ISLAM RISING : Palestinians : Competing Visions of a Future State : A growing number in the Israeli-occupied territories look to the Koran as a political guide, worrying activists who want a secular Palestine.

Fifteen years ago, only six mosques in Nablus held services at each of the hours appointed for prayer by devout Muslims. Today, more than 65 mosques do so--and they are crowded.

“We are winning--rather, I should say God is,” Dr. Nihad Masry, a pediatrician active in the Islamic movement here, said with a soft smile. “It is a struggle, but throughout Palestine our people again are embracing Islam. In another generation, at most two, Islam should govern here.”

That vision of an Islamic state in Palestine motivates a growing proportion, probably 40% of the 2 million Palestinians living on the West Bank and Gaza Strip as they seek an end to nearly 26 years of Israeli occupation.

“The Koran has everything we need to guide us,” Sheik Hasan Deib, a religious leader and science teacher in Gaza City, said. “We will establish our state with Islamic political institutions, with economic and social policies based on the Koran, with a thoroughly Muslim character.”

For Deib, Islamic Palestine may be established on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it will in time stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River--”erasing Israel,” as Deib put it--and become part of a massive Islamic state. “We should not be too impatient,” he added. “This will come soon enough--it is God’s will.”

But this vision frightens many of those at the forefront of the long struggle for an independent and, most would insist, for a democratic and secular Palestine, a state they hope will emerge from the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.

“An Islamic political system would be a disaster for Palestine,” Dr. Shawkat Kilani, a Nablus physician and the founding president of An Najah National University, the West Bank’s largest, commented. “It would bring civil war, it would bring the Israelis back, it would destroy us.”

Yet, the struggle for an independent Palestine increasingly is a struggle between “nationalists” like Kilani and “Islamists” like Masry and Deib, between their competing visions of the future and their rival ways to reach it.

The struggle is far from an intellectual debate, as supporters of Fatah, the principal political movement within the Palestine Liberation Organization, battle the backers of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, an Arabic acronym meaning “zeal,” for control of the institutions that will play key roles as Palestinians move toward self-government.

Slogans on the walls of the Nablus casbah--in black for Fatah, green for Hamas and Communist red for the Marxists--tell a story of intense rivalry, a reluctance to compromise, a willingness to fight each other ahead of Israel. Bullet holes from summer gun battles in the old city’s close, crowded streets testify to the depth of the enmity between Fatah and Hamas.

“A struggle is under way for the soul of Palestine,” Dr. Moustafa Barghouti, a Moscow-educated physician prominent in the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party, said in Jerusalem. “We have our own specific issues, of course, but a victory in Palestine will affect the course of other struggles across the Arab world. Although still not free, still not independent, little Palestine could be pivotal.”

Elections at universities, chambers of commerce, lawyers groups, medical associations and other organizations are contested fiercely.

“The Islamists are 10 times stronger than they were a decade ago,” Kilani said. “They are now demanding equivalent representation on the boards of our institutions . . . even a ‘beliefs’ test. ‘We are 40%,’ they say, ‘and so we want 40%.’ . . . “

The best schools in Nablus are already run by the Islamists, who have substantial funds from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to recruit top teachers and equip them with modern laboratories and computers. Their medical clinics and hospitals are proliferating at a time when those financed through the PLO are unable to pay their doctors and nurses. Their welfare system is extensive.

“The peasants, our fellaheen, say (the Islamists) care for them, that their help is real and tangible, not words, and we can’t argue,” Said Kanaan, a prominent Nablus businessman who supports the PLO, commented. “All these Hamas institutions have opened in the last decade, most in the last five years.”

Pressure from Islamists is reshaping Palestinian society. A theater week in Nablus, intended to spark formation of a local theater group, was canceled when Islamists objected. Palestinian women, among the Arab world’s most liberated, are adopting the modest dress favored by Islamists--only the face and hands should be seen.

And men find it awkward to be on the streets of Nablus or in the coffee shops after the city’s muezzins have called them to prayer.

“During Ramadan (the Muslim month of fasting) this year, it was virtually an act of political defiance not to fast publicly,” a Christian hospital administrator complained. “To take a cup of coffee in the privacy of one’s own home, it was necessary to close the shutters. To have a cigarette, one had to lock the office door.”

Masry, Deib and other Islamists reject these charges of intolerance.

“What we want is our people to become better people,” Masry said. “In Islam, there are rules of personal conduct, but they are personal. If a man drinks, let him drink at home. There are also rules of social conduct, and they promote a better society. But all change must come through persuasion for Islam is, first of all, acceptance of Allah and love of one another.”

Criticism also comes from those who say that Islam has failed almost everywhere as a political philosophy, that it has not met the needs of the modern world and that ultimately it looks backward.

“They can run a school, but not an educational system, they can operate a hospital but not a whole health-care system, they can win an election but they cannot govern,” Kilani asserted. “Islam, as any religion can, might inspire individuals, but it has not delivered the goods for any nation. Not yet. You can look for salvation in Islam or in Christianity, but not for an action agenda.”

Deib acknowledged that the Islamists, including Hamas, have not embarked on the sort of detailed planning and institution building that their nationalist rivals have undertaken for the future Palestine. “We don’t have the same resources,” he said. “Besides, those are not our interests.”

“What (the nationalists) do really does not matter too much,” added Masry. “Let them make the mistakes, let them make the compromises. We are not ready to govern, we are still gathering our strength. Our time will come--it is ordained. My son is 5, and by the time he is 40 he will see it.”

The appeal of Islam, in fact, is already great, as those in the nationalist camp admit as they assess the steady growth of Hamas.

“We are reaching the point where there is an urgent need for a political solution. Yasser Arafat (the PLO leader) probably will not be able to sign an agreement with Israel a year from now because Hamas may have a full veto by then. Our people are looking for success, and Hamas certainly is promising much more than the PLO is achieving.”

The failure of Palestinian politics, and Arab politics in general, to “deliver the goods” is widely seen as the basis for the Islamists’ popular appeal. “In the absence of a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem, people’s frustration has increased,” Kanaan said. “The Islamists say, ‘God will solve it all,’ and that sounds pretty good, often better than what we have to say.”

But Ibrahim Dakkak, a retired engineer and a founder of the Arab Thought Forum in Jerusalem, contends that this is too simplistic and ignores the real import of Islamic fundamentalism. Islam embodies many values that are truly Arab, he argued, and Palestinians in their search for a way to establish an independent state and then govern naturally look toward their origins.

“We are searching for models of statehood, models of governance,” he said. “What we see around us in Jordan, in Israel, in Syria, in Lebanon are not really adequate, nor are the systems of Western Europe, the United States or the old Soviet Union. We want to be a very democratic state--we have not struggled this long for anything less.

“Yet, we want something with our values, that grew from our history, that reflects our character, that is indigenous. Islam has a lot of this for it codified what was already here. Most of our people, the vast majority, are culturally Islamic even if they are not devout.”

“Palestine, in the end, will have to be Islamic if it is to be democratic,” Dakkak said, “but it may be a cultural Islam rather than a religious Islam that prevails.”