Appeal of Fundamentalism Growing in Egypt

Egyptian governmental seal (AP)

In Egypt, the revolution will not be televised. There, the revolution is being crushed.

It is Friday, just before noon prayers in the heart of old Islamic Cairo. The second week of bombing is underway in Afghanistan and throughout the Moslem world there were protests against U.S. action, but not here. The police presence is none too subtle.

At the Al-Azhar Mosque, the oldest Mosque in Egypt, the seat of the nation's spiritual leader, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the crowds hurry past a squadron of uniformed police and plainclothes men who make no attempt to hide the pistols sitting on their hips. A single Egyptian camera crew has turned up in anticipation of some kind of event. They go away empty handed.

Other days, al-Azhar is not guarded. Learning goes hand in hand with prayers.

In a stairwell by the entrance a teacher helps a young man in his twenties memorize the Koran.

The feeling you get walking the streets of Tehran and Cairo is that Egypt, where revolutionary Islam is suppressed, is a much more devout place than the Islamic Republic of Iran, run by Islamic clergy.

Nevertheless Ayatollah Khomeini's successful overthrow of the Shah remains the benchmark for Egypt's Islamic revolutionaries according to Hala Mustafa, of the Al-Ahram Institute.

Cairo skyline, and the Nile River(AP)

"Most of the militant groups who emerged in the seventies in Egypt were really inspired by the Iranian revolution and of course the Iranian way of ruling," she says.

Islamic radicals have yet to stage their revolution, but their presence in Egypt has changed the social order.

The society has become "Islamized," according toMona Makrana Ebeid, professor of sociology at the American University of Cairo and a former member of the Egyptian Parliament. "Secular voices are very faint," she says, and the process has accelerated in the past decade.

The Sheikh of Al-azhar Mosque is the supreme cleric in Egypt. The Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak, refers decisions to him on a range of issues, not just questions that skirt religious sensibility like organ donation, but practical issues like land reform as well.

The process of Islamization cuts across all social classes in Egypt.

Fifty years ago, Egypt's educated elite were secularists. Gamel Abdel Nasser's revolution of 1952 did nothing to change that. He too was a secularist, with a socialist bent. However, secularism was critically wounded by one event according to sociologist Mona Makrana Ebeid.

Six Day War's Lasting Effect

In 1967, was the Six Day War. In less than a week, the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed, Israeli armored divisions seized Sinai and rolled to the edge of the Suez Canal less than three hours' drive from Cairo. It was a national trauma for Egyptians. "It was only after '67 that this whole religious resurgence started to emerge," says sociologist Ebeid. "The people had felt so humiliated, so desperate so angry and so lost so the one refuge was religion."

Because of the defeat of 1967, a generation of politically radical students turned away from Nasser's form of socialism. According to Professor Ebeid, they didn't turn very far.

She says that the slogans of the Islamic movement were often the same slogans as the socialists slogans of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. "They're asking for more equity, they are fighting against corruption they want more justice and more morality. .. They feel their traditions are getting lost and their authenticity is disappearing under the burden of modernity or what we call today globalization.," she says.

Long before globalization, there was a world economic order. It was called colonialism, and it was run from Europe. After World War I, that economic order began to fall apart. Nationalist movements surged through the colonial world. In Egypt, in the 1920's a group combining nationalist sentiment with Islam was formed. They called themselves the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, their leader Essan al-Aryan says the group is the most popular party in Egypt

It's a remarkable claim considering the Muslim Brotherhood is banned from Egyptian politics.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak (AP)

Egypt is essentially a one party state and has been since Nasser's time. There are 444 seats in the Egyptian Parliament. Close to 90 percent are held by President Mubarak's National Democratic Party and allied groups. Since the Muslim Brothers can't field candidates as a party, individuals who support them stand as independents. These independents make up the second largest group in Parliament. The Brotherhood really wields its influence elsewhere according to Essan el Aryan.

From the Mosques the Brotherhood provides services usually associated with the state: health programs, welfare and education. Education is a critical part of Revolutionary Islam, around the Muslim world it is in the schools or Madrassahs, that Islamic politics are inculcated in young minds.

Only the autocratic power of President Mubarak seems to stop the onward march of revolutionary Islam in Egypt. Mubarak's government has been criticized for its anti-democratic tendencies. However, Hala Mustafa, of the Al-Ahram Institute, says the critics are wrong. The time for true democracy is only after a solid foundation is laid

Another view of the Cairo skyline (AP)

"One of the mistakes made by the west is giving much attention to the democratization process in the Arab or Muslim countries before giving attention to secularizing these societies. It will never be a real democracy without secular developments," says Mustafa.

Still, the government has many critics. There are 13,000 political prisoners in Egypt. They are detained under special security legislation enacted following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by radical Muslims.

Lawyer Montasser Zayat represents those prisoners as they come to trial. He works from personal experience. After Sadat's assassination, Zayat, a member of Islamic Jihad was among the first thrown in prison under the special laws. The irony in the Sadat murder is that the late president was an extremely devout Muslim, his forehead marked with the permanent bruise of those who pray five times a day. That not enough for the radicals zays Zayat.

As Egyptian society became more Islamized, revolutionary groups like Islamic Jihad and Gamaa al Islamiya became more aggressive. The harder the Mubarak regime suppressed them, the more violent these groups became. Finally, in 1997 the radicals attacked a group of tourists at the ancient Temple of Luxor killing 57 of them. The government crackdown became so severe that the leadership of Islamic Jihad and Gamaal-islamiya left Egypt. They went to Afghanistan to join Osama bin-Laden and Al Qaeda. Among those who left was a man who was tortured alongside Montasser Zayat twenty years ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief deputy.

An international movement needs an international enemy. Islamic revolutionaries have two.

The Twin Enemy: America and Israel

US Army M1A2 tank after completing Operation Brightstar training exercise (AP)

On a Mediterranean beach west of Alexandria an Egyptian Army Band serenades an assembly of military bigwigs with popular tunes from the days of the British Empire. Operation Brightstar is taking place, the biennial joint military maneuvers between the U.S. and Egypt and several other Mediterranean countries. Today the assembled troops are rehearsing a beach assault.

Overhead Egyptian pilots fly their U.S.-built F-4's in support.

Bright Star is part of Egypt's peace dividend. Because Egypt signed the Camp David accords, it can purchase U.S. weapons like the F-4 and train with American forces.

The Mubarak government is happy to take part. However, it is precisely this kind of U.S. military activity in a Muslim country that enrages Islamic revolutionaries. If you point out to an Egyptian radical that his country is the second largest recipient of American foreign aid, not all of it in the form of military hardware, it won't gain you much credit. That's because the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid is Israel.

Around the Muslim world, anger at the U.S. is not directed at the American government for its support of regimes that are autocratic and frequently corrupt. A reading of the Egyptian daily press shows the hatred for the U.S. comes from its support of Israel. Israel is seen, for example in the words of Egypt's al-Akhbar newspaper as "the reason behind the calamities in the world."

Governments use the press in Egypt and throughout the Arab World as a pressure valve. Columnists can't vent anger about their regimes unless they want to lose their jobs and end up in jail, but they can freely vent rage at Israel and the U.S.

To an American traveling in the region it often seems like the news comes from a parallel universe where all facts are reversed.

On the beach west of Alexandria, Egypt and America are allies, in the streets of Cairo, America is the friend of the enemy, and therefore an enemy itself.

Continued: Meanwhile, Attitudes Shifting Iran