Inside Egyptian prisons a profound change has been taking place around the Islamic ideology of jihad (literally "struggle" but often taken to mean "holy war"). Top militant leaders serving long sentences have been given the chance to gain their freedom by reneging on their previous ideas of establishing Islamist societies by violent means.
Kamal Habib is an example of one such man who made the transition. A former member of Egyptian Jihad (also known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad), Habib served a 10-year prison sentence in connection with that group's assassination of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
Fawaz Gergis, a university professor and an authority on Islamic militancy and Jihadist groups, speaks of Habib in his book Journey of the Jihadist. "Habib was a key figure in the first generation of Muslim militants, who in the 1970s had planted the seeds of jihad throughout Muslim lands," Gergis said.
"(He) graduated from Cairo University in 1979 at the top of his class, with a degree in political science. Charismatic and ambitious, he could have trained to become an academic. But neither money nor the allure of ascending the ladder in jahili (non-Islamic or "pagan") institutions appealed to him," Gergis added. Of his reasons for joining the Egyptian Jihad group Habib told dpa that "most Egyptians wanted to get rid of Sadat."
Sadat, who was the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel, also was known for his government's oppressive policies domestically. "At the beginning," Habib said,"(Islamists) didn't advocate violence against individuals, that happened much later, in the 1990s, when retaliation by killing police officers and other violent acts took place."
Many experts, including Islamists, have argued explicitly and implicitly that torture was behind much of the so-called prison revisions of the extremists in the al-Jamaa al-Islamiya (The Islamic Group) and Egyptian Jihad groups. During a 2001 interview with the US broadcaster CNN, Habib had claimed severe torture in Egyptian prisons was something everyone knew about.
"I prefer not to talk about it. But back then, it was on a very large scale," he said. One of the victims of torture after the Sadat assassination was Ayman al-Zawahiri, now second-in-command of the al Qaeda terrorist network.
Addressing the press in 1983 al-Zawahiri said about his three-year jail term as one of the 300 people tried for involvement in the Sadat case: "They whipped us with electric cables, they shocked us with electricity, and they used their wild dogs."
Habib denies the torture of the early days in prison had anything to do with this revision. Revisionism, he said, "was something that was growing inside me, as a result of thinking, reading and talking to other people." Habib eventually used his term in jail to write a doctoral thesis in political science and revise much of his previous ideas.
When asked about the evidence used to advocate then reject violence, Habib says his sources - Sharia (Islamic law) and the Quran - did not change, only the interpretation did. "This has to do with one's vision and mental state at a given time. I read differently into Islam and the Quran while reviewing the experience. The understanding was different," said Habib. The result was a book he published in the early 2000's titled The Islamist Movement from Confrontation to Revision.
But despite revising many of his earlier beliefs, Habib continues to blame the West, saying the conditioning of the country by Western imperialism ultimately produced the violence of the 1990s. "The prevailing social and political context ... directed us to seek change in that way, so that we could drive out the occupiers of our homeland," he said, explaining how militant Islamists like himself and his fellow prisoners felt.
Habib unapologetically justifies the position of the top two al- Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, arguing that it was the environment they lived under that guided their steps toward fundamentalism.
"If Western policies change," Habib said, "then perhaps these forms of violence and confrontation will take a different turn - the concept of the clash of civilisations, of demonising Islam. All this has created supporters for Bin Laden's and al-Zawahiri's project across the Muslim World."
For Habib, the terrorists are driven by feelings shared by many Muslims: the lack of hope of a better future, be it for Muslims as a "nation" or as individuals. "They see the injustice done to them, and perceive their religion and identity as being threatened. This is the main source of their fear and anger. These people were not born violent." Delphine Touitou adds from Malmoe, Sweden.
Sweden has welcomed immigrants with open arms for decades but now it is grappling with how to integrate them into society, especially in the southern town of Malmoe amid a massive influx of refugees. Once a thriving industrial town with full employment, Malmoe has seen many of its plants shut down since the 1990s. That, combined with a never-ending stream of foreigners arriving, has led to rising juvenile delinquency and rampant unemployment.
Of the town's 280,000 inhabitants, a third are foreigners and 60,000 are Muslims. "We are an open city. We see these immigrants as a resource for our society," Malmoe's Social Democratic mayor Ilmar Reepalu told AFP. "The problem is that we have welcomed too many immigrants at the same time," he said, pointing out that last year Malmoe took in more Iraqi asylum-seekers than Germany, Spain, France and Italy combined.
Reepalu said 5,000 refugees a year seek asylum in Malmoe, Sweden's third largest city behind Stockholm and Gothenburg, though it is really only able to take in 1,500. The result is many overcrowded apartments as refugees flock to immigrant-heavy areas and an employment rate that has dropped to around 50 percent.
Swedish Integration Minister Nyamko Sabuni -- a Muslim who came to Sweden when she was 12 and the first African to become a member of government in the country -- insists that the only way for immigrants to integrate into society is to learn the language and get a job.
"It is crucial that immigrants get in contact with the labour market as soon as possible after receiving their residence permit. This has to be combined with language courses," she said. While immigrants to Sweden in the late 1950s and 1960s came as much-needed labourers, the trend has in recent decades shifted toward political refugees, according to Yves Zenou, an economics professor at Stockholm University who specialises in integration problems.
"Immigrants to Sweden have become political refugees. First there were people from South America, then Iran, Afghanistan and now Iraq," he said. "They come seeking asylum and not work," he said.
He recalled the Scandinavian country's generous humanitarian policies which provide immigrants with everything they need once they arrive. "The famous welfare state takes care of everything on a social level. But that's the limitation of the system -- the country cannot provide any solution when it comes to jobs, which is the key to integration," he said. And the situation risks getting worse.
New arrivals tend to settle where they already have friends and family members, leading Swedes to desert some areas, such as Malmoe's south-eastern neighbourhood of Rosengaard.
"When a lot of people from one ethnic group concentrate together, you always see the same phenomenon everywhere: they become marginalised, with high unemployment and crime rates," Zenou said. "That's the case in the United States, France and Britain -- and now in Sweden, although at different levels," he said. If nothing is done, he said, the situation in Sweden could explode within 10 or 20 years, as it already has in other parts of Europe.
Immigrants in Sweden follow a well-established pattern, he explained. Children grow up seeing their parents unemployed and socially excluded, and inherit their frustration. Compared to slums and projects in France or the US, Rosengaard looks like a nice community. But it stands out in a Swedish context.
On a recent visit, veiled women walk behind the men, casting quick glances at their husbands before refusing to speak to AFP's reporter. At the local mall, more Arabic is heard than Swedish and 28 of the 30 shopkeepers are immigrants.
The neighbourhood is clean, with plenty of greenery providing a nice backdrop for the modern brick buildings. But sprouting from every balcony or rooftop is a satellite dish, broadcasting programmes for faraway countries. For the time being, crime levels in Rosengaard are manageable, Malmoe police spokesman Lars Foerstell said.
"We do have a problem with youth criminality, with young people who commit different kinds of crimes," he said, citing minor robberies, assaults, gang fights or rocks thrown at police cars. "But it doesn't happen everyday." However, the neighbourhood is stigmatised and even the slightest of incidents is reported in the press. "The media often make it sound very much worse than it is," he said.
Meanwhile, Bejzat Becirov, the head of Malmoe's Islamic Centre and mosque, Scandinavia's first when it opened in 1984, continues to spread his message of tolerance and integration, as he has for 45 years. "We have accepted a part of this country, we have accepted its rules and we want to be a part of it," he said, echoing Sabuni's insistence that integration comes through the language. Discrimination is not a serious problem, he said. Rather, "the biggest enemy of integration is the satellite dishes which broadcast TV programmes from countries where some children were even not born".
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