‘Rich Scared, Poor Don’t Understand’ : Egypt Facing Challenge of Fundamentalist Appeal

The “hero of Suez” sat behind a coffee- and ink-stained desk, surrounded by flies, followers and dusty stacks of old papers. His bony fingers picked absently at the frayed ends of a grimy plastic fly swatter as he lectured the young, eager men around him about God, politics, Egypt and Islam.

“He is our guide and our leader,” said a bearded young man who had come all the way from Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, to hear Sheik Hafez Salama speak. “The government should listen to him. But it cannot because it is controlled by the United States.”

In 1973, Salama stubbornly refused to leave the city of Suez before advancing Israeli tanks, thus earning himself the nickname “hero of Suez.” Today, he stands just as stubbornly before his own government, demanding the immediate and full implementation of sharia, or Islamic law.

If Salama and other fundamentalists like him get their way, liquor would be banned, all women would be obliged to wear long dresses and head scarves in public and thieves would answer for their crimes with the loss of their hands.

Relations with Israel would be severed, Salama said, “because of its continued occupation of Arab lands.” Relations with the United States, which last year provided Egypt with nearly $1 billion in aid, would also be broken, because of its support for Israel.

When asked during a recent interview what effect such drastic changes would have on the Egyptian economy, Salama replies, “Our income comes from God.”

(On Sunday, Salama’s attorney and the Cairo newspaper Mayo reported that the religious leader was taken into custody for questioning after security police raided his office the previous day, news agency reports said. The paper said leaflets that “incited anti-government disturbances” were confiscated during the raid, and it added that hundreds of other Muslim fundamentalists were arrested as part of a government crackdown in recent days.)

Salama is widely regarded as the most vocal of Egypt’s militant--but internally divided--fundamentalists. The government calls them “an extremist minority” and says they are not representative of “the people’s democratic views.” An Egyptian political analyst estimates that all together, the fundamentalists command a following of not more than 300,000. “Not much,” he added, “in a nation of 48 million.”

But there is little doubt that the appeal of fundamentalism is growing in Egypt, as it is elsewhere in the Middle East, even if no one has come along yet to unite the movement.

“There is definitely a lot more religious conservatism in Egypt now than there was 10 years ago,” a Western diplomat said recently. “And it’s evident everywhere you look.”

Women Wearing Scarves

On the streets, more and more women are wearing Islamic dress--head scarves and long sleeves. Until early July, when the government banned them, religious stickers bearing Koranic inscriptions could be found on the windows of most cars, from clanking, Soviet-made Ladas to sleek new Mercedes-Benzes.

“The rich are scared of the stridency of the fundamentalists, and the poor don’t understand the political and economic implications of what they preach,” an Egyptian intellectual said. “But most people here, rich or poor, are religious. They are for Islam.”

The government of President Hosni Mubarak is taking seriously the challenge posed by Islamic militancy. “It has looked, with something akin to horror, at what has happened in Iran, Sudan and south Lebanon,” a Western diplomat said. “It doesn’t want it happening here.”

Most experts, Western as well as Egyptian, caution against taking the Iranian parallel too far.

For one thing, fundamentalism as preached by the Sunni Muslims of Egypt is far different from the fiery Shia Muslim militancy practiced in southern Lebanon or Iran.

“Egyptian fundamentalism is different from Saudi fundamentalism, which is different from Iranian fundamentalism,” a Western diplomat said. “To lump them all together, to confuse them as the Western press so often does, is like saying that the Moral Majority represents all Christians in the United States.”

Nor is the controversy over fundamentalism in Egypt exactly new. Parliament held its first debate on the sharia in 1946--and the issue was not new then. In the 19th Century, when the Turkish viceroy of Egypt ordered the enactment of new laws based on the Napoleonic Code, he touched off strong opposition demanding the application of the sharia.

“Fundamentalism,” an Egyptian scholar noted, “is something that every government in this century has had to contend with in its own fashion.”

Mubarak’s two immediate predecessors, Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser, tried to contend with fundamentalism by harnessing it to their own political purposes. Sadat openly encouraged the fundamentalists in order to check the influence of the Nasserites and other leftist opponents. But this soon got out of hand and helped lead to conflicts with Egypt’s Coptic minority, which at the time was itself becoming more militant under the influence of activist Christian bishops led by Pope Shenouda III, patriarch of the Coptic Church.

When mounting sectarian strife finally erupted into full-scale riots in Cairo in June, 1981, Sadat cracked down and arrested more than 1,500 opponents--Christian, Muslim and secular. But he failed to get them all. One Muslim extremist group evaded the dragnet, and on Oct. 6, 1981, five of its members assassinated Sadat as he reviewed a military parade.

Mubarak’s way of dealing with fundamentalism, and with dissent in general, has been a bit different.

Like Sadat, he has on the one hand sought to appease the fundamentalists--in effect, to “out-fundamentalize” them--by acceding to some of their demands. Egypt Air, for instance, has stopped serving liquor on its flights; an expurgated edition of “Thousand and One Nights” has been banned on grounds of obscenity, and the popular American television series “Dallas” has been put aside in response to fundamentalist complaints.

Yet, while proffering his predecessors’ carrot, Mubarak has also been a lot more lenient with his stick. Upon assuming the presidency, one of Mubarak’s first acts was to release religious leaders from jail and to invite the opposition to the presidential palace for discussions on Egypt’s political future.

The consensus that emerged from that meeting, which Mubarak has more or less followed, was that more democracy should be introduced into Egypt to break the cycle of violence and repression that was uniting radical religious elements.

On this score, Mubarak gets high marks from Western diplomats. Although there were opposition charges of ballot-rigging, last year’s parliamentary elections were widely regarded as the freest in years. The press remains on a short leash, but the judiciary has been given a new degree of independence and has exercised it on several occasions, including last year’s acquittal of 174 fundamentalists accused of trying to overthrow the government in the wake of Sadat’s assassination.

But more freedom has also given the fundamentalists more opportunity to lobby more loudly for Islamic law. And, to varying degrees, their message is being embraced at all levels of Egyptian society.

For the rich, there are now “Islamic chic” boutiques offering imaginative and brightly colored clothing for the fashion-conscious but respectable Muslim woman.

Among the educated, especially the students who have traditionally been involved in the Islamic movement, fundamentalism fills what one diplomat believes has been “an ideological vacuum” created in part by Mubarak’s low-key, economy-oriented leadership.

“Nasser offered charisma and pan-Arabism,” the diplomat said. “Sadat promised peace and reigned like a pharaoh. But Mubarak’s is a very non-ideological government. Under Mubarak, the debate has been over the allocation of resources, not ideology. In a sense, he is Egypt’s first non-pharaoh.”

Among the poor, fundamentalism’s hold is harder to judge. But its ability to “articulate social and economic grievances” has a powerful appeal, the diplomat said.

An Egyptian writer put it this way: “There is a momentous debate going on in Egyptian society at the moment. On the one hand, you have the government preaching about democracy and a prosperity that for most does not even exist yet. On the other, you have people preaching purity, piety and an end to corruption by the rich. You tell me who’s likely to win that debate.”

So far, the poor show no sign of being that disaffected or of being, in one diplomat’s words, “poised to run screaming into the streets.” Nor are the fundamentalists urging them to do so. Although the movement has occasionally bared its fangs in the past, it has so far remained law-abiding in its current incarnation. “Sheik Salama,” a Western diplomat said, “is in our estimation no Khomeini.”

Nevertheless, the government is showing signs of increasing unease over the fundamentalists and, some diplomats think, may be on the verge of switching tactics. No longer content with just the carrot of appeasement, Mubarak is warning that he will not hesitate to use the stick.

At least three times in the past month, the government has used emergency powers that have been in effect since Sadat’s death to ban fundamentalist rallies. Earlier this month, Mubarak tried to ban Salama from Cairo’s Al Noor mosque, where he has spoken every Friday after noon prayers. Embarrassingly for the government, the attempt failed. Troops ringed the area but backed down when Salama’s followers refused to let the new government-appointed cleric address them.

‘Warn and Warn Again’

Now Mubarak has warned that he will not tolerate “agitation and marches . . . under slogans that appear good on the surface but have all kinds of evil underneath.”

“I warn and warn and warn again,” he said in a recent speech to provincial governors, “that we shall not hesitate for a moment to resist people who, out of ignorance or arrogance, try to impose their ambitions on the nation by force.”

And there are other signs that the appeasement policy may have peaked.

In early July, Parliament passed a new divorce law that, while affirming the right of polygamy for men, upheld the right of a wife to divorce her husband if she objects to his taking another spouse. Left substantially unchanged from the previous law, the portion dealing with the wife’s right to divorce had been contested by fundamentalists who believe that it impinges upon polygamy as sanctioned by Islam.

And perhaps just as telling were the new television listings. “Dallas” was still off the air, but in its place was the Cairo premiere of a new series likely to ruffle fundamentalist feathers at least as much--”Knots Landing.”