In many ways Egypt and Pakistan form the two poles of the same movement. The former produces the guides, the latter provides the training grounds and shelter. The blind orator Omar Abdul Rehman of Gama’a Islamiyya caused the greatest stir when he planned the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre through Ramzi Yusuf who was of Pakistani origin. ....

Money worked almost equal wonders, when Khalid Sheikh Muhammad sat in Karachi and guided all sorts of killer operations in Pakistan through Pakistani operatives — while Omar Abdur Rehman’s son was ensconced comfortably in Quetta organising the murder of Hazara Shias there on behalf of Osama Bin Laden, who in turn was supporting his son’s father-in-law, Mullah Umar.

Egypt ’s salafist Islam of the Ikhwan has mixed well with Saudi Wahhabism to create the explosive chemistry unleashed by Al Qaeda on the world. Many scholars now think that the poison of violence is not sown in the Muslim mind by the madrassa but by the mosque. Not only the Finsbury mosque in the UK and the Al Quds mosque of Hamburg in Germany, but mosques all over the United States too are using hate literature penned by the late blind chief mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Bin Baz, and have attracted all sorts of middle class Muslims to suicide bombing.

Ayman Al Zawahiri had not only attacked Gama’a for going quiescent after the 1997 massacre at Luxor; earlier in his book, The Bitter Harvest, he had also attacked the Ikhwan for giving up violence. He held the view that Egypt had to be attacked because that was where the West had to be fought first.

Sitting in Peshawar he repeatedly tried to assassinate Egyptian ministers and civil servants suspected of persecuting the Islamists. His recruits narrowly missed two government figures in Cairo but killed one informer. He tried to destroy the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad in 1995, succeeding only partially. He was however more successful in fulfilling Osama Bin Laden’s agenda against the Americans after the setting up of Al Qaeda in 1998. ....