Islamic Militants Target Arab Intellectuals, Artists

Rifaat Said used to be one of Cairo’s best-loved men-about-town, a man who relished nothing better than a good argument. As head of Egypt’s leftist Tegamu Party, he could always be counted on to step out prominently on behalf of Egypt’s abundant ranks of the disinherited and to ridicule, with his sharp pen, the excesses of Muslim fundamentalism.

But then Said started getting anonymous messages in the mail, like the one he received only a few weeks ago:

“You dog,” it said. “I’ll kill you, you atheist. But I will not shoot you. I’ll cut you with my knife, and I’ll throw your flesh to the dogs to eat, so you won’t contaminate holy ground.”

Said’s life changed dramatically after such vengeful missives from Islamic militants started pouring in. Now he travels nowhere without his six machine-gun-armed bodyguards. His daughter ducked out of his car at a traffic light the last time she rode with him to school, overwhelmed by the gun barrels bristling out the back window that every once in a while the guards would click, tic-tic-tic , into firing mode.

Now when Said shyly lifts up his jacket, there’s a gun in a holster underneath it. He doesn’t go to parties anymore. He has nearly eliminated his lecture schedule at the American University of Cairo. He doesn’t do weddings.

Like an uneasily growing number of intellectuals and artists threatened by Islamic extremists around the Arab world, Said is on the run, but he’s not hiding.

“When they assassinated Farag Foda (a prominent Egyptian secularist gunned down after engaging in heated public debates with fundamentalist leaders), many people stopped writing. I was the only one who continued attacking them,” Said said with a little grin that seems startling under the circumstances. “Of course, I feel sympathy for my wife and my children. But what shall I do?”

While militant threats against writers, singers, actors and intellectuals have been a way of life in the Islamic world since the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death decree against British author Salman Rushdie, the last few months have seen a dramatic increase, reflecting the growing schism between Arabs committed to Islamizing society and those equally bent on maintaining free and open public discourse.

The knife attack last month on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz pointed up many of the debates that increasingly are polarizing Muslims at a time of traumatic political change in the Middle East: Mahfouz was attacked as an apologist for Zionism, as a protege of America and the West, as a symbol of Egypt’s controversial cooperation in the peace process with Israel.

“The target of the assailants was not the person of Mahfouz but rather the image of Egypt in the international community,” commented Cairo’s leading daily newspaper, Al Ahram. “His international standing and persona are symbolic of the secular orientation of the Egyptian and Arab intelligentsia.”

On the other side, Cairo cleric Sheik Mohammed Ghazali, while deploring the violence against Mahfouz, lashed out at the decision to publish for the first time this month--against Mahfouz’s own request--the author’s “Children of Gebelawi,” a 1959 allegorical novel about the prophets banned by Islamic decree for two decades in Egypt.

The book was published in full in a special edition of the Tegamu Party’s Al Ahali newspaper that sold like wildfire shortly after the attack on the 83-year-old writer. Al Ahram, the voice of the Egyptian government, waived the copyright that it has held dormant for 20 years and announced its own plans to serialize the book.

“We question ourselves about people who hate God dearly, detest Islam completely and quarrel with inspiration everywhere,” Ghazali lamented of the publishers. “I know of those who never had the privilege of kneeling before God, who on the contrary are happy when they hear about a new bar opening, feel sad if a new mosque is built and feel the Earth is getting narrow around them. The state destroys itself by leaving them to bark against Islam’s caravan.”

Security analysts fear that the attack on Mahfouz, in which a man holding a bouquet of flowers approached the writer on the sidewalk as if to shake his hand and then stabbed him in the neck, reflects the new kind of savagery witnessed in militant fundamentalist attacks in Algeria against intellectuals, some of whom have had their throats slashed in front of their families.

More than two dozen journalists have been assassinated in Algeria, which is locked in an increasingly violent clash between Islamic fundamentalists and the old regime. In recent months, attacks like these have escalated. Among them:

* Algerian Berber singer Lounes Matoub--who has declared himself as “neither an Arab nor a Muslim,” openly professed his love of whiskey and dedicated a recent record to a fellow Berber activist assassinated by Islamic militants--was kidnaped by militants Sept. 25 and held for two weeks. When he was released unharmed, he had a message from the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria’s most violent Islamic faction: “The villagers must understand that we are not against them but that we are fighting an illegitimate regime,” it declared. “We are asking them to help us and not to greet us with hunting rifles when we appear in their villages.”

* Four days after Matoub’s kidnaping, Algerian pop singer Cheb Hasni was shot and killed in the western city of Oran after religious leaders reportedly issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, ordering the death of any singers considered vulgar.

* A knife-wielding man believed to be an Islamic militant stabbed popular Sudanese singer Khogali Osman to death and wounded two other artists at a union club in Khartoum on Nov. 11, an unexpected attack in a country that already has an Islamic fundamentalist government. The Sudanese government condemned the killing and affirmed the state’s respect for the status of artists.

* Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin is under the protection of 1,200 police officers assigned for her visit to France following her flight from Muslim fundamentalist death threats at home earlier this year. Nasrin has been ordered to stand trial Dec. 10 for blaspheming Islam and has said she will eventually agree to serve a prison sentence if convicted on condition that the government can guarantee her safety in prison.

The aim of such attacks by militants does not seem to be to target the individuals’ lifestyles, political analysts say, but rather to curb the ability of these intellectuals to move the body politic in a more secular direction, either through their music, books, newspaper columns or films.

A common complaint of Muslim organizations is that access to the mass media in most Arab countries is limited to the government and government-approved organizations, most of which are essentially secular. (Secularists in Egypt, however, complain that the government airwaves have grown too religious in an attempt to meet the demands of the militants.)

“These people (intellectuals) do have an important secularizing influence, though in a very diffused manner,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent Egyptian writer and professor who has written extensively on the Islamic movements.

“That has become very clear, I think, in the last seven or eight months, when the artistic community rose up through its own creative work against the fanatic extremist Islamists,” Ibrahim said. The writer cited a recent film by one of Egypt’s most popular actors--on a terrorist black list--ridiculing Islamic militants and special anti-fundamentalist television programming during the holy month of Ramadan earlier this year.

“These programs have tremendous impact on public opinion. It actually isolated the extremists, and if there was a lull or downward turn in violence, it was mostly due to these kinds of programs, not the government’s security measures,” Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim himself has become a target of the extremists, most notably when he tried to organize a conference on Egyptian minorities in Cairo a few months ago. The Muslim Brotherhood-dominated biweekly newspaper Al Shaab issued a call to “use any means” to block the conference, which was to raise the controversial issue of relations between Egypt’s Muslims and Christian Copts.

“The words ‘any means’ always translate to violence. That was a public invitation to any Islamist to take the law into his own hands,” said Ibrahim, who at the government’s request moved the conference to a neighboring country, Cyprus.

No Islamic groups have claimed responsibility for the Mahfouz attack, and indeed, some have condemned it, although government officials say some of the perpetrators arrested or killed are linked to the outlawed Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group.

Islamists have praised Mahfouz for refusing even from his hospital bed to sanction the publishing of “Children of Gebelawi.” But Egypt’s notorious Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the Gamaa al Islamiya who is awaiting trial in New York in the World Trade Center bombing case, said in 1989 that Mahfouz and Rushdie were alike: “Apostates, as are all of those who speak of Islam as evil. The judgment upon them is repentance, and for he who does not repent, death.”

Mahfouz apparently still takes the threat seriously. His associates say the author considers republication of the book an invitation to “a second assassination attempt.”

Mainstream Islamic figures seem willing to give Mahfouz the benefit of the doubt.

“Naguib Mahfouz made a mistake 35 years ago with the novel, but he also had very respectable accomplishments since then,” said Mohammed Abdel Quddous, a well-known Islamic writer in Cairo and son of the famed late novelist Hussein Abdel Quddous.

Quddous said the roots of the violence against intellectuals can be traced to the violence that Arab regimes have directed at the Islamic trend.

“You should not ask people who are not getting their freedom to respect other people’s freedom. The intellectuals in Algeria, for example, have an anti-Islam position, and they have welcomed the (January, 1992,) cancellation of the elections” in which fundamentalists would have scored a victory, Quddous said.

“The murder of Farag Foda was by a group that has always been chased by the government. They were not allowed freedom of expression, so it was not such a strange thing that they would react like that,” he said. “If there were freedom of speech, there would not be the need for guns. . . . But how do you expect stability to reign when there is no freedom?”

In a cluttered apartment in the posh Cairo district of Zamalek, Said Ashmawi, a former chief security court judge and outspoken writer against Islamic fundamentalism, sits with his drapes drawn during the day and with an armed guard sipping tea on a chair outside his door. Another guard, connected by walkie-talkie, sits in the apartment lobby downstairs.

Ashmawi’s name is enough to draw a snort from even the most moderate Islamist. How could they have hit Mahfouz and not touch Ashmawi, steamed one Islamic intellectual, who asked not to be identified by name.

Ashmawi responds with writings on his computer, producing new treatises in which he turns fundamentalism on its head, usually by probing ideological and theological holes in the arguments of the fundamentalists. In a recent series of articles, he analyzed the traditional Koranic justification for Muslim women covering their heads with a veil and argued that it was unfounded. A Saudi magazine, Al Tawhid, responded angrily, calling him anti-Muslim.

In 1980, Egypt’s highest religious authority branded Ashmawi an apostate, which he has regarded as the equivalent of a death sentence. Although Ashmawi continues to publish, the strain is evident. He is nearly always angry and becomes vituperative when the issue of human rights for the Islamic followers is raised.

“Have they human rights and I haven’t?” he fumed. “After 14 years, these people (at Al Tawhid) are repeating all this again and saying there’s a fatwa against me. This article is justification for any militant to execute me! Should these people have the right to attack decent and liberal people like me, when they are unable to answer what I write?”

Still, Ashmawi evidently relishes the role of attacker and says he has no plans to stop writing.

“I’m living in this dangerous situation since 1980, and I believe I have a mission, and anyone who is looking to fulfill his mission or to enlighten Islam and Muslims’ ideas will be subject to something like that,” he said. “I believe I have to go on. And if I am murdered, my death could be a part of my mission.”

Mahfouz himself has spoken only sparingly from his hospital bed, calling on the world not to confuse Islam with terrorism. But in his regular column for Al Ahram last month, he hinted that there is more than enough blame to go around.

“People seem to have grown intolerant of discussion and unforgiving of difference. Each person who presents a view feels that he is an authority on the matter and that his view is the only one and should be unanimously accepted by all. Those who object should not go unpunished,” he wrote.

He concluded: “Long years of totalitarian rule have left their scar. We need a process of salvation that touches our very spirits.”