Egyptian Exercise in Democracy Falls Short as Fundamentalists Wind Up Jailed : Mideast: Just when President Hosni Mubarak was hoping to showcase national elections, imprisoned dissidents generate a human rights controversy.

In a narrow-street slum of Egypt’s capital, a man went campaigning. He drew a crowd, as a worthy campaigner might. Unfortunately it is illegal for a candidate to draw a crowd here, and the man was arrested.

In a tony neighborhood of Alexandria, nine men filled a car with 50,000 campaign leaflets. Security police, however, deemed those materials anti-government, and the men were arrested.

In the ancient trading center of Asyut, six men handed out circulars complaining about their government’s highhanded arrests of political opponents. They were hauled off to jail.

Today is election day in Egypt. The police and jailers are working overtime.

President Hosni Mubarak’s government would like the vote for a new People’s Assembly, or Parliament, to go down as a noteworthy step toward Egypt’s democratization, a little wobbly perhaps but still advancing in a part of the Arab world where disagreements are seldom decided by plebiscite--particularly the disagreement between fundamentalist Islam and all else.

The arrests cited above--and perhaps 600 more during this short campaign season--have been aimed at Islamists, those who seek to replace Egypt’s secular government with an Islamic state answerable not to popular will but to the holy Koran.

“People hate the government,” says one of the most outspoken of the Islamist candidates in today’s election, Saif Islam Banna, son of the founder of Egypt’s oldest and most important Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The fiery sloganeering is familiar. What is different today is that Islamist candidates have decided against shouting from the sidelines and boycotting the election as in the past, even though their Muslim Brotherhood is technically an illegal organization. About 150 Brotherhood members and sympathizers have filed as candidates for the 454-member Parliament.

Other opposition parties that boycotted the most recent election also are fielding candidates. With independents added in, more than 4,000 men and women are looking for seats in the People’s Assembly that will see Egypt into the 21st Century.

For Mubarak, the electoral challenge has meant a controversial shift in his running battle against Islamists. And this, in turn, has generated greater human rights controversy just at a time when Egyptian democracy was supposed to be showcased.

After a bloody four-year police and military crackdown on violent Islamic groups, Mubarak now seems absorbed with the ostensibly nonviolent political resistance, mainly manifested in the Brotherhood. On Thursday, a military tribunal sentenced 54 Islamists to prison for nonviolent political activities, including some who had announced their intention to seek election. Among those convicted were prominent doctors, lawyers and former members of Parliament.

“We are shocked,” the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in an open letter to Mubarak dated Monday.

The organization said Egypt blemished its international reputation as a result of “the expanding role of the military justice system in civilian political life. . . . “ It went on to decry the arrest and harassment of Islamist candidates, one of them for the petty offense of shaking hands in a coffee shop.

Mubarak, whose own presidential term runs through 1999, counters that the Brotherhood cannot be considered peaceful because it seeks to overthrow an established system of government.

Friendly Western allies, including the United States, give that argument at least some weight, even though they wince at Mubarak’s seemingly expanding heavy-handedness.

In particular, critics note that the Egyptian government has suppressed dissidents other than militant fundamentalists. A new anti-press law was signed by Mubarak, apparently the result of media insinuations of corruption in the president’s own family. With its severe penalties for libeling public figures, the law serves to deter criticism.