A World Restored: Religion, Counterrevolution, and the Search for Order in the Middle East

On 16 September 1971, Henry Kissinger welcomed Ali Hamdi al-Gamal, managing editor of the semi-official Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, into his office. Al-Gamal had come to discuss U.S.-Egyptian relations, which had been improving recently. Kissinger mentioned in passing that he had never been to Egypt, to which Al-Gamal responded that he would be “most welcome.” Kissinger smiled, replying that he could not “even go to Harvard without causing a riot.” Then he asked how things were in Egypt.1 Relations between Cairo and Washington had hit their low point in 1967, but a shared fear of domestic unrest was bringing the two governments back together. Each government saw a rising tide of global dissent—student protest and post-1967 Palestinian nationalism in particular—as a serious threat to internal and international stability. Over time, both regimes came to recognize their mutual interest in containing these threats. Although they provided a short-term tonic for domestic upheavals, these parallel reactions also threatened to force the two nations back into conflict with one another. As leaders in Washington and Cairo moved to undercut radical unrest and restore order and national unity, they gathered allies from previously marginalized groups and forged makeshift coalitions; in doing so, they reshaped the dynamics of social power within their own countries. The Egyptian and American regimes sought to use religious groups—evangelicals in the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—as instruments of state power. By laying claim to structures of religious authority, political elites hoped to increase their control over the social body and reconstruct the apparatuses of cultural hegemony within their respective societies. Although these efforts to reconstitute social authority through confessional politics reinforced the power of the state, they conferred a new degree of legitimacy on religious groups in each nation. Although some scholars have argued that the tensions between Western ideals and those of the Islamic world reflect an age-old “clash of civilizations,” an international perspective based on the documentary record suggests that many of these seemingly cultural conflicts can be traced back to recent political struggles.2