Islamic Radicals’ Appeal Seems to Be Gaining in Egypt

“We killed Sadat,” the bearded young man, his face beaded with sweat, said softly. “We killed him because he was an obstacle. Islam is a religion of peace, but Islamic people must use any methods they can to change things.”

The speaker is a member of the Jamaat Islamiya, a loosely confederated network of Islamic extremists that is said by security sources to be the “political wing” of Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War), the terrorist group that assassinated President Anwar Sadat on Oct. 6, 1981.

The young man sat on a stack of dirt-stained pillows in a small, dark and featureless room that looked like a prison cell and felt like the inside of an oven. He spoke in quiet but intense tones about his vision of Egypt’s future and the revolution that he believes will one day make it a reality, sweeping the atheists and secularists from power and establishing a religious government based on the Sharia, the Islamic code of law, in accordance with God’s will.

Clandestine Interview

The interview, like the organization to which the young man belongs, was clandestine. Getting to the interview site involved a brisk march over a tortuous route that several times doubled back on itself--a precaution, the young man said, against possible police surveillance.

“We have to be careful. We have to move around all the time. None of our members can sleep safely in their homes these days,” he said.

Hundreds of bearded young men like him have been arrested over the last few months as part of a renewed crackdown on radical fundamentalists whose appeal, while still limited, nonetheless appears to be growing. The campaign began in late May, after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and accelerated in July after three Jihad members implicated in the Sadat assassination escaped from a Cairo prison.

The three were subsequently tracked down--and shot and killed while resisting arrest, according to the police.

Despite the many arrests, the Islamic radicals remain active. Indeed, it was they who sought out reporters touring Ain Shams, a lower-middle-class suburb of Cairo, that in August was the scene of the bloodiest rioting involving religion in Egypt since the aftermath of the Sadat assassination. Five people were killed and 37 injured in clashes that erupted after police searching for suspects besieged a neighborhood mosque during Friday evening prayers.

“The police attacked the mosque and the brothers inside appealed to the people outside to help them. Seeing their mosque violated made people angry and they threw stones at the police. Then the police opened fire on the people,” the young Jamaat member said.

Officers Pelted With Rocks

Although this account comes from someone who is not unbiased, information provided by other witnesses and by diplomats who investigated the incident indicate that it is substantially correct. Hundreds of people responded to the appeal for help made over the mosque’s loudspeakers and began pelting the police with rocks and bottles from street corners and rooftops. Poorly trained and ill-equipped for riot duty, the police panicked and, “started shooting at anything that moved,” an Egyptian television cameraman, who himself was wounded, said.

The Ain Shams incident proved, according to the Jamaat member, “that all the people are with us.”

While the truth of that assertion may be debatable, many Egyptian and foreign analysts view the Ain Shams incident as an early warning sign for the secular, pro-Western government of President Hosni Mubarak.

Because warmth, tolerance and patience are virtues deeply ingrained in their national character, Egyptians are often portrayed as a nonviolent, even passive, people with a seemingly limitless capacity for enduring hardship. Yet the events in Ain Shams, like large-scale riots by the police themselves less than three years ago, also suggest a deeper volatility that seems to be edging ever closer to Egypt’s outwardly placid social surface.

It stands out because, although clashes between the police and Islamic extremists are not uncommon, the Ain Shams incident marks the first time, since bread riots in 1977, that “ordinary people have taken to the streets in large numbers to protest and to confront authority,” one diplomat noted.

Outrage at the sacrilege committed against their mosque was undoubtedly one factor behind the neighborhood revolt, but pent-up anger over deteriorating social and economic conditions may also have been a major motivation, this and other analysts said.

“It was the first time we’ve seen spontaneous, popular support for the Jamaat,” said one diplomat, who follows the Islamic movement in Egypt closely. “People were identifying the social and economic injustice they feel they are suffering at the hands of the government with the legal and political harassment the Jamaat is suffering.”

Even if this is true, it does not necessarily mean that Egyptian society is becoming more extremist, other analysts caution. But it does suggest that Islam, a religion deeply rooted in Egyptian life, is once more emerging as a vehicle for the expression of economic and social discontent.

This is not a new phenomenon. The revival of Islam, as a modern sociopolitical movement in the Middle East, originated in Egypt with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1920s--long before today’s better-known fundamentalist, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, came to dominate the scene in Iran.

But while earlier revivals were essentially reactionary movements against the foreign and secular influences then dominating Egypt, the revival today is more in the nature of a populist trend reacting against endemic Egyptian problems--overpopulation, poverty, corruption and the shortcomings of successive regimes that either abused their powers or, in Mubarak’s case, are perceived as being powerless to do anything to stop inexorable decay.

Jamaat’s members still rail against foreign domination--in this case, as they see it, by the United States--but their appeal on the streets of neighborhoods like Ain Shams probably has more to do with the fact that inflation is running between 35% and 40% and that people forced to live four and five to a room are, by local standards, considered middle class. Under the circumstances, the fundamentalists’ message--that secularism is the root of all evil and piety is the only panacea--exerts a powerful, if simplistic, pull.

The problem has been compounded by what many analysts believe has been Mubarak’s failure to articulate an appealing alternative to the fundamentalists, to devise an effective strategy for either countering or accommodating them.

Mubarak’s two predecessors, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sadat, both used heavy sticks against the fundamentalists but succeeded only in radicalizing the movement and driving it further underground. Mubarak has tried to add a carrot by making superficial concessions to religion and by drafting the venerable and by now Establishment-oriented Muslim Brotherhood into Parliament, where it holds 36 seats.

But instead of co-opting the Islamic movement, these gestures only seem to have polarized it, widening the divide between “those who want to reform the government and those who want to overthrow it,” a Western diplomat said. Among the Jamaat, the Muslim Brothers are derisively referred to as “circus lions.” Clashes between the two groups in the upper Egyptian city of Asyut this year have sharpened their differences.

The other half of Mubarak’s strategy, the stick, has also been wielded badly, diplomats and other analysts say. While the carrot has been offered to the Muslim Brotherhood, the stick wielded by Interior Minister Zaki Badr has been used against the Jamaat with a degree of force that has shocked and alienated many Egyptians.

Though the government denies it, beatings and torture are believed to be commonplace for opponents of the regime in Egyptian jails. And Ain Shams was only the most recent, albeit the most serious, incident in which the “police behaved like thugs,” one diplomat said.

“Zaki Badr is pushing the tough guy approach too far,” another diplomat said. “He’s getting innocent people involved and in doing so he’s polarizing communities and widening the Jamaat’s base of support.”

No one knows for sure how much support or how many members the Jamaat actually have. But judging from the number of mosques they control--every major city in Upper Egypt has at least one and Cairo has four--their base is slowly expanding, especially on university campuses from which they draw most of their recruits.

“They are no longer isolated. They have a national network and a strong command structure,” one diplomat, who has studied the Jamaat extensively for the last year, said.

The government seems to share this assessment. Zaki Badr, in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper earlier this year, called the radical Islamic groups, “the greatest danger threatening Egypt’s internal security at present.”

Groups using “religion as a mask find fertile ground in this society which is, by its nature, attracted to religion. . . . Their roots are so deep in the ground that they can rise again. It is a flourishing phenomenon,” he said.

The larger question is whether this flourishing phenomenon can capitalize on the economic grievances of ordinary Egyptians to tip the currently more or less even balance between the secular and Islamic trends in Egyptian society towards the latter’s favor. So far it hasn’t, and many Egyptians doubt that it can.

But with a population of 52 million that is increasing by more than 1 million each year while revenues and resources are declining, the government clearly is worried by the fundamentalists’ conviction that time is on their side.

“We are the only true voice of opposition in Egypt,” the young Jamaat member said. “We can’t say how long it will take, but the revolution is coming. One day, the people will arise.”