A Month by the Sea by Dervla Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

theologians – so a venerable philosopher told me, when I visited him in his al-Azhar University office. (Gaza’s al-Azhar, not to be confused with Cairo’s.) Mujamma’s fundamentalism, said my learned friend, might be described not as a movement to reform Islam for the sake of all mankind but as a frustrated protest against a system ( Westernisation ) seen as belittling Muslim traditions while exploiting Muslim workers. To this extent, as the philosopher observed with a chuckle, Mujamma adherents and PLO leftists had more in common than either was allowed to recognise by their leaders.
    On the positive side, Mujamma had inherited from the Brotherhood various Islamic Social Institutions (ISIs) set up in the 1950s, despite Egyptian repression, to help Gaza’s disadvantaged. In 1978 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) administration registered Mujamma as a charity, to the dismay of those Israelis who saw its anti-Westernisation stance as anti-Semitic. From 1979 to 1981 Brigadier General Itshak Segev governed Gaza and commended Sheikh Yassin’s tireless work for the poor, who were consistently neglected by the PLO’s self-serving representatives. In 1980 Segev arranged a consultation for Yassin with Israel’s top surgeons but the Sheikh’s spinal injury (caused by a childhood accident) was found to be irreparable.
    To cater for Gaza’s fast-growing population more than 100 Mujamma-run mosques were built within a decade, funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. These became (and remain) central to the daily life of the poor in most camps, villages and urban districts.In the run-up to the First Intifada in 1987, when Palestinians rose up to protest at the occupation of their territory by Israel, certain preachers were alarmingly inflammatory and from their Friday prayers youthful mobs emerged to taunt the PLO as ‘atheist’ and ‘Communist’. At the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), opened in 1978, lecturers who taught evolution were bullied into dropping the subject. They had no one to defend them; by then some 15,000 of the PLO’s nationalist/socialist followers had been imprisoned in Israel’s remote desert camps. During the early ’80s, in defiance of the Mujamma leadership – which prided itself on maintaining order – many mobs ran amok, burning and smashing cafés, video stores, hairdressing salons, cinemas, liquor stores, libraries, billiard clubs, boutiques and bookshops. Meanwhile IDF troops stood around, watching. Israel’s tolerance for this anarchy has been likened to US support for Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet Mujahedin: another case of what the CIA calls ‘blowback’. These rampages shocked most Gazans, whether Mujamma, PLO or unlabelled. Yet the contrast between the PLO’s endemic embezzling and the incorruptibility of the ISI’s Mujamma officials enabled Islamism to retain the loyalty of Gaza’s deprived. Mujamma might lack trained theologians but few of its members ever forgot Allah’s views on honesty.
    In 1984 Sheikh Yassin was arrested for the first time and charged with demanding an end to the Occupation and setting up a militant cell (Hamas in embryo). His thirteen-year sentence shrank to one year through a prisoner exchange but he was forbidden to resume his chairmanship of Mujamma.
    On 9 December 1987 the first Intifada started in Jabalya in Gaza and a fortnight later Hamas was born.
    In 1993 Hamas condemned the Oslo Accords as ‘a heresy that will lead to the surrender of Muslim lands to Jews’. Edward Said agreed, reproaching Arafat for signing ‘the equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’ and foretelling the Second Intifada as aninevitable consequence. However the PLO’s compromise won international approval and lavishly increased funding. By the mid-’90s most Palestinians, throughout the OPT, had made plain their aversion to any further violence. It was time to put militarism aside, Hamas realised, and concentrate on non-violent community building. As Professor Ali al-Jarbawi of