The Middle East: Through a Glass Darkly : NONFICTION : GOD HAS NINETY-NINE NAMES: Reporting From a Militant Middle East.<i> By Judith Miller (Simon & Schuster: $30, 574 pp.)</i> : THE IRANIANS: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation.<i> By Sandra Mackey (Dutton: $26.95, 426 pp.)</i>

When militant Islamists bombed the World Trade Center, killing and wounding scores of people, they also tore a great rent in the American psyche. Average citizens can no longer feel secure, even if they stay at home, never fly in an airplane and remain far from capitals like Tehran or Khartoum where Islamic militancy has bred and burgeoned in multifarious mixes of politics and Islamic religion, intrigue and repression, power and poverty. Yet most Americans know little about these forces that have shattered their conception of safety.

A reason for this ignorance, other than the general insularity of many Americans who disregard foreign matters, is the extraordinary complexity of the Middle East and its militancy.

King Hussein, an Arab monarch with moderate tendencies and an American wife, supported Saddam Hussein during his madcap Gulf War venture. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the mullah who revolutionized Iran and epitomizes radical Islam, is not an Arab but a Persian. Hezbollah, which recently made headlines by firing rockets into the settlements of northern Israel in the face of brutal Israeli bombing retaliation, is armed by Iran and not related to the Palestinian Hamas, which made an equal share of headlines as its gruesomely suicidal fanatics with explosives strapped to their bodies blew up buses on Israeli streets. Moammar Kadafi, the eccentric leader of Libya and no Islamist himself, who sheltered the terrorists responsible for the infamous bombing of the jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, could not be more different from Hafiz Assad, the soberly ruthless president of Syria who also has sheltered a variety of terrorists in his Damascus capital. Consistency and predictability are not part of the bizarre blend.

The United States has played its own role in the mix of Islam and radicalism when, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency bolstered the Islamic sheiks waging war on Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, providing them and their moujahedeen fighters with training and with arms that are now splintering that country and filtering back into other terror-laden venues. Some were among those arrested for the plots to blow up the World Trade Center and other vital New York sites, and some--to add another twist to the complexity--carried passports from Sudan, a north African country now governed by radical Islamists.

For those who are looking for an understanding of the encroaching realities of the Middle East, two valuable books have just been published that describe with authority and detail the politics and personalities that have been transforming the region and, directly or otherwise, various parts of the world.

“God Has Ninety-Nine Names” is an exhaustive survey of the happenings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iran. Its author is Judith Miller, who served as the New York Times correspondent in the Middle East in the 1980s and has earned a special love for the both splendid and wretched (sometimes simultaneously) region. Her writing is informed by her remarkable friendships with some of the most powerful figures in the Middle East, her tenacity at pursuing interviews with some of the most potent of the militants, her large knowledge of the difficult territory and her attention to the forces of history. The book suffers only from her ambition to explain with microscopic intensity 10 disparate countries, an effort from which she emerges without trenchant conclusions. Her work does offer the patient reader a treasure trove of information, though.

The second book, “The Iranians,” goes deep rather than wide, elucidating Iran’s history, the country’s role as the leader of militant Islam and, in the post-Khomeini era, its struggle for identity. Its author, Sandra Mackey, is a journalist, expert on the Middle East, who has managed an open-minded approach to a country vilified by much of the world.

The title of Miller’s book derives from the Koran having 99 names for god, a reflection of her observation that Islam is no monolith, with varieties “as distinct from country to country as Catholicism is in France, Italy, Brazil and America. There is no more an Islamic world than there is an Arab one or a Christian one.” As with other religious groups, too, most Muslims have refrained from the extremism that gets the world’s attention, practicing Islam without politicizing it. But about 175 Islamist groups do function in the region, nearly three-quarters of them “militant” or “radical,” according to a political scientist cited by Miller.

The only common ground of these Islamists is the Koran. They possess a general belief that a return to the values of the prophet Muhammad, and a strict interpretation of his teachings, will free them from the evils, the social laxness and the inequalities of Western-style modernity and will resurrect a golden age when Islam ruled the known world. Several general reasons for the increasing success of hard-core Islamists can be suggested. Government via the dictates of the Koran promises egalitarianism--which has yet to be delivered--in a region where widespread poverty butts up against oil wealth and repressive governments squash popular protest. More practically, Islamic groups have established networks of social institutions, from schools to clinics, that service the needy in slums from the Gaza Strip to the alleyways of Algiers. Finally, militant Islam in its insistence that Israel be eradicated claims to have the answer to the West’s, particularly the Americans’, support for a Jewish state in a hostile region.

The author makes few predictions about what this melange of resurgent Islamic radicalism will deliver, but she does conclude that “militant Islam seems likely to grow in the long run” in a region “with autocratic governments that refuse to relinquish or share power” in countries with, in many instances, “grossly inadequate jobs, social services and housing.”

Miller pays attention to the lot of women, who under strict interpretations of the Koran are assigned a most unliberated place in the ranks of the jihad, the Islamic holy war against the infidels--the nonbelievers--particularly the Israelis and their allies. Hamas has defined a woman’s “main role,” according to Miller, as “maker of men” who can become holy warriors. In Algeria, a “moderate” leader of the Islamic movement recited for Miller one of the extreme Islamic rules for women: A woman should leave her home only three times: “when she is born, when she is married and when she goes to the cemetery.”

In her Middle Eastern travels, which began in 1971, Miller has cultivated intellectuals, thinkers who tend to be appalled and endangered by militant Islam. By their very nature, their ideas lead them from the “straight path” of unquestioning adherence to a Koranic world view. Intellectuals often find freedom in exile or risk Islamic wrath back home.

Although most Middle Eastern countries are not theocracies and do not practice Sharia, the Muslim holy law that exacts severe penalties--death for apostasy and adultery, the hacking off of hands for thievery--a few do. Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan practice it with vengeance. Miller opens her book with a vignette from Sudan, where an elderly Islamic reformer was publicly hanged for questioning the president’s interpretation of Sharia. In the din following the hanging, as the corpse dangled like a sack of potatoes, hundreds of the onlooking men, hugged and kissed each other and shouted in jubilation, “God is great.”

One of the defining events in the revival of militant Islam occurred in Iran. In 1979, secular and religious revolutionists drove from his throne the “King of Kings,” Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the dictator nurtured by the U.S. and detested by millions of his poor and voiceless subjects. The revolution opened the way for the return of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, the zealous, grim-faced Islamic cleric, whose radical view of Islam won out. Iran became the Islamic Republic ruled by a new elite composed of the clergy of the Shiite sect of Islam whose ideas spread like wildfire through the region.

Mackey argues accurately in her book on Iran that “the volatile state” of the Middle East cannot be understood without first understanding Iran. She, having both studied the country and traveled there extensively, delves into its fractured history. This is the land of the ancient Persian kings who believed in the god Zoroaster and held thrall over an empire. In the 7th century, a new force overwhelmed the empire, the Islamic religion of invading Arabs. Ever since, the country has struggled with two warring identities, one evolving from the ancient Persian kingship and the other from Islam, which demands holy rather than secular leadership.

The Shiite sect of Islam, that of the oppressed as opposed to the more mainstream Sunni sect, served Khomeini well. When, during the first year of the revolution, radical students seized as hostages the American diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, “Khomeini reached into Shiite tradition for the symbol he needed,” to justify the action, according to Mackey. “In Shiism, it is believed that Satan exerts his influence by acting within a person.” Khomeini broadened the concept to apply it to the United States. “Satan dwelt within the global superpower,” writes Mackey, “directing his power against Iran.” All the hostages were guilty of Americanism.

Iran, however, is no more a behemoth than the U.S. is satanic. In the post-Khomeini era, Mackey points out, American policymakers have been foolish to ignore the moderating efforts of President Hashemi Rafsanjani. The Clinton administration’s current embargo against Iran raises the “danger of creating a monster from an adversary,” she warns. “It has been almost two decades since [the shah] departed Iran. “Yet, in all those years, the United States has never seriously grappled with the issues of Iranian culture that might explain Iranian behavior.”

Not just Iran, but the whole Middle East has more than once befuddled American policymakers. The U.S., for instance, has lurched back and forth in its support of Iran and Iraq, ending with both oil-rich countries on its enemies’ list. Jimmy Carter bungled his presidency trying to rescue hostages from a theocratic Iran. Ronald Reagan suffered a tremendous embarrassment to his presidency with the Iran-Contra affair. The U.S. was caught flat-footed by the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, who was supposedly an ally in an anti-Iranian stance.

A better-informed American public and policy might help avert fiascoes so typical in the region. Both Mackey’s and Miller’s books are waiting to be read, so that perhaps “the Great Satan” can better comprehend the “holy warrior.”