Kuwaitis question US ambitions

Islamist radicals have also been silenced by a nervous Kuwaiti government eager to maintain warm relations with the US - often at the expense of legal procedure, lawyers say. On Monday, a court threw out the testimonies of four suspected Al Qaeda militants because defense lawyers claimed the confessions had been extracted under torture.

The arrests and detentions simply fuel further hostility toward the US and Western-friendly Arab regimes, says Hakim Al-Mutayri, secretary-general of the Salafist Movement in Kuwait. "Before Sept. 11 and before the Palestinian intifada, the people of the Gulf looked at America as an ally. Nothing like [these recent attacks] happened here before Sept. 11, although the Americans had been in Kuwait for more than 10 years."

Though fear of arrest has silenced most members of the extremist Islamic community, and though he has been detained several times by Kuwait's state security, Mulaifi, the Islamic student, is willing to speak freely. Yes, Saddam Hussein is reviled by Islamists, he says, but a US-led invasion of Iraq would nonetheless spark widespread unrest in the Gulf and the Arab world. "Once the US strikes Iraq, [the Islamists] will emerge like devils," he says. "There are many true believers in Kuwait and the Gulf who will attack the Americans."

Yes, Dr. Mutayri agrees, there is "widespread public sympathy in the Arab and Islamic world for the thoughts of Al Qaeda ... because of the belief that the Americans want to suck the Arab world dry." That's why, he adds, Samuel Huntington's 1996 book, "The Clash of Civilizations," was an accurate forecast of unfolding events. But where Professor Huntington writes that the impetus for a civilizational conflict would come from Islam, Mutayri blames the West.

"America wants to impose its imperialism and culture on the Arab world without paying attention to other cultures," he says. "There is no clash between Islamic culture and Chinese and other East Asian cultures - and our ties are closer with Europe than with China, because our peoples believe in monotheistic religions. We believe in Christ as a messenger of God and there are ethics and values that we share. But these hostilities have been created by Western goals and ambitions for the Arab world." A clash between Islam and the West is not inevitable, he insists.

Though bin Laden subscribes to a form of Salafism - as did Afghanistan's Taliban regime - Mutayri says the sect rejects violence. But he says jihad is justified under sharia. "For example, what the Palestinians are doing in the intifada is legitimate jihad," he says.

Does he believe bin Laden's jihad against the West is justified under sharia? Mutayri, arrested earlier this year for his outspoken views, pauses, then smiles. "No comment," he says.

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