Amid Social Malaise : Egypt: Rise of Muslim Militancy

She was not more than 10, and a frown of concentration vexed her dimpled face as she took the microphone from her teacher and stepped before her classmates to lead them in the words she knew by heart.

“We will answer the call of Islam, and all of us will be sacrificed for Islam,” she intoned in a bell-like voice.

The other children, all between the ages of 5 and 10, replied in unison: “We will gather in the Islamic state. We will change society and the evil in it.”

At the Dar el Andalus elementary school and three other Islamic schools like it in this provincial capital in Upper Egypt, rigorous religious training begins early.

‘Things Out of Control’

“It is necessary,” said a Muslim university professor who sends his children to the school. “We live in a mess. Things are out of control. The government doesn’t know how to solve our problems, and the people don’t know what they want. So, our job is to build an idea. We must help people know what they want.”

The “idea,” in this case, is what is often referred to as Islamic fundamentalism. Adherents prefer to call it the Islamic trend or solution.

Although its advocates differ in the degree of their militancy, in their attitudes toward the West and in the means that they would use to achieve their ends, they share essentially the same goal: a “pure” Islamic state whose laws and foreign policies would be governed by the strict codes of conduct embodied in the Sharia, or Islamic law.

Solving ‘All Our Problems’

In such a state, the fundamentalists believe, there would be true social and economic justice. The sale of liquor would be banned, women would have to wear the nun-like attire known as the hijab and apostasy would be the worst of all possible crimes, punishable by death. In such a state, said Mohammed Habib, a geology professor at Asyut University, “all our problems would be solved.”

Precisely how specific problems such as inflation, foreign debt, urban blight and overpopulation would be solved is something the fundamentalists have yet to work out, their secular critics note.

To the fundamentalists, these are mere details. In their view, the underlying causes of all Egypt’s problems are moral decadence and lack of faith; solutions will follow naturally once the wicked ways of the West are rejected and virtue is re-established according to Allah’s will.

“Let us not think of what happens after we cross the river,” Habib said. “Let us cross the river first.”

Five years ago, on Oct. 6, 1981, fundamentalists from a militant group known as Jihad (Holy War) tried to storm across that river.

During celebrations marking the anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, a team of assassins led by Khaled Islambouli, a young army lieutenant, broke away from a military parade near Cairo and poured gunfire into a reviewing stand, killing President Anwar Sadat.

Taking this as their cue, several hundred Jihad members rose up in Asyut, the largest city in Upper Egypt, 235 miles south of Cairo. Their goal, according to subsequent court testimony, was to start an Islamic revolution that would overthrow the essentially secular government and impose Sharia by force.

The uprising lasted three days and left more than 100 people dead. More than 300 Jihad members were arrested. Islambouli and four others were executed, 107 were sentenced to prison terms of up to life at hard labor and 174 were eventually acquitted.

Things have calmed down considerably in the five years since Sadat’s death, which was the climax of a series of bloody events that began seven years earlier, when armed fundamentalists from another extremist group tried to carry out a coup by seizing a military academy.

Analysts generally credit President Hosni Mubarak’s more liberal and conciliatory policies, toward not only the fundamentalists but the opposition in general, for dampening the religious passions inflamed by Sadat’s sometimes mercurial rule.

Nevertheless, both proponents and opponents of the Islamic trend agree that it is growing.

Although numbers are extremely hard to come by, the increase in converts is evident in the large numbers of women wearing the hijab. In some areas of Cairo and in provincial cities such as Asyut, which has long been regarded as a center for Islamic fundamentalism, the niqab , a full veil covering everything but a woman’s eyes, may be seen.

In recent years, private schools such as the Dar el Andalus elementary school have also become popular. They are part of a still small but expanding Islamic infrastructure set up by fundamentalist groups as a parochial alternative to overcrowded and often substandard government institutions.

The four schools in Asyut, which include a middle school opened this year, have an enrollment of 1,800 students and five times as many on their waiting lists, according to Mahmoud Ahmed, an Asyut University engineering professor who helped organize the schools. The curriculum duplicates that of the government schools but adds 12 hours of religious instruction per six-day week.

“The thinking behind them is to produce children who will be educated in Islam, children who someday will change society,” Ahmed said.

Besides the schools in Asyut and four others in Cairo, Islamic institutions include several banks and factories, medical clinics and scores of small businesses, including fast food outlets.

Although fundamentalist leaders deny it, much of the money made by these businesses is believed to go back to the movement, which is also said to receive support through discreet channels from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Persian Gulf states.

More telling, however, are the impressive inroads made by fundamentalist groups in politics and in recent elections to university and professional associations.

The largest and oldest fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, has nine members in the national People’s Assembly despite the fact that it is technically illegal and cannot form its own political party due to its sectarian platform.

Banned from campaigning under the banner of Islam, the Brotherhood has donned a political veil and formed odd-couple partnerships with the secularist Wafd and Liberal Socialist opposition parties, which have sought to broaden their own limited voter appeal by tapping into the fundamentalist fervor.

Of the Wafd’s 56 assembly seats, eight are filled by fundamentalists, while the tiny Liberal Socialist Party recently doubled its representation with the defection of another fundamentalist from the Wafd.

Fundamentalists from other Islamic groups, which collectively are known as the jamaat , also won 12 of 14 contested seats on the board of the medical association last spring and captured similarly strong majorities in elections to the pharmacists’ association and the faculty clubs at Cairo and Asyut universities.

“The fundamentalists are spreading everywhere,” said a Western diplomat who has followed their fortunes. “They are even seeding the left-wing opposition newspapers with their members.”

Fundamentalism is thriving, most analysts say, because of widespread and worsening economic and social hardships.

Those problems include soaring prices, shortages of essential goods, urban overcrowding and the gradual decay of antiquated services and infrastructures that can no longer support a population that recently topped 51 million and grows at the rate of 1 million every nine months.

“I don’t think the fundamentalists pose an immediate threat to this government, now in 1986,” the diplomat said. “But as long as the economy continues to stumble, they will flourish in fertile ground.”

After years of enforced egalitarianism under Gamal Abdel Nasser, the class differences re-created by Sadat’s infitah, or open-door economic policies, polarized society between the very rich and the poor. Most of what was once the middle class fell into the top of the latter category, in economic terms at least.

Although some of the excesses of these policies have been curbed under Mubarak, he has failed to defuse the social tensions that continue to rise as oil-related revenues fall, adding to economic hardship.

One alarming indication of these tensions was the riot last February by several thousand poorly paid police conscripts. In three days on the rampage, they burned several of the luxury hotels that they were supposed to protect.

Although primarily a revolt against economic conditions, the riot also had fundamentalist overtones. Among the targets of the rioters’ wrath were nightclubs that served liquor and featured belly-dancing, which the fundamentalists believe is sinful.

Mohammed Sid Ahmed, a prominent leftist writer and critic of the fundamentalists, said the Islamic revival “is a religious expression of the political crisis in Egypt today.” Also, he observed, it is “the other side of the coin of infitah, a way to keep your emotional stability by making your deprivations tolerable, virtuous, even militant.”

Less visible but equally important, in the view of many analysts, is a malaise of the spirit that began to seep through society after Egypt estranged itself from the rest of the Arab world by making peace with Israel. It is a depression that has deepened under Mubarak, whose leadership is often criticized as lackluster and indecisive, though well-meaning.

“This is a country that once had meaning and visions and dreams and desperately needs them again,” an Egyptian intellectual said. “Egyptians are really thirsty for something good to happen to them. Day and night, they are longing for something that says tomorrow can be better.”

Habib, the geology professor, who is one of the leaders of the fundamentalist trend among the faculty at Asyut University, agrees.

“The lack of solutions and thoughts has led people to Islam,” he said. “Everywhere, the trend is growing. People are becoming more religious.”

However, like the secularists, Habib and other moderate fundamentalists say they worry that Islamic extremist groups such as Jihad are also gaining in popularity among the young, especially on university campuses.

The moderates, represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, most of whose members are over 60 years old, counsel patience and seek to establish an Islamic state from “the bottom up” by first instilling Islamic values in society through lectures and educational endeavors such as the fledgling Islamic school system, Habib said.

The radicals, however, are impatient, Habib said. They would impose Islam from the top down, forcibly and through revolution, and are openly scornful of the Brotherhood, whose members they refer to derisively as “circus lions.”

“Their goal is the same,” Habib added, “but their way of reaching it is different. The militant wants to ride a rocket to his goal. The moderate is content to go by car.”

Lately, there have been several signs that the activities of the militants are increasing.

In Cairo, a number of liquor shops and stores that rent what the fundamentalists deem to be indecent videos have been the targets of arson attacks.

In Asyut, a fire believed to have been set by fundamentalists damaged a newly built bridge across the Nile. Asyut University last year was the scene of several violent protests and incidents, including a hunger strike and an incident in which a male student was stabbed by fundamentalists for walking on the campus with a woman. She happened to be his fiancee.

Although no new incidents have been reported in the new academic year that began on Sept. 27, several students interviewed last week still complained of being intimidated into not socializing on campus with someone of the opposite sex.

The video club attacks and other incidents, rumored but never confirmed by the government or the government-controlled press, have resulted in a number of arrests. Fundamentalist sources assert that at least 900 people have been arrested since June, and they charge that many are being tortured in prison.

Interior Ministry spokesmen denied the allegations of torture but refused to say how many fundamentalists have been arrested over the summer on grounds that the information is confidential. However, diplomats and other knowledgeable sources say they believe that 900 is a gross exaggeration.

In Asyut, both university officials and fundamentalist leaders said the reports of violence and religious tension appearing in the Cairo press have been greatly exaggerated.

“The security forces want to exaggerate these reports to scare people and put the Islamic trend in a bad light,” one fundamentalist professor said. “No matter what you hear, this is not Beirut,” he said.

Indeed, compared to such bloody incidents as a military academy takeover in 1974, the kidnaping and murder of a former Cabinet minister in 1977 and Sadat’s assassination in 1981, the burning of video shops and the intimidation of more liberal-minded students on campuses seem minor.

But the concern today stems not so much from these specific expressions of militancy as from the fact that, as a form of protest, fundamentalism is growing and posing a challenge to the status quo.

Not only in Egypt but throughout much of the Middle East, Islam--as Cairo University political scientist Ali Hillal Dessouki has observed--is replacing Arab nationalism as “the ideology of dissent.”

Jihad, still the leading group among Islamic extremists in Egypt, continues to draw sympathy if not outright support from students despite a determined effort by authorities to wipe it out.

Among the roughly 25,000 Muslim students at Asyut University, 80% support the Islamic movement and 60% of those are militants, Habib estimates .

“The government doesn’t like the Muslim Brotherhood, but it encourages it in order to give the feeling that the Islamic trend has its own channel in Egypt and to convince the young not to join those other groups,” said Fahmy Huweidy, a journalist who specializes in Islamic affairs. Nevertheless, he said, “among the youth now, Jihad is the strongest.”

It draws its support, sociologists say, from the young, mostly lower-middle-class youth from the countryside or from the sprawling urban slums where the tide of rural migration has washed over the overcrowded cities.

These youths, generally poor, initially lonely and experiencing the dislocations of moving from the country to the city for the first time, are “ripe for conversion to something,” one analyst said.

In the present social malaise, with its ideological vacuum and its absence of alternative solutions, Islam may be winning them by default, he said.