Egypt's moderate militants talk

Gamal Sultan's past is no secret. He used to be involved in Jihad, the same outlawed Islamic militant group whose leading members included Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who went on to be one of Osama bin Laden's closest colleagues in al-Qaeda.

But Mr. Sultan recognized that the use of violence by Jihad - which considers violence a legitimate means of ridding the country of a regime corrupted by Western values - was leading nowhere. And along with other members of Jihad, Sultan left the group to form a political party that could run in national elections.

The result, in 1997, was Islah (Reform Party), one of two Islamic political parties that asked for the right to run on last November's ballot. The government responded with a resounding blow-off.

"We received detailed notice that the reason for refusal was that the party had no new principles to offer the political arena," says Sultan, sitting on the couch in his home office near Ain Shams University, where students have been holding rallies against the US-led airstrikes in Afghanistan.

"The idea was to bring together the government and the Islamic groups, because of the constant repression on the part of the government," says Sultan, "and because of this increasing political oppression, people are becoming more extreme."

Islah's prohibition from participation in Egyptian elections hardly grabbed international headlines. Today, however, the events of Sept. 11 are bringing more attention to the role regimes such as Egypt's play in keeping a lid on Islamic fundamentalists - a lid sometimes closed so tight that militants seek ever more radical outlets.

Those who have a hard time summoning sympathy for Sultan's lack of political freedoms should consider that these Islamist groups are not just frustrated with their own government, which some say is easing back on repressive tactics. They are equally irritated with US support for the Egyptian government, which paves the way - in their eyes - for continued authoritarianism.

"This is why there is animosity between Islamists and the US, because Islamists see America as the power standing behind the oppressive regimes," says Sultan, editor of an Islamic political journal called "The New Minaret."

According to one school of thought, last month's attacks on New York and Washington only give firmer ground for President Mubarak to justify his domestic policies. He sympathizes with America, he has said, because he too is fighting terrorism operating under the banner of Islam. But many Middle East observers point out that the most pro-Western regimes have kept democratization to a crawl, fueling extremism by forcing Islamists to go underground. Several of the Sept. 11 plane hijackers came from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

"That's one of the things that drives people to extremism - that they don't have a voice," says Sharif Elmusa, director of Middle East Studies at the American University of Cairo. "Then you create an extreme fringe, similar to what we've seen in Algeria," where the government has refused to recognize Islamic gains in elections.

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