THE DEMOCRACY GAME.(West Bank)

Every Friday, just before midday prayers, thousands of men and women in the West Bank town of Dura stop to gossip and shop in the market stalls that lead to the steps of the Grand Mosque. I visited Dura on the first Friday after Hamas had swept the Palestinian elections. And yet that morning all the talk was of cartoons: a dozen caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad had been published in the Danish daily JyllandsPosten, igniting a worldwide paroxysm of apocalyptic hysteria that brought into use, once more, that "Star Wars"-like phrase "a clash of civilizations." The imam at the Dura Grand Mosque is a man in his late forties named Nayef Rajoub. Although Sheikh Nayef is a leader of Hamas and the top votegetter in the entire West Bank, his supporters told me that he, too, was focussed on the cartoons. He would be speaking that day on the Danish caricatures as a "weapon of the Western Crusaders."

Outside the mosque, I met a group of people standing around a fruit-andvegetable store run by a man called Eichmann Abu Atwan. I thought I'd misheard his name, but he smiled, showed his identity card, and said, "Eichmann. Like the Nazi." His father had named him during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem in 1961. "He was an early fighter, killing Israelis in the seventies," Eichmann said proudly. "And my brother was such a fierce fighter that a Syrian paper compared him to Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi"--one of the founders of Hamas. Eichmann was a supporter of Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist group that Yasir Arafat founded some fifty years ago, and, like everyone else I'd been talking to in the occupied territories, he said that Hamas had won for a variety of reasons: the financial corruption of Fatah and its leadership; the utter failure of the Oslo process; a marked increase in Islamic practice throughout Gaza and the West Bank; Hamas's dual mastery in providing social services for Palestinians and launching armed assaults on the Israelis. "Time has run out for Fatah," Eichmann said.

As the muezzin summoned the people of Dura to the mosque, Nayef's fraternal twin, Yasir, stopped by the store. "Are you all coming to hear the Sheikh?" he said. Like Nayef, Yasir had been affiliated with Hamas from the start, but their older brother, Jibril Rajoub, was one of Arafat's most powerful aides and a Fatah lord. Jibril had run the Preventive Security Service in the West Bank, and he was one of the losers in the elections.

Prayers began at eleven-thirty, and we filed into the mosque and knelt down. The walls were whitewashed. A dozen fluorescent tubes dangled low from the ceiling, giving off a vague yellow light. The room was filled entirely with men, but I was hardly inconspicuous. My translator, an aspiring young journalist from the West Bank named Khaldoun, quickly came to realize that his principal task, after rendering the Sheikh's sermon into English, was to explain to all who inquired (and many did) that the foreign visitor was "not Danish." Al Jazeera and the other Arab-language television stations had broadcast fiery protests throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

"Danish?" a man asked me.

Khaldoun responded with a prolonged explanation featuring the word "Am-rika," which has not been something to brag about in recent years, but this time it did the trick.

Sheikh Nayef has a graying beard, close-cropped hair, and a tranquil, strangely distant gaze. His posture was as straight as the microphone stand before him. I was told that outside the mosque his personality was shy, even remote--a marked contrast to his worldly and fierce-looking brother Jibril--but he soon rose to a register of high dudgeon in his sermon. The Danish cartoons, the Sheikh said, were reminiscent of the calumnies hurled at the Prophet fourteen hundred years ago. Muhammad "was accused of being a magician, of being insane. The same thing is happening now in Denmark, in France, although many mosques in Europe are spreading his message. . . . What happened in Denmark is an offense against Muhammad and his followers. It is an act of aggression against us and against our feelings."