Islam Fundamentalists Slip in Kuwait Election

Islamic fundamentalism, which has been regarded since the Iranian revolution as a potent and growing political force throughout the Muslim world, has suffered a setback in voting for Kuwait’s tiny but influential legislature.

Election returns made public Thursday indicated that Khaled Sultan and Issa Shaheen, the two principal spokesmen for the fundamentalist movement in Kuwait, lost their bids for reelection to the National Assembly.

With 50 elected members and 15 appointed by the executive, the assembly is the only functioning Parliament in the oil-rich Arab states that line the Persian Gulf.

Different Views

Two candidates with leanings toward Sunni Muslim fundamentalism were elected in other districts, helping to offset the losses by Sultan and Shaheen. However, two Shia Muslim fundamentalists were defeated and replaced by Shias holding what diplomats described as less sectarian and more moderate views.

Diplomatic analysts said the failure of the Kuwaiti fundamentalists, who scored major gains in the last election, in 1981, to expand their power base in Kuwait suggested that their influence may have reached a plateau.

The results of Wednesday’s polling also suggested, according to political analysts here, that voters have become increasingly frustrated with the government since 1981, particularly on such economic issues as the decline in oil prices and a financial scandal involving a massive stock market fraud.

Thirty-one of the deputies elected to the assembly were new candidates. The losers included Assembly Speaker Mohammed Yusuf Adsani, a close ally of the government, and Jasim Saqr, head of the assembly’s foreign affairs committee.

The primary beneficiary of this discontent was the Democratic Alliance, a loosely knit group of politicians who are the Kuwaiti heirs to the principles of the late Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Democratic Alliance was ousted from the assembly by the shift to fundamentalism in 1981.

Six candidates close to the alliance were elected Wednesday, including Ahmed Khatib, whose election to the assembly in 1975 was one of the reasons cited by the government as justification for the body’s closure for more than five years.

All-Night TV Show

Supporters of the Democratic Alliance staged jubilant celebrations here Thursday morning. Kuwaiti television broadcast the results until the early morning hours, the first time that television has functioned all night here.

The Democratic Alliance deputies are expected to be openly anti-government in the new National Assembly. During the campaign, candidates from the alliance were critical of Kuwait’s relations with the United States, particularly concerning the investment of oil revenues in America, which they said makes Kuwait vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

Sunni fundamentalists constitute a far more important movement in Kuwait than do the Shia fundamentalists because 70% of the population belongs to the Sunni sect. Shia fundamentalists are regarded with increased suspicion here because of their early support for the 1979 revolution in Iran, across the Persian Gulf. Iranians are primarily Shia Muslims.

Although Kuwait’s elections are the freest in the Persian Gulf region, only 56,848 of Kuwait’s 1.7 million people are eligible to cast ballots. Voting is limited to males over age 21 who are able to prove that their families were in Kuwait before 1922. Soldiers and policemen may not vote.