328 DESTINY DISRUPTED
his status among Arabs, claiming that they were the real pan-Arab nation-
alists. Then there were Egypt's communists. At the height of the Cold War,
given their pipeline to Soviet support, they no doubt seemed more dan-
gerous than some cult organizing the Muslim rabble. And finally there
were the frankly antirevolutionary monarchs and the tribal dynasts who
still ruled some of the Arab states, and who disapproved of everything
Nasser stood for.
In 1963, Nasser blundered into a proxy war in Yemen. He sent troops
in only as a gesture, to show support for a socialist party that had seized
power there by ousting the tribal monarchy; but as soon as Egyptian
troops arrived in Yemen, Saudi Arabia began pumping money and guns to
the royalists. Suddenly Nasser found himself bogged down in a quagmire
of a war that dragged on without result for years.
Meanwhile, Sayyid Qutb went on preaching his doctrines from prison.
Nasser decided that, frustrated though he was on other fronts, he didn't
have to put up with this gadfly. In August 1966, he did what men with too
much power and too few procedural restraints often do: he had Qutb
hanged-only to see him hailed as a martyr by a frighteningly far-flung
network of admirers.
Just three months later, Syria and Israel got locked into a cycle of raids
and counterraids back and forth across their border, which escalated for six
months, growing ever more bloody. Ba'athists ruled Syria by this point.
They were Nasser's main rivals in the secular modernist camp and by going
toe-to-toe with Israel, they were gaining credibility at Nasser's expense,
among Arabs generally and among the Palestinians in particular, those
wretched refugees still mired in the camps.
So there was Nasser, hero of the Arab world, besieged by his own Arab
Muslim masses, eclipsed by his Arab secular modernist rivals, bogged
down in an endless war-with other Arabs. Clearly he needed to do some-
thing! And dearly it could not be directed against any other Arab country,
group, or movement.
This is where matters stood in the spring of 1967, just before one of the
most seminal events of modern history, at least as seen through Islamic
eyes: Israel's Six Day War against her Arab neighbors.