For the rest of the war, Cairo’s ambiguous status, undefined sovereignty and geographical position made it a hotbed of espionage, subversion, treachery, double-dealing and international chicanery that was to become legendary. The atmosphere of the city in those days was best caught by the immortal Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman film “Cairo.” People who pretended to be insiders insisted that the “Rick’s Bar” featured in the film was modeled on the King Tut Club. Real insiders knew that “Rick’s Bar” was actually inspired by The American Club a few doors down from the King Tut.
The King Tut itself had been founded by the pursers and stewards from a P&O liner that had been trapped in Egypt when everything started to fall apart. It had quickly gained a reputation for excellent food and wine, to the point where the German, Italian, French, various British and American intelligence organizations had an informal agreement to keep the King Tut as neutral ground. For five years, secret agents who had been industriously trying to kill each other a few minutes earlier, would dine on adjacent tables in uninterrupted, if strained, peace.
Post-war, when Egypt became a truly independent country, the King Tut management had sold out to local interests but the reputation and standards of the club had been maintained. It had benefited from the upsurge in tourism that had started when air travel had become commonplace with the huge American Cloudliners. Now, it was crowded.
Looking out over the floor, Achmed Faowzi was a happy man. Still early in the evening, the clientele had settled down for the long haul. Another prosperous night meant happy owners and a substantial commission for Faowzi. He earned it and he knew it. For how long, that was another matter. There was an edgy, uncertain air in Egypt now, as if the country was living on the edge of a volcano. For that was exactly what it was doing. The green fundamentalist stain on the map that had started in Afghanistan and Iran had spread across the map of the Middle East and had now reached the Egyptian border.
There was a young couple entering the club and Faowzi sized them up quickly. Both were Arabic but the man was in a western-style tuxedo and the woman in a fashionable evening gown. Probably a couple of the young business owners who were turning Egypt slowly into a modern country. As Faowzi watched, the man fussed around the woman a little too much. A wife or mistress? Faowzi watched, interested by them. Then he saw the woman’s waist was slightly thickened, she was pregnant. That explained it. A young man and his pregnant wife, their first baby probably, and he was overdoing his care for her. Understandable, and touching. Faowzi had five children and he’d got over such things long before.
As the couple reached the body of the club the wife leaned over and whispered in her husband’s ear. He smiled at her and she set off for the lady’s rest-room on the other side of the floor, joining the group of women who were gossiping by the door. Her husband joined a crowd of men at the bar, almost exactly opposite her. Then, Faowzi saw the wife wave at her husband.
Faowzi couldn’t see properly. The interlocking blasts from the two human bombs at opposing sides of the room devastated the King Tut Club, and also had done something to his eyes so that all he could see was blurs. Then he realized it wasn’t just his eyes, the smoke and dust in the room was a fog nobody could penetrate. There was nothing left of the women waiting by the rest room or the men at the bar, just smears and stains. The girls in the floor show had caught the worst of the blast wave, the rags of their gaudy costumes and sequined outfits were mixed up with ghastly lumps of unrecognizable flesh. Perhaps they were the lucky ones. Many of the guests were still alive but had been hideously mutilated by blast and debris. Arms, legs blown off, bodies ripped open, faces mutilated beyond recognition.
Screams, whimpers and weeping started to penetrate through the wool that seemed to surround Faowzi’s ears. Even as he watched, a blurred unrecognizable figure on the debris-ridden ground moved, its intestines snared on the ground underneath it. The figure collapsed again, and was still.
Faowzi felt somebody take his arms and lead him out of the catastrophe. A rescue worker, an ambulance man. As he looked back on the devastation he realized the King Tut Club wasn’t neutral ground any more.
Sheikh Ijlin Mosque, Cairo, Egypt
“Allah drowned Pharaoh and those who were with him. Allah drowns the Pharaohs of every generation. Allah will drown the little Pharaoh, the dwarf, the Pharaoh of all times, of our time, in our land. Oh, people of Egypt, the Egypt of Islam and Arabism, the Egypt of civilization and history. I am amazed at some of the clerics of the nation who cooperate with their treachery. I am amazed that they are trying to keep the nation away from Jihad and they issue Fatwas according to which we should not rise to defend Islam, against calf worshippers or fire worshippers. Aren’t they Muslims? Why Egypt, Oh Muslims? Wake up. You’re being attacked because of your religion. Islam is being attacked for a number of reasons: there are economic and security reasons. There are reasons stemming from personal vendetta, there are historical reasons, and there are religious reasons. Hence we have no choice but to start a war. The only way to remove the shame is to topple down the Egyptian regime. Just as Egypt is sacred so is also the lands of Islam, because the Prophet said so. All the lands of Islam will be united in the Caliphate and the Middle East will become a cemetery for oppressors.”
The crowd had poured out onto the streets and rampaged towards the business center of the city. That was where the agents of the Great Satan, the businessmen and idolators who polluted the pure land with their filth, plotted their evil schemes. Only the night before, two heroic martyrs had struck at them where they fornicated and destroyed them in the midst of their debauchery. As they surged down the streets towards the offices and banks of the business district, they found their first victims. A cab containing a young man in a western business suit was stopped, turned over and set on fire though not before the passenger had been dragged out and kicked, beaten and slashed until all that was left was a mass of unrecognizable rags. Not far away, in a doorway a young woman lay screaming and holding her face. Probably a secretary sent out on an errand, she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many of the rioters carried bottles of acid to pour over the faces of women who were not decently shrouded in their burkas.
By the time the police riot squad had arrived on the scene, the crowds had merged into a single, raging mob, streaming down the roads in an apparently unstoppable fury. The riot squad had been ordered to contain the surging mass within the sections of the city it had come from, but that was easier said than done. In truth, the police came from backgrounds not so very different from the rioters and they had heard the sermons also. They went through the motions of containing the crowd, but their hearts weren’t in it and they fell back before the mob, slowly handing control of the streets over to them. As they gave ground, the howling mob pursued them, catching the sluggish and turning them into the same unrecognizable scraps as their other victims.
There was another alternative to the police riot squad. As the Government lost control of the streets, it was that other riot control force that took over, one that was run by the Egyptian Nationalist Party, not by the local authorities. Intended primarily as an anti-coup force, the Gendarmerie were far better armed and equipped than the local police. They arrived in armored busses and their first order of business was to stop the slow retreat of the police.
The first indication the original riot squad had that the rules of the battle had changed was the sound of pistol shots immediately to their rear. Those of their number that had tried to fade away from their duty were lying in the roadway, shot in the back of the head. Now, it was certain death to go back, and certain death not to stop the advance of the cacophonous swarm it front. With the Gendarmes behind, forcing the police to hold ground, the advance of riot stopped.