by Tarek E. Masoud
About the author: Tarek E. Masoud is executive director of the Presidential Oral History Project and a research fellow in the Program on Contemporary Political History at the University of Virginia.
In the early morning hours of January 22, 1997, in Cairo, Egypt’s crowded capital, security forces conducted a series of house-to-house raids, detaining at least seventy-eight young Egyptians. Such mass arrests are not uncommon in that country of 60 million, where the state’s war on Islamic fundamentalism has resulted in the arrest of hundreds—if not thousands—since 1981, most from villages in the Egyptian hinterland or from Cairo’s slums, where angry young men with little hope and few prospects often turn to Islam for comfort. Police routinely arrest individuals on the mere suspicion of Islamist activity. It is often said that a beard—the universal sign of Islamic zealotry—is all it takes to arouse such suspicion.
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