Haha, torture more or less started and roll-balled into the
radicalizing of the Islamist movement. It begins with this man
called Sayed Qutb. He was a functionary of Egypt's Ministry of
Education, sent to US while on a scholarship to study the
educational system. As he travelled around, he became increasingly
disenchanted with America. The very things that, on the surface,
made US look prosperous and happy, Qutb saw as signs of an inner
corruption and decay. He perceived crassness, materialism and
selfish individualism among other stuffs of those lines.
So he travelled back to Egypt and was determined to control those
forces in his own country. His vision was to have all the modern
benefits of Western science and technology, but a more political
Islam to provide a better moral framework. Then Qutb realized that
the individualist culture was already spreading in Egypt, trapping
the masses. "What was needed, he believed, was an élite, a vanguard
who could see through these illusions of freedom, just as he had in
America, and who would then lead the masses to realize the higher
truth.
On his return, Qutb became politically active in Egypt. He joined a
group called the Muslim Brotherhood, who wanted Islam to play a
major role in governing Egyptian society. And in 1952, the
Brotherhood supported the revolution led by General Nasser that
overthrew the last remnants of British rule. But Nasser very
quickly made it clear that the new Egypt was going to be a secular
society that emulated Western morals. He quickly forged an alliance
with America. And the CIA came to Egypt to organize
security agencies for the new régime. Faced with this, the Muslim
Brotherhood began to organize against Nasser, and in 1954 Qutb and
other leading members of the Brotherhood were arrested by the
security services. What then happened to Qutb was going to have
consequences for the whole world.
In the 1970s, a film was made, that showed what happened in
Nasser's main prison in the '50s and '60s. It was based on the
testimony of survivors. Torturers who had been trained by the CIA
unleashed an orgy of violence against Muslim Brotherhood members
accused of plotting to overthrow Nasser. At one point, Qutb was
covered with animal fat and locked in a cell with dogs trained to
attack humans. Inside the cell, he had a heart attack.
Qutb survived, but the torture had a powerful radicalizing effect
on his ideas. Up to this point, he had believed that the Western
secular ideas simply created the selfishness and the isolation he
had seen in the United States. But the torture, he
believed, showed that this culture also unleashed the most brutal
and barbarous aspects of human beings. Qutb began to have an
apocalyptic vision of a disease that was spreading from the West
throughout the world. He called it jahilliyah, state of barbarous
ignorance. What made it so terrifying and insidious was that people
didn't realize that they were infected. They believed that they
were free, and that their politicians were taking them forward to a
new world. But in fact, they were regressing to a barbarous
age."
- small excerpt from The Power of Nightmares. Aired on the BBC
channel.
So those ideas influenced one events after another, and met up with
Ayman Zawahiri (radicalized even more after being tortured in the
likes of Qutb - ignorant muslims can be killed), who later was the
mentor of Mr.Bean Laden. After continous failed bloody uprisings in
Egypt and among other Muslim masses themselves, they turned to
America as an act of desperation.
