Murphy, Caryle 1946-

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MURPHY, Caryle 1946-

PERSONAL: Born November 16, 1946, in Hartford, CT; daughter of Thomas Joseph, and Muriel Kathryn (McCarthy) Murphy. Education: Trinity College, graduated 1968; Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, M.A. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Foreign languages, hiking.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-0002.

CAREER: Journalist. St. Cecilia Teacher Training College, Nyeri, Kenya, teacher, 1968-71; Brockton Enterprise, Brockton, MA, 1972-73; freelance correspondent, 1974-76; Washington Post, 1976—, Cairo, Egypt, Middle East reporter, 1989-94, Washington, DC, religion writer, 1994—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Courage in Journalism Award, Women's Media Foundation, 1990; Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, George Polk Award for foreign reporting, and Edward Weintal Journalism Award, Georgetown University, all 1991, all for reportage from Kuwait.

WRITINGS:

Passion for Islam: Shaping the Modern Middle East:The Egyptian Experience, Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Caryle Murphy is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, who was the lone American reporter in Kuwait when Iraq invaded on August 2, 1990. She wrote her dispatches, some anonymously, so that the fact that she was there remained secret, and on August 14, when a group of Europeans made a run for Saudi Arabia, Murphy joined them. She did make several short trips back and forth to cover the short war, and her reporting was awarded with the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Drawing on her five years based in Cairo, Egypt, Murphy wrote Passion for Islam: Shaping the Modern Middle East: The Egyptian Experience. A Kirkus Reviews contributor who called Murphy's reporting "lucid and solid," noted that she "depicts an Egypt uncomfortably close to collapse, though full of devout Muslims who have no interest in seeing their nation become another Iran or Afghanistan and are willing to struggle for the soul of Islam."

Murphy contends that religious terrorism is rooted in a resurgence of fundamentalist Islam, the encroachment of Western culture, the still-unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the increasing power of authoritarian governments in a region that has long been plagued by poverty, corruption, and inequality. She observes that the country's stability is critical to the United States, as long as the United States is dependent on oil imports. Murphy says that, although bound to the peace accords, Egypt is comfortable in letting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict serve as a distraction. Some contend that the socialism of the Nasser era and subsequent governments have weakened Egypt because their foundations are not based in religion, as are those of Israel.

Murphy addresses Islam in four contexts: as political Islam, pious Islam, cultural Islam, and thinking Islam. Her thinking Islamists are reformers who advocate democracy and a more liberal interpretation of Islam and condemn Islamic extremism. Emran Qureshi, reviewing Passion for Islam for the Washington Post Book World, observed that Murphy "holds out hope that these thinkers constitute the nascent forces of an Islamic reformation, which will eventually reconstruct modernity within an indigenous Islamic idiom."

Qureshi wrote that "Islamist militants have not merely benefited from Egypt's prevailing intellectual climate of intolerance; from the 1970s onward, they have enjoyed open state support." It has been suggested that Ayman al-Zawahari, Osama bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, may be the real force behind al Qaeda. If this is true, then the power of al Qaeda springs as much from Egypt as it does from Saudi Arabia, birthplace of bin Laden. Qureshi remarked that the author "has produced a great deal of valuable reporting that lays bare the roots of this reign of terror, chronicling how fringe violent Egyptian Islamist organizations fought the state and terrorized the populace. There are indeed echoes of al Qaeda here."

Qureshi concluded by saying that "Murphy's careful reporting and cogent analysis present readers with an indispensable opportunity to understand how the variegated strands of Islam—tolerant reformist traditions as well as militant anti-Western ones—have taken root in the Arab world's most vital civilization."