ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 8, 1996 TAG: 9612100068
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CAIRO, EGYPT
SOURCE: ANTHONY SHADID THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Deep in the heart of Sudan, on the sun-parched banks of the Nile, white-robed mystics sway at dusk to a drumbeat and chants of ``There is no god but God.''
Barefoot men in ragged clothes - meant to symbolize their disavowal of worldly things - jump up and down, stomp the dirt and throw themselves to the ground. Delirious with religious fervor, they shout, ``God!''
The deafening beat of drums and tambourines quickens. Women excitedly ululate. The chants become louder and faster as the hour-long ceremony known as a zikr reaches its climax.
``It is worship,'' said Zubair Abu Zeid, a mystic wearing lion skins and carrying a staff. ``The idea is to prepare oneself for God.''
Thousands of miles away in a serene park on the shores of the Bosporus, an altogether different celebration is under way.
Organized by the Islamic Welfare Party, Turkey's biggest political organization, a midday picnic draws 200 people to celebrate the traditional circumcision of young boys.
Unable to afford their own ceremonies, they share yogurt drinks, rice and dessert, courtesy of the party. Festive children run around with balloons. Their parents listen to the soft strains of Turkish religious music and speeches by party dignitaries sharply dressed in coats and ties.
``We've never refused people who come to us for help,'' said Gulnihal Guldemler, a neighborhood activist for the party. She added: ``Politics and religion are one and the same.''
These are two faces of the Islamic revival - a breathtakingly diverse resurgence that stretches from Africa's west coast to the Pacific rim.
With the demise of communism, Islam has emerged as one of the world's most powerful ideologies, a religion that embraces more than 1 billion adherents who make up a majority in about 45 countries.
Yet, as a new century dawns, Islam is undergoing change potentially more important than any time since the death of the Prophet Mohammed, who founded the religion in Arabia more than 1,350 years ago. That change - a quest to determine its role in a modern world - poses a challenge to the West and to Islam itself.
Its impact is vast, with implications for the flow of oil, trade, nuclear proliferation, even war. While Muslim countries account for just 4 percent of the world's economy, they make up one-fifth of its population - a potentially explosive mix.
Already the revival has witnessed terrorism in Algeria, a battle over women's rights in Afghanistan, militancy of Iran. Its flip side has been grass-roots work that has bettered the lives of millions.
For the West, the renewal may mean confrontation or coexistence with Islam, depending on attitudes on both sides at their many points of contact.
The movements shaping the revival are as diverse as they are numerous: from the engineers and lawyers of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to supporters of Turkey's Welfare Party in Istanbul slums, from the savvy leaders of the National Islamic Front in Sudan to the angry Palestinian militants of Hamas.
They find inspiration in the ideas of Islamic thinkers from the 13th century to today. Some look to Iran's troubled experiment in exporting its Islamic revolution, while others forsake the challenge of today's politics by finding solace in Islam's resurgent mystical brotherhoods.
Often all they have in common is how little they share. But consistently through their speeches, their publications and their conversations emerges a strong, at times overwhelming, concentration on ideas of justice - or lack of justice, at home and abroad.
In Egypt, college graduates who were 5 years old when President Anwar Sadat was assassinated can only hope for a government job that pays the equivalent of $90 a month.
Young Palestinians have lived their lives confined to a prison called the Gaza Strip.
Peasants from the Turkish countryside arrive in Istanbul, frustrated and resentful in a city they do not recognize and a culture they do not share.
In every case, Islamic activists are there to answer those frustrations with the enticing phrase ``Islam is the solution,'' a slogan that can mean everything from peaceful activism to suicide bombings.
Their message is rooted in the bleak landscape of corruption, poverty and repression that prevails in many Muslim countries, particularly the Arab world. Disenchantment is rife with regimes whose priority is often simply staying in power.
Islamic activists speak about the poor, about the ostentatious lifestyles of the rich, about corruption, about governments that rule through the consent of soldiers.
They preach social justice, a place for God at home and in schools and an end to humiliating dependence on the West. Above all, they insist on a return to Islam and its morals, promising clean government and a renewal of the Muslims' triumphant past.
In fact, some Islamic activists sound like conservative Christians in America. Like their Western counterparts, they share God, country and family.
Listen to Adel Hussein, an activist in Cairo:
``Most of what is shown on television, in films, in plays is not what we need if we are committed to Islamic values. So if you change what is said in the media and what is taught in the schools, this will encourage families to bring up their children according to Islamic principles.''
The most controversial statements make headlines - for instance, when Saudi Arabia's chief cleric warns that adultery results from women being in the work place.
But in contrast to their backward reputation, Islamic activists have shown a knack for the cutting edge of the Information Age. Fax, e-mail and cassettes are the weapons of activists who have accepted the West's technology, while rejecting its materialism.
At the heart of the Islamic revival is a belief that the Muslim world suffers from decline, a painful recognition for a culture that long dominated the world.
The generation that followed Mohammed conquered an empire that stretched from Central Asia to Spain by the 8th century.
Muslims helped guard world knowledge during the Dark Ages. Its scholars developed astronomy and mathematics.
As late as 1683, the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Empire were besieging Vienna.
Today, many Muslims feel under siege themselves.
While the West fears Islam, Muslims point to attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya, Kashmir and the Palestinian territories.
At home, they ask what it means to be Muslim - a source of identity as important as ethnicity and nationality in the West.
Take Turkey, a country remarkable in the Muslim world for how secular and Western it has become. Yet, like other Muslim countries, it is searching its soul.
``People have an identity crisis in Turkey,'' said Nilofer Narli, an expert on Islam at Istanbul's Marmara University.
In bookstores, histories of the Ottoman Empire are popular. Ottoman art is undergoing a revival. And students talk about resurrecting an Ottoman identity defined less by Turkish nationalism and more by Islam.
It is a search, in Turkey and elsewhere, that has only begun.
* * *
In Iran, many are questioning what role, if any, Islam should have in running a country - doubts unheard of five years ago. Their search is still confined to the salons of intellectuals and high-brow journals, but its implications could very well determine the future of the Islamic revival.
Iran, like no other Muslim country, has the perspective of hindsight.
Islam is in the ascendant in much of the Muslim world - as protest in the Palestinian territories, as government in Sudan and as grass-roots movement in Turkey. But faith in Iran more and more resembles a defeated soldier returning from the front - weary of the slogans, blind to the symbols and desperate for a quiet, ordinary life.
Iran's economy is a mess, salvaged only by oil revenues that allow it to muddle along without drastic reforms. On average, Iranians earn two-thirds what they did before the revolution. Inflation runs at 50 percent.
For a revolution that claims to embody spiritualism, Iran is adrift and gripped by material obsessions - obsessions tame by Western standards but anathema to a movement that poses itself as an alternative to crass Western consumerism.
In the revolution's heady days, the government boldly promised to create a new moral order empowered by Islam.
But that change is difficult to find. Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic, does not embody an Islamic symbol. In fact, the only thing distinctly Islamic about it is the veil.
At the Golistan Shopping Center, Chanel No. 5 and Estee Lauder clutter the windows of chic boutiques.
Wine and vodka produced by Armenian Christians, who are exempt from the Muslim prohibition on alcohol, are liberally consumed at private parties.
Privately, Iranians talk about a search for spirituality and a growing interest in Buddhism among the youth. Some attribute it to the transformation of Islam into a government ideology that has, in turn, left a spiritual void.
At bookstores across from Tehran University, books on yoga and meditation, Asian religions and Egyptian mythology sell well, a hint of a bigger phenomenon.
After 17 years, Iran has failed to create a uniquely Islamic response to the challenges of a modern world that are powerful fodder for Islamic activists elsewhere. While Islam and its symbols can mobilize millions and articulate opposition, they have not provided answers to Iran's problems.
In fact, many Iranians say, religion itself has fallen victim. The clergy, Islam's most identifiable symbol, are blamed for society's ills, particularly the mismanagement of the economy, diminishing substantial moral authority built over centuries.
The bleak situation has created a new thinking.
A recent article in Kiyan, a magazine published by Islamic intellectuals questioned the role of the clergy itself in religion. Abdel-Karim Saroush, one of the country's most controversial philosophers, argued that all believers are entitled to their own understanding of Islam. Therefore, neither the clergy nor any government can claim to possess the exclusive right to interpret religion. Because all knowledge is human, that knowledge is inherently fallible and thus potentially wrong, he says.
It is an explosive idea in a society effectively run by clergy.
But Iran has demonstrated that Islam cannot provide all the answers for the economy, for spirituality, for a morality that would replace the allure of Western materialism.
* * *
Wrenching economic changes have visited countries from Algeria to Saudi Arabia, aggravating anger at corruption and repression endemic to regimes in much of the Third World.
Violence is the answer provided by some Islamic activists. More effective is the helping hand provided by others.
In Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and the Palestinian territories, activists have identified themselves with the poor, providing solace to the disinherited and downtrodden. Their clinics and legal-aid societies, schools and orphanages create a reservoir of good will.
No better example exists than the Palestinian territories, particularly Gaza, where the number of mosques nearly tripled in the 20 years after the 1967 Mideast war.
Financed by up to $120 million a year, largely donated by Palestinians working abroad and supporters in the Persian Gulf, the community work of Hamas overshadows its smaller but influential military wing, to which only a fraction of its thousands of supporters belong.
The biggest charity in Gaza, al-Mujama al-Islamiya, was founded by Sheik Ahmad Yassin, the jailed leader of Hamas.
Today, his society runs workshops to teach girls sewing, medical clinics and a youth club it opened last year, said Ibrahim al-Yazouri, its secretary-general. Across Gaza, it operates seven preschools, caring for 1,500 children, he said.
And education at just a few dollars a month is welcome relief in Gaza, where unemployment soared to two-thirds of the work force during a blockade Israel imposed earlier this year.
Hamas, however, does not succeed on welfare alone.
Like Islamic activists everywhere, its social agenda is coupled with a religious message that emphasizes social justice and morality.
Hamas leaders call for law based on the Koran, pious conduct and education grounded in religion. They accuse the PLO's leaders of corruption.
Above all, they strive to offer the answers, speaking with a self-confidence built on moral certainty.
But Hamas, like Islamic movements elsewhere, is also set apart by a political program that is shaped by circumstances at home.
In Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas has successfully exploited the anger at Israel no longer claimed by the PLO and the frustration with a peace plan that looks increasingly flawed.
The can-do approach of Gaza can be seen in Lebanon as well, where clinics and welfare agencies run by Hezbollah give the militia almost as much standing as its resistance to the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.
In Egypt, some neighborhoods resemble a state within a state. The Muslim Brotherhood operates schools and clinics, giving the country's young doctors, engineers and teachers a chance to work.
In the teeming Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba, the government effectively withdrew in the early 1990s, leaving its 800,000 residents to cope with sewage that flooded houses.
Only after Islamic activists took control - taxing Christians and arbitrating disputes - did the government return in 1992. It poured in $20 million to pave roads and install electricity and water lines. This summer, the U.S. government finished 150 miles of sewer lines costing $45 million.
As long as Muslim countries remain adrift, sometimes guided more by corruption than conscience, Islamic activists are sure to win favor with the help they offer and the message they provide.
More than the fiery words of preachers in mosques on Friday, that campaign provides for their surging appeal.
LENGTH: Long : 247 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Iran has demonstrated that Islam cannot provideby CNBall the answers for the economy, for spirituality, for a morality
that would replace the allure of Western materialism. Two young
Iranian women (left) wear traditional-style clothing but carry
backpacks covered with images of rock musicians. 2. A billboard
(bottom) depicting the three most prominent leaders of the Islamic
Revolution in Iran - the late Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hashemi Rafsanjani -looks down
on a Tehran street. color.