front
David Hirst
Last month an “important announcement” appeared on a website, , “in the name of God the merciful, the compassionate”. It consisted of a brief interview which the journal al- Murabitoun – mouthpiece of al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, Egypt’s largest underground organisation – had with one of the group’s exiled leaders, Sheikh Abu Yasser Rifai Taha.
In three laconic sentences, he denied that al-Gama’a was a member of the Islamic Front for Holy War against the Jews and Crusaders. That was all. But the importance of the message was emphasised by its appearance on the home page of the al-Gama’a site, and not on the more usual location of a subsidiary page. Unusually it appeared on the Internet before being in print.
Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on the Islamist movement, found it a puzzling announcement. Because in February, and in Sheikh Taha’s name, al-Gama’a certainly had joined the six-member front – along with another Egyptian organisation, Jihad, and the suspected Saudi sponsor of Islamic terrorism Osama bin Laden – with the aim of killing Americans wherever it could. Why go back on that and seek so urgently to publicise it?
The answer soon came – in the mayhem of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Through its link with the front, Rashwan concluded, al-Gama’a had got wind of an operation in which it wanted no part, and was determined the world should know it. On the face of it, that was strange. The African bombings were, in appearance at least, the triumphant, spectacular debut of a new strategy to which al-Gama’a and Jihad had been steadily gravitating.
Although for both, the United States and Israel were mortal foes, in practice the waging of holy war against them never formed part of their strategy. Since their insurgency began in 1992, it had been directed against the enemy within, against “iniquitous princes” – like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt – those “apostates from Islam, nourished at the table of colonialism, be it crusader, communist or Zionist”. Such a struggle, wrote the seminal thinker Abdul Salam Faraj, “has priority over the enemy abroad. We must concentrate on our own Islamic problem, on establishing God’s law in our own countries.”
The mission for al-Gama’a and Jihad was to establish “the Islamic state” through violence. They confined their attacks to Egypt. Even foreign tourists were not targeted as “infidels”, only as a means of undermining the “atheist” state.
Yet as the domestic struggle continued, they were thinking more and more about the “foreign” enemy. The shift first became apparent in their internal literature after the devastating suicide exploits of their Palestinian counterpart, Hamas. “They were impressed,” said Rashwan, “by the impact these had on Arab public opinion; this was not because they were Islamists, but because they were `doing something’ against the Zionist enemy while Arab governments did nothing. The arrival of [Israeli President Binyamin] Netanyahu, and US complicity in all he did, only made US targets more appealing.”
But however spectacular, the attack on Nairobi should not be seen as a yardstick of the Islamists’ growing strength – certainly not in their key Egyptian arena. Rather the opposite. The resort to foreign targets can equally be viewed as the result of failure at home.
In fact, the decline of al-Gama’a at home is easily measured, and followed its own misdeeds and inadequacies, as well as ferocious repression of it by the state. The neighbourhood good works that brought initial popularity are long past. Its fanatical puritanism steadily told against it. It reached its nadir of popular disapproval with the massacre of tourists in Luxor last year.
Luxor was the spectacular exception to the the decreasing use by al-Gama’a of military operations of all kinds. This year there have been only 14 attacks, in which 31 people – 13 Islamists, six police and 12 “civilians” – have died. Last year 193 died. There must be compelling reasons why Sheikh Taha, one of the hawks in al-Gama’a, dissociated his organisation from an operation which, in light of the new strategy, was so politically timely and theoretically appropriate.
They are to be found, Rashwan believes, in the reluctance of al- Gama’a to open a “new front” against the US when it is in such retreat at home.
Unlike Jihad, al-Gama’a has always been an above, as well as an underground, movement. It began life in the universities, with former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s encouragement. Even when it became clandestine and violent, it persisted in al-Da’wa, or re-Islamicisation of an Islamically “ignorant” society. Its road to power was through gradual destabilisation in which propaganda and violence had its role.
Furthermore, al-Gama’a seems to be groping towards a fundamental transformation of its attitude towards state and society, which is likely to portend a renunciation of the violence.
Last year its jailed “historic” chiefs called for a ceasefire, which has been gaining support ever since. They are said to be drawing up a “peaceful contract between the Islamist movement and society”. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam hardly square with such a radical change of heart.
Al-Gama’a’s sometime ally, sometime rival, Jihad, has been affected by this moderating trend too. But less so. It was always more ideologically extreme and almost wholly military.
Its original theory of action dispensed with gradualism – all-out, immediate violence against the “apostate” state and its instruments was to be the only way. In practice, Jihad has confined itself to a few, carefully prepared bombings against important state targets. Being very small and highly secretive, it can better protect itself against state or international reprisals.
There will probably be more attacks such as Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The perpetrators have already invited such merciless retaliation that they have nothing to gain by retreat. The fact that Egypt’s main Islamist underground movement, al-Gama’a, has apparently resolved not to be a party to such action may be a sign of its weakness. On the other hand, few Islamist experts doubt that religiously motivated violence is rooted in the Egyptian people’s dismal living conditions. And these get worse year by year.