Читать книгу Inside the Muslim Brotherhood - The Truth About The World's Most Powerful Political Movement - Youssef Nada - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCAIRO, NOVEMBER 1954
He stumbled off the train into the confusion of Misr Station at the end of the railway line which for more than 60 years had brought passengers from Alexandria to Cairo seeking opportunities, and comfort from family and friends.
Comfort wasn’t available for 23-year-old Youssef Nada: simply staying alive would be welcome enough. The young man had some hope. The guard he’d been handcuffed to for the dry, dusty and cramped four-hour journey knew his family. Maybe there was a chance of survival. He hadn’t see it in the eyes of the soldiers who’d roughly escorted him from his family home in a pleasant, green suburb of Alexandria, only a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea, or now in the behaviour of the guards preparing to take him and their other, tougher captives to military prison. The noise was overwhelming. The shouts of the army men, their tunics soaked in sweat, were full of anger and ricocheted around the station like bursts of bullets.
Youssef Nada, a tall, wiry agricultural student, had heard terrifying tales about the evil concentration camp – Abbasia Military Prison – after Gamal Abdel Nasser became the power of, and in, Egypt and outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, which a teenage Nada had joined six years earlier. There were many such stories, each more scary than the next.
Membership of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) – and a dictatorial crackdown after an ‘assassination attempt’ on President Nasser which was linked to Mahmoud Abdel Latif, also a Brotherhood member – led to Nada being escorted into the desert on the outskirts of Cairo. He stood at the open gate of the military building, home of what was to be a never-ending jailhouse horror.
‘They took us directly from the train to the military compound. On the gate three words were written beneath the name of the prison. The message spelled out the treatment we could expect: Discipline, Behaviourism and Correction. They put us in lines and between every line of prisoners was a stretch of soldiers with whips. Suddenly, the leader screamed and every soldier lashed the prisoner next to him with a whip. The commander screeched again and stared at the prison sign. We were ordered to look at it. Read it. Repeat it. Read it and repeat it.
‘The soldiers began their business – thrashing us, flaying the skin from our backs and legs and arms. One giant of a man, a boxer and a sporting hero, jumped at the soldiers and knocked one down. Four others turned on him. The big man was very strong and tough and fought back with all his being. About two dozen soldiers turned from us and attacked the boxer. I looked at him moments later and he was but a piece of blood and meat.’
The prisoners were told they had been ‘taught a lesson’ and were forced, bleeding and cut, inside the compound, consigned to the military from the control of the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry Defence. Then the soldiers started the paperwork of confinement. They said that it all must be written down: your name, your father’s name, mother’s name, your address, your sister’s, brother’s, their husbands and wives – so they knew who they were whipping and killing.
‘We had to get on our knees in the muddy water and put our hands up on a wall in front of us. From behind they cut off all our hair with clipper machines. They buzzed our heads and whipped our bodies. We were left kneeling in the blistering sun. If your hands came down, so did the guard’s hand with a whip in it. It went on for hours. Bodies were taken away. We didn’t know where. In the prison I saw people being tortured to death with inhuman means in ways which even the Devil could not invent.
‘The excrement of the prisoners went into barrels and filled to the top. A man with his hands and legs tied was hung above a barrel by his shoulders from a crane device in the ceiling. If he didn’t say what they wanted they’d dip him in it again and again and again…dip him in the human waste and whip him until he talked the words they wanted to hear. Sometimes they just found fun in routine humiliation. One prisoner was hanged with the crane and asked to swear insults at the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood. He refused until he was dipped in the barrel and gulping the waste.
‘The guards seemed to take a special pleasure in their work. The officers always put the Brothers in the hands of a group of ignorant and illiterate peasant soldiers. They used them for tasks which didn’t need brains.’
One particular guard confronted Nada, berating him: ‘You are a fool. You are Brotherhood. You want to come in power. Do you think the government is an easy job? We are in the government and we are here all day and night hitting you. We are in power but we have no rest. We work all the time hitting you. And you want to have a job which has no rest?’
Nada said there were special cells with the door opening out, not in. ‘The prison officials closed it with bricks and cement 70 centimetres high: when you opened the door to come in you had to step up. The cell was filled with water and ice blocks, so freezing you couldn’t stand up. Some prisoners gave up after five minutes. Some, if they were strong, managed to stay for one hour.’
After the cell ordeal the interrogations began. ‘They tied men to crosses and whipped them and worked on them, cutting them with small knives. Pieces of flesh cut off here and there. I saw terrible cases which still make me shudder. I saw prisoners crucified and castrated and torches put to all part of their bodies.’
Nada’s astute family’s connections spared him from death inside the military concentration camp but his stories of what went on make you want to turn deaf, to press your hands to your ears. In the prison clinic where he was taken it was discovered there was an extra portion of food, someone had died. He was told: ‘Youssef, take it to cell thirteen.’ He did. It was dark.
A voice said: ‘Take it next door. He needs it more than me…’ He found the source of the words on the floor. He could just make out the red eyes and mouth on the man’s body which was burned all over, charred beyond recognition. ‘He needs it more than me…’ He took the food to the next cell. There were parts of a man there. Everything between his legs had been eaten by starved attack dogs.
That barbarism became part of the way of life in Egypt after Colonel Nasser emerged as the power of the nation following the 1952 revolution. He feared losing control, losing the hearts and minds of the Egyptians, to the popular Muslim Brotherhood: his reaction was to get them out of sight, and so more than 300,000 Brotherhood followers were imprisoned in Nasser’s early years.
‘Before the coup d’état, Nasser said he was going to put Islam in the society and not contradict the Sharia law, but when he took power he started to hammer the Muslim Brothers. He established a dictatorship. The clash began. The Muslim Brotherhood were strong. To eradicate them he had to find a reason, and he did.’
Youssef Nada was blessed with caring parents and their ability to prevent him becoming a total victim of the new Egypt. While still in captivity he was in great pain from appendicitis, and through their connections his family had him moved to the military hospital. Still, the security, with the prison paranoia, was immense. ‘Our guards included a team from the military prison, a Ministry of Defence group who were monitoring them, another from the Intelligence Service and yet one more from the Presidential Security Force. We were isolated from the main prison and there were a lot of people from military families coming to visit patients in the hospital. Sometimes you could talk with them and they’d call your family and give them news of you.
‘A terribly troubled Brother arrived and I tried to calm him down. I said the doctors would care for him and he’d be able to contact his family. He was surprised: “My father and my wife and her father? Can I see them?” I said he could and asked him: “Is it better to have them one by one, or all together?”
‘He looked at me and then down at himself and said: “All together, I prefer.” I thought he’d want to meet with his wife on his own, to see and talk with his family individually but he looked me in the eyes and said: “I am not a man anymore.” The torturers had cut him all away. He felt he had to divorce. Everything was gone – because he was opposing the dictator. I’ve never forgotten this case. If what happened in that prison happened to the poorest, dying animals I couldn’t forget.’
Youssef Nada’s life was never to be normal after that. How could it be? It was to be extraordinary. He watched – and heard – men tortured to a point where there was nothing left to confess. Nothing left of their dignity, of their soul. The boy, they say, is the father of the man. Yet, so were the antecedents of his decency through his family and experience.
While Nada was in jail, the security police imprisoned the renowned scholar Muhammad Al-Qaraxi who was aged 80 and in poor health. Al-Qaraxi had to wear high prescription spectacles to see a little and even then it was hazy. The cruel guards played games with him. They would whip him and asked if he could see who had done it. No matter what he answered they beat him again. Throughout the daily ordeals he would pray for the man wielding the whip and say: ‘Allah grant you health, my son.’
Angered by this treatment, the young Youssef Nada suggested that the soldier with the whip should have his hand paralysed or broken. He balanced on that always fine line of submission and rebellion. The tormented Muhammad Al-Qaraxi gazed at him through his milk-bottle lenses and said: ‘Youssef, my son, what benefit will I gain if his hand is paralysed? Have you forgotten the verses of the Koran about pardoning and forgiveness.’
Years later, as he tells the story, Youssef Nada has tears in his eyes: ‘He was smiling as he said to me: “Oh Youssef, are you a fool? Are you crazy? What will I gain if his hands are clasped shut. What will I gain if his head will be broken? Maybe God will make him good and he will be converted and he will see the others and mix something good for the humanity and for Islam.”
‘I stared at him. Either I was mad, or he was mad. With all that was done to him, it didn’t change him. He still wanted good for others. He was more pure than me. It was an unforgettable lesson.’
Incarcerated with Nada and other political prisoners were some of the country’s most vicious, hardened criminals: ‘The prison was sectioned, one for general prisoners and one for high security prisoners who’d been sentenced to 100 years by military courts and had nothing to lose. Once a week we were all taken into the yard to wash our clothes in a long, communal basin with many taps. There was very little time and lots of pushing and shoving.
‘I was not used to it and very wary – even the soldiers were afraid of these men who had been locked away forever. Somebody kicked me with his shoe and said: “You are not fit for such a job. Leave it and I will do it for you. It’s not your job.” He was laughing. I was frightened. He said to me: “You don’t know me, but I know you very well. You are Youssef!”
‘How did he know who I was? Was he there to assassinate me? I didn’t answer. He explained to me: “I worked for your father; I was fed by your father. Your mother was always sending food to us, to our families.”
‘He protected and helped me. He’d remembered the kindness of my parents when he saw me – just like the soldier handcuffed to me on the train. My mother had sent food to him too and he asked me for my father’s phone number and alerted my family to where I was. We have a proverb: “Make the good, and throw it in the sea/One day it will come to you.”’
