In his house, in Hammersmith, a multiethnic neighborhood in west London, Sebaai stressed that religion was behind Bush’s campaign, and referred to right-wing Christians who assumed leading positions in his administration.

“Is it a coincidence that [US Attorney General] Ashcroft is distributing bibles and prayer manuals in the Justice Department?” he said. “George Bush himself stated it’s a ‘Crusade.’ That was not a slip. The man is not stupid as people think. He means what he says, and he is driven by his faith.”

The Bush administration is “mobilizing the American soldiers using religion, and in return they want to deny the other the right to use religious mobilization,” Sebaai added in dismay.

Observers in Cairo have highlighted the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, September 11 attacks, and the US-led onslaught on Afghanistan and Iraq as triggers to the ongoing radicalization across the Muslim World, a radicalization that is feeding Islamist militancy, especially as Muslims could clearly see that it is largely the Islamists who are now on the forefront of the struggle to end Western hegemony in the region.

“September 11 was Islamism’s Suez War,” said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst with Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “Nasser’s defiance to the West in 1956 was the virtual birthmark of pan-Arabism. September 11 attacks and the war on terror served the same purpose for pan-Islamism. They united Muslims around the world by the sense that ‘we are all under attack by the West, and we have to do something.’ ”

This is pushing, Rashwan argues, new actors to enter the stage of armed politics: the “freelance jihadis.” And it has never been that easy before for rage to meet ideology, as Abdullah Schleifer, a Cairo-based media analyst, likes to put it.

“The discourse associated with al-Qaeda is very contemporary. It is accessible, demotic and needs no great erudition or literacy to understand,” noted The Observer’s Chief Reporter Jason Burke in his recent book on al-Qaeda. “It evokes events and personalities, many dating back to the seventh century, in the knowledge that they will be understood by the target audience, a large portion of whom are illiterate. The symbolism is powerful but easy to grasp. It offers instant gratification, instant empowerment. Any group or individual can find elements that are useful within it… Its symbols have even spread outside the Islamist context. Thai Hells Angels now sport portraits of bin Laden on their bikes and helmets. Bin Laden has become a counter-cultural symbol, representative of a discourse of dissent.

“Before satellite TV, phones and the Internet, bin Laden might have been nothing more than a Messianic mahdi for a thousand tribesmen. But modern communications technology has allowed exiled radicals to broadcast their views to target populations free from state interference or retribution.”

On the early morning of last Christmas, about two dozens of men and women gathered outside a military camp on the outskirts of Medinet Nasr, an eastern suburb of Cairo. After two hours of waiting, a blue prison truck packed with Muslim detainees hurled its way into the camp, followed by armed Special Operations soldiers in a van. The families ran after the truck till it reached the gate, hysterically waiving their hands and shouting their relatives’ names.

The 43 detainees are awaiting a trial in a martial court after they were picked up in Alexandria, Beheira, and Mahalla 15 months ago. The government charged the suspects with forming an underground group, dubbed as “Jundullah” (Soldiers of Allah), and planning attacks on “Western targets” in Egypt.

The police announced they discovered two homemade bomb factories. The suspects were planning, according to the security, to use pigeons laden with explosives, to be flown directly to their targets. The suspects are also accused of planning to hijack a bus, load it with explosives, and then storm the US embassy on a Friday, by the time of the call for the Friday prayers, so as to avoid inflicting causalities on Egyptian civilians and limit the carnage to the empty building and its American guards.

The authorities carefully stated the group did not have a direct “organizational” link with al-Qaeda, but Osama bin Laden’s video statements, as well as literature by his right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahri, were found in some of the suspects’ homes - constituting the group’s “action program.”

According to defense lawyers and Islamist sources in London and Cairo, the detainees, most of whom are in their mid 20s and 30s, do not have political records.

“Everyone is talking about the Intifada,” said defense lawyer Youssef Saqr, in his house, few kilometers away from the military court. The suspects “are simply a group of people who sat down, gave it a thought, and wanted to travel to carry out jihad in Palestine. When they couldn’t, they decided to attack the American and Israeli embassies in Cairo.”

The state-owned Al-Ahram had reported, on January 5, 2003, that the defendants had allegedly vowed revenge for the Israeli atrocities in Jenin in April 2002.

The 67-year-old Islamist lawyer proudly stated that he would include, in his defense, studies on the “Crusader-Zionist conspiracy plans” against Muslims, hoping “the military judges would realize the threat all Muslims are under today.”

The arrest of Jundullah’s suspects was followed by a series of security crackdowns on other new amateur groups. Last September, the Egyptian minister of interior announced the arrest of 25 alleged militants, including six foreign Al-Azhar students: three Bengalis, a Turk, a Malaysian, and a Tunisian. They were charged with establishing an underground group, dubbed as the “Jihad group for supporting Muslims inside and abroad.” The minister told the weekly Al Mussawar last September that the group “followed al-Qaeda’s line, but is not affiliated organizationally.” He added that the suspects were not planning attacks in Egypt, but they wanted to join the jihad in Iraq and Palestine against Coalition and Israeli forces respectively. “The group’s members confessed they endorsed jihadi thought [regarding it as a way] to protect Muslim minorities under oppression in some Asian countries, and because they were enraged by US and Israeli practices in the Arab region,” the minister added.

“More of these [amateur] groups will appear, due to the rage against the US policies in the Middle East,” commented Islamist lawyer Montasser Al-Zayat, in his office in downtown Cairo. The expected damage could vary in scale from a couple of rocks thrown at a McDonald’s branch to “disastrous operations,” he warned.