THE ASSOCIATION OF MUSLIM BROTHERS
Against the background of terrorist violence of the last
five years, the exploits of the Zarqawi
group in Iraq, the arrival in power of Hamas
in Palestine, the electoral successes of Islamists in Egypt have finally
attracted the attention of observers to the Association of Muslims Brothers and
its politico-military offshoots: the Jamaa
Islamiyyah (Islamic groups) more often known by their local or adopted
names (Islamic Jihad, GIA, GICM, Al Qaeda, Zarqawi group etc). The belated
discovery by the Western media of a movement that had been making its presence
felt since the middle of the 20th century in most political
developments in the Arab and Muslim world, and whose name is synonymous with
exclusion, violence, isolation and confrontation with the rest of the world.
Fuelled by the internal contradictions of the Muslim developing world, by the inequalities and injustices of the North-South relationship, able to profit from the political, economic and social disorder affecting Muslim communities, the Brotherhood has become – especially after the collapse of the Communist bloc – the only transnational actor capable of managing and turning the political and social differences of the Muslim world to its advantage.
Founded in 1928 in Ismailia in Egypt by the educator Hassan al-Banna (grandfather of the well-known Tariq Ramadan) who himself had no religious background or legitimacy, the Brotherhood initially – along the lines of a number of modernist Muslim theoreticians (Jamaleddin al-Afghani, Mohammad Abdu, Rashid Rida) wished to become the reform movement of an Islam in retreat whose followers had been unable to keep up with changes in the modern world, and as a result placed under the foreign domination of predatory colonial powers. But, rather than forming a basis in modernity and flexibility, Hassan al-Banna made the resolute choice to go with reaction and confrontation.
The basic political principle of the founders of the
Brotherhood arose from a simple – if not simplistic – syllogism:
- Islam had known an unrivalled glory and influence during
the Golden Age of its founding ancestors (salaf);
- However all of its innovative interpretations and
developments only led to ruin and servitude;
- Therefore, the answer is to begin again with a slate clean
of all these innovations, and return to the origins of Islam, imitating (tabligh)
the founders (salaf) especially in the literal reading of the revealed texts,
in order to rediscover the Golden Age.
In Egypt, then under British control via a monarchy of
Albanian origin set up by the former Ottoman occupier, the first faltering
steps of electoral democracy were taken, by the installation of a parliament. The
example of the Brotherhood immediately found favour with a number of
intermediate elites themselves excluded from power and privilege – especially
of a monetary sort – who signed up because they otherwise had none of the
qualities needed to gain or exercise power democratically. That was mainly the most
conservative and least dynamic fringe of trade, crafts, middling civil servants,
teachers and some professionals. The Islamic theocratic order put forward by
the Brotherhood, ruled to the letter by legal sources dating back fifteen
centuries, would permit these natural administrators of society an over-arching
and comfortable legitimacy where there was no need to do battle or to win
arguments, unlike the elective democratic model offered by the West.
In fact, from its inception the Brotherhood replicated the
systems of extreme right throughout the world, as well as their ways of operating:
xenophobia, exclusion, the rejection of any scientific approach, insults and
anathemas and physical violence. Hassan el-Banna was executed in 1949 for his
part in the assassination of the Egyptian prime minister.
The Muslim Brotherhood, associated with the fight against
the British presence and the creation of the State of Israel, looked forward to
reaping the rewards of its position from 1952, with the arrival in power of General
Neguib, a sympathiser from the outset. Their haste in wishing to eliminate Gamal
Abdel Nasser, the real organiser of the coup yet considered too unreliable,
earned them a vigorous response from him, as he took power from Neguib and
ordered a policy of merciless repression against the Brotherhood.
The repression was marked by a legal ban on the Brotherhood
in 1954, permanent persecutions and trials and the execution of several of
their leaders, among them Sayyid Qutb in 1966, the ideologist of a new
radicalism and spiritual father of the activists of today.
The Brotherhood's modern strategy was shaped by the
repression it suffered, along lines it was never to depart from: clandestinity,
duplicity, exclusion, violence, pragmatism and opportunism. Taking refuge in
clandestinity, the Brotherhood abandoned all more vulnerable forms of pyramidal
or hierarchical organisational structures. Ideological direction emerges
informally and consensually by a college of elders, while operational
management is in the hands of the very decentralised secret organisation Tanzim as-Sirri. Whether political or
military, the subversive actions of the Brotherhood are left to the initiative
of each basic cell. Their actions follow no short-term concrete tactical plan:
the only requirement is that they form part of the long-term strategy of taking
power by any means available. And this strategy rests on the two fundamental
pillars formalised by Sayyid Qutb: breaking the ties between the people of the
Muslim world and their rulers on the one hand, and splitting Muslims off from
the rest of the world on the other, the better to take power without the risk
of outside intervention. Any initiative which moves in these directions,
whether legal or illegal, peaceful or violent, overt or covert, is acceptable
and integrated into the plan which will bring the leaders of the Brotherhood to
the power and to the benefits they consider their own.
What could have remained a subversive populist movement
restricted to Egyptian public life instead saw itself spread across the Arab
and Muslim world through a series of favourable historical circumstances. The
first wave of repression suffered by the militants in the 1950s-1960s forced
many of them into exile. This first diaspora took place in a period of
political and economic decolonisation in many Arab and Muslim countries keen,
out of a sense of national identity, to promote their own language and cultural
values. They were however on the whole lacking in the human resources to pursue
such a policy (teachers, historians, clerics) as the occupying powers had naturally
discouraged any form of education in these areas. The exiled Brotherhood
militants provided in many cases the perfect cadre for the implementation such
policies – as was the case in the Maghreb, Sudan, the Gulf states, Lebanon, Jordan
and Syria (in particular to the benefit of the brief Egypto-Syrian union of
1958-62).
The receiving countries rapidly became anxious at the
propaganda and recruitment efforts of the new zealots. While some made
accommodations with them with more or less good grace (Jordan, Sudan) others
like Syria, Iraq and Libya rapidly took the road of repression, thus feeding
the Brotherhood diaspora with various new nationalities, even as the movement
extended to the Indian sub-continent, to Indonesia and the east coast of
Africa. In Pakistan, the Brotherhood met with ultra-religious nationalists of
the Deobandist school who harboured a hatred for India and rancour at Partition
and their exodus. The cocktail was later to prove an explosive one.
For, while the doctrines of the Brotherhood were by this
time more or less fixed, they were still missing an essential influential
element: the financial means to allow them to buy consciences, to build up a
clientele, to train and maintain militants, to raise up the masses against
those in power by investing in the education and social action too often
neglected in the developing countries or among minorities emigrated to the
West. These means were to come mainly and massively from Saudi Arabia. The Saud
family built its political legitimacy on its stewardship of the holy places of
Islam, which it usurped in 1926 from the Hashemites. Its power is therefore
under threat on two fronts. It lives in fear as much of a democratic and
secularising current as of an Islamising pressure which would lay claim to more
respect for fundamental values. And while the Sauds have the revenues from oil
to allow them to operate this "double
containment" they also lack the human resources necessary to such a
policy. The Brotherhood's network, by now worldwide, would provide (but not
without some reluctance on the Saudis' part) with this determining element in
the form of political, religious, and cultural structures for the control of
Islam the world over, while organising subversion in countries judged a threat
to the endurance of Saudi power.
Initially concentrated on secularising or proto-democratic
Muslim countries (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Yemen and Turkey) the
Brotherhood's subversive efforts rapidly extended to monarchies rivalling the
Saud dynasty – Jordan and Morocco.
But the real extension of their influence on a world scale
came with the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1978. The emergence in Tehran of a
real opposition to the religious legitimacy of the Saudis lead the latter to
try to put into place an international system of orientation and control of
Islam, operated through NGOs and associations, for which the Brotherhood acted as a matrix. Money was
no object following the oil-price hike of 1973, and was pumped into regions
where Islam was not well-embedded, opening the door to Iranian influence –
essentially Africa and immigrant Muslim communities in the West. Penetration
was made easier by the economic crisis which hit the West and the first
oil-price shock led to poverty, exclusion and even rejection among these
emigrant communities.
Traditionally placed under the joint – but rather
superficial – control of country of origin and host country, these communities
proved to be permeable to the populist identity discourse of the Brotherhood,
which took majority control of local representations (UOIF in France) in a decade or so. They had three objectives: to
prove their capacities for mobilisation to their Saudi sponsors; to constitute
a mass for manoeuvre against the regimes in countries of origin; and to make
Islam hateful to Westerners in order to preclude any tendency they may have to
intervene in the Muslim world.
In the decade between 1980-1990, the Brotherhood added a
military capacity to its ideological and financial ones. It owes that development
to the shared desire of Nato and Arabia to foster local resistance networks to
counter Iranian influence and bring about the exhaustion of the Soviet Union in
the quagmire of Afghanistan. While the members of the Brotherhood already
dispersed throughout the region in question had already organised good
ideological links with local populations, helped by Pakistani fundamentalism
and deep Saudi pockets, they had little experience of operational organisation
and armed struggle. But that problem would soon be solved.
From 1981, strengthened by the popular support their social
and protest actions had earned them, the Brotherhood thought themselves able
finally to take power in Cairo by eliminating President Sadat. But having
failed to ensure the existence of a sufficiently hard core of support within
the Army and the security services, their attempt failed, and more than 300
members of the Brotherhood, including virtually the entire Secret Organisation,
were arrested, tried and sentenced. Around 50 of them were sentenced to death
and quickly executed. The others, sentenced to prison sentences of various
lengths, were gradually freed at the demand of Saudi charity organisations and
American welfare groups.
Among those liberated who rushed to leave Egypt was Sheikh
Omar Abd-el-Rahman, organiser of the first bomb attack on the World Trade
Center in New York, and Ayman Zawahiri, the brains of what was to become Al Qaeda, as well as a hundred or so
operational members who spread rapidly out among the various theatres of
military operations in order to train, shape and direct troops. Through their
exploits – real and mythical – particularly in Afghanistan and later in Bosnia
and Chechnya, they helped legitimise and enlarge the credibility and prestige
of the Brotherhood in the Muslim world and its communities abroad, as well as
its strategies, ideology and methods, to the point where no other form of
thinking or acting within Islam any longer seemed possible.
Beyond this period of equipment, which benefited the US and
Saudi Arabia, the Brotherhood, comfortably financed and now with a solid
operational capacity, took over its own strategy and management from the
beginning of the 1990s. The party line remained immutable: to cut the Muslim
world off from the rest of the planet in order to be better placed to take over
power at any cost. The wave of fundamentalist terrorism that struck the West as
much as those "impious" Muslim regimes starting in 1998, the
deployment of militants on all the borders of the Muslim world, the permanent
pseudo-racial agitation carried out by emigrated Muslim communities in the
West, were all part of that strategy. Faced with the risk of seeing the
disappearance of the financial support they received from the petro-monarchies,
and the loss of American military support, the Brotherhood went looking within
the Muslim masses for the support necessary to the development of their
influence and their image. That called for spectacular actions and strong media
coverage for those actions, which led to the wave of suicide attacks worldwide
seen in the years 1998-2005, the engagement of Hamas in a bitter battle with
Israel, and the anti-Western and anti-Shiite offensive of the Zarqawi group in
Iraq. That list is not exhaustive, and the expanding cycle of violence will end
for no other reason than the Brotherhood's long-awaited grasp of power in a
certain number of Muslim countries – preferably the richest.
The "democratic conversion" of Mohammad Mehdi Akef,
grand master of the Brotherhood in Egypt, the vituperative comments by Ayman
Zawahiri on the Egyptian and Jordanian Brothers and their support for the
democratic process, the apparent moderated discourse of Tariq Ramadan towards
the European institutions should not fool anyone. Like every fascist movement
on the trail of power, the Brotherhood has achieved perfect fluency in
double-speak. They are able to command all the possible means of accession to
the control of the masses, and to power.
From the 1930s, Hassan el-Banna and many of the first members
of the Brotherhood offered their services to the Abwehr. Apart from the
resistance to the British presence in Egypt, Hassan el-Banna's commitment was a
result of a real admiration for Hitler and the Nazi regime. In 1942, at the
side of Haj Amin el-Husseini, grand Mufti of Jerusalem and long-standing
Brother, he encouraged Bosnian, Albanian and North African Muslims to join the SS Handschar, Kama and Skanderbeg
divisions created specially for them.
In its history, strategy and tactics, the Brotherhood is
related to the worst fascist movements: the same appetite for power and profit,
the same petty-bourgeois recruitment, the same ideological basis founded on
identity myths excluding all those who do not share them, the same pragmatic
duplicity, the same terrorist violence magnified to galvanise militants and
shock opponents, the same political assassinations, the same hatred for
democracy – even though it can be used to arrive in power only to destroy it
afterwards, the same hijacking of democratic procedures, the same historic
evolution studded with failed coups, successful terrorism, paid service to the
powerful, exploitation of the misery and the fears of the most disadvantaged
and disdainful sacrifice of the rank-and-file militant.
Even if it has had the foresight to kit itself out in the
costume of "Muslims," the Association of Brothers has no more to do
with Islam than the various fascist movements of the 20th century
had to do with basic European values or with Christianity. It simply took
religion hostage and confiscated it for its own ends. The mistake, for Muslims
as much as for Westerners, would be to play their game and treat them as a
valid representative of Islam, and a political or social mediator. Like all
fascists, the Brotherhood exists only to satisfy the appetites and fantasies of
its leaders.