2 Jordanian Lawmakers Guilty of Anti-King Plot : Mideast: They were accused of taking guns and money from Iran. Trial was test of nation’s effort to balance democracy and Islamic fundamentalism.

A military court convicted two prominent members of the Jordanian Parliament on Tuesday of plotting with Iran to overthrow King Hussein. But the tribunal stopped short of ordering death sentences in a case that became an unprecedented test of Jordan’s struggle to balance the forces of democracy and Islamic fundamentalism.

In sentencing the two popular, fundamentalist legislators to 20 years of hard labor, the court declared in a 47-page verdict that Laith Shbeilat and Yacoub Qarrash had abused Jordan’s new democracy. The court said they used their positions to create an underground, pro-Iranian revolutionary group that sought to replace Jordan’s long-reigning monarch with an Islamic “caliphate.”

The verdict, which many Jordanians expect King Hussein to set aside with a royal pardon on his 57th birthday on Saturday, ended a five-week public trial that had riveted and polarized Jordanian public opinion. The case also drew the attention of governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa, where the relationship between democracy and Islamic fundamentalism has raised similar controversy and debate.

Jordanian police had surrounded the small military courthouse in a blue-collar neighborhood of Amman where the verdict was delivered Tuesday morning. Authorities successfully barred protesters on both sides of the case, although there had been sit-ins and demonstrations during the trial.

Inside, the courtroom was packed with spectators who watched the two parliamentary deputies--who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks while jailed--show little emotion as the chief military judge read the verdict for two hours.

Prosecutors charged that Shbeilat and Qarrash had accepted automatic weapons and $200,000 worth of German marks from the Iranian government last April to finance an organization called Vanguard of the Islamic Youth. They did this after meeting with high-level government officials in Tehran in 1990, prosecutors asserted.

Most foreign diplomats who followed the trial after the two deputies were arrested last August viewed the case as a reminder by Hussein that democracy has its limits in an often-violent region where plots, subversion and revolution are all too common. Most said they believe the king, having made his point, will follow Arab tradition with a pardon that will bar both men from holding public office.

Jordan’s king has, in fact, been at the forefront of the region’s slow march toward democracy, allowing in 1989 the nation’s first parliamentary elections since political parties were banned in Jordan in 1957.

In a landmark speech last week, Hussein took pains to stress his commitment to democracy. His nationwide address came at a time when the Hashemite monarch is about to leave for the United States for more medical tests after his radical cancer surgery last summer; most Jordanian analysts viewed his speech as a reminder that Hussein wishes to leave an enduring democracy in Jordan as his legacy.