Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Time for the temporal The struggle is coming to a head. The conflict between Islamism's two ultimately irreconcilable concepts -- divine authority and popular sovereignty -- is being decided in Iran today and, writes David Hirst, the reverberations will be felt throughout the Islamic world. At stake is whether Islamism is capable of the reform and evolution necessary for its survival in any form at all, or if it will condemn itself to inevitable self-destruction Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, above, oversaw the rise of world Islamism. Millionaire terrorist, Bin Laden, aptly perhaps, oversees its decline "Whichever way the Iranian conservatives go down, their defeat will reverberate through fundamentalism's ranks everywhere. And just as, at its birth, the Republic gave an immense boost to a movement then in general ascent, so, now, it will dramatise and accelerate its decline. For Islamism is in decline"

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When the Iranian people go to the polls, on 18 February, to elect a new parliament, it will be a crucial moment not just for the Islamic Republic, but for Islamism everywhere. With the overthrow of the Shah, the republic's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, achieved Islamism's first great triumph, the first accomplishment of that aim which all Islamists have in common: the taking of political power. A new credo had been taking root among the world's one billion Muslims; it was widely perceived, in some forty-odd states whose populations were wholly or partially Muslim, as well as in the West, as a new, global threat, comparable to that other great messianic ideology of the century, communism. Khomeini's astonishing triumph, in so strategic a country as Iran, gave immense impetus to it, seeming to portend a chain of upheavals whose cumulative effect would pose the greatest challenge to the existing international order since World War II.

The elections will decide, 21 one years on, whether Islamism is capable, in its foremost stronghold, of the reform and evolution needed for its own survival in any form at all, or condemns itself to eventual self-destruction. Even if, on the day, their outcome is not, for one reason or another, decisive, the mere holding of them has already highlighted as never before the fundamental contradiction that besets Islamism everywhere. And never before have a people been so clearly, democratically, called upon to choose between the two. It is a contradiction between the two basic concepts on which, constitutionally, the republic has always rested, the 'sacred' -- reflecting the sovereignty of God over the people's affairs -- and the 'popular'- reflecting the people's sovereignty over itself. It has plunged the regime into a relentless, all-pervading power struggle between its two main wings: the reformists, led by President Mohamed Khatami, and the arch-conservatives, headed by the leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In the Khomeinist theocracy, the clergy assume full temporal power. The awesome task of interpreting God's will on earth goes to the leader, aided by other institutions, like the Guardian Council, drawn largely from the clerical hierarchy. The conservatives insist that the 'sacred' has precedence over the 'popular.' Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, head of the Council of Experts, put it very frankly. Khamenei's powers were "absolute," and "subject to no conditions of any kind and popular elections have no influence on the matter." Till divine justice was restored on earth, he had guardianship over "the goods and souls of men." On the other hand, Khatami, though a cleric himself, puts popular sovereignty above God's, or, more precisely, the right of a clique of self-appointed Mullahs to exclusive interpretation of it. "Unfortunately," he said, "the world has the idea that under a religious government the ruler dictates and the people have to obey."

The struggle between these two ultimately irreconcilable concepts is now coming to a head. The conservatives will lose it. They will do so. Either peaceably and constitutionally, for in any fully free and fair election, the reformists will repeat the overwhelming success that they did with Khatami's own landslide victory in the presidential elections of May 1997 and take majority control of parliament, the one key institution that is dependent entirely on 'popular' sovereignty. Or they will do so violently and unconstitutionally. This will surely come about if they falsify the results beyond tolerable measure. That is quite possible. In the arrogance of their contention that it is God's will which they are obeying, a sacred, not a mere man-made, system they are defending, they may be ready to extinguish altogether that antithetical principle on which the republic was founded. Some, among them, have already resorted to murder; they have not been brought to book; indeed, one leading Ayatollah openly justified such 'sacred' violence in Islam's name. But if they do resort to such a dire extreme, they will pay for it when popular sovereignty, denied all constitutional expression, turns, as it sooner or later surely will, to insurrection as the only avenue left. And that will probably destroy the Islamic Republic itself.

Whichever way the Iranian conservatives go down, their defeat will reverberate through fundamentalism's ranks everywhere. And just as, at its birth, the republic gave an immense boost to a movement then in general ascent, so, now, it will dramatise and accelerate its decline. For Islamism is in decline. That might seem a bold assertion in the light of so much that suggests the contrary. For one thing, Islam, both as faith and culture in the broadest sense, has clearly undergone a revival almost everywhere. For another, the notion that religion should have a bigger role in public life has put down deep roots; most governments have responded to this sentiment with pious gestures, from the prohibition on bank interest imposed by the new military rulers of Pakistan to the Egyptian government's retreat from new legislation on women's rights that would have permitted them to travel abroad without their husbands' written permission. Bigotry and extremism is rampant still. In Indonesia, once a bastion of inter-communal tolerance, 100,000 demonstrators surge through the streets of Jakarta; addressing them, Amien Rais, president of the People's Consultative Assembly, says: "Tolerance is absurd -- massacre the Christians."

In more moderate forms, Islamists are still the most powerful opposition force in just about every Muslim country; from Malaysia -- where, in recent elections, the Islamists greatly increased their representation in parliament -- to Nigeria -- one of whose federal states has just adopted the Shari'a, or 'holy law' -- they continue to make gains. In that most obvious, bloody front line of the 'clash of civilisations', Chechnya, a small band of Islamists, infused with extraordinary valour, are keeping the might of Orthodox Russia at bay. More spectacular Islamist triumphs may lie ahead. The 'Talibanisation' of Pakistan now looks an ominous possibility. And if, one day, Colonel Gaddafi of Libya falls, it will very likely be an obscure Islamic insurgency which, in alliance with disaffected soldiers, brings it about.

Egypt's Muslim Brothers, seen here marching openly during a brief '52-'54 honeymoon with Nasser's revolutionary regime, were the fount from which global Islamism sprung

"A global movement which came to reform others is now in need of its own reforms. Without them Islamism-in-power will self-destruct, and Islam-in-opposition never achieved power in the first place. Enlightened Islamists acknowledge it. And they increasingly acknowledge the vital importance of what, in its original, textual, return-to-roots essence, Islamism began by wholly rejecting: democracy"

Yet, measured against the original hopes and fears it aroused, the evidence of Islamism's decline is far more impressive. Egypt was Islamism's first great fountainhead; it was there that the famous, hypnotic cry "Islam is the solution" first went up. With the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan El-Banna made the first, systematic attempt to harness Islam to modern political purpose, and one of his disciples, Sayed Qutb, executed under President Nasser, wrote what some call the bible of Islamism. He prefigured its five main features: 1. Ideologically, it thrived on the failure and exhaustion of secular-modernist credos -- nationalism, parliamentary democracy, Marxism -- which Muslim societies borrowed from the West, and on whose basis, throwing off direct Western control, they sought to build their own modern, post-colonial order. 2. Sociologically, its natural constituency was those middle and lower classes which should have most benefited from the new order, but in the end suffered most from it. Typically, its rank and file were found in the vast slums, peopled by rural immigrants, that grew up around great metropolises from Jakarta to Cairo; its intellectuals and activists were the products of massive, but poor-quality, educational programmes, and usually science rather humanities graduates, with minds predisposed to the mechanical implementation of received theories. They were the deprived seeking social justice and political representation, but using religious, not discredited leftist, means to achieve it. Many were former communists; in his book Islam or the Deluge, the Moroccan Islamist leader Abdel-Salam Yassin lent an Islamic gloss to classic Marxist-Leninist concepts, class consciousness, objective conditions and the methodology of revolution.

3. The most defining, yet paradoxical, feature of this 'sublimated Leftism' was that, while bent on 'renewal', it looked for it in what the Arabs untranslatably call Asala, a 'return-to-roots cultural authenticity', and found it, above all, in a seventh-century book, the Qur'an. The secular-nationalists had rejected Western political and economic domination; they went further, rejecting its philosophical and cultural intrusion too. Islam being, classically, a regulator of man's temporal as well as his spiritual affairs, with little in it of Christianity's dualism, its "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's," political Islam was doctrinally bound, in its pure form, to reduce human freedom to a minimum. In the perfect Islamic state, there could be no place for 'democracy', that Western secular 'corruption' and direct affront to the only legitimate sovereignty, God's, exerted through a government acting on His behalf.

4. Islamists had two alternative routes to political power. One was that of the revolutionaries -- the Bolsheviks of Islam. For them all Muslim societies had sunk into a state of complete Jahiliya, or pre-Islamic 'Ignorance.' They sought to 're-Islamicise' them from the top. For Qutb, a 'vanguard', drawn from the select few 'who know what nobody else knows', undertook this task. They found sanction in all that is most intolerant in the Prophet's revelations, generally those from his state-building, Madina period, as opposed to the earlier, evangelising, Meccan one; they relied on the verses of the sword -- "And slay them wherever ye find them" -- not on the better-known injunction to tolerance: "There is no compulsion in religion." All they knew of democracy was their own equivalent of the Marxist-Leninists' 'democratic centralism.' Their most typical manifestation was Egypt's Jihad or Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, or Algeria's Groupes Islamiques Armés (GIA).

The other route -- Islamicisation from below -- was that of the gradualists, the 'Mensheviks' of Islam, who opposed the all-or-nothing violence of the 'Bolsheviks.' Through Al-Da'wa, the 'Call,' they sought the long-term re-education of society, purifying individual minds of secular deviation. Through the 'propaganda of the deed,' or good works, they tried to show their capabilities and undermine the state's political legitimacy. Most claimed to believe in democracy, buttressing this claim with arguments -- heretical for the 'Bolsheviks' -- that the Qur'anic concept of Shura, or 'consultation,' is democratic in intent too. But, given their essential beliefs, it was never quite clear what they would do with democracy once they attained power through it. Most Islamists -- from the Jaamat-i Islami of Pakistan to the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) of Algeria -- belonged to this mainstream.

5. Islamism was supra-national, promoting the unity of the Umma, or Islamic 'nation.' There was no directing bureau, no 'Comintern', the nearest thing to that being the occasional get-together of the national chapters of the Egyptian-dominated Muslim Brothers. But, given the community of sentiment, the traffic of ideas, especially radiating from Islam's Middle East heartlands to its outlying provinces, it was axiomatic that Islamists achieving power in one country would have an exemplary effect on others who had yet to do it. The record shows, however, that in the quarter century since it became the dominant, dynamic ideology of the Muslim world, Islamism has not merely failed to supplant nationalism, or narrower ethnicities, it has often exploited them for its own purposes; neither has it improved the conditions of its natural socio-economic constituency, or gratified the quest for cultural identity; and, in the three places where it achieved power, it has signally failed to be a model to others.

Just as, in Marxist theory, the communist revolution should have begun in the most advanced capitalist societies of Europe, so, logically, the Islamist revolution should have begun in the Arab heartlands of the orthodox Sunni faith. That it actually happened in Shi'ite Iran made it, like the Russian Revolution, a kind of aberration. In fact, however, Shi'ism had its own peculiar revolutionary potentiality, a very powerful one as it turned out, because the official religious hierarchy -- traditionally at odds with temporal power in a way the subservient Sunni hierarchy never was -- led it. Khomeini sought to transcend the historic schism of Islam; and, indeed, Sunni Islamists were vastly encouraged by the emergence of the world's first 'Islamic state.' Yet his supra-national ambitions soon proved vain. From the outset, he was bent on 'exporting' his revolution. And not for him any of Stalin's tactical restraints -- no 'building of Islamism in one country' till he was ready to promote it in others. He relied both on the force of example and, when opportunity offered, by state power and subversion.

Opportunity soon did. When Saddam Hussein went to war against the new-born republic, Khomeini resolved not merely to expel the invader but to turn Iraq into the world's second Islamic Republic. Yet, in striking contrast with a Stalin who took over much of East Europe after the Second World War, Khomeini failed even with his next-door neighbour, and that despite the fact that Shi'ites account for 65 per cent of Iraq's population. When, as he put it, he "drank from the poisoned chalice" of the Gulf war cease-fire, he was acknowledging the fatality of the blow dealt to his pan-Islamic vision. The republic henceforth only projected its influence, in any serious way, by exploiting narrow sectarian means, the best, most enduring example being Lebanon's Hizbullah, in their often unsavoury role as an instrument of Iranian foreign policy during the civil war and, subsequently, their more elevated one as the 'Islamic resistance' to Israeli occupation of the south.

What failed at home could hardly be a model abroad. The revolution had come about in a genuine, nationwide, spontaneous insurrection, embracing almost all classes and political currents. But it was soon 'Bolshevised'; its most reactionary, bigoted component, the traditionalist Mullahs, steadily eliminated everyone else, from communists to moderate Islamists, till they monopolised the whole. The apparatus of repression they constructed to protect this 'divine-political' system far outdid the Shah's merely man-made one in brutality, torture and mass executions. In a cynical debasement of religious fervour, the Basij forces, first recruited from the poorest and least educated to become the backbone of 'human wave' assaults on the Iraqi army, were turned into the shock troops of internal control, now endowed with Islamically-sanctified immunity from any retribution in the case of shoot-to-kill excesses in the suppression of popular unrest.

The revolution has also betrayed its original 'Leftist' bent. It had begun with a disposition in favour of its natural constituency, those it dubbed the Mustad'afeen, or the 'Oppressed'. But, in time, the conditions of the ordinary people grew immeasurably worse. Islamism-in-power was incapable of applying what, in theory, was supposed to be an 'Islamic economy' rooted in 'Islamic justice', superior, in its morally formed essence, to the two great alternatives, socialism or capitalism, of the secular-materialist world. In fact, traditionalist Islamic jurisprudence came to the fore; that is where, in the end both Islamic orthodoxy and Asala, the quest for 'cultural authenticity', inexorably led. And insofar as it has any tendency in the economic sphere, it favours the private and the individualistic. It has not only lent Islamic blessing to market-oriented policies, it encouraged the bazaar merchants and unproductive, speculative capitalism at the expense of modernisation, industrialisation and social welfare.

The Mullahs proved no more capable of remedying the characteristic Third World socio-economic ills than the secular regimes they despise. Vulnerable to the same temptations as secular elites, they have gone into business themselves. Mullah capitalism -- turning the great Bonyads, or 'Foundations,' philanthropic organisations built on confiscated property from the Shah's time, into vast profit-making corporations -- was as corrupt, inefficient and feather-bedded as anyone else's.

Only two things are really Islamic about a system that sought, vainly, to Islamicise everything from labour laws to school curricula. On the one hand there is the stress on ostentatious, state-sponsored religious ritual and symbols, the retrogressive interpretation of penal and personal status laws, and the imposition of outward observances, most famously the chador, in public life. The other is the carefully vetted religious qualifications of those who run its key institutions. The combination has turned people in ever increasing numbers not only against the Mullahs but also against Islam itself.

The signs are everywhere, from the fall in attendance at religious schools to the way in which parents give pre-Islamic, Persian names to their new-born: if they are looking for Asala, Iranians now chiefly find it in nationalism, not religion. At his showpiece trial before the special Mullahs' court, which recently sentenced him to five years imprisonment for "undermining Islam," Hojatoleslam Abdollah Nouri, the former Khatamist interior minister, pointed to the damning fact that in the Islamic Republic "disregard for religion is increasing" while in militantly secular-nationalist Turkey the opposite is true.

Like the Islamic Republic, the world's only two other examples of Islamism-in-power were largely the outcome of special circumstances: in Sudan the interminable struggle of the Arab/Muslim north to control the Christian/animist south; in Afghanistan the vacuum left by 20 years of foreign invasion, war, civil war and institutional collapse. The brilliant, Sorbonne-educated Hassan Al-Turabi has always claimed that Islam subsumes 'democracy', but he presides over the most oppressive regime in Sudan's modern history. What more reminiscent of the Mullahs than the National Islamic Front's conversion of its often press-ganged Mujahideen from waging holy war in the south to the suppression of hungry Muslims in the north, or the new breed of Islamist businessmen, financiers and beneficiaries of free-market economics which outdo the IMF in their hard-nosed financial rectitude. As for the Taliban, in their backwardness, their degradation of women, barbarous punishments, prohibition of music, television, and boys flying kites from roof-tops or playing football in the street, they have become the almost universal pariah. Even the Iranian clerics who formerly occupied the frontiers of extremism now excoriate them in a language hardly less severe than the West's.

Elsewhere, Islamism remains an opposition force only; and generally speaking, though still a potent one, it is losing ground. Among the exceptions, Chechnya is now the most dramatic example of Islamism ascendant. It has its own long history of resistance to Russian domination rooted in a native tradition of militant Sufi mysticism. But it is also the latest, powerful magnet for those 'permanent revolutionaries', the 'Trotskyists' of Islam, who, as itinerant 'jihadists,' or 'holy warriors', move from battlefield to battlefield in defence of the faith. They began in Afghanistan, joining local Mujahideen in the struggle to drive out the Soviet invaders. They came mainly from the Arab world; the war over, they either returned to their native lands to become the leaders of the violent, 'Bolshevist' wing of an 'internal' jihad, or they continued it, against the infidel foe, wherever opportunity arose, from Kashmir to the Caucasus. At first, in Afghanistan, they enjoyed the sponsorship of the CIA and wealthy pro-Western Arab governments, but after they turned against their sponsors, they relied largely on the largesse of individual patrons in the Gulf.

They are known in Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan as Wahhabites, after the puritanical brand of Islam that is practised in Saudi Arabia, because, with communism's collapse, Saudi Arabia had poured preachers and petro-dollars into the newly independent states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. They are led in Chechniya by one Ibn Al-Khattab, who, calling himself a 'Muslim from the land of the Muslims', is now acquiring something of the legendary mystique of his more celebrated compatriot, Osama Bin Laden. Like Bin Laden, or his close Egyptian adviser Ayman El-Zawahri, and other 'Trotskyists', he comes from an affluent background, a tribal family that straddles the Saudi-Jordanian border. Such exemplary knight-errants of the faith are driven less by the socio-economic motives of rank and file Islamists, than by the pure flame of pan-Islam.

Pan-Islamic they may be, but, in practice, what their idealism shows is that when Islamism is allied with a local patriotism, as in Chechnya, it is at its most formidable. This 'Islamo-nationalism' explains why, in Palestine, the militant group Hamas commands a much greater appeal among those who, on ideological grounds alone, would have little time for it. It profits from its advocacy of 'armed struggle' and the 'total liberation' of Palestine, aims and methods which Arafat, the representative of secular nationalism, has abjectly abandoned. The same is true, though less intensely, for Lebanon's Hizbullah.

It is striking, however, that, by and large, Islamists-in-opposition are still in the ascendant only in the peripheral regions of the Umma. This, argues the leading Islamic scholar Olivier Roy, is because, there, they are a relatively new phenomenon. Thus in the Caucasus and Central Asia the moment of opportunity only came with communism's collapse, a decade later than in the Middle East, and they still have time to play themselves out. However impressive, they are quixotic, isolated, confined largely to remote and mountainous terrain, a proof that there is really no such thing as the pan-Islamic solidarity Islamists clamour for.

And sharing their flaws, they are unlikely, in the end, to be any more successful than their brethren in the heartlands. These are the best yardstick of the movement's performance -- and, mostly, they have known only decline and failure. A failure brought about, first of all, by the extraordinary resilience -- despite its decadence -- of the existing order they had made it their business to remove. The first, most spectacular demonstration of that took place in Mecca itself, when, within a year of the Iranian Revolution and doubtless inspired by it, a band of fanatics -- 'Bolshevists' par excellence -- seized the Grand Mosque and held it for several days. The more despotic the regime, the more highly motivated the Islamists are likely to be -- but also the more likely to be crushed, savagely and unobserved.

In 1981, some 20,000 people died in the central Syrian city of Hama, stronghold of a Muslim Brother uprising against President Hafez Al-Assad. The outside world barely had an inkling of the desperate insurgency which, in the early '80s, Iraqi Shi'ites mounted against Saddam Hussein. Lately it has been the turn of the Egyptian and Algerian regimes to bear the brunt of the continuing Islamist challenge. It came from both the 'Menshevik', essentially non-violent mainstream -- Muslim Brothers in Egypt, the FIS in Algeria -- and the 'Bolsheviks' -- Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya and Jihad in Egypt, GIA in Algeria. Less despotic than Iraq or Syria, they nonetheless fought back harshly, suppressing the political rights of non-violent and violent alike, and waging military campaigns as vicious as the 'terror' they combated.

By 1997, Egypt's Al-Gama'a was forced to declare a unilateral cease-fire; in Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Army, the FIS's military wing, has now joined forces with the regime against the GIA. In most other countries there was no significant 'Bolshevik' threat at all, and the 'Mensheviks' were ready to play by local rules, however far short of true democracy these fell. That sometimes earned them political space. In Jordan and Kuwait, where they support the hereditary regimes, Islamists have maintained a sizeable number of deputies in parliament. It sometimes earned them none at all. President Bin Ali of Tunisia has ruthlessly suppressed the relatively liberal strain of Islamism that Al-Nahda stands for. Turkey, the Middle East's most democratic Muslim country, eventually broke its own rules to exclude the Islamists from the power they had legitimately won.

On forming a government after his victory in the 1997 elections, Necmettin Erbakan, the Refah party leader, bent over backwards to appease the military, guardians of the militantly anti-clerical Ataturkist order, and was mocked by his more intransigent followers for joining this 'completely un-Islamic democratic game.' Not only did he deny any intention of introducing the Shari'a, he backed off the very modest Islamicisation programme -- the building of mosques and opening of Qur'an schools -- which he had tentatively proposed. It was not enough; under military pressure, the judiciary declared his party illegal. Only in Pakistan, with its melange of profound Islamic sentiment and (between military coups) its British-inherited respect for due process, have mainstream Islamists had regular, untrammelled access to the legitimate political process. But the reason for the Islamists' decline is not state oppression alone.

Islamism may still be much the most potent opposition in almost every Muslim country, but it is declining, and it owes that decline to its own inherent shortcomings as well as state oppression. In any case, even at the height of success it never commanded overwhelming popular support. For even in reasonably free and fair elections, it never won anything like an outright majority. In that fateful, 1992 Algerian poll, whose abolition triggered the civil war, the FIS only garnered 3.25 million votes in a 13-million electorate. Almost everywhere it has been the same pattern of strong initial gains followed by a steady decline subsequently.

In 1997, Turkey's Refah peaked with a mere 21 per cent of the vote, and, as in Algeria, much of that was clearly a 'protest vote' against a much resented existing order rather than a reflection of the Islamists' true strength. For in the next, 1999 elections, Refah -- or its newly legalised successor Fazilet -- won a mere 16 per cent, the 'protest' now switching to the extreme nationalist right. In Kuwait, Islamists won 15 out of 50 parliamentary seats in 1991, tapering off in subsequent polls. Pakistan is the best yardstick. There the mainstream Islamist party, the Jamaat-i Islami (to be distinguished from the newly arising breed of neo-Talibanist extremists), has been longer exposed to the normal wear and tear of conventional politics than mainstream Islamists anywhere else; that steadily weakened, rather than increased, its appeal; its representation in parliament fell accordingly.

The loss of popularity grows partly out of the way Islam-in-opposition has conducted its struggle, with the 'Bolshevists' discrediting the movement as a whole. A mainstream leader like Abbas Madani, of Algeria's FIS, simply cannot comprehend the savagery perpetrated in Islamism's name, or so he claims. "We must not even deny that Islam is responsible," he said, "because to deny is to acknowledge that Islam is so much as accused. It is Islam that is being massacred, and how can the killed be the killer, the lamb the wolf?" But after all due allowance is made for the provocations it suffered at the hands of brutal regimes, it is hardly surprising that, with the verses of the sword always there for the invoking, Islamism has a tendency to gravitate towards its own most extreme expression. Hence those climactic horrors, the massacre of tourists in Luxor, and the mass, throat-cutting barbarities of Algeria.

"If," said a letter in Al-Ahram newspaper after Luxor, "this is what they do to get to power, what will they do when they achieve it?" Any opposition of any kind has a built-in moral advantage over any authority. But an opposition that expresses itself in a religious idiom has the additional, 'unfair' one of being able to portray itself as godly, its adversaries as ungodly. But it is an advantage particularly liable to expose it in the end to the charge of hypocrisy. Egypt's Muslim Brothers may still gain from good works in Cairo's slums, but it has become clear to many Egyptians that, in power, they would just as readily betray their natural socio-economic constituency as the Iranian Mullahs. Was it not an Islamic company, Al-Rayan, which cost thousands of pious Egyptians their modest, life-long savings when its Islamically correct, but otherwise recklessly immoral, pyramid scheme collapsed?

Astonishingly, not just the Brothers, but the extremist Al-Gama'a, supported the 1997 reversal, in favour of the possessing classes, of Nasser's great land reforms. The reintroduction of the Shari'a is a rallying cry of Islamists-in-opposition everywhere. But if, as they contend, the Shari'a is the codified reflection of Islam's immutable essence, its deep-seated commitment to justice, they don't behave as if it is. They almost invariably confine themselves to pressing for those mechanically applicable, but ethically empty observances and prohibitions -- concerning alcohol, dress, personal status -- which, in their literal-minded interpretation, the Holy Book commands.

And almost invariably their idea of piety is to simply to be more extreme than the milieu in which they operate. Thus in Kuwait, the Islamists wanted to form a religious police, like Saudi Arabia's Mutawwa', "with a branch in every neighbourhood to patrol and watch citizens," sever thieves' hands, ban all sexual mixing, and punish people for drinking even in the privacy of their homes. In their excess, they alienated many who might otherwise have supported them. In Saudi Arabia itself, a model for such Kuwaitis, the prevailing orthodoxy is already so extreme that Saudi Islamists tend to seek a raison d'être in the even more extreme.

A global movement which came to reform others is now in need of its own reforms. Without them Islamism-in-power will self-destruct, and Islam-in-opposition never achieved power in the first place. Enlightened Islamists acknowledge it. And they increasingly acknowledge the vital importance of what, in its original, textual, return-to-roots essence, Islamism began by wholly rejecting: democracy.

There are doubts, among secular intellectuals, about how far even these enlightened ones will go at the expense of basic doctrine, how influential they are on the movement as a whole. One, Egypt's Fahmy Howeidy, perhaps the most celebrated Islamist commentator, put his finger on the central problem, when he said that, unlike Christianity, "the only way Islam can be separated from any field of human activity, politics included, is by changing or sacrificing its teachings. I don't think any Muslim believer would condone such a step."

Clearly, it is much harder to subject the Qur'an, held to be the literal word of God, to the kind of higher criticism to which Christian scholarship subjected the bible. But until Islamists acquiesce in that necessity they will never truly accept modern universal values based on reason alone. When the Egyptian academic Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid propounded the thesis that, once revealed to Mohamed, the Qur'an became subject to human reasoning, many Islamists called him as an apostate, and brought an initially successful legal action requiring him to be forcibly divorced from his wife. Insofar as Islamists do accept universal values, they always have to seek Qur'anic legitimation for them. This, if they really want to, is something which, however implausibly, they always manage to contrive; there is a process of reasoning, usually apologetic in tone, casuistic and philosophically shallow. "They pick and choose what they want," said secularist Egyptian scholar Hussein Amin, "For them the sacred texts are as full of alternatives as Lenin's sayings for communists."

There are obvious exceptions, like the Taliban and its Pakistani or Central Asian extensions, but, in the heartlands, with its greater maturity and experience, the concern for democracy, and related values of pluralism, human rights, religious tolerance, sexual equality is strengthening. For Howeidy, it ranks as the primary value, the indispensable foundation of any true Islamic state. He deplored the results of the recent Indonesian elections, in that they brought to power a one-time Muslim activist, Abdul-Rahman Wahid, who decries the application of the Shari'a and declares that Islam should have "a role in morals, education and worship, but not in affairs of state." But he rejoiced at the restoration of democracy, "which is the gateway to Shari'a, while tyranny is its death."

This point of view has won support, most startlingly, even among former 'Bolsheviks' of Al-Gama'a and Jihad. On the face of it some of them have undergone a complete conversion from the verses of the sword to their Qur'anic antithesis, "there is no compulsion in religion." They are trying to form legal, above-ground political parties. In a charter of his new beliefs, one of their leaders, Gamal Sultan, wrote recently: "we must acknowledge that, till now, democracy is the best practically available means for guaranteeing public rights and freedoms, and they are the essence of Islam." He conceded that among Islamism's secular adversaries "there have always been many noble, high-minded, moral and humanist" individuals.

This evolution in thinking is found mainly in Islamism's younger generation. In Egypt, young members of the mainstream Muslim Brothers have broken with their old-guard leaders, authoritarian and dogmatic, and are trying to set up a party of their own, which even includes a leading Christian intellectual among its founding members. In Turkey, there is a similar dissidence among young Refah activists. By and large, the more democratic the system under which they operate the more democratic Islamists themselves become, the readier to sacrifice ideological purity to the exigencies of achieving power, to reduce their fundamental tenet, the sovereignty of God in human affairs, to a purely metaphysical concept. One scholar sees a "Darwinian selectivity" at work; "even if the profession of democracy is tactical, the very process of working within a democratic framework may transform this opportunism into a more substantive commitment."

The great obstacle, here, is the regimes. When Islamism threatens, not a single one, not even the most democratic, has permitted democracy to run its full, unfettered course. They accuse Islamists of wanting to annul democracy as soon as they achieve power through it; but, in practice, it is they -- most obviously in Algeria or Turkey -- who have done precisely that before the Islamists ever had the chance. They may not have actually created the great Islamist peril. But, at an earlier stage, when other perils loomed larger -- the Egyptian left for President Sadat, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan for the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Kurds for Turkey, the PLO for Israel -- they encouraged and co-opted even the most violent and fanatical of them. But they certainly did create, or failed to correct, the environment in which Islamism grew and flourished, an environment marked, in varying degrees, by tyranny and oppression, ethnic, clan and sectarian exploitation, corruption, nepotism and gross disparities of wealth -- in short by the accumulating ravages of their own misrule.

For some the Islamists have become as useful enemies as they once were protégés -- just look at the way the Turkish military and intelligence establishment is now turning on the underground Hizbullah fanatics it once co-opted for its own purposes. They are a pretext for evading change and reform; it is easier to blame deep-rooted socio-economic ills on 'returnees from Afghanistan' than it is to remedy their underlying causes.

In the bleak political picture which the heartlands of Islam present today, change, when it comes at all, is rarely for the better. Is Iran now set to become the momentous exception? Its parliamentary elections could usher in, and by peaceable, constitutional means, the most far-reaching transformation in the nature of the ruling system since the Revolution. If they do, the republic would continue to call itself Islamic. For after all, it is Islamists who would be leading the change. But ideologically and institutionally -- with the victory of the people's sovereignty over God's, a hard-line Mullahs' God, and the emergence of a reformist parliament that acts upon it -- the change would be so far-reaching that the world's first Islamic state would be well on the way to becoming its first post-Islamic state, a secular, democratic one in all but name.

In dissolving itself, the theocratic order Khomeini founded would at last become a model, for the whole Muslim world, of a kind he never imagined.

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg