Summer 1994

slam and Politics: I Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia

A Great Decisions, 1994 lecture sponsored by the Institute of World Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Tuesday, March 22, 1994

by Abbas Hamdani University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my dear daughter, Amal, who died on May 8,1994, of cancer and pneumonia at the age of 29, leaving behind two little children.

n discussing Islam and politics and taking Egypt, Algeria, and I Tunisia as case-studies, one runs into two wrong impressions: first, that these three countries typify the Muslim world, and second, that Islam is singularly responsible for the extremist trends that have characterized the recent past of these nations.

The Muslim world comprises forty-five countries from Africa to southeast and central Asia with Muslim majorities. The world-wide population of Muslims is about 900 million or one-fifth of the hu- man race. The total population of the three countries under study is about 94 million, i.e., only 9.5 percent of the world Muslim popula- tion. There are many cultural varieties in the Muslim world, also many ethnic differences and regional characteristics.

tries is not typical of Islam. It is a universal trend. We find similar religious revivals in America, Europe, and Israel. Religious conser-

Right at the outset, I would like to rectify these impressions.

Secondly, the trend of religious extremism in these three coun-

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Islam and Politics

vatism, which is otherwise known as fundamentalism, is the result of world-wide disillusionment with liberalism since the 1970s and the latter's failure to deliver what it had promised. Islamic funda- mentalism must be understood in the context of the Christian, Jew- ish, Hindu, and other fundamentalisms that are on the rise and are reacting to each other. Behind the uninformed impression of Islam is the notion that this religion stands for mere fanaticism, violence, and holy war. Such a view does not take into account the very rich civili- zation built by Islam in the Middle Ages, a civilization that was one of the pillars on which European culture rested as it awoke from its Dark Ages into its Renaissance. As for the charges of "holy war," "violence" and "fanaticism," the history of Europe also is replete with these phenomena. One has only to look at the five-hundred- year history of the Crusades and the Reconquista, followed by many more centuries of colonial and imperial rule. The carnage in Bosnia makes us wonder whether the medieval days of the Inquisition and expulsion of Muslims from Spain are being repeated in modem times. One talks of Arab, Palestinian, or Islamic terrorism, but there have been many such terrorisms in the world: the state terrorism of Israel; regime terrorism by the Shah of Iran; Phalangist terrorism at Sabra and Shatila; the settler terrorism in South Africa and the West Bank; terrorism by the Irish, the Germans, the Japanese, and the Croatians; Tamil terrorism in Sri Lanka and the Serbian terrorism against the Muslims of Bosnia.

Before I go on to discuss the specific cases of Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia, I would like to say a few words about fundamentalism in general and of Islamic fundamentalism in particular. If byfunda- mentalism we understand a revival of the foundational principles of a religion, then there have been many such revivals in Muslim histo- ry, and it is not a new phenomenon. In the Western Christian world, fundamentalism also has a long history, from the rise of Protestant reform movements in the sixteenth century to the Jerry Falwell-type organizations of the present. In our days, fundamentalism in the United States boils down to certain conservative positions such as teaching religion in school, espousing the creation theory, and ban- ning abortion.

In the Muslim world, fundamentalism arose with conservative schools of law, such as the Hanbali in the late ninth century, then with the antimystic (anti-Sufi) teachings of Ibn Taimiyah in the early fourteenth century, and later with the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century and in the context of foreign European rule, the ideas of Jamal al-din al-

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Afghani, Muhammad Abdu, and Rashid Rida led people to revive their religious and cultural values in opposition to the inroads made in Muslim life by Western Christianity and colonial rule. Islam was always a component of all national and independence movements.

Fundamentalism has since then been of two kinds-prospec- tive and retrogressive. The first wants to look back to the Qur'an and the early history of Islam in order to correct the many manifes- tations of decadence in later centuries, which were supposed to be responsible for Muslim defeats and loss of independence to colonial powers and to blind adoption of the ways of Western society. Such was the method of Jawdat Pasha's Mecelle in 1876; of the ideas of Lutfi al-Sayyid of Egypt; of Amir Ali and Sir Sayyid Ahmad in In- dia; of Muhammad Iqbal, who inspired the Pakistan movement; and, to some extent, although in an erratic fashion, of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya.

Retrogressive fundamentalism did not return to the origins of Islam but looked back instead to the centuries of decadence, particu- larly to the post-Crusades period, with its anti-Christian overtones; to the assertion of orthodox Islam, opposed to any hint of heresy; and to the traditional ways of life in family, marriage, divorce, and other aspects of personal law. It reacted more than it asserted. It em- phasized the tradition of the forefathers (salufl. It justified itself not only by the Qur'an but also mostly by the hadith-reports about the Prophet Muhammad (S ) , accumulated over many generations and not always very genuine. Such was the fundamentalism of the Mus- lim Brotherhood of Egypt and Syria and its leaders Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and of Jamaat-i-Islami and its leader Abul-Ala Mawdudi in Pakistan, culminating in its successful coup under Gen- eral Zia and its domination of the Muslim League by the previous Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In a Shi'ite rather than a Sunni milieu, there was the fundamentalism of Iran under Imam Khomeini. These fundamentalists wanted an Islamic state, always headed by a MUS- lim; prominence of the ulurnu (religious scholars); rule of the reli- gious law (shari'u); restrictions on women; revival of the 2ex talionis criminal code; and insistence on the prohibition of alcohol, dancing, and nightclubs, and on the condoning of polygamy.

Another trend in Islam has been secularist. The founding lead- er of the Muslim state of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, viewed his state as constituting a Muslim majority, salvaging its life from the permanent Hindu rule of India, but a state in which sharib law would not be applied. This explains the opposition of Mawdudi's fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan.

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In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser introduced in Egypt an ideology that, although it used Islam for legitimation, was socialist in charac- ter and part of the movement of nonaligned states. Its emphasis was on land reform, nationalization of industries and commercial enter- prises, free education and health care, and national construction projects such as the Aswan Dam and the steel industry. Islam was used to help this modernization process, not to impede it.

Another secular socialist movement, the Baath in Syria and Iraq, was led by a Christian leader, Michel Aflaq, and although the Baath party split into Syrian and Iraqi branches, the essential charac- ter of the movement remained the same. Its program was similar to that of Nasir’s Egypt.

The Syrian-Lebanese Christian Arab leaders and intellectuals played an important role in the cultivation of nonreligious, secular Arab nationalism that first opposed the rule of Ottoman Turkey and then of British and French imperialisms. Muslim masses were active followers of these leaders. Today, several factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization are led by Christian leaders, such as George Habash and Naef Hawatmeh, who are more militantly nationalist than the Muslim Fatah leader, Yasir Arafat. The fundamentalist re- action to secularized politics in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine has come from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Hamas, and the new extreme parties of Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Alge- ria, and even Senegal.

The 1967 defeat suffered by Arab states at the hands of Israel, armed and supported financially by the United States, contributed to public disillusionment with secularized Arab regimes. Local lead- ers trusted by the West were no longer trustworthy for the people. Noteworthy was the assassination of Anwar Sadat and the fall of the Shah of Iran. The Middle East grew more restive when the days of employment and comparative security under socialism gave way to Infitah, or an opening of countries to the free market and western capitalism, when poverty and inflation increased. Bread riots erupt- ed; national pride was hurt and humiliated; Palestinians were thrown out of their lands and homes; and the superpower, America, vetoed many UN resolutions granting Palestinians their legitimate right to return to their homes and achieve their self-determination, while doling out billions of dollars every year to Israel and strength- ening its occupation of Palestinian lands.

This situation generated the new fundamentalism of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. It has been reactive and retrogressive. In Lebanon, the Hizbullah and the Islamic Iihad caused an American and Israeli

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Summer I994

withdrawal from that country after Israel's 1982 invasion. There was the opportunistic and exploitative lip service to Islamic revival by Jafar Numeiri of Sudan and General Ziaul-Haq of Pakistan. There is the Senegalese Islamic Movement called Mus tarshidin wa Mus tarshi- dat (Men and Women Seeking Guidance) led by a university profes- sor, Mustafa Sy, the largest movement in West Africa, which recent- ly has been banned by President Abdou Diouf. In Sudan, the current regime of Hasan al-Turabi is exacerbating the internal conflict be- tween the Muslim North and the Animist and Christian South. Sur- prisingly enough, Libya is comparatively quiet.

Tunisia under consideration. For the right-wing, conservative reli- gious movements here, a term has been used-Islamist. It is an un- happy expression. We do not say Christianist, Judaist, Buddhist, Hinduist, then why, Islamist? The use of terminology such as this betrays a psychology of separating our fundamentalist phenomena from those of the Muslims. However, for want of a better word and the connotations already established for that term, I shall use it, al- though quite reluctantly. The political regimes in all the three coun- tries are secular; i.e., not necessarily based on Shari'a or the Islamic religious law although operating in predominantly Muslim popula- tions (99 percent each in Algeria and Tunisia and 91 percent in Egypt). However, the popular opposition has been Islamist. In each of the three cases, the opposition has gone through two phases: first, a creeping popularity due to disastrous economic conditions-rising unemployment and poverty; and the second, accelerated popularity due to government repression. Algeria is the worst case because it is on the brink of a civil war; in Egypt and Tunisia, the situation is con- tainable, though serious.

Let us first take Egypt-the most populous Middle Eastern and African country; culturally and educationally most advanced, head- quarters of the Arab League with a brief interregnum, and the poor- est in per capita income. The first Islamist party there, as in Syria, was the Muslim Brotherhood founded as far back as 1928. Its leader, Hasan al-Banna was assassinated in 1950 by the hoodlums of the last Egyptian King Faruq. At the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser's rev- olution in 1952, they were the most popular force but were re- strained and restricted. Their popularity was eclipsed by that of Nasser because of his abolition of the monarchy, securing the with- drawal of British forces from Egypt, nationalizing the Suez Canal, and joining the bloc of nonaligned countries. Egypt was economical- ly prosperous until 1962, but the Yemen war (1962-70) and the 1967

Let us now come to the specific cases of Egypt, Algeria, and

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Islam and Politics

defeat in the Six Day War with Israel brought down that prosperity and occasioned the revival of the influence of Muslim Brotherhood in the lower middle and Bazari classes of Egypt.

The next president, Anwar al-Sadat, allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to function openly because he wanted their counter- weight to his socialist and proSoviet rivals. He gained universal popularity in 1973 by his successful crossing of the Suez Canal in his October war against Israel. However, signing a separate peace with Israel, allowing Western influence in Egypt; rolling back land re- form and because of the Infitah, i.e., opening Egypt to free-market economy, all too suddenly with consequent unemployment and poverty; he lapsed into unpopularity. Now, not only the Muslim Brotherhood but other Islamist groups began to gain the people’s support, such as Skabab Muhammad (the Prophet’s Youth) and the Salvation from Hell. There were new leaders such as Muhammad Mitwalli al-Sha‘rawi and Abdul Hamid Kishk. The most virulent Islamist movement was that of Jamaa Islamiya, (the Islamic group, better known as Takfir wal -Hijra (Excommunication and Emigration) led by Ahmad Shukri Mustafa. It was also anarchical. It not only op- posed the government but also the ulama (religious scholars), other Islamist parties, and the army, and it isolated itself by excommuni- cating the whole society around it. It considered the internal enemy more dangerous than the external ones. It resembled the Kharijite group of the medieval times. One of its members assassinated Presi- dent Sadat in 1981.

The current president, Hosni Mubarak, first clamped down on the Islamists, then loosened the political system and eased restric- tions on the press. The U.S. has helped him with an annual $1.3 bil- lion military aid, and, after the Gulf War, it wrote off Egypt’s mas- sive debt. But poverty and unemployment are rampant. The Islamist groups have revived and the Egyptian press-namely al-Arabi and al-Shaab dailies have been critical. Islamist groups run schools, hos- pitals, and social service organizations.

After his election to his third term as president, Mubarak seems to be entering the second phase, i.e., government repression that makes the Islamists even more popular. The Jamaa Islamiya has been targeting the Banks and the tourists, has assassinated a promi- nent religious scholar al-Dhahabi, and even plotted Mubarak’s as- sassination. But the massive arrests by the government, the hanging of fifteen Islamist leaders, new restrictions on the press (even on for- eign correspondents), and the lifting of subsidies from many con- sumer goods have made the confrontation more painful. Yet Egypt

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has not reached the point of no return, and the case is not so acute as that of Algeria. Temperamentally, the Egyptian people are peace- loving and respectful of any authority. The influence of Shaykh Ab- dul-Rahman, who has been arrested in New York in connection with the World Trade Center bombing, is highly exaggerated in our press.

Now let us consider Algeria. From the time the French occu- pied Algeria in 1830 until their departure in 1961, the country was considered a part of France, and the French language and culture was intended to replace Arabic and Islamic heritage of the country. It was intended to be a settler state, although 99 percent of the na- tion is Muslim. Islam was therefore from the beginning synonymous with Algerian resistance. The French referred to it as the resistance of ”musulmanes.” After independence, the ruling party-the Na- tional Liberation Front (FLN), first under Ben Bella and then under Boumedienne-kept the country socialist, nonaligned, and pro-Nas- serite Egypt. Its 5,000 mosques were controlled by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Due to its oil income, the country remained pros- perous, but when that income plunged from $13 billion a year to $8 billion in 1985, when unemployment and poverty then increased, there was major rioting in October, 1988, and the following of Islam- ist groups increased. Abbasi Madani, a university professor, formed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). The Algerian sociologist Lahouari Addi described the Front thus: ”The leaders of the FIS speak a reli- gious language-but this language is not theological-it is political, social and economic.” The movement was popular not just among the petty bureaucrats, the Bazari shopkeepers, and the lower middle class, but also among the middle class, the professionals, the intelli- gentsia, the media, and the junior officers of the army and police. The president, Colonel Chadli Benjedid (1979-1992), attempted to introduce political and economic reforms. A new constitution was promulgated in 1989; Algeria became a multi-party state; and par- liamentary elections were held in December 1991. The FIS won 188 of the 430 seats. Previously, it won major victories in the provincial and municipal elections. In Tanuary, 1992, a run-off election was scheduled, and the FIS was expected to win a parliamentary majori- ty. However, the military staged a coup, forced President Benjedid to resign, appointed a military-dominated High State Council, and annulled the elections. Martial law was imposed.

Algeria now entered the second phase, that of repression which made the FIS more popular but, at the same time, less liberal. The conservative Islamist phase began and also its insurgency. FIS

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was banned both in Algeria and France; many of their leaders were imprisoned; 12,000 people were incarcerated in a desert fortress of Tazoult, 220 miles east of Algiers, many of them on death row. Since the insurgency began, about 3,500 people on both sides have been killed, including eighteen prominent intellectuals and twenty-seven foreigners.

The five-man, army-backed High State Council called for a na- tional conference of consensus but would not release the imprisoned leaders; thus, the gesture was ineffective. A conference was in any case summoned, 1,300 delegates attended, and a new President was chosen-Algeria’s defense minister Lamine Zeroual-for a three- year term.

But the FIS has declared war on the government. It gunned down the leader of a small party, Rally for Culture and Democracy, that collaborated with the High State Council. It has called for put- ting on trial all those behind the cancellation of the elections of Janu- ary, 1992. Just a few days ago on March 10,1994, the FIS guerrillas stormed the above-mentioned Tazoult prison and freed about a 1,000 prisoners including 280 condemned to death by special courts. In fact, the FIS is building an army of its own and is poised to carry out a military confrontation with the government.

On the economic front, Algeria pays about $9 billion a year on its loan payments to its creditors-an equivalent of its entire annual income from oil and gas exports.

1883. In 1956 it gained independence. Habib Bouraguiba, the leader of the Neo-Destour Party (later named Destourian or Constitutional Democratic Rally) ruled Tunisia until 1987 when he was ousted by Zein el-Abidin Ben Ali, the current president. Under Buraguiba, a very progressive Personal Status Code was introduced. It prohibited polygamy and guaranteed women’s right. Tunisia was very pro- West and did not support the Nasserian politics of Egypt. Ben Ali did not change the politics of Buraguiba but gave it a new lease on life. In the 1980s, when Tunisia went through an economic crisis and unemployment increased, an Islamist party, called the Islamic Ten- dency Movement (MTI) was formed by its leader Rachid Ghan- noushi. In 1989, it changed its name to an-Nahda or the Renaissance Party. Its demands included reducing unemployment, political par- ticipation, and the rejection of Western (i.e., French) cultural domi- nation in favor of Arabic and Islamic education. Ben Ali outlawed the party and prevented it from participating in the 1989 elections.

Since then, the party has been more radicalized and the gov-

We come now to Tunisia. It was a French protectorate since

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Summer 1994

ernment more repressive. When a group of young Islamists attacked the ruling party’s office, the government arrested thousands of radi- cals. Two hundred seventy-nine people were brought to court on charges of overthrowing the government. Tunisian lawyers who have tried to represent the opponents of the government have been imprisoned. At least nine political prisoners have been tortured to death. This month Tunisia is holding its parliamentary election. One hundred forty-one seats will be contested between the ruling RCD and a new opposition party-the Social Democratic Party (MDS) led by Muhammad Moadda. The Nudha, being illegal, will contest indi- rectly with independent candidates. Because of the system of pro- portional representation, the Islamists will have no seats because they will not be a party, and the MDS will have much less represen- tation. Thus the government and party of Ben Ali will continue to rule.

the government there does not learn from the example of Algeria, the tables may be turned against it in the years to come.

France. It opposed Nasser’s hostility to Israel. The United States, therefore, gave it economic and military assistance. After Egypt signed a separate peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the Arab countries voted to shift the headquarters of the Arab League from Cairo to Tunis. In 1982, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was ousted from Lebanon, it shifted its headquarters from Beirut to Tunis. In October, 1985, Israel carried out a raid on the P.L.O. Head- quarters and killed a prominent P.L.O. leader. These events have drawn Tunisia more into the general Arab politics and weakened its ties to the West, increasing at the same time the influence of the Is- lamists.

situations in Egypt, Algeria, and Tunis in terms of the United States’ options towards them.

about these countries. On the one hand, we want to support the present regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia because they are pro- West and at least two of them are pro-Israel. We also want to sup- port them because they are opposed to Islamic fundamentalists whom we consider as enemies of the West and Israel. It is strange that we once encouraged the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against Nasser and the Afghan Islamic militants against the Soviet Union; we now are unable to put the genie back into the bottle. Israel en-

Of the three counties, Tunisia’s Islamists are the weakest, but if

Under Bouraguiba, Tunisia was pro-West and had close ties to

Some conclusions need to be drawn from the above-described

First of all, there is an apparent contradiction in our thinking

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couraged the Palestinian Hamas as a counter-weight against the P.L.O. and is now regretting the consequences of its short-sighted policy. On the other hand, we criticize these regimes for being au- thoritarian, dictatorial, and undemocratic. We oppose their violation of human rights, cancellation of elections, corruption, nepotism, im- prisonment without trial, torture, and killings. We cannot have it both ways.

Our policies should go beyond the general criticism of both sides. There is no quick fix. One has to examine the deeper causes of the conflicts. In our confrontation with the Soviet Union, we needed regimes, not people, to be pro-West, and we supported their dictato- rial conduct. But the cold war is over, and we are the only super- power in the world. We have the time and should have the patience for a long process to work itself out.

We must first of all insist on the democratic process, even if the new elected governments are composed of Islamists and hostile ele- ments. Their own populations will tire of them, for they do not have a sound economic and social program. By further democratic stages, still new forces will arise who will genuinely be popular and also need us. Then and only then will our relations with these countries become normal and friendly.

Secondly, we have a myopic concept of moderation. We con- sider the monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Morocco as moderate, despite the fact that they are socially retrogressive. Because they are oil-rich, we do not have to give them aid. On top of it, they are pro-West-an additional bonus. But social retrogression breeds radicalism, and one day we may regret our short-sighted policy. On the other hand, we do not consider countries like Iraq, Syria, and Nasserite Egypt as moderate because they are anti-West and anti-Israel, although they may be socially more advanced. The same holds true of how we view the regimes and peoples of present-day Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. We consider their regimes moderate and their people fanat- ical radicals. That is not a very democratic way of looking at things!

Lastly, in the post-cold war era, we tend to replace one enemy with another, namely Communism with Islam. As we previously characterized every shade of pink as red, so now we lump all Mus- lims as fundamentalists. Well-educated experts in the United States-professors, journalists, consultants, and think-tank special- ists-argue that the new resurgent Muslim East is now and will be in the future as antagonistic to the West and its values as it allegedly has been in the past. They also think a revival of the old crusading

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Summer 1994

spirit against Islam to be not only a proper but useful way of main- taining Western unity. Surprisingly, that is the same logic of the new Russian chauvinists in their thinking about the central Asian and Caucasian Muslim countries of the former Soviet Union and also about their attitude to the Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims. The fault in this approach to the Islamic World is that, whereas Communism as a political and economic philosophy might disintegrate and dis- appear, Islam as a religion will not. Are we prepared to make ene- mies of nearly one billion Muslims in the world and the six million in United States? This would be highly divisive for our own society. Losing our fine sense of discrimination in the proper evaluation of the situation in these three important North African countries- Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia-can only lead to the depletion of our influence in the region. Professor Esposito has correctly stated: ”U.S. perception of a monolithic ’Islamic threat’ often contributes to sup- port for repressive governments in the Muslim World and thus to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Jimmy Carter, who came to know the Middle Eastern and Muslim World better than many so-called experts. He said: ”I think there is too much of an inclination in this country to look on Muslims as in- herently terrorists and inherently against the West. I don’t see that when I see these people.” He complained that Americans’ “obses- sion” with Islam is ”unfair.”

I will conclude with the wise statement of our former President

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