Let’s admit to a growing Islamist problem

In the aftermath of the rioting Sunday that led to the ransacking of several neighborhoods in Ashrafieh and the burning of a building housing the Danish embassy, there was a consensus in official Beirut that Syria was to blame. Perhaps it was, in part, but many adopted that expedient line to cover-up something far more disturbing: There is a growing Sunni Islamist movement in Lebanon, some of whose members are violent, and no one has control over them.

It seems plausible that the Hariri camp and the office of the mufti at Dar al-Fatwa initially sought to take advantage of the Sunday demonstrations protesting the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Both perhaps sought to reassert their Islamic credentials amid accusations from pro-Syrian groups that the parliamentary majority is in the pocket of Western powers; perhaps, too, they wanted to flex their sectarian muscles. Rioting was certainly not on the agenda, and from the statements of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora and Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa, the organizers offered assurances that they would control the marchers. That explains why there was wholly inadequate security around the Danish embassy, and why both the Hariri camp and the Lebanese Forces leader, Samir Geagea, were so quick to point a finger at outsiders: everybody would buy into that argument, though Geagea also had to demand Sabaa's resignation to assuage his angry Christian base and deflect attention away from his close alliance with an embarrassed Future Movement.

There were very likely agents provocateurs acting on behalf of the Syrians. However, this was to be expected and only made the government's laxity in providing an efficient defense cordon more incomprehensible. But it would be a mistake to miss the forest for the trees: the extent of the damage was too wide, the statements of some Lebanese demonstrators interviewed on television too enraged, for the destruction to have been solely the work of a few infiltrators.

What the Hariri camp and Dar al-Fatwa don't want to tell us is that they have, at best, nominal influence (if indeed any influence at all) over a swathe of radical Sunni Islamist groups, particularly in North Lebanon and Sidon, that care little for the religious tolerance that Muslim moderates strive to highlight. While a large majority of Sunnis accept the rules of the confessional game, including the Jamaa Islamiyya, the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, there are myriad splinter groups endorsing a far more aggressive, exclusivist ideology, supporting the establishment of an Islamic state. Even the Jamaa is frequently ambiguous in its rhetoric. As Bernard Rougier has written in a book on Islamist militancy in Lebanon: "To conserve their political audience on the ground, Jamaa militants are often obliged to speak the language of Salafist Islamism, though this risks contradicting their public commitments."

These extreme Sunni groups tend to recruit from the periphery of Lebanese life, in poor, often rural regions like Dinniyeh and the Akkar. They also have a solid hold over the poorer neighborhoods of Tripoli and Sidon - especially around the old souqs - and have extended into popular Sunni areas of Beirut. They are very different in outlook than the conservative but also outward-looking, urban and urbane Sunnis whom the late Rafik Hariri liked to flaunt and who tend to live from commerce and services. Hariri's great success for many years was his sweeping these groups under the rug, so that he came across as the sole representative of Lebanese Sunnis. In his image, the community exuded temperate cosmopolitanism.

The most visible glitch was with the Ahbash movement, which has fought Dar al-Fatwa for control over certain mosques in Beirut. However, the fact is that Hariri had little margin to eliminate the Ahbash, a virtual extension of Syrian intelligence, propped up by the Syrian regime to be used both as a counterweight to the Muslim Brotherhood and an instrument to play Sunni politics and contain Hariri.

The real moral of last Sunday's violence was not that Syria manipulated hoodlums to destroy Christian property, but that multi-confessional Beirut had its first sighting of Islamist extremists. It was a distant echo of the January 2000 uprising in Dinniyeh, but that took place too far from the capital to matter. Syria is using Islamists to destabilize an independent Lebanon, and it has reportedly tried of late to infiltrate Al-Qaeda type groups through the northern border. The Sunni extremists will readily collaborate with Damascus if that helps advance their objective of creating an Islamist state. However, this game is as dangerous for Syria as it is for Lebanon. President Bashar Assad may prove as inept at riding the Sunni Islamist wave in Syria to protect his own regime as the Hariri camp was in trying to use it last weekend to enhance its domestic standing.

So what is to be done? At the least the state must return to those areas in the North and Sidon from where it has been absent in recent years, and where Islamists are thriving. But that means more than sending in more security forces, though this is necessary; it also means promoting economic opportunities and distributing social services to the periphery.

Such policies will not shake the convictions of the most hardened Islamists, nor does pouring money into an area turn a true believer into a fervent secularist. But state intervention will help draw potential recruits away from Islamists, allow the state to compete with these relatively small groups in distributing favors, and allow security agencies to have a better sense of what is going on in more isolated regions.

If the parliamentary majority is really worried about Syria's effort to wreak havoc in Lebanon, then, instead of concealing the presence of extreme Sunni Islamist groups, it must address the issue openly. These groups are no less dangerous to social peace than are Syria's agents, and the two will collaborate if they haven't already done so. Lebanon's mainstream Sunni representatives saw their endeavor backfire on Sunday. Unless they admit to the reality of religious extremism, we should expect more destruction, and maybe worse, down the road.