The Dark Side Of Islam

The world has felt the power of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's words before. In 1980 youthful members of a militant fundamentalist group in Egypt called Jihad (Holy War) were secretly forming a new cell and sought out their spiritual leader for guidance. What, they asked the sheik, would be the fate of a ruler who ignored the law of God? Abdel Rahman's reply: "Death."

On Oct. 6, 1981, as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat stood reviewing his troops, a military truck halted in front of him and four uniformed men leaped out, firing automatic rifles at the reviewing stand. One of the men ran straight toward Sadat, pumping bullet after bullet into his body. "I am Khalid al-Islambouli!" the attacker shouted. "I have killed Pharaoh."

Army Lieut. al-Islambouli, a member of Jihad, was executed along with four others for the assassination. Abdel Rahman was indicted, accused of issuing a fatwa, or religious decree, ordering Sadat's murder, but was acquitted. The assassination of the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel settled nothing. The clash between Islamic religious and political authority is more widespread and in some places more threatening now than it was then. Today every secular Muslim government from North Africa to the Persian Gulf faces a challenge from radical fundamentalists. Their accusation is not just that political leaders have strayed from the holy law of the Koran but that they have done so without solving the chronic unemployment, corruption and hopelessness that plague the Arab world.

This is the dark side of Islam, which shows its face in violence and terrorism intended to overthrow modernizing, more secular regimes and harm the Western nations that support them. Its influence far outweighs its numbers. The Islamic revival that has swept the Middle East is primarily a peaceful movement for a return to religious purity. But where desperation is greatest, a small number of radicals have resorted to military action to impose the Islamic ideology they espouse. For the most part, they are not members of some grand conspiracy sponsored by a state apparatus, but loosely organized, grass- roots militants who use similar terrorist methods and get money and weapons from the same like-minded sources. Unlike the Palestinian and Shi'ite revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s, these disparate cells of angry young men seem to boil up from the broad opposition growing in the largely undemocratic countries of the region, in a self-proclaimed war to force pure, undiluted Islamic law on the societies that have failed them. When that violence spills over into the U.S., it is usually aimed at punishing Washington's support for Israel and the secular Arab states.

In some countries the ideological conflict has developed into a bloody struggle for political dominance. Violence inspired by radicals determined to topple President Hosni Mubarak has killed 200 people in Egypt over the past two years; in Algeria, the government most immediately threatened by fundamentalists, the toll is at least 1,200. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is the biggest danger to the infant peace process in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, is a special case. Its first aim is the destruction of Israel; after achieving that, Hamas would establish a Muslim state on the wreckage as a precursor to a greater pan-Islamic union.