World View : Islam in the '90s: A Study of Diversity : Despite pervasive stereotypes, major Islamist groups differ widely in tactics and tenets.

By ROBIN WRIGHT

Feb. 7, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TEHRAN —

Sixteen years after Iran’s revolution launched militant Islam as a powerful modern political force, the broader Islamist movement has fractured, deeply, into diverse and often disparate strains--in some cases even rivalries.

The emerging Islamist spectrum in the mid-1990s ranges from the religious right elected to Kuwait’s Parliament, where it is demanding sexually segregated classrooms and accountable government, to Egyptian militants trying to overthrow a secular state.

Most groups want an Islamic state based on or guided by the religious values spelled out in the Koran. But visions of that state vary significantly. Some limit their agenda to enacting legislation to conform with Islamic law, or Sharia. Others stress conforming society to religious values through everything from education to entertainment. Still others are willing to share power with secular parties and other religions.

The most notorious is the minority that advocates a rigid Islamic state in which all aspects of life follow the strictest religious interpretations. But even among these hard-liners, very few actually want a state headed by a sheik, ayatollah or any of the many titles conferred on Muslim religious leaders.

Despite pervasive stereotypes, the tactics of about 20 major Islamist groups also differ widely.

In contrast to Islamic Jihad’s suicide bombing that killed 21 people at a bus station in Israel last month and the ongoing executions of intellectuals by Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group, Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights distributes monthly newsletters, and Morocco’s Justice and Charity movement performs humanitarian work.

Leaders of the most energetic force in the Middle East also span the spectrum, from a Sorbonne-educated lawyer and a petrochemical engineer to turbaned Muslim clerics steeped in the learning of millennia-old seminaries.

Islamists are now so diverse that an old adage has been popularly adapted: In any country where there are two Islamists, there are three movements--sometimes at odds under one umbrella.

Even Iran, which in the late 1970s aspired to unify all Islamist groups and create a modern Islamic empire, now acknowledges the diversity.

“Islam has become a serious force throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the groups have developed without much connection to each other,” said Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s deputy foreign minister.

“What motivates people in Algeria may not be the same as in Egypt or Afghanistan or among Palestinians,” he added.

The U.S. government agrees.

“While there are informal contacts among Islamists--especially abroad, where their leaders often find safe havens and fund-raising opportunities--there is little hard evidence of a coordinated international network or command and control apparatus among these groups,” said Philip C. Wilcox Jr., State Department coordinator for counterterrorism. And for years, U.S. officials have stressed that the Islamist movement does not necessarily or even usually equate with terrorism.

Despite their common cultural history, modern Islamist movements are separated in part by nationalism.

Loyalties created after most Mideast states gained independence from Ottoman Turkey and European colonialists in the 20th Century now usually supersede religious bonds.

In the wider Muslim world, ethnic distinctions and tensions--between Arabs, Persians, Indonesians, Indians and others--also create differences.

But the split goes deeper than nationality. Goals are so wide-ranging that some countries have their own full spectrum of Islamists, reflecting the broader movement’s evolving pluralism.

Egypt is home to the Muslim Brotherhood, the first mass Islamist movement of the 20th Century and now among the most moderate Islamist groups anywhere.

But the slums of Cairo and the poor Nile villages of Upper Egypt also hide militants of the Islamic Group, which has launched terrorist strikes to weaken President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.

The most important factor, however, is Islam itself. Its two major sects--Sunni and Shiite--differ critically on the role of religion in politics and the clergy’s powers.

Internal disparities are a prime reason that Shiite Iran’s Islamic republic is not a singular model for other movements. It now has only minority support among foreign Islamist groups.

Within the full Islamist spectrum, however, axes or alignments have formed--not unlike alliances in other ideological blocs.

As the forerunner of a trend that has exploded in the late 20th Century, Iran remains the centerpiece of the oldest and most militant axis linking Shiite Islamists of varying strengths in Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain.

Since the late 1980s, Tehran’s ruling Shiite mullahs have also tried to consolidate an axis with a new crop of Sunni Islamists. Many Sunni had became disillusioned with Iran’s authoritarian style of rule soon after the 1979 revolution.

Of Iran’s new Sunni links, the primary one runs through Sudan’s Islamists, who seized power in 1989.

Iranian Revolutionary Guards have trained militants from several countries in Sudanese camps, according to Western intelligence services. After the Palestinian intifada erupted in Israel’s occupied territories in 1987, Iran also cultivated groups among the Sunni Palestinians.

Those ties are evident in an innocuous fourth-floor apartment on Chahrazi Street in Tehran where Osama Hamdan, a member of the militant Palestinian Hamas organization, runs a two-man office.

“Our main work here is talking to members of Parliament, Foreign Ministry officials, Arab and European embassies and the press,” Hamdan said. “We’re not like the Shiite groups. We don’t do military training here”--a claim supported by Western envoys.

Indeed, Hamas complains of Iran’s limited help. Its main financial aid comes from supporters in Saudi Arabia and the United States, according to Hamdan.

Islamic Jihad, based in the Gaza Strip, gets far more Iranian aid, Hamdan noted grudgingly, reflecting a rivalry between the two Palestinian groups.

Since last year, Tehran has also begun to aid some Algerian Islamists. At least one arms shipment has transited via Sudan, while Iranian officials have tried to cultivate relations with extremist factions in Algeria, according to U.S. officials.

Iran’s Sunni allies represent marriages of convenience--and Tehran’s desire to tap into Sunni groups that are now often more dynamic than their Shiite counterparts. Sunni make up more than 80% of the world’s 1 billion Muslims, while the Shia represent about 12%.

“There is no Islamist or fundamentalist stereotype,” a key U.S. official concluded. “Their spectrum is at least as varied as ours in the West.”

Islamists and Middle East analysts offer this breakdown of the spectrum and the forces on it:

North Africa

* Egypt--The roots of the modern Islamic spectrum are in Egypt, a Sunni nation where Hassan Banna, a schoolteacher, formed the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya in 1928. It is, directly or indirectly, the grandfather of many current movements throughout the region.

The Ikhwan now has 100,000 members and a vast network of sympathizers, despite being outlawed in 1954.

Since the mid-1980s, it has been unofficially permitted to field candidates in alliance with the secular Socialist Labor Party, which publishes the newspaper most critical of Mubarak.

In elections in the late 1980s, the Brotherhood alliance established the largest opposition in Parliament, which is controlled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The Brotherhood has since boycotted polls, saying the balloting is rigged. It also dominated unions, including the lawyers union, headed by Seif Banna, son of the Ikhwan founder.

The vision of the elder Banna, a fiery orator who rallied workers, students, merchants and young professionals, still defines the Ikhwan mission as well as the approach of many Mideast Islamists.

“My brothers, you are not a benevolent society, nor a political party, nor a local organization having limited purposes. Rather, you are a new soul in the heart of this nation to give it life by means of the Koran,” Hassan Banna exhorted his followers.

“When asked what it is for which you call, reply that it is Islam, the message of Mohammed, the religion that contains within it government. . . . If you are told that you are political, answer that Islam admits no such distinction.”

The Brotherhood has spawned or inspired separate groups of the same name in Syria, Jordan, Sudan, the Israeli-occupied territories and elsewhere.

Despite failed attempts to organize an international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood over the past decade, the groups share general goals. They include applying the Sharia, challenging regimes that do not practice it, limiting Western influence in Islamic nations and rejecting Israel, although, in recent years, by nonviolent means.

On the spectrum’s opposite end are two radical groups--Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group--that emerged in the 1970s. They collaborated in the 1979 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and are now linked to most terrorism since 1992.

After leaders of the two groups were imprisoned for Sadat’s death, their followers split under different spiritual mentors. But the Cairo government believes that the turning point--and most important factor in today’s violence--was its decision to let Egyptians fight with Afghan moujahedeen against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

When Egyptian militants trickled home, the extremism in Egypt began with attacks against foreign tourists, security and government officials, and intellectuals. The Islamic Group is most active in Upper Egypt, while Islamic Jihad’s attacks, both better organized and against more prominent figures, such as Cabinet officials, are mainly in Cairo.

The Islamic Group is made up of followers of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, now on trial in New York for plotting to bomb the United Nations and blow up New York City tunnels, and Mohammed Islambouli. After his Afghan experience, Abdel Rahman went to New York to raise money for the Afghan moujahedeen and the Islamic Group.

Members of Islamic Jihad follow Ayman Zawahiri, a middle-age doctor who served three years for Sadat’s death, then went to minister to the Afghan wounded.

Although hit hard by arrests and executions last year, Egyptian extremists launched a comeback this year with a spate of new attacks.

The Islamic Group pledged to “confront the regime . . . and defend religion and liberties until our people enjoy the freedom they want under Islam.”

* Sudan--After Iran, Sudan has the most militant Islamist government. Since 1989, the National Islamic Front led by Hassan Turabi, an urbane British- and French-trained lawyer, has gained control over every facet of life and business--and stepped up the civil war against Sudanese in the Christian and animist south. Turabi is the power behind the government of President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir.

“Islam has come. We shall follow the rules of the Prophet Mohammed, or we shall die for it. There is no alternative to God’s Sharia,” Turabi said, reflecting the National Islamic Front’s absolutist vision.

Sudan has denied running terrorist training camps, but U.S. officials confronted the regime with evidence last year.

In 1991, Turabi organized the first United Islamic Popular Congress, an alternative to the Islamic Conference headquartered in Saudi Arabia. It was one of several Islamic conventions hosted by the front in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in an attempt to foster militant Islam.

The front’s goal is to spread its vision in the Horn of Africa and to build an Islamic empire from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Through Islamic relief organizations, it seeks fertile breeding ground in refugee camps in Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya. Sharia is now being practiced in many camps.

In the mid-1980s, Turabi spurned Iran’s mullahs. “They are destroying themselves. Religious energy is breathtaking. If it is liberated without having a constructive program, it is capable of destroying everything, including us,” he said.

* Algeria--The greatest Islamist challenge to an Arab government is in Algeria, where the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, was sweeping the first free parliamentary elections in 1992 when the army seized power and outlawed religious parties. The FIS leaders--philosophy professor Abbas Madani, firebrand cleric Sheik Ali Belhaj and petrochemical engineer Abdel Kadar Hachani--were among thousands detained.

Forced underground, the Islamists have since split on both tactics and goals--an increasingly familiar scenario in places where governments react with repression. All are now engaged in an insurgency campaign against the junta. The death toll is estimated to be as high as 30,000.

The Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, is linked to ruthless assassinations of officials, civilians and, since last year, foreigners.

The GIA’s latest threat was to target all French planes, boats and other transport to Algeria. It also ordered Algerian journalists to stop working or face attack for “justifying the crimes and covering up the evils” of the junta. Many in the GIA cadre are graduates of the Afghan war.

In contrast, Salvation Front exiles worked out a peace formula with seven Algerian secular parties last month in Rome. The plan rejects violence, guarantees rights regardless of race, religion or sex and endorses multi-party democracy. It calls for an end to hostilities by all parties and a “gradual, simultaneous and negotiable peace process.”

“The specter of anti-democratic Islamists is now obliterated,” said Anwar Haddam, a Salvation Front official. Together, the eight parties to the Rome peace pact accounted for 85% of the 1992 vote.

* Tunisia--The Renaissance Party had support or sympathy from up to 40% of the population in the late 1980s, according to a U.S. congressional report. Its platform--including democracy, coexistence with secular parties and full women’s rights--is among the most moderate in the region.

“Complete equality is the basis of any new Muslim society,” said its leader, philosophy professor Rashid Ghannouchi. “There is no room to make distinctions between citizens on religious or other grounds. And the only state legitimacy comes from elections including all parties.”

The party even changed its name from the Islamic Tendency Movement to calm government fears of radical Islam. But the movement was crushed after a wave of mass arrests and show trials in 1990-91, forcing members underground and leaders into exile.

Western officials fear that Tunisian mishandling could push the party toward the other end of the spectrum.

* Morocco--A moderate Islamic group, Justice and Charity, tried to build alliances with the secular opposition to run in recent elections, but it had little luck because of official resistance. Its main work is mosque-related social services.

In an ominous turn, 18 Islamists of Moroccan or Algerian origin, including one trained in Afghanistan, were convicted last month of a string of attacks in Fez, Marrakech and Casablanca in 1993-94. The targets included a McDonald’s restaurant and a tourist hotel.

But they do not appear to be members of an organized group. Most claimed to have been recruited in France or Germany and lured to Morocco under false pretenses, including promises to fight in Bosnia.

The Middle East

* Occupied territories--After the intifada erupted in 1987, Islamists began to steal the limelight from the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hamas grew out of the Islamic Center led by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a charismatic preacher recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood while studying in Cairo. Although jailed for life by Israel, Yassin remains Hamas’ spiritual mentor.

Hamas’ charter seeks the liberation of all of old Palestine through a long struggle. It also stresses development of an Islamic society living by Koranic traditions.

“Liberation will come, we believe, when Palestinians have submitted to the will of Allah,” said Ibrahim Yazouri, a Gaza pharmacist, one of seven Hamas founders and a student recruit of the Muslim Brotherhood while in Egypt.

Hamas, which rejected the PLO-Israeli autonomy agreement, is now deep in a dialogue with the PLO about a role in the Palestinian Authority and in elections later this year. Recent polls show that Hamas could win up to 40% of votes in Gaza and 25% in the territories overall.

“We strongly criticize the PLO and (Chairman Yasser) Arafat for capitulating time and again to the Zionists. Nevertheless, we recognize that it is better to be under Palestinian rule, however it has come about, than Israeli occupation. We will use it--not accept it, but use it--as a step toward an Islamic society and an Islamic state,” said Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Zahar.

Ironically, Hamas, an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, was initially encouraged by Israel to counter the PLO.

More extreme is Islamic Jihad, which preaches armed struggle in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Israel, without waiting for Islamization of Palestinian society. It condemns Arab regimes for promoting peace with Israel and ties with the West.

Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini inspired Islamic Jihad, and Tehran is still a major source of funding. Highly fragmented--with nine factions just in the Gaza Strip--Islamic Jihad commands little popular support, recent polls indicate. But its attacks, such as the January’s suicide bombing, are widely admired, notably among frustrated youth.

* Israel--The Islamic Movement, led by Sheik Abdullah Nimr Darwish, developed a strong following in Israel’s Arab towns through a network of charities and social groups. From a loose network of preachers in the 1980s, the Islamists have elected six mayors and council members in 16 towns and could win up to 12 seats in the Israeli Parliament next year.

Its long-term goal is an Islamic Middle East and the return of Arab East Jerusalem to Muslim administration. Its focus is social change--sexually segregated schools, prayer breaks during soccer matches, modest female dress and bans on alcohol.

“Anywhere there is a Muslim majority, it is incumbent on them to establish an Islamic state,” Darwish said. “Where there is a Muslim minority, it is incumbent to serve their community. Yes, I want to see an Islamic state here and across the Middle East. But this is only after the majority of the IDF (Israeli army) converts to Islam along with most citizens of Israel. . . . This will not come tomorrow.”

* Lebanon--Lebanon’s Shiite Party of God, or Hezbollah, was among the first offshoots of Iran’s revolution. Sub-cells with many names were linked in the 1980s to suicide bombings of U.S. embassies and a Marine compound, and kidnapings of dozens of Western hostages.

Hezbollah also remains the external force most active against Israel, operating from southern Lebanon.

Its first leader, Sheik Sobhi Tufeili, pledged: “We do not work or think within the borders of Lebanon . . . which is one of the legacies of imperialism. We must eliminate the artificial entity known as Lebanon.”

With the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, however, the Party of God fielded candidates for Parliament in 1992--and won the largest bloc. It also provides a vast array of services, from free health care to farm cooperatives, and snow and garbage removal. As an umbrella group, Hezbollah itself spans the spectrum.

Its latest leader is young Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who received religious training in Iran and Iraq. “Hezbollah is now as much political as military,” he said last year.

* Jordan--Once allied with the monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest, largest and most moderate Islamic movement. It flourished for decades as a counterweight to radical Palestinian influences in Jordan. But since Iran’s revolution, it has been viewed as a potential challenge, despite peaceful policies.

When Jordan began democratizing in 1989, the Brotherhood formed a political wing, the Islamic Action Front, headed by Ishaq Farhan, president of Al-Zarqa University and a former senator. In 1989 and 1993 parliamentary elections, the IAF and Islamist sympathizers won the largest blocs.

In Parliament, the bloc has pushed hardest to segregate the sexes, promote Islam in education, ban alcohol and investigate government corruption.

“We believe in the gradualness of change, and in democracy and freedom for all people. We believe we have a message for the whole world, but we have proven that we can live with Christians and Jews, whose message is the same as ours,” said Abdulatif Arabiat, an IAF member of Parliament.

Tensions increased during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and again last year after the Jordan-Israel peace treaty, which the Brotherhood opposes.

King Hussein admonished them to voice opposition within democratic bounds. Abdel Muneim Abu Zant, a hard-line parliamentarian, was beaten by security forces after preaching against the peace treaty in an Amman mosque.

But Islamic Action Front leaders, who do not always agree, recently said they would like to defuse tension and serve alongside non-Islamists in the Cabinet.

On the other extreme is the Islamic Liberation Party, which broke from the Brotherhood in the 1950s and has since aimed at overthrowing the monarchy. Its most recent plot to assassinate the king was uncovered last year. Its main strategy is to infiltrate the military and bureaucracy.

* Syria--The Muslim Brotherhood posed the most serious threat to the regime of President Hafez Assad until he ordered it quashed during a 1982 uprising in Hama. Up to 25,000 Brotherhood adherents and their families were killed, and much of the city was destroyed. It operates only in exile.

But force could not put down Islamist sentiment. Ironically for one of the region’s most secular societies, Islamist activity has increased throughout Syria in the 1990s, leading to construction of a massive new mosque in Hama--a gift from the president.

The Persian Gulf

* Kuwait--Political parties are not allowed. But since the Persian Gulf War forced the monarchy to hold elections and reopen Parliament, non-government organizations, such as the Heritage Revival Society and Social Reform Society, both Sunni, and the Shiite Islamic Cultural and Social Society have been tolerated. Most have social agendas. The Heritage Society, for example, is pushing to reform society through Islamic education.

In 1993 elections, however, Islamists won two-thirds of the opposition seats in Parliament. They operate in loose coalitions called the Islamic Constitutional Movement and the more conservative Islamic Grouping to enact various aspects of Islamic law.

“Many of us were educated in the West, and we want to continue to benefit from Western science and technology,” said Islamist parliamentarian Admad Baqr after the 1993 elections. “We know the West helped us a lot in liberating our country (from Iraq). But we are Muslims and we need to say that out loud.”

Yet even Kuwaiti moderates differ. Some promote sexually segregated classrooms, while others are pushing the female franchise in the only Gulf emirate with any vote.

* Saudi Arabia--The ruling House of Saud, which used conservative Wahabi Islam to consolidate feudal tribes in the 1920s, has faced a host of Islamist movements beginning with the 1979 takeover of Mecca’s Grand Mosque by Sunni extremists and 1979-80 Shiite riots. Both were forcibly quelled.

Since the late 1980s, a new crop of Islamists emerged and prospered politically in the wake of declining oil revenue and the heavy Western presence during the 1991 Gulf War. Unlike the tribal and poorly educated Saudi rebels of the past, the new Islamists are professionals, middle-class and well-educated.

Internally, they are amorphously centered on the Salafi movement, a radical Wahabi strand, and range from moderates demanding reforms to ultraconservatives who are linked to a number of recently arrested sheiks, such as Sheik Salman Auda.

Recent dissent ranges from rare protests around mosques, which have prompted mass arrests, to petitions to King Fahd.

Petitions have called for clerics to oversee all government branches and embassies; the dismantling of Western-oriented banks and “purification” of financial institutions; an end to corruption and nepotism; reform of the media to serve Islam and censorship of foreign media with secular or infidel ideas; and creation of an army of half a million soldiers to fight Jews and help Muslims.

Within weeks of being founded in 1993, the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights was ordered to disband, and an official, physics professor Mohammed Masaari, was jailed. The committee was relaunched abroad by Masaari after he was freed and had fled to Europe.

Like the Salafi, the committee advocates change without violence and also envisions an even more purist Saudi Arabia.

Ironically, private Saudi aid organizations are the biggest single source of funds for a host of movements elsewhere, from Algeria’s FIS and Egypt’s Ikhwan to Hamas in the West Bank.

* Iraq--A shadowy movement--Al Dawaa, or the Call--was once the oldest and largest Shiite extremist group and a serious threat to President Saddam Hussein. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Al Dawaa was linked to a host of assassination attempts on Hussein and his Cabinet. It successfully launched small attacks on government facilities.

But with ruthless force and executions of key Shiite religious leaders, Hussein forced Al Dawaa underground, and tens of thousands of Shiites crossed the border into Iran.

The Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq has been based in Tehran for more than 15 years, even though its vision of an Islamic state differs from Iran’s. It is headed by Mohammed Bakr-Hakim, a soft-spoken cleric and son of the Al Dawaa founder, reflecting the close ties.

* Bahrain--For 15 years, the tiny island nation ruled by a Sunni monarchy has witnessed sporadic bursts of violence by the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. The clandestine movement of Shiites, many of whom have family links in Iran, has had offices in Tehran and Beirut.

Since a new wave of rioting and unrest began in November, the government has launched a series of crackdowns--with trials expected in the near future. The front grew out of--and now exploits--economic disparities between Sunni and Shiites.

* Oman--A new Ikhwan movement has tried to gain influence in the Gulf emirate’s education system. It also advocates expelling Christians, anathema to a government dependent on foreign expertise.

But recent government arrests--including members of the military and the government--are widely believed to be as much a reaction to events outside Oman, notably in Algeria and Egypt.

* Yemen--The Islamist Islah Party finished second in newly unified Yemen’s first democratic elections in 1993, ahead of the Socialist Party of former South Yemen. Its position strengthened after the two-month civil war last year, when the north quashed southern secessionists.

“Islam approves the concept of democracy and gives Muslims a chance to choose the system that fits them best. Islam did not make it one way or one system which every generation at all times must apply,” said Mohammed Yadomi, editor of the Islah newspaper.

An underground militant party, Jihad, launched hit-and-run attacks on Yemeni security forces last fall in the Arab world’s poorest state.

Times staff writers Mary Curtius, Kim Murphy and Michael Parks contributed to this article.