INSIDE On Wednesday, New York Times correspondent Judith Miller's penetrating examination of mil- itant Islamic movements reached America's bookstores. By special per- mission with the publisher, we offer an excerpt from God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From A Militant Middle East, which postulates that just as there is no united Arab world, so, too, is there no unified Islam. For even within the Koran, God has 99 names. Ms. Miller, a courageous reporter with a novelist's gift for narrative, has spent much of her ca- reer in the Middle East. There, she gained access to the inner work- ings of militant Islamic groups in 10 countries, including Hezbollah's political base within Lebanon, where our excerpt opens. THE DET R O tileirut's southern suburbs, or "Lit- tle Teheran," as they are known, reminded me more of the poorer cities of Iran than of Lebanon. The muddy, unpaved streets were filled with barefoot children in tat- tered clothes and smudged faces and women hooded in black. The shop and street signs were in Arabic, not French or Eng- lish. Makeshift telephone and power lines crisscrossed the nar- row, sunless streets. Laundry hung from the balconies of the unpainted, four-story, cement- block buildings. Again and again the call to prayer could be heard through- out the neighborhood. The Par- 48 Author Judith Miller has been a New York Times correspondent since 1977, including terms as Cairo bureau chief and special correspondent to the Persian Gulf War. Other published works include One, by One, by One: Facing the Holocaust. ty of God's water trucks, schools, and medical clinics were every- where, and badly needed. There was little government-supplied electricity for the 800,000 most- ly poor Shiites who now lived here. The sound of small private generators hummed through the dank, unpaved side streets, where puddles of rainwater mixed with sewage. In late 1993, I was on my way to see Hussein Musawi, a mem- ber of Hezbollah's ruling Polit- buro and the founder of a radical allied group. "(Prime Minister) Rafic Hariri," Mr. Mu- sawi told me calmly, had been "implanted in Lebanon by the United States so that Lebanon would make peace with Israel." Mr. Hariri's "only concern" was "profits for the rich from his casinos, bars and hotels. He does not care about the poor. He is a dangerous man," Mr. Mu- sawi said. Hussein Musawi knew about dangerous men. He was one of them. American and Israeli intel- ligence officers had long identi- fied him as a key figure in In the minds of militant Islamics within Lebanon, peace between Israelis and Arabs must never be. JUDITH MILLER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS Hezbollah, an early Lebanese disciple of the Iranian revolu- tion that had initiated the hi- jackings, kidnappings, and murders of Westerners in Lebanon in the early 1980s. American intelligence officials put him at the center of the planning and execution of sev- eral successful terrorist opera- tions — among them, the bombings of the American Em- bassy in Beirut in April 1983, the U.S. Marine and French compounds six months later, and the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA station chief who was tortured to death. In the spirit of taqiyya (lying to pro- tect the faith), Mr. Musawi had long denied responsibility for these actions, though he had condoned them as acts of "self-defense" against Israeli and American aggression in Lebanon. `Neutralizing' local leaders The Hezbollah office, like most militant Islamic head- quarters, was functional and spare. There were none of the expensive, hand-carved wood- en chairs with stuffed leather seats and embroidered ot- tomans found in most rich pri- vate homes and government ministries. Tea was served in small, plain glasses, without the usual gold trim. There were no paintings or decorations on the wall other than pictures of Shi- ite Islam's heroes: (the late Ay- atollah Ruhollah) Khomeini; the vanished imam Musa al-Sadr; and Hezbollah's latest martyr, Abbas Musawi, the late leader of Hezbollah and Hussein Mu- sawi's cousin. Israel had killed Abbas Mu- sawi, his wife, their 6-year-old son, and five bodyguards in Feb- ruary 1992 in a dramatic heli- copter attack on his motorcade as it was leaving the southern Lebanese town of Jibsheit. Sheikh Abbas, who only the week before had asked God in his Friday mosque sermon to "bless and honor us with mar- tyrdom," had imprudently traveled to Hezbollah's south- ernmost outpost to deliver an impassioned sermon marking the eighth anniversary of the murder of Sheikh Harb, the man I had interviewed in that same stony, dirt-poor town a decade ago. Less than three miles from Israel's "security zone," Jibsheit had been the repeated target of Israel's efforts to crush Hezbol- lah by, in American spy par- lance, "neutralizing" its local leadership. First, Israelis had killed Sheikh Harb. Then, in 1989, Israeli commandos had kidnapped Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, who had succeeded Sheikh Harb as Jibsheit's imam, or chief sheikh, despite his lack of formal religious train- ing. As I sat in Mr. Musawi's of- fice, I knew that only a few months earlier Israel had struck Jibsheit again. During Opera- tion Accountability, much of the town, including Sheikh Harb's tomb, was flattened.