In Arab World, Suppression of Dissent Sparks Extremism
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 28, 2001; Page A22
CAIRO -- The students of Cairo University held a protest earlier this month. Mounted against the U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan, it was, like everything even remotely political in Egypt, nothing so much as controlled.
The students chanted. The police looked on. But the heady satisfaction of giving voice to conviction remained securely contained within university gates, which remained closed throughout the midday demonstration.
"Inside the university, people are very free, but outside they're very secretive," said Moustafa Mahmoud, a science student. "If a person can't give his opinions, there's a lot of fear in him, and it will make him move underground."
In searching for the origins of Islamic extremism in the Arab world, many analysts point to the considerable restraints that autocratic governments impose on political expression. Without Western recognition of a single Arab government as a real democracy, and without serious opposition brooked in most of them, frustrated activists say dissent has been channeled into the only arena that remains relatively open -- religion.
"Politics is prohibited in this society in general," said Hafez Abu Saada, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, which the government has refused to give legal standing. "But the government can't close the mosque.
"If you can't gather people to discuss issues in the appropriate place, such as the headquarters of the opposition party," he said, "the only place you can gather people is the mosque."
The rise of "political Islam" has many roots, analysts note, including the guidelines for political behavior in the Koran. The prophet Muhammad's call for shura, or consultation between the ruler and the ruled, has been called in the Muslim world the "essence" of democracy. Modern political Islam is sometimes influenced as well by many Muslims' perception of Western institutions and culture as hollow.
Egypt, with 70 million people, is by far the largest Arab country and among the most closely aligned with the West. It has a parliament, but opposition parties hold few seats; the ruling National Party is answerable mainly to the military-backed government of President Hosni Mubarak.
Criticism of government policies is allowed, but challenges to reform the fundamentals of the system are discouraged, sometimes with force and prison terms. With firm control of parliament and the electoral system, Mubarak has faced no substantial electoral challenge to his authority in 20 years.
In that political environment, ordinary citizens and activists say the absence of any other outlet for civic expression leads increasing numbers of people to view religion as the frame for politics. And for a small minority, that politics includes terrorism.
"Of course losing your freedom attracts you to being violent," said Mohamad Al-Hodhaibi, a senior official of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement that originally sprang up against British colonial rule. The Brotherhood, which though technically outlawed manages to field candidates for parliament using the slogan "Islam is the Solution," is widely regarded here as the most formidable internal opposition to Mubarak's government.
"This is the same whether you're Muslim or not," Al-Hodhaibi added. "Any system that's forced on people will create opposition."
Many people here believe that such a cause and effect exists.
True believers tend to be emotionally damaged individuals who seize on "fanatical literature," said Mohamed Salah, a correspondent in Cairo for London's Arabic-language Al Hayat newspaper.
"I don't believe oppression is the real cause," said Salah, who has spent years covering Islamic extremists. "I don't even call it oppression. I call it stringent procedures in a grave situation. Because these procedures are what stopped jihad in Egypt."
Salah pointed to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamic fundamentalists Sadat had once found useful in holding back the country's socialist front. "Sadat provided complete freedom to these people," Salah said, "and they killed him."
A Western diplomat who tracks radical groups said extremism tends to be rooted in illiteracy and poverty, especially in Upper Egypt, the hinterlands upstream on the Nile.
"These organizations that recruit people are offering people either a better life or a better afterlife," the diplomat said. "If they had more political dialogue here, would they still have terrorism? I personally believe they would still have terrorism."
The diplomat was less dismissive of the contention that U.S. support for unpopular Arab governments fuels the widespread impression that the United States regards Arabs as second-class citizens. "Democracy for the Jews," Saada, the human rights official, said of Israel, "but not for the Arabs."
Cairo residents acknowledge their frustration warily.
"Shall I say my opinion? I won't be arrested? Because anyone who says their opinion gets arrested," said Farid Sayed Ibrahim, one of a dozen unemployed men idling outside a mosque in Cairo's Nasser City neighborhood. "If I say the truth they'll take us all in a group out of here."
Saada, also a human rights attorney, said the mosque was near the location where Egyptian security forces had swept up about 70 suspected Muslim radicals a month earlier, charging them with raising money for extremist causes. Police said they were members of a new group called Al Waad, Arabic for "the Promise," that an Egyptian newspaper linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist organization.
The unemployed men said they knew nothing of the arrests or the group.
Western diplomats dismissed the reported link to al Qaeda, as well as reports that the group plotted against U.S. targets in Egypt. Saada, who is representing one of the group's alleged leaders, said two suspects who the government announced had been trained as pilots had in fact been arrested well before the sweep against Al Waad.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, worshipers have been urged to leave their mosques immediately after Friday prayers, rather than linger in groups, lest they form the core of a protest. University students say they get the same rush treatment when a class ends.
"Everybody's on their toes, everybody's nervous these days, both students and security," said Mohamad Hassan Mohamed, 21, a student in Cairo University's agriculture school.
The demonstrations that offer young idealists at least the opportunity to vent do not satisfy the craving for real political involvement, several students said in interviews.
"You can't truly express yourself," said Ahmad Hassanein, another science student. "Most of the people in the university feel they have very few people to hear them."
Khalid Mohamad, a 20-year-old business student, complained of the government's constant "effort to push the youth away from politics. The youth have a lot of energy inside them, and they have to find a way to express it."
And if they don't?
"It's inside the heart," Mohamad said. "It's boiling inside the heart."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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