Blame the Left

Almost 30 years after the assasination of Sadat islamist theorist Nageh Ibrahim engage in left-bashing disguised as self-criticism: In one of a series of articles published on the website of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya on the occasion of the anniversary of the October war, he expresses nostalgia about the freedom enjoyed by "the whole spectrum" of Islamist movements in Egypt during the seventies. Unless the islamists had "blindly followed the left" in their hatred against Sadat, they would have remembered that he gave Egypt and Islam the great victory over Israel in the October war and forgiven his later "mistakes." (These include, one can only assume, arresting hundreds of socialists and trade union activists - Sadat encouraged the islamist movements in part to counter the growing strength of the left and opposition to his neoliberal economic policies.)