7 - 13 February 2002
Issue No.572
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 February 2002 Issue No.572 |
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Held accountable
When analysing the causes of religious extremism, advises Ibrahim Nafie, the US would do well to examine its own conscience
What is most distressing about US media allegations that the Egyptian government is responsible for the rise of terrorism is that they betray no small measure of malicious intent. Otherwise, the writers responsible could have paid a little more attention to the facts. One fact is that religious extremism is a universal phenomenon, a widespread reaction against some of the inadequacies of modernity. A second is that public opinion in Egypt is unequivocally opposed to extremism and vehemently condemns violence. A third is that the Egyptian government has scored major victories against extremist violence, virtually eradicating its spectre from our domestic horizon.
Equally important is the price the Egyptian people had to pay for their victory against terrorism in the 1990s. Part of this price was paid in the coin of civil liberties. Specifically, suspects of involvement in terrorist activities were denied some of the normal legal and judicial guarantees accorded under normal law. This was the only way to stem the precipitous slide into civil strife -- Algeria's tragic fate, for example. Time and again, terrorists exploited legal rights and guarantees to portray themselves as beyond the reach of the law.
Egypt had to act resolutely because, starting in the late '70s, extremism spread so malignantly that, within a few years, terrorist organisations had recruited thousands of young men. Under most other governments, this alarming development would have been sufficient cause to abolish all legal rights and to bring the democratisation process grinding to a halt. Egypt adopted a more coolheaded approach. It reviewed its philosophy of comprehensive development and rescheduled the phasing in of full democracy and a market economy, thus allowing temporary sacrifices of legal rights to protect the very democracy to which we aspire.
A comparison between Egypt and the US would be useful here. The US, with all its illustrious legislative history, powerful democratic institutions and technological prowess, was so stunned by the events of 11 September that Congress almost unanimously voted in the Patriot Act, which not only jettisoned many rights to which suspects and defendants are entitled, but also conflicts with the spirit of modern law and fundamental humanitarian values. Indeed, one might frankly assert that the legislation is racist.
Still, we must ask what caused the cancerous spread of extremist violence in the late '70s. Let us have the courage to admit responsibility for some of it. One cause was the mixed messages the government sent out toward the end of the Sadat regime. A second was the disruption of the delicate balance between the various components of Egyptian identity at the time.
We learned a very precious lesson from that experience. Since then, the political elite has struck a fine balance between deference to religion's role in society, on one hand, and modernisation's benefits and exigencies, on the other. The culture of enlightenment revived under President Mubarak reflects this symmetry, as do the policy reforms intended to address the needs of rural Egypt and, in general, to focus more on education, health care and other basic elements of welfare and development.
The measures undertaken by the Egyptian government succeeded in stemming the rise of extremism in Egypt. Still, there remains a certain space for the growth of terrorism that Egypt can do little to eliminate, because it is determined by external circumstances over which the US has preponderant influence: specifically, the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people.
It is no coincidence that the sharpest growth rate of extremist violence occurred between 1978 and 1984, the period that witnessed the Camp David peace treaty and Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The hopes the Egyptian people had pinned on Sadat's peace drive came up against a brick wall. To most Arabs, and to young Egyptians in particular, it appeared that Israel had perceived Sadat's foresight and magnanimity as a sign of weakness, and was determined to use Camp David not as a platform upon which to build regional peace, but as a tool to neutralise Egypt while Israel invaded Lebanon and crushed the Palestinian liberation movement. Today, Israeli encroachment on Arab land continues unabated and its repression of the Palestinian people has reached unprecedented peaks of violence. Meanwhile, 25 years of Egyptian efforts to coax Israel into a just and lasting peace have met with nothing but arrogance, intransigence and lies.
If Israeli policy generated a climate favourable to religious extremism, the US, in the 1980s, promoted extremism further by organising and funding jihad against the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. At the same time, a large segment of Arab public opinion believes that the US aids and abets Israel's actions, and widely interprets this collusion as one aspect of anti-Arab and anti- Muslim sentiments. Naturally, the Egyptian government does not subscribe to this belief and has tried to explain to its people and the Arabs generally the complexities of the US political system and the difficulty of achieving a just and lasting settlement. Nevertheless, Washington's unconditional support for Israel, its failure to persuade Israel to abide by international law and the provocative statements the US administration has been issuing have all conspired to compound the widespread sense of injustice and frustration. Such sentiments give rise to extremism, and extremism can vent itself in violence.
One would have hoped that political commentators in the US possessed enough wisdom and objectivity to understand this. Sadly, one fears, ulterior motives and political bias take over when it comes to writing about Egypt and the Arab world.
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