Islamic Extremism Is the Foe Arab Leaders Fear Most : Mideast: Militants say they want nations to abandon secularism. Heads of state insist they covet political power.

From Saudi Arabia to Morocco, Islamic militants are battling the Arab Establishment--sometimes with bullets, sometimes with words--in an attempt to redesign the character of the Middle East.

Their professed goal is to turn secular states into Iranian-style Islamic states, which would be anti-West and anti-Israel. Arab leaders counter that the militants’ true motive is to win political power; they assert that the fervid offer no ideology or vision other than destruction, usually achieved through terrorism.

“Fundamentalists preach their ideology because they consider Islam the elevator to take power,” King Hassan II of Morocco said recently. “The day I see a fundamentalist who preaches religion for the love of God, then I’ll say, ‘Fine, let’s listen.’ But so far, I haven’t heard that.”

Since intra-Arab religious violence spread through the Middle East in the early 1990s--coinciding roughly with the end of the war in Afghanistan, in which thousands of Arab volunteers fought as a sort of Islamic Foreign Legion--religious extremism has replaced Israel as the enemy that Arab leaders fear most.

Virtually no Arab country has been immune:

* 30,000 Algerians, including 50 journalists, have died in the government’s war against the Islamic Salvation Front.

* Battles between the Egyptian government and the Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group) have killed 820 people.

* Yemeni soldiers fought militants outside Aden last month; Bahrain fought Shiite protesters whose burning and looting caused millions of dollars in damage.

* In Oman, the government announced recently that it had arrested 200 extremists; Saudi Arabia admits to having arrested 143 last year.

Branding extremists as terrorists, Arab governments have responded to the fundamentalists’ threat with uniform harshness that has brought widespread criticism from human rights groups.

“Arab governments,” said the Cairo-based Arab Organization for Human Rights, “are major violators of their citizens’ human rights, unjustly killing and torturing scores of them and limiting their freedom to dissent.”

With the possible exception of Algeria, Arab governments appear to be winning the confrontation against radical Islam with police-state tactics. “We have broken their leadership,” Hassan Alfi, Egypt’s minister of the Interior, said in an assessment with which Western diplomats agree. Ali Dessouki, dean of political science at Cairo University, observed: “The extremists are dangerous. They can cause problems, but they’ve been isolated.”

Arab leaders dismiss any connection between the rise of Islamic extremism and the presence of serious economic and social problems in their nations. They blame violence on “outside forces”--meaning, for example, Iran or Sudan.

Although they once remained mostly silent while terrorists blew up planes and killed civilians in the name of Palestinian rights, Arab leaders now echo the West in condemning terrorism, at home and abroad, as a scourge that requires a uniform international response.

Critics contend that some governments, among them those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are using crackdowns on Islamic extremists to destroy legitimate political opposition. “Sheer fabrication,” Egypt’s Alfi said. But, undeniably, Arab governments have helped create conditions in which Islamic fervor can take root.

In the absence of democracy, the kings, generals and de facto presidents-for-life of the Arab world have given their people nothing to replace the sense of identity, pride and hopefulness that the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser provided with his message of Pan-Arabism in the 1950s and ‘60s. Today, Islamic fervor has replaced the Pan-Arabism of a generation ago as a refuge for many Arabs.

But the growth of Islamic conservatism in the Middle East should not be considered synonymous with militancy. Asked why she recently started covering her hair with a scarf, an educated young Egyptian woman said, “It just evolved.” She was not a revolutionary or a proponent of an Islamic state. To her, the scarf was a symbol: of piety, of belonging, of accepting a greater power in a time of uncertainty.

“During the oil boom, people said the decision to modernize and bring in so many foreigners would threaten our values--and what happened?” asked Abdul-Rahman Zamil, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of commerce. “We are more religious today than we were 20 years ago. I go to my mosque, and 80% of the men there are younger than 30 years old. All the best doctors, all the best engineers and businessmen are there.”

Egyptian sociologists who have studied the rise of militant Islam say its adherents are younger, less educated and more rural than before. They are recruited in mosques and villages with the promise that to find purpose and fulfillment, one need only be a true believer.