Faces of Fundamentalism

Around the 1980s an eruption of militant Islamic passion sent tremors through the Middle East: the 1979 installation in Shiite Muslim Iran of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; the occupation that same year of Mecca's holiest shrine; the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after the Camp David accords; Hezbollah's car-bomb assault on the U.S. embassy in Beirut; the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan by the Saudi- and American-armed mujahedeen; the growth of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in Israeli-occupied territories; the election victories in Algeria of the Islamic Salvation Front; and the military coup in Khartoum that brought Hassan al-Turabi's Muslim Brotherhood to power and made Sudan the region's first militant Sunni Arab state.

But that was the 1980s. The present decade has seen mostly setbacks for the militants. Sudan, always poor, is now bankrupt and still trapped in a savage, costly civil war after five years of Islamic rule. Economically isolated, Khartoum became a political pariah in 1993, when Washington added it to the short list of countries sponsoring or assisting international terrorism. In Iran, Islamic militants vie among themselves for power in the political vacuum left by Khomeini's death. Afghanistan is locked in vicious civil strife among competing Islamic warlords. And Saddam Hussein's invasion forced the once-wealthy militant Islamic movements to choose between their traditional patrons - Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states - and their mostly pro-Saddam constituents.

Moreover, America's spectacular display of military power in the Persian Gulf War signaled Washington's determination to protect its access to oil and other vital interests. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. victory in the gulf led to American-sponsored peace talks in Madrid in 1991, which culminated two years later in Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signing a peace accord in Washington. Now Jordan has all but agreed to a formal peace, and Syria is not far behind. Islam's defeats of the 1990s have been so widespread, so relentless, that French scholar Olivier Roy has written of "the failure of Islam," and Fouad Ajami, an eminent American analyst of Lebanese origin who pronounced the death of Arab nationalism in this journal four years ago, has concluded that "the pan-Islamic millennium has run its course; the Islamic decade is over."