U.S. Struggles to Deal With Global Islamic Resurgence : Policy: The dilemma: How to promote democracy without encouraging new fundamentalist states?

Thirteen years after the Iranian revolution wrought the world’s first modern theocracy, Islamic fundamentalism once again is becoming both a nemesis and an enigma for U.S. policy-makers.

As the threat from communism wanes, some U.S. analysts predict that Islam will be increasingly--and wrongly--perceived as one of the principal rival ideologies and potential threats to the West and its predominantly Judeo-Christian culture.

After years of tumult, Iran’s revolution is beginning to settle down, and Lebanon is gradually restoring law and order. But the second phase of the Islamic resurgence--already evident in Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union--may present even broader challenges to the Bush Administration, Mideast experts say.

In some cases, such as Algeria, Muslims are rising to power not through violence or political upheaval, but through the ballot box. In others, such as the former Soviet republics, Islam is shaping political agendas in ways the United States cannot influence.

“There are now as many shades to Islam as there are to communism or conservatism,” says John Entelis, an Islamic specialist at Fordham University in New York.

As Islamic activism takes on these new, more subtle hues, the Administration must grapple with a profound dilemma: How can the United States promote democracy abroad without encouraging the rise of new Islamic fundamentalist states?

The new face of Islam has even greater portent because it primarily involves Sunni Muslims, rather than the Shiites who have shaped events in Iran. The Sunnis account for more than 85% of the world’s 1 billion Muslims--stretching from Morocco through Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, into China and as far east as Indonesia.

Although Islam is associated mainly with the Mideast, where the Prophet Mohammed founded the faith in the 7th Century, more than 70 of the world’s 184 countries are considered members of the Dar al Islam , or house of Islam. Indeed, the five largest Muslim-dominated nations are not in the Arab world.

The first phase of Muslim activism was characterized by political upheaval and extremism, particularly in Iran, where Muslims overthrew the shah and ended 2,500 years of monarchy, and in Lebanon, where Islamic zealotry intensified Beirut’s havoc for a decade.

Indeed, American attitudes are still shaded by images of Western hostages and suicide-bombers and the fiery rhetoric of holy war, U.S. officials and private analysts say.

The West also recalls the movement’s toll on Mideast allies: President Anwar Sadat was gunned down by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad in 1981, and more than 450 people were killed in Saudi Arabia after Islamic extremists seized the Grand Mosque--Islam’s holiest shrine--for two weeks in 1979.

But the new generation of Muslims has learned from the mistakes of Iranian and Lebanese extremists. They are aware of the heavy costs incurred by their brethren in both countries, which still may be years away from full acceptance by the international community, and are taking pains to avoid making similar blunders.

More typical today are the trends evident in North Africa and Central Asia.

In Tunisia, the outlawed Islamic Renaissance Party has become the most serious government opposition force by quietly recruiting and proselytizing on campuses, on farms and in factories to promote democratic change--and to avoid zealotry and violence.

In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front has emerged as the country’s leading political party over the past two years in both local and parliamentary elections--the first multi-party balloting since Algeria won its independence from France in 1962.

And in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, Muslims have mobilized opposition to the Communist leadership through public, but peaceful, demonstrations.

Four of the five Central Asian republics are the last bastions of Communist rule in the new Commonwealth of Independent States. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union after last August’s coup attempt, Islam has emerged as one of the two most vibrant political opposition movements in each, even though they are still banned.

In September, Muslims mobilized thousands for a round-the-clock vigil in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, to demand democratic elections. They pledged not to take down a tent city they had erected across from Parliament until the acting president resigned.

Despite the passage of time since Islam’s emergence as a major political idiom and the burgeoning growth of Muslim movements, the United States still has no more tangible strategy for dealing with Islam than it did after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran in 1979.

Some critics, both American and Muslim, have equated the U.S. quandary with the indecision that gripped intellectuals and policy-makers over the appropriate American posture toward communism in the years after World War II.

“We have to be smarter in dealing with Islam than we were in dealing with communism 30 or 40 years ago,” concedes a senior Administration official. He and others warn against simplification or alarmist strategies that could intensify rather than defuse the tension.

“Have we found the answer yet? No,” he adds. “But are we smarter? Yes.”

Yet he admits that U.S. analysts had to fight to get the State Department to express its “regret” that Algeria suspended its transition to democracy two weeks ago. Because of fears that the Islamic Salvation Front would sweep the second round of parliamentary elections on Jan. 16--thus providing the two-thirds majority needed to change the Algerian constitution--a military-led coup forced President Chadli Bendjedid to resign, and the elections were canceled.

“Democracy has been assassinated here,” an embittered Algerian official said last week. “The West could have helped stop it, but the Americans and Europeans are so scared of Islam that they weren’t prepared to act boldly or condemn it outright and recall their ambassadors.

“It appears they’d prefer the return to a police state than a democracy, just because the new government would be heavily Islamic.”

Several Mideast specialists have criticized the Administration’s response, comparing it to past U.S. alliances with right-wing governments that won America’s support simply because they opposed communism.

“Our effective silence encourages the coup leaders and, in fact, propels them to go forward,” says Entelis, the Fordham expert. Last week, Algeria’s new military-backed Council of State arrested Islamic Salvation Front leader Abdelkadir Hachani and prohibited all public gatherings around mosques.

Judith Kipper of the Brookings Institution said, “It’s much better to have Islamic parties lawfully elected in Parliament, and therefore accountable, than to have them left to operate as clandestine and subversive groups.”

The end result of America’s ambivalence, specialists predict, is likely to be even greater support or sympathy for Islamic activists within their own countries. In the worst case, it could contribute to the re-emergence of Islamic extremism.

For example, Hachani is from the Jazara, or moderate wing of the Islamic Salvation Front. His repeated calls for restraint and nonviolence are known to be questioned by the Salafia, the hard-line faction within the movement.

In Hachani’s absence, and with the military crackdown intensifying (more than 500 have been arrested), the situation appears ripe for trouble.

In Tunisia, which has been ruled by a single party for three decades, the government of President Zine Abidine ben Ali recently launched a crackdown on Muslims. He also has reneged on democratic reforms promised in 1987 and on a pledge to recognize Tunisia’s Islamic Renaissance Party.

Yet the United States provided $58.7 million in aid to Tunisia in 1990 and $19.7 million in 1991. This month, the U.S. Agency for International Development agreed to a loan guarantee for Tunisia for an additional $9.4 million, and more aid is anticipated this year.

Senior U.S. officials have been barred by the Administration from meeting with Rachid Ghannouchi, an exiled leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party, during his visits to Washington over the past four years.

“It’s a double standard on democracy,” Kipper says.

U.S. or Western aid to the new Central Asian states--only one of which has moved toward democracy--may help entrench Communist leaders just as Islamic movements are mobilizing support for change, Mideast experts say. The end result may be anti-Western polarization.

The United States is not alone, either in the concern it feels about the Islamic tide or in its struggle to craft a coherent policy. In Washington last week to attend a conference on aid to the nations of the former Soviet Union, a prominent European foreign minister spoke to journalists of his concern about the “Islamic challenge” that is dividing the world along new lines.

Muslim immigrants have become a major political issue in many European countries. Antipathy toward Muslims, particularly those from Turkey and North Africa, has fueled right-wing and xenophobic groups in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and elsewhere.

On Thursday, nine neo-Nazis were arrested over the stabbing of an Algerian and a Tunisian sleeping in a park near Rome’s Colosseum. Italian police said that 20 skinheads, shouting “Foreigners out of Italy!” and wielding baseball bats, brass knuckles and chains, took part in the incident.

Part of the problem for U.S. policy-makers is the mind-set of Western politics, experts say.

The United States is a constitutionally secular nation. Islam is the only major monotheistic religion offering a set of rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual beliefs. Trying to deal with a political system that incorporates religion is unfamiliar, even awkward, for Washington.

Entelis proposes two preliminary policy steps. “First and foremost, when Islam appears in politics, it must be evaluated in its own terms and its own environment on its own merits. Don’t lump them all together and equate them with our experience with Iran,” he says.

“Second, we should accept the results of any honest, free and fair election in which the democratic process is followed--whatever the results. In so doing, we implicitly say a lot of important things to Arabs and Muslims around the world, while staying loyal to our principles.

“It’s a way of showing that we can co-exist with Islam, and that we do not want confrontation.”