Milton Viorst

(JERUSALEM) — Readers have been exposed to a great many words lately about the Islamic resurgence, some of them coming from this very typewriter. A rebirth of Koranic zeal helps explain to Westerners the recurring episodes of what looks to us like bizarre behavior in the Moslern world. Now I think it is time to turn our attention to its counterpart, the Judaic resurgence. For there is a revitalized religious urge discernible in Israel, and it has become an increasingly significant factor in determing whether there will be war or peace in the Middle East. In a sense, Israel is itself the product of a Judaic resurgence. Religion is the one element that Jews around the world possessed in common during the 2000 years or so of their diaspora, and a basic tenet of Judaism during these millenia was the ultimate return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Nonetheless, the ideology which became the foundation of the new state was not religious but secular. Zionism’s roots lay in the surge of nationalism

CAIRO – Hassan AI-Tuhami is one of those men who, at first sight, conveys to you a special presence, and even something more. I had asked for an interview because he is known as Anwar Sadat’s eminence grise, and apart from Sadat himself is considered the principal inspiration behind Egypt’s peace overture to Israel. He invited me to see him late one afternoon in his apartment in Zamalek, the most bourgeois of the quarters of Cairo. I arrived only with the knowledge that he was regarded as a man of mystery, and nothing more. A servant showed me into his large, sparely furnished living room, and I sat down to wait on a once-stylish, now threadbare sofa. After a few minutes, a jockey-sized man in foppish dress entered and sat down on a chair near me. He talked about Arabian race horses, and I said to myself, ‘Is this the character I came to see?’ I promptly revealed my uncertainty by a silly question, to which the man answered reverentially, ‘You’ll have to ask His

What is this religious fervor that is gripping the Islamic world? Institutional Islam has toppled a government in Iran, threatens a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, executed a former prime minister in Pakistan. Interpreters say that the huge influx of wealth from petroleum has transformed Islam’s sense of itself and of its international importance. I have read in newspapers and magazines that Moslems are filled with a new confidence, a greater feeling of self-assurance, a vision and a hope. Are we, as some observers have written, on the threshold of a resurgence of Islamic power, of a new Golden Age for the followers of Mohammed? I strongly doubt it. My own view is that the new Islamic wave is not the product of a new self-confidence at all but of a crisis that emerges from social frustration, inner doubt and profound feelings of inadequacy. The surge of oil wealth, far from transforming Islam’s self-image of social inferiority into a positive conception, has created new uncertainties. The Shah of Iran was not kept in power