Whither Islam? • 417can backers were expressed by acts of terrorism against government offi¬
cials, Copts, foreign tourists, and secularist writers. Islamists won control
of the professional unions of lawyers, physicians, and engineers in 1992
elections; later, the Mubarak government established new rules for their
elections. But Mubarak could not stamp out fundamentalism whenever it
popped up; a judge tried in 1995 to force a woman to divorce her hus¬
band, a Cairo University professor, after he published a scholarly article
that the magistrate deemed anti-Islamic. The Sudan, impoverished by
years of civil strife, has an avowedly Islamist government that exports pro¬
pagandists to the rest of the Arab world. The growth of violence in the Su¬
dan, due in part to a prolonged civil war between its Arab Muslim north
and its Black animist and Christian south, continued through the 1990s
and into the new millennium, when it spread to Darfur province, leading
to widespread destruction, suffering, and a new refugee problem.
The Islamic revolutionaries who drove the Soviet army out of Afghani¬
stan in 1987 formed a network called al-Qa'ida, which trained other ac¬
tivists in Muslim countries, including Egypt and the Sudan. In Afghanistan
itself the Taliban (Muslim students) won control of most of the country
against better-armed militias in 1996 and proceeded to impose severe re¬
strictions on women and westernized intellectuals. In Iran, President Mu¬
hammad Khatami, elected in 1997, tried to ease some Islamic restrictions
and open better relations with the West, in contrast to the hard-line poli¬
cies of the country's religious leader, the Ayatollah Khamanei, who under
the 1979 constitution retains most of the power.
Turkey's pro-Islamist Welfare Party won enough votes in the 1995 gen¬
eral elections to lead a coalition government for a few months, but its
diplomatic approaches to Iran and Libya, plus its threat to undo Ataturk's
legacy, so incensed the army officers that its leader voluntarily resigned in
1997 and let the secularists regain power for the next five years. Turkey's
Islamist and the secularist governments alike strengthened military ties
with Israel. The country most threatened by this alliance was Syria, where
Islamist revolutionaries had no effect on the Asads, either the father or the
son (who were Alawis). Of Israel's neighbors, Syria is the one most op¬
posed to making peace, especially if it cannot regain the Golan Heights. It
also gets most of its irrigation water from Turkey, whose massive dams
now control the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Water, scarce everywhere,
may cause the wars of the coming century.
The Islamists might somehow manage to oust a long-entrenched Arab
regime. Jordan has been ruled by Hashimites since 1921, Syria by the Asad
family since 1970, Yemen by Ali Abdallah Salih since 1978, Egypt by