Bombs in The Name of Allah

By Bruce W. Nelan

They prefer softer names, like Islamists or fundamentalists, but these were trained killers. They loaded their bomb on a motorcycle and slipped it between two parked cars on a narrow, tree-shaded street outside the American University campus in downtown Cairo. As Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi's black Peugeot rolled past, the terrorists triggered the bomb, blasting ball bearings at the Minister's motorcade and passersby on the crowded sidewalk.

The carnage on that leafy street was another link in a chain of bloody attacks that has swept over Egypt for the past 19 months. A shadowy coalition of Islamic fundamentalist groups has proved its willingness to use any means, no matter how lethal, to overthrow the secular government of President Hosni Mubarak, a key ally of the U.S. In response, the Cairo government and its security forces have shown they will raid, arrest and hang as many militants as they think it will take to stamp out the insurrection.

The motorcycle bomb was one of a series of similar assassination attempts on senior officials, though the first since April. In recent months the government had steadily intensified its crackdown on the militants, arresting thousands and executing 15. Last week's carefully planned assault looked like the radicals' reply to the suppression. Their brazen defiance was evident in the timing -- just before noon on a business day -- and the location -- the middle of the capital, a block from the Interior Ministry and from Tahrir Square, known to millions of tourists as the site of the Egyptian Museum.

The explosion killed four people and wounded at least 15, including al-Alfi, whose arm was broken. From the window of a second-floor office John Aydelott, a member of the university faculty, heard the roar of the bomb, looked down and saw a woman lying in the street. "Her shoulder had been blown away," he recounted, "and her legs were slashed. A man nearby was nothing but a torso."

One of the dead was Nazih Rashed, 35, whose leg was severed and who died later in a nearby hospital. He had apparently achieved martyrdom, since the extremist Islamic Jihad, or Holy War, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the bombing and saying he was one of the members who carried it out. Police had Rashed on top of their most-wanted list, and he was already on trial in absentia, charged with murder and membership in an illegal group responsible for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Rashed, noted police, had been trained in the use of explosives when he fought with the fundamentalist mujahedin against the communist regime in Afghanistan. According to an Interior Ministry statement, the second assailant killed in the attack was a high school student, Mahmoud Hafez Zaki. The other two victims were a parking attendant and a Palestinian accountant who happened to be strolling by.

From his hospital bed, the 57-year-old al-Alfi, who directs the nation's hard-pressed 125,000-member police force, went on television to prove he had survived. The attack, he said, "shows the whole world that these terrorists are killers and butchers who have no religion or conscience. We urge all citizens to fight them."

Since early 1992, almost 200 people have been killed in the Muslim fundamentalists' campaign against the government. The targets for their bullets and bombs have shifted from Muslim opinion leaders who frown on fundamentalism to Christian Copts, foreign tourists and police officers. No matter whom they shoot at, their long-term aim remains constant: to topple Mubarak and install a purely Islamic anti-Western government, complete with such harsh traditional punishments as beheading and limb amputation.

Only three days before the bombers struck, a military court began trying 53 members of Islamic Jihad and its offshoots on charges ranging from attempted murder to conspiracy against the government. It was only the first of several trials that will haul 756 accused members before the military tribunals Mubarak set up when he felt civilian court procedures were dragging on too long and inconclusively. As a case in point, a regular court in Cairo earlier this month acquitted 24 defendants charged with assassinating parliamentary Speaker Rifaat el-Mahgoub almost three years ago. The court's chief judge criticized the paramilitary national police's methods and charged that "none of the defendants have escaped torture."

For Mubarak, the dead terrorist's Afghanistan connection is an important one. The President has insisted that the campaign of extremist violence in Egypt was sparked by the return of Afghan war volunteers, many of them inspired by the fiery preaching of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now in jail in the U.S. who is linked to the suspects in the bombing of New York City's World Trade Center last February. Mubarak claims some of the fighters came back by way of Iran and Sudan and received subversive training in guerrilla camps there. The extremists, he says, "want to destabilize Egypt, the one Arab country that made peace with Israel, so it will be easy for them to destabilize all the countries in this area."

It is true that almost every secular Arab state from North Africa to the Persian Gulf confronts a fundamentalist threat. But they would face it even without subversion from abroad. "The problems in Egypt," says a U.S. expert, "stem from problems in Egypt. I don't think Iranian or Sudanese support is the cause for what's going on." Egypt is plagued by a pervasive discontent with the country's poverty, unemployment and corruption and a widespread conviction that things are not getting better. The slogan "Islam is the solution" is embraced by millions of impoverished Egyptians who have been completely disillusioned by the failures of Arab nationalism and socialism.

The nation's difficulties are multiplied by its unchecked population growth. Since Mubarak came to power 12 years ago, the number of Egyptians has grown from 43 million to 58 million. "Young, educated Arabs who have no job prospects, even as taxi drivers," says a senior British diplomat, "have been willing recruits to fundamentalism." These people are coming not only from the slums but also from the middle class.

The fundamentalist challenge takes two main forms. In the forefront is the traditional, more moderate approach of the 65-year-old Muslim Brotherhood, a religious, charitable and educational movement that abandoned the use of violence in 1971. It issued a statement last week denouncing the bombing as a "dangerous evil."

The Brotherhood applied last year to become a political party, but the government was determined not to allow what happened when the Algerian government permitted fundamentalists to run in 1991 parliamentary elections and they swept the first round. Cairo denied the Brotherhood's request.

That experience bolstered the case of underground Islamic militants who believe it is pointless to wage their battle in the political arena. On the verge of victory, the Algerian fundamentalists were kept out of power by the government's emergency decrees and drawn guns. If election victories are meaningless, the Egyptian militants argue, violence is the way to succeed.

The Islamists have made a point of striking directly at ministers of the interior, the men in charge of the police crackdown. In 1987 terrorists wounded two former ministers, and in October 1990 they mistakenly killed parliamentary Speaker el-Mahgoub when gunning for Interior Minister Abdel- Halim Moussa. At the same time, the terrorists have been attacking members of the security forces and tourists, three of whom have been killed. The Egyptian tourism industry could have expected to earn $4 billion this year, but since militants began bombing landmarks and shooting up tour buses, that income projection has fallen $1 billion.

Living with Islam is a constant dilemma for Mubarak. Says Adel Hussein, editor of the opposition newspaper Al Shaab: "He cannot exclude Islamists from the political process without alienating the nation from its roots." If Mubarak does not choose to reject Islam outright, he must try to compromise with it. But fundamentalism is such an all-encompassing world view, making no separation between religion and government, that finding a middle ground is almost impossible. The government suppresses Islamic Jihad but tolerates the Muslim Brotherhood, which nevertheless insists, "We cannot allow anyone to rule unless that rule is based on the spirit of Islam."

Liberal Egyptian intellectuals worry that even mainstream Islam may carry the seeds of a future Iranian-style theocracy. A leading Muslim cleric, Sheik Mohammed al-Ghozali, shocked officials when he testified last month at the Cairo trial of Islamic Group members accused of killing a secular writer. "A secularist represents a danger to society and the nation that must be eliminated," the sheik declared. "It is the duty of the government to kill him."

This kind of icy rigidity reinforces Mubarak's conclusion that it makes little sense to negotiate with the fundamentalists. They seek capitulation, not compromise. But the government's alternative -- mass arrests, military trials, executions -- is not working either. Harsh repression might even be encouraging the radicals. "These young men are martyrs," says an attorney for Muslim militants. "They are unafraid to die."

Mubarak will be re-elected to a third six-year term by Parliament in October, even though his National Democratic Party is generally dismissed as incompetent and corrupt. But the party enjoys an overwhelming majority in Parliament, and Mubarak is the sole candidate. Every opposition group in the country, including the Muslim Brotherhood, refuses to endorse him. As election time approaches, Mubarak is talking vaguely about reform. In a recent speech he called for more cooperation "between all political forces" in order to "surround the abyss of terrorism and foil its plots." His supporters say he intends to resign his party post, in order to try to raise the presidency above politics, and to appoint new, more vigorous ministers to key economic posts in the Cabinet. If the economy continues to stagnate, however, the Islamists can count on the despair of the nation to send them regiments of new recruits.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Elaine Shannon/Washington