Arab Fundamentalism : Revival of Islam a Vent for Protest

Laith Shubeilat, a soft-spoken engineer, hardly fits the popular Western image of a Muslim fundamentalist.

At work at an architectural firm here, he is dressed in a stylish dark suit, the mark of business success among Jordan’s fledgling middle class. He speaks self-assured English with an accent reminiscent of the American East Coast, a byproduct of a master’s degree from George Washington University in Washington.

Yet Shubeilat is one of three politicians who surprised political analysts last year by winning election to Parliament on an unambiguous platform of transforming Jordan, one of the Arab world’s most moderate nations, into a strict Islamic state.

“In Jordan, our identity as Muslim Arabs has been stolen completely,” Shubeilat said in a recent interview. “People no longer trust anything Western.”

Sympathies Shared

People who share Shubeilat’s sympathies are becoming increasingly common in the Arab world as a major resurgence of Islam sweeps the region.

While the violent fundamentalist tide so feared in the West after the revolution in Iran six years ago has largely failed to materialize, the Islamic revival continues to gather momentum, particularly among the young people of the Arab world.

Women from Morocco to Egypt are donning conservative clothes and covering their heads with scarves and even veils in a display of Islamic pride. Mosques virtually everywhere are full to overflowing for Friday prayers.

“The young have tried everything from communism to socialism and nationalism,” observed Abbas Kelidar, a professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “Now they have returned to the ‘ism’ they know best--Islam. People are not becoming more pious, they are merely more active. It’s a political manifestation.”

The reasons for this Muslim upsurge seem as diverse as the region itself.

In some Arab countries, notably Egypt, the failure of a nationalistic secular government to fulfill its ambitious promises is frequently mentioned as a cause of popular discontent.

At Birzeit University in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, female students wear Islamic head scarves as an emblem of their opposition to Israeli rule. During student elections recently, supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization won 800 votes, the Communists polled 100 and 600 went to Islamic fundamentalists.

In countries like Syria and Iraq, where socialist Baath Party governments have ruthlessly suppressed Islamic movements in recent years, adherence to Islam is often regarded as a form of political protest that the ruling group finds difficult to eliminate.

“It’s hard for anyone to be against Islam in a Muslim country,” said Malise Ruthvens, a British scholar who has just published a study of Islam. “The nationalist vocabulary has been discredited by the fact that the nationalists have been in power and didn’t deliver the goods. Where can the popular opposition go? In Islam, it’s got a vocabulary that can appeal to the masses.”

While the fundamentalist revival shows few shown signs of abating, there are indications that Arab Muslims are beginning to repudiate excesses carried out in the name of religion, such as in Sudan, where President Jaafar Numeiri was deposed in April.

There also has been hesitation about whether fundamentalism has gone too far; Egypt recently rejected the imposition of Islamic law, known as the sharia (meaning “the right path”) in place of the country’s mixture of Western and Islamic legal codes.

Silent Muslim Majority

“The fundamentalist challenge has alerted what you might call the silent majority of the Muslim world,” said Ruthvens. “Muslim fundamentalism is primarily an urban phenomenon--groups look to religion as a kind of prop under difficult living conditions--and the rural majority is beginning to hit back and stand up for versions of Islam that are not so puritanical or orthodox.”

Indeed, it was the rise to power of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran after the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi that set off alarm bells throughout the Arab world, particularly in the arc of Arab states along the Persian Gulf.

The gulf states, many of them religiously conservative before the Iranian revolution, were nonetheless horrified at unsavory reports emanating from Tehran of wide-scale executions and the martyring of children by sending them into battle against Iraqi troops in the name of the Islamic revolution. There was an even greater fear: The same thing might happen to them.

‘Just a Disaster’

“The difficulties in Iran are making people outside think twice about Islamic fundamentalism,” said Sheik Isa ibn Mohammed al Khalifa, the former minister of justice in Bahrain. “The situation there is just a disaster.”

Thus, a major cause of concern for the gulf states is the Iran-Iraq War, which has been raging since September, 1980. Fears of Iranian revolutionaries spreading their cause after vanquishing Iraq have resulted in a rare display of Arab unity, with all the gulf countries lining up in support of Iraq’s war effort.

The Iran-Iraq conflict has also sharpened the centuries-old antagonisms between the two principal branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias.

Forming 90% of the population in non-Arab Iran, the Shias also have a majority in Iraq and sizable populations in most of the gulf countries. Overall, however, Shias are a minority in the Arab world.

Issue of Succession

The principal distinction between the two groups is that the Shias believe that the Prophet Mohammed designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor and that Ali’s male descendants have a divine authority. The Sunnis believe that while Ali was an esteemed figure, he was not the Prophet’s designated heir.

The martyrdom of Ali and his son, Hussein, infuse Shia Islam with a sense of tragedy, defeat and martyrdom that Sunnis do not demonstrate. At its worst, this sense of martyrdom has been exploited as a justification for terrorist acts such as assassinations and suicide bombings.

Equally important, the primary Shia sect holds that until the return of the 12th Imam, who disappeared in the year 874, the religious leaders known as ayatollahs will rule on Earth in his place. This distinction has led some observers to compare Shia and Sunni Islam to the differences between the Roman Catholic Church, with its hierarchical order led by the Pope, and Protestantism.

In the Name of Islam

The excesses carried out in the name of Islam in Iran have been so repugnant that they probably played a role in turning voters against fundamentalist candidates during elections in February for Kuwait’s tiny Parliament.

While several local issues acted to favor nationalist politicians, it was also apparent that a backlash against Iran had developed because of a series of terrorist bombings carried out in Kuwait a year ago by an Iranian-backed group and the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner to Tehran that resulted in the deaths of two Americans.

When the votes were counted in Kuwait, the leading Shia fundamentalist and two prominent Sunni fundamentalists had been defeated.

The only country where the Iranian revolution has found fertile soil for transplantation is Lebanon, where Shias form a narrow majority.

In recent months, the political group known as Hezbollah, or Party of God, has expanded rapidly. Hezbollah is led by Shia clerics who openly acknowledge their allegiance to Iran, which is believed to finance the party’s activities in Lebanon.

Role in Terrorism

Hezbollah and another Iranian-supported Shia group known as Al Dawa are widely believed to be the principal actors behind Islamic Jihad, an ephemeral group that has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon and for kidnaping Americans in the Lebanese capital.

While the rise of Hezbollah has been accompanied by a trend toward fundamentalism--the Iranian chador is now commonly worn by Muslim women in Lebanon--Hezbollah’s rapid growth can be traced almost directly to Muslim outrage over Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.

The hijacking of a Rome-bound Trans World Airlines plane to Beirut last month was widely regarded as the work of Hezbollah.

Even though one of the American hostages was killed during the 16-day air piracy drama, many Lebanese expressed approval of the hijacking, not as an Islamic act but as a way of forcing Israel to return 766 Lebanese prisoners held in an Israeli prison.

In the wake of Israel’s retreat from Lebanon after three years of military occupation, the importance of Shia fundamentalism is widely expected to diminish.

Egypt is perhaps the best example of a nation being pushed toward Islam by the failure of nationalism. In Egypt, the turning point is frequently put at 1967, when the armies of the charismatic Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser were easily defeated by the Israelis in the Six-Day War. The defeat made many Egyptians embrace religion as a substitute for Nasser’s vanquished political theories.

Review of Legal Code

Although President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Muslim fundamentalists in 1981, there have been ambiguous signs since then about the country’s religious course.

The Egyptian Parliament has rejected calls from the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of fundamentalists founded in 1922, for the imposition of sharia law and said the country’s legal code will instead be reviewed to revise provisions that contradict Islamic law.

The sharia controversy was followed by an intriguing recent debate over the importation of “Thousand and One Nights,” one of the most famous works in Arabic literature.

An Egyptian court eventually ordered the imported Arabic edition banned on grounds of obscenity, but not before the government-controlled press complained that rather than saving the Islamic world from Western culture, the fundamentalists were now engaged in stripping away Egypt’s cultural heritage. The ban, however, remained in effect.

Egypt is one of the Arab countries where allegiance to Islam can now be measured in the number of veiled women whom a visitor casually encounters on the streets.

Request for Prayer Area

Colin Davis, director of a private language institute in Cairo, said students recently sent him a petition asking for a prayer area. Later, they asked for separate facilities for women.

Davis recalled that a student was turned away at another private school in Cairo because the child’s mother did not cover her hair in the Muslim fashion.

“The Muslims took things from the Western world and they thought it would satisfy them, but it didn’t,” said Abdel-Munem Nimer, Egypt’s former minister of religious affairs. “The return to Islam is not an attack on Western countries. It is merely aimed at making life better within Islamic countries.”

Paradoxically, efforts by President Numeiri in Sudan to impose strict Islamic laws worked against him and helped lead to his overthrow.

Initially, efforts to impose Islamic law in Sudan were popular. But Numeiri began moving at an astonishing pace, finally adopting Islamic punishments such as amputation of hands and limbs.

Hanged for ‘Heresy’

Numeiri even had one elderly cleric, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, publicly hanged for “heresy” because of his opposition to the way Islamic law was being imposed.

“Many Muslims are very worried about people like Numeiri, who try to co-opt Islam and are identified with Islam because they misrepresent and distort the religion,” said Muddathir Abdel-Rahim Tayeb, a Sudanese political scientist. “This kind of unthinking conservatism is now a basic target of Muslim intellectuals.”

In Jordan, the government is also attempting to co-opt religion to some extent, but the effort seems more succesful than in Sudan and far more benign.

King Hussein’s government has permitted the fundamentalist movement to operate, but under very close scrutiny. Every preacher in the mosques is a government employee whose weekly sermon has been approved in advance by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Frequently, plainclothes policemen are in attendance.

Degree of Freedom

“In Jordan, Islamic activities are free but not characterized by extremist or compulsive behavior,” said Ahmed Hilail, the director of Islamic preaching and the king’s religious adviser. “There is freedom to practice your religion, but it is controlled by the government to some extent.”

Politics are forbidden topics in sermons, Hilail added, except as related to the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.

It has been suggested that the election of Muslim fundamentalists to Parliament last year may have been orchestrated by the government as a means of ensuring that relatively “safe” politicians, rather than fanatics, unfurled the banner of Islam.

The one place where it would seem hard to be more fundamentalist is Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the Prophet Mohammed and guardian of Islam’s holiest shrines at Mecca. It is a fundamental principle of Islam that a devout Muslim will make a pilgrimage to Mecca sometime during his lifetime.

Ultraconservative Movement

The ruling Saud family of Saudi Arabia adheres to the tradition of an ultraconsertavive Sunni movement known as Wahhabism, which requires a literal interpretation of the Koran and the holy book of traditional Muslim practices known as the Hadith.

In Saudi Arabia, stores close for prayers at prescribed times during the day, and women are forbidden to drive and are legally segregated from men at work and at play. All this is supervised by bearded, cane-wielding men known as the mutawain, or public morality committees.

Movie theaters are banned, and Saudi theologians have decried such seemingly innocuous aspects of Western culture as Michael Jackson (on grounds of lewdness), the game of chess (for unclear reasons) and life insurance (it is, in the theologians’ view, wagering against the will of God).

Recently, however, even the Saudis have encountered increasing trouble from fundamentalists. For two terrifying weeks in November, 1979, Islamic fanatics took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and proclaimed one of their number the messiah.

Heavy Security Measures

While the Mecca incident was never believed to have aroused much public support, the Saudis have since applied stringent security measures during the annual pilgrimage known as the Hajj.

In 1982, for example, there were several clashes between Saudi security forces and Iranian pilgrims that resulted in the expulsion of 67 Iranians. Last year, Libyan pilgrims were arrested for trying to smuggle weapons into Mecca during the Hajj.

Perhaps as a result of the contradiction between Saudi Arabia’s strict adherence to Islamic law and the high-technology advances that are the country’s pride, King Fahd recently called on Islamic scholars to renew the practice of ijitihad, or interpretation, to help reconcile the teachings of the Prophet with the modern world.

Fahd was quoted as saying that Islam confronts “a multitude of new events and many unanswered questions and accumulated problems. . . . “

As Albert Hourani, a noted Arabist at Oxford University in England wrote in a recent essay on Islam, the Islamic revival can in part be explained “by the need (not felt only in Muslim countries) to give meaning and direction to the process of rapid and irreversible change in which we are all involved. In such a situation, men and women look for beliefs and symbols which will give them the possibility of behaving rationally, and the assurance that what they are doing, or what has been done to them, is somehow intelligible and in accordance with the nature of the universe.”