I came across a thought-piece by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour in a WhatApp group-chat about Israel. His work was shared as a provocative (in a good way) new way to think about Israel, Jews, and all the troubles that face us today. I only read the first part, but was intrigued by his approach to an empowered Jewish identity, and a rejection of the progressive/academic narrative about Jews. What further intrigued me, when I looked him up, was that he was born and raised in Egypt, and spent time as a religious, jihadist Muslim, though that was no longer the case. One further search revealed that he wrote a biography in 2018 titled Minority of One: The Unchaining of An Arab Mind, which I ordered and quickly read.
Mansour was born in 1989 in Egypt to a traditional, but not overly religious Muslim family. In his early teenage years he began to become more religious, going to the Mosque five-times a day, and took on other traditional observances. This exposed him to the world of radical Islam, or Islamism, and, eventually, a desire on his part to become an active jihadist. But as he was making this commitment, which included rabid anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, as well as anti-Christianity (there is a significant Coptic Chritian population in Egypt, though many have left), he wanted to understand the “other” he was about to destroy. This spiraled into a long journey, first of discovery of who those “others” really were – often kind, normal, and entirely different from the stereotypes he’d been taught – and then a crisis of his own identity and where he fit in. I’m leaving out a lot of detail from this fascinating, and often painful journey, partly in the hopes that you’ll read about it.
Two things strike me as revealing and important about the book. The first, which I always find to be a mystery, is how people change, especially when it comes to identity. For Mansour, in a place like Egypt, the stakes were even higher than someone in the West. A rejection of identity meant not only rejection by his family, but it meant that his life was in danger – from his family, from the Muslim Brotherhood, and from the security state that is Egypt. That he had the courage of his convictions is astounding. That he let himself see the world as it was, rather than the imagined world presented to him, is certainly unusual, especially when social pressure and conformity is so high. The title of his memoir is a quote from George Orwell, another truth teller and intellectual gadfly, and with good reason.
The second, which I’d never really come across, were his descriptions of Egyptian culture, both its incredible hospitality and strong social bonds, as well as his many descriptions of the way anti-semitism and anti-Zionism pervades that society. From the book, it seems that though this has been the case for a long time, it has gotten much worse as Egypt, beginning with Sadat, has become an increasingly Muslim state. Also fascinating was the notion of “taquiyya.” Historically, it referred to the practice of concealing one’s religious beliefs when facing danger or persecution, but what it’s evolved into in the contemporary Islamist context is the permission to lie to non-Muslims in order to further the spread of Islam. This double-speak (lying) is religiously and socially acceptable, and helps explain part of the challenge Westerners have with understanding the Muslim worldview.
After reading the book I signed up for Mansour’s Substack, The Abrahamic Metacritique. It’s original, provocative and refreshing. And leaves everyone a little bit offended.
It seems that the book is self-published, though I’m not sure why this would be the case, given how unique and powerful it is (though I can imagine reasons why some publishers might stay away). This showed in some of the typos, and areas where the writing could have been stronger. That said, the power of the story more than makes up for any of these smaller shortcomings. It’s well worth the read.
Just Because I Liked It: