308 DESTINY DISRUPTED
the treasury. Anyone who knows what the Taliban did in Afghanistan at
the end of the century will recognize an eerily precise preview of their car-
nage in the career of the Water Carrier's Son. By the time he was finished,
Afghans were so sick of chaos, they were eager to accept a strongman. The
British obliged them by helping a more compliant member of the old royal
clan claim the Afghan throne, a grim despot named Nadir Shah.
This new king was a secular modernist too, but a chastened one. He
guided his country back toward the Atatiirkist road but very, very slowly,
taking care not to offend the British, and placating his hometown De-
obandis by clamping down on Afghanistan socially and culturally.
So much for Wahhabism. What of the reformist current embodied by
Sayyid Jamaluddin? Was that one dead? Not at all. Intellectually, Jamalud-
din's work was carried forward by his chief disciple, Mohammed Abduh,
who taught at Egypt's prestigious thousand-year-old Al Azhar University.
Abduh pulled the Master's patchwork of ideas together into a coherent Is-
lamic modernist doctrine. Abduh's own disciple and friend Rashid Rida
went on to explore how a modern state might actually be administered on
Islamic principles.
Then came Hassan al-Banna, perhaps the most important of Sayyid
Jamaluddin's intellectual progeny. This Egyptian schoolteacher was more
activist than philosopher. In 1928, he founded a club called the Muslim
Brotherhood, originally something like a Muslim version of the Boy
Scouts. This was a seminal event for Islamism, but one that went virtually
unnoticed at the time.
Banna lived and taught in the Suez Canal Zone, where he could feel the
scrape of West against East every day. Virtually all trade between Europe
and the eastern colonies passed through this canal, which was the most
boomingly modern structure in Egypt, and every cargo ship had to pay a
steep toll. A European firm owned by British and French interests operated
the canal and took 93 percent of the rich revenue it generated. Foreign
technicians therefore abounded in the Canal Zone, making this little strip
ofland the starkest embodiment of two worlds intersecting. One whole in-
frastructure of shops, restaurants, cafes, dance halls, bars, and other ser-
vices catered to the European community. Another whole infrastructure
consisted of markets, coffeehouses, and whatnot frequented by Egyptians
of the humbler classes: two worlds interwoven but entirely distinct.