Читать книгу Inside the Muslim Brotherhood - The Truth About The World's Most Powerful Political Movement - Youssef Nada - Страница 16

‘He who binds to himself joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sun rise.’

William Blake, 1792

Gunfire changed history and the life of Youssef Nada. Eight bullets from a pistol on 26 October 1954 did not end the life and rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser but it conveniently provided him with the ammunition to turn on his rivals for popularity.

Nasser was delivering a speech in Alexandria’s Manshieh Square, marking the agreement for a British evacuation from Egypt, when the shots were fired. He was not hit but there were screams and shouts, a cacophony of fearful wailing, which drowned out anyone trying to make statements.

Nasser stole the moment and appealed for calm: ‘If Abdel Nasser dies then every one of you is Abdel Nasser. Each of you is Gamal Abdel Nasser. Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation.’

He brought his hands up by his head, triumphantly waving them backwards and forward in an empowering Baladi movement. It was a vote winner, if votes had mattered: a huge moment in Egyptian history.

But it was a set-up. Hassan al-Tuhami, a CIA contact for many years and Chief of Intelligence during Nasser’s rule, revealed (when he was Egypt’s Deputy Prime Minister under Anwar Sadat), that it ‘was all an act’. This was something that had been argued from the moment of the ‘assassination attempt’ by Mohamed Abdel Latif which began the nation’s biggest political repression and reign of terror – officially endorsed terror. Latif was branded a Brotherhood assassin, and when he returned to Cairo, the confident and ebullient Nasser had his passport for repression.

Youssef Nada isn’t convinced by the Brotherhood’s denials over the violence of the late 1940s, but he has no doubts the Alexandria incident was a pre-meditated ploy to compromise the Brotherhood. ‘Nasser had promised the Brothers much, but when he came to power he started to attack and exclude them,’ said Nada. ‘He said he could press a button and all Egyptians did what he wanted – except the Brotherhood. He told his people: “I have to kick the Brotherhood out of my way.”

‘He played on the desperate incidents of the past, and from them developed the plan to crush the Brotherhood by accusing them of trying to kill him. When there was any trouble the Brothers were accused of using violence to pursue their politics.

‘Yes, there was violence in the 1940s and I don’t fully accept the Brothers’ explanation for the death of Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmy El Nokrashy Pasha and of a judge. The Brothers said that those who did it were not Brothers and what they did was against Islam. Even Hassan Al-Banna said they were not Brothers as he did not know that they were Brothers. He was an honest man and none of the Brothers informed him that they were members. It is not expected from a leader of such huge organisation to know all the members but he could not believe that any member would defy his teaching. But indeed they had been members. The prime minster received instruction from the British Occupation to disband the Brothers and this maverick group from the Brotherhood killed him. The judge handed out harsh sentences to some Brothers for crimes they didn’t commit; the judgment was not correct and politically dictated, but that doesn’t mean you go and kill him.

‘There were other stories: one that the Brothers arranged groups against the British during the British occupation. Another that in Palestine in 1947 – when the Zionists movement started to prepare for the declaration of Israel – that groups from a lot of Muslim countries went to assist the Palestinians to defend their homes. It is true the Brotherhood sent groups to help the Palestinians. But that is it – there are no other stories. If you go to their history which is written by their opponents you will find violence and more violence. It was all contrived.

‘There has not been violence by the Muslim Brotherhood since that time in 1948. Rulers have said that agitators like the people of Osama Bin Laden had come out of the Brothers, that they were in the Brotherhood and they left to form other factions. It was individuals who did it; not all the group did it; not all the society did it; just one or two among hundreds of thousands. You cannot condemn the countless others for the mistakes of a few.

‘The Brotherhood was coming of age. It started to appear in the universities and among more educated people. It had grown into this society, like a person growing: during the time of adolescence, the teenaged years, you can expect mistakes from the child. The Brotherhood was strong, and to get them off his back Nasser had to offer a reason. He had to show them as violent, as killers, as his potential assassins. Hassan al-Tuhami orchestrated it for him. After Nasser died, Hassan al-Tuhami admitted the plot to “kill Nasser in Alexandria” was fabricated by him with Nasser’s consent.

‘But it was in too many people’s interests to accept this explanation. They wanted the Brotherhood to stay branded as terrorists – even when the testimony came from the man who had arranged it, and facts supported him. It was good propaganda – there were about 100,000 people there. The police said that they had caught one of the Brothers among the crowd and he was the shooter. In prison they hanged him by his legs with his head down and whipped him to get him to confess and name those who had supposedly told him what to do. ‘But the pistol didn’t have the range to hit never mind kill Nasser. They said the gunman was well trained and that was why he was chosen. To use a pistol with a range of about 400 metres doesn’t sound like an expert marksman. They can torture people to say anything.’

Nasser began to imprison the Brothers wherever they could be found, and Youssef Nada was one of them – one of many thousands. Nasser showed no humanity with the Brotherhood or any other perceived foes or political threats. The 26 October events were branded a ‘crime against the revolution’. Mamdouh Muhammad Salem, a future Egyptian prime minister, was in charge of security in Alexandria and enthusiastically pursued his orders.

A ‘People’s Court’ was established and the guillotine-minded Gamal Salem, one of Nasser’s ‘Iron Guard’, appointed as president. Anwar El Sadat and Husain El Shafie were the other two judges. Gamal Salem had eighteenth-century revolutionary zeal, saying: ‘A head like Farouk’s only interests me when it has fallen.’

King Farouk retained his head, yet several Brotherhood members were given the death sentence. Seven of them were hanged. The group’s Supreme Guide, Hassan Hodeibi and the thinker Sayyid Qutub, had their lives spared. Countless others were charged with a vast range of conspiracies. Many of them were sent to military prisons or concentration camps without being charged or convicted of any crime and remained there until three years after Nasser’s death. (Four of them became Supreme Guides of the Muslim Brotherhood one after the other starting from 1972. The last was Mahdi Akef who in 2011 insisted that the organisation must elect someone from the younger generation. Mohammed Badie was chosen.)

It took them time to capture Youssef Nada. He was at home in Alexandria when a friend who had been arrested called and asked him to tell the boy’s parents of his plight. He hung up the phone. ‘I thought how stupid he was to call me from the police station for now they will know me and where I am,’ said Nada. ‘After about half-an-hour the doorbell rang. I was in the hall near the entrance. One of the servants went to open the door and I stopped her. My mother went instead. There was an officer with three guards. My mother said I wasn’t there.

‘The officer knew my mother and out of respect called her “Aunt”. He said: “Aunt, we need Youssef to sign a declaration that he will not contact the Brotherhood anymore. Where can I find him, with his father?” My mother just answered “Maybe”.

‘They went but left six guards at the house. I had to go. I went up over the roof to our neighbour’s building and I escaped. When my father and brother Sobhi returned at 10pm they were arrested and taken away. My mother was distraught but still she was able to deal with the situation. She called one of her cousins, a high ranking police officer. She asked about the arrests of my father and brother and he told her: “If Youssef surrenders, we will release them.”

‘It was a dreadful thing for my mother, a horror of a choice: give up a son for a husband and son? What could she do? When I called her at 2am she told me all that had happened. I said I would give myself up – but if I surrendered they might keep all three of us. She asked her relative and he assured her that wouldn’t happen.

‘There was no choice for me. I couldn’t leave my father to be arrested in my name. I asked my mother to arrange my surrender. I knew that if I was picked up on the streets I’d be tortured. Her cousin said he would meet me and personally take me to the prison. When that was done they released my father and brother immediately and I was not tortured when they arrested me. But they didn’t tell my family where I was going.

‘Then, there was to be another bounty from my mother the miracle worker! The guard who was handcuffed to me contacted my father. When the train stopped at Seedi Gaber station I found my father looking in every window of the train. My mother had once given the guard food and been kind to him when he was on duty near our home; he remembered that and phoned my father to say I was being taken to military prison.’

Nada entered the jail with an inflamed appendix. Again his mother and her relatives used every influence and managed to get him moved to the prison clinic – a series of 13 cells on each side of a corridor. ‘It was meagre,’ Nada recalled. ‘There was an office for a doctor and a nurse, a bathroom and a toilet. I had been crushed in a cell with others at the prison but when they locked the door on me in the clinic I was alone. I started to pray and recite what I remembered from the Koran. There was nothing I could do but wait for another miracle.

‘They gave me nothing to eat but in the morning they opened the cell for me to go to the toilet; the guards took me. One by one the cell doors were opened for prisoners to go with the guards. I said to one man: “You have Koran?”

‘“Yes.”

‘“Can you give me some pages from it? I don’t have anything to read.”

‘“I cannot tear the Koran.”

‘You cannot believe what I felt when he said that to me. The stupidity that some pages cannot be taken from the Koran to be read. I was sick and weak and I fell to the floor. They bundled me back to my cell. The next time the door opened they threw food ate me and slammed the door.

‘When I went to the toilet in the evening I discovered a prisoner they said had tried to kill Nasser. He was cut, his arms were dangling down, one hand broken, one arm paralysed. He was accused of being the head of the Brotherhood’s “secret apparatus” and was called Youssef Talat. I said: “God help you brother Youssef.”

‘He looked at me: “I am not Youssef, I am Salah Shadi.”

‘I knew him as a high-ranking police officer and close personal friend to Nasser. He was one of the Muslim Brothers. He had instructed the Brothers everywhere on 23 July, the day of the coup, to go and protect the banks and the embassies and the main buildings and the courts. That was when I went to defend the British Consulate. The instructions came from Salah Shadi. Despite his connections to Nasser, when Nasser went after the Brothers he was imprisoned and tortured and spent 20 years moving from prison to prison until Nasser died and Sadat released him 1972. I remind you that Sadat was one of the three judges who sentenced seven of the brother to death and they were executed. Although Salah Shadi was also sentenced by the same judges to death but they were kind!!! And converted the sentence to life imprisonment.

‘From the beginning, Nasser promised the Brothers that he would completely change the law and the constitution and make a good and moral society. But he went to war with the Brothers and Salah Shadi suffered. Nasser showed him no mercy. He was tortured; they did despicable things to him. He was bent over at 90 degrees and they filled him with air, blown up with pumps. It ruined his spine and he could never stand straight; he remained in prison for twenty years until Sadat released him. Sadat was one of three judges who sentenced him to death and then reduced it to life time imprisonment.’

Nada returned to his cell in a miserable condition. As well as the mental turmoil over what he’d just seen, there was the constant pain of his grumbling appendix. By proxy, the goodness of his mother, Nemat Abu Saud, helped again. She was the glue which kept all strands of the family connected, especially during the ongoing upheaval in society.

She counselled the dying, attended the ill and those relatives who were simply confused and alone. One distant relation was the brutal Anwar Ahmed who had a justifiably cruel reputation in the Nasser regime as the head of the military police. Nemat didn’t care about that when it came to her son’s well being – and Anwar Ahmed was a relative.

Nemat told him that her son needed urgent surgery and he ordered treatment. Youssef Nada only discovered his mother’s intervention when his cell door swung open and a nurse came in and questioned him about his illness and the whereabouts of his family. ‘This quiz went on like a game of ping pong and the corruption charade began,’ Nada recalled.

Dr Mohamed Shafik Safwat visited his prospective patient but did nothing. A week went on and after complaining that he was still in pain, the doctor visited Nada again. His ‘prescription’ was for the crippled-up young man to carry a 50kg weight and run in the sun for two hours – every day.

An hour later the nurse appeared again with a message: if Nada’s family could be contacted and ‘an arrangement made’ then treatment would be forthcoming. The nurse wanted something in writing but Youssef Nada was wise to that, knowing such evidence could result in years in jail. Still, the deal was done. At 2am he heard his name over a loudspeaker: ‘Youssef! Moustafa! Nada!’ He banged an answer on his cell door. When it opened a smiling Dr Mohamed Shafik Safwat, the nurse, and a supervising prison officer were there.

The acting began with the doctor’s beside manner: ‘Why is your face pale. What is wrong with you? Are you sick?’ The doctor went through a cursory examination and announced that his new patient should be swiftly treated and he was soon at the military hospital outside the prison in Cairo.

‘When I opened my eyes I found four other Brothers in beds next me also having had treatment,’ said Nada. ‘It was a new atmosphere with different levels of guards. It was twenty-four hours after my surgery and I was weak and couldn’t speak when the military commander Anwar Ahmed appeared with an entourage. He told Dr Safwat: “See how many days he will be here, because after that we are going to send him back.” He left. The doctor was used to taking bribes to treat prisoners.

‘He had his own protector – his brother Ali Shafik Safwat was the manager of the office of Major Abdel Hakim Amer who was an important figure in the coup d’état and became Egypt’s Chief of Staff and Minister of Defence. It was a chain of corrupted people. [Major Abdel Hakim Amer was poisoned by Nasser and Sadat after his failure in the Six Day War.] Anwar Ahmed came to satisfy himself that I had been operated on – and, more importantly, that his family obligation to my mother was completed.’

Nada stayed in the hospital for three months. Each month he had to pay the doctor 50 Egyptian pounds which at the time was the salary of Deputy Government Minister. Every patient had to pay the same. It was a goldmine.

‘There were riches for me too,’ said Nada. ‘I met the man who helped shape my personality. After my surgery I was exhausted and even when I woke I couldn’t move; I was still under the anaesthetic. I opened my eyes to find a lady, a stranger, sitting by a bed near mine where another patient was sleeping. She said to me words in Arabic which mean: “Thank God that you are good. What is your name?” I told her who I was and that I was from Alexandria and a student at the university. She asked which faculty and I told her agriculture and she exclaimed: “You know Shafiq Alkeshen?”

‘“That was the Dean of my college.

‘“I’m his wife. This is my brother in the other bed. Give me the telephone number of your family? My brother is Haroon Almujadidi”

‘She was Tahra Almujadidi. Her name reflected her soul and mind: Tahra in Arabic means virtue and moral excellence and she was all of that. The situation was very political. The Dean of the Faculty had been chosen by Nasser to be the Deputy Head of Parliament which was headed by Anwar Sadat. He wanted Dr Shafiq Alkeshen to be a power buffer against Sadat. He played them as favourites against each other. Because of his political position, his wife was able to send her brother, who was a Muslim Brotherhood member, to the hospital to remove his gall bladder.

‘She had a very good heart. Her younger brother, Haroon Almujadidi, was in a worse condition than me and couldn’t speak but in time we became friends. He was about fifteen years older than me and he treated me as his son and I started to learn from him. Haroon and Tahra were the children of Sadik Almujadidi who was the Afghani Ambassador in Egypt during the time of the King Farouk. He was very friendly with the palace and held high religious authority in the Muslim world.

‘He was a close friend of Sheik Almaraghi who held the title of Sheik Al Azha as the leader of Al Azhar, which is the oldest Sunni theology, established more than 1,000 years ago. Haroon was Chargé d’Affaires, a senior ambassador at the Afghan Embassy, and was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

‘While King Farouk was still in power he was one of the group which kept secret contact between the Brotherhood and Nasser and the other military officers. Before the coup, Nasser stole weapons from an army depot and told Haroon Almujadidi that he needed his car with diplomatic plates without telling him why. Because they were good friends and Haroon had good heart he gave Nasser the car. It was a Jeep and they made several trips to transport the weapons and explosives.

‘Another Brother was a famous lawyer called Hassan Al-Ishmawi and Nasser and he and Haroon worked with others who were very deep in the Brotherhood, high up in the system. Nasser asked Hassan Al-Ishmawi to use his farm to hide the weapons to be used against the British occupation, and with three other army officers they built an underground store for them. Hassan Al-Ishmawi trusted them not to make anything “bad” from it for him.

‘And then came the burning of Cairo. Who did it? Still, today, no one knows. And then curfew, and the coup. No one investigated but the fire led to the military being in charge and then unknown officers challenged the king and the government – and then came Nasser’s coup. The new rulers brought some outrageous cases of corruption and presented them to the courts. Yet no one asked who burned Cairo. They kept silent. How can history interpret it? Everything was a means to an end: needs must.

‘When Nasser ordered the crushing of the Brotherhood he told his security to go to the farm of his friend Hassan Al Ishmawi and find the guns he himself had helped place there. Nasser then accused the Brotherhood of keeping weapons to topple his regime.

‘In the Middle East nothing is ever as it seems: promises and pledges are made in private, contracts are agreed, but they are in secret so no one ever knows what motivates men or the events which they created to pursue or break the promises or pledges. It is the mystery and the enigma of the Middle East.

‘In hospital we were all paying our fifty pounds each. The doctor had a tame patient, a “collections officer”, but he was sent back to prison. The doctor tried to enlist me to collect from the Brothers. That way I could stay in hospital but I told him: “Excuse me doctor. I am responsible for myself, but I cannot do it.”

‘The next day I was sent back to military prison. Bribery! I am ready to pay myself to save my life, but assisting bribery is a big sin. It’s wrong. The price was very high for me in prison. I did not like being part of the bribery. After that, when I recognised any corrupt person, I had to cut them from my life immediately.

‘If I do recognise something or someone as being corrupt, then I have to find another way to do my business. If there is no one, I have to drop the business rather than deal with anyone corrupt. It would be wrong for my life because it would harm my honour and my character, which is coming from my religion. You take the rights of the others when you bribe.

‘Nasser tried to bribe Sayyid Qutb who was in prison with me after the Alexandria shooting. Before the coup d’état, Nasser had secretly created the Free Officers unit and courted Sayyid Qutb. At the same time, he was dealing covertly with the Brotherhood.

‘Sayyid Qutb didn’t suspect Nasser’s plot and met him for many hours a day to discuss the form the Egyptian government would take after King Farouk was gone. When he understood what Nasser was up to and realised that Nasser was setting him up, he walked away. Nasser pleaded with him and tried all manner of bribery, every job in the country – except the throne, the job of king. Sayyid Qutb rejected it all. He was his own man. Later, others tried to use him, just as Nasser had, to give their enterprises some authority. Osama Bin Laden and others adopted him as their inspiration. The Americans called him “the father of terror”.

‘Nasser was clever to try to recruit Sayyid Qutb because he was a knowledgeable man. I witnessed it when he joined the Brotherhood in 1952 after the coup d’état and he had clashed with Nasser about the dictatorship.

‘When he was in the prison he was in a cell next to me. He was a weak man and he suffered terribly by the torture. He was a philosopher and he was very knowledgeable about Islam, and at the same time he was a poet. He put the three things together: philosophy, Islam and poetry, into twenty-four highly regarded books.

‘It was clear from his books that he understood the effects of injustice which he had observed and which had happened to him. He was living a clean life himself, and he was angered by the corruption in the country – which he believed was ruining the new generation – and he started to attack it in his writing while opposing the dictatorship. He criticised the society which accepted corruption morally, clerically and politically.

‘He was sincere in himself and in what he said, but he began to go too far and started to say things which, although we respected him and his knowledge, the Brothers and I could not accept. The direction of his theory to put a wall between pure Islamism and society and to judge others as evil went too far. He attacked Nasser and the dictatorship and the military and for that they finally hanged him in 1966 along with six other Brotherhood members. He was sincere but he did not influence me.

‘But Haroon Almujadidi was someone who had the greatest impact on me as a person. I had great respect for him as a man of ethics, protocol, and the highest standard of personality. I learned much from him including supreme ethics. When I came out of prison I became closer to Haroon and it became a family connection.’

When Nada was released after two years, without charge or any convictions, he discovered that Nasser’s security team had issued orders for him to be kicked out of university, and his registration was cancelled.

‘I told Haroon’s sister, Tahra Almujadidi, that I had to find a job in business or try another faculty, but “security” would probably block that too. She said to leave it to her. The Dean [her husband, Dr Shafik Al Keshin] with his high political connections got permission for me to return. I was a student again. But I was changed, especially by Haroon’s influence on my behaviour and in all my way of thinking of how to treat others.

‘Haroon had an outlandish Cadillac limousine, a long car no one could miss. One day he said to me: “If you’re free tomorrow let’s go visit a family.” We drove about 180km along muddy streets and bumpy little roads and through tiny villages until we reached the house he was looking for. A boy came out followed by other children. Haroon had some presents with him, and he asked the children to call their mother. When she came he didn’t look at her face, he just prayed. He said words of encouragement and prayers and we left.

‘It transpired that her husband, Saleh Abu Ruqiek, was one of the Brotherhood leaders who had been one of Nasser’s inner circle, and he had been one of the creators of the Arab League in 1945. After the Free Officers’ coup he was sentenced to death but that was commuted to a life in prison. His family were under surveillance by the secret police day and night to watch who might contact them. Haroon knew this, and he understood that accusations of conspiracy plots could be conjured. And he knew what reprisals could be – torture and death.’

Nada and Haroon drove to see the family once a month. ‘It was not about politics but about humanity,’ said Nada. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood is not a club, it is an organisation based on the ethics of the Islamic religion. It’s about trying to help people comply with the ethics in their life, with teaching them until they, themselves, implement it in their life socially and economically and morally, with their soul and mind.

‘The Prophet says that you are responsible not only for your neighbour but up to and including your seventh neighbour, no matter what his class, creed or colour. They are the same as your family. If they need anything and you can assist, you give it – during the good and bad times. If they have anyone sick, you have to try and help, whether medically or at least emotionally. If anyone dies, if anyone marries, has a problem with social life, you have to be helpful. If you are a doctor or a teacher, you have to help the sick and the students. If you are an engineer, you have to try and train the workers in their work.

‘That is all charity. You don’t take money for it. That is the reason the Brotherhood doesn’t need to have much money. Anyone who can do arithmetic can understand that with more than 100 million members of the Muslim Brotherhood around the world, if every member subscribed one dollar a month then the income would be $100million.

‘Mubarak and his lieutenants failed in arithmetic. They made a plan against the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 with three dimensions. One: to try to stem the finance resources. Two: to take to court the known activists and paralyse them through imprisonment. Three: to please his mentors and protectors (the US administration). Mubarak decided to choose forty members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including me in absentia, to the criminal court in Cairo.

‘The court dismissed the case – saying there was none to answer. The case was sent to yet another court with the same result. And then it was sent to another court and rejected yet again. The majority of Egyptian judges are not corrupt but the rest are the Government’s people and always ready to do what the Government wants. President Mubarak didn’t give up. He used another means – the military court, which is not restricted in the terms proscribed by criminal law. They, of course, said “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty”. The accusation was financing the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.’

Nada found the outcome ‘strange, amusing if not so distressing’ and went on: ‘The whole world knew that since 2001 until September 2009 all my assets and bank accounts all over the world were blocked by the order of the UN Security Council. Although my assets and money were frozen I was supposed to have financed the Muslim Brotherhood with one billion American dollars!

‘I was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison. In June 2012 that sentence still stood. If I went to Egypt right this moment they could arrest me. That was not the first time: in 1966 Nasser’s Special Court sentenced me in absentia also to ten years, again for supposedly financing the Brotherhood.

‘In 2005 two of the three judges of the military court were members of the military junta which was ruling Egypt early in 2012. Their ruling was signed by Hasan Al Rueni a member of the present Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to which Mubarak ceded his authority following the Arab Spring. In Tunisia in 1993 Ben Ali, who was forced out as President in 2011, sentenced me in absentia to three years imprisionment. But up to July 2012, none of them succeeded in putting me back in jail.

‘The Brotherhood are banned in many places. In some places we don’t exist legally but we are there. In Egypt, in all the years we were outlawed we were in the streets, in the parliament, hospitals, schools and universities, in the factories and in the fields.

‘When the Brothers were being herded into jails, others tried to help their families with food and money. If you gave five pounds to a starving family you were given, not sentenced by a court, but given five years in prison. If the charity had been ten pounds – that was ten years in prison. And so on.’

When the Arab Spring demonstrations began in Cairo on 25 January 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood were criticised for not taking part, but as Nada points out, there is always another side to the story: its members would have been threatened with jail if they had demonstrated representing the Brotherhood. Ten of their leaders were arrested on 22 January but escaped when the guards deserted the prison.

‘Given the history of torture and punishment, it was wise to be careful. All the members were told that they should be part of the demonstrations, but as individuals. That way they could help express the feelings of the people without being thrown into jail and forgotten. I joined the Brotherhood when I was 17. I was jailed when I was 23. You could call where I was a concentration camp, you could call it a jail. But I had never been prosecuted, never interrogated. You can call it what you want to call it, but it was wrong. I stayed there for about two years.

‘I was only asked for the names and addresses of my family. They never asked me about any crime. How could they? After two years they released me with no explanation. It was into another a world of intrigue and more danger.’

He is a devoted Muslim but Youssef Nada wryly points out: ‘I am a Muslim but also human. My mother gave birth to a baby boy – not a Muslim. I shared humanity with her before being a Muslim. Your religion doesn’t mean you are cut off from your origin.

‘I never killed anyone. I never used a weapon, although I was trained, yes. Even if it is justified to defend your country from invaders, how would you feel if you killed another person? Once, I hit a cat with my car. I swear I trembled for half-an-hour afterwards – and the American intelligence agencies accuse me of paying for violence, paying for people to be killed! Never. I will never forget what I saw in the military prison.’

About two years after he left the prison, Nada was visited by one of the soldier-guards who had tortured the prisoners. ‘He had left the army and was looking for work,’ said Nada. ‘I’d watched him kill people – three in front of me. One was a thirteen-year-old boy from the Brotherhood. He’d been caught distributing Brotherhood pamphlets and they brought him in and sliced him up. He was called Abd El-Hadi. I never knew all his name, but his face – I remember his face. And his wounds – his chest all covered in blood. When I tried to help him he said: “Brother Youssef, there is no need to trouble, it’s all over now.”

‘The man who killed him was called A’oud. When he came to me the killing rolled before my eyes as if it had just happened. My mind played it to me again and again. I could see it so clearly. It frightened me, for I hated that man so much. I looked at him and put my hand in my pocket and pushed a bunch of cash at him and said: “May Allah be pleased with you but please… please, don’t come here again.”

‘I could not seek revenge, because of my belief. This doesn’t mean that all the Brotherhood are the same, but we are taught to try to keep within the pure limits consigned by God and his messenger. I can’t say I that the Muslims don’t make mistakes, or that all the Brotherhood are perfect – like society, there are good and bad. The hope is everyone is trying to be good, which is a wonderful thing.

‘The last statistics, which were computed in 2009 from all over the world, showed those who are committed to the way of thinking and the principles of the Brotherhood are more than 100 million. There is no official registration – a Brother is one who adopts our way. And they are people working with political parties in all countries – in the schools, in the mosques, hospitals, universities; students and professors and peasants in the farms and workers in factories; parents trying to make their families inherit their way of thinking. It’s everywhere in society, throughout all standards of living.’

Of course, not all the world has a benign view of the Muslim Brotherhood, but to claims that the Brotherhood want world domination by lethal force, by atrocity, Nada has a quiet answer: ‘If more than one hundred million people attacked today could they be stopped? We want to talk, to educate, to negotiate. I have done that all my life.

‘When it comes to tyranny, we are glad to be humble. When we are confronted by muscles we are glad to respond by wisdom. We are the students of Muhammad Al-Qaraxi who asked me what would be gained by violence. Nothing is the answer – the very thought of taking another life is repugnant to me.’

Yet, in 2001 George W Bush accused Youssef Nada of financing atrocities and ordered the Security Council to list him as a banker of terrorism. ‘I continue to deal with another severe case of injustice not by a military junta and not by totalitarian regime but by the biggest democratic country in the world as well as the small but most civilised country in the West: the United States of America and Switzerland.’