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in desert prisons. But an idea is hard to destroy, and the Brotherhood, though banned, did not die. Many of its activities continued underground, and some Brothers cautiously formed groups similar to the Brotherhood. The momentum behind sharia grew.
    As Nasser’s socialism faltered, it was his misfortune to bungle wars against Israel in 1956 and 1967. The failure of 1967, which he shared with Jordan and Syria, was so thorough that Arabs generally and Egyptians particularly asked how they had come to such desolation. Many throughout the Arab world found convincing the Brotherhood’s argument that God was punishing them for leading wicked lives and leaving wicked men in power. They were also comforted by the Brotherhood’s simple cure for these ills. Piety could be achieved by anyone, and collective piety, whether forcefully or peacefully expressed, was easier to understand as a national remedy than, say, improving the balance of trade or entering wiser geopolitical alliances. After 1967 a large subset of Muslims gravitated to the Brotherhood’s hairshirt Islam like down-and-out Pentecostals to snake-handling.
    NASSER DIED in 1970 of a bad heart. His successor, Anwar Sadat, wanted little of his socialism, and to balance the leftists who had multiplied under Nasser, he negotiated a détente with the Brothers. They renounced violence, and in exchange he paroled great batches of them from prison and let them preach and organize politically. Officially the group was still banned, but unofficially it was tolerated. Perhaps more important, other Islamist groups were given greater freedom to proselytize, and they gained members quickly. (An Islamist is a Muslim with a fundamentalist view of the Quran and a desire to share it. Some, but by no means all, Islamists believe violence is the best means of sharing.) Sadat seems not to have fully appreciated the power he was dealing with. He apparently thought Islamism was something like an unruly camel that could be pacified with a few dates and bridled, but it was much more akin to a virus, and he had just let it out of quarantine. In 1981, after making peace with Israel, he was assassinated by members of Jihad, one of several extremist groups that had evolved under his détente. Jihad had hoped the assassination would inspire a popular uprising that would culminate in sharia, as had happened in Iran in 1979, but the Jihadis overestimated the Egyptian enthusiasm for both blood and Islam.
    Sadat was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, who reverted to a Nasserian intolerance and imprisoned so many thousands of Islamists—some after trials but many not—that he had to build new prisons to house them. Many of the prisoners were tortured, and nearly all were brutalized in one form or another. They defended themselves with prayer and solidarity and found in their persecution a stigmata of their faith. Men who came to prison relatively moderate Islamists became zealots. Zealots were won over to violence. Some of the violent came to support not just insurrection but terrorism. These last reasoned that a government so barbaric could be defeated only with barbarity and that those who enabled the government, whether by action or inaction, would have to suffer. Mubarak had meant to pulverize the movement, but his maul had forged a stronger metal.
    Jihad profited from these developments but not as fully as it might have. The group’s leaders remained more interested in trying to decapitate and seize the state than in winning over the millions who might demand more enduring change, so Jihad remained a relatively small group. Not so al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, whose bland name—the Islamic Group—belied its wallop. Founded in 1973 during Sadat’s liberalization, Gamaa flourished among students at Egypt’s badly underfunded and overcrowded universities. Its founders had learned from the Brotherhood’s provision of services, and they offered tutorials, cheap textbooks, lecture notes, and rides to classes.