Islamist contradictions. A few points.

• The first argument holds that Islamic fundamentalism, whatever its past, has entered upon an evolution, and has already started to reconcile Islam with democratic values.
As one academic apologist claims:
Many Islamic activists have "Islamized" parliamentary democracy, asserting an Islamic rationale for it, and appeal to democracy in their opposition to incumbent regimes.
• The distortion here does not lie in the claim of compatibility between Islam and democracy. Although the dominant interpretation of Islam has historically sanctioned authoritarian rule, the reinterpretation of Islamic sources, done with enough imagination, could conceivably produce an opposing argument for Islamic democracy.
• Here and there, intrepid Muslims have searched the divine word of the Qur'an, the traditions of the Prophet, and the early history of Islam in order to establish the democratic essence of Islam, buried deep beneath the chronicles of despotism.
• But these are not the Muslims leading the fundamentalist movements now bidding for power. Fundamentalists insist they have not demanded free elections to promote democracy or the individual freedoms that underpin it, but to promote Islam.
• Indeed, when leading fundamentalist thinkers do address the broader question of democracy, it is not to argue its compatibility with Islam but to demonstrate democracy's inferiority to Islamic government. Such a virtuous government, they affirm, can rest only on obedience to the divinely-given law of Islam, the shari'a.
• A deception lurks in any description of the fundamentalists as being committed to the rule of law, for the shari'a is not legislated but revealed law
• As such, in the eyes of the fundamentalists it has already achieved perfection, and while it is not above some reinterpretation, neither is it infinitely elastic. If anything, fundamentalist exegesis has rejected reformist attempts to stretch the law much beyond its letter, and has even magnified the differences between Islamic and universal law.
• At the heart of these differences reside Islamic law's principled affirmations of inequality, primarily between Muslims and non-Muslims, secondarily between men and women.
• This has made fundamentalists into the most unyielding critics of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the freedom to choose one's religion and one's spouse. Both freedoms indisputably contradict Islamic law, which defines conversion out of Islam as a capital offense, and forbids marriage between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man.
• (In 1981, the leading fundamentalists met in Paris and put out an Islamic Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which omits all freedoms that contradict the shari'a.)
• The shari'a, as a perfect law, cannot be abrogated or altered, and certainly not by the shifting moods of an electorate. Accordingly, every major fundamentalist thinker had repudiated popular sovereignty as rebellion against God, the sole legislator
• In the changed circumstances of the 1990s, some activists do allow that an election can serve a useful one-time purpose, as a collective referendum of allegiance to Islam, and as an act of submission to a regime of divine justice. But once such a regime gains power, its true measure is not how effectively it implements the will of the people but how efficiently it applies Islamic law
• The ideal of Islamic government most often evoked by the fundamentalists harks back to the rule of a just commander, ruling in consultation with experts in the law.
• There is a revulsion against the combat of parties and personalities in democratic politics, best expressed by the Sudan's Turabi, fundamentalism best-known spokesman in the West. In a tract on the Islamic state, Turabi explains that such a state, once established, really has no need of party politics or political campaigns
• While Islamic law does not expressly oppose a multi-party system,
• this is a form of factionalism that can be very oppressive of individual freedom and divisive of the community, and it is therefore, antithetical to a Muslim's ultimate responsibility to God
• As for election campaigns:
• In Islam, no one is entitled to conduct a campaign for themselves directly or indirectly in the manner of Western electoral campaigns. The presentation of candidates would be entrusted to a neutral institution that would explain to the people the options offered in policies and personalities.
• Through this elaborate hedging, Turabi arrives at a tacit justification for one-party rule, which is the actual form of government he now justifies and supports in the Sudan.
• Of the vast complex of democratic values and institutions offered by the West, the fundamentalists have thus seized upon only one, the free plebiscite, and even that is to be discarded after successful one-time use.
• When asked which existing regime most closely approximates an ideal Islamic order, fundamentalists most often cite the governments of the Sudan or Iran — the first a military regime, the second a hierocracy ruled by an increasingly autocratic cleric, and both first-order violators of human rights.
• The second argument holds that Islamic fundamentalism drives many movements and represents a wide spectrum of views, not all of them extreme.
• This claim for the diversity of fundamentalist movements — again labelled expectantly as movements of "reform" — is most convincingly countered by the fundamentalists themselves, with their uncanny knack for refuting every Western argument made on their behalf
• The awakening of Islam, he said, has produced a world movement notable for its uniformity. If there appear to be differences, it is because "God in His wisdom is varying and distributing the phenomenon to let people know that it is coming everywhere at all times
• The leading fundamentalists insist that their movement is pan-Islamic as a matter of principle
• The greatest success of their joint efforts has been the aid they collectively mobilized for the Afghan mujahidin during the 1980s — aid that included money, material, and thousands of volunteers who fought in the Islamic jihad against the Soviet occupation
• The Sudan has run Algerian voting data through its computers for the FIS, it has provided diplomatic passports for foreign fundamentalists, and it has brought the foremost fundamentalists to Khartoum to create an Islamic Arab Popular Conference, of which Turabi is secretary. Iran is still more active, and not only continues to finance Hizbullah in Lebanon, but includes a line item in its budget for support of the Palestinian Intifada — monies which have gone largely to fundamentalists who battle the peace process. Visitors to Khartoum and Tehran are astonished at the odd mix of foreign fundamentalists who can be spotted in hotel lobbies and government ministries.
• The apologists, preoccupied with imaginary changes in the substance of the fundamentalist message, overlook perhaps the most important transformation of all: the emergence of a global village of Islamic fundamentalism
• Once in power, promises another Western apologist, fundamentalists will
• generally operate on the basis of national interests and demonstrate a flexibility that reflects acceptance of the realities of a globally interdependent world.
• But where their apologists see an interdependent world, the fundamentalists themselves see a starkly divided world. During the Gulf crisis, they championed the view that any partnership between believers and nonbelievers constituted a violation of divine order. Therefore, while Saddam may have done wrong when he invaded Kuwait, King Fahd, who depended on American "Crusaders" to defend Saudi Arabia, most certainly sinned
• Ma'mun al-Hudaybi, official spokesman of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, announced that "Islamic law does not permit any enlisting of assistance from polytheists [mushrikun]." According to Rashid al-Ghannushi, the exiled leader of the Tunisian fundamentalist movement, Saudi Arabia had committed a colossal crime. Of Saddam, no friend of Islam before the crisis, he said:
• We are not worshipping personalities, but anyone who confronts the enemies of Islam is my friend and anyone who puts himself in the service of the enemies of Islam is my enemy.
• We may not have the actual power the U.S. has, but we had the power previously and we have now the foundations to develop that power in the future
• Unlike several Arab regimes and the PLO, which have grudgingly accepted the reality of the Jewish state, the fundamentalists remain uncompromisingly theological in their understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestine is a land sacred to Islam, a land stolen by the Jews. Not an inch may be alienated. Israel is a cancer in the Islamic world, implanted by imperialism and nurtured by the U.S. The Jewish state has to be fought, passively through non-recognition, actively through jihad
• Democracy, diversity, accommodation — the fundamentalists have repudiated them all. In appealing to the masses who fill their mosques, they promise, instead, to institute a regime of Islamic law, make common cause with like-minded "brethren" everywhere, and struggle against the hegemony of the West and the existence of Israel.
• These principles bear no resemblance to the ideals of Europe's democracy movements; if anything, they evoke more readily the atavism of Europe's burgeoning nationalist Right.
• In this instance, the myth of fundamentalism as a movement of democratic reform assures the West that no society on earth has the moral resources to challenge the supremacy of Western values: even Islam's fundamentalists, cursing the ways of foreigners, will end up embracing them.
• As for the fundamentalists themselves, they and their apologists warn against the futility of resisting the fundamentalist surge. "Islam is a new force that is going to come anyway, because it's a wave of history," Turabi assures his Western listeners, and "superficial obstacles will certainly not stand in the way." In fact, fundamentalism will triumph no matter what the West does, because it "thrives" on repression.
• The same fundamentalists who condemned Saudi Arabia's enlisting of assistance from "polytheists" would enlist some of it themselves, if they could. Their approach has been to tug at the conscience of the Western democracies.
• In particular, they ask that the United States intervene to protect the rights of free speech and assembly so precious to the West, and press for free elections throughout the region. "I am trying to tell my audiences that the values which are dear to them are also common to Islam," said a disingenuous Turabi in Washington, especially citing "free government based on consultation and participation."
• If those hands are joined, the overture to fundamentalism promises to be the riskiest policy venture of the next decade in the Middle East and North Africa. According to one academic analyst,
• The twenty-first century will test the ability of political analysts and policymakers to distinguish between Islamic movements that are a threat and those that represent legitimate indigenous attempts to reform and redirect their societies.
• Every movement combines threat and "reform" in a seamless message, and much of the supposed "reform" is threatening as well — to women, minorities, and the occasional novelist who would write a book on Islam.
• Political pluralism and peace do have true friends in the Middle East and North Africa. They are beleaguered and dazed by the generational surge of Islamic fundamentalism, and they are divided over the fate of Algeria and its implications. Some have been ridiculed by the democracy theorists as self-styled liberals, guilty of pedaling the view that existing governments are preferable to the anointed fundamentalists.