For hundreds of years the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo was one of the foremost seats of Islamic learning, propagating its ideas throughout the Muslim world. Today this "house of wisdom" radiates a spirit of religious bigotry. Its bigotry does not, however, serve the cause of Islamic fundamentalism. Rather, it is employed by the army-backed government of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in his battle against fundamentalists intent on supplanting his regime. The book-banning and harassment of secular intellectuals at which Azhari clerics have excelled for much of this century now has the power of the state behind it.
Egypt's situation encapsulates the underlying drama for the countries of the Arab world experiencing the Islamist revival. Virtually none of their governments have confidence enough in their own legitimacy to mobilise society against the fundamentalist upsurge. They seek instead to survive by outflanking the Islamists, through recourse to official piety and the courting of the religious establishment. They are thereby abetting a creeping theocracy, visible across the region in the proliferation of the veil and the beard, and in the growing social and political role of the mosque. Much of Arab civil society-traditionally vibrant and pluralist in Egypt-is in headlong retreat.
Gone are the days when Mubarak himself could order the demolition of a minaret because it obscured a view of the great pyramids at Giza. In the most populous country of the region, Pharaoh now defers to the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, who has been prodigal in his fatwas on what books should be read and films seen, and why young girls must be genitally mutilated (now possible in state hospitals).
Meanwhile, western leaders frighten themselves with the Islamist menace while endorsing anyone from Saddam Hussein to Mubarak who appears to have a strategy for dealing with them (in Afghanistan they even backed an Islamic war against the Soviet occupation). Willy Claes, the beleaguered secretary-general of Nato, stated recently that radical Islam posed "at least as dangerous a threat" to the western alliance as communism had. He was speaking almost exactly 900 years after Pope Urban II launched the first crusade, kicking off centuries of conflict between Christian and Muslim.
Much western commentary on the current fundamentalist phenomenon conjures up the spectre of Islamic dominoes falling across the region, usually starting from Iran, spreading into central Asia, through the middle east and across north Africa. (East Asia remains largely immune to politicised fundamentalism.) Such images are gratefully reinforced by Arab and north African regimes keen to use the fundamentalist threat to secure western financial and military aid to keep themselves in power.
Fundamentalist strongholds
Anti-western fundamentalism holds power in only two states. In 1979 the mullahs won power in Iran and ten years later the military coup in Sudan ushered in a regime ideologically fuelled by Hassan al-Turabi's Islamic National Front.
But in 1992 Algeria subsided into a savage civil war, with the military-dominated regime barely able to hold its own against two Islamist militias. And Islam-inspired militancy provides daily, often chilling, incident in several other states: the emergence in Afghanistan of the Taliban, a movement led by theology students which has swept to the gates of Kabul; or the suicide bombers launched against Israel by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, Palestinian groups in the occupied territories which are copying the tactics of the Iran-inspired Hizbollah militia used to drive Israel out of most of Lebanon.
"Yes, we are using their methods," acknowledges Dr Mahmoud Zahhar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, the teeming sliver of land from which Yasser Arafat's secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) now hopes to expand into the west bank and build a state after September's agreement with Israel on expanding Palestinian self-rule. Dr Zahhar, professor of medicine at Gaza's Islamic University (the finishing school for scores of Hamas cadre), perfumes his hands with jasmine and describes the carnage of the suicide bombers as "the natural escalation of defence" against Israeli occupation. "We are in no hurry," he smiles, talking of long-term strategy which is "to establish a pan-Islamic state-not just in Palestine." Such theocratic groups, ruthless and able, undeniably pose a threat within and beyond the borders they profess not to recognise. But they still occupy a small part of the Islamist spectrum. There is a far broader phenomenon of political Islam as a channel for popular grievance at the failures of middle eastern development, and the lack of legitimacy of most of the regimes presiding over these failures. So far there is no widely agreed strategy on dealing with that phenomenon-or, for that matter, agreement on exactly what it is.
The Islamist case
The core of the radical Islamist argument is that existing institutions in the Arab world were imposed by colonial powers. These are now administered by corrupt, brutal and narrow elites, while the mass of people goes hungry. The failures of "Arab socialism" in countries such as Syria, Egypt and Algeria, and the dislocation and inequity caused by attempts to catch up with the west via capitalism (fuelled in part by wastefully employed oil riches), have created an ideological vacuum in which fundamentalist Islam is able to flourish.
Algeria is the best example of this. The now displaced National Liberation Front (FLN) government, which having won the war against France, frittered away the country's oil and gas wealth, and sank into corruption. When the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed poised for victory in elections in 1991 the army moved in and cancelled the second round-the trigger for civil war.
In the east of the region, Egypt, Jordan and Syria once derived legitimacy from their state of permanent mobilisation against Israel. But then came defeat in the 1967 six-day war. The significance of this event, as catalyst in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a liberation theology, cannot be overstated. The Arabs' defeat and heavy loss of territory irretrievably damaged the cause of secular, pan-Arab nationalism.
A marked tone of piety crept into the rhetoric of the "radical" regimes (Nasser in Egypt, and the Ba'ath party in Syria and Iraq). The "feudal " regimes they had reviled -the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and the al-Saud ruling family in Saudi Arabia-suddenly regained vigour and credibility, especially after the newly acquired Gulf wealth created by the 1973 oil shock. Those riches also helped to promote the al-Saud's austere Wahhabi strain of Islam throughout the region. Anyone who wonders where Arab political aspirations took refuge after 1967 could simply count mosques. Their number doubled in the west bank and tripled in Gaza since 1967, while in Egypt there are an estimated 40,000 unlicensed mosques. And the three main countries defeated in 1967 (Syria, Egypt and Jordan) produced surges of support for the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al-Muslimin, the original "fundamentalist " group, founded in Eygpt in 1928.
Repression or co-option
Each country has dealt differently with this recharged Islamism. In Syria, the Ba'athist regime militarily crushed a Brotherhood insurrection in 1982, razing its Hama stronghold with the loss of 20,000 lives; in Jordan, seven years later, King Hussein took the risk of letting the Brothers stand for election, in which they confounded all predictions by taking over a quarter of the seats and becoming the strongest opposition group. In Egypt itself, the Brotherhood, formally banned since 1954, has survived repression alternating with periods of government tolerance. Today the country is in many respects a test case of how to contain the Islamic revival, and would be the greatest prize for the fundamentalists.
The Mubarak government faces low-level insurgency from the violent Islamists of the Gama'a al-Islamiya. Against them Mubarak has used what he himself calls "the iron fist." His flamboyant predecessor Anwar Sadat-assassinated by members of the Jihad group in 1981-had temporised with the revivalists and even financed the Gama'a as a counter to the left on Egypt's campuses. But Mubarak's security services, according to human rights organisations, habitually use torture and hostage-taking against the Gama'a. These tactics have restricted the Gama'a to three impoverished districts of Upper Egypt, about 300km south of Cairo. Yet the limits of repression were highlighted in June, when the Gama'a-operating from their rearguard in Sudan-came close to assassinating Mubarak while he was on his way to an African summit.
The attempt sparked a new crackdown, aimed this time at the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government accuses of being no more than the civilian wing of the Gama'a. Evidence for the link is thin and the Brotherhood is both part of mainstream Egyptian society and the country's largest political grouping. Likened by some to a state-within-the-state, they are really more a society within society. The Brotherhood competes advantageously with the state to provide services, ranging from supermarkets to soup-kitchens, financed in the past by Saudi money but now mostly from collecting the Zakat, an Islamic tithe system.
As well as welfare the Brotherhood controls patronage-through Islamic publishing houses and banks, and through valuable endorsements for hundreds of thousands of Egyptians seeking work in the religiously conservative Gulf. Members of the Brotherhood also lead influential professional unions of doctors, lawyers and engineers.
The crackdown in Egypt is eloquent of the regime's lack of confidence. Its immediate motive is the parliamentary elections this November, for which the rules have been changed to prevent the effective participation of the Brotherhood. Mohamed Sid Ahmed, an independent Egyptian commentator, argues that "the regime fears that the FIS will take over in Algeria and that with Turabi in Sudan, and Hamas entrenched in Gaza, it will be cornered." Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian authority on fundamentalism, says: "Egypt, of course, is the heart of the matter; if it falls to the fundamentalists, it will have a domino effect." Nevertheless, he argues that "Egypt can't do it in the Syrian way."
That is not a view shared in the west, where the US and its allies continue to bankroll Cairo's and Algiers' military response to political Islam. Western agencies and governments have kept aid flowing to Algiers, pushing aside any suggestion that financing should be conditional on the regime negotiating a transition to democracy on the basis of the platform agreed in Rome earlier this year by the secular and Islamist Algerian opposition.
But there is also the more inclusive Jordanian (and Kuwaiti) way of dealing with resurgent Islam. It seems to work, so the question is whether or not it is transplantable. King Hussein of Jordan brought the Brotherhood into parliament, giving it enough responsibility to demonstrate that there is little substance to its mantra that "Islam is the solution." In Kuwait, too, the Brothers have lost ground: failing to impose segregated education; and seeing their presence in cabinet reduced.
So why doesn't the Egyptian government follow this example? "The point is that Jordan has 3m people, Kuwait has about 1m, Egypt has 60m," says Mubarak, himself a Muslim Brother in his youth. "These Islamists are sly people and you have to understand the culture." Co-option of the Islamists via "the parliamentary road," says a senior Egyptian official more candidly, "will only work if you fill the political vacuum."
That is difficult for a regime as tired as Mubarak's. Although it has broken with "Arab socialism" it is lukewarm about structural economic reform, through fear of losing patronage. The story is similar in Syria, which has been orphaned by the collapse of its Soviet sponsor and impoverished by the middle east peace process.
Political vacuum
The Brotherhood in Egypt understands as well as the regime that there is a vacuum, and calculates that its best chance of filling it is through overt and legitimate political action.The Brothers now advertise their acceptance of the principle of a written constitution which protects all citizens irrespective of belief, and stress that Islam makes women equal to men. Democratic advocacy has displaced the restorationist discourse of the previous generation.
There has always been a rich vein of casuistry in "Islamic governance," in part because Islam does not separate church and state. Most Muslims are "fundamentalist" in that they would claim to believe in the founding tenets of their creed. The original codification of the Hadith-the doings and sayings of the Prophet-was done largely to boost the rival claims of different theological/legal schools of Islamic governance and morality. Development of these canons was subsequently subject to the devices of theologians at the service of the powerful or the would-be powerful. This tradition of suppleness-Mubarak would say "slyness"-applies both to the fundamentalists and their opponents.
There are plenty of current examples. Hamas, for instance, is caressing the idea of a power-sharing agreement with the PLO. Whether or not it participates in the Palestinian elections due next spring as a result of September's PLO-Israeli agreement will be an entirely pragmatic decision. This will weigh up its support (unlikely to exceed the 20-30 per cent attraction to the Islamist option now common across the region), and the possibilities of influencing the PLO-which, despite Palestinian traditions of pluralism, scarcely deviates from the autocratic practices of most Arab governments.
How violent how international?
But what about the other side? Should the PLO, or the governments of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, treat with the Islamists or not? Can they rely on beating the fundamentalists in open political combat? Are the Islamists internationally co-ordinated? Is violence intrinsic to their strategy?Is Islamism a permanent phenomenon?
One way or another, it is the power of the state which everywhere is being used to combat the Islamists: the Syrian tanks at Hama, the rigid secularism of Tunisian school books, the Egyptian gallows, the Algerian army "Ninja" units. But the "state" is also the bedrock which allows King Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait to admit the Brotherhood into contested elections. In both Jordan and Kuwait the issue is not size-as Mubarak says-but the fact that both monarchs have a guarantee of unconditional, tribal, support from part of the population which, for the moment, gives them a (pre-modern) base of legitimacy. Arafat has taken note and is assiduously cultivating the Palestinian system of clans and family notables in the west bank in order to counter Hamas and guarantee electoral victory next spring.
It also helps that Kuwait is rich-nobody can doubt that the foot-soldiers of Islamism are the desperate poor-and that Jordan has a prosperous middle class (even if parts of the middle class across the Arab world are falling into the arms of the fundamentalists). Furthermore, tribalism is not available as a weapon of co-option in countries such as Egypt and Syria, whose regimes ultimately rely on the army. But such reliance is dangerous. No army in the region is impervious to the Islamists. Sadat, for example, was assassinated by Islamist army officers at a military parade and in Sudan it was the army which brought the Islamists to power.
There is, however, little evidence that violence is intrinsic to Islamism, or that fundamentalism is as pan-Islamic as its proponents or opponents claim. Violence has taken place generally as resistance (Hamas in the occupied territories, the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan), as opposition to corruption and the denial of the democratic process (Algeria, Egypt, Syria), or as spillovers from these situations into the cities of western countries seen as the allies of these regimes (the Algerian Islamist bombings in France). Where Islamism has been admitted into the democratic process, as in Jordan and Kuwait, there has been no violence (not even in Tunisia, where the Al-Nahda movement has eschewed an armed response despite the government's blanket repression).
The Brotherhood is the nearest to an "international" the Islamic movement has. But beyond pan-Islamic conventions there is little strategic co-ordination. Most western commentators now acknowledge that the 1990s have been far less fruitful for the fundamentalists than the 1980s were. Even the Iranian mullahs have pulled in their horns. Iran badly needs to break out of its international isolation, and is strapped for cash (its subvention to Hizbollah in Lebanon has been more than halved). The only real "internationalist" dimension is a direct by-product of the western-backed war in Afghanistan, the training ground for many Islamist volunteers who have now returned home to take on their own regimes.
Afghanistan has had a broader significance. In the Islamist critique, the Israelis won the 1967 war, and subsequent contests, because of their ability to ally the quasi-religious motivation of Zionism with modern technology. For tens of millions of Muslims, for whom Afghanistan was a faraway country of which they knew little, victory against the Soviets-more even than the Iranian revolution-was proof that the tide was turning in their favour: that religious fervour and western rocketry were an irresistible combination which could humble an empire.
Copying the Zionist recipe for success fails to take account of the democratic legitimacy of Israel. It also disregards how unappealing Islamist solutions appear to most of the world's one billion Muslims. The Islamists have failed to show that they can run countries (witness the prostrate economies of Iran and Sudan), much less to substantiate their claims that they have an alternative economics and sociology.
Some believe that Islamic fundamentalism is a cyclical phenomenon, a retreat into pietism at times of social stress. Others argue that it is an inevitable evolution from "folk Islam" as the masses become better educated and unfavourably compare their own regimes against the high principles of Islamic teaching. In either case it is widely accepted that it will remain a force. The logic of co-option through democracy is the most attractive. But that depends on the political self-confidence of Arab rulers-something, alas, in short supply.
