Tag: Islamism

O (Muslim) Brothers, Where Art Thou?

One of the big “disappointments,” if you can call it such, about yesterday’s 25 May demo in Cairo was that the Muslim Brotherhood was no-show. That meant that, aside from the 300 judges that stood silently in front of their Club to demand judicial independence, there were only a few hundred leftists activists in Central Cairo. I haven’t heard about what happened in other areas of Cairo, or in the provinces, so there may be a lot more people out elsewhere, including Brothers. If the Brothers had come to Central Cairo, there would have been thousands on the streets as during the last few Thursdays.

Activist friends tell me they heard late on Wednesday night that the MB was not showing up. It’s not clear why — maybe this is a sign to the regime that they are open to collaboration rather than being locked in to confrontation like Kifaya, or maybe they didn’t want more bloodshed, violence and mass arrests of their cadres. Either way, it did show that the MB is not a reliable partner of Kifaya activists. It may be that the Kifaya people’s strategy is wrong and that the MB is right to led the Judges stand by themselves, without various political groups surrounding them and tainting their actions. I suspect, though, that it had more to do with a self-preservation instinct among the MB, especially after some senior leaders were arrested the previous Thursday. Has anyone noticed that whenever the MB insists on making a big show on the street, spokesman Essam Al Erian gets arrested and then the MB starts behaving? Same thing happened last year.

In other news, yesterday three Muslim Brotherhood MPs met with the political officer of the European Union delegation in Cairo. According to press reports (in Al Masri Al Youm), the meeting was at the request of the European Commission. I believe it marks the first meeting (rather than casual encounter) of an EU official with the MB. Mid-level Western diplomats, aside from US ones, routinely have meetings with the MB for information gathering — is this different? The fact that it was requested from Brussels is also interesting, especially that in many ways the EU has been more militant about pushing democratization in Egypt than individual EU member states. This has largely been due to the awareness-raising work of EU parliamentarians such as Emma Bonino, the Italian Radical Party leader, who has been frequently visiting Cairo for the past four years and even started learning Arabic. I find her politics bizarre, but when she talks about the need democracy in the Arab world, she puts her money where her mouth is. I do wish the Radical Party didn’t advocate EU membership for Israel, though.

Meanwhile, the NDP protests that it would never, never engage in a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood because it’s against the law. I suspect Egypt also never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

One more thing: a paper quoted “a high-level diplomatic source” as saying Egypt won’t be sending a security contingent to Palestine (presumably to “protect” Mahmoud Abbas). My first thought: OMG the Egyptians are sending a security contingent to Palestine! At least they’re considering it. The Egyptian FM has been snubbing the Palestinan FM lately, and the Egyptians have made some (unfounded, or at least they’re not sharing the evidence) noise about links between the Sinai bombings and Palestine. Ever servile, Egypt is busily trying to help out with the coming, engineered, fall of the Hamas government.

MB poll: Majority thinks Brotherhood is moderate

I came across this unusual poll on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website:

Mbpoll

Obviously this is not representative of anything, but I find it interesting that the MB would ask this question on its own site, which obviously is not only read by fans since over 31% of respondents think the MB are either extremists, extremists pretending to be moderates, or terrorists. I voted “unclear,” which seems to be the majority opinion of those who don’t view it as moderate. Incidentally, I don’t see any polls on the Arabic website.

Islamist imagery

From a guide to interpreting Jihadi imagery:

Hell B

The motif of jahanam, which means “hell” in Arabic, is often used in jihadi propaganda to discredit enemies and to emphasize the notions of good (Islam) and evil (enemies of Islam). The concept of Hell in Islam is similar to that in Christianity and Judaism. It is a place of eternal suffering and fire for the wicked, the tyrannical, and the unjust.

In one of the examples below, the concept of hell is used to boast about the deaths of what are represented as two American soldiers. The text of the image reads the same in both Arabic and English, literally: “They went to Hell.” The notion of hell and the gruesome pictures serves as propaganda against the Coalition Forces, and they are an attempt to boast of jihadi victories. It also serves to bolster the resolve and reinforce the religious righteousness of the anti-occupational jihadi insurgency. By labeling dead Coalition soldiers as people who are destined for Hell, the jihadi cause (i.e. those who brought about the death of these soldiers) is presented as the righteous side of the conflict.

From the Islamic Imagery Project — which includes sections on nature, geography, people, and “warfare and the afterlife.” There are some odd examples in there, and they shouldn’t say “Islamic” when they mean “Islamist,” but it’s an interesting project.

Rethinking Taba

The Washington Times has an in-depth article looking at how the Israeli intelligence community has re-assessed its attitude towards Al Qaeda’s influence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in light of the Taba bombings. Talking to many Israeli intelligence experts in academia and government, as well as Palestinian and Saudi analysts, it draws a picture of Al Qaeda extending its network’s activities beyond its “core” areas — the Saudi regime and the US — to the pro-US Arab regimes like Egypt. In the long term, the aim is to also have Israel as one area of activity, which would add an entirely new dimension to the conflict as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have thus far stayed away from Al Qaeda.

The consensus in Israel’s intelligence establishment is that al Qaeda is intensifying its campaign against Arab states that have close ties to the United States. Al Qaeda’s long-term goal, according to the intelligence establishment, is to rid the Middle East of perceived Western implants, including the Jewish state.

Bin Laden confirmed that view 21 months ago.

Accusing the moderate Arab regimes of backing the Bush administration in the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq, he described them as “Jahiliya” heathens — the Arabic term for paganism practiced on the Arabian peninsula before the advent of Islam.

In March 2003, Al Jazeera television and some Arabic Web sites carried bin Laden’s “will,” in which he said that “getting rid of the Arab regimes is an Islamic commandment because they are heretical and cooperate with America.”

Until Taba, there has been speculation in Egypt as to why it had been spared from the terrorist attacks that in the past three years have hit Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul, Bali, Madrid and other places. Some analysts even ventured as far as saying Al Qaeda had explicitly excluded Egypt from their hit-list, although they had little evidence of this. And while the Egyptian government’s version of events was to downplay the importance of the group that carried the bombings — they basically argued that it consisted of local thugs who had just recently gone fundamentalist — the ongoing campaign of arrests in Sinai suggests that they are looking for something much more sophisticated than this.

Another interesting thing from the story was a little backgrounder on Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian Islamist activist after which one of the groups that claimed the attack. Azzam is a veteran of Al Azhar, Saudi universities and the Afghan civil war, and apparently a leading proponent of the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be addressed by dismantling the pro-US Arab regimes.

Azzam’s slogan, “The Way to Liberate Jerusalem Passes Through Cairo,” implies that the downfall of Egypt’s pro-U.S. regime will lead to Israel’s elimination from the Middle East.

That slogan is something that over the past year I’ve heard over and over in demonstrations in support of the intifada or against the Iraq war. The idea it expressed has been endorsed by not only Islamists but also leftists who are enraged by the Mubarak regime’s support of the bogus peace process of the 1990s and the current roadmap effort. I doubt that many of the non-Islamists who chant it are even aware of its origins, but the elegant idea that freedom must come to Cairo (and Riyadh, and Amman, and Damascus and elsewhere) first has an ecumenical potential — even if their interpretation is not, as above, “Israel’s elimination from the Middle East” but rather a stronger, more united Arab stance in negotiations with Israel.

One of the main sources for the Washington Times article was Reuven Paz, whose ideas on the meaning of the Taba bombing are explored in this article reprinted on Internet Haganah.

The Hitler-Stalin pact of our times?

More on the unusual alliance Issandr mentioned between leftists and Islamists in this month’s Commentary. It’s the “Hitler-Stalin pact of our times” says David Horowitz’s in his new book, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.”

The fact that radical Islamists hold social and cultural values diametrically opposed to those of American leftists is not, Horowitz maintains, as big a problem for either party as it might appear. As in a previous era, when the hard Left dealt with Stalin’s widely acknowledged crimes by turning its attention to more attractive proxies of the cause like Vietnam and Cuba, today’s radicals tend to pay tribute not to al Qaeda but to groups like Hamas, whose extensive social-service network can be invoked to soften the horrors perpetrated by its terror cells.

Syria released Muslim Brothers

A presidential pardon has been granted to 112 Syrian political detainees, the BBC reports:

It is reported to be the biggest single amnesty for three years. The official Sana news agency said it was part of an “open and tolerant policy”.

Those freed are thought be Islamist activists from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The head of the Syria’s Human Rights Association welcomed the move, but said President Bashar al-Assad should have freed all political detainees.

Haitham al-Maleh said some of those set free had been held for more than 10 years.

The question, as always, is why now? The Brotherhood was long considered the regime’s greatest threat; it appeals to the Sunni majority and was the only social force to show any real opposition to Alawi-dominated the military regime. At its peak between 1978 and 1982, it was quite a formidable force. So much that the regime sent out squads of “socialist women” to rip the veils off conservative women. That all ended with the Hama massacre in 1982, when between 15,000 and 40,000 people died after the army bombed the town of Hama when the Brothers took control of it.

In other Syria news, a new English-language publication has come out there, Syria Today. Several of the founders are friends of mine, and I wish them good luck. But expect this to be a mostly economic publication (as the first issue is), as I doubt there is the margin of movement for the press to deal with substantial political questions. Still, it’s a beginning and should provide interesting information about the business elite in that untransparent country.

Also, the Washington Post has a story quoting US military intelligence saying that the Iraqi insurgency may be directed from Syria by Baathists who found refuge there. However, not everyone is buying that:

Some U.S. officials in Baghdad resented the briefing, which they saw not only as a form of long-distance micromanagement but also as misguided in its recommendations. For example, some fear that it could lead to a resumption of the tough tactics used sometimes last year as the insurgency emerged, such as taking families hostage to compel an insurgent leader to turn himself in. Subsequent internal Army reviews have criticized such tactics as counterproductive.

One person familiar with the situation said that Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. general in the region, was sent a copy of the briefing and responded by sending a classified cable politely dismissing it and stating that he believes that U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq have the situation in hand. A spokesman at Abizaid’s headquarters, the U.S. Central Command, declined to comment on that exchange.

Neither Lawrence T. Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, nor Navy Capt. Frank Thorp, the spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had any comment for this article.

Pentagon Kremlinologists will have a field day with this. Also, I wasn’t aware that the US army was using tactics like “taking families hostage to compel an insurgent leader to turn himself in.”

Iran hands over Islamist to Egypt

According to some news reports — basing their stories on the London-based Islamist cabal — Iran has handed over Mustafa Hamza, a former member of the Gamaa Islamiya who was involved in the 1995 attempt on Hosni Mubarak’s life in Addis Abeba. This story says it was confirmed by an Egyptian security official, but this one says Iran is denying the reports.

Hani el-Sibaie, a former leader of the outlawed Egyptian group Islamic Jihad who now runs an Islamic affairs research center in London, said by telephone that he’d been informed by people he trusts within al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya that Hamza was handed over to Egypt by Iran “a few weeks ago.”

El-Sibaei, of the research center in London, claimed Iran had handed over Hamza in exchange for security information about Iranian opposition members in Egypt.

“Iran now is not like Khomeini’s Iran,” el-Sibaei said, referring to the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Now, Iran is like any secular country. It’s just using Islam as a slogan. This is a low deal,” he said.

Egyptian authorities first arrested Hamza in 1981. He served three years in prison in the case of the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. On his release, he went to Afghanistan. He’s believed to be the alleged mastermind of a 1995 assassination attempt on Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, Hamza has agreed along with most if not all Gamaa Islamiya leaders to renounced violence. That process, begun in 1997 and continuing today, had led the group’s leadership to apologize to the Egyptian people for their campaign of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s and publish a series of books explaining their decision. Only a few former members who are now exiled in Europe have dissented from that decision. It’s not clear what the Egyptians would want with Hamza at this stage if only to punish him for the assassination attempt.

Secondly, it marks yet another small rapprochement between Egypt and Iran, a pattern that emerged since December 2003 when the leaders of both countries agreed to renew relations. There have been some steps taken, and bilateral investment is growing, but after an early enthusiasm in 2004 full relations are still restored. One would assume that the US is ambivalent on this one, if not dead against. But it could be a useful back channel to Tehran. In any case, it would only make sense for two of the most powerful regimes in the region to talk to each other. It also shows Iranian pragmatism in agreeing to renew relations to one of the Arab governments that is closest to the US and Israel.

Finally, there have been stories that have made the appalling mistake of calling Hamza a Muslim Brotherhood leader rather than a Gamaa Islamiya leader. This Jerusalem Post story is particularly bad, saying the Brotherhood was responsible for all kinds of terrorist attacks and so on. They also call him the head of the Brotherhood, which he is not (and he isn’t the head of the Gamaa Islamiya, either). The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist movement in Egypt that renounced violence in the mid-1970s and whose history of violence in Egypt is, I believe, limited to a few political assassinations in the late 1940s. Its leader is quite free and works from their headquarters in Cairo. They are banned but tolerated. I know one shouldn’t expect too much out of a Conrad Black publication, but still…

Takfir in Morocco

There is an interesting if rather confused piece about takfir movements in Morocco in this month’s English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s interesting because these movements have drawn little attention in Morocco, since they were born in Egypt in the 1970s and for the most part have not had a very public role elsewhere. They also show the multi-faceted nature of Islamic fundamentalism, with so many factions and different offshoots that it reminds me of the “People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front/Popular Front of Judea” skit in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

However, I found the article rather confused because while the headline, “Morocco: slums breed jihad” would lead one to suspect that the argument is that poverty breeds terrorism, most of the article is devoted to explaining the beliefs of the takfiris and the networks they’ve created. This is an old dispute when we talk about Islamist terrorism: is the idea in itself violent or is it conditions of living that inspire violence? While the answer is probably a mixture of both, I tend towards the first option. It may be popular to point to the Arab world as have failed its development and try to explain violence as the result of “arrested development”, but in many cases the key advocates of violence were not particularly poor: think of Muhammad Atta, son of a comfortably middle class engineer, Ayman Zawahri, scion of a prominent family of doctors and theologians, or even Osama Bin Laden, heir to a vast fortune and playboy millionaire until he found his calling. (At the same time, think of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his origins in Jordanian slums.)

In other words, poverty breeds conditions when idle young men who see limited horizons in front of them may be tempted by a radical ideology. But the ideology has to be there in the first place. And here it’s important to distinguish between the many different types of Islamism, some reformist, some conservative, some democratic, some autocratic, some progressive, others backwards.

For those who don’t know what takfir is, here is a long explanation from the article:

The bomb blast at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba last month confirmed that the cause of global jihad is no longer confined to peripheral areas such as Afghanistan, Chechnya or former Yugoslavia. It is now striking at the heart of the Arab Muslim world, with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco directly in the firing line.

The bomb attacks in Casablanca on 16 May 2003 revealed the existence of a new form of fundamentalism – takfir. Takfirists are no longer content to fight the United States or the “Zionist entity”; they brand Muslim leaders, and all their direct or indirect supporters, as infidels (kafir) and condemn them as apostates. They preach political violence as a means of forcing states to return “to the laws of God and the society of the Prophet of original Islam”. Their aim is not only to overturn unpopular and corrupt regimes but to cleanse the existing political order.

The movement Takfir wal-Hijra emerged in the 1970s after a split in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood; it has inspired one of the main ideologies of violence in the Muslim world, especially since the early 1990s. It is sometimes referred to as “Takfiri Salafism” and it constitutes a clear break with other Islamist movements that are prepared to engage if necessary in legal political activity aimed at establishing an Islamic state through the ballot box.

The importance that Takfirist doctrine has assumed for armed groups reflects a deep gulf between this extreme fringe of Islamism and countries that are themselves rooted in traditional Islam. In Morocco, where the king is regarded as a descendant of the Prophet, we are witnessing a shift in the boundary between jihadists and their targets within Muslim society. A few weeks before the attacks of May 2003 fundamentalist groups issued a declaration of apostasy against the Moroccan state and Moroccan society and distributed it in mosques in slum districts of Casablanca.

A Salafist activist spoke of Mohamed Fizazi, 57, a primary school teacher, the Moroccan Takfirists’ “theoretician”, who was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in August 2003. He said: “Fizazi was found guilty of pronouncing the Muslim profession of faith [There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet] differently from others.” This comment demonstrates how the Takfirists’ relationship with Islam has changed and how other Muslims are now considered heretics.

An inquiry conducted after the Casablanca attacks (like the investigation into the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004 in Spain) revealed that most Takfirist groups originate in the shanty towns and disintegrating districts of Casablanca, Meknes, Fez and Tangiers. It also showed that extremist groups have a solid, active local base and are not just dormant cells waiting to respond to commands from al-Qaida, even if Osama bin Laden’s network has played a major role in providing logistic support and formulating strategy.

Figures for 2002, when more than 166 civilians were assassinated, suggest the extent of Takfirist violence in Morocco. But mass media have taken care not to publicise them and do not much cover the violence, which usually happens in the poor districts. The autonomous activities of local gangleaders – self-proclaimed “emirs” such as Fikri in Douar Sekouila on the outskirts of Casablanca and Rebaa, a militia leader in the Meknes suburbs, and some dozen others heading local groups – show they act on their own initiative and not always on instructions from somewhere in Afghanistan.

The Takfirists are part of a new generation of Islamic fundamentalists from Morocco’s urban slums. Their strongholds are what locals call al-karyan, the disused quarries in industrial zones left to decay after independence in 1956. The shanty towns that have mushroomed there in the past 20-30 years are home to uprooted landless peasants, victims of a rural exodus. Most Takfirists, like the suicide bombers of 16 May, are karyanis, from a class of social outcasts living in the shanty towns.

All of which reminds me of a good friend of mine who was walking down the street of a poor quarter of Cairo with a Muslim Brotherhood activist. A man with a long black beard dressed in traditional robes — the marks of the ultra-pious — walks by them and throws a dirty look at the Muslim Brotherhood activist. “He’s a member of takfir wa al hijra,” the Brother says. Then he added, with an air of contempt, “extremist!”

The point is that there is a real effort that can be done to curb extremism by closing down the sources of funding for the real extremists (mostly Saudi Arabia) while engaging other Islamists in a political dialogue even if some of their ideas are distasteful (as they are to me). In most Arab countries, this is not being done.

P.S. At the risk of contradicting what I said above, I’m also pasting an article I wrote a few months after the 16 May 2003 bombings in Casablanca that looks at the slums from which most of the bombers came on the day of a local election. Click “more” below to see the story.

Continue reading Takfir in Morocco

Intellectuals vs. fundamentalist sheikhs

A group of over 3000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals wants to take to court sheikhs who they say encourage violence and terrorism:

Shaker al-Nabulsi, a U.S.-based Jordanian university professor, said about 3,000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals have signed the petition thus far calling for international trials. Iraqis, Jordanians, Libyans, Syrians, Tunisians and Persian Gulf intellectuals were among those who signed, al-Nabulsi said.

“The Arab regimes cannot put an end to these fatwas of terrorism; the international community can,” al-Nabulsi told The Associated Press in Cairo in a telephone interview from his Denver home.

Among those the intellectuals want to see tried are Qatar-based Egyptian Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi, who has condoned attacks on American civilians in Iraq and sanctioned kidnapping in wartime. Two prominent Saudi clerics, Sheik Ali Bin Khudeir al-Khudeir and Sheik Safar al-Hawali, also are mentioned.

Good for them. It would be great if a movement of liberal intellectuals took to court prominent Islamists in their own country (although I’m not sure on what legal grounds they could do so), much as Islamists in Egypt have taken liberals to court for publishing books that are “insulting to Islam.” Youssef Al Qaradawi (even if he is not guilty of all the things often attributed to him) would be a good start.