MARTYR, SCHOOLGIRL, SOLDIER, TERRORIST: THE BATTLE FOR EGYPT : Squeezed between the violence of Islamic fundamentalists and a campaign of terror by their government, Egyptians must choose sides in a battle for national survival that neither side truly deserves to win

It is a morning like many mornings at the Hole of the Snake cafe, with the scent of cardamom-flavored coffee, the gurgling of water pipes and the stench of the butchers’ trade in the air. Work-weary men, their white galabiyas dappled down the front with blood, sip and gossip and nod off surrounded by the bedlam of Cairo’s second-largest slaughterhouse. The alarming knives of their trade, the size of fat swords, glint in holsters slung across the backs of their chairs. At a shop next door, a burly man with trunk-sized arms rhythmically whacks at the bones and entrails of what perhaps recently was a cow, with explosive results. Not an eyebrow lifts.

On this morning, Mustafa the Alexandrian, at the center table near the street, is the focus of attention. In the ancient Zeinhoum slaughterhouse quarter, whose ancient wall dates back centuries (it was already 300 years old when the Arab crusader warrior Saladine extended it), time is measured in eras, and Mustafa is still “the Alexandrian” even though he migrated to Cairo from Alexandria 28 years ago with his butcher father at the age of 4.

“Thank God I am not afraid of this kind of thing,” says Mustafa of the recent night when Islamic militants, apparently caught up in a midnight operation that went awry, opened fire at large with their automatic weapons--prompting Mustafa to pick up his knives, run into the alley in his nightclothes and set to work on one of them, sending him to the hospital two slices away from a human cutlet. He was offered a medal by the Ministry of Interior, which he bashfully declined.

“After I attacked him, I even cried about him. He was a normal, healthy young guy. But I had to do it because I was seeing somebody killing people. How else would I beat him but cruelly? What I did was a national duty.”

It is in these small dramas--the butcher and the terrorist, the schoolgirl who died from the bomb intended for the prime minister, the automobile dealer who turned in the terrorist, only to be gunned down in his shop by vengeful militants when he became a national celebrity--that the story of Egypt’s war with Islamic militancy has unfolded during the past two years, with every chapter ending in death: more than 435 so far.

Islamic violence has been a part of the Middle East landscape for decades, most prominently since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the 16-year civil war in Lebanon that prompted American troops to pull out in 1984 in exasperation when confronted with Shiite Islamic wrath. But it is in Egypt, the cosmopolitan heart of Arab learning and culture, and America’s key Arab ally, that the most crucial battle for the soul of Arabia is unfolding. With Islamic unrest also threatening stability in neighboring Palestine, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia and even Libya, the outcome in Egypt, with its 60 million citizens, will likely shape the future of all of North Africa and the Middle East.

Cairo’s teeming streets, with their neon Coca-Cola billboards, lascivious movie posters and ubiquitous Kleenex vendors, seem an unlikely breeding ground for Islamic revolution. Indeed, Egypt has long been one of the Arab world’s most secular societies. Yet the past decade has seen a sea change in Egypt that reflects the growing influence of religion and tradition worldwide. An increasing number of Egyptian women don’t venture outside without a modest head scarf and ankle-length dress. Mosques have sprung up on every other street corner, with private mosques now numbering approximately 70,000. Government television--accused by embittered secularists of nurturing the Islamic tide--features five-times-a-day alerts to the Muslim call to prayer. Cairo’s poorer quarters are festooned with Muslim Brotherhood posters proclaiming “Islam is the Solution” that reappear as fast as the government can peel them down.

Nor does the battle show any real signs of abating. After a lull of several months, when authorities rounded up and executed many key militant leaders, the renegade Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group, began striking again to disrupt the United Nations-sponsored International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in September. Warning foreigners to stay away from the “licentious conference” and its focus on abortion, birth control and sex education, Islamic militants attacked foreigners as far away as Upper Egypt and the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, spraying gunfire at two busloads of Spanish and British tourists in August and October (killing two and wounding six others), fatally shooting a German tourist and two Egyptians in a crowded square in September, ambushing a U.N. vehicle in mid-September (killing one UNICEF employee and four police escorts and gravely wounding another UNICEF worker and a photographer) and launching a fresh wave of violence against Egyptian police officers.

The cold-blooded nature of the war became chillingly clear on Oct. 14, when one of Egypt’s most famous citizens, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the neck by a suspected militant as Mahfouz tottered out of his house in Cairo en route to an evening rendezvous with other writers. The 83-year-old writer, who is diabetic, hard of hearing and nearly blind, had thought the attacker was a well-wisher who wanted to shake his hand. (Mahfouz remains hospitalized in stable condition.)

Directed by exiles in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in European capitals where Egyptian Islamic leaders have been granted asylum, in New York--where the notorious Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, spiritual leader of the Gamaa al Islamiya, collected funds to dispatch back to militants in Egypt--and even in Cairo’s hellish prisons, the militants’ campaign has focused on police officers and tourists. This year, the campaign included a series of bombings at banks, designed to target foreign investment and discourage the awarding of banking interest, which fundamentalists view as illegal under the Koran.

The government has responded with a terror campaign of its own, dispatching thousands of forces into villages in Upper Egypt, a region that begins about 75 miles south of Cairo and extends through the southern and central portion of the country, deploying armored personnel carriers and missile launchers in crowded slums and launching heavy-firepower operations against militant hide-outs. Reports of torture in Egyptian prisons--one of them so notorious it is dubbed “Scorpion Prison”--are practically commonplace: electric shocks applied to the genitals; lemons squeezed in the eyes; filthy water injected into muscle tissue. Whole towns in Upper Egypt have been subjected to repeated curfews, crushing their dubious economies, and it is not unusual for entire families to be arrested.

I was not ready to believe these stories, despite repeated complaints from human-rights organizations, until I visited a family near the oasis town of Fayoum, Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman’s hometown west of Cairo, a family whose 19-year-old son, Moursi Ramadan Mohammed Moursi, had just been hanged by the government for murderous militant activities.

It’s not unlikely that Moursi had participated in the shooting of a police intelligence officer loathed by fundamentalists in Fayoum, as the government said he did. Perhaps he even deserved a death sentence. But sitting on the dirt floor of the living room of their tiny home--joined occasionally by a pair of curious chickens and peering neighbors--Moursi’s family said they wondered what they had done to earn their place in the drama.

The day of the shooting, an army of police officers descended on the family home and started asking questions. Moursi’s 11-year-old brother was taken to the police station, hanged by his feet and beaten. His mother was blindfolded and beaten. His sister, four months pregnant, was beaten and shoved against the wall, and police officers, holding her naked, threatened to rape her in front of her husband unless he gave them information on Moursi’s activities. Fire was set to several houses in the village, and Moursi’s brother was thrown into the fire, then pulled out again by a neighbor.

“They tied my husband to an electric pole outside and they took me to the station,” says Moursi’s sister, who miscarried after the incident. “They undressed me in front of my brother and my husband and said they would rape me if he didn’t confess.” She begins to cry quietly. “So of course he confessed.”

Surprisingly, most Egyptians are unmoved by such stories. In fact, they will say the family probably deserved it, for harboring a dangerous militant. It is fundamentalist lawyers and human-rights organizations who register the most complaints about torture in Egypt, not the public, which has generally given the government carte blanche to do what’s necessary to stop the terrorism that threatens to drag a tolerant and cosmopolitan country back into the nether world of religious fundamentalism.

Also surprising is how few Egyptians back the government’s efforts, either. President Hosni Mubarak’s regime is increasingly viewed as corrupt and dangerously out-of-touch, and much of the public supports the government only in its efforts to stop extremists. The fanfare that accompanied Mubarak’s election to a third six-year term last fall--complete with hot-air balloons, leaflets dropped from planes and banner headlines exulting over his 99% victory--fell hollow in most Egyptian living rooms. Here, as in most Third World military regimes, the president had won because there was no opposition.

The confrontation over the spread of militant Islam has forced nearly all Egyptians to choose sides. But it is only too clear to most citizens, caught in the middle of what they see as a struggle for the nation’s survival, that neither side truly deserves to win.

To drive along the Nile in Asyut, the most dangerous place in Egypt, is to be almost hypnotized by the sultry landscape--a carpet of green fields, bending date palms and slow-footed water buffalos that shimmers along riverbanks heavy with egrets. This has always been a land of outlaws, from the original tomb robbers who made their living from the riches of the buried pharaohs to modern-day villains who tend and transport valuable caches of opium and hashish. Whole villages in Qena, just south of Asyut in Upper Egypt, are given over to men casually slinging automatic rifles, and some villages the police simply never enter.

There are professional killers to be hired here, a species spawned by the family vendettas that rage for decades at a time. So it surprises no one that many of fundamentalism’s elements have come together in these verdant farmlands to make radical Islam the nation’s single most important political undercurrent.

The Islamic wave first generated by the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 got its strongest push in the 1970s from former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who supported Islamic militants to counter what he perceived to be a more serious threat from leftists and communists. The plan backfired when Sadat, cracking down on the enemy he had nurtured, was gunned down in 1981 by an Islamic Army lieutenant, Khalid Islambuli, who had seen his brother mistreated in an Asyut prison two months earlier.

To understand the fundamentalists’ current appeal, one must look at Egyptian politics from the 1920s through the ‘40s, when many of the minefields of the modern Middle East were laid. A continuing British occupation left the local monarch looking helpless and ridiculous; Arabs were defeated in Palestine and the state of Israel created; corruption and unemployment grew. The country endured a 1952 revolution that was supposed to throw out the evils of Western imperialism, an Egyptian king who answered to London and an out-of-touch wealthy elite. But in recent years, the revolution has been largely discredited and a disturbing echo of those times has begun to reverberate in the minds of many unhappy Egyptians: Nearly 50 years later, Palestine still belongs to Israel; the middle class boosted by the revolution is again disappearing in the widening gulf between rich and poor; corruption is at an all-time high, with stories daily in the local press about wealthy businessmen with government connections profiteering on the poor, and perpetual scandals involving government officials. Mubarak’s regime is viewed by many, both supporters and opponents, as yet another tool of Western diplomacy.

For decades, the center of Islamic radicalism in Egypt has been in Asyut, the country’s third-largest city, in the achingly poor farm villages near it and in the nation’s urban slums, disconnected swaths of misery that look like “Blade Runner” landscapes just across the Nile from the neatly trimmed polo fields of the elite Gezira Club in central Cairo.

Fundamentalists these past years have provided a glimpse of what an Islamic republic would look like in many parts of Egypt. Consider Imbaba, for example, a teeming district in the heart of Cairo crowded with immigrants from Upper Egypt. Until the government moved in 14,000 troops in a virtual invasion two years ago to stem the fundamentalists’ influence, the Gamaa al Islamiya had declared a “state within a state” in Imbaba, appointing local “emirs” as governors and imposing Islamic law by fiat on millions of Cairenes.

More efficient than the Egyptian government in some ways, Gamaa-controlled mosques set up discount clinics and schools, offered meat to the poor at wholesale prices and established furniture factories to employ the jobless. Dissent was little tolerated. Girls and women were sharply criticized or harassed if they ventured outside without covering their heads, and Gamaa leaders extorted “taxes” from Christian shopkeepers to pay for their protection. In full view of uneasy police officers, Gamaa leaders convened public meetings in the street each Tuesday night, openly calling for the dispatching “to hell” of the “criminals” who had strayed from the right path of God.

Gamaa’s war with the government started in 1990 with the killing, presumably by police, of the Gamaa’s main spokesman in Cairo. The Gamaa and its companion group, the Jihad Organization, began picking off police and government officials, and then violence erupted wholesale with the massacre of 13 Christians in the village of Manshiet Nasser near Asyut in 1992. The following Friday, the Gamaa “emir” in the adjacent village of Sanabu was killed by police as he emerged from his mosque after prayers. Soon the violence spread to attacks on foreign tourists, literary figures such as secularist writer Farag Foda, government officials such as Parliament Speaker Rifaat Mahgoub (killed when his motorcade was attacked in 1990), Interior Minister Hassan Alfi and Information Minister Safwat Sharif (both escaped assassination attempts) and the wave of bank bombings in Cairo and Upper Egypt this year. Police responded with a massive, weeklong siege on Imbaba and similar raids in the Upper Egyptian towns of Qosiya and Dairut, where previously police had feared even to enter.

The Muslim Brotherhood estimates that approximately 50,000 Islamic defendants are imprisoned. (Human-rights groups have variously estimated the numbers at 20,000 to 30,000.) Most of the Gamaa’s key leaders in Egypt are dead, victims of alleged shootouts with police, or executed after brief military trials summoned by Mubarak under Egypt’s 13-year-old state of emergency. But only recently has the crackdown really begun to make inroads. In a series of intelligence coups, the Ministry of Interior this year aimed with surprising accuracy at the heart of the Gamaa leadership, uncovering high-level organizational meetings in progress and killing their participants.

Seven militants were killed in a Feb. 1 raid on an apartment in the northeast Cairo suburb of Zawya al-Hamra after an informant, later identified by the Gamaa as an undercover police officer, tipped off officials. Authorities followed up with another major bust and declared victory at an international press conference, only to see the Gamaa strike back in mid-April with the assassination of a leader in the war on terrorism, Maj. Gen. Raouf Khayrat. The deputy head of state security intelligence was incinerated when one of five assailants threw a bomb into his car as he was leaving his house near the pyramids.

“Our trap resulted in his death and the burning of his corpse in less than a minute,” the Gamaa crowed in a fax to news agencies. “The operation asserts that mujahideen (holy warriors) will not delay a second to follow up tyrants, even if they feel they are safe. Raouf Khayrat ... died and burned the way they fight the youth: unjustly. But we are not alike. Our martyrs are in heaven, and their dead are in hell.”

Women, as the symbols of Islamic purity and protection, have been on the front lines of the struggle over the nature of Arab society. Officially, they have been winning in Egypt. Literacy rates, though still substantially lower than those of men, have been climbing steadily and women’s employment is at an all-time high. Women vote in Egypt and hold positions in the Cabinet and Parliament. Yet there has been increasing debates over their roles as professionals and homemakers, which have taken a feverish tone because Egypt seems to be identifying its society by the behavior of its women.

In addition to battles in the schools over girls’ wearing the Islamic veil, many women say they are being urged by their husbands to avoid improper mixing in the workplace. Doctor and writer Nawal Sadawi, a prominent advocate of women’s rights, had her women’s organization shut down by the government and its assets handed over to an Islamic women’s group. A Cairo University professor was shocked this year to see a divorce petition filed on her behalf by a group of Islamists seeking to protect her from the secularist views of her husband, a professor at the same university. For large numbers of women, the question is perplexing: Where do they fit in Egypt’s ever-shifting society?

Last year, 500 teen-age girls north of Cairo suffered fainting spells. They were never explained, but an editor of a widely read women’s magazine says the girls fainted because, in a world of increasingly conflicting signals, they didn’t know what else to do. “Should they continue their studies and plan on working, or expect to get married and keep house? Should they wear the veil? Or skirts and blouses? They fainted because they simply don’t know what to do,” Ekbal Baraka says.

Nagwa, a communications graduate of the American University of Cairo who doesn’t want her last name used, faced such choices. She had reached the dubious age of her mid-30s last year before finally consenting to become engaged, to her family’s great relief. Nagwa, who usually wears red lipstick and stylish slacks, had said she didn’t want to submit to the kind of man who would not allow her to work or maintain her own independence. But after meeting Ahmed, a young engineer and religious conservative, she admitted she might one day consider wearing the higab after her marriage. As the months went on, she found herself becoming more and more drawn to religion. When they are married, the couple announced, they plan to install a small mosque on the ground floor of their home. Cooing affectionately to her fiance over the telephone one afternoon, Nagwa prepares to end the conversation and go back to work.

“There is no God but Allah,” Ahmed says.

“And Mohammed,” she replies, “is his prophet.”

The town of Dairut, just north of Asyut, is still reeling from more than a year of on-again, off-again curfews and police crackdowns. It is digging out of the crisis but remains a sullen little city. Merchants complain that they are being forced to pay taxes for a year in which most of the time they could not even leave their homes. “I did not make any profit. I was spending out of my assets, which are almost none,” one grocer complains.

According to a recent survey, 12,323 of Dairut’s 61,000 families live in shared housing, and 479 families live in shacks. The government, recognizing the shortfalls of the past, has recently allocated 10 million Egyptian pounds ($2.9 million) on projects for drinking water, sanitary services and new electrical hookups. But the survey found 182,000 young men in Dairut--a virtual powder keg--unemployed.

An aging sheik sits in his small reception room and says the government has not made good on its promises to build a new life for Upper Egyptians. For years there have been promises, and no results, he says. “The government and the interior ministry say we are the ruling party that has the power and the authority in this country. And the youth say we are the youth that have the energy, the belief and the ideals. Each one of them started pushing his horse forward. And Egypt does not find the person that says, ‘Stop there,’ ” the old man says. “All of Egypt now is waiting for an explosion, a national blow-up.”

This appears to be a gentle old man. He is from one of Dairut’s oldest aristocratic families and is a former member of the provincial government. As he sits somewhat nervously in this Islamic hotbed, I ask him if the claims of violence are being exaggerated. Are foreign tourists safe here?

“No,” he says, his wide eyes unblinking. “I do not think tourists are safe. Because there is no scale or indicator to the situation now. The government says it wiped out the Gamaa, and the next morning the Gamaa carries out an operation. And it turns out the government doesn’t know anything about the Gamaa.”

The problems of Dairut are magnified in the slums on the outskirts of Cairo, where Upper Egyptians have migrated over the years only to find a new urban life of poverty and limitation. In the Zawya al-Hamra district, site of one of the most violent confrontations between police forces and the fundamentalists in February, stacks of concrete houses stand in a bleak landscape of dust, garbage and running sewage. On a recent steaming afternoon, a crowd of men is clustered around a public water tap, sweating with wrenches over a broken water faucet that is the single source of water for an estimated 50,000 people.

“This whole neighborhood drinks out of this faucet--maybe 40 years we’ve been living like this,” complains Sayed Sharqawy, a retired refrigerator technician. “We put this in with our own money and we’re fixing it with our own money. People s--- in cans and have to come and dump it in the street. Nobody else does anything for us because this is a poor neighborhood. They have no high-ranking officers of the government here.”

“No water, no sewage, no electricity, no vegetation,” adds Ali Abu Dahab, a 40-year-old day laborer who lives in two rooms with his wife and five children. “People are living in a primitive world of instinct.”

In the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, a small, unmarked office above a fetid vegetable market in downtown Cairo, spokesman Maamoun Hodaiby sits in a gray leisure suit below a poster depicting a large octopus, labeled with a U.S. flag, spreading its tentacles around the globe. Another picture shows Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s holiest sites, locked with a chain bearing the insignia of the Star of David. It poses the question: “Omar conquered it, Saladin freed it, who has it now?”

The Muslim Brotherhood professes no relationship with the militant Gamaa al Islamiya, or Jihad Organization, and claims to be the nonviolent Islamic alternative in Egypt. Nonetheless it is illegal, and its members have joined the Egyptian Parliament only by running on the lists of the Socialist Labor Party. And its statements deploring the violence have only begun appearing lately in earnest, because of the sheer quantity of blood washing the Egyptian streets. Before that, the Brotherhood tended to say things like it “regretted” the violence “on both sides” and pointed out it wouldn’t have happened had there been a democratic alternative.

“Behind this violence there are economic, financial, intellectual and social factors involved. But the most important thing is the lack of hope, hope for a peaceful solution to the problem. People ask themselves: How will the change come? And they become convinced that there is no chance for change except by using force,” Hodaiby says. “Nevertheless, we are patient. (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco ended. The communists ended. Everything has an end. You see, this government is very powerful in killing, and it has no other power. No one supports this regime. They have been in power more than 30 years, and they have got no plan. This man Mubarak has got nothing to say to his people. Nothing.”

Indeed, Mubarak is widely perceived among political analysts to be attacking the symptoms of terrorism while moving only haltingly toward the free market and political reforms that could underscore a wider public confidence in Egypt’s future. Privatization of inefficient state-run companies has moved at a snail’s pace, partly due to fears of increasing unemployment, partly due to the bureaucrats who run them, who have been the basis of the regime’s support for decades. To his credit, Mubarak has managed to cut inflation, stabilize the rate of exchange and reduce the level of foreign debt, laying the groundwork for more economic prosperity. But it has not been enough to inspire widespread confidence, let alone a feeling among poor Egyptians that they will benefit from any bonanza to come.

Tahseen Bashir, a longtime Egyptian diplomat, cautions that the government’s harsh crackdown on Islamic militants could backfire. “This is creating an equalization in the minds of some of these groups and the police of one violence against another. The concept of a national state that keeps some norms of behavior is being squeezed out of existence. And that is very dangerous.”

Mubarak has tended to blame Islamic violence on outside support from Iran and Sudan. Privately, senior government officials say Egypt is too turbulent and too underdeveloped to plunge headlong into democracy. They are fond of pointing to the experience in neighboring Algeria, where an Islamic party was legalized, gained the majority in national elections, forced the army to take over the country in a coup and plunged the nation into civil war.

“A reasonable degree of democracy is possible. A democratic trend which could be consolidated, which could be improved. And I believe this is what is happening in Egypt,” says one government official, who asked not to be identified. “But it seems that during this process some forces are unleashed, and this intermediate stage is very critical. You allow people to criticize, and allow them to group into political parties, but the whole situation has not yet ripened for full-fledged democracy and an exchange of authority.

“Don’t forget these extremists received a great deal of support from the government under Sadat,” adds the official. “And now we are the ones who are sorry for it.”

Almost no one thinks the situation has yet progressed to a point where the stability of the regime is seriously threatened. “They do not have the ability to either overthrow the Egyptian government or to cause any kind of acute crisis in Egyptian society, based on what we’ve seen so far,” says one Western diplomat who has studied the Islamic violence. “But the police in areas like Asyut have become, in the eyes of a lot of people, another warring clan, and you’ve had a lot of people emerge from detention with a deep sense of personal grievance. Their families have a sense of personal grievance. And now the cycle looks very difficult to escape.”

Cairo attorney Montasser Zayat concurs. “The picture is getting darker,” says Zayat, who has gained notoriety in Egypt, first by defending Al-Sayed Nosair in the United States (Nosair was convicted on charges stemming from the death of militant Rabbi Meir Kahane), and later by taking on the most high-profile fundamentalist cases in Egypt, including the defense of Omar Abdul Rahman.

Zayat does not openly profess membership in the Gamaa al Islamiya, but at his ramshackle downtown office in Cairo, where clients’ wives sit draped in anonymous black in the waiting room, he often acts as their unofficial spokesman. He is in prison now, held after protesting the arrest of a colleague who died in confinement. (Authorities say the man, Abdel Harith Madani, died of asthma. His fellow attorneys say he was tortured to death.)

“It is difficult to say the government can destroy the Islamic organizations,” he said a few months before his arrest, “because by the nature of the Islamic religion, its followers become harder and have more solidarity after each crisis. We’re waiting for the frustration explosion. Natural laws say that for every action, there is a reaction. Suppression will always be followed by an explosion, and previous history shows us that oppressors never last more than 15 years.”

Sitting behind his desk, he took a sip of sweet tea. “Every household in Cairo has an element of the Islamic organization in it, and the Egyptian army in the end will find itself between two solutions. Either to be unbiased, or to comply with the national desire by changing the regime. There is no third alternative.”