COLUMN ONE : Fighting to Keep Their Voice Alive : Artists and scholars in the Arab world face growing attempts to silence them. They fear religious censors, powerful patrons, even assassination.

After 22 years of teaching, the promotion of Nasr Hamid abu Zaid, a professor of Arabic literature and one of Egypt’s best-known intellectuals, seemed a sure bet. Two fellow professors evaluated him and complimented his many papers and books on Islamic discourse. They recommended him for a full professorship at prestigious Cairo University.

But a third scholar was troubled by Abu Zaid’s assertions that the texts of the Koran, the holy book of Islam, should be studied in light of the men who had interpreted them. Such talk is “similar to atheism,” this evaluator warned.

Abu Zaid was denied his professorship. Denouncing him as a heretic became a cause celebre at mosques throughout Egypt. Then, last fall, he found himself served with divorce papers. They were not filed by his wife, a fellow Cairo University professor and one of his greatest admirers, but by a lawyer who argued that a Muslim woman protected under Egyptian law should not remain married to an apostate.

“Before the court case, I thought we were living in a modern civil society,” said Abu Zaid, whose divorce will be decided in a Cairo courtroom today. “When we heard about the case, my wife and I were shocked. We thought it was some sort of black joke. We were amazed to learn something like this is permitted under the Egyptian legal code.

“Now, we realize the whole issue is intended to make me stop writing and teaching,” he continued. “To make me silent--whether by this deprivation of promotion, or by the loss of my wife, or by death. The intention is to stop the critical mind--a battle intellectuals thought was won 100 years ago.”

The Arab world, which brought civilization the beginnings of mathematics and astronomy and the greatest library of all time, is in a state of ideological peril. It has become the victim of dwindling educational resources, religious fundamentalism and a general intellectual confusion that has left much of the developing world searching for its place in the new world order, experts say.

In Egypt--historically the Arab cultural heart and a teeming center for entertainment and media--intellectuals and artists are locked in a war with religious conservatives who are seeking to hold all books, magazines, plays and paintings to a strict religious standard. Financing from conservative Arab Gulf states has hamstrung Egypt’s famed film and publishing industries.

In Algeria, long considered a land of deep, often avant-garde thinkers, writers and intellectuals have been the target of a massive assassination campaign by Islamic fundamentalists. Most have been forced into exile or hiding. A noted sociologist and think tank director had his throat slit in front of his family. Many of Algiers’ remaining intellectuals have left their homes and are living under army guard in a compound outside the capital.

Many of the region’s most important media outlets--including the respected Al Hyat and Al Shark el Awsat newspapers and the influential Middle East Broadcasting Center satellite television station--are now owned by powerful Saudis close to Saudi Arabia’s royal family. The takeover of these media is part of a wave of such acquisitions by wealthy Saudis in recent years; the trend is spreading the ultraconservative Gulf’s influence throughout the important media centers of the Arab world.

The debate over religious fundamentalism, raging in cultural centers from Kuwait to Morocco, emerges against a backdrop of unease that has beset the Arab intelligentsia since the Arabs’ crushing defeat by Israel in 1967. It worsened with the Persian Gulf War in 1991--a military setback that spelled an even more important loss in the ideological underpinnings of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism upon which the Arab world had comfortably rested for most of this century.

“I am trying my utmost to understand the scope of the crisis that has afflicted Arab thought since the defeat in the 1967 war,” said Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, one of Egypt’s best-known writers and a confidant of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In a rare interview in his sunny office overlooking the Nile, Heikal predicted that the ideological vacuum in the Arab world will open the door to a new era of Israeli domination--in a new Middle Eastern market, in a new period of “peace without justice” negotiated by Arabs out of weakness.

“One of the intellectual crises in the Arab world is that we are dealing now in fluids and gases,” Heikal observed. “We are still unable to find either an inspiration for our hopes or a target for our anger. When President Bush talked about a new world order, we accepted it as a final solution, not realizing it was only an experiment, an idea.

“The Israeli era that is coming will be brief,” he predicted. “But it will last until the Arab nation finds itself and returns back to a new world, not a world based on the end of history, nor an Islamic paradise--something different. But we haven’t found that something different yet, and that is the crisis of the Arab intelligentsia.”

Arab intellectuals in recent times have struggled to find a way of understanding themselves and their place in the world. They have been hit by a triple whammy:

* The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had backed radical regimes in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Egypt off and on through the years.

* An Arab world turned against itself and the West with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

* And a new peace between Palestinians and Israel that many still regard as suspect and ill advised.

These developments have plunged Arab thinkers into turmoil: Many erstwhile Marxist intellectuals are now card-carrying Islamic fundamentalists; they find in political Islam a way of asserting a nationalist identity without having to align themselves with the world’s new emerging powers.

“The Arab nationalist movement and the Islamic reform movement have been intertwined for at least 100 years--but now they are part of a more general and ambitious process of intellectual and political self-questioning,” Edward Said, a leading Palestinian intellectual, wrote recently.

“What is modernity for a Muslim? What is our heritage? Who has and ought to have authority? These are major epistemological problems that now occupy a lot of attention among intellectuals and scholars.”

In Cairo, Mahgoub Omer, one of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s most steadfast advisers and a longtime leftist, now writes a weekly column for the Islamic biweekly Al Shaab.

“Those who are trying to differentiate among the intellectuals in our nation, I think, make a big mistake, if they forget that all the people here are Muslims,” he said in an interview. “Even the (Christian) Copts are Muslim in tradition and culture. We have a reference ideology, which is Islam. We see that Islam gives us our morals, our ethics, our red lines not to cross, our dreams, our life.”

Yet the dilemma for many Arab intellectuals is that Islamic philosophies have the past as their point of reference; this is a difficult matter at a time when the Arabs’ future is very much in doubt.

“Intellectuals are placed in a very difficult situation,” said Egyptian leftist Mohammed Sid Ahmed. “Either they espouse Enlightenment philosophies and then feel they’re not on the wavelength of the people--who are caught up in the problems of joblessness, economic problems, deep frustration, the feeling of being manipulated rather than being master of your fate--or else they try to rationalize the Islamic movement . . . which is not an intellectual movement at all. It is a religious movement that has become a source of ideology, faute de mieux (for want of something better). Enlightened intellectuals, if they are honest, they are torn apart.”

Against a backdrop of Islamic and nationalist values, Arab intellectuals are trying to make sense of the Gulf War. Was it a defeat for pan-Arab pride, because it called in the West to crush the Arabs’ only remaining military power? A victory for a new world order that protects democracy and shuns aggression? And if the latter, among the oppressive sheikdoms and military-backed regimes that populate the Arab world from east to west, where is there a democratic Arab regime that is part of this new world order?

In his “Cruelty and Silence,” a book that has created a firestorm in Arab coffee shops, Kanan Makiya, an exiled Iraqi writer, bitterly indicts Arab intellectuals for defending Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical Iraqi regime in the name of tired nationalist slogans while remaining silent about the Arab Baath Socialist Party regime’s slaughter of Kurds and Shiites in uprisings in Iraq after the Gulf War.

“In the wake of the mountain of bodies created by the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian revolution, the Iraq-Iran War and the Gulf War, there can be no more romance and no more false heroics in the Arab world,” Makiya said. “There is only a legacy of pain which must be grappled with by a new language and a new style.”

Yet Arab artists and writers say they have often found themselves powerless to speak out against the oppression around them because they are caught in a dragnet, not only of religious conservatism but of state censorship; in the name of religious values, interference by the state often stifles critical political discourse.

Omar Belhouchet, publisher of Algeria’s lively Al Watan newspaper, was shot at by suspected Islamic militants last year and escaped only by ducking in his car and gunning the accelerator. But the government arrested him and held him for several days, and it has detained several other journalists.

In Egypt, intellectuals have been reeling for weeks from a parliamentary debate that began when a national assembly member condemned the minister of culture for several publications, one of which included a famous painting by Gustav Klimt of Adam and Eve and another an erotic Indian poem in which a woman entreats her lover to stand naked in front of the mirror with her to see that he is stronger. (Female deputies were asked to leave the room before the debate began.)

The minister responded, to the horror of some media commentators, by defending the works in question but assuring the floor that all publications of the government are cleared first by Azhar University, the conservative seat of Islamic learning.

Cairo intellectuals debated calling a protest march but decided it would probably be quashed by security-conscious authorities. They settled for a statement of protest. But many have complained that, as in Algeria, Arab governments, and not just religious conservatives, are often part of the problem.

Adel Hussein, editor of Al Shaab, has been called in for questioning in Egypt recently. Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia were arrested last year when they attempted to launch a human rights group critical of the government. The dispute went uncovered in the widely circulated Al Hyat or Al Shark el Awsat, owned by wealthy Saudis and published in London. It also attracted no attention from the Egyptian media, which when it is government-controlled responds slavishly to Egyptian officials’ restrictions and when it is privately owned follows the dictates of the lucrative Saudi market.

Rose el Youssef, an upstart Egyptian weekly magazine, was recently banned in Saudi Arabia, a move that must have been a severe financial blow. But it was the same magazine that, in a recent controversy in Egypt over cultural and artistic restrictions, last week published several banned works that had never appeared in print in the Arab world. These included:

* Excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses,” which earned their author a death sentence from Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

* “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights,” portions of which, believe it or not, have long been banned as risque.

* An Egyptian novel by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz that contains allegorical passages deemed irreverent about the Prophet Mohammed.

* A forbidden poem from the Arab world’s most popular poet, Syrian writer Nizzar Kabbany. The poem, “Father of Ignorance Buys Fleet Street,” talks about the Saudis’ feverish purchase of media--publishing houses, magazines, newspapers and television stations; this has been one of the biggest irritants to writers and filmmakers in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and North Africa. The cultural elite in the heart of the Arab world sees its artistic heritage being sold to oil barons whose cultural interests, in the main, are to protect the wealthy ruling families of the Gulf and maintain strict Islamic values.

“We are in the middle of the process of buying up our culture,” said Mursi Saad Din, former undersecretary of culture and cultural editor of the Cairo newspaper Ahram Weekly. “At the last Cairo film festival, not a single Egyptian film won a prize. The two prizes went to films that were co-productions, Palestinian and Syrian, but co-produced from outside, which means they cannot in a true sense be considered Arab films. . . . In my view, it is an orchestrated campaign against culture in Egypt.”

Wrote Kabbany:

Long life for you,

You that buy women by the pound

And buy pens by the pound.

We don’t want anything from you.

Sleep with your slave women as you please.

Slaughter your dependents as you please.

Blockade the nation with fire and steel.

No one wants to take away your happy monarch.

No one wants to steal your khalifa’s headband.

So drink the oil wine to its end,

And leave culture to us.