NP - Nowhere Man

[David Morris]

In case you didn't read Sunday's NYT magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07WWLN.html
October 7, 2001
Nowhere Man
By FOUAD AJAMI

[...]
There had come to Egypt great ruptures in the years when the younger Atta 
came into his own. A drab, austere society had suddenly been plunged into a 
more competitive, glamorized world in the 1970's and 1980's. The old pieties 
of Egypt were at war with new temptations. There must have been great 
yearning and repression in Mohamed Atta's life; it is the torment of Atta's 
generation. They were placed perilously close to modernity, but they could 
not partake of it.

The place affected an unaccustomed hipness -- big new hotels, the cultural 
clutter of Europe and America, the steady traffic of foreign tourists 
throwing in the air intimations of more emancipated ways in less 
constricted, repressed lands. But the sons and daughters were to be chaste, 
and the old prohibitions were to be asserted with increasing stridency.

An easy secularism had once been the way of Egypt, and a measure of banter 
between men and women. Never as tranquil as its legend, but a gentle and 
soft country all the same, Egypt knew a cultural wholeness and prided itself 
on a fairly vibrant cultural life. This had given way by the time young 
Atta, born in 1968, made his way to the university.

On the crowded campuses where Atta and his peers received an education -- an 
education that put off the moment of reckoning with a country that had 
little if any room for them, little if any hope -- there emerged an anxious, 
belligerent piety. Growing numbers of young women took to conservative 
Islamic dress -- at times the veil, more often the head cover. While the 
secularists sneered, it became a powerful trend, a fashion in its own right. 
It was a way of marking a zone of privacy, a declaration of moral limits. 
Young men picked up the faith as well, growing their beards long and finding 
their way into Islamist political movements and religious cells. A cultural 
war erupted in the land of Egypt. A stranger who knew the ways of this land 
could see the stresses of the place growing more acute by the day.


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