To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (233459 ) 4/4/2003 12:22:01 PM From: Haim R. Branisteanu Respond to before oil got to today's high prices the focal point was Egypt. At a time that oil was in teh single digits the Saudi Clan had no power. Qutb, was in fashion then and not Wahhabism even that both doctrines are very similar.The Islamists and the Pan-Arabists tried to cooperate with one another in Egypt in those days, and there was some basis for doing so. Both movements dreamed of rescuing the Arab world from the legacies of European imperialism. Both groups dreamed of crushing Zionism and the brand-new Jewish state. Both groups dreamed of fashioning a new kind of modernity, which was not going to be liberal and freethinking in the Western style but, even so, was going to be up-to-date on economic and scientific issues. And both movements dreamed of doing all this by returning in some fashion to the glories of the Arab past. Both movements wanted to resurrect, in a modern version, the ancient Islamic caliphate of the seventh century, when the Arabs were conquering the world.query.nytimes.com
