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Despite the movement's anti-Western rhetoric, fundamentalists are more concerned about instigating change in their own countries than in the outside world. In nations from Algeria to Pakistan, the desire for an Islamic society stems largely from the failures of corrupt and ineffectual secular governments to give burgeoning urban populations the jobs, housing and basic services they need. Most of the faithful are looking for justice at home, not war abroad. Yet many who decry the ills of the modern world would flinch at imposing religious rule by violent means. "The most important thing to remember is that not all Islamic revivalist movements are fundamentalist, that not all fundamentalists are political activists, and that not all political activists are radicals," says Mumtaz Ahmad, a Pakistani professor of political science at Hampton University in Virginia. "There are very respectable Islamic fundamentalist movements in major Muslim societies that are part of the mainstream and part of the democratic electoral process, and that want to operate within a constitutional framework."
Sheik Omar has put in his bid for something more dramatic. In January, one week before his appearance before the federal immigration court in Newark, he said he wanted to return to Egypt if he was deported. "If they kill me," he said of his possible return, "that will be a certificate that I am a martyr."