NEWS ANALYSIS : Hussein’s Buzzwords Tap Into Arab Sense of Injustice : Culture: His call for a jihad against the West evokes deep feelings. But the socialist, secular Iraqi is the wrong man to deliver the message.

President Saddam Hussein of Iraq evoked one of the most emotionally loaded of Middle East buzzwords Wednesday when he called on fellow Arabs to wage a jihad, or holy war, against the multinational force in Saudi Arabia.

To many Westerners, the word jihad conjures up images of swirling crowds in the streets of Tehran chanting “God is great!” and “Death to America!” It brings on nightmares of hijackings and airport massacres and Iranian boys going to do battle against the Iraqis with wooden keys to heaven hanging from their necks.

The word has no less an emotional impact on the Arab masses. It speaks of Arabs standing together to fight outsiders, of Islam’s strength in uniting true believers, of all the injustices the Arabs believe they suffered during 2,000 years of foreign rule at the hands of the Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and European colonialists.

Although Hussein’s call for jihad is not likely to have any real impact, many Arabs still find the notion worth cheering.

Increasingly, Hussein has relied on slogans in the hope of acquiring support for his invasion of Kuwait, a move that has been condemned even by Arab countries that had been his allies. He has offered to withdraw, but only if Israel withdraws from its own occupied territories. He has said he is trying to redistribute the Arab world’s wealth among the poorer nations. And at least twice he has called for a holy war against the infidels.

“We call upon all Arabs, within the teachings of Allah and according to the Muslim holy war of jihad,” Hussein said Wednesday, according to his government’s English translation of the speech, “to fight this U.S. presence of nonbelievers and to fight the stance taken by Arab agents who have followed these foreigners.”

His slogans are compelling to those who still believe in such a thing as an “Arab nation.” How, after all, could an Arab argue against freeing Palestine, driving out the foreigners and safeguarding the holy places of Islam?

But Hussein is the wrong man to deliver the message, and his attempt to capitalize on the growing religious fervor in the Middle East will strike some as less than creditable.

First, Hussein, a Sunni Muslim ruling a Shiite Muslim majority, runs a secular, socialistic country. He has bought peace with the mullahs, or holy men, by building mosques for them, but he does not permit them to meddle in politics.

Second, it was Hussein who in 1980 went to war with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran, a country with a rigid interpretation of Islam and its holy book, the Koran.

What Hussein has done with his buzzwords is what many other Arab leaders have done: manipulate religion for political purposes.

When, for example, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat needed support after negotiating an unpopular peace treaty with Israel, he called in loyalist sheiks and asked for a favorable religious ruling. They said there was nothing unholy about the alliance because the Prophet Mohammed himself had once struck an agreement with the Jews.

In this century, religious fervor as a factor in Middle East politics is a relatively new phenomenon.

In the Arabs’ 1967 war against Israel, the battle cry was “land, sea and air,” reflecting a faith in modern equipment and technology. But they were defeated in six days, and many Arabs believe they lost because they had not been pious enough and had angered God. The mosques started filling up, and women started putting back on the veils that their mothers had discarded as symbols of sexual oppression.

By 1973, with fundamentalism taking hold in the region, the Arabs went to war with Israel again, and this time the war was carried out under the banner of Islam. The Arab offensive was code-named “Badr,” after Mohammed’s first victory in AD 623, and on the battlefields the cry “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) was raised by a people who believed they were fighting for a holy cause.

To the true believer, Islam is as much a way of life as it is a religion. It demands five obligations, or pillars, of its followers: accepting one God and Mohammed as his prophet, praying five times a day, giving a specified amount of one’s income to the needy, fasting from dawn to dusk during the holy month of Ramadan, and making the hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca at least once in one’s life.

Sometimes a sixth obligation is included: the jihad. In the West, the word is generally translated as “holy war,” although its real definition is much wider. In Arabic it means, literally, “utmost effort,” or to protect and strive for Islam. Some Muslims say an internal spiritual struggle can also be called a jihad.

In one of its meanings, it could include armed conflict, but it does not connote irrational militancy. Nor, in its proper context, is jihad used to mean waging war for political or personal ends, as some argue that Saddam Hussein has used the word.