Moderate Muslims Fear Their Message Is Being Ignored
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: October 21, 2001
CAIRO, Oct. 20 — Since the September attacks, Al Azhar — the revered mosque, the distinguished university, the leading voice of the Sunni Muslim establishment — has renewed with accustomed grace the roles it has played in the world of Islam for more than 1,000 years.
It has sought to advise Muslims around the world that those who kill in the name of Islam are nothing more than heretics. It has sought to guide, to reassure Westerners against any clash of civilizations.
But throughout an Islamic world full of anger and despair, political rulers and those like Al Azhar who support them have perhaps never been so unpopular. So despite the mosque's best efforts, the banners raised last week at the mosque to protest the American airstrikes expressed a very different voice: "Jihad is the solution!"
This is Islam as the language of dissent, and over the past quarter century, its words have become increasingly loud. In places like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, frustrated people — choked by booms in population, disoriented by the uneasy mix of imported American culture and old traditions, blocked by failing economies and squelched by curbs on political expression — have found a single vehicle to express their rage: political Islam.
Until 30 years ago, in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, the language of politics was cast in terms of nationalism or the demands of the cold war. Now it is tinged almost everywhere with slogans like "Islam is the answer."
If there is one constant amid the many faces of this religion, experts say, it is that Islam is growing as a force. Sometimes financed by Saudi oil, Islam is the dominant vehicle for the hospitals and charitable foundations that increasingly fill voids left by secular governments.
In recent decades new Islamic republics have emerged in Sudan, Iran and Afghanistan. Islamists have been elected to parliament, served in cabinets or held high office in countries from Algeria to Jordan to Pakistan to Malaysia and Indonesia.
None of these countries is a true democracy, and while Islamists cast themselves as pluralizers in authoritarian states, few go so far as to advocate a Western-style democracy. The traditions of Islam emphasize submission to religious law, leading many scholars to question whether Islam is even compatible with democracy.
The United States has allied itself with many Arab governments that have no interest in democracy, among them Saudi Arabia. At the same time, the United States is widely seen in the globalized, post-cold-war world as the voice and exporter of the message that democracy, free markets and technology are the answer for everybody.
Both these facets of American policy — what is perceived as hypocrisy in backing autocratic Arab states, and the democracy- fits-all message — have caused unease or anger among Muslims.
So, too, have American support for Israel and for sanctions on Iraq, and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. As a result, the message of the accused terrorist Osama bin Laden has gained a broad resonance.
The attempt to control and if possible reverse this growing antagonism is clearly one of the major diplomatic challenges facing the Bush administration. The elimination of Mr. bin Laden's network has given America an immediate military focus, but the sentiments among Muslims who have helped that network grow present a far deeper problem.
Islam is a faith of many faces: from its stern Wahhabi visage in Saudi Arabia to the more flexible versions that prevail in Egypt or Indonesia, where clerics have long scoffed at rigid rules like the Saudis' ban on women's driving, and have argued that Islam is eternally adaptable to modern life.
Islam's 1.3 billion followers include Shiites, the minority sect that is dominant in Iran, and Sunnis, the majority in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and most other Islamic countries. There are also the mostly secular, as in Syria, whose government has crushed a religious challenge to its authority, and the militant, exhorted by extremist clerics in places like Lebanon, Gaza and now Afghanistan. Some extremists have condoned the Sept. 11 attacks and routinely use religion to justify violence in the name of a holy struggle, or jihad.
The category of militants is growing. It is a development that saddens men like Sheik Fawzi al-Zafzaf, an Islamic scholar who has spent 40 years at Al Azhar. He acknowledges that its authority has been cast in doubt in some quarters by Al Azhar's very ties to an Egyptian government that also needs the center's support.
"They call us the clerics of the authorities," Sheik Zafzaf said with clear regret, speaking of Muslims who have taken more militant voices as their religious guides.
It is a conundrum not only for Egypt, but perhaps for all of the Islamic world.
Since the time of Muhammad (A.D. 570-632), the teachings of Islam have always linked political rules with spiritual rules, so governments like Egypt's need the mantle of institutions like Al Azhar as a seal of legitimacy.
But the more that governments like Egypt's harness themselves to mainstream clerics, the more those unhappy with their leaders have disdained the clerics as well.