foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

166 Epilogue
with some two million deaths from starvation, disease, and war in the South,
whose people were also the victims of a massive slave trade. (The genocide
was also racial, in the sense that the "Arab" North looked down on the "black"
South, as well as on the Muslim "blacks" of Darfur.) Bin Laden and Sheikh
Omar Rahman of Egypt, later imprisoned in the United States for orchestrating
the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, were allowed to base
themselves in Sudan for a time. In 1996, Sudan's military rulers pulled back
somewhat, expelling bin Laden that year and sidelining al-Turabi in 1999.
After September I I, the regime attempted to placate the United States, which
sponsored peace negotiations with the southern resistance.
While radical Islamists never came to power in Algeria, they fought a
lengthy and extremely brutal civil war in the 1990s that claimed more than a
hundred thousand lives. In the late 1980s, Islamist parties were gaining headway
as the National Liberation Front (FLN), which had led Algeria to independence
from France in 1962, attempted to move toward a multiparty system.
By 1992, the newly formed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed poised
to win the national elections. In response, elements within the FLN and the
military seized power in a coup, canceling the elections, banning the FIS, and
imprisoning thousands of Islamists. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA), whose
core consisted of Algerian men who had participated in the Afghanistan jihad,
now took up arms. While the GIA was able to mount serious attacks on the
regime, its extreme brutality toward civilians included the massacre of whole
villages and the kidnapping and rape of village women and girls. The GIA also
assassinated intellectuals, labor activists, secular leftists, feminists, and even
women who dared walk the streets in anything less than the GIA's definition
of proper clothing. Such tactics lost it the support of all but the most extremist
Islamists.3 This gave an opening to the military regime, which reformed itself
somewhat, succeeding by 1999 in legitimating its rule through an election
that, although essentially an authoritarian plebiscite, nonetheless seemed to
reflect popular revulsion at the Islamists.
By the early 1980s, Egypt had also begun to experience Islamist terrorism,
albeit on a far smaller scale than in Algeria, with about a thousand deaths resulting
from both the terror and the government repression against it. Still,
the crucial importance of Egypt as a center of Muslim culture meant that
the actions of the Islamist movement there had a very wide impact. Earlier,
in the 1970s, as he moved away from the left-wing and pro-Soviet policies
of Gamel Abdel Nasser, President Anwar Sadat had courted the lslamists as
a counterweight to leftist groups that opposed his realignment toward the
United States. However, Sadat's separate peace with Israel in 1979 outraged
the Islamists, who broke with him completely. Their movement also gained