Word: egyptian
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Cairo is one of the world's most crowded, impoverished cities, and by the early '90s, Atta felt the intense pressures on middle-class Egyptians not to slip in social rank. His friend Khalifa says Atta grew frustrated because he was unable to fulfill his academic ambitions in his homeland. He believed that political favoritism at Egyptian universities would keep him from the top spots...
Atta made a few friends in school, but he was such a loner that when a classmate, Iman Ismail, drew a caricature of their class, she depicted Mohamed standing next to a sign posted on Egyptian military fences: COMING NEAR OR TAKING PHOTOS PROHIBITED. When it came to politics and religion, topics no Egyptian can avoid, he offered mainstream opinions. His friends don't remember ever seeing him pray, and they recall his harsh words for Islamic terrorists--"brainless, irresponsible people...
Which is why several of his Egyptian classmates could not accept his guilt in interviews with TIME. "I could never imagine him on a plane threatening people, killing people," says Ahmed Khalifa, 33, Atta's best friend at Cairo University. "He would be scared to death...He was not a leader. He had his opinion, but he was modest in everything. His emotions were steady, and he was not easily influenced or swayed. Mohamed was well liked because he never offended or bothered anyone." Says Ismail: "He was good to the roots...
...fact that the Israelis have to keep doing it suggests that wiping out the leaders does not actually solve the problem, a principle that at least one "coalition" member is already highlighting. "My advice," Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the BBC last week, "is not to attack Afghanistan or kill bin Laden. This will result in the rise of a new generation of terrorists." But for the Bush Administration, committed to capturing bin Laden "dead or alive," no strike at all is the one option it doesn't seem to have any longer...
...depth of the disbelief among those Mohammed Atta left behind in Cairo signifies the extent of the personality change required to have turned their friend into a mass killer. And yet, all are also aware of the powerful cross currents generated by Egyptian society's precarious perch at the intersection between the harsh and conflicting demands of Western modernity and geopolitics, failed Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism...