Islamic Fundamentalism

D

Egypt

Political Islam in Egyptian society includes a spectrum of organizations, from radical and violent to mainstream and nonviolent. The Muslim Brotherhood gained strength during the 1970s under Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat and began participating in the political process during the 1980s under his successor, Hosni Mubarak. By the 1980s the Islamist movement had split into those who advocated the violent overthrow of the government in order to create an Islamic state and those who believed in peaceful, grassroots organizing as the most effective way to establish an Islamic society. The Muslim Brotherhood joined the latter, renouncing violence and focusing their efforts on organizing among the poor.

Radical Islamic organizations, such as Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group (al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya), turned to violence in the 1990s, attacking government officials, institutions, fellow Muslims, Christians, and foreign tourists. Their goal was to destabilize and overthrow the Egyptian government.

The Mubarak government launched a counteroffensive against the radical groups, imprisoning more than 20,000 Islamists, many of them without charge. Military courts not subject to law were created, and laws were enacted to restrict freedom of the press, take control of mosques, and prevent elected Islamists from heading professional associations. The slaughter of 58 foreign tourists at the historic town of Luxor in 1997 seemed to indicate the powerlessness of the government. By 2000, however, the Mubarak government had gained the upper hand and weakened the radical movements.

Despite the government’s apparent success in containing Islamic radicalism, Egyptian society has become more Islamized by moderate Islamists at the grassroots level. Young, university-educated professionals preach to middle- and upper-class audiences. Physicians, journalists, lawyers, and political scientists—male and female—speak out and write on issues of Islamic reform, such as pluralism (different beliefs) within Islam, women’s rights, and social justice for the poor. Islamic schools, clinics, hospitals, and social services, as well as Islamic banks and publishing houses, offer an alternative set of institutions and an indirect indictment of the government’s inability to meet peoples’ needs. Elections in 2000 were the first to be supervised by Egypt’s independent judiciary and thus free of the ballot tampering that characterized previous elections. Although the Muslim Brotherhood was banned from participating as a legal party, its members, running independently or with other parties, won 17 of the 444 contested seats in the legislature.

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Egypt held its first-ever presidential election with multiple candidates in 2005, a sign of short-lived optimism that the country might be heading toward full democratic reform. Mubarak won a fifth six-year term as Egypt’s president. He had promised sweeping reforms if he won, including repeal of emergency laws that allow for arbitrary arrest and have been in place since Mubarak came to power in 1981. Instead, the government extended Egypt’s emergency laws for two more years. Furthermore, Mubarak’s closest challenger in the elections, Ayman Nour, the leader of the liberal Al-Ghad party, was thrown into jail, despite doctors’ pleas that he was dangerously ill.

In subsequent parliamentary elections in 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood—outlawed since 1954—won an unprecedented 88 seats in parliament (one-fifth of the seats), its largest gain since participating in the political process. However, the Brotherhood’s candidates had to run as independents because of the party’s illegal status. In recent years, its members have been targeted by the state security services, arrested, and sometimes tortured. Islamist leaders claim that the arrests were motivated by the government’s desire to curb opposition in parliamentary elections in 2007. Many of those arrested were likely contenders in the elections, according to the Brotherhood’s leader.

E

Iran

In 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an aging, white-bearded Muslim cleric, came to power in Iran, having toppled Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a modern ruler and close ally of the United States. The Iranian revolution was the product of a long, slow buildup of opposition to the shah, who came to power in 1941. In 1953 the shah was forced to flee the country after a failed coup by supporters of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, whose efforts to nationalize Iran’s oil industry angered Great Britain. Fearing that Iran might develop close ties with the Soviet Union as the Cold War got under way, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spearheaded another coup after the original failed and the shah was reinstated within a week. The shah maintained a close relationship with the United States and Europe afterward.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the shah used his country’s enormous oil revenues to finance a modernization program. But the reforms tended to benefit urban areas and the educated elite rather than Iran’s thousands of rural villages. Opponents warned that the shah’s uncritical economic, military, and cultural dependence on the West, referred to as “Westoxification,” threatened Iranian identity, autonomy, and culture.

The Iranian revolution (1978-1979) was supported by a broad-based alliance of religious and political opponents, mobilized under the umbrella of Shia Islam, the dominant form of Islam in Iran. An existing network of clergy, mosques, and seminaries in every city, town, and village provided necessary organization and a means for communication and mobilization of the people. Although the government had banned political meetings, it could not close the mosques, where Iranians heard sermons denouncing injustice and oppression. Khomeini, exiled in 1964 for criticizing the shah, became a symbol of the opposition. As the shah’s military and security forces responded with increased ferocity against opponents, the shah’s unyielding stance transformed his opponents into revolutionaries. As a stunned world looked on, the shah’s government fell. Khomeini returned from exile, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was born.

Although many Iranians expected the clergy would return to their mosques and seminaries soon after the revolution, Iran became a clergy-governed state within a year. Khomeini sat at the apex of power and served as the final authority on all domestic and international matters. He silenced all effective opposition, secular and religious, and many Iranians fled the country.

After Khomeini’s death in 1989, Iran witnessed an expansion of political participation and dissent. Public discussion and debate became more open, and the number of independent newspapers, magazines, and journals grew significantly. But perhaps the most stunning example of increased moderation and pluralism in Iran was the victory of Muslim cleric Mohammed Khatami in Iran’s 1997 presidential election.

Widely seen as moderate and progressive, Khatami pursued two major policies: creating a more open and tolerant society at home and promoting dialogue with the West abroad. In 1998 Khatami proposed cultural exchanges with the United States as a means of breaking down the “wall of mistrust” between the two countries. As a result, Iran and the United States embarked on more open communication and exchange.

In its third decade, the Islamic Republic of Iran was locked in a struggle to redefine its political and economic future at home and abroad. The 2004 legislative elections marked a defeat for Khatami’s reformist movement. Since then, the Majlis (legislative assembly) has been dominated by a conservative coalition, chiefly the Developers of Islamic Iran. That alliance was made up of the “second generation” of the Islamic revolution—men and women who had been in their 20s and 30s when Khomeini came to power and who defended the values of Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme spiritual leader.

In the 2005 presidential elections, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Khamenei loyalist, was elected with the backing of the Developers of Islamic Iran, his main political base. Domestic supporters and critics alike soon became weary of Ahmadinejad’s fiery rhetoric, which placed Iran under the threat of a military attack by the United States. Some Iranians blamed Ahmadinejad’s provocative statements for the UN’s passage of economic sanctions against Iran late in 2006. Iran also rejected UN demands to halt its program to develop nuclear fuel. Further criticism of Ahmadinejad, at home and abroad, followed his hosting of a Holocaust-denial conference in Iran in 2006.

F

Iraq

The United States-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 overthrew the authoritarian and secular regime of Saddam Hussein (see U.S.-Iraq War). The ouster of Hussein, who had long repressed Shia Muslims in Iraq, gave breathing space for the Islamist parties known as the Da`Wa Party and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). These two parties joined with other mainly fundamentalist Shia parties to form the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). The UIA established warm relations with the clerical regime in Iran.

In Iraqi legislative elections held in December 2006, the UIA gained the single largest bloc of seats, with 128 out of 275. The Kurdish Alliance, which was allied with the UIA, won 53 seats, leaving the Shia and the Kurds only three seats shy of the two-thirds majority needed to elect a president and push through constitutional reforms. Among Sunni Muslims in Iraq, the fundamentalist religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front, did best, winning 44 seats.

The deputy leader of the Shia Da`Wa Party, Nouri al-Maliki, became Iraq’s prime minister in May 2006. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was elected to the largely ceremonial post of president, becoming the first non-Arab to lead an Arab country. From early 2007 al-Maliki’s government met with increased confrontation from the Medhi Army, the strongest Shia militia in Iraq. Led by young, radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, the Medhi Army was accused of inciting sectarian violence against Sunni targets and against U.S.-led forces. However, al-Maliki was reluctant to take action against the militias because he relied on Sadr’s influence and political support to maintain power. Unlike Sunni insurgents, Sadr was involved in the political process and controlled 30 seats in the Shia bloc that dominates the Iraqi parliament.

G

Pakistan

Pakistan moved toward greater Islamization of state and society under General Zia ul-Haq, the country’s president from 1978 to 1988. A side effect of Pakistan’s Islamization was increased conflict between different religious communities and organizations, especially between the Sunni Muslim majority and the Shia Muslim minority. Although anti-Shia sentiment had existed in Pakistan, the 1990s saw a dramatic upsurge of religious radicalism and violence. Armed with automatic weapons and explosives, militant Sunni organizations fought equally militant Shia organizations.

During this period of religious violence, Pakistan, long regarded as a stable ally of the United States, became a training ground for guerrilla warriors and Islamic terrorists. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and a ten-year Soviet-Afghan War followed. Afghan rebels set up camp in Pakistan, where Muslims from other countries joined them to train as guerrillas. Known as mujahideen, the guerrillas were regarded as freedom fighters in their campaign against Soviet forces, and they received substantial financial and military assistance from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other countries throughout the 1980s. After the war ended with Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, many of the mujahideen returned home to such countries as Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan. There they contributed to the spread of radical Islam. Others remained in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pakistan’s military, Islamized under Zia, supported the mujahideen. The military developed close ties with the Taliban (the movement that controlled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until November 2001) and with militant Pakistani groups. So did many of Pakistan’s madrasas (religious seminaries). Pakistan and Afghanistan together supported the mujahideen in their struggle against India in Kashmir, disputed territory claimed by both Pakistan and India.

In a bloodless coup in 1999, Pervez Musharraf seized power as president of Pakistan and chief of its army staff. During parliamentary elections in 2002 Musharraf formed an alliance with a coalition of six hardline Islamic parties known as the Muthida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA; United Council of Action). Until the 2002 election, the religious parties had never won more than 5 percent of the total vote in the country, but their alliance with Musharraf in 2002 brought them 11 percent of the vote. With 50 seats, the MMA became the second-largest opposition party in Pakistan. The MMA parted ways with Musharraf in 2005 after he ordered the army to attack tribal lands along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. Some of the Islamist political parties in the borderlands, which receive support from the tribes, were supposedly “hosting” members of Al-Qaeda.

After a U.S. invasion toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, Musharraf provided critical support to the U.S. war on terrorism and aid in the effort to capture Osama bin Laden. As a result, however, Musharraf became labeled an “American puppet” in Pakistan, where anti-Americanism has steadily increased on account of the war in neighboring Afghanistan. In October 2006 Pakistanis erupted in outrage after Pakistan’s military bombed a madrasa (Islamic school) near the Afghan border, killing at least 80 people. Musharraf also came under criticism from the United States and Afghanistan for allegedly providing refuge for the Taliban.

H

Palestine

The political views of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have long been regarded as primarily secular and nationalist. But Islamist groups, such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas, have won popular support. Hamas was influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and like the Muslim Brotherhood, it provided social services. Hamas rejected the Oslo accords that established the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and gave hope for a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a long time it continued to wage terrorist attacks against Israel while the Fatah leadership of the PNA sought to enforce a cease-fire with Israel and continue negotiations for a Palestinian state.

In elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, Hamas won a surprising victory, claiming 76 of the 132 seats and emerging as the dominant political force. Many political observers, however, believed that Hamas’s showing was largely a rejection of Fatah’s corruption and inefficient administration rather than an embrace of militant Islam. Fatah, which had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s, won only 43 seats in the legislative elections. Signs of Palestinians’ dissatisfaction with Fatah had been visible for years, and its alleged misappropriation of funds only intensified the discontent of Palestinians.

After Hamas’s election to government in 2006, sanctions by Western countries crippled the Palestinian economy. The United States froze its aid package, and the European Union (EU) followed suit. Israel refused to release taxes and custom duties collected from Palestinians on behalf of the PNA. The Palestinian government’s bankruptcy created a volatile situation that soon led to clashes between Hamas and Fatah supporters. Fighting in late 2006 and early 2007 left 90 Palestinians dead and the government in complete chaos.

Saudi Arabia’s king Abdullah brokered a peace agreement between Hamas and Fatah in Mecca in February 2007. The agreement called for Hamas to abide by previous PNA agreements with Israel, including Israel’s rights to its pre-1967 borders, which Hamas agreed to respect. The United States and the EU withheld judgment on the peace accord. Fighting between Hamas and Fatah militias in June 2007 left Gaza under the control of Hamas and the West Bank under Fatah control. Palestinian Authority president and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the power-sharing government with his rivals in Hamas and set up a Fatah-led administration to govern the West Bank. The United States, EU, and Israel moved quickly to recognize the new government and offer aid to the West Bank while continuing to withhold recognition and aid from the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.

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