Revolutionary Islam’s [Modern Origins] (insightful?)

For a quarter of a century, a revolutionary movement has been spreading around the planet. While America's leaders were focused on Marxist revolutions and the Soviet Union, a radical new vision of Islam was surging through the Muslim world. It's full power was made bloodily manifest on September 11th. In Iran, where the revolution started and Egypt where Islamic radicals are brutally suppressed where does revolutionary Islam draw its strength, can what happened in Tehran happen in Cairo, and why is America perceived by Islamic radicals as the enemy?

The story begins in 1979 in Iran. In that year, the U.S.-backed Shah and his family fled the country, and exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran. Revolutionaries stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and took staff as hostages. After 444 days in captivity, the hostages were finally released in January 1980, after the terms that had been laid out were met. More than two decades later people in Iran are back on the streets, albeit for different reasons. It is a pleasant Wednesday night in Tehran, capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A war may be raging next door in Afghanistan, but here in Mohseni Square, the kids are demonstrating about something more important. Iran's national soccer team has just defeated the United Arab Emirates to keep alive its hope of playing in the World Cup. Up Mirdamad Boulevard the crowd spreads. The middle of the tree-lined boulevard has been taken over by kids in their teens and early twenties. Boys and girls... dancing.

While this may seem normal, in a country where dancing in public is forbidden, it is a small act of defiance. Not that the boys and girls are dancing with each other. Things haven't gone that far, but here in Iran the authorities are taking notice. This is the third soccer demonstration in as many weeks. Ten years ago, five years ago, maybe even last year, this scene would have been impossible to imagine. Now, signs of change are all over Tehran.

A half-hour or so before kickoff, in an Internet cafe in the fashionable Farmanieh section of town a TV broadcasts evening prayers. In another corner, a young woman yaks away to a friend in Paris via the net. The cafe is a hangout for the neighborhood's affluent twenty and thirty year olds like Mehezda, 34, who works in marketing for BBD&O. He says the weekly soccer demonstrations aren't necessarily political, that they are a product of youthful energy, not desire for another revolution. Football is as good a place as any to sublimate youthful life force in a society where 65 percent of the population is under 25, dancing in public is forbidden, drinking is illegal, and women must cover their head in public and wear clothing that obscures their shape. The demonstration at Mohseni Square had been underway for about half an hour. To call it a riot would be an exaggeration. Any college police force in America would be grateful for such a light-hearted celebration after a big win by the football team. Tehran's uniformed police were laughing along with the crowd, but the Basiji weren't. The Basiji are a kind of plainclothes militia, loyal to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Two years ago, the Basiji brutally put down demonstrations for greater personal freedom at Tehran University.

As the soccer revelry grew louder the militiamen grew angrier. They set off tear gas and chased the dancers up Mirdamad Boulevard, flailing away with sticks and truncheons. The Basiji come from a different part of the city.

Tehran's topography perfectly reflects the capital's social order. In this city of 12 million, the wealthy live above the smog and gridlock along the flanks of the Alborz mountain range. As you move down the slope, you descend through Iran's social classes. At the bottom, in the hot flatlands south of the city center, you find the working poor and the recent arrivals from the countryside. These are the late Ayatollah Khomeni's people. This is where the Basiji come from. There, at the southern edge of the city is where you will find the tomb of the founding father of the Islamic Revolution. It has become a modern shrine for his supporters.

Next door to the shrine is the Behesht e Zahra cemetery, the Martyr's Cemetery. In the Islamic Republic, soldiers don't simply die in combat, they are "martyred." Thousands of the dead here are among the more than half a million Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq war. Many of those buried here were also called Basiji, special volunteers. They were the men who made up the suicide squadrons sent by the Ayatollahs against the army of Saddam Hussein. From top to bottom, Tehran, now more than twenty years after the Islamic Revolution, has the feeling of the Soviet Union during the time of glasnost. Up the hill, reform seems an unstoppable force, down the hill among the families of the martyrs, allegiance to the revolution and its puritanical Islamism is strong. Blood sacrifice is the ultimate loyalty oath. The tug of war between reformers and conservatives, between the secular and the religious in Iran predates the revolution. It predates the Shah, in fact it has been part of Iranian society for at least 150 years. Youssef Alijabadeh, of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy says democratic society in the Western world is product of the Enlightenment. He says in the West, the movement took 200 years to mature and succeed, but "In the developing world, when the question of setting up democratic structure arises, this process is completely overlooked."

Like the United States, Revolutionary Iran has three branches of government: The Legislative, Judiciary, and the Executive. The Clerics control the judiciary and the executive, in the form of President Mohammed Khatami. Although he is a mullah, the president is an enormously popular figure, reelected in 2000 by an overwhelming majority.

Reformers consider him among their ranks, but political philosopher Youssuf Alijabadeh says Iran's President doesn't represent one side or the other. He says that the Iranian president himself wavers between "modernity and despotism." "He is a cleric and a modernizer. He embodies in his personality a tension between modernization and organized religion," says Alijabadeh. Over and above the three branches of government sits the council of guardians, clerics presided over by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini. He has the final say on foreign policy, judicial decisions, and is allowed to overturn legislation deemed to be anti-Islamic. Twenty-two years after the revolution, Iranian society is balanced on the relationship of the reform-minded Khatami and the conservative Khameini.

Westerners trying to understand the hold of Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution in Iran often focus exclusively on Islam. This is a mistake in the view of longtime Tehran resident, Cathy Squire. "They forget the Revolution part," says Squire. "As far as women are concerned, I think that it has opened up women's aspirations, and has created a lot of opportunities that weren't there before," she says. Squire, who works with local Iranian non-governmental organizations, doesn't deny that women face problems of equality in the country. Islamic Sharia law pretty much guarantees that in terms of marriage, divorce, and inheritance women are discriminated against. However, she says the situation is more complicated than people in the West understand.

Squire points to literacy rates as an example of revolutionary changes in Iranian society. She says rural literacy rates for women have risen almost 85 percent. "That was a deliberate government policy, to go out and make sure that as many people as possible could be literate." There are limits, though, to the Islamic revolutionary government's ability to deal with the modern world. Working on contemporary social problems increasingly is the realm of local nongovernmental organizations.

In the holy city of Mashad, 80 miles from the Afghanistan border, stands the shrine of Imam Reza, the only one of Mohammed's direct descendants to be buried in Iran. It is Iran's Lourdes, a place of pilgrimage. Sooner or later all Iranians come here. Hundreds press through massive doors covered in pure gold to get close to the Imam's sarcophagus while thousands pray outside waiting their turn. Murmured prayers fill the shrine. In the corridors, groups periodically gather to sing about the martyrdom of Hossein, the great saint of Iran's Shia Muslims.

Adjacent to the Shrine is Mashad's bazaar. The atmosphere there is considerably less sacred. In the shrine's shadow, drug addicts are waiting to score opium, heroin, or hashish. According to psychiatrist Hamid Salehpour, director of the Sun Group, a local nongovernmental organization director, 1.5 million Iranians are drug addicts, around 3 percent of the population. In a country ruled by Islamic law, that is a shocking figure. Alcohol and all stimulants that alter consciousness are strictly forbidden by the Koran.

The spiritual essence of Revolutionary Islam is puritan. The nature of Iranian society is sensual. Three decades into the reign of the Mullahs, the need to express this sensuality is gnawing away at their control. Sometimes it shows itself through the sheer joy of dancing in the streets, sometimes negatively, taking heroin in the shadow of a Holy Shrine.

In Egypt, the revolution will not be televised. There, the revolution is being crushed. It is Friday, just before noon prayers in the heart of old Islamic Cairo. The second week of bombing is underway in Afghanistan and throughout the Moslem world there were protests against U.S. action, but not here. The police presence is none too subtle. At the Al-Azhar Mosque, the oldest Mosque in Egypt, the seat of the nation's spiritual leader, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, the crowds hurry past a squadron of uniformed police and plainclothes men who make no attempt to hide the pistols sitting on their hips. A single Egyptian camera crew has turned up in anticipation of some kind of event. They go away empty handed. Other days, al-Azhar is not guarded. Learning goes hand in hand with prayers.

In a stairwell by the entrance a teacher helps a young man in his twenties memorize the Koran. The feeling you get walking the streets of Tehran and Cairo is that Egypt, where revolutionary Islam is suppressed, is a much more devout place than the Islamic Republic of Iran, run by Islamic clergy. Nevertheless Ayatollah Khomeini's successful overthrow of the Shah remains the benchmark for Egypt's Islamic revolutionaries according to Hala Mustafa, of the Al-Ahram Institute.

"Most of the militant groups who emerged in the seventies in Egypt were really inspired by the Iranian revolution and of course the Iranian way of ruling," she says.

Islamic radicals have yet to stage their revolution, but their presence in Egypt has changed the social order.

The society has become "Islamized," according toMona Makrana Ebeid, professor of sociology at the American University of Cairo and a former member of the Egyptian Parliament. "Secular voices are very faint," she says, and the process has accelerated in the past decade.

The Sheikh of Al-azhar Mosque is the supreme cleric in Egypt. The Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak, refers decisions to him on a range of issues, not just questions that skirt religious sensibility like organ donation, but practical issues like land reform as well.

Fifty years ago, Egypt's educated elite were secularists. Gamel Abdel Nasser's revolution of 1952 did nothing to change that. He too was a secularist, with a socialist bent. However, secularism was critically wounded by one event according to sociologist Mona Makrana Ebeid.

In 1967, was the Six Day War. In less than a week, the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed, Israeli armored divisions seized Sinai and rolled to the edge of the Suez Canal less than three hours' drive from Cairo. It was a national trauma for Egyptians. "It was only after '67 that this whole religious resurgence started to emerge," says sociologist Ebeid. "The people had felt so humiliated, so desperate so angry and so lost so the one refuge was religion."

Because of the defeat of 1967, a generation of politically radical students turned away from Nasser's form of socialism. According to Professor Ebeid, they didn't turn very far.

She says that the slogans of the Islamic movement were often the same slogans as the socialists slogans of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. "They're asking for more equity, they are fighting against corruption they want more justice and more morality. .. They feel their traditions are getting lost and their authenticity is disappearing under the burden of modernity or what we call today globalization.," she says.

Long before globalization, there was a world economic order. It was called colonialism, and it was run from Europe. After World War I, that economic order began to fall apart. Nationalist movements surged through the colonial world. In Egypt, in the 1920's a group combining nationalist sentiment with Islam was formed. They called themselves the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, their leader Essan al-Aryan says the group is the most popular party in Egypt.

It's a remarkable claim considering the Muslim Brotherhood is banned from Egyptian politics. Egypt is essentially a one party state and has been since Nasser's time. There are 444 seats in the Egyptian Parliament. Close to 90 percent are held by President Mubarak's National Democratic Party and allied groups. Since the Muslim Brothers can't field candidates as a party, individuals who support them stand as independents. These independents make up the second largest group in Parliament. The Brotherhood really wields its influence elsewhere according to Essan el Aryan.

From the Mosques the Brotherhood provides services usually associated with the state: health programs, welfare and education. Education is a critical part of Revolutionary Islam, around the Muslim world it is in the schools or Madrassahs, that Islamic politics are inculcated in young minds.

Only the autocratic power of President Mubarak seems to stop the onward march of revolutionary Islam in Egypt. Mubarak's government has been criticized for its anti-democratic tendencies. However, Hala Mustafa, of the Al-Ahram Institute, says the critics are wrong. The time for true democracy is only after a solid foundation is laid.

"One of the mistakes made by the west is giving much attention to the democratization process in the Arab or Muslim countries before giving attention to secularizing these societies. It will never be a real democracy without secular developments," says Mustafa. Still, the government has many critics. There are 13,000 political prisoners in Egypt. They are detained under special security legislation enacted following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by radical Muslims.

Lawyer Montasser Zayat represents those prisoners as they come to trial. He works from personal experience. After Sadat's assassination, Zayat, a member of Islamic Jihad was among the first thrown in prison under the special laws. The irony in the Sadat murder is that the late president was an extremely devout Muslim, his forehead marked with the permanent bruise of those who pray five times a day. That not enough for the radicals zays Zayat.

As Egyptian society became more Islamized, revolutionary groups like Islamic Jihad and Gamaa al Islamiya became more aggressive. The harder the Mubarak regime suppressed them, the more violent these groups became. Finally, in 1997 the radicals attacked a group of tourists at the ancient Temple of Luxor killing 57 of them. The government crackdown became so severe that the leadership of Islamic Jihad and Gamaal-islamiya left Egypt. They went to Afghanistan to join Osama bin-Laden and Al Qaeda. Among those who left was a man who was tortured alongside Montasser Zayat twenty years ago, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief deputy. An international movement needs an international enemy. Islamic revolutionaries have two.

On a Mediterranean beach west of Alexandria an Egyptian Army Band serenades an assembly of military bigwigs with popular tunes from the days of the British Empire. Operation Brightstar is taking place, the biennial joint military maneuvers between the U.S. and Egypt and several other Mediterranean countries. Today the assembled troops are rehearsing a beach assault. Overhead Egyptian pilots fly their U.S.-built F-4's in support.

Bright Star is part of Egypt's peace dividend. Because Egypt signed the Camp David accords, it can purchase U.S. weapons like the F-4 and train with American forces.

The Mubarak government is happy to take part. However, it is precisely this kind of U.S. military activity in a Muslim country that enrages Islamic revolutionaries. If you point out to an Egyptian radical that his country is the second largest recipient of American foreign aid, not all of it in the form of military hardware, it won't gain you much credit. That's because the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid is Israel. Around the Muslim world, anger at the U.S. is not directed at the American government for its support of regimes that are autocratic and frequently corrupt. A reading of the Egyptian daily press shows the hatred for the U.S. comes from its support of Israel. Israel is seen, for example in the words of Egypt's al-Akhbar newspaper as "the reason behind the calamities in the world."

Governments use the press in Egypt and throughout the Arab World as a pressure valve. Columnists can't vent anger about their regimes unless they want to lose their jobs and end up in jail, but they can freely vent rage at Israel and the U.S.

To an American traveling in the region it often seems like the news comes from a parallel universe where all facts are reversed.

On the beach west of Alexandria, Egypt and America are allies, in the streets of Cairo, America is the friend of the enemy, and therefore an enemy itself.

At the time of the Islamic Revolution, 22 years ago, the U.S. was the Great Satan. Now, a comparatively temperate view of the U.S. is becoming common. So much so that hardliners felt they needed to educate young Iranians about the true nature of what they call "global arrogance." A recently-opened an exhibition in Tehran celebrates the Revolution's most glorious moment, the seizure of the American embassy.

Called Smashing the Glassy Palace, it turns the embassy into a kind of museum of American horrors.

In the first part of the exhibit, there is a sequence of rooms dedicated to each of the countries where America has committed what the organizers consider evil: Korea, Japan, Palestine. The displays are like 1960's agit prop run amok.

The corridor's are filled with high school students bussed in for the afternoon. They giggle and chatter and seem grateful for the opportunity for getting out of class.

After visiting the various rooms of American wrongdoing, we went to the perfectly preserved security and intelligence wing of the Embassy. Behind the thick steel doors we saw the glass room, which gives the exhibition its name. In this perfectly secure, unbugged environment, America's ambassador and his intelligence team discussed the crumbling regime of the Shah. Curiously, there is no room dedicated to what is arguably America's one true crime in Iran: the 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled the popular nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh and placed the Shah on the Iranian throne. Those politics must seem ancient history to the organizers. The hardliners have other, more contemporary political points to make. The exhibition continues in a temporary building behind the embassy. There at various stands, Iranian youth can learn more about America and its alleged Zionist paymasters.

The magical mystery tour ends at a couple of amusement arcade games. You could shoot tennis balls at a grotesque caricature of a Jew or you could test your strength by bashing Uncle Sam on the top of his top hat and listening to the recorded message.

As I wound around to the end of the exhibition, I spoke with high school student Saparieh Yevi.

I took a great deal of comfort in my conversation with the schoolboy. It was a relief to know that this 14-year old could still express feelings of good will towards Americans.

"In this exhibition, there are many things here that I don't know where they are coming from," he said, pointing out an exhibit that illustrates supposed Zionist symbols hidden on American currency.

He says the show makes him Angry at America, but, "about the government, about the presidents and the capitalism, not about the people, not at the people."

Visiting the exhibition I felt like I was standing in the center of a circle violently squared. Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini called America the Great Satan. When his young followers seized this embassy, it was an attack on the United States. It did me no good to remind myself that the power of the Ayatollah is ebbing away because what they started is mutating around the Muslim world. The success of the Iranian Revolution inspired Egypt's Islamic radicals. The leaders of Egypt's Islamic revolutionaries provided the theoretical brains of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda launched a more deadly attack on the U.S. than Ayatollah Khomeini could ever have imagined.

I would love to meet Saperieh Yevi again to try and explain all this to him and tell him more about the U.S. I think he could understand.

The harder the Mubarak regime suppressed them, the more violent these groups became. Finally, in 1997 the radicals attacked a group of tourists at the ancient Temple of Luxor killing 57 of them.

A good article, but there are some things here that are not entirely complete. The above should have said:

"The harder the Mubarak regime suppressed them, the more outraged western liberals became and the more they condemned Mubarek in the world press and through groups like amnesty international. The west's suppport for the radical groups made these terrorist groups grow very bold and confident, and so, the more violent these groups became. Finally, in 1997 the radicals attacked a group of tourists at the ancient Temple of Luxor killing 57 of them."

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