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, and the incommunicado detention of prisoners in the Scorpion—and broke into Arabic with his Minister of Information, who was sitting next to me. I wondered if it was possible, as I had been told by some of his aides, that Mubarak genuinely didn’t know many of the things that were happening in Egypt, though they were happening in his name.

One of his top advisers had told me earlier that, in his view, the main irony surrounding the Middle East’s militant Islamic groups was that all of them had been spawned by the leaders of the region themselves: Gama’a was a creation of Egyptian intelligence to counter the left; Hamas was a creation of Israeli intelligence to undermine the P.L.O.; and the Arab-Afghanis, as the veterans of the Afghan war are called, were created by the C.I.A. and Saudi intelligence. And, as the contacts among these various Islamic groups increased, there was a growing resentment toward the United States; for it was Washington, in Egypt’s view, that was most responsible for creating what the adviser called a hydra-headed monster on the battlefields of Afghanistan, yet had then refused to assist threatened Arab governments in putting the genie back into the bottle again.

So I asked Mubarak how much responsibility, in his view, the government of the United States—and that of Egypt—bore for the creation of today’s militant Islamic groups.

He remained quiet for a moment, and then he replied, without answering, “Yes, Sadat was responsible for the formation of Gama’a. He was badly advised, and he made a big mistake. But, I must tell you, even though this group calls itself Gama’a al-Islamiya, it is not Islamic. None of them are: they have nothing to do with Islam. They want to seize power, pure and simple, and who are they? Belly dancers and drummers from the slums. The man who tried to assassinate Naguib Mahfouz knows nothing about the Koran; he knows nothing about praying. He was simply paid to do what he did. It’s all a matter of money.”

“Who is paying them?” I asked.

“The financing is coming from different places,” he replied. “These people have their contacts in Paris, Germany, Switzerland. They move about, from here to there. And, thanks to modern technology, they make bank transfers by wire, and run the movement by conference calls and fax.”

“What about the United States?” I asked.

It was clear that he was angry and bitter, even before he spoke.

“Your government is in contact with these terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood,” he replied. “This has all been done very secretly, without our knowledge at first. You think you can correct the mistakes that you made in Iran, where you had no contact with the Ayatollah Khomeini and his fanatic groups before they seized power. But, I can assure you, these groups will never take over this country; and they will never be on good terms with the United States. These contacts will never be of any benefit to you, or to any other country which supports these groups.”

A year or so ago, Mubarak had told a group of Egyptian editors that Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman was a paid agent of the C.I.A., and I now asked him if he still held that belief.

He replied that he did, and when I asked him why, he responded that he had read it in the New York Times. (Not surprisingly, the Sheikh denied the allegation and told me that when Mubarak made the original charge “even Warren Christopher denied that it was true.”)

When Mubarak had first assumed office, he did more to bring about democracy than most Egyptians thought he would. But then, having doled out certain freedoms, he began reining them in. Now his government, according to international human-rights organizations, has one of the most abusive records anywhere. So I asked the President if it wasn’t a mistake to treat the Islamic movement as strictly a law-and-order problem, and, in the process, come under criticism around the world.

“I do not have one political prisoner in my jails,” he said. “Everyone there is a criminal, who has engaged in criminal acts. Not once have I ever arrested anyone for their political beliefs. Yet the moment anyone is picked up, somebody immediately sends a fax to Amnesty International. And most of these human-rights organizations abroad get their information from a so-called human-rights organization here, which is controlled by members of the former”—Nasser—“regime, and is stacked with people from the Muslim Brotherhood.”

He had begun shouting, and paused to take a deep breath.

I used the occasion to ask him when the autopsy report on Abdel Harith Madani’s death—which had been requested by President Clinton’s aides—would be made public.

He leaned across a table toward me, and his face hardened.

“Why is there such a big fuss about Abdel Harith Madani?” he asked, and his voice began to rise. “What about the human rights of the women and children that these people kill? Madani was a criminal! And those who say they’re looking out for human rights are only looking out for criminals’ rights. They never ask about the innocent people who have been killed in the streets. There’s no balance at all! What about Naguib Mahfouz? What about his rights? What about the woman who lost all her sons—two in the wars, and one at the hands of these terrorists. What about her? She cannot have any more children. Till this day, when I see her on TV, I cannot look at her face.”

The President leaned back in his chair, looking suddenly beleaguered and tired. Then he said, seemingly to no one in particular, “We are in a mess.”

Naguib Mahfouz has now left the Police Hospital and has resumed his normal life, moving from café to café. The only difference is that, much to his irritation, he is now surrounded by a phalanx of five heavily armed security men.

A few weeks after the attack on him, “Children of Gebelaawi” was serialized in the Egyptian press. It was done without his permission and, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, without the permission of al-Azhar. Mahfouz was furious, and told friends that the re-publication of the banned novel was tantamount to “a second assassination attempt.”

The controversy began when the Minister of Information—with television cameras in tow—appeared at Mahfouz’s bedside, and declared that the government did not support a ban on any of his works. No one was certain—including Mahfouz himself—whether the Minister’s statement ended the prohibition or not.

The evening that I visited Mahfouz in his hospital room, when I asked him what he thought, he merely shook his head and said, “I asked that the publication come at a later time, if the book was to be re-published at all.”

“Who do you hold responsible for the attack on you?” I asked.

He answered without hesitation, “The system, not the young man. The young man who attacked me didn’t know anything about ‘Children of Gebelaawi.’ He had never read the book.”

I asked Mahfouz what troubled him most about the situation in Egypt now.

“All the young men, like the one who attacked me,” he replied. “We have alienated an entire generation—our most precious commodity, our youth.”

“You’ve told your friends that young people today don’t have the same chances that your generation did,” I said.

Mahfouz smiled sadly, and nodded his head.

“Can you explain that?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment, and then he turned toward me and said, “We sat in the coffeehouses, late into the night, and discussed the world. We didn’t have to worry about what life would bring us the following day. Our economic situation was far better, and we had more democratic rights. We could choose any political party, and we could choose our government. Some of us even had the hope to be in that government. We had the hope to rule, and to have a chance.” He paused for a moment, and then he said, “But the young men of today don’t have our hopes, or our opportunities. They also don’t have our dreams.”