ISLAM RISING : A New Vision for Mohammed’s Faith

CAIRO — In the chilly half-light before dawn there is a furious chirping of invisible birds that gives way, as the sun breaks in the east over the tombs of ancient pashas, to the ear-splitting sound of a thousand mosques in a city as old as time.

“God is great,” the muezzins proclaim, their words amplified to rock-concert proportions through the city’s narrow and winding streets, a celebration of holiness at 70 decibels.

The vacant streets begin moving, and what was at first a slow trail of sleepy worshipers becomes a parade, and then a mob. Thousands move through the gathering dawn, pushing through a ubiquitous wall of sound that proclaims, with the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, a message of obedience redeemed: “God fulfilled his oath and supported his worshiper.”

Here is one of the most cosmopolitan and secular cities in the Arab world, an urban extravaganza that embraces everything from tawdry belly-dancing clubs to Pharaonic monuments, a city that for generations of Arabs has been the beloved Sin City of the Middle East.

It is also near the heart of a growing Islamic resurgence that is calling the world’s Muslims closer to the roots of their faith than at any recent time in their 1,400-year history.

Islam and its 1 billion adherents--over 10 million of them living as minorities in the West--today constitute a powerful international political and cultural force that stands to redefine the West’s relationship with the Third World, challenge its conceptions of progress and set the parameters of the new world order.

In recent months, Islam has captured headlines with Muslim electoral gains in Algeria, Jordan and Kuwait and bombings by Islamic extremists in New York and Cairo. Yet behind the headlines, the more important reality is the way in which the faith is increasingly weaving itself into the everyday lives of Muslims from Africa to Asia, from New Jersey to Manila, in whom a renewal of an ancient faith is providing a new source of cultural identity and political action in a world of dizzying change.

In the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, new Koranic schools have opened to replace the secular institutions of the Communist era, and in freewheeling Jordan, alcohol is no longer served on intra-Arab airline flights. In Southeast Asia, Malaysia is flirting with the implementation of Islamic law while the Philippines staves off the threat of secessionist wars by setting up an autonomous haven for Muslims.

From Tunisia to Jordan, young Islamic activists are winning majorities in local student associations, trade unions and municipal councils, and mosques are so overflowing in Egypt that the faithful are setting up prayers in basements, back rooms and sidewalks.

This resurgence is little understood in the West, whose images of Islam spring from the 1979 Iranian revolution and its angry crowds chanting “Death to America,” or later from Lebanon, where a generation of Islamic militants dealt death and terror to Westerners who ventured near the heart of Lebanon’s civil war.

Indeed, it is Islam’s historic association with the sword that probably makes some Westerners shudder when they see the words “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet” emblazoned next to a thrusting blade on the Saudi flag--yet remain indifferent to the words “In God We Trust” on the back of a dollar.

Many Stereotypes

The association of Islam with warring Arab tribesmen, the founders of Islam, is only one of many misconceptions at work today. Arabs in the 1990s are increasingly a minority in the 75-nation “House of Islam,” whose largest centers are in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. One-fifth of the world’s population, spread across 11,000 miles from western Africa to Southeast Asia, proclaim Mohammed as the last prophet of the heavenly religions.

There are other myths and stereotypes:

* That Islam is “barbarous” because in its strictest form it advocates such punishments as beheading, amputations and stoning for crimes. In fact, only Saudi Arabia, Iran and occasionally Sudan practice these Hudood punishments, and the matter-of-fact beheadings in front of Riyadh’s Grand Mosque, complete with a plastic sheet laid out on the tile and a waiting ambulance, are hardly more barbaric than the electric chair. Most citizens, from taxi drivers to university professors, applaud them and point out to critics the difference between Riyadh’s crime rate and New York’s.

* That the dour face of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pronouncing death on apostates, represents the bulk of the Islamic clergy. Try Egypt’s wise-cracking TV cleric, Sheik Mohammed Sharawi, who sits cross-legged on the floor each Friday night and cheerfully interprets the Koran for millions of viewers.

* That militant Islam is on a violent collision course with the West. Islam may indeed be at odds with the West in some ways, but its weapons of the future are more likely to be intellectual forums and the ballot box than bearded terrorists. Even in Egypt, which has suffered some of the worst Islamic violence in recent years, violent extremists are thought to number only about 10,000 out of about 200,000 radicals. That compares to more than 1 million followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates a peaceful move toward Islam in government.

Indeed, while many see the Muslim world emerging as the next frontier of conflict after the Cold War, it is not so much because Muslims represent a military or terrorist threat but because they present an even more basic challenge: a growing social and political force that questions some of the West’s conceptions of reality--about the nature of progress, the relationship between God and humankind, the role of technology and modernization and morality in human lives.

A new generation of Islamists, many of them educated in the West, are ready to turn democratic concepts against repressive regimes throughout the Middle East--governments that are among the strongest of America’s allies in the region and whose pro-Western concepts of trade, debt payment, oil pricing and foreign policy on issues like Israel are likely to be the first targets if the Islamists take power.

They are armed with the ancient writings of the Koran adapted to the needs of the present in a modern-day reformation that is one of the most important intellectual debates in the history of Islam.

“It’s not only a spiritual revival,” said Sudan’s Islamic leader, Hassan Turabi. “It’s a scriptural revival, it’s a renewal of thought itself, a resurgence of activity of Islamic energy, and it’s mostly being led by the modern elites who have been exposed to the West, to the challenge of Western culture itself.”

Whether the Islamic world is inevitably bound for conflict with the West, they say, depends on how ready the West is to accept a standard of fairness that allows democracy in the Third World even if it breeds Islamic militancy and that ensures that Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Palestine, Iraq and Libya are dealt with on equal terms with Jews in Israel and Christians elsewhere in the world.

“We are talking about true independence, not the nominal independence which was seen in the ‘50s and ‘60s in African countries and some Asian countries,” said Ghazi Saleheddine, minister of state for political affairs in Sudan. Sudan’s new-sprung Islamic government is forging links with militant Islamic groups all over the world, causing consternation for neighboring regimes in the Middle East and Africa.

“(We are talking about) true independence in economics, in educational systems and political systems,” Saleheddine said. “This is one of the ideas that makes us in Sudan particularly obnoxious to the West, because what we are preaching would inevitably infringe on some of the interests of the West in Africa. But those interests, we maintain, are not based on a fair and constructive relationship with the Third World.”

A constructive relationship, he said, would mean fairer repayment schedules for Third World debtors, more equitable trade relationships, a better ability on the part of developing nations to exploit their own natural resources.

Rejecting Western Ways

Adel Hussein, a leading Islamic intellectual in Egypt, traces the path of Arab nationhood from Egypt’s original 1919 revolution for independence from Britain, after which Egyptians continued to adopt Western traditions of business and culture, through Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 revolution, which established socioeconomic independence based on Marxist and secular nationalist doctrines.

“Now, I think we are in the third phase of our national liberation movement, and in this phase we discovered that we were too much involved in the Western tradition, to the extent that we forgot the simple fact that we are different. . . . “ Hussein said. And when we speak about our character, our national identity, we inevitably come to Islam.”

Hussein infuriated the Egyptian government last year when he wrote in his Al Shaab newspaper that the government is too dependent on foreign tourism. Tourism is Egypt’s largest source of foreign revenue--an estimated $3 billion a year before a recent downturn spawned by Islamic militant attacks on tourists--but Hussein argued that Egypt should not employ its young men to wait on foreigners.

“The first thing we reject in the West is the insistence of Western culture that they monopolize the concept of progress. They identify progress and modernity with Westernization. . . . We think, why? If Muslims rule, they will make such a model that you’ll have different norms, different criteria. You will not have a single criterion which is the rate of growth. We don’t worship the rate of growth,” Hussein said.

It is the notion of cultural independence that is perhaps most threatening of all to the West, which has tended to base its notions of progress and modernity on the rule of reason and the search for economic prosperity that has dominated Western civilization for more than three centuries.

Islam provides another model: an all-encompassing system of faith in which religion, government, marriage and business are inextricably intertwined; in which concrete and definable notions of morality replace the language of accommodation; in which a body of jurisprudence established and deemed closed and final in the 10th Century prevails over modern Western notions of a law that evolves out of necessity and changing circumstance.

“We get mad at these Islamic movements because they hurt us in our guts. We can understand concepts like ‘This land is our land,’ but we do not understand this guy who no longer wants to recognize the concept of land,” said French scholar Francois Burgat, who has closely studied Islamic movements in North Africa.

“They have forced us to recognize the fact that we do not have a monopoly on the symbolic system. We are not the only ones with access to the universal. Is the balance of force changing in the area? Yes. Is it in our interest? No,” he said. “But if we are losing our monopoly, should we face it by interfering in the processes which go on in our periphery? We are creating more antagonism toward us, and we are creating violence for our children.”

In part, the resurgence of Islam reflects a growing worldwide phenomenon in which religion has become an energetic and dynamic force for change.

Among struggling societies attempting both to rid themselves of bankrupt or inefficient systems and to find viable alternatives, religion provides ideals, identity, legitimacy and an infrastructure during the search. In varying degrees, Buddhists in East Asia; Catholics in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Philippines; Sikhs and Hindus in India, and even Jews in Israel have turned to their faiths to define their goals and to mobilize.

In much of the Arab world, Islam presents a way of accommodating decades of social, economic and military failures, most recently with the turmoil of the Persian Gulf War. In an era of loss, it revives a past in which Islam united a region of feuding tribes with a single language and a single faith and dominated an empire twice the size of Alexander the Great’s.

From the time the Prophet Mohammed fled Mecca in the year 622 and began the first Islamic state in the Arabian desert at Medina, Islam launched a golden age of political and artistic ascendancy spanning five centuries and that transported the prophet’s teachings with the Moors into Spain, with the Ottoman Turks into Constantinople and back through the Balkans toward Europe.

In Asia, Arab mariners and merchants converted generations of clients in Java, Sumatra, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Indochina, China and the Philippines from the 6th to the 12th centuries, and hundreds of years later, Islam would travel on slave boats from Africa to America.

Looking to History

It is this historical imperative to which many Muslims, especially in the heartland of the Muslim world, have turned in the last decades.

A generation of Arabs had been numbed by a series of successive ideologies, founded in Marxism and nationalism, which inspired them to dreams of unity and independence that never were realized. The turning point for many was the Arabs’ crushing defeat in 1967 at the hands of Israel--a nation that was perceived by many Muslims to have been victorious because it had not lost touch with its religious roots.

“For a century, Egypt has flirted with a variety of beliefs and ideologies. Each phase was greeted with great fanfare, each new belief adopted with conviction, each new sacrifice accepted without question,” Egyptian diplomat Hussein Ahmed Amin wrote last year in Cairo’s Al Ahram.

“We have raised so many banners that people have lost count. We erect numerous statues and then pull them down, we name streets after those in favor and then change the names. We made war with Israel and then peace. We were united with Syria and then not on speaking terms. We fought American domination and then surrendered to it. We made a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and then tore it up. And throughout all of this, Egypt’s intellectuals have watched and become increasingly disenchanted. Egypt’s young people have watched and become incredulous.”

A generation of young men and women all over the Arab world have watched their lives fall into ruin in the wake of the pronouncements of their rulers, and political Islam gave them an excuse to be angry.

“They gave a raison d’etre, a meaning, to the fact that being poor is not your mistake, it is the mistake of the corrupt society,” said Tahseen Bashir, a former Egyptian diplomat who has studied the Islamic movement. “They gave a rationale for fighting society, and that’s a lot. Islam became the language of protest.”

Conspiracy Theories

The protest in recent months has taken international dimensions, as underground Islamic organizations are suspected of involvement in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and a series of attacks on foreign tourists in Egypt.

Their apparent mission: the overthrow of regimes perceived as corrupt and anti-Islamic and an end to Western support of those regimes.

Is there an international Islamic conspiracy? A network dubbed by some Middle Eastern leaders as “Fundamentalism International,” whose goals rival Lenin’s Communism International?

Some of the regimes most threatened by Islamic militancy have accused Iran of funding a broad spectrum of Islamic terrorism and Sudan of providing safe haven, training and encouragement for the militants. But evidence is scant and most of it points more to a unity of shared goals and ideals than a conspiracy of terror.

Turabi, Sudan’s Islamic leader, denies allowing anyone to plot terrorist acts on Sudanese soil, though he admits some militants have been given safe haven in Sudan fleeing prosecution from their own governments. In the end, he said, Sudan is seen as a threat primarily because “as a model, it radiates most powerfully.”

“The West unfortunately lacks in its understanding of the new wave, they don’t understand it, they think it’s a conspiracy somewhere, and they personalize it: Who is the chief conspirator?” he said in a recent interview in Khartoum.

The Islamic world is engaging in a new notion of jihad to fight back, he said--not the traditional notion of holy war, but the sense of a struggle to achieve, to construct better, more moral societies, to produce enough to attain economic independence.

“Indeed,” Turabi said, “the Muslims have become very resistant, and they’ll fight back, of course, if Europe tries to enforce its own model against them. We know that Europe doesn’t believe in democracy absolutely. Democracy, when it breeds Islam, they’ll suppress it. They did it in Turkey, they did it in Algeria. But we will resist it. If there is a suppression of Islam, the Muslims will engage in jihad. This translates exactly as resistance, not as war. If someone puts an effort against you, you put an effort against him. It will become a revolution.”

The most common complaint is that Islamic governors have no program for putting their ideals to work. Most talk in generalities about implementing the Sharia, or Islamic law, but have no proposals for making the Sharia induce economic prosperity or true social justice.

In Sudan, inflation is running at over 100% and, while the government is exporting food, hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese, most of them Christian and animist, are in danger of starving as a result of the country’s civil war. Opponents of the Islamic regime are, according to interviews with opposition figures and human rights reports, routinely detained and often tortured.

The government in Sudan, along with its precursor in Iran, have raised grave questions about Islam’s commitment to principles of human rights and democracy, notions that most Muslims do not regard as uniquely Western.

Algeria’s most radical Islamic leaders frightened the public when, on the eve of their short-lived electoral victory in 1991, they declared that Islam and democracy were not compatible, that God’s law would and should triumph over the law of the majority, prompting a military takeover that stamped out the Islamic victory. Even moderate King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has made similar statements.

Democratic Aspect

Yet Islam does endorse the concept of Shura, or the obligation of leaders to consult with a broad range of the community in decision-making. And in Muslim countries throughout the Middle East, new Islamic organizations are expressing strong commitments to multi-party democracy and working effectively within the system--in Jordan, where the Muslim Brotherhood holds the largest bloc of seats in the Parliament, in Kuwait, and even in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood, officially banned, runs candidates in conjunction with officially recognized parties.

Whatever disillusionment exists with Islamic politicking and the prospect for conflict does not negate the hope for accommodation, even where the friction is most dangerous, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the killing of Muslims is calling a new Islamic generation of moujahedeen to come to their aid and raising the specter of a dark new era of holy war.

For many in the Muslim world, Bosnia has become a frightening symbol of everything that is wrong between East and West. It is a place where Muslims are being raped, starved and slaughtered while the world watches in silence--as it stood motionless when hundreds of Muslim activists were deported last year out of Israel onto a snowy mountainside in Lebanon.

Bosnia could have been much more, some Muslim thinkers say, a bridge between two worlds, Muslim and Christian.

Bosnia’s Muslims are unquestionably Europeans in their political outlook, in their language, in their genetic heritage, even in their way of life. Yet spiritually, they are Muslims.

“They on the one hand have the comprehension of Western civilization from within, and not a comprehension that is disturbed by negative elements like colonization and the Crusades. And at the same time, they have the intimate knowledge of Islam, since they themselves are Muslim,” said Ahmed Tuwaijary, a moderate Islamist from Saudi Arabia.

“I think humanity benefits a lot when great cultures interact. Bosnia could be one of our best candidates for this interaction,” he said. “The danger of what is going on, in addition to the agonizing destruction, (is that) it also diminishes (this) hope. . . .”

Times staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.