‘Islamic Communes’ Set About Cleaning Up Algeria : North Africa: Muslim fundamentalists are quietly transforming how local government is run. The prize is popular support.

Amid the crumbling Turkish-era houses of the Casbah, a stairwell that once served as a garbage dump is now so clean that neighborhood youths sit chatting on its steps late into the night.

Since Muslim fundamentalists took over the Casbah--and hundreds of town councils across Algeria--in June elections, clean streets and clean government have been watchwords of their “Islamic communes.”

The Islamic Salvation Front, known as the FIS, is quietly transforming the way Algeria’s towns and cities have been run since independence in 1962.

Vowing open and corruption-free rule, they are striving to win the hearts and minds of voters, who in turn could bring the Islamic Salvation Front to national power in general elections next year.

In the Casbah and Bab el-Oued, low-income strongholds for the FIS, new mayors are rekindling civic pride crushed by 28 years of one-party rule by the National Liberation Front, known as the FLN.

“People have confidence in us. Those I meet are very badly housed, but they feel the FIS is there to solve their problems,” said Achour Djadouf, Bab el-Oued’s affable 40-year-old mayor.

Djadouf works 18-hour days capped by a late-night tour of his teeming inner-city district, which has become synonymous with social protest in Algeria.

The youth riots in October, 1988, that launched the country on the road to multipartite democracy broke out in Bab el-Oued, where the FIS won 80% of the vote in the June 12 elections.

“Before, under the FLN, you would pass the mayor in the street and he would not even look at you. The new people talk to us and invite us to their homes,” said Saad, a contractor.

Djadouf says he receives an average of 300 people a week. Like other FIS mayors, he took a special oath of office that binds him, among other things, “never to privilege someone for his wealth or ties of friendship and family.”

The moral stature of Islam was a crucial factor in the rise of the FIS among a crisis-hit population that has long linked its rulers with corruption and favoritism.

Fundamentalist mayors hit the headlines last month with scattered attempts to ban the wearing of shorts, shut down bars and brothels and separate men and women on the beach.

Only partially implemented, they caused an outcry from Algerian liberals and across the Mediterranean in France, which views anxiously the Islamic experiments in its former colony.

However, while the FIS shows every intention of eventually applying its moral agenda--derived from Islamic Sharia law--priorities now appear to lie in less controversial but no less profound reforms of municipal life.

The FIS has set up “neighborhood committees” to monitor local problems and sound out solutions. Each is represented on a municipal majlis al-shoura, a consultative assembly cited in the Koran.

The assemblies, closely linked to mosques and including prominent imams, can adjudicate informally in disputes over land, housing and personal wealth.

Some Algerians have expressed alarm at the creation of parallel institutions with vague extra-legal powers. But the FIS says they will make government more responsive.

Mosque appeals have mobilized street sweepers in the Casbah and mechanics in Bab el-Oued, where they repaired for free four garbage trucks left incapacitated by the previous council.

Djadouf is studying the possibility of hiring a private firm to take over garbage collection--an unprecedented break with Algeria’s past socialist ideology.

To reduce youth unemployment, estimated at nearly 30% nationwide, the council is asking merchants to take on extra hands. It is studying a new municipal transport service and ways to revive local industries.

But the FIS agenda in Bab el-Oued also includes action on alcohol abuse, harassment of women and clandestine brothels.

Djadouf said he plans to petition the Ministry of Education to ban coeducational classrooms on the grounds that mixing the sexes encourages immoral conduct.

“A morals police has become imperative. Citizens are demanding it,” said Djadouf, calling for the revival of a now-defunct municipal police force to fill this role.

Alcohol is forbidden by Islam but Djadouf plans to leave bars alone for the moment.

“For the time being we will leave the bars up to citizens. They will have to tell us that such and such a bar is annoying them,” he said.

While the FIS appears to be enjoying something of a honeymoon, it is also aware of the enormous difficulty in trying to solve at the local level nationwide problems facing its constituents.

Demonstrations over lack of water erupted in early September in the coastal city of Jijel, the first major protest in a FIS municipality.

And Djadouf and other mayors say some provincial governors, or walis, who are appointed by President Chadli Bendjedid, are obstructing their projects.

Most residents of the “Islamic communes” appear to be willing to give the FIS time, however.

“We’ll give them a few years,” said a 65-year-old mother of five in the Casbah.